[PLUG-TALK] Using plug talk...

Michael Robinson plug_1 at robinson-west.com
Mon Oct 5 22:02:34 UTC 2009


It has been suggested that talking about open source tax software 
that works under Linux belongs on plug talk or that I need a blog 
to talk about this...

I don't like plug-talk for the following reasons:

1) Anyone can comment that you are prejudiced and it doesn't go 
   away.  The label can and does follow you back to plug thanks 
   to people like Rogan Creswick for example.

2) If you don't like Obama or any other Democrat for that matter, 
   you are likely going to have to put up with frequent posts 
   from people who worship him as long as you stay subscribed.

3) What is the point of a venue that is labeled as a waste of 
   time for meaningless chat?  Anything you say is by definition 
   of this list useless and time wasting.

4) Controversial issues just don't work on here because Democrats 
   in general cannot handle being disagreed with.  Common Democratic
   behavior is to label you as discriminatory if for example you 
   oppose recognizing same sex couples as married couples.  That
   isn't the only issue that liberals are a royal pain in the
   neck on though.  Never mind that Oregon passed a defense of
   marriage act.

I hope open source tax software catches on and I hope it gets the
support from qualified CPAs that it needs.  

As far as doing a blog,
why would anyone read my blog and frankly where am I going to get
the bandwidth for people to come and read it?  If you live in a 
rural community, bandwidth is a major problem.  Even if you live
in the heart of downtown Portland though, it costs money to have
bandwidth where you end up paying that money yourself if you don't
charge people to look at your site.  Google is polluted with blogs
such as auto blog green etcetera that are not authoritative sources
on their subject matter.  There is a lot of stupid and frankly 
outright wrong information on the web thanks to the blogs of 
random people.  Bad information and stupid comments are as serious
a problem as old information on the Web.  The Web just records, it
doesn't sort information.  The truth can get lost in the haystack.

A passion of mine is to promote fuel cell cars and hydrogen as a
rational and sane alternative to Obama's plug in hysteria.  Plug
in cars will NEVER have a 300+ mile all electric range and seat a
reasonable number of people with a reasonable amount of trunk 
space.  Fuel cell cars on the other hand will be selling in 
2015 for $30k or less per vehicle.  That said, you still find 
Scientific American and other sources claiming that these cars 
will cost $50k a piece or worse that the prototypes cost a 
million dollars.  If you try to comment on gm-volt.com that 
fuel cells and hydrogen are the way to go, your comments 
mysteriously disappear regardless of the particular blog you 
are commenting on.  It doesn't even matter if you comment on 
a blog about 5th generation GM hydrogen fuel cell tech, pro 
hydrogen comments just simply disappear.

I could do my own hydrogen pages and I have, but I don't have
any bandwidth and frankly I'd prefer to not advertise my pages
because I can't handle a lot of traffic.  Doing your own blog
unless people have reason to read it is pretty pointless.  It
is far better to get your opinions and comments accepted on a
blog that people actually read which has a decent amount of
bandwidth.




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