I recommend the following books from Amazon:
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Life After the Oil Crash
Deal With Reality or Reality Will Deal With You
Editor's Note: New California Law Will Have Severe Impact on LATOC
It looks like California is about to make it near impossible for California residents such as myself to run advertisements on their websites. If you want the gory details of the proposal, this article from NewsBlaze does a pretty good job of summarizing the situation as does this article from last Friday's edition of Wall Street Journal. As the WSJ article points out, the bill here in California (AB 178) was shelved back in April. Unfortunately, on Friday night somebody in the legislature snuck the exact language of the shelved bill it into the current budget bill. (See the above linked article from NewsBlaze for more on this.)
Amazon has now sent out a letter notifying the legislature that if this is passed, they will drop all of their California affiliates (that includes me) from their associates program. You can read the letter in PDF format here or in html format here. Other LATOC affiliates such as Nitro-Pak and The Ready Store will likely have to do the same as complying with the proposed law will be phenomenally complicated to the point of near-impossible. New York passed a nearly identical law last year and most companies simply dropped all their New York based affiliates rather than attempt to comply with the law. (See the Daily Uprising's summary or this editorial from the San Jose Mercury News on the devastating effects of these unconstitutional "nexus" laws if you want to know more.)
Note that companies like Amazon will still be able to sell goods to California residents without remitting the tax to California. All they have to do to get out of the tax is stop doing business with sites like LATOC. So the law won't actually raise any revenue for the state, it will only result in sites like LATOC seeing their revenue choked off as companies would rather sever their relationships with us than be subjected to the rule of California's tax authorities. An editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle explains:
I recommend the following books from Amazon:
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LATOC readers bought the following at Amazon:
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Mr. Speaker, several weeks ago I read a treatise written by Matt Savinar, and I was galvanized by his introduction. Let me read it.
"Dear reader,'' he begins, "civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the whacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse Bible prophesy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best-paid, most widely respected geologists, physicists, and investment bankers in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by a phenomenon known as global peak oil.''
Mr. Speaker, in the weeks since I read this, I have checked with a large number of experts in this area across the country and indeed around the world. He could be right. He will be right unless we appropriately address this big challenge which faces the world and particularly faces the United States, and that is what we will be talking about in our Special Order this evening. Source
Ms. Sager remembers well her husband's conversion. She returned home one afternoon in August 2005, from her job as a software engineer for General Electric Aviation and found him at his computer, deep into a Web site he found while researching gas prices called lifeaftertheoilcrash.net. "He sat me down and said, 'Do you think this is a hoax?' " she recalls. "And there went the next two hours." "Dear Reader," the Web site announced: "Civilization as we know it is coming to an end." Oil supplies are dwindling just as world demand soars. The result: oil prices "will skyrocket, oil dependent economies will crumble, and resource wars will explode." From there, Mr. Wissner plunged into a burgeoning literature arguing that soaring energy costs will put a halt to globalization and the American way of life. His forebodings -- of banks faltering, of food running out -- have turned him into a peak-oil proselytizer in this farm community just south of Grand Rapids. Source: WSJ
My first exposure to "peak oil" was on a long overnight drive, flipping through the stations, I stumbled across Matt Savinar on Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM show. Some topics on Art's show are at least interesting enough to keep me awake, so I listened.
I'll never forget my reaction. "Hooey!" I said. "It can't be that bad."
About a week later, I remembered the show and went over to Savinar's site while bored and read some more.
"Hooey!" "It really can't be THAT bad." "If this were true, someone would do something about it."
Then, interestingly, I didn't hear about or think about a darned thing related to the topic for a while afterwards.
One day, about a month later after reading Savinar, my subconscious must have digested it all. I started thinking about it again. I got angry. I started writing about it on my blog, and I was pissed off. Source: The Oil Drum
If out-of-state retailers that do not have a presence in this state believe that doing business with these California-based online Web publishers will result in their having to collect sales tax on all California sales, they probably will sever ties with these businesses and opt for working with affiliates in states without these laws.
Such was the case a year ago when New York State passed a similar bill. Less than a week after the law was enacted, more than 250 retailers dropped all of their affiliates in New York, leaving thousands of affiliates - most of which are small- and medium-size businesses - with a major loss of income.
In California, an estimated 30,000 small businesses use this specific advertising business model, and many will be severely affected if AB178 eventually gets passed. Source
There are literally tens of thousands of regular people out there who reacted to LATOC's presentation of Peak Oil and related issues just like Aaron, Professor Goose, and Representative Bartlett did. (Check the LATOC letters section for a small sampling of the emails I get to this effect) Similarly, the LATOC Forum is filled with stories of people who after reading LATOC, pulled their money out of doomed investments and managed to avoid losing 40%-50% of their net-wroth in the last 12 months like so many of their peers have
The site has also played an instrumental role in the development of several recently published Peak Oil books including Dmitry Orlov's "Reinventing Collapse" as that book was, in part, the result of a series I paid Dmitry to write back in 2006. (See Dmitry's introduction to the series archived here)
I could go on and on and on but it would begin to sound like I'm thumping my own chest. The bottom line is I fee comfortable saying LATOC has done and continues to do a tremendous amount of good for a great number of people. And now that is threatened.
It's important that people realize I never would have been able to invest the amount of time necessary to develop LATOC into such an incredibly useful and effective resource had it not been for taking advertisements. The money from the ads is what has allowed me to put so much time into the site. (You'd think this would be obvious but it seems is lost on many people) So, without sounding like a broken record, if you happen to be one of them and have thought to yourself, "One of these days I'll buy something from one of Matt's affiliates or by way of his Amazon ads in order to support LATOC", now is the time to do so as it is looking like California law will prohibit me from taking advertisements as early as later this week:
Note: Anything you buy on Amazon or Ebay by way of the above links will earn a commission for LATOC even if it is something that isn't advertised on LATOC. My commissions at the above sites are in the 5-10%, if you're curious.
If you want to make a donation, you can do so at the following link. Note that a Paypal account is *not* required:
Unfortunately, California is not the only state attempting this. Similar legislation is making its way through the legislatures of Hawaii, Minnesota, North Carolina, Connecticut, Rhode Island and several other states.
Why are the states doing this?
Without getting too conspiratorial, I can't help but think putting independent sites out of business is the *true* intent of this law. Raising revenue is the rationale put forth to the public but putting independent websites out of business is the only thing it will actually accomplish. This is, "just coincidentally", coming at the same time that the MSM has declared a "war on the internet" and as the federal government has announced it will begin heavily monitoring and regulating blogs starting later this summer. (See this discussion at the LATOC forum for more on impending federal regulation of blogs) So forgive me if I can't help but suspect this may be part of a concerted effort by "THEM" or "IT" to extend imposition of the "shock doctrine" to the blogosphere and independent media. I certainly can't prove that is the case but it sure feels that way, at least to those of us on the receiving end.
How much time is left?
Unfortunately, the California proposal could pass as early as Wednesday (tomorrow) when the budget goes to the state senate. Obviously I'm hoping the nexus language will either be shelved or that Arnold will veto any budget with this proposal in it. But if it does go through - and it looks like it's going to - it will eliminate the overwhelming majority (possibly all) of LATOC's revenue.
So what now?
I've put probably about 12,000 hours into LATOC and the LATOC Forum over the last 6 years. (40 hours/week x 50 weeks a year x 6 years = roughly 12,000 hours). I'm thrilled to have been able to dedicate so much time to the site as there are countless numbers of people who have benefited tremendously from the platform that LATOC has developed into. If you are one of them and have thought to yourself, "One of these days I'll buy something from one of Matt's affiliates or by way of his Amazon ads or maybe make a donation in order to support LATOC", now is the time to do so as it is looking like California law will force my
Note: Anything you buy on Amazon or Ebay by way of the above links will earn a commission for LATOC even if it is something that isn't advertised on LATOC. My commissions at the above sites are in the 5-10%, if you're curious.
If you want to make a donation, you can do so at the following link. Note that a Paypal account is *not* required:
Some Notes Regarding the Positive Impact and Role of LATOC:
It's worth noting that LATOC was the site that, according to Representative Roscoe Bartlett, originally "galvanized" him into speaking publicly on Peak Oil. On May 3rd, 2005 he said the following on the floor of the U.S. Congress:
Last year, PO blogger Aaron Wissner was featured in front page story in the Wall Street Journal in which he epxlained that LATOC was his introduction to Peak Oil. His experience discovering the site and subsequent personal transformation will likely resonate with many of you:
LATOC has also helped kick off at least two other large peak oil/econo-collapse sites - including The Oil Drum as the founder (Proffesor Goose) did not know about Peak Oil until he came across LATOC in 2005:
Is LATOC going to cease operations?
I absolutely have no intetion or desire to cease operations BUT if this passes and I'm unable to develop alternative revenue streams at least roughly comparable to current ones, then yes either cessation of operations or a drastic reduction in the scope of operations will be necessary. There's just no way anybody can put in the amount of time it takes to run a site like LATOC if they're not earning income from it congruent with the amount of time they're investing in it unless their funded by a third party. (And I've never been funded by a third party, the only funding I've ever recieved is from LATOC readers by way of their purchases of books and prep suppplies.)
I have money saved from last year and I'm hoping if people stock up now on prep gear they've been meaning to get anyway, along with dontaions, then I'll have 3-6 months to get some type of alternative revenue model up and running before I'd have to consider ceasing or drastically scaling back operations.
LATOC news updates will be back on Thursday.
Best,
Matt
matt@lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
