I went in wet season and got sunburnt. Cycled it. Most of my pictures were of tourists.

Excellent! I've gotten my failures out of the way and now I'm primed for my millions. — Hanover

Woo Hoo! Nothing is going to break your stride now! 8-)

The problem with sharing a backup of PF is legal issues. If we share it, I wouldn't be surprised if the one thing the owners bother to do is sic lawyers on us. Also it's a couple gigabytes of SQL which isn't very easy to make use of except when presented in the format of a forum, which makes lawyers ever more likely.

You have a copyright to your own posts, so those aren't an issue... but anyone else's are.

It is really depressing to look over there.

To work decades for a $20,000 pay off makes no sense except as a desperate act when in need of a quick payout. — Hanover

It wasn't work, it was fun, and I never expected it to have resale value. But when I realized it did, and that it could buy me 2 more years to try to figure out how to reinvent myself, and I hadn't been as actively into it lately anyway, and I had perhaps a month in which to get that deal done before running out of money... couldn't pass it up. Not that it was an easy decision or one that I don't regret sometimes considering the outcome.

Anyone could do the math and realize that the ads wouldn't cover the cost of labor or server space, much less lead to recovery of the initial investment. — Hanover

It probably could've brought in at least $200 a month in ad revenue without being exceptionally obnoxious. And hosting costs might've been mitigated for a company that owns a bunch of forums and shares resources. But yeah there wouldn't be much left to pay for their time.

It probably could've brought in at least $200 a month in ad revenue — Paul

Wow--so only 100 months/just over 8 years to break even.

Not that it was an easy decision or one that I don't regret sometimes considering the outcome. — Paul

Don't regret too much. Old apple trees are best replaced by fresh stock, even if the varieties are excellent. TPF is a refreshed cutting of PF; the varieties are the same; you are freed of the burden. Pursue your reinvention, and good luck.

Someday TPF will be ready for a succession as well.

Change is the only constant.

Well, it looks like they're trying to sell the domain for $50,000.

Haha--that's hilarious. Buy it for an already exorbitant amount, let it completely fall apart, then try to sell it a year later for a 60% profit margin.

Offer them $100 for it. Otherwise some douche will come along and buy it... for maybe less than that.

Well, it looks like they're trying to sell the domain for $50,000. — Michael

What I find interesting about that page is the price of the other sites that are up for sale

Related Domains For Sale or At Auction
YogaPhilosophy.com ($2,288) DesignPhilosophy.com ($3,875) SpiritualPhilosophy.com ($4,888) PhilosophyResearch.com ($2,488) GermanPhilosophy.com ($799) ChristianPhilosophy.com ($4,888)

Bit of a difference no?

^ For empty domains that may never have had any content or search engine ranking, those are extreme rip-off prices too. thephilosophyforum.com is at least as good a domain name as any of those, and I suspect you guys didn't pay thousands for it.

I just awarded ModBot the poster of the month award for the shoutbox. She appears to be the most proliferate and productive member over there at the moment.
Sad, sad, sad. :’(

I just awarded ModBot the poster of the month award for the shoutbox. She appears to be the most proliferate and productive member over there at the moment.
Sad, sad, sad. :’( — Sir2u

I was wondering about that. Who's posting under ModBot? Paul?

I was wondering about that. Who's posting under ModBot? Paul? — Nagase

She is a Bot. She does her own thing without anyone having to help her. X-)

Maybe she's practising for the Turing Test.

Maybe she's practising for the Turing Test. — Wayfarer

She has a bigger chance of passing it than the owners of the site. 8-)

Geez--all these years, and I never realized ModBot was female.

I helped Paul fix ModBot during the PHP 5.5 upgrade. It is basically a program that scans posts for key words and phrases and sends out canned responses. That was apparently enough to convince a lot of people that she was human, ("she" because the avatar is feminine).

After fixing it, I quickly wrote up ChomskyBot, (hated by thousands), based on another ChomskyBot program and sent it to Paul. It ignores what you post and just strings together a bunch of phrases from his essays which is very frustrating to read because it seems like it should make sense, but rarely does.

Well, it looks like they're trying to sell the domain for $50,000. — Michael

50k for a website that just spins and spins trying to find itself!

Yes, but it's obscene when you get use that failure to avoid paying taxes for 20 years.

Yes, but it's obscene when you get use that failure to avoid paying taxes for 20 years. — aequilibrium

Why is it obscene to be given tax credit for a business you invested real dollars into that later failed? The dollars that Paul was paid for PF was not play money, it was real money. The purchaser had to earn/gather that investment money to pay Paul (to rob Peter ;) ) and it was clean money so the transaction was legal.
If the current owner of PF purchased 100 sites total at 20k each, he would have an initial investment of 2 million dollars, before a single ad is placed on any of the sites. If PF was successful in the transition and revenue from the ads rolled in, he might make a profit of 5k the first year. That would mean PF is operating in the red, as far as their investment is concerned and could very well be for the first 3 years of new ownership.
But if their profit off the other 99 sites bumps them ever so gently up against the next tax rate, a strategic loss could be/would be something to consider.

Yes, but it's obscene when you get use that failure to avoid paying taxes for 20 years. — aequilibrium

I agree with what Tiff said above. It's never to a business' advantage to gather losses, as if the tax write off associated with a $1 loss is more than $1. That is, if a business could choose a $1 profit and have to pay 40% of it in taxes, it would choose that instead of having a $1 loss and not having to pay taxes on it. Sure, under scenario 1, they'd pay $ 0.40 in taxes, and under scenario 2, they'd pay $0, but the net profit under #1 is $0.60, preferable to the $0 profit under #2.

It stands to reason that if your net income is negative, you'd owe no taxes. It also stands to reason that businesses don't start and stop every year on the tax due date, which means that if my losses in Year 1 are $1m, then I should be able to carry over the loss to Year 2. That means in Year 2, if I earn $500k, I'm still at a $500k loss over Years 1 and 2. I can keep carrying over the loss until it's gone. That's how it works. So, if Trump (for example) took massive losses in Year 1 and he's now very profitable in Year 10, it would make sense that he would have had a very low to no tax burden in Years 1-9.

I agree with what Tiff said above. It's never to a business' advantage to gather losses, as if the tax write off associated with a $1 loss is more than $1. That is, if a business could choose a $1 profit and have to pay 40% of it in taxes, it would choose that instead of having a $1 loss and not having to pay taxes on it. Sure, under scenario 1, they'd pay $ 0.40 in taxes, and under scenario 2, they'd pay $0, but the net profit under #1 is $0.60, preferable to the $0 profit under #2.

It stands to reason that if your net income is negative, you'd owe no taxes. It also stands to reason that businesses don't start and stop every year on the tax due date, which means that if my losses in Year 1 are $1m, then I should be able to carry over the loss to Year 2. That means in Year 2, if I earn $500k, I'm still at a $500k loss over Years 1 and 2. I can keep carrying over the loss until it's gone. That's how it works. So, if Trump (for example) took massive losses in Year 1 and he's now very profitable in Year 10, it would make sense that he would have had a very low to no tax burden in Years 1-9. — Hanover

And then we get to the tricky part: how to value intellectual property. Quite possibly the reason it's on sale for 50 kUSD instead of the 20 kUSD it was bought for, is to write off a loss of 50 kUSD (and probably a lot more in labour costs and other things) instead of the actual money spent. So with 20 kUSD, he probably "bought" a 100 kUSD write off. Depending on the taxation rate that could create an effecitve profit.

Bingo!
Now, why aren't you investing in the American economy? 8-)

Now, why aren't you investing in the American economy? 8-) — ArguingWAristotleTiff

It's also interesting that goodwill and IP are activated on the balance sheet of large corporations. What happens with Apple's already dismally small amount of taxes when their goodwill evaporates? It's not going to be hip forever.

Different business balance sheets look very different from one another. A real estate investment corporation can have huge, non cash losses related to depreciations expense. Other companies, such as banks are highly leveraged compared to other businesses, because the majority of their assets are cash. Computer companies buy the good name, and intellectual property when they merge with other companies. Apple has, last time I read, about a billion dollars in cash available. It can purchase and purchase companies, and never have much of a tax bill.

The thing is that the tax code ought to be set up to direct business spending, so that if you don't want to pay taxes, you don't have to, but you must invest in other businesses or processes that benefit society. Apple went from employing around 10,000 people in 2002 to 47,000 today.

Big corporations are getting far too big. The proposed merger between AT&T and Times Warner would create a corporation with around $400bn in assets, which is monstrous. I think ultimately that such large corporations, bigger than many countries, are bad for society. M&As take the place of innovation and become a cyclic method of competition.

ModBot's shouts are human-operated by someone who won a bet with me many years back. I shall not reveal who, but it's not me.

By the way I've just started up a new site about possible future developments/events/technologies which might interest some of you. It updates daily, I've got the first 60 articles picked out already.

Heh, I sign up and find out that the only other member (besides you) is also called Michael.

Interesting format, by the way. Kind of a cross between a forum and a blog.

A frog?

Anyone check up on the old PF recently?

No, why?