Friday, October 15, 2010

Making Money Your


Weezer Responds To Fan Fundraising Attempt To Get Them To Stop Making Crappy Albums

from the connecting-with-anti-fans? dept

There are so many "fan-funding" platforms, like Kickstarter, out there that involve trying to raise a certain amount via a bunch of fan pledges, where they only have to pay if they reach the goal. Usually, we see projects on those sites used for things like funding a new album or a book or something. But what about an anti- funding project? Hypebot points us to the fact that some "fans" (and perhaps I should use that word loosely) of the band Weezer are using one of those platforms to try to raise $10 million dollars to get the band Weezer to break up. The organizer is apparently upset that the band doesn't make good albums any more:


I have never been a fan of this band. I think that they are pretty much horrible, and always have been. Even in the early 90's.



But this isn't about me. This is about the Weezer fans. They are our brothers and sisters, our friends, our lovers.



Every year, Rivers Cuomo swears that he's changed, and that their new album is the best thing that he's done since "Pinkerton," and what happens? Another pile of crap like "Beverly Hills" or "I'm Your Daddy."



This is an abusive relationship, and it needs to stop now.



I am tired of my friends being disappointed year after year.



I am tired of endless whimsical cutesy album covers and music videos.



I'm sick of hearing about whatever this terrible (and yes, even if you like the early stuff, you should be able to admit that they are wretched now) excuse for a band is up to these days.



If all 852,000 of you (really?) who bought "Pinkerton" pitch in $12, we will meet our al.



I beg you, Weezer. Take our money and disappear.

Amusingly, one of the band members responded via Twitter saying:

if they can make it 20, we'll do the "deluxe breakup"!

Nicely done. Of course, now that it's gotten attention, the guy who originally posted it is taking it down, saying that he did it (of course) for the lulz (as if anyone thought he was serious?). Anyway, perhaps we should have tried this for our $100 million offer to have us silence Techdirt.



8 Comments | Leave a Comment..



One thing sure to bring a tear to the eye of a frugal WalletPop reader is the sight of a product put out to the curb for trash pickup that could have, with a little more care, lasted much longer. To that end, we offer these 10 suggestions on how to stretch the lifespan of your possessions.



1. Quit washing your jeans



How often do you wash your blue jeans? After each wearing? Once a week? Once a month? According to some enthusiasts, you're destroying what should-be a longtime love affair. Blogger Dr. Denim says the most enthusiastic denim lovers will wear their new jeans six months before the first washing, then three months before a second washing.



And these aren't washings as you might picture them. Carl Chiara of Levi Strauss and Co. told the Wall Street Journal that at the six-month mark, he soaks his jeans in the bathtub with some very mild soap and lets them air-dry. That's it.



There is also an environmental spin to this issue: The United Nations put out a video encouraging people to wash their jeans less often.



Heat, water and detergents can make those new jeans look old in a hurry, but that's not such a good thing when the goal is to increase the lifespan of your favorite denims.



2. Dry your razor blades



Among the most overpriced items on the pharmacy shelf, IMHO, is the razor blade. An 8-pack of Gillette Fusion 5-blade cartridges from Amazon costs $2.64 per cartridge. If you go through one every two weeks, you'll spend $68.58 in a year. If you could cut that in half, what would you do with the extra $34 in your pocket?



Could these savings be as simple as drying your blades after each use? Oxidation of the steel blade can dull the cutting edge quicker than wear and tear against your facial hair, and the bathroom is the perfect climate for oxidation: warm and moist. If you store your razor in the shower (guilty!), don't be surprised if you find those telltale specs of rust on your blade after only a few days.



To extend the life of your blade, dry it carefully after use (if you use a hair dryer, waft it over your razor, too) and store it in a drawer away from the sink and shower.



There are a number of devices on the market that promise to resharpen your blades, but little information on whether they really work or not. Have you tried one? What was your experience?



3. Coddle your tires



A set of good tires can set you back $400, so the payoff from getting extra life from them can save you significant dough. Extending their life isn't rocket science, either. The Michigan Natural and Energy Resources Dept. recommends:

  • Keeping them inflated to the proper psi; check weekly. A set of tire pressure valve stem caps can help, and costs less than $10.

  • Rotate your tires every 5,000-8,000 miles.

  • Use the tire size your car was designed for; smaller tires will wear more quickly.

  • Keep your car aligned; misalignment will show up in unusual tread wear.

  • Avoid quick starts and stops. When your tires are smoking, you may be accelerating too fast.

  • If you store tires, stack them on their side in a dry, cool place, no more than four high.


4. Keep your shoes pristine



With the price of shoes today, squeaking out an extra year or two of shoe life can help you save up for that new pair of Manolo Blahniks. Among the tactics you can employ:

  • Buy decent quality. Those half-price shoes will most likely last less than half as long.

  • Alternate your shoes (this applies mostly to men, I believe, since most women don't wear the same shoes day after day). By having two pairs of everyday shoes and alternating them, you give your shoes a chance to breathe and properly dry out.

  • Dry them completely if you've gotten them wet. Consider using a waterproof spray to keep the rain off, especially in the winter if you live in the north.

  • Clean them thoroughly before polishing, and polish often. The polish isn't just cosmetic; it protects the leather.

  • Buy shoes that can be resoled.

  • When shopping for kids' shoes, have them wear heavy socks to reserve a little room for their rapidly growing feet.

  • Break the habit of wedging yourself in and out of shoes without tying or untying the shoelaces.

  • Use a shoehorn for those that fit tightly.


5. Make your perfume last



Perfume is altered by your body chemistry, so perfume will not smell the same on every person. Every perfume goes through three stages after it is applied to your skin: the top note, the middle note and the dry-out note. Depending on how it reacts to your body, these phases may go by quickly or last and last. Work with your perfume purveyor to find a signature scent that has staying power on your skin.



You can also extend the life of your perfume by applying it properly. This begins with moisturization. The perfume will stick to moist skin better than dry, so applying it before dressing, while fresh from the shower, could help it last. Using a non-scented moisturizer on those parts of the skin when you are about to apply it could also help.



Choosing where to apply it can also be a factor. Avoid the "pulse points", those parts of the body where you can clearly detect a pulse, because blood flows close to the skin there, so that skin is warmer -- inside wrists, neck, behind the ears, on the ankles. Apply the perfume on parts of the body insulated with a fat layer (your upper arms, or your outside thighs, for example).



If your scent dies quickly on you, apply lightly but more frequently.



6. Keep that Christmas tree green



Some of the most enthusiastic season celebrators will put up their Christmas trees just after Thanksgiving and keep them up until the New Year. They risk having a dried-out fire hazard sitting in their living room for weeks. But you can take steps to keep that tree remaining supple and green all the way to the take-down.



The first rule: buy fresh. Perhaps you're lucky enough to live where you can pick out and cut down your own; if not, ask the vendor where the tree came from, and how long ago it was cut. Take a look at the needles. According to the National Christmas Tree Association, a fresh fir tree's needles "should break crisply when bent sharply with the fingers -- much like a fresh carrot," while a pine tree's needles will be supple and resilient. Also check for excessive needle loss, wrinkled bark and a musty odor, all signs of a tree too long from the saw. Favor lots that shade their cut trees from the sun.



Before you take home a tree from a tree lot, ask the vendor to cut off an inch from the bottom of the tree, which will help the tree take up water. At home, keep the water reservoir at the base of the tree full of water. Aspirin, sugar and other folklore additives aren't necessary to keep the tree green.



Place the tree away from heater grates, fireplaces and any other source of heat. Don't expose it to direct sunlight, either.



7. Make your clothes last



Not all clothes can go without washing like the blue jeans mentioned above, but there are ways to extend the life of your underwear, children's wear, shirts, blouses, slacks and jammies. These include:


  • Treat spots rather than wash the whole piece of clothing. The new stain-remover pens work very well, and if you can save a washing, that piece of clothing will last longer.

  • Line dry rather than tumble dry. It's not only ecological, it adds that wonderful fresh sunshine smell to all you wear.

  • Avoid using dryer balls; they soften clothes by beating on the fibers, not a recipe for long life.

  • Maintain your body weight. Easier said than done, but some of us eat our way out of clothes long before they wear out.

  • Hang and/or fold your clothes. It's all too easy to toss wrinkled clothes in the wash basket before they've actually been worn enough to warrant washing.

  • Reserve a set of clothes for dirty tasks, and change into them before digging in the yard, changing your car's oil or washing your dog.

  • Use the sniff test to determine if a shirt or blouse is ready for the laundry, rather than automatically toss it in after a single wearing. Ask a loved one's help; your nose is used to your own body odor.

  • Remove and store those extra buttons sewed onto better quality clothing, so you can replace them when needed rather than ditch the piece of clothing.


8. Extend the life of produce



How much of the produce you buy do you end up pitching because it has decayed? Too much, if you're like my household. This is not necessarily inevitable, however. Try these methods:



Rehydrate. Vegetables like lettuce, spinach and celery can be brought back to life when they begin to wilt by soaking them in cold water. Dry well afterward.



Sequester:
Apples will stay edible in the crisper section of your refrigerator for a long time. Put them in perforated plastic bags to help them stay moist, and toss out any that show decay spots; remember the old adage about rotten apples. If you live in a cooler climate with a garage that doesn't freeze, you could store larger quantities of apples there. Keep them away from other fruit and vegetables that over-ripen easily, however; the ethylene gas the apples give off will hasten the ripening of other produce.



Refrigerate: Some fruits do just fine left out on the kitchen counter, but some are best kept in the fridge. These include berries of many types, grapes, cherries, apricots, and vegetables like broccoli, asparagus, lettuce, mushrooms and sweet corn. The University of California has a convenient chart to help determine what goes where.



Freeze: If you find you aren't going to be able to use peaches and green peppers, for example, before they go bad, toss them in the freezer. They'll last for months if properly packaged.



Chill: Some vegetables like potatoes will last a long time in a cool, dry area, perhaps like the far end of your basement or an attached garage. In days of old, root cellars were dug for this purpose.



Breathe: Onions and garlic should have room to breathe, so don't keep them wrapped in plastic or buried in too small a drawer.



You've probably seen ads for plastic produce bags that claim to allow ethylene gas to escape from fruit and vegetables stored within, thereby keeping them from over-ripening. Consumer Reports tests didn't find these claims valid, however.



9. Save that fine wine



Many of us enjoy a glass of wine with a fine meal, but when dining at home, it's not always wise or appropriate to kill the entire bottle, This leaves us with the dilemma of how to properly save the remaining wine so that it doesn't lose its bouquet and flavor.



The answer begins by understanding that oxygen is your wine's enemy, and the less oxygen you can allow to come into contact with your wine, the better it will retain its character. This means merely banging the cork back into the bottle isn't a good idea; you have all that air trapped with it.



One method is to keep on hand an empty half-sized bottle (a split, in wine terms) into which you can decant the wine. Perhaps a Tupperware tub of equal volume might also serve the purpose, but a wine aficionado would be aghast to see you pour a glass of wine from it.



If you are willing to pay some money to solve the problem, one device that helps is a vacuum pump made to fit over the neck of the bottle and suck out that nasty air. The Wine Doctor, however, doesn't care for this technique and conjectures that the vacuum pump pulls up more than just the air in the bottle neck -- it removes gas that is part of the wine itself.



The pricier solution to the problem is to replace the air with an noncorrosive gas such as nitrogen or argon. The Wine Doctor isn't fond of this solution, either, fearing it could degrade the quality of older wines.



In retrospect, perhaps the answer is to drink the rest of the bottle, but do it very, very slowly.



10. Scratch-proof that smart screen




Fellow WalletPop writer Josh Smith turned me on to screen protectors for my HTC Droid Incredible smart phone. Phones such as this or the Apple iPhone allow the user to scroll across the screen with his/her finger. The technology, also used in the iPod Touch and the new, hot iPad, makes browsing a snap, but risks scratching the screen.



A scratched screen is not only unsightly, but it detracts from any resale value. There are a number of third-party screen overlays such as the Zagg Invisibleshield that are virtually impervious to scratches. Hint: You might find a better price buying through Amazon than through Zagg's website.



Those of us with clumsy fingers, prone to drop expensive objects, might also consider a hard-shell case for our device. I use the Otterbox for my Droid, and have dropped my phone a couple of times without damaging it. There are many other brands available for the device of your choice.



Again, shop around before buying it directly from the manufacturer, and you might save substantially.
benchcraft company scam

Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated Wii <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Wii news of Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings | Chilean Mine Rescue | Chile - Cable <b>News</b> | Mediaite

Americans were gripped Tuesday night by images from the scene of the Chilean miner rescue. But whose images gripped them most? While CNN won during one hour, Fox News Channel, dominated prime time as usual, ahead of CNN, MSNBC and HLN.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings HUGE For Final Chilean Miners&#39; Rescue

Fox News saw a staggering 7 million viewers as the final miner was rescued in Chile Wednesday night. The network averaged 7.066 million total viewers in the 8PM hour (when the final miner was rescued) and 4.862 million total viewers in ...


bench craft company reviews

Weezer Responds To Fan Fundraising Attempt To Get Them To Stop Making Crappy Albums

from the connecting-with-anti-fans? dept

There are so many "fan-funding" platforms, like Kickstarter, out there that involve trying to raise a certain amount via a bunch of fan pledges, where they only have to pay if they reach the goal. Usually, we see projects on those sites used for things like funding a new album or a book or something. But what about an anti- funding project? Hypebot points us to the fact that some "fans" (and perhaps I should use that word loosely) of the band Weezer are using one of those platforms to try to raise $10 million dollars to get the band Weezer to break up. The organizer is apparently upset that the band doesn't make good albums any more:


I have never been a fan of this band. I think that they are pretty much horrible, and always have been. Even in the early 90's.



But this isn't about me. This is about the Weezer fans. They are our brothers and sisters, our friends, our lovers.



Every year, Rivers Cuomo swears that he's changed, and that their new album is the best thing that he's done since "Pinkerton," and what happens? Another pile of crap like "Beverly Hills" or "I'm Your Daddy."



This is an abusive relationship, and it needs to stop now.



I am tired of my friends being disappointed year after year.



I am tired of endless whimsical cutesy album covers and music videos.



I'm sick of hearing about whatever this terrible (and yes, even if you like the early stuff, you should be able to admit that they are wretched now) excuse for a band is up to these days.



If all 852,000 of you (really?) who bought "Pinkerton" pitch in $12, we will meet our al.



I beg you, Weezer. Take our money and disappear.

Amusingly, one of the band members responded via Twitter saying:

if they can make it 20, we'll do the "deluxe breakup"!

Nicely done. Of course, now that it's gotten attention, the guy who originally posted it is taking it down, saying that he did it (of course) for the lulz (as if anyone thought he was serious?). Anyway, perhaps we should have tried this for our $100 million offer to have us silence Techdirt.



8 Comments | Leave a Comment..



One thing sure to bring a tear to the eye of a frugal WalletPop reader is the sight of a product put out to the curb for trash pickup that could have, with a little more care, lasted much longer. To that end, we offer these 10 suggestions on how to stretch the lifespan of your possessions.



1. Quit washing your jeans



How often do you wash your blue jeans? After each wearing? Once a week? Once a month? According to some enthusiasts, you're destroying what should-be a longtime love affair. Blogger Dr. Denim says the most enthusiastic denim lovers will wear their new jeans six months before the first washing, then three months before a second washing.



And these aren't washings as you might picture them. Carl Chiara of Levi Strauss and Co. told the Wall Street Journal that at the six-month mark, he soaks his jeans in the bathtub with some very mild soap and lets them air-dry. That's it.



There is also an environmental spin to this issue: The United Nations put out a video encouraging people to wash their jeans less often.



Heat, water and detergents can make those new jeans look old in a hurry, but that's not such a good thing when the goal is to increase the lifespan of your favorite denims.



2. Dry your razor blades



Among the most overpriced items on the pharmacy shelf, IMHO, is the razor blade. An 8-pack of Gillette Fusion 5-blade cartridges from Amazon costs $2.64 per cartridge. If you go through one every two weeks, you'll spend $68.58 in a year. If you could cut that in half, what would you do with the extra $34 in your pocket?



Could these savings be as simple as drying your blades after each use? Oxidation of the steel blade can dull the cutting edge quicker than wear and tear against your facial hair, and the bathroom is the perfect climate for oxidation: warm and moist. If you store your razor in the shower (guilty!), don't be surprised if you find those telltale specs of rust on your blade after only a few days.



To extend the life of your blade, dry it carefully after use (if you use a hair dryer, waft it over your razor, too) and store it in a drawer away from the sink and shower.



There are a number of devices on the market that promise to resharpen your blades, but little information on whether they really work or not. Have you tried one? What was your experience?



3. Coddle your tires



A set of good tires can set you back $400, so the payoff from getting extra life from them can save you significant dough. Extending their life isn't rocket science, either. The Michigan Natural and Energy Resources Dept. recommends:

  • Keeping them inflated to the proper psi; check weekly. A set of tire pressure valve stem caps can help, and costs less than $10.

  • Rotate your tires every 5,000-8,000 miles.

  • Use the tire size your car was designed for; smaller tires will wear more quickly.

  • Keep your car aligned; misalignment will show up in unusual tread wear.

  • Avoid quick starts and stops. When your tires are smoking, you may be accelerating too fast.

  • If you store tires, stack them on their side in a dry, cool place, no more than four high.


4. Keep your shoes pristine



With the price of shoes today, squeaking out an extra year or two of shoe life can help you save up for that new pair of Manolo Blahniks. Among the tactics you can employ:

  • Buy decent quality. Those half-price shoes will most likely last less than half as long.

  • Alternate your shoes (this applies mostly to men, I believe, since most women don't wear the same shoes day after day). By having two pairs of everyday shoes and alternating them, you give your shoes a chance to breathe and properly dry out.

  • Dry them completely if you've gotten them wet. Consider using a waterproof spray to keep the rain off, especially in the winter if you live in the north.

  • Clean them thoroughly before polishing, and polish often. The polish isn't just cosmetic; it protects the leather.

  • Buy shoes that can be resoled.

  • When shopping for kids' shoes, have them wear heavy socks to reserve a little room for their rapidly growing feet.

  • Break the habit of wedging yourself in and out of shoes without tying or untying the shoelaces.

  • Use a shoehorn for those that fit tightly.


5. Make your perfume last



Perfume is altered by your body chemistry, so perfume will not smell the same on every person. Every perfume goes through three stages after it is applied to your skin: the top note, the middle note and the dry-out note. Depending on how it reacts to your body, these phases may go by quickly or last and last. Work with your perfume purveyor to find a signature scent that has staying power on your skin.



You can also extend the life of your perfume by applying it properly. This begins with moisturization. The perfume will stick to moist skin better than dry, so applying it before dressing, while fresh from the shower, could help it last. Using a non-scented moisturizer on those parts of the skin when you are about to apply it could also help.



Choosing where to apply it can also be a factor. Avoid the "pulse points", those parts of the body where you can clearly detect a pulse, because blood flows close to the skin there, so that skin is warmer -- inside wrists, neck, behind the ears, on the ankles. Apply the perfume on parts of the body insulated with a fat layer (your upper arms, or your outside thighs, for example).



If your scent dies quickly on you, apply lightly but more frequently.



6. Keep that Christmas tree green



Some of the most enthusiastic season celebrators will put up their Christmas trees just after Thanksgiving and keep them up until the New Year. They risk having a dried-out fire hazard sitting in their living room for weeks. But you can take steps to keep that tree remaining supple and green all the way to the take-down.



The first rule: buy fresh. Perhaps you're lucky enough to live where you can pick out and cut down your own; if not, ask the vendor where the tree came from, and how long ago it was cut. Take a look at the needles. According to the National Christmas Tree Association, a fresh fir tree's needles "should break crisply when bent sharply with the fingers -- much like a fresh carrot," while a pine tree's needles will be supple and resilient. Also check for excessive needle loss, wrinkled bark and a musty odor, all signs of a tree too long from the saw. Favor lots that shade their cut trees from the sun.



Before you take home a tree from a tree lot, ask the vendor to cut off an inch from the bottom of the tree, which will help the tree take up water. At home, keep the water reservoir at the base of the tree full of water. Aspirin, sugar and other folklore additives aren't necessary to keep the tree green.



Place the tree away from heater grates, fireplaces and any other source of heat. Don't expose it to direct sunlight, either.



7. Make your clothes last



Not all clothes can go without washing like the blue jeans mentioned above, but there are ways to extend the life of your underwear, children's wear, shirts, blouses, slacks and jammies. These include:


  • Treat spots rather than wash the whole piece of clothing. The new stain-remover pens work very well, and if you can save a washing, that piece of clothing will last longer.

  • Line dry rather than tumble dry. It's not only ecological, it adds that wonderful fresh sunshine smell to all you wear.

  • Avoid using dryer balls; they soften clothes by beating on the fibers, not a recipe for long life.

  • Maintain your body weight. Easier said than done, but some of us eat our way out of clothes long before they wear out.

  • Hang and/or fold your clothes. It's all too easy to toss wrinkled clothes in the wash basket before they've actually been worn enough to warrant washing.

  • Reserve a set of clothes for dirty tasks, and change into them before digging in the yard, changing your car's oil or washing your dog.

  • Use the sniff test to determine if a shirt or blouse is ready for the laundry, rather than automatically toss it in after a single wearing. Ask a loved one's help; your nose is used to your own body odor.

  • Remove and store those extra buttons sewed onto better quality clothing, so you can replace them when needed rather than ditch the piece of clothing.


8. Extend the life of produce



How much of the produce you buy do you end up pitching because it has decayed? Too much, if you're like my household. This is not necessarily inevitable, however. Try these methods:



Rehydrate. Vegetables like lettuce, spinach and celery can be brought back to life when they begin to wilt by soaking them in cold water. Dry well afterward.



Sequester:
Apples will stay edible in the crisper section of your refrigerator for a long time. Put them in perforated plastic bags to help them stay moist, and toss out any that show decay spots; remember the old adage about rotten apples. If you live in a cooler climate with a garage that doesn't freeze, you could store larger quantities of apples there. Keep them away from other fruit and vegetables that over-ripen easily, however; the ethylene gas the apples give off will hasten the ripening of other produce.



Refrigerate: Some fruits do just fine left out on the kitchen counter, but some are best kept in the fridge. These include berries of many types, grapes, cherries, apricots, and vegetables like broccoli, asparagus, lettuce, mushrooms and sweet corn. The University of California has a convenient chart to help determine what goes where.



Freeze: If you find you aren't going to be able to use peaches and green peppers, for example, before they go bad, toss them in the freezer. They'll last for months if properly packaged.



Chill: Some vegetables like potatoes will last a long time in a cool, dry area, perhaps like the far end of your basement or an attached garage. In days of old, root cellars were dug for this purpose.



Breathe: Onions and garlic should have room to breathe, so don't keep them wrapped in plastic or buried in too small a drawer.



You've probably seen ads for plastic produce bags that claim to allow ethylene gas to escape from fruit and vegetables stored within, thereby keeping them from over-ripening. Consumer Reports tests didn't find these claims valid, however.



9. Save that fine wine



Many of us enjoy a glass of wine with a fine meal, but when dining at home, it's not always wise or appropriate to kill the entire bottle, This leaves us with the dilemma of how to properly save the remaining wine so that it doesn't lose its bouquet and flavor.



The answer begins by understanding that oxygen is your wine's enemy, and the less oxygen you can allow to come into contact with your wine, the better it will retain its character. This means merely banging the cork back into the bottle isn't a good idea; you have all that air trapped with it.



One method is to keep on hand an empty half-sized bottle (a split, in wine terms) into which you can decant the wine. Perhaps a Tupperware tub of equal volume might also serve the purpose, but a wine aficionado would be aghast to see you pour a glass of wine from it.



If you are willing to pay some money to solve the problem, one device that helps is a vacuum pump made to fit over the neck of the bottle and suck out that nasty air. The Wine Doctor, however, doesn't care for this technique and conjectures that the vacuum pump pulls up more than just the air in the bottle neck -- it removes gas that is part of the wine itself.



The pricier solution to the problem is to replace the air with an noncorrosive gas such as nitrogen or argon. The Wine Doctor isn't fond of this solution, either, fearing it could degrade the quality of older wines.



In retrospect, perhaps the answer is to drink the rest of the bottle, but do it very, very slowly.



10. Scratch-proof that smart screen




Fellow WalletPop writer Josh Smith turned me on to screen protectors for my HTC Droid Incredible smart phone. Phones such as this or the Apple iPhone allow the user to scroll across the screen with his/her finger. The technology, also used in the iPod Touch and the new, hot iPad, makes browsing a snap, but risks scratching the screen.



A scratched screen is not only unsightly, but it detracts from any resale value. There are a number of third-party screen overlays such as the Zagg Invisibleshield that are virtually impervious to scratches. Hint: You might find a better price buying through Amazon than through Zagg's website.



Those of us with clumsy fingers, prone to drop expensive objects, might also consider a hard-shell case for our device. I use the Otterbox for my Droid, and have dropped my phone a couple of times without damaging it. There are many other brands available for the device of your choice.



Again, shop around before buying it directly from the manufacturer, and you might save substantially.
benchcraft company portland or

Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated Wii <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Wii news of Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings | Chilean Mine Rescue | Chile - Cable <b>News</b> | Mediaite

Americans were gripped Tuesday night by images from the scene of the Chilean miner rescue. But whose images gripped them most? While CNN won during one hour, Fox News Channel, dominated prime time as usual, ahead of CNN, MSNBC and HLN.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings HUGE For Final Chilean Miners&#39; Rescue

Fox News saw a staggering 7 million viewers as the final miner was rescued in Chile Wednesday night. The network averaged 7.066 million total viewers in the 8PM hour (when the final miner was rescued) and 4.862 million total viewers in ...


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recording &quot;how to make money off your holiday gifts&quot; by jessica mullen


benchcraft company portland or

Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated Wii <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Wii news of Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings | Chilean Mine Rescue | Chile - Cable <b>News</b> | Mediaite

Americans were gripped Tuesday night by images from the scene of the Chilean miner rescue. But whose images gripped them most? While CNN won during one hour, Fox News Channel, dominated prime time as usual, ahead of CNN, MSNBC and HLN.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings HUGE For Final Chilean Miners&#39; Rescue

Fox News saw a staggering 7 million viewers as the final miner was rescued in Chile Wednesday night. The network averaged 7.066 million total viewers in the 8PM hour (when the final miner was rescued) and 4.862 million total viewers in ...


benchcraft company scam

Weezer Responds To Fan Fundraising Attempt To Get Them To Stop Making Crappy Albums

from the connecting-with-anti-fans? dept

There are so many "fan-funding" platforms, like Kickstarter, out there that involve trying to raise a certain amount via a bunch of fan pledges, where they only have to pay if they reach the goal. Usually, we see projects on those sites used for things like funding a new album or a book or something. But what about an anti- funding project? Hypebot points us to the fact that some "fans" (and perhaps I should use that word loosely) of the band Weezer are using one of those platforms to try to raise $10 million dollars to get the band Weezer to break up. The organizer is apparently upset that the band doesn't make good albums any more:


I have never been a fan of this band. I think that they are pretty much horrible, and always have been. Even in the early 90's.



But this isn't about me. This is about the Weezer fans. They are our brothers and sisters, our friends, our lovers.



Every year, Rivers Cuomo swears that he's changed, and that their new album is the best thing that he's done since "Pinkerton," and what happens? Another pile of crap like "Beverly Hills" or "I'm Your Daddy."



This is an abusive relationship, and it needs to stop now.



I am tired of my friends being disappointed year after year.



I am tired of endless whimsical cutesy album covers and music videos.



I'm sick of hearing about whatever this terrible (and yes, even if you like the early stuff, you should be able to admit that they are wretched now) excuse for a band is up to these days.



If all 852,000 of you (really?) who bought "Pinkerton" pitch in $12, we will meet our al.



I beg you, Weezer. Take our money and disappear.

Amusingly, one of the band members responded via Twitter saying:

if they can make it 20, we'll do the "deluxe breakup"!

Nicely done. Of course, now that it's gotten attention, the guy who originally posted it is taking it down, saying that he did it (of course) for the lulz (as if anyone thought he was serious?). Anyway, perhaps we should have tried this for our $100 million offer to have us silence Techdirt.



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One thing sure to bring a tear to the eye of a frugal WalletPop reader is the sight of a product put out to the curb for trash pickup that could have, with a little more care, lasted much longer. To that end, we offer these 10 suggestions on how to stretch the lifespan of your possessions.



1. Quit washing your jeans



How often do you wash your blue jeans? After each wearing? Once a week? Once a month? According to some enthusiasts, you're destroying what should-be a longtime love affair. Blogger Dr. Denim says the most enthusiastic denim lovers will wear their new jeans six months before the first washing, then three months before a second washing.



And these aren't washings as you might picture them. Carl Chiara of Levi Strauss and Co. told the Wall Street Journal that at the six-month mark, he soaks his jeans in the bathtub with some very mild soap and lets them air-dry. That's it.



There is also an environmental spin to this issue: The United Nations put out a video encouraging people to wash their jeans less often.



Heat, water and detergents can make those new jeans look old in a hurry, but that's not such a good thing when the goal is to increase the lifespan of your favorite denims.



2. Dry your razor blades



Among the most overpriced items on the pharmacy shelf, IMHO, is the razor blade. An 8-pack of Gillette Fusion 5-blade cartridges from Amazon costs $2.64 per cartridge. If you go through one every two weeks, you'll spend $68.58 in a year. If you could cut that in half, what would you do with the extra $34 in your pocket?



Could these savings be as simple as drying your blades after each use? Oxidation of the steel blade can dull the cutting edge quicker than wear and tear against your facial hair, and the bathroom is the perfect climate for oxidation: warm and moist. If you store your razor in the shower (guilty!), don't be surprised if you find those telltale specs of rust on your blade after only a few days.



To extend the life of your blade, dry it carefully after use (if you use a hair dryer, waft it over your razor, too) and store it in a drawer away from the sink and shower.



There are a number of devices on the market that promise to resharpen your blades, but little information on whether they really work or not. Have you tried one? What was your experience?



3. Coddle your tires



A set of good tires can set you back $400, so the payoff from getting extra life from them can save you significant dough. Extending their life isn't rocket science, either. The Michigan Natural and Energy Resources Dept. recommends:

  • Keeping them inflated to the proper psi; check weekly. A set of tire pressure valve stem caps can help, and costs less than $10.

  • Rotate your tires every 5,000-8,000 miles.

  • Use the tire size your car was designed for; smaller tires will wear more quickly.

  • Keep your car aligned; misalignment will show up in unusual tread wear.

  • Avoid quick starts and stops. When your tires are smoking, you may be accelerating too fast.

  • If you store tires, stack them on their side in a dry, cool place, no more than four high.


4. Keep your shoes pristine



With the price of shoes today, squeaking out an extra year or two of shoe life can help you save up for that new pair of Manolo Blahniks. Among the tactics you can employ:

  • Buy decent quality. Those half-price shoes will most likely last less than half as long.

  • Alternate your shoes (this applies mostly to men, I believe, since most women don't wear the same shoes day after day). By having two pairs of everyday shoes and alternating them, you give your shoes a chance to breathe and properly dry out.

  • Dry them completely if you've gotten them wet. Consider using a waterproof spray to keep the rain off, especially in the winter if you live in the north.

  • Clean them thoroughly before polishing, and polish often. The polish isn't just cosmetic; it protects the leather.

  • Buy shoes that can be resoled.

  • When shopping for kids' shoes, have them wear heavy socks to reserve a little room for their rapidly growing feet.

  • Break the habit of wedging yourself in and out of shoes without tying or untying the shoelaces.

  • Use a shoehorn for those that fit tightly.


5. Make your perfume last



Perfume is altered by your body chemistry, so perfume will not smell the same on every person. Every perfume goes through three stages after it is applied to your skin: the top note, the middle note and the dry-out note. Depending on how it reacts to your body, these phases may go by quickly or last and last. Work with your perfume purveyor to find a signature scent that has staying power on your skin.



You can also extend the life of your perfume by applying it properly. This begins with moisturization. The perfume will stick to moist skin better than dry, so applying it before dressing, while fresh from the shower, could help it last. Using a non-scented moisturizer on those parts of the skin when you are about to apply it could also help.



Choosing where to apply it can also be a factor. Avoid the "pulse points", those parts of the body where you can clearly detect a pulse, because blood flows close to the skin there, so that skin is warmer -- inside wrists, neck, behind the ears, on the ankles. Apply the perfume on parts of the body insulated with a fat layer (your upper arms, or your outside thighs, for example).



If your scent dies quickly on you, apply lightly but more frequently.



6. Keep that Christmas tree green



Some of the most enthusiastic season celebrators will put up their Christmas trees just after Thanksgiving and keep them up until the New Year. They risk having a dried-out fire hazard sitting in their living room for weeks. But you can take steps to keep that tree remaining supple and green all the way to the take-down.



The first rule: buy fresh. Perhaps you're lucky enough to live where you can pick out and cut down your own; if not, ask the vendor where the tree came from, and how long ago it was cut. Take a look at the needles. According to the National Christmas Tree Association, a fresh fir tree's needles "should break crisply when bent sharply with the fingers -- much like a fresh carrot," while a pine tree's needles will be supple and resilient. Also check for excessive needle loss, wrinkled bark and a musty odor, all signs of a tree too long from the saw. Favor lots that shade their cut trees from the sun.



Before you take home a tree from a tree lot, ask the vendor to cut off an inch from the bottom of the tree, which will help the tree take up water. At home, keep the water reservoir at the base of the tree full of water. Aspirin, sugar and other folklore additives aren't necessary to keep the tree green.



Place the tree away from heater grates, fireplaces and any other source of heat. Don't expose it to direct sunlight, either.



7. Make your clothes last



Not all clothes can go without washing like the blue jeans mentioned above, but there are ways to extend the life of your underwear, children's wear, shirts, blouses, slacks and jammies. These include:


  • Treat spots rather than wash the whole piece of clothing. The new stain-remover pens work very well, and if you can save a washing, that piece of clothing will last longer.

  • Line dry rather than tumble dry. It's not only ecological, it adds that wonderful fresh sunshine smell to all you wear.

  • Avoid using dryer balls; they soften clothes by beating on the fibers, not a recipe for long life.

  • Maintain your body weight. Easier said than done, but some of us eat our way out of clothes long before they wear out.

  • Hang and/or fold your clothes. It's all too easy to toss wrinkled clothes in the wash basket before they've actually been worn enough to warrant washing.

  • Reserve a set of clothes for dirty tasks, and change into them before digging in the yard, changing your car's oil or washing your dog.

  • Use the sniff test to determine if a shirt or blouse is ready for the laundry, rather than automatically toss it in after a single wearing. Ask a loved one's help; your nose is used to your own body odor.

  • Remove and store those extra buttons sewed onto better quality clothing, so you can replace them when needed rather than ditch the piece of clothing.


8. Extend the life of produce



How much of the produce you buy do you end up pitching because it has decayed? Too much, if you're like my household. This is not necessarily inevitable, however. Try these methods:



Rehydrate. Vegetables like lettuce, spinach and celery can be brought back to life when they begin to wilt by soaking them in cold water. Dry well afterward.



Sequester:
Apples will stay edible in the crisper section of your refrigerator for a long time. Put them in perforated plastic bags to help them stay moist, and toss out any that show decay spots; remember the old adage about rotten apples. If you live in a cooler climate with a garage that doesn't freeze, you could store larger quantities of apples there. Keep them away from other fruit and vegetables that over-ripen easily, however; the ethylene gas the apples give off will hasten the ripening of other produce.



Refrigerate: Some fruits do just fine left out on the kitchen counter, but some are best kept in the fridge. These include berries of many types, grapes, cherries, apricots, and vegetables like broccoli, asparagus, lettuce, mushrooms and sweet corn. The University of California has a convenient chart to help determine what goes where.



Freeze: If you find you aren't going to be able to use peaches and green peppers, for example, before they go bad, toss them in the freezer. They'll last for months if properly packaged.



Chill: Some vegetables like potatoes will last a long time in a cool, dry area, perhaps like the far end of your basement or an attached garage. In days of old, root cellars were dug for this purpose.



Breathe: Onions and garlic should have room to breathe, so don't keep them wrapped in plastic or buried in too small a drawer.



You've probably seen ads for plastic produce bags that claim to allow ethylene gas to escape from fruit and vegetables stored within, thereby keeping them from over-ripening. Consumer Reports tests didn't find these claims valid, however.



9. Save that fine wine



Many of us enjoy a glass of wine with a fine meal, but when dining at home, it's not always wise or appropriate to kill the entire bottle, This leaves us with the dilemma of how to properly save the remaining wine so that it doesn't lose its bouquet and flavor.



The answer begins by understanding that oxygen is your wine's enemy, and the less oxygen you can allow to come into contact with your wine, the better it will retain its character. This means merely banging the cork back into the bottle isn't a good idea; you have all that air trapped with it.



One method is to keep on hand an empty half-sized bottle (a split, in wine terms) into which you can decant the wine. Perhaps a Tupperware tub of equal volume might also serve the purpose, but a wine aficionado would be aghast to see you pour a glass of wine from it.



If you are willing to pay some money to solve the problem, one device that helps is a vacuum pump made to fit over the neck of the bottle and suck out that nasty air. The Wine Doctor, however, doesn't care for this technique and conjectures that the vacuum pump pulls up more than just the air in the bottle neck -- it removes gas that is part of the wine itself.



The pricier solution to the problem is to replace the air with an noncorrosive gas such as nitrogen or argon. The Wine Doctor isn't fond of this solution, either, fearing it could degrade the quality of older wines.



In retrospect, perhaps the answer is to drink the rest of the bottle, but do it very, very slowly.



10. Scratch-proof that smart screen




Fellow WalletPop writer Josh Smith turned me on to screen protectors for my HTC Droid Incredible smart phone. Phones such as this or the Apple iPhone allow the user to scroll across the screen with his/her finger. The technology, also used in the iPod Touch and the new, hot iPad, makes browsing a snap, but risks scratching the screen.



A scratched screen is not only unsightly, but it detracts from any resale value. There are a number of third-party screen overlays such as the Zagg Invisibleshield that are virtually impervious to scratches. Hint: You might find a better price buying through Amazon than through Zagg's website.



Those of us with clumsy fingers, prone to drop expensive objects, might also consider a hard-shell case for our device. I use the Otterbox for my Droid, and have dropped my phone a couple of times without damaging it. There are many other brands available for the device of your choice.



Again, shop around before buying it directly from the manufacturer, and you might save substantially.
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Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated Wii <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Wii news of Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings | Chilean Mine Rescue | Chile - Cable <b>News</b> | Mediaite

Americans were gripped Tuesday night by images from the scene of the Chilean miner rescue. But whose images gripped them most? While CNN won during one hour, Fox News Channel, dominated prime time as usual, ahead of CNN, MSNBC and HLN.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings HUGE For Final Chilean Miners&#39; Rescue

Fox News saw a staggering 7 million viewers as the final miner was rescued in Chile Wednesday night. The network averaged 7.066 million total viewers in the 8PM hour (when the final miner was rescued) and 4.862 million total viewers in ...


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Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated Wii <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Wii news of Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings | Chilean Mine Rescue | Chile - Cable <b>News</b> | Mediaite

Americans were gripped Tuesday night by images from the scene of the Chilean miner rescue. But whose images gripped them most? While CNN won during one hour, Fox News Channel, dominated prime time as usual, ahead of CNN, MSNBC and HLN.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings HUGE For Final Chilean Miners&#39; Rescue

Fox News saw a staggering 7 million viewers as the final miner was rescued in Chile Wednesday night. The network averaged 7.066 million total viewers in the 8PM hour (when the final miner was rescued) and 4.862 million total viewers in ...


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Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated Wii <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Wii news of Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings | Chilean Mine Rescue | Chile - Cable <b>News</b> | Mediaite

Americans were gripped Tuesday night by images from the scene of the Chilean miner rescue. But whose images gripped them most? While CNN won during one hour, Fox News Channel, dominated prime time as usual, ahead of CNN, MSNBC and HLN.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings HUGE For Final Chilean Miners&#39; Rescue

Fox News saw a staggering 7 million viewers as the final miner was rescued in Chile Wednesday night. The network averaged 7.066 million total viewers in the 8PM hour (when the final miner was rescued) and 4.862 million total viewers in ...


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Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated Wii <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Wii news of Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings | Chilean Mine Rescue | Chile - Cable <b>News</b> | Mediaite

Americans were gripped Tuesday night by images from the scene of the Chilean miner rescue. But whose images gripped them most? While CNN won during one hour, Fox News Channel, dominated prime time as usual, ahead of CNN, MSNBC and HLN.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings HUGE For Final Chilean Miners&#39; Rescue

Fox News saw a staggering 7 million viewers as the final miner was rescued in Chile Wednesday night. The network averaged 7.066 million total viewers in the 8PM hour (when the final miner was rescued) and 4.862 million total viewers in ...


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Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated Wii <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Wii news of Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings | Chilean Mine Rescue | Chile - Cable <b>News</b> | Mediaite

Americans were gripped Tuesday night by images from the scene of the Chilean miner rescue. But whose images gripped them most? While CNN won during one hour, Fox News Channel, dominated prime time as usual, ahead of CNN, MSNBC and HLN.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings HUGE For Final Chilean Miners&#39; Rescue

Fox News saw a staggering 7 million viewers as the final miner was rescued in Chile Wednesday night. The network averaged 7.066 million total viewers in the 8PM hour (when the final miner was rescued) and 4.862 million total viewers in ...


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If you're a freelance writer, or thinking about becoming one, then you know that writing is the easy part. Finding places to pitch your writing, eg, marketing it, takes up the bulk of your time.

Well, there are a few ways on the Internet where you can start making money right away - as in, within one week. Following are three.

1. Write for Pay Sites (3 Reviewed)

A. AssociatedContent.com: My favorite write-for-pay site. The beauty of writing for this site is that you write what you want and get paid for it - anywhere from $3 to $40 for a minimum 400-word article. They also accept videos for payment.

The reason I like this site is: 1) as mentioned above, you write what you want. No editor guidelines to follow, writing about subjects that you have no interest in and/or tons of research to do. 2) No minimum pay out to reach (many sites have a minimum you have to reach before you get paid); and 3) Fairly quick turnaround time They usually take 5-7 business days to read your submission and make you an offer.

If you have a hobby, a subject you are passionate about, or a subject you want to take the time to write about - for whatever reason - simply set up an Author's account with them (it's FREE!) and submit.

NOTE: On rare occasions, your article will be rejected. However, the editors usually leave a note explaining why and you then have the chance to make changes and resubmit the content. As I said, to be rejected is rare, but on the few occasions I have been, I always rewrote and usually got a higher than normal offer by acting on the editor's suggestions.

Since I've been a freelance writer for over a decade and had a large library of content, I made a couple of hundred dollars in a few week's time by submitting previously published material.

Didn't I mention that the material you submit doesn't have to be original? You will be paid less for it, but as it's already written and has probably been used for other purposes, it's like free cash. They pay more for original material and material that they specifically request (new topics are emailed from the administrator each Friday).

B. WriteForCash.com: With WriteForCash.com, it takes them up to two weeks to review your article, and more often than not, you will have to make some revisions before your article will be accepted.

Also, it takes them up to three months to get your article on the web. Another drawback of this site is that they own the copyright to the work (eg, you can't resell the content) and you have to choose from topics they list on which to write.

To their credit, the list of topics can be wide-ranging and they pay from $10 to $15 per article. But, if you have a hankering to write about, for example, the World Cup, and it's not on their list, you won't get paid for it.

C. Constant-Content.com: With this site, you basically put your articles up for bid, setting your own price. However, a lot of writers there offer their articles for free, which diminishes your chance of selling one - especially if it's in the same genre. Further, you have to keep your price pretty low to sell articles - anywhere from $1 to $5. Although, this can increase if you write for high-paying genres, eg, finance, technical, etc.

On the upside, you can resell content here. So, if you are going to write an article anyway and sell it elsewhere, you might as well post it here. However, another drawback is that you won't be paid until your account hits the $50 mark. Realistically, this can take months, especially if you are only posting one or two articles a week and selling them for $2 or $3 each.

There are tons of ways to sell your writing online; these three sites are just to get you going and/or supplement what you may already be doing.

2. Start an Article Directory: This takes a bit more work, but is very simple to start. What do people look for on the Internet - information - lots of it!

To start an article directory, all you have to do is put up a simple website and start soliciting writers to submit their articles to you - free of charge. Most article writers are promoters of something - e-books, seminars, software, workshops, etc. They are constantly looking for free and/or low-cost exposure.

Soon, you can have hundreds of pages of content. How will you make money? Add Google ads (details below). Every time someone clicks on one of the ads, you make money.

Many article directories take articles on many subjects; some specialize. Only you can decide which is right for you. I personally prefer niche directories because as the web expands, I think users will revisit a directory that carries quality information on a specific topic more often than one that carries a lot of articles on everything. Even if you separate them out by category, I find the "all inclusive directories" too overwhelming. Again, it's up to you.

The real key to making money with an article directory is promoting it and getting good, quality articles for your site. To get excellent articles, surf the web using key words on your subject. Once you find an article you like, contact the author (most will have their contact info in the resource box at the end of the article) and ask them to regularly submit articles to your directory. They will almost always say yes.

Once your directory has been indexed by search engines, many will start sending you articles automatically. This is when your site should really take off. Once you have a few hundred articles in your directory (and this can literally take as little as a few weeks if you put in the time), slap those Google ads on each page, and voila - you have hundreds of pages of content carrying ads that, each time they're clicked, is money in your pocket.

NOTE: There are many article directories online where you can automatically pull articles from to get started. Do a Google search for "article directory" and about 3.5 million (yes, million!) results pop up.

Article Directory Software: If you want to put out a little money, you can purchase software that will completely automate this process for you. Do a Google search for "article directory software" and close to half a million results come up. With most of the software you can choose to buy and install yourself, or have the publisher install it for you. Note: You have to be a real techie if you choose to go the self-install route.

Before starting an article directory, I recommend taking several hours and doing some reading on the subject. While it's a relatively simple concept, it can be a lot of work up front - but can pay huge dividends over the months and years to come.

To learn more about getting those Google ads you see on many websites, go to Google.com. Click on "Advertising Programs" (a plain text button right under the search box). Then click on "For Web Publishers: Google AdSense". Finally, click on "What is AdSense? Quick Tour". The program will be explained in detail and you can have it up and running in about 5 minutes.

3. Start a Blog: This is becoming old hat, but is still new and fresh enough that if you have a passion for something and can target a highly defined niche, you can start a blog on it, add some Google Adsense ads, and turn it into a few hundred bucks a month without too much effort. Want to make more? Like anything in life, the more time you commit to it, the more your income will rise.

There's even a new website, Scoopt.com, that acts as a blog literary agent. What do I mean by this? Specifically, they "help you license your blog for both commercial and non-commercial use." In essence, they help you sell your blog's content. See full details at their site.

Blogs are no longer just for ranting about your last bad relationship or the bad dye job your colorist did on your hair. They are professional outlets for making money now.

To read a case study of how a personal interest can be turned into a popular, moneymaking blog, go to ProBlogger.net and do a search of their site for ""Back in Skinny Jeans". The article should pop up. It's very, very interesting reading.

FYI, to start a blog, go to blogger.com, create an account and start blogging away. It's FREE!

SUMMARY: These are not get-rich-quick schemes. My mission at InkwellEditorial.com is to help creative and editorial freelancers earn a decent living. I will never promise you that you will "make thousands a month by just doing x", as many will. Don't believe the hype.

I have been in publishing since 1987, and have been a freelancer since 1993. Believe me, I've heard about and tried so many different programs. The only way to make money is to consistently plug away at something. It takes time and effort, effort and time. The good news is that if you are determined to make a living as a creative professional, the Internet makes it easier than ever. And, it can be done "relatively" easy if you choose effective methods and consistently implement them.



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Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated Wii <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Wii news of Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings | Chilean Mine Rescue | Chile - Cable <b>News</b> | Mediaite

Americans were gripped Tuesday night by images from the scene of the Chilean miner rescue. But whose images gripped them most? While CNN won during one hour, Fox News Channel, dominated prime time as usual, ahead of CNN, MSNBC and HLN.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings HUGE For Final Chilean Miners&#39; Rescue

Fox News saw a staggering 7 million viewers as the final miner was rescued in Chile Wednesday night. The network averaged 7.066 million total viewers in the 8PM hour (when the final miner was rescued) and 4.862 million total viewers in ...


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Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated Wii <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our Wii news of Wii Remote/Motion Plus combo dated.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings | Chilean Mine Rescue | Chile - Cable <b>News</b> | Mediaite

Americans were gripped Tuesday night by images from the scene of the Chilean miner rescue. But whose images gripped them most? While CNN won during one hour, Fox News Channel, dominated prime time as usual, ahead of CNN, MSNBC and HLN.

Fox <b>News</b> Ratings HUGE For Final Chilean Miners&#39; Rescue

Fox News saw a staggering 7 million viewers as the final miner was rescued in Chile Wednesday night. The network averaged 7.066 million total viewers in the 8PM hour (when the final miner was rescued) and 4.862 million total viewers in ...


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Monday, October 4, 2010

Women Making Money


The newly formed �super PAC� of abortion rights advocacy group EMILY�s List drew most of the $430,000 it raised in August from just five sources, a Center for Responsive Politics review of campaign finance reports filed Thursday shows.

Last month, the PAC, known as Women Vote!, raised $250,000 from the Service Employees International Union and another $95,000 from four wealthy women philanthropists and investors who have been prolific political donors over the years, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis. Such contributions illustrate how relatively few people may now, in the aftermath of major federal court decisions, significantly affect the financial fortunes of certain political groups.

This $95,000 represents more than 50 percent of all non-SEIU contributions Women Vote! collected in August.

The largest individual contribution the group received in August came from New York investor Judith-Ann Corrente, who contributed $50,000.

Along with her husband, Blenheim Capital Management Chairman Willem Kooyker, Corrente is among the top 50 donors to all federal candidates, parties and committees so far this election cycle.

The other women to drop five-figure checks for the committee are as follows:



  • Anne D. Taft, of Binghamton, N.Y. She contributed $25,000 and her occupation is listed as �investor� on the group�s Federal Election Commission filings

  • Emily H. Fisher, a philanthropist who lives in Sheffield, Mass. She contributed $10,000 and her occupation is listed as �retired� on the group�s FEC filings

  • Anne Bartley, of San Francisco. She contributed $10,000. Her occupation is listed as �investor� on the group�s FEC filings. She is married to Larry B. McNeil -- who is the director of the SEIU�s Institute for Change and who was a �Saul Alinski organizer for 25 years,� according to an official online biography
Bartley is also currently a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. (Full disclosure: This foundation is a funder of the Center for Responsive Politics.)

The EMILY�s List�s Women Vote! PAC was established earlier this year for the explicit purpose of making independent expenditures in hot races, for example, running advertisements overtly telling voters to support or defeat specific candidates. It is one of more than two dozen groups to register with the FEC as an �independent expenditure-only committee,� as OpenSecrets Blog has previously written about on numerous occasions.

The group has raised $1.5 million between January and August. It ended August with about $703,000 cash on hand.

It has spent $826,900 since January, including $65,800 on mailings in August touting Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Robin Carnahan and opposing Republican Senate candidate Roy Blunt in Missouri.

During previous election cycles, federal rules limited how much money PACs could collect from individuals. It was illegal to collect more than $5,000 per person, per year. But recent federal legal rulings -- including Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission -- have changed that.


Shopping platform Shwowp aspires to be“a Tripit plus Blippy plus Mint for shopping.” Founded by Internet marketer Tara Hunt, Shwowp (in the same space as RightCliq) attempts to grapple with the issue of all our purchase data being siloed across multiple retailers like Amazon, Bluefly, etc by trying to corral our diverse shopping history into one place.


Shwowp users can make a purchase, forward the receipt or order information to wow@shwowp.com and the service will synch that info to their account. Once there a user can change their own data, view their buying patterns and share information about the shopping experience like how long it took to get to the store, availability, how influenced they were by what their friends were buying and so on and so forth.


Of course the end of goal of this is a serving up a personal RFP in order make shopping data more useful, i.e. provide customers with targeted discounts based on their buying history.


Founder Hunt asserts that currently data is “one sided” and hopes that the fully portable Shwowp platform will make sure that customers really take advantage of their own data and get the shopping experience they needed.


Currently in the friends and family stage of funding, Shwowp plans on making money through affiliate advertising, coupons, opt-in vendor deals, data reporting as well as API usage.  They’re targeting the female market primarily, at $37 million dollars a year.


A: We’re not like Blippy, we’re not a sharing platform in way More interested in signaling part and data portability part. Have an export button on the website.


LL: Leaves me with idea that we want to share what we buy.

A: Our target market is women, because they control 4.3 trillion of spending. And they often shop online and share about products.


JS: I wouldn’t mind sharing my data online as long as I was getting economic benefit.

A: Biggest part is data portability…


JH: Love that you’re thinking big. Practical point, I feel like if you have opportunity to streamline what you’re asking users..

A: We have a lot of steps currently because we’re optimizing for privacy.


DD: I think this idea is deeper than you could convey in six minutes. Data portability, that sort of thing. I think it’s pretty powerful. Getting offers to come to you based on your interests. Would suggest your data is already being shared anyway, you just don’t know it.


JS: Reminds me of end-of-year American Express summary, the thought I could turn that around and get paid for it is compelling.



The Birmingham <b>News</b> Pink Edition: Supporting the fight against <b>...</b>

Reports on the work being done in our community to fight the disease and sharing the stories of breast cancer survivors.

<b>News</b> the Old Media Won&#39;t Tell You: More Trash at One Sparsely <b>...</b>

12774581 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fbigjournalism.com%2Fmpleahy%2F2010%2F10%2F03%2Fnews-the-old-media-wont-tell-you-more-trash-at-one-sparsely-attended-left-wing-rally-than-at-all-the-tea-parties-around-the-country-in-a-year-and-a-half%2FNews ...

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs <b>News</b> 10/4 - Arrowhead Pride

However, there aren't many real stories because of the bye. I'd expect the hype to start soon. We're just a few days from the undefeated Chiefs playing the "struggling" Colts. Here's your Kansas City Chiefs news.


eric seiger eric seiger

The newly formed �super PAC� of abortion rights advocacy group EMILY�s List drew most of the $430,000 it raised in August from just five sources, a Center for Responsive Politics review of campaign finance reports filed Thursday shows.

Last month, the PAC, known as Women Vote!, raised $250,000 from the Service Employees International Union and another $95,000 from four wealthy women philanthropists and investors who have been prolific political donors over the years, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis. Such contributions illustrate how relatively few people may now, in the aftermath of major federal court decisions, significantly affect the financial fortunes of certain political groups.

This $95,000 represents more than 50 percent of all non-SEIU contributions Women Vote! collected in August.

The largest individual contribution the group received in August came from New York investor Judith-Ann Corrente, who contributed $50,000.

Along with her husband, Blenheim Capital Management Chairman Willem Kooyker, Corrente is among the top 50 donors to all federal candidates, parties and committees so far this election cycle.

The other women to drop five-figure checks for the committee are as follows:



  • Anne D. Taft, of Binghamton, N.Y. She contributed $25,000 and her occupation is listed as �investor� on the group�s Federal Election Commission filings

  • Emily H. Fisher, a philanthropist who lives in Sheffield, Mass. She contributed $10,000 and her occupation is listed as �retired� on the group�s FEC filings

  • Anne Bartley, of San Francisco. She contributed $10,000. Her occupation is listed as �investor� on the group�s FEC filings. She is married to Larry B. McNeil -- who is the director of the SEIU�s Institute for Change and who was a �Saul Alinski organizer for 25 years,� according to an official online biography
Bartley is also currently a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. (Full disclosure: This foundation is a funder of the Center for Responsive Politics.)

The EMILY�s List�s Women Vote! PAC was established earlier this year for the explicit purpose of making independent expenditures in hot races, for example, running advertisements overtly telling voters to support or defeat specific candidates. It is one of more than two dozen groups to register with the FEC as an �independent expenditure-only committee,� as OpenSecrets Blog has previously written about on numerous occasions.

The group has raised $1.5 million between January and August. It ended August with about $703,000 cash on hand.

It has spent $826,900 since January, including $65,800 on mailings in August touting Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Robin Carnahan and opposing Republican Senate candidate Roy Blunt in Missouri.

During previous election cycles, federal rules limited how much money PACs could collect from individuals. It was illegal to collect more than $5,000 per person, per year. But recent federal legal rulings -- including Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission -- have changed that.


Shopping platform Shwowp aspires to be“a Tripit plus Blippy plus Mint for shopping.” Founded by Internet marketer Tara Hunt, Shwowp (in the same space as RightCliq) attempts to grapple with the issue of all our purchase data being siloed across multiple retailers like Amazon, Bluefly, etc by trying to corral our diverse shopping history into one place.


Shwowp users can make a purchase, forward the receipt or order information to wow@shwowp.com and the service will synch that info to their account. Once there a user can change their own data, view their buying patterns and share information about the shopping experience like how long it took to get to the store, availability, how influenced they were by what their friends were buying and so on and so forth.


Of course the end of goal of this is a serving up a personal RFP in order make shopping data more useful, i.e. provide customers with targeted discounts based on their buying history.


Founder Hunt asserts that currently data is “one sided” and hopes that the fully portable Shwowp platform will make sure that customers really take advantage of their own data and get the shopping experience they needed.


Currently in the friends and family stage of funding, Shwowp plans on making money through affiliate advertising, coupons, opt-in vendor deals, data reporting as well as API usage.  They’re targeting the female market primarily, at $37 million dollars a year.


A: We’re not like Blippy, we’re not a sharing platform in way More interested in signaling part and data portability part. Have an export button on the website.


LL: Leaves me with idea that we want to share what we buy.

A: Our target market is women, because they control 4.3 trillion of spending. And they often shop online and share about products.


JS: I wouldn’t mind sharing my data online as long as I was getting economic benefit.

A: Biggest part is data portability…


JH: Love that you’re thinking big. Practical point, I feel like if you have opportunity to streamline what you’re asking users..

A: We have a lot of steps currently because we’re optimizing for privacy.


DD: I think this idea is deeper than you could convey in six minutes. Data portability, that sort of thing. I think it’s pretty powerful. Getting offers to come to you based on your interests. Would suggest your data is already being shared anyway, you just don’t know it.


JS: Reminds me of end-of-year American Express summary, the thought I could turn that around and get paid for it is compelling.



The Birmingham <b>News</b> Pink Edition: Supporting the fight against <b>...</b>

Reports on the work being done in our community to fight the disease and sharing the stories of breast cancer survivors.

<b>News</b> the Old Media Won&#39;t Tell You: More Trash at One Sparsely <b>...</b>

12774581 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fbigjournalism.com%2Fmpleahy%2F2010%2F10%2F03%2Fnews-the-old-media-wont-tell-you-more-trash-at-one-sparsely-attended-left-wing-rally-than-at-all-the-tea-parties-around-the-country-in-a-year-and-a-half%2FNews ...

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs <b>News</b> 10/4 - Arrowhead Pride

However, there aren't many real stories because of the bye. I'd expect the hype to start soon. We're just a few days from the undefeated Chiefs playing the "struggling" Colts. Here's your Kansas City Chiefs news.


eric seiger eric seiger


Make Money Every 30 seconds! Its FREE by www.onlinejobdb.com





















































Saturday, October 2, 2010

Being Right or Making Money





Hullabaloo








Saturday, September 25, 2010




 

NY Times Miss Manners Hints At Truth

by digby

The New York Times features an interesting story this morning about a move across teh country to remove judges by people who don't like their decisions:

After the State Supreme Court here stunned the nation by making this the first state in the heartland to allow same-sex marriage, Iowa braced for its sleepy judicial elections to turn into referendums on gay marriage.

The three Supreme Court justices on the ballot this year are indeed the targets of a well-financed campaign to oust them. But the effort has less to do with undoing same-sex marriage — which will remain even if the judges do not — than sending a broader message far beyond this state’s borders: voters can remove judges whose opinions they dislike.

Around the country, judicial elections that were designed to be as apolitical as possible are suddenly as contentious as any another race.

In Kansas, anti-abortion activists are seeking to recall a justice. In Illinois, business interests are campaigning against the chief justice after a case that removed a cap on malpractice liability, prompting him to run a television ad that opens with the declaration, “I am not a politician.” And a conservative group called Clear the Bench Colorado is citing a host of decisions in seeking to oust the full slate of justices on the ballot there, urging voters, “Be a citizen, not a subject.”


It goes on to point out that the laws many of them were using were designed to remove corrupt or incompetent judges but are now being used to send a message that judges who do not adhere to certain views will be kicked out of office.

It also points out that there is big money involved, with the campaigns being underwritten by corporate interests and wealthy Christian groups.

But they forgot to connect the dots in this story. Do you notice something that all these cases around the country have in common? Yes, I knew that you could -- they are all being waged by right wingers. This "trend" is decidedly one-sided, run by a minority faction in America who have decided that their interpretation of the laws and the constitution will be imposed upon everyone.

Far be it for me to suggest that intimidating judges and replacing ones you don't like with social conservatives might be just a little bit theocratic and surely nobody can believe thatcorporate sponsored removal campaigns are designed to make it impossible for moderate or conservative judges to compete against business friendly judges. It would be very impolite to point any of that out, which is why, I'm sure that the New York Times didn't bother to do it.

They simply left some little hints for the discerning reader to sift through:

Brian S. Brown, executive director of the National Organization for Marriage, which has spent $230,000 on television ads criticizing the Iowa judges, said he understood that removing the three judges would not change the same-sex marriage ruling. (It was a unanimous ruling by the state’s seven justices.) But Mr. Brown said he hoped the judges’ ouster would help prevent similar rulings elsewhere by making judges around the nation aware that their jobs are on the line.

“It sends a powerful message,” he said, “That if justices go outside the bounds of their oaths, if the justices go outside the bounds of the U.S. and state constitutions they’re going to be held accountable.”

Bob Vander Plaats, who made opposition to same-sex marriage a centerpiece of his unsuccessful run for governor in Iowa, is leading the ouster campaign on behalf of the political arm of the American Family Association, a conservative Christian organization based in Tupelo, Miss.

“My bigger fear isn’t about injecting politics into judicial retention elections. The bigger fear is that we don’t hold them in check,” he said, warning that gun and property rights could be at risk.


Make of that what you will dear reader. But never say that the NY Times stooped to the level of shrill bloggers who suggest that the far right might have a radical agenda. Let no one say that the old Gray Lady is anything but well mannered.




.




|






News started to break earlier this week about a $100 million donation Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making to Newark’s school system. He’s announcing it today on the Oprah Winfrey show.


Jason Kincaid and I spoke to Zuckerberg about the donation earlier this week, at the same time we interviewed him about the Facebook Phone issue.


He’s creating a new foundation and funding it with $100 million in Facebook stock. The money will be used to revamp the Newark school system, including closing some schools, opening new ones and experimenting with teacher pay. Newark Mayor Cory Booker will be a key figure in how the money is spent.


We interviewed Mayor Booker in 2008 when he was focusing on fighting crime in Newark via high quality security cameras and a gunshot detection system to monitor an eight square mile crime-heavy area of Newark.


The interview is below.


Mark Zuckerberg: So over the last year. I started researching what the best ways would be to kind of improve the education system. And I just have a lot of reasons why personally I’m interested in this. Have you met Priscilla, my girlfriend?


Michael Arrington: I only know her through your Facebook account.


Mark Zuckerberg: Yes. I mean – so we’ve been dating for about seven years. When she graduated from school, she went and became a teacher. Now, she’s in medical school and she’s studying to be a pediatrician. But this is just kind of a common thing that we’ve been really interested in – about education, kids. And, you know, the default path that we were on, we’re just like, okay, a lot of other people wait until later on in their career to figure out how to give back. Then we decided – this is just like a year ago, maybe nine months ago, I said, why should we wait? I mean, most people don’t have this kind of success early on in life. We feel really lucky so we should be researching this now. And we decided early on that the thing that we wanted to try to help out with was education. It’s just that there are so many things that are broken in the education system across the country now. The national education budget is 600 billion dollars that goes towards all of education. So it’s kind of crazy, right?


Michael Arrington: That includes state budget?


Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah – national, state, everything. So it ends up being quite difficult to make a difference because any amount of money that anyone has is just a drop in the bucket compared to that. So when you start learning about education, there are all these organizations that are national like KIPP – the chapter schools that are the top performing. There are 99 of them across the country. They’re really high performing schools.


There’s stuff like Teach For America, that places a few hundred teachers in a lot of different cities. And they’re really creating the pipeline for all of the – kind of HR and people who go into… A lot of people who do Teach for America don’t end up staying in teaching. But about two-thirds of them end up in education. So for example, the people who started a lot of the top charter schools are TFA alums. That’s an amazing institution.


But the thing that’s working a lot more recently is rather than trying to take a cut of one of these problems on a national level, going in to any given school – like a school district or city and trying to reform all these different things at once. So in New York, Bloomberg did a bunch of this, D.C. there was a bunch of this. Unfortunately, the mayor who did it there just lost his election. And the approach is – because there are so many different issues that are kind of all compounding in the education system rather than trying to fix any one of them in a lot of places,you get a lot better results when you fix all of them in one place. And the idea is that you’re going to show that it’s getting results on a five or eight year time frame. Then, that creates an example that other cities can go copy and improve.


So we did all this research and we figured it would be a while until we found a good candidate but it turns out that Newark, New Jersey is a good candidate for a lot of reasons. So the main reason is that the leaders there are really good. So there’s this guy, Cory Booker, who’s the mayor and who’s a Democrat and the governor, Chris Christie in New Jersey is a Republican. They’re both really good leaders who are rising stars in their respective parties. And just very well respected nationally, have a lot of political capital that they can spend on trying to make the reforms, the changes that are painful but necessary to get this stuff done. And at the same time, Newark is one of the lowest performing school districts in the country right now. About 45% of high school students drop out. Around 50% of students don’t pass the state proficiency exams for literacy.


In a study at the local community college almost all of the Newark students who end up graduating and going , end up having to take remedial classes in education – in language or math to just to learn stuff that they should have learned in high school. So it’s really right now, it’s not – it’s one of the lower performing school districts but to me that’s just an opportunity when you get great leaders to show that you can make really good improvements, right? And one of the great things about Newark is that it’s so close to New York City that there are a lot of other issues in Newark at the same time. But if you can just fix the education issues, then, everyone can just drive 10 minutes and get a job in New York City, so it becomes the highest order bit.


So that – that way Cory is really aligned towards one – like this is his top priority. He just got re-elected by a pretty big margin and it’s his biggest priority. Then, so now – so that’s kind of what we’re doing, I mean, the idea is fund him and basically support him in doing a really comprehensive program to get all these things in place that they need to get done.


Michael Arrington: It’s $100 million and – that will be spent over how long do you think?


Mark Zuckerberg: Five years.


Michael Arrington: Okay. And that will open up some new schools?


Mark Zuckerberg: Oh, yeah.


Michael Arrington: Quickly?


Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, yes.


Michael Arrington: They can build them up.


Mark Zuckerberg: But it’s also a – well, actually a lot of the work will be done in the first year, kind of just like getting the charter schools to come … Working with Teach For America to get more placements for their – for their teachers.


Michael Arrington: So what happens after five years if this works out really well?


Mark Zuckerberg: Well, a lot of the data on reforming school districts shows that it actually takes eight to 10 years really to turn the thing around. But what the real goal is here – is just to show that it’s working. I mean, I don’t have much of a connection to Newark. I grew up in New York, right outside the city. So Newark is just close by and it’s going to – I hope that this helps the 45,000 students who go to school there. But the long-term goal would be to make Newark into a symbol that you can do this. So that way, a lot of the results can get replicated in other places and I – I hope that we can do that on the three to five-year period and that there will be more work after that. But hopefully a lot of it will get put in motion in the first year or so, and a lot of stuff that they need to do is just close down certain schools, make sure that there’s room for good schools to come in and join, set up programs. And then, a lot of this is going to be operating it and just going to take a long time to change.


Jason Kincaid: What about attracting better teachers to the schools? I’d imagine part of this isn’t just the way teachers are gauged but you know, the actual teaching talent. Is that what TFA should and can help with?


Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. Also, TFA is – one of the things that’s pretty interesting is around this. So my girlfriend wanted to be a teacher after she graduated from Harvard. And one of the things that I saw that was interesting was socially the response that she got. Where, everyone was kind of, “this is such a nice thing that you’re doing it”. But it was like she’s doing charity. It’s clear that she could have gotten paid more doing some other job. She’s really smart and she was clearly foregoing the real economic value for her to do something that was socially valuable. So the question is, how can you make it so that a lot of the people who would go do other things, teaching is a respected and valued enough job that people actually go into it. Given that it has a lot more impact than what these people are being compensated at today. And I think of that – that is a big problem. One of the things that’s been pretty interesting about TFA is they’ve actually gotten a lot of really good college students to go into teaching but it’s only for a short period of time. 15% of the graduating Harvard class applies to TFA and there are aren’t enough placements today to accept all those people but they would accept a lot more of them if they could. It’s just that it’s really hard —TFA needs to go fund those people and get them placed at specific schools. There is often some politics around that. So that’s one of the big things that they are working on. But the TFA is trying to double over the next five years, right. So but that number surprised me, when I learned that 15%, I mean… Apparently TFA is I think by far the largest employer of students graduating from Ivy League schools.


Michael Arrington: So is it a government organization?


Mark Zuckerberg: No, no. It’s a private charity. Yeah. And now, the woman who founded it is starting – this woman, Wendy Kopp, is starting an international version Teach For All. So it’s cool, but in doing research for this, a lot of the educational issues in the U.S. are pretty different from international. So I’m not sure how much we’re going to be able to learn from this experience to do it internationally but maybe for the next one we’ll think about something like that. A lot of this really just comes down to though — I spend all my time running this company, you know. So for a lot of people who are later in their careers when they start this stuff, they can spend more time on it like running a foundation and I really couldn’t. So for me this is more like a venture capital approach where it’s like you pick the entrepreneur, the leader that you believe in and then you really like try to give them a lot of leverage.


Michael Arrington: Cory Booker in that case.


Mark Zuckerberg: Yes.


Michael Arrington: He was doing some things around cameras and crime control.


Mark Zuckerberg: Exactly.


Michael Arrington: That was really controversial.


Mark Zuckerberg: So his whole first term was focused on getting crime down because Newark has the highest crime rate, I think in the country and he reduced it by like 50 or 60% or something insane. Those numbers aren’t fact checked, so that might be off but it’s large, all right. And he’s pretty amazing when you talk to him about this stuff. He himself moved from the – mayor’s house and he got like a trailer and moved to like the most dangerous street in Newark. And he used to drive around on the streets with the police there at like three or four in the morning tracking down crime. And his whole theory was like…


Michael Arrington: That was when he was a city councilor, right, before he ran for mayor?


Mark Zuckerberg: I think it was after he was mayor. I mean, maybe he did that before and after. But my understanding was that, that was during his time as mayor because that’s when he made this this huge priority, is we have to cut down crime. It was like, if I’m going to get the police force to care about this, they’re going to go out risking their lives like I need to show that I irrationally care about this. I think he is pretty amazing.



Various <b>News</b> Tidbits - Lookout Landing

Various News Tidbits. ... Various News Tidbits. Tiny by Matthew on Oct 1, 2010 4:25 PM PDT in Miscellaneous � Tweet. 3 comments; Story-email Email; Printer Print. Even Felix's hugs are powerful � More photos » Elaine Thompson - AP ...

As AOL rushes to local <b>news</b>, Examiner.com is already there <b>...</b>

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. ...

<b>News</b> Roundup: &#39;Jersey Shore&#39; Under Fire in Canada, Bret Michaels <b>...</b>

It seems not everybody is DTW (down to watch) the 'Jersey Shore' cast work on their GTL. The macaroni rascals are under fire up North for.


bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off

Session &quot;Step 3: $$$$PROFIT$$$$ Making money with Drupal websites&quot; by khawkins04


Various <b>News</b> Tidbits - Lookout Landing

Various News Tidbits. ... Various News Tidbits. Tiny by Matthew on Oct 1, 2010 4:25 PM PDT in Miscellaneous � Tweet. 3 comments; Story-email Email; Printer Print. Even Felix's hugs are powerful � More photos » Elaine Thompson - AP ...

As AOL rushes to local <b>news</b>, Examiner.com is already there <b>...</b>

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. ...

<b>News</b> Roundup: &#39;Jersey Shore&#39; Under Fire in Canada, Bret Michaels <b>...</b>

It seems not everybody is DTW (down to watch) the 'Jersey Shore' cast work on their GTL. The macaroni rascals are under fire up North for.


bench craft company rip off bench craft company rip off




Hullabaloo








Saturday, September 25, 2010




 

NY Times Miss Manners Hints At Truth

by digby

The New York Times features an interesting story this morning about a move across teh country to remove judges by people who don't like their decisions:

After the State Supreme Court here stunned the nation by making this the first state in the heartland to allow same-sex marriage, Iowa braced for its sleepy judicial elections to turn into referendums on gay marriage.

The three Supreme Court justices on the ballot this year are indeed the targets of a well-financed campaign to oust them. But the effort has less to do with undoing same-sex marriage — which will remain even if the judges do not — than sending a broader message far beyond this state’s borders: voters can remove judges whose opinions they dislike.

Around the country, judicial elections that were designed to be as apolitical as possible are suddenly as contentious as any another race.

In Kansas, anti-abortion activists are seeking to recall a justice. In Illinois, business interests are campaigning against the chief justice after a case that removed a cap on malpractice liability, prompting him to run a television ad that opens with the declaration, “I am not a politician.” And a conservative group called Clear the Bench Colorado is citing a host of decisions in seeking to oust the full slate of justices on the ballot there, urging voters, “Be a citizen, not a subject.”


It goes on to point out that the laws many of them were using were designed to remove corrupt or incompetent judges but are now being used to send a message that judges who do not adhere to certain views will be kicked out of office.

It also points out that there is big money involved, with the campaigns being underwritten by corporate interests and wealthy Christian groups.

But they forgot to connect the dots in this story. Do you notice something that all these cases around the country have in common? Yes, I knew that you could -- they are all being waged by right wingers. This "trend" is decidedly one-sided, run by a minority faction in America who have decided that their interpretation of the laws and the constitution will be imposed upon everyone.

Far be it for me to suggest that intimidating judges and replacing ones you don't like with social conservatives might be just a little bit theocratic and surely nobody can believe thatcorporate sponsored removal campaigns are designed to make it impossible for moderate or conservative judges to compete against business friendly judges. It would be very impolite to point any of that out, which is why, I'm sure that the New York Times didn't bother to do it.

They simply left some little hints for the discerning reader to sift through:

Brian S. Brown, executive director of the National Organization for Marriage, which has spent $230,000 on television ads criticizing the Iowa judges, said he understood that removing the three judges would not change the same-sex marriage ruling. (It was a unanimous ruling by the state’s seven justices.) But Mr. Brown said he hoped the judges’ ouster would help prevent similar rulings elsewhere by making judges around the nation aware that their jobs are on the line.

“It sends a powerful message,” he said, “That if justices go outside the bounds of their oaths, if the justices go outside the bounds of the U.S. and state constitutions they’re going to be held accountable.”

Bob Vander Plaats, who made opposition to same-sex marriage a centerpiece of his unsuccessful run for governor in Iowa, is leading the ouster campaign on behalf of the political arm of the American Family Association, a conservative Christian organization based in Tupelo, Miss.

“My bigger fear isn’t about injecting politics into judicial retention elections. The bigger fear is that we don’t hold them in check,” he said, warning that gun and property rights could be at risk.


Make of that what you will dear reader. But never say that the NY Times stooped to the level of shrill bloggers who suggest that the far right might have a radical agenda. Let no one say that the old Gray Lady is anything but well mannered.




.




|






News started to break earlier this week about a $100 million donation Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making to Newark’s school system. He’s announcing it today on the Oprah Winfrey show.


Jason Kincaid and I spoke to Zuckerberg about the donation earlier this week, at the same time we interviewed him about the Facebook Phone issue.


He’s creating a new foundation and funding it with $100 million in Facebook stock. The money will be used to revamp the Newark school system, including closing some schools, opening new ones and experimenting with teacher pay. Newark Mayor Cory Booker will be a key figure in how the money is spent.


We interviewed Mayor Booker in 2008 when he was focusing on fighting crime in Newark via high quality security cameras and a gunshot detection system to monitor an eight square mile crime-heavy area of Newark.


The interview is below.


Mark Zuckerberg: So over the last year. I started researching what the best ways would be to kind of improve the education system. And I just have a lot of reasons why personally I’m interested in this. Have you met Priscilla, my girlfriend?


Michael Arrington: I only know her through your Facebook account.


Mark Zuckerberg: Yes. I mean – so we’ve been dating for about seven years. When she graduated from school, she went and became a teacher. Now, she’s in medical school and she’s studying to be a pediatrician. But this is just kind of a common thing that we’ve been really interested in – about education, kids. And, you know, the default path that we were on, we’re just like, okay, a lot of other people wait until later on in their career to figure out how to give back. Then we decided – this is just like a year ago, maybe nine months ago, I said, why should we wait? I mean, most people don’t have this kind of success early on in life. We feel really lucky so we should be researching this now. And we decided early on that the thing that we wanted to try to help out with was education. It’s just that there are so many things that are broken in the education system across the country now. The national education budget is 600 billion dollars that goes towards all of education. So it’s kind of crazy, right?


Michael Arrington: That includes state budget?


Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah – national, state, everything. So it ends up being quite difficult to make a difference because any amount of money that anyone has is just a drop in the bucket compared to that. So when you start learning about education, there are all these organizations that are national like KIPP – the chapter schools that are the top performing. There are 99 of them across the country. They’re really high performing schools.


There’s stuff like Teach For America, that places a few hundred teachers in a lot of different cities. And they’re really creating the pipeline for all of the – kind of HR and people who go into… A lot of people who do Teach for America don’t end up staying in teaching. But about two-thirds of them end up in education. So for example, the people who started a lot of the top charter schools are TFA alums. That’s an amazing institution.


But the thing that’s working a lot more recently is rather than trying to take a cut of one of these problems on a national level, going in to any given school – like a school district or city and trying to reform all these different things at once. So in New York, Bloomberg did a bunch of this, D.C. there was a bunch of this. Unfortunately, the mayor who did it there just lost his election. And the approach is – because there are so many different issues that are kind of all compounding in the education system rather than trying to fix any one of them in a lot of places,you get a lot better results when you fix all of them in one place. And the idea is that you’re going to show that it’s getting results on a five or eight year time frame. Then, that creates an example that other cities can go copy and improve.


So we did all this research and we figured it would be a while until we found a good candidate but it turns out that Newark, New Jersey is a good candidate for a lot of reasons. So the main reason is that the leaders there are really good. So there’s this guy, Cory Booker, who’s the mayor and who’s a Democrat and the governor, Chris Christie in New Jersey is a Republican. They’re both really good leaders who are rising stars in their respective parties. And just very well respected nationally, have a lot of political capital that they can spend on trying to make the reforms, the changes that are painful but necessary to get this stuff done. And at the same time, Newark is one of the lowest performing school districts in the country right now. About 45% of high school students drop out. Around 50% of students don’t pass the state proficiency exams for literacy.


In a study at the local community college almost all of the Newark students who end up graduating and going , end up having to take remedial classes in education – in language or math to just to learn stuff that they should have learned in high school. So it’s really right now, it’s not – it’s one of the lower performing school districts but to me that’s just an opportunity when you get great leaders to show that you can make really good improvements, right? And one of the great things about Newark is that it’s so close to New York City that there are a lot of other issues in Newark at the same time. But if you can just fix the education issues, then, everyone can just drive 10 minutes and get a job in New York City, so it becomes the highest order bit.


So that – that way Cory is really aligned towards one – like this is his top priority. He just got re-elected by a pretty big margin and it’s his biggest priority. Then, so now – so that’s kind of what we’re doing, I mean, the idea is fund him and basically support him in doing a really comprehensive program to get all these things in place that they need to get done.


Michael Arrington: It’s $100 million and – that will be spent over how long do you think?


Mark Zuckerberg: Five years.


Michael Arrington: Okay. And that will open up some new schools?


Mark Zuckerberg: Oh, yeah.


Michael Arrington: Quickly?


Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, yes.


Michael Arrington: They can build them up.


Mark Zuckerberg: But it’s also a – well, actually a lot of the work will be done in the first year, kind of just like getting the charter schools to come … Working with Teach For America to get more placements for their – for their teachers.


Michael Arrington: So what happens after five years if this works out really well?


Mark Zuckerberg: Well, a lot of the data on reforming school districts shows that it actually takes eight to 10 years really to turn the thing around. But what the real goal is here – is just to show that it’s working. I mean, I don’t have much of a connection to Newark. I grew up in New York, right outside the city. So Newark is just close by and it’s going to – I hope that this helps the 45,000 students who go to school there. But the long-term goal would be to make Newark into a symbol that you can do this. So that way, a lot of the results can get replicated in other places and I – I hope that we can do that on the three to five-year period and that there will be more work after that. But hopefully a lot of it will get put in motion in the first year or so, and a lot of stuff that they need to do is just close down certain schools, make sure that there’s room for good schools to come in and join, set up programs. And then, a lot of this is going to be operating it and just going to take a long time to change.


Jason Kincaid: What about attracting better teachers to the schools? I’d imagine part of this isn’t just the way teachers are gauged but you know, the actual teaching talent. Is that what TFA should and can help with?


Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. Also, TFA is – one of the things that’s pretty interesting is around this. So my girlfriend wanted to be a teacher after she graduated from Harvard. And one of the things that I saw that was interesting was socially the response that she got. Where, everyone was kind of, “this is such a nice thing that you’re doing it”. But it was like she’s doing charity. It’s clear that she could have gotten paid more doing some other job. She’s really smart and she was clearly foregoing the real economic value for her to do something that was socially valuable. So the question is, how can you make it so that a lot of the people who would go do other things, teaching is a respected and valued enough job that people actually go into it. Given that it has a lot more impact than what these people are being compensated at today. And I think of that – that is a big problem. One of the things that’s been pretty interesting about TFA is they’ve actually gotten a lot of really good college students to go into teaching but it’s only for a short period of time. 15% of the graduating Harvard class applies to TFA and there are aren’t enough placements today to accept all those people but they would accept a lot more of them if they could. It’s just that it’s really hard —TFA needs to go fund those people and get them placed at specific schools. There is often some politics around that. So that’s one of the big things that they are working on. But the TFA is trying to double over the next five years, right. So but that number surprised me, when I learned that 15%, I mean… Apparently TFA is I think by far the largest employer of students graduating from Ivy League schools.


Michael Arrington: So is it a government organization?


Mark Zuckerberg: No, no. It’s a private charity. Yeah. And now, the woman who founded it is starting – this woman, Wendy Kopp, is starting an international version Teach For All. So it’s cool, but in doing research for this, a lot of the educational issues in the U.S. are pretty different from international. So I’m not sure how much we’re going to be able to learn from this experience to do it internationally but maybe for the next one we’ll think about something like that. A lot of this really just comes down to though — I spend all my time running this company, you know. So for a lot of people who are later in their careers when they start this stuff, they can spend more time on it like running a foundation and I really couldn’t. So for me this is more like a venture capital approach where it’s like you pick the entrepreneur, the leader that you believe in and then you really like try to give them a lot of leverage.


Michael Arrington: Cory Booker in that case.


Mark Zuckerberg: Yes.


Michael Arrington: He was doing some things around cameras and crime control.


Mark Zuckerberg: Exactly.


Michael Arrington: That was really controversial.


Mark Zuckerberg: So his whole first term was focused on getting crime down because Newark has the highest crime rate, I think in the country and he reduced it by like 50 or 60% or something insane. Those numbers aren’t fact checked, so that might be off but it’s large, all right. And he’s pretty amazing when you talk to him about this stuff. He himself moved from the – mayor’s house and he got like a trailer and moved to like the most dangerous street in Newark. And he used to drive around on the streets with the police there at like three or four in the morning tracking down crime. And his whole theory was like…


Michael Arrington: That was when he was a city councilor, right, before he ran for mayor?


Mark Zuckerberg: I think it was after he was mayor. I mean, maybe he did that before and after. But my understanding was that, that was during his time as mayor because that’s when he made this this huge priority, is we have to cut down crime. It was like, if I’m going to get the police force to care about this, they’re going to go out risking their lives like I need to show that I irrationally care about this. I think he is pretty amazing.



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Various <b>News</b> Tidbits - Lookout Landing

Various News Tidbits. ... Various News Tidbits. Tiny by Matthew on Oct 1, 2010 4:25 PM PDT in Miscellaneous � Tweet. 3 comments; Story-email Email; Printer Print. Even Felix's hugs are powerful � More photos » Elaine Thompson - AP ...

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Various <b>News</b> Tidbits - Lookout Landing

Various News Tidbits. ... Various News Tidbits. Tiny by Matthew on Oct 1, 2010 4:25 PM PDT in Miscellaneous � Tweet. 3 comments; Story-email Email; Printer Print. Even Felix's hugs are powerful � More photos » Elaine Thompson - AP ...

As AOL rushes to local <b>news</b>, Examiner.com is already there <b>...</b>

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. ...

<b>News</b> Roundup: &#39;Jersey Shore&#39; Under Fire in Canada, Bret Michaels <b>...</b>

It seems not everybody is DTW (down to watch) the 'Jersey Shore' cast work on their GTL. The macaroni rascals are under fire up North for.


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Various <b>News</b> Tidbits - Lookout Landing

Various News Tidbits. ... Various News Tidbits. Tiny by Matthew on Oct 1, 2010 4:25 PM PDT in Miscellaneous � Tweet. 3 comments; Story-email Email; Printer Print. Even Felix's hugs are powerful � More photos » Elaine Thompson - AP ...

As AOL rushes to local <b>news</b>, Examiner.com is already there <b>...</b>

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. ...

<b>News</b> Roundup: &#39;Jersey Shore&#39; Under Fire in Canada, Bret Michaels <b>...</b>

It seems not everybody is DTW (down to watch) the 'Jersey Shore' cast work on their GTL. The macaroni rascals are under fire up North for.


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