I hate Netflix.

With a clever name, endless incentives to get you to join, and a lot of buzz, you would really think that Netflix isn’t a huge waste of your money. Now that they’ve nearly cancelled their DVD service, I want to make it clear what they’re doing wrong.

• Netflix’s catalog sucks.

Minors Can’t Have Opinions.

The other day, I was talking to an acquaintance. (I am protecting his name, even though I lost all my respect for him, I think that any human shouldn’t have their arguments broken down into almost meaningless words on the Internet.) A week prior to that, he was a friend. He said something that really enraged me as a conservative, not only our difference in opinions but the fact that he said, “Who are you, Glenn Beck? Seriously, no one cares about your opinions. You can’t even vote to make a difference.” Let’s tackle this carefully crafted insult sentence by sentence.

Apparently I am Glenn Beck

We’re all entitled to our opinions. We all have the right to voice them as long as we do so in a way that doesn’t harm people. I enjoy following current events, and for that reason I was naturally sucked into politics. The story doesn’t go exactly like that, though. I just enjoy talking about controversial things and being provocative. Politics have proven a way for me to fulfill that need while still giving the illusion that I am a respectful, educated young man.

No one cares about my opinions

Political leaders care about my opinions when lobbying for votes. Specifically if I will go to such a route to promote them and change people’s opinions, I could become a real threat without even being able to do anything directly. I could actually become a bigger threat than a single voter.

I can’t make a difference

If I can sway the votes of 50,000 people, I can make a difference. We already went over this. Remember?

The next post you can expect to be about politics just because this has made me start to think. Perhaps why Republicanism is better than Democracy? I’ve said too much already.

The AdSense Conspiracy: How Google Profits from Disabling Your Account

From the looks of it, Google is a great company. They make tons of money, yet almost all of their products are free, and they’re of high quality. The biggest problem from a consumer’s side is that it is impossible to get support from Google. I have a little information about Google that I’d like to expose to the public, so you can see exactly where my roots of Google displeasure begin.

I signed up for an AdSense account back in 2007 or 2008. Since I am a minor, the AdSense account was not in my name but one of my parents’. I made about a dollar per day off the AdSense account, and it seemed that I was heading in the right direction. Out of nowhere, my AdSense account was disabled due to “invalid click activity”. But let’s examine my AdSense account before it was disabled.

I had about $70 in my AdSense account. Google’s payment threshold for AdSense is $100. I wouldn’t be sent a check until I reached the $100 and withdrew it from my account. That is perfectly fine, but now that my AdSense is disabled I have no way of making any additional advertisement revenue. My account was stuck at $70, and I would not be getting a check for the $70. While this is buried in Google’s AdSense agreement, I think this is an example of shady behavior.

That means that, since they do not have to pay the publisher for those ads, but the advertisers still paid those costs, that money goes straight into Google’s bank account, so they have made $70 off of my AdSense account in addition to the percent that Google takes per click. And guess what? I’m not the only one who has had my AdSense account disabled.