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Kasuto's RamblingsThe newest endangered species: Moochers (Moocherus lazyus) I'm about as mad as Oprah after running out of ham
hocks about the newest development in the Internet: the disappearance of
free stuff. I don't know about you, but I like free stuff. Don't you like
free stuff? Of course you do. Everyone likes free stuff. I remember when
everything on the Internet was free: Internet access, web pages, counters,
guestbooks, software, and other unwholesome stuff (you know what I'm talking
about, you pervert). The only catch to all this free stuff was advertising.
Sure, those little ads could be annoying at times, but it was worth it
if I didn't have to pay anything. But now all that advertising-based free
stuff is disappearing. Apparently companies don't make money off of ads
anymore. Last time I watched TV, there were commercials. TV is free because
companies pay to put their ads on TV. They make money off of those, why
is the Internet so different? People are saying that some so-called "stock
market" is responsible for the decline in free stuff. The question I ask
is "Where is this 'stock market', and what does it do?" I've seen food
markets, produce markets, but I've never seen a 'stock market.' It sounds
like they sell soup. According to what I can piece together (most of which
comes from fortune cookies and Jeopardy!) the whole world economy
is based on some imaginary business that sells soup. Soup is just as cheap
as it always was, so why does the Internet have to suffer? I personally
blame this all on Alan Greenspan, who is the 237-year-old chairman of the
Federal Reserve Board, which is where I think the US keeps its strategic
soup reserves. Supoosedly the "stock market" hasn't been doing so well
in the divison of Internet and computer companies. In the last few years,
rich investors (euphemism for "genetically-engineered gibbons that have
somehow gotten Swiss bank accounts") have thrown billions of dollars at
any company with the letters ".com" in them. So for a while, the "stock
market" was doing great because there were so many ".com" companies that
got money from wealthy gibbons. So in came all the free stuff supported
by advertising. "Stock" prices rose and everyone was making money hand
over fist. Ordinary people were getting rich from starting imaginary businesses
like ExtraLargeThighMastersForReallyFatChicks.com that didn't actually
do or sell anything. People just put up a nice ".com" website and the rich
gibbons mailed them checks. So we all got free stuff because of all these
fake businesses. But somewhere along the road, some idiot (possibly Al
Gore) told the rich gibbons that these companies didn't actually do anything.
Then came the dot-com bust. All these new businesses suddenly lost funding
and all of them failed. It turns out that companies that sold stuff like
pet supplies spent their billions of gibbon-provided dollars on commercials
with sock puppets and didn't actually provide any service. All the companies
flopped when the gibbons realized that none of their investments were making
money. I always heard in my economics class that the purpose of starting
a business was to make money, not to spend it on animated sock puppets.
I guess the investors forgot that little fact of life. So what's the result?
All that free ad-based stuff was cruelly taken away from us because they
were idiots that didn't know how to run a business. They should've asked
me for advice. I used to run a lemonade stand, and by-gar we made money!
My lemonade stand was based on no-cost advertising (running in front of
cars and forcing them to stop). Those businesses should've taken my example
and sent expendable employees to all the major highways and made them hold
up signs. So now we have to pay for their mistakes. Remember all those
free Internet Service Providers? I used to use Alta Vista free access,
Free Lane, and NetZero. Now Alta Vista is defunct, and Free Lane and NetZero
charge for access. But you want to know the part that makes me really angry?
The formerly-free providers charge you, but they still have those damn
ads! So now I'm mad because I can't get free Internet anymore. And what
about those other free services? My old counter and guestbook sent me a
little notice saying that now I have to pay twenty bucks a year for them
to count the number of hits to my site. Needless to say that I was a little
more than angry. So I had to go through hell and high water to find another
free counter.
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