The best way to improve your readership is by linking up with big blogs. If you never get anyone to link to you, then you’ll never rise in Google and will never be as popular as John Chow. He has the blogging market cornered and makes money by blogging about how you can try and do what he does. By being popular, he gets more popular, and he knows how to cash in on this. One day, I wish to be like John Chow, making money by telling you how to make money online. Its a win-win situation. If you’d like to get in on this super-blog-improving action, you can review his blog to get a boost in traffic.

You go to school to get an education and because it’s the law. You go to college or university to get an education too? No, that isn’t it. To get a job? That’s right, and not just any job, a high paying one that utilizes your degree. Thats the ideal, too bad it almost never happens. On top of that, all that good money you thought you were making isn’t much better than the high school grads.

Now, if you take that same 78k you’d have spent on public university education and invested it, you’d have a lot more money than any college grad:

I wish I had found this out before I graduated high school. Going to college for work could actually be the worst investment in your life. Don’t believe me? Hit the link at the bottom for the full article plus the math and data to back it up.

[tables via -MichaelRobertson.com ]

Radio Frequency ID is the wave of the future! And by future I mean now! That’s right! Very soon, every passport issued by the US government will have a RFID chip with biometric and personal information on it. This is a terrible idea, but unfortunately a necessary one if we ever want to live in a cool future world like Minority Report or Demolition Man.

Passport RFID chips are incredibly small, contain personal information and can be read by a simple RFID chip reader. These readers are about as complicated as radios and are easily obtained by determined people. While our government touts the security of these new data chips, hackers have already cloned them, and copied information off of them. Real safe.

Another, more useful project for RFID would be to chip and help locate papers in a business setting. A company has thought up a novel way to find papers in offices loaded to the brim with stacks of documents in piles everywhere. the RFID staple! Yes, a chip that carries the information about the document, when it was printed and by whom. Great idea, but I propose taking it one step further. Chip the paper! I’m not sure if I’m the first, since I found several patents on RFID paper, but most are ambiguous.

Just to get you a little more paranoid, Hitachi has come up with RFID ‘powder.’ RFID chips that are .05 square millimeters! Smaller than salt and pepper, thiner than a human hair and full of your personal information! Here is a picture to give you the scale.

that line is a human hair!

What are some good uses for RFID tags you have heard of?

So I found a great source of graphs that shows the problems the US is going to have economically in the near future.  It helps to pinpoint the problems to the bush administration and their blatant overspending mostly due to the war effort.

Every blog, website and company on the planet has to let people know about its products and services. Advertising is worth billions of dollars, internet advertising alone is in the 10s of billions. If I’m ever to make any money, I’m going to have to take some of yours.

Thats terrible, I know. I don’t want to do it. Well, I don’t want your money specifically. You understand I’m sure. In fact you’ve probably already realized the inevitability of the situation and already clicked on the google banners (and maybe even turned off adblock to do so) or even sent an e-mail request about website hosting to ME.

If you wanted yet another way to show your support for me travelling the globe you could buy something from my store or now, you could leave me a comment on my new website GatewayGames.net. The next big step for tabletop RPGs.

For some reason I like brackets at the end of articles. Makes it seem more official, no?

[Gateway Games]

Later this month Russia and North Korea will be meeting to discuss the repayment of Korean debts to Russia.  This amounts to several billion dollars, and I can see why Russia might want their money back.  It also makes me ask a question about sovereign states and debt.

If you spend more money than you have, you accrue debt.  Its a simple system.  Banks give you money and charge interest for it until you give it all back.  This is how most Americans live, and how almost all Americans who’ve gone to college start out their life.  I’ve taken many classes on economics and they all explain that when you die, most of your debts go on to your children (or are paid by insurance).  Thus guaranteeing monetary flow and supporting the economy.  But my question is what happens at the international level?

Take the US for example.   Our external debts are somewhere in the 10 trillion dollar range (10,000,000,000,000).  I also found some articles about a default in repayment by the USA would cause a world economic crisis.  I’m not so sure I can believe it.  Sovereign countries aren’t entities that often die.  When one does cease to be, often all debts are forgiven because whoever takes their place doesn’t count as next of kin.  But I think we could see an example of ‘collecting dues’ on a country wide scale with North Korea.  If the North Korean state collapses, no one will get their money back.  No one will really care economically either.  Yes, N. Korea isn’t very big and is isolated from the world, but an entire country should have some impact on the international debt system.

I didn’t do much research but I found a link on international debt, and found it boring.  If you find something contradictory there please comment about it here.  I’d also like to know how terribly the US treasury website is laid out.  Lots of information can be found there, but not to someone without a strong background in economics and economic terms.

Economics is like “Who’s line is it anyway?”  Its a game where the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.  Btw, why do people think green paper will make them happy?