That's good. I'm glad you felt it necessary to punish the site you use daily and for long periods of time. Leech. That's very compassionate of you, mister far left of Liberal.

I think you ( and many others) are making the mistaken notion of thinking votes are valuable. They really aren't. Yes, they are an important part of how the site works but what matters the most is the community and the content of the videos. It could have been much worse, for example not even having your videos, or all the comments disappearing, etc.

I have found excellent videos here, excellent comments too. Look at what is taking place right now: The site had a problem and everyone is helping each other and helping the site recover. That's what matters, votes and stats are just temporary markers, they come and go.

I experienced something similar on another site. The content was 90% gone. What did more than half of the people do? they left instead of helping out like the members here are doing. Then a month later when most things were starting to run in place again, many came back to continue leeching and complaining without ever contributing. Think about that.

Your video, Stand By Me - Leeches!!, has made it into your personal Highest Rated Videos listing. Congratulations on a job well done. For you contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

yessss. i've been waiting for a new episode of drunk history.

upvote for the phonecall from mom, the snakes and leeches, and the way he says "boooze".

none of us actually made or paid for any of this, so worrying about "via" etiquette seems bizarre to me.

or put it this way... if you find a vid on the sift that you like, feauring some talented guy or some amazing animation or music... do you ever go to the dude's youtube channel and thank him for providing you with free entertainment?

parasites, leeches, web 2.0 bitches

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

^First off I don't think blocking the site to "guests and lurkers" is a good idea - 50% of our traffic comes from random drop ins and they do provide revenue through CPM ads

I provided some financial information earlier, here: http://blog.videosift.com/dag/Money-Stuff#comment-634752 though that is a little out of date - as our ad revenue has probably dropped another $1,000.

Our costs do vary some on a month to month basis - depending on our CDN bill mainly. I will not be printing off PDFs of our bills to link in here.

I understand that you are unwilling to support "freeloaders" and "leeches" please, please feel free to withhold any contribution to VideoSift.

Yes dag, I think if you are expecting people to fund the site then you should publish the financial accounts relating to the site, i.e. your hosting bill, wages and traffic reports. This could even encourage more donations, if people actually knew what they were paying for. Farhad's ironic reference to the bailouts was totally on target.

Anyway, $12,000 is a lot of money, I dunno why you would build something so completely unsustainable... It looks like you are going to be screwed again in a few weeks and I don't think you have enough loyal members to support the place.

As always, I suggest cutting off the guests and lurkers. You call this place a community but now you are asking for donations so that completely silent and inactive people can view the fruits of active members' labour 24/7. I for one am not prepared to pay for that, and I don't think the quality of my experience would go down if you excluded unregistered guests and leeching lurkers. I also don't really care that "sometimes lurkers turn into good members" if it costs thousands of dollars to do it.

It would be interesting to see your accounts and traffic and work out how much you could reduce your bill if you cut off the freeloaders instead of asking loyal members to pay for them.

^ That's a tremendously simplistic viewpoint. It supposes that in a recession, all businesses suffer. It supposes that there is no root cause, and therefore no root solution. It supposes that all companies are independent, and that the failure of one business has no negative effects on the other.

It supposes all failures, even in recession, are due to bad decisions made by the business. It assumes that people losing their jobs is generally not a big deal, or that they deserve what they get.

I personally don't understand how someone can presuppose all those falsehoods.

To answer your musing, I don't know if the casinos should be bailed out or not. I suspect they don't employ enough people, or have enough dependent industries to really classify for being important enough to the economy as a whole.

In the case of the banks, a huge amount of businesses depend on ready lines of credit. If I want to buy a car, or start a small business, I can't even if my credit rating is good, and I have what used to be sufficient collateral. Never mind if I'm working for a company that's been bought by a leveraged buyout firm that's now in big trouble, since they can't get credit anymore.

As for the auto companies, between the big three themselves, and their suppliers who depend on business from those big three, we're talking about not just 3 million jobs, but 30 million -- 10% of the US population. They wouldn't all lose their jobs in one big burst, but it'd probably unwind pretty quickly, maybe a couple years, and then there's the matter of the effect their being unemployed has on the economy...

Eventually it comes down to making a cost/benefit analysis of doing something vs. doing nothing. It's not easy, and there are certainly lobbyists and political loyalties pulling on you to make a decision that's not based on facts, but then, that's why we're supposed to vote for good people to have these roles in our government.

I think these workers made a good case, and the Shelbyites kept falling back to the "we're not sure it's a good idea", which is just a chickenshit response. If they're acting on principle, tell the unions that they're communist leeches to their face, and walk out. If they're truly uncertain of which way to go, identify what you want in the way of convincing to be shown that the loans will keep the company afloat (the Union guys wouldn't provide that, but the Big 3 would). If it's just political maneuvering, well, then it's a pretty thin cover story for that. Gosh, I'm just not sure if I want to help the employers of people who're my political adversaries. I'll have to think about it, ya know, forever.

But hey, it's not like it's an important decision or anything. We should just make the decision axiomatically, so we don't have to think about the consequences of our actions.

Culture of personal responsibility my ass.

>> ^alien_concept:
I actually liked this film...


This movie was a lousy piece of shit that, ironically, parasitically leeched on the reputation of the earlier Alien films. I hated it. It was an all too simple ploy to get a few more bangs for the buck, by huffing out a crappy sequel that had nothing to do with the rest of the mythos. I love the Alien franchise, but what they did in this one was just an atrocity. What the fuck was that last monster thing? Pfft, I could write a better alien film with my cock.

And don't get me started on Alien vs. Predator...


I said, don't get me started on ...

Huh? Top 15 for this ideologue?

The entire conservative philosophy is as sound as a "philosophy" of medicine based on the principle that since organs sometimes fail, people will be healthier if we just removed all of them before anything goes wrong.

Fighting for reduction of government spending in a recession is like applying leeches to a patient with anemia -- not just backward and misguided, but the exact wrong action to take.

Even so, while Paul was against the bailout for ideological reasons, most of his fellow Republicans were against this for more pedestrian reasons. This was, as Gettelfinger put it, about piercing the heart of the labor movement in the US, while also sticking up for the foreign automakers who they do business with in their states.

The deal fell apart, not because conservatives were sticking to their conservative principles, but because they demanded that unions cut their pay to below the levels of the foreign automakers in 2009 instead of 2011 (the latter had been offered by the UAW). Isn't that a case of government trying to tell business how it should operate? I seem to remember Republicans saying so when it was talking about limiting executive salaries for the TARP ($700bn) program. Guess they were just blowing smoke. Reminds me a bit about how tax cuts for the middle class were socialism, but tax cuts for the rich is good conservative governance.

Oh, and the bill failed in a vote of 52 for, 35 against. Obstructionist filibuster much?

From a purely political POV, I couldn't be happier with how this turned out. The word "Neo-Hooverite" is getting some play, and there's no doubt at all about which party will be responsible if either GM or Chrysler end up collapsing, or having major layoffs.

On the other hand, from the perspective of someone who cares about our country, I'm disappointed, and hope there won't be too many more chances for the Republicans to successfully implement their childish, misguided, hypocritical corrupt class warfare bullshit.

Ah I see, fair enough.

>> ^blankfist:
^Bit Torrent is good for those things you cannot get, but, in my experience, it simply takes too long to download when everyone would rather leech than seed. Speaking of which, when are you getting a charter membership, RedSky? [inquisitive stare]
Hulu is pretty much instantaneous. That, and their site is about as perfect a media distribution service I've ever seen.


... but, but I'm poor, really poor. I mean surely my hypothetical profligate flouting of copyright is indicative of that

For speeds, private trackers is where it's at! But yeah, if you just wanna watch something quickly with no hassles Hulu's pretty handy.

^Bit Torrent is good for those things you cannot get, but, in my experience, it simply takes too long to download when everyone would rather leech than seed. Speaking of which, when are you getting a charter membership, RedSky? [inquisitive stare]

Hulu is pretty much instantaneous. That, and their site is about as perfect a media distribution service I've ever seen.

>> ^imstellar28:
^I have never once argued for or supported anarcho-capitalism. It drives me nuts when people associate capitalism with anarchy. I am as strongly against anarchy as I am socialism.
Mainstream economists disagree with me like the mainstream disagrees with me that the earth was created more than 10,000 years ago. Keynesian economics holds about the same weight as intelligent design in my book. It is a completely unsupported "theory", and is facing an intense amount of contradictory evidence, yet it still persists.
Fraud is illegal in this country right? I am charging him with 300,000,000 counts of fraud. Isn't that enough to put someone away for life? I am also charging him with treason. Isn't that enough to warrant the death penalty? I was giving the rest of the "mainstream" the benefit of the doubt. If you can prove they are familiar with Austrian theory, then its going to be a long day at the noose. I am positive this is not true in most economic programs in the country. There are less than a dozen Austrian programs in the country and 25 years ago there were less than a dozen prominent Austrian economists in the world.
Advocating Keynesian ideas when you are versed with the Austrians is like trying to save a dying man with leeches and voodoo when you are versed in germ theory and have antibiotics in your back pocket. Greenspan is the moral equivalent of an atheist who is the pope of a church leading an inquisition.


Quit pretending that pure capitalism has been proven better by the Austrian school, without actually supplying any of that so-called evidence.

Quit pretending you know Greenspan's inner thoughts. The most likely explanation is that he changed his mind about Objectivism and Austrian economics because the evidence against them outweighs the evidence in their favor.

Give ONE example of a country that has brought its GDP (PPP) per capita to current U.S. or European levels without depending on central bank fiat currency for liquidity. All the gold and all the Oil in existence is not enough to provide an adequate amount of currency. The total value of all gold ever mined ($4.3 trillion) is less than 1/15 of the world's GDP.

^I have never once argued for or supported anarcho-capitalism. It drives me nuts when people associate capitalism with anarchy. I am as strongly against anarchy as I am socialism.

Mainstream economists disagree with me like the mainstream disagrees with me that the earth was created more than 10,000 years ago. Keynesian economics holds about the same weight as intelligent design in my book. It is a completely unsupported "theory", and is facing an intense amount of contradictory evidence, yet it still persists.

Fraud is illegal in this country right? I am charging him with 300,000,000 counts of fraud. Isn't that enough to put someone away for life? I am also charging him with treason. Isn't that enough to warrant the death penalty? I was giving the rest of the "mainstream" the benefit of the doubt. If you can prove they are familiar with Austrian theory, then its going to be a long day at the noose. I am positive this is not true in most economic programs in the country. There are less than a dozen Austrian programs in the country and 25 years ago there were less than a dozen prominent Austrian economists in the world.

Advocating Keynesian ideas when you are versed with the Austrians is like trying to save a dying man with leeches and voodoo when you are versed in germ theory and have antibiotics in your back pocket. Greenspan is the moral equivalent of an atheist who is the pope of a church leading an inquisition.

oh...don't worry. I like you though. But I'm like that loser kid that has no friends that leeches onto anything that'll give him a chance to socialize with somebody other than his stuffed animals.


...I love Mr Bear-bear. He's my stuffed giraffe. Sorry for making this about me but even I find roasting myself more fun than roasting you.