One benefit of the online, inter-connected world we live in is that it’s no longer necessary to purchase music or software. Although I have my favorite music and the latest video games and photography software, I haven’t purchased a single intangible item in years. Hardware, yes, software, no.

The Pirate Bay is the source for almost any music or software you are looking for. Get uTorrent and start downloading torrent trackers. While you’re receiving files, you’re also sending pieces of those files to other people, helping provide freedom to everyone.

If it isn’t on BitTorrent, it’s probably on RapidShare. Find your booty.

I have a brand new copy of Adobe Photoshop CS5 on my computer, Sibelius 6 for composing, a Nintendo Wii hooked to a hard drive with 50 games, a Nintendo DS with even more games and my favorite music, and I didn’t pay a dime for any of it. Anyone who pays a dime for any of this stuff is a chump, plain and simple.

The beautiful thing about piracy is that it’s a victimless crime which hurts no one. The people who pirate software would not buy it anyway, and the people who buy it are …

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Most people assume manifesting money requires hard work and providing value, but since money is just worthless paper, the quickest way is to print it.

So you should immediately become CEO of Goldman Sachs and start printing credit default swaps. Sell them to the Federal Reserve at face value, then buy gold in sacks and flee to Mexico.

Proposed in the United Nations and the U.S. Congress is a tax on all carbon dioxide emissions. Whenever we light our wood-burning stove to heat our house, carbon atoms in the wood are being oxidized to release heat and carbon dioxide. Whenever we breathe in and out, we convert oxygen into carbon dioxide. A carbon tax is no more than a slave tax—a yoke around the necks of industry which will kill a billion people in the third world. Gasoline and power bills will easily go up 10%, and the cumulative effects will be even worse at the supermarket and the office stores.

The Carbon Tax Center postulates that “a permanent and increasing U.S. carbon tax is essential.” The theory is that burning carbon causes the Earth to become warmer, and that any influence we have on the Earth’s environment must be negative. Therefore, the ultimate solution is human extinction. We all know the Earth would be completely perfect without our presence. Short of that mass suicide, modern feudalism to our elitist overlords for our carbon sins will do (carbon is one of the four major organic molecules along with hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen). The mindset is we are a …

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I’ve spent ten hours today and yesterday listing stuff on eBay and Craigslist to sell. Mostly new stuff, much of which I acquired many months ago from rebate grifting, and more recently, small items I purchased cheaply through an ink cartridge recycling scheme, with intent to sell. Now, that intent is a reality.

A few details: I bought 6000 empty ink cartridges at an auction for $1080 two months ago, and me and my Dad have turned in 3700 of them at Office Depot for $3 store credit coupons. We have a box of them. You can only turn in 25 per day and use 3 per day, so each time we go there we buy $9.02 worth of stuff and get $9 off. Since the cartridges were only 17 cents each, it’s a safe, though tedious way to acquire small office supplies cheaply.

Recently, that program has changed so you can only turn in 5 per day and you get the store credit back all at once on a gift card at the end of the quarter. That won’t be till February, but we continue to turn in the 1700 remaining cartridges. I’ll be able to buy a computer or …

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Just got this check from Google for $112.23. I wasn’t sure if this Google ad program was real till now; perhaps they’d just take my money and ban me when I reached the $100 threshold?

I started this blog way back at the end of last year, just for my photography. I didn’t do much for a long time, often just spending lots of time fiddling with the layout and code, but in the past two months I’ve made lots of progress. I feel I can do a lot of good here, if not for others, for my own mind.

While DaytonaState.org makes the most, the balance is switching to this blog. I think it’s because I’m writing in-depth, thought-provoking articles like Digital Sharecropping, Personal Development for Photographers, and Transcending Limiting Beliefs. Not lists or tables or mash-ups or charts. No fluff. Writing that takes will work and has a real purpose. I didn’t really start doing this till two months ago, when I added personal development as my main subject alongside photography.

While $112.23 is no more than pennies an hour for all the work I’ve put in …

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Before 1994, the Internet was basically unknown. It was just a tool for professors and researchers to connect with their peers. All websites had to be non-profit.

In 1994, the National Science Foundation took away these restrictions. Anyone could register a domain name and start a website, even to sell stuff. Pepsi.com was one of the first, but at the time it seemed a pointless gimmick.

Flash forward to 2008. In the past five years, power has become consolidated between a few major websites, despite the flat nature of the Internet. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, and eBay are the major players. These corporations control billions of dollars in capital, yet with the exception of eBay, provide free services. How does this happen?

The way it happens is through advertising. Much like how newspapers make money from the classifieds or how the local Pennysaver is completely free despite rising print costs, websites make money from selling ad-space. With technology like HTTP cookies and click-counting, advertisers can pay only when viewers click their ads, or even only when they make a sale. If you think no one buys anything online, take a look at this.

That’s a …

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It’s a very scary thing when someone openly disproves your limiting beliefs. If you have empowering beliefs, being disproven is a triumph rather than an attack, because you’ve been given the easy opportunity to fine-tune your belief system, which can only lead to improving your self and your model of the world. But if your mind is holding you back, you’re highly afraid of breaking the chains. The three major reasons for this are:

1. If you’re disproven now, whose to say that you won’t be disproven again? If you switch from Catholicism to Protestantism, couldn’t what you really want be Unitarianism? If you disconnect yourself from your heart and intuition, you have no reason to ever change or grow. Depending on where you are in life, that could be much more comfortable than change.

2. Changing your beliefs invalidates your past. If you spend all your life buying groceries at the normal price, and then a spendthrift tips you off that you could easily pay half the price with judicious acquisition and use of coupons, what does that say about all the groceries you’ve already bought? If you accept your new couponing beliefs fully, you’re acknowledging that your previous shopping beliefs …

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2009-12-20 Update: Having a job is not so bad after all. I apologize to those I’ve misled and encourage you to keep your job if you enjoy it or to support your family.

I know a lot of people like to tear down gainful employment in general, but there really are some good benefits to be had.

1. Guaranteed payment for your work.

If you own a restaurant, and it’s losing money, can you get out of paying your employees? No—you still must pay them for the work they’ve done. While you can let them go, you can’t refuse to pay for the work they’ve already done, even if you’re going into debt yourself. In this relationship, employees are in a much safer position.

2. Trading time for money.

In a job, it doesn’t matter if you spend eight hours cleaning a mop bucket or finding the cure for cancer. You get the same wages either way. Your pay has nothing to do with the value of your contributions.

You can use this to your advantage by wasting time and reducing the value of your contribution. This way, you can become a leech rather than an asset. It feels fun, because you know assets aren’t …

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Lilac (purple) flowers at the Daytona State College campus. These aren’t lilacs, but I like the name so I’m using it to refer to the color.

A friend volunteered to let me borrow his lens: a Sigma EF 105mm 1:2.8. I have it till next week, so I’ve been taking pictures of stuff with the different perspective it offers. Everything’s so close; I can’t get any sort of landscapes with this. But it’s interesting to focus on the details, and I can get closer to flowers than I can with the kit lens.

While I take good care of my camera and lenses, one of the worries in borrowing a lens–or anything for that matter–is that it will break in your possession, or you’ll break it by accident. Breaking your own stuff isn’t so bad as breaking someone else’s stuff, because then you (generally) feel obligated to replace it. What happens more often is the lender will say you broke it when you didn’t. Or if anything goes wrong with it in a period of one month after you return it, the lender blames it on you. I’m not sure why this happens, but it seems to …

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Just wanted to give you a little hint for how my websites did last month. My goal is $1 per day, and while I didn’t hit that every day last month, the overall total was $56.41, or $1.80 per day.

I can see I’m making a bigger impact on the world. In July, I made $20, so my income basically tripled last month. You can’t get that kind of raise with a regular job.

$53.73 was from Google AdSense; $2.68 was from this blog’s Amazon Associates commissions.

Of the $53.73, $1.54 came from Brilliant Photography and Personal Development by Richard X. Thripp. Th8.us made $2.30, DaytonaState.org made $42.63, and the Thripp.com users made me $7.26. Our hosting / domains bill is $15 per month, so I’m more than covered.

DaytonaState.org is targeted. A lot of people come from Google looking for information on enrolling in colleges, so the information appeals to them. On the other hand, Thripp.com is black-listed by Google, so this blog and others appear low in the search results. I haven’t done much marketing either, instead focusing on writing and producing new works of art, so that explains the low turnout. …

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