Category: Commentaries

Pennies on the Dollar

I know sometimes I watch too much TV.  Or should I say listen to too much TV.. I seldom just sit and watch it.. There are just to many things to get done to actually sit and watch it.. Well anyway….

I was listening and turning down the volume of the usual blast of loud commercials when I heard one that really bothered me.. “Do you owe over $10.000 to the government in tax debt.. If you do we could settle your tax debt for just pennies on the dollar…”

What.. pennies on the dollar? and they made enough money to have to pay $10,000 dollars in taxes.. And now I hear they won’t even have to pay most of them.. Why the heck not?  I have to pay mine. Everyone I know struggling or not has to pay theirs.  How come some fancy TV advertising lawyer can get some rich person standing in front of a near million dollar home out of paying most of their taxes.. “And we didn’t even have to lose our home”  Well, Yea Rah! for them. I’d be standing there smiling like a cheshire cat too if I just got the tax people to say “okay, hey don’t worry about it..

Every year the little guy like me pays my couple thousand to Uncle Sam.  Struggling to pay them religiously out of our paychecks.  Heaven forbid I am even late in paying the couple hundred that they didn’t get from my pay. For a  $70 mistake my tax prepared did on my taxes one year, they put a lien on my house with threat of selling it at public auction within months of the error. Seventy dollars and they were going to garnish our wages and sell our house and not let us tag our cars.. And these people who owe tens of thousands of dollars are not going to have to pay most of theirs..  What is wrong with this picture?

What makes them so special?  Why do my taxes that I have t pay go up every year and they are giving tax relief forgivemess to enough people that they have a commercial to target them?  Is that fair?

I still think of that little mistake my tax preparer made everytime I see that commercial and it makes me mad all over again. Of course I had a smile on my face when I found out it was a computer glitch that didn’t calculate the taxes correctly for our area at the good old IRS.. It took several months of worrying about losing our house and having to repay what we didn’t owe in the first place to keep them from putting a lein on the house and cars. Then we get a letter with a check saying, oh sorry our mistake here is your check back..  (paraphrasing of course, but you get the gist)

Maybe,  instead of this obvious, generous amount of people who owe the IRS huge amounts of back taxes being forgiven, they had to pay their taxes like the rest of us hard working middle and lower class americans, we wouldn’t have to watch our taxes go up, yet again, next year.

What is wrong with America???.

Adding Sense To It All

There was a time when you could go to a search engine and get the information you wanted first try. This was the time when Google was really the top of the line for the internet savvy. You could find anything you wanted.

It was a time when you submitted your site to a search engine and they checked it for content to decide if you were good enough to add to their search engine. If you were lucky enough to get approved for their engine you would be easily found and would be assured plenty of visitors.

It wasn’t just google.. All search engines were by submission only. You had to sometimes wait 6 weeks or so to be added. But it was worth the wait to see your site show up under the search terms from your meta tags and content. In those days my site grew from a small one person site to hundreds and thousands of pages of poems…

DreamersReality.com got so many hits I could not keep up with the old hand written html coding I was doing on the poems. I was getting sometime a couple dozen poem submissions a day. With the onslaught of visitors I had to have the help of a friend to switch the working of my site to a more workable and timesaving database form.

That seems to be where things changed. About the time I finished getting my site upgraded to be able to handle all the flow of new talented writers Google made a change..The added Adsense to the scene.

The original reason I created my site was so that I didn’t have to have ads on my site taking away from the content. So the writing on the site would be the centerpiece of the site, not some unsightly ad for some other company. So I did not evolve into putting junk ads all over my site.. I had offers from time to time to time from the online casinos and other places. It was due to  havingt I has such high traffic stats on my site.

But times were changing.. For some reason when I changed over to my data bases even though I had a redirect to the new pages, Google decided it no longer thought this top ten website was worth promoting.. Could it have been because I did not choose to add their ads to my site to junk it up with commercialism hoping to make a buck.

It seems that it was not just my site that had these things happen.. It is harder and harder to find a site with real content these days. You have to weed through all the sites, (and I use that term loosely) that  have nothing but ads and links to other sites. Some with no content on them at all; just other links to more non-content sites. So you go back to Google and look for the next link that seems to have the content you are looking for, Then what do you get? A front page locked into “you are not a member you must first register before you can view this site”..

One incidence, when I was checking to see if anyone was linking to me, one site had taken one of my poems without permission from my site and put on their own.  I could tell due to the words from the beginning of my poem were in the search description.. When I clicked on the link it took me to a site that was an ad for a book that had a collection of poetry on it.. What?? not only could I not get in to see where my poems were being used and advertised in the search engine, but they were using them to make a profit too. Was there a contact link? Nope just a page with links and ads on them.. Maybe it was a scam to get money out of concerned writers. And maybe it was just a draw to get you to click on their link.

Was the site only using the content of my poem because it had gotten so many hits on my webpage that by using the beginning of my poem they were hoping to get hits on their ads and get their ranking higher.. Well they achieved both. Their site with my website name and the beginning of my poem was ranked higher in the search engines than mine with the original open and viewable content.. Of course they had plenty of Google Adsense on their site. Tell me is there something wrong with that or is it just me?

This is happening with lots of sites. Every time I go to search for something I find this same misdirection happening.. The search engine description looks like it has the content only to get there and find usually none at all or a bunch of random writing that makes no sense or a page full of clickable ads, with no content at all.

Hard to believe these are the top 10 sites on the Google search engine now. But they are..

I can find many more of my content rich pages.listed on Yahoo and Ask.com. even Msn beat out Google. And actually Ask.com, the little guy in the race has the most pages of my website linked in. I find it much easier to find what I am looking for on the not so popular search engines.

I have tried to play some of the games Google has designed. I made a robots site map, and loaded it to their sitemap page.. I deliberately left out the pages from a near dead portion of my site forum.. Do you think it helped? Not a bit. I was later told that if I removed the, now near, useless meta tags that would help.. nope.. that didn’t help either.

One day I got excited I seen that Google has spidered my site and added a couple hundred pages of my site.. So I went to see what was added. And would you believe it was the pages I wanted ignored from the old forum. Not the content from the site.. Not any of the 6000 + poems.. Just forum chit chat of no real relevance except to the friends that once frequented the site years ago.

A friend of mine decided to give adsense a try.. and in the last year he has make maybe $5 dollars. Woo Hoo.. I guess you have to be a abuser of the technology in order to make any real money. Sorry it’s not for me.

I have pretty much given up on Google.. I rarely use them for any searches anymore. I want content, not ads to waste my time.. When I am searching, I want to search, find, and get on with my day..

Google has turned into a big time wasting search engine full of so much gobbly goop with all that adsense it has forgotten that as a search engine it needs to focus on the search outcome quality….

But then that would… add sense .

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