Obama Gets the Nerd Vote
Written by Brent Oxley on November 3, 2008 – 1:29 am -Many of us at HostGator were curious what the ‘nerd vote’ looked like so we went ahead and ran our own poll amongst employees. We limited the choices to either Mccain or Obama in order to keep the results realistic.
Here’s a breakdown of the results:
98 Texas employees participated
55 nerds voted for Barack Hussein Obama II
34 nerds voted for John Sidney McCain
The remaining 9 votes were disqualified for failing to follow the strict directions of selecting one candidate or the other. For the sake of being democratic, here are the results of the 9 votes that were neither McCain nor Obama:
1 vote for “in your moms box” – Whatever this means….
3 votes for “neither”
1 vote for “ray” – Ray, you’re a loser if you voted for yourself.
1 vote for “Ron Paul”
1 vote for “cocktail party” – If you voted this, please come see me for psychiatric help.
1 vote for “Brent Oxley” – Your vote may have been disqualified, but you will still be getting a raise for having such wisdom.
1 vote for “Cbar” – I think this vote was an attempt to spell “brent”, but got mixed up on the spelling.
Obama dominated with 62% of the votes versus McCain’s 38%. This nerd vote took place at the HostGator office in Houston, Texas which is one of McCain’s strongest states! I can only imagine what these results would have looked like had HostGator employees been from somewhere more liberal, like San Francicso.
I personally voted for McCain with the belief that he is the lesser of two evils. I disagree with McCain on a few key issues such as withdrawing from Iraq, and having preconditions before meeting with foreign leaders. This, of course, seems much better to me than Obama’s relying on the United Nations and resolving issues in a “diplomatic” way. The U.N. is a joke, which is why major atrocities and genocide are happening in places like Darfur and Burma. The diplomatic route is the best way to go, but you can only talk so long until action is necessary if the talks are fruitless.
The Iraq war is costing Americans roughly 147 billion a year. This is a ton of money, but when you consider our current deficit is at $438 billion, you can quickly understand the war isn’t the main or only problem in America.
We have a few major problems in America right now. The consensus majority would have you believe that it’s the economy. I believe the biggest problem we have is our nation’s debt, which is about ten and half trillion dollars! To pay this off: every man, woman, child, and baby would need to pay about $35,000 in cash today. Even if our economy was going strong and we withdrew from Iraq our debt would still be increasing!
Both Mccain and Obama have the same plan to fix the economy by adding another trillion dollars if not trillions in further debt to America. To summarize the politics:
Mccains plan is to keep taxes the same
Obamas plan is to tax the rich further.
And here’s the problem…
In 2007, Forbes Magazine reported 946 billionaires in the entire world, with total accumulated wealth of $3.5 trillion. So even if somehow we said screw all you billionaires of the entire world we are now taking 100% of your money to help pay America’s debt it would still only put a small dent in the total $10.5 trillion America owes. This isn’t even taking into consideration that most of their wealth is in assets which means if everything was liquidated the market would be so flooded that the $3.5 trillion would probably be worth much less than half.
If you took 100% of the money and assets excluding real estate of every single person with one million dollars or more in both America and Canada this would still only be somewhere around 7 trillion dollars.
America needs to start being run like a business and Obama’s socialism is not the answer.
If a business is struggling would it be wise for them to raise the prices on its best customers?
No!
Your best customers would be the last ones to receive the price increase. You can’t penalize a customer for doing an increased volume of business with your company. If you do they’ll do less business or find someone else to do business with altogether.
If you raise the taxes of United States businesses they will become less competitive and the world is going to find someone else to do business. This will result in both fewer jobs and less government income. The middle class and the poor will suffer the most.
It’s a fact that the last time the capital gains tax was increased the government brought in less revenue. It’s a fact that the last time the capital gains tax was decreased by Bush the government’s revenue increased!
When Obama was asked about this he said: “I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness“. Instead of looking at the capitals gains tax for what’s going to make America the most revenue, Obama is going to raise it due to what he calls “fairness”. That doesn’t make any sense to me.
The truth is that the rich and small businesses are America’s best customers who are already paying the highest percent in taxes.
The rich fall into the 35% tax bracket.
The average household falls into the 25% tax bracket.
And the poorest fall into the 10% tax bracket.
So, basically as a business owner that’s increasing wages and adding jobs to America I’m already paying about 50% more in taxes than the average citizen.
I honestly wouldn’t mind my taxes being increased if it meant decreasing our nation’s debt. However it’s upsetting that Obama wants to raise my taxes to add further debt to America. You can only tax the rich so much, or heck you can take 100% of their money, and it’s still not going to be enough to pay off the debt. It doesn’t take a genius to see that on our current course America is going to have no choice but to bankrupt itself if something doesn’t change and neither candidate seems up to taking on this challenge.
A democracy fails when everyone votes to give themselves money, and that’s what this election is about. The middle class and the poor far outnumber the rich and Obama is winning votes by promising more money at the expense of the horrible small businesses such as HostGator. It may not be what’s best for the country but it is a great way to win votes! I mean after all who cares if the tax revenue decreases when you raise the capital gains tax since it’s a matter of “fairness”.
According to the Wall Street Journal — 40% of income earners pay zero, zip, nada, in income taxes. Obama’s plan is to give people paying zero in income taxes $1,000 a year for nothing. I can’t seem to comprehend why Obama is going to use hard working American’s money to pay someone who isn’t working hard and not even paying a dime in income taxes. This money is coming from all three classes the poor, the middle and the rich. Is that what he calls “fairness”? Sounds more like welfare to me.
What we need right now is a president that says we have harsh times ahead, but shows that we’re going to make cuts and get through this together. If you have thousands in credit card debt you can either squeeze a few more lobster dinners out of it or you can suffer and start eating Ramen Noodles. America needs to start suffering and start eating Ramen. This isn’t the time we should be voting for our last lobster dinner.
Sources:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2008/06/comparison-of-t.html
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
http://money.cnn.com/2003/06/11/pf/millionaire/millionaires/index.htm
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121910303529751345.html?mod=most_emailed_day
photo credit: the_real_cjs
Tags: obama mccain politics
Posted in Gator Politics, World Gator | 44 Comments »
Hostgator for Humanity
Written by fmerrill on May 23, 2008 – 3:17 pm -That’s right, the folding@home hostgator.com team is a reality and we’ve broken into the top 1,000 ranked teams!
Although we’ve kept this fairly low profile on our forum post here , we do have a large amount of users starting to come on board, so I’d like to present something a hosting company is doing to better the world.
The Folding@Home project by Stanford University is a distributed computing project used to create one of the largest supercomputers in the world. The client has long been used used as both a metric to measure processors and machines efficiency and also to help the cause. The project is distributed much in the way Seti@Home was, however, with a more direct human goal.
Just in case you’re wondering, “what is protein folding and why does this matter to me?”; the Folding@Home project simulates complex mathematical formulas about how these proteins fold, unfold, and misfold with the goal to hopefully one day learn better how many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes actually work and occur. Results? Darn right! The project has already come up with a number of notable scientific results, and is with our help and yours, continues to go somewhere tangible as you can see at Stanford’s whitepage papers
As for how this all came about; I was first introduced to the project when I was looking for something better to do with my Spare CPU cycles than let them idle. A lot of people are worried that clients like this will hog CPU, but the beauty of this software is it scales and re-nices it self so well, so you can be running it and it will use a defined amount of CPU at all times, but when any other process needs the CPU it will throttle itself. You can literally play high end games with the client running, as it will just scale back.
I really began to get involved in the project when I picked up a PS3. I wanted to put the powerful Cell processor through it’s paces so I immediately downloaded the client and started running work units. Now, as an administrator here I began thinking how helpful it could be if some of the machines we have that idle certain days of the week at HostGator were to fold in the background while the machine was not in use. NAS boxes were the perfect solution, and now we’re about to break the 1,000,000 point milestone.
So, do you want to help humanity and have a chance at free hosting? Well help us out and we’ll help you! Here’s what to do :
- Go to http://folding.stanford.edu/ and download the appropriate client for your operating system, and if you have a dual or quad core make sure you get the High Performance SMP client. (If you have a PS3 you can install it directly from the PS3 crossbar interface)
- Install folding@home and use team number 122600 , you can enter anything for your Donor name but we would prefer you use either your forum name so we can better contact you for your prize(or your wordpress login name)
- Start folding and leave it running. Don’t be surprised if it takes a while for you to start getting work units (these things are huge), the more machines you have it running on and the faster the machines, the quicker you will break milestones.
Prize Details
Prizes will be calculated by contributions to the team based on performance. Dead line to see who can get the most milestones will be on 07/01/2008. At that time winner will need to claim prize by emailing sales@hostgator.com with their donor name.
1. GRAND PRIZE (1 winner)
The top contributor who contributes the most points to the team will get a free year of hosting on our Aluminum reseller plan or equivalent in credit to existing HostGator plan if already a customer.
2. FIRST PRIZE (1 winner)
Runner up will receive a free year of hosting on our Swamp hosting plan (or equivalent).
3. SECOND PRIZES (8 winners)
Following 8 runners up will receive 6 months of free hosting on the Baby hosting plan (or equivalent)
I’d like to extend a special thanks to every team member both from our employee pool and some of our very active forum members and customers currently active (over 345 active CPU’s) and especially to both our owner Brent Oxley and our CTO David Collins for allowing me to run this on each and every one of our network backup servers to create a huge grid.
Statistics links :
Tags: alzheimers, cancer, distributed computing, folding@home, free hosting
Posted in Gator Goodness, World Gator | 7 Comments »
Hatchling Gators
Written by Chad Bean on April 17, 2008 – 8:31 pm -HostGator has been growing in record numbers lately, and hiring employees just as fast. We thought it might be interesting to go around and harass some of the new trainees. Without further ado, meet our new employees as recorded by Justin…
The first few people we interviewed for the video started saying how much we sucked, but after canning them the morale suddenly increased as you can see in the above video.
The employee culture at HG has generally stayed the same over the years. I started at the company when there were just 4 of us in a small office in Florida, and now we’re closing in on 200 employees in our Houston office.
One of the cool things about the company is you’ll see the owner, Brent Oxley, at the office every day working more hours than just about any other employee. Many new hires would never expect him to be the owner of the company, which reminds me of a prank we pulled on Vincent when he first started.
Vince was heading home after his shift, when he ran into Brent. Not knowing that Brent was the owner, Brent was asking him how he liked it at the job. Of course Vince, like the other new fish you saw in the video, declared his love for the job. He was a bit surprised, however, when Brent started going off on how much he hated the company. Acting as though he was a disgruntled employee, Brent mentioned how he was going to come back the next day with a gun to shoot the place up.
Brent went on for a minute complaining about the “owner” of the company and how much of an @!^hole the owner was before he asked if Vince had met him yet. Vince had tried to reason with Brent not to shoot the place up, until Brent finally broke the news and introducing himself to him.
Good thing Vincent loved his job that day.
P.S. We’re looking for excellent System Administrators and Support Techs to join the fold. Apply today if you want to love your job too.
Tags: Comedy, employees
Posted in Gator Politics | 16 Comments »
One Laptop Per Child, They Will Fail…
Written by Brent Oxley on January 31, 2008 – 7:16 pm -
I’m very proud to announce that Hostgator has made a $100,000 donation to MD Anderson which is one of the world leaders in cancer treatments and research. They have truly been a pleasure to work with. Working with MD has given many of our employees that warm fuzzy feeling inside that you should have when you are helping people.
I would also like to announce that I feel used, abused, and completely violated on a $25,000 donation hostgator made to One laptop per child. OLPC has a mission to develop cheap laptops for children to educate and express themselves on.
Maybe I’m being a drama queen so please come to your own conclusion based on the following experience…….
It all started with a $25,000 donation being made on their site and the following email being sent shortly after:
“Hello,
I’m the owner of hostgator.com and I just wanted to shoot off an email
to let you know I have just donated $25,000 via google checkout on my
amex. We get dozens of fraud orders a day so the purpose of this email
is to let you know it’s legit. I’m currently on xmas vacation in the
bahamas in the wyndham so the ip isn’t going to match my american address.
Please let me know if you have any questions or if any further
verification is needed. Thank you, and keep up the good fight!!
Sincerely,
Brent Oxley ”
Their Response 11 days later January 11th 2008
“Dear Donor,
In order for me to locate and track your donation, can you please provide me
with your complete address, reference number and the name used at the time
of donation. This will allow me to access the correct donation and locate
your laptop.Thank you for your interest in One Laptop Per Child.
OLPC
Donor Services”
My Reply January 11th 2008
“Are you serious?
Our company name is hostgator.com
My name is Brent Oxley
How many $25,000 donations do you receive? Please spend the minute that
it would take to look up the donation. Thank you.”
(we received automated email back instantly confirming they did receive our email)
Twenty days later and we still have not had a follow up response or anyone in the company making any type of contact with us other then what’s listed above!!!
OPLC has been getting slammed recently after Intel left the group January 3rd of this year. There are many critics that argue the money can be spent better on libraries, food, water, etc. You can read up more on OLPC on wikipedia. Even with all the negative publicity I and many of our customers believed it to be a worthy cause that deserved our help.
Based on our experience it’s quite obvious OLPC is being mismanaged to the point of failure. I now feel our donation would have been put to better use had we mailed 25,000 one dollar bills for the children to use as toilet paper.
Posted in Brent Oxley | 27 Comments »
Lifestyles of the Rich and the Homeless
Written by Brent Oxley on November 28, 2007 – 1:51 am -Since moving into our new office located in Houston, we have had many experiences with the homeless. I personally had a homeless man charge at me screaming. “It was you, it was you, f*** the man!” I was ready to gator whoop him if necessary, but luckily it did not have to come to that. Just a few weeks ago we were so privileged to have an artistic bum use our restroom facilities. His medium of choice proved to be feces, with the canvas being the walls, mirrors, door, and even our ceiling!
The homeless problem isn’t just around the HostGator building. It seems that anywhere I travel to in Houston, there is a homeless man begging for money nearby.
Anytime I look out my window I can see at least one or two bums working the street. I’ve been watching the same faces work the same corner for over a year now. Being the business man that I am, it was impossible to look at them without wondering how much money they were making. I asked around… I read a bunch of websites… and all I could find was meaningless statistics without any real field testing being done.
So I did the only thing that any self respecting CEO would do. I became homeless myself.
The experiment was setup so that each day of the week a different popular homeless slogan would be advertised.
Here are the results of our study.
Bum deployed: Brent Oxley, CEO of HostGator
Day of week: Monday
Time in the field: 5:00pm-7:00pm
Slogan: “We need our flea shots anything helps”
Earnings for the day: $26.40
Hourly Wage: $13.20
Brent’s Experience: I prepared for being a bum by stealing my mom’s German Shepherd named Hawkmoon, not shaving for a week, and rolling us both around in dirt. I knew being a bum was serious business, and if I was going to compete with guys who were doing it for years, I would need to bring my game face. Upon stepping out onto the corner, I was instantly being evaluated by a homeless man the area knows as “dumpster dan”. He received this nick name after he took up residence in our building’s dumpster and started a fire. (Years before we owned the building)
I decided to ignore Dan and began to make my rounds. When the light turned red I walked along side the cars holding hawk moon, and my sign that read, “We need our flea shots anything helps.” Within minutes people began putting money in my trusty plastic cup. It seemed almost every person that gave me money said something about the money being for the dog and not me! I have never felt so unloved before. I had a lot of people asking me questions. Why don’t you go to this shelter… Why don’t you have a job. Etc. If only they knew I was the owner of a multi-million dollar company! I responded to one guy who asked, with “I do have a job” and he in turn responded with “so you’re out here hussling huh?” before driving off. I had about 15 middle aged women and one man roll down their window to give me money. Most of the people gave a buck and some change, with my highest payment being $3.00. It was pretty obvious that most of the people giving me money made less per hour then I was making bumming! I don’t believe I received money from a single car that would be considered worth more than average.
Being a bum was a very depressing experience for me! The highlight of my day was when a car with a few kids in the backseat were looking at Hawkmoon. I picked up her paw and started waiving at them, and they all started smiling and laughing. That concludes my bumming experience.
Bum deployed: Chris A. Lvl1 Chat tech
Day of week: Tuesday
Time in the field: 5:00pm-7:00pm
Slogan: “My Ex Wife had a better lawyer. Homeless now”
Earnings for the day: $6.60
Hourly Wage: $3.30
Chris’s Exprience: The dog day went pretty well with the women so we decided to try a sign that might appeal more to the men. If you’re a woman reading this please don’t be offended. The sign was a bad joke in an attempt to get the men to open their wallets. We were able to get 6 times more men to donate, but it was at the expense of losing 100% of the female demographic. The majority of the women who read Chris’s sign were PISSED, and instead of giving money all he got was death stares. Dumpster Dan was out in full force this day with one car actually giving both Chris and Dan two dollars to split.
Bum deployed: Chris A. Lvl1 Chat tech
Day of week: Wednesday
Time in the field: 5:10pm-6:50pm
Slogan: “Ninjas killed my family need money for kung fu lessons”
Earnings for the day: $22.75
Hourly Wage: $13.65
Chris’s Exprience: I’m sure most people have seen a picture of this homeless sign on the internet at some point or another. This sign had everyone laughing, and in exchange for the laughs the money rolled in. With $13.65 an hour being made, it turned out to be the second highest pay day of our experiment. It was about 50/50 split of middle aged men and women donating. A few people asked what happened to the family and Chris responded with, “We went on vacation to Thailand, took a private scuba driving trip and got ambushed by ninja pirates.”
Bum deployed: Chris A. Lvl1 Chat tech
Day of week: Thursday
Time in the field: 5:00pm-7:00pm
Slogan: “Why lie need a beer”
Earnings for the day: $20.30 in cash and 5 beers
Hourly Wage: $10.15
Chris’s Exprience: This was the only sign that got any teenagers / college kids to donate. No middle aged women donated, but their were two college girls that did. It was pretty evenly split between the older guys and the younger college crowd donating. The reaction was pretty much a, “hell yeh get drunk” response from everyone. On top of all the money made, five different cars gave a beer for a payment! A real homeless person that was in a wheelchair came up and took one of the donated beers from Chris’s pile
Bum deployed: Chris A. Lvl1 Chat tech
Day of week: Friday
Time in the field: 5:50pm-7:15pm
Prop: Wheelchair
Earnings for the day: $33.42
Hourly Wage: $23.59
Chris’s Exprience: Being in the wheelchair received the most sympathetic reactions. It was about a 50/50 split between men and women donations. There was an incident where a teenage boy caught HostGator Lance wheeling Chris into position. The teenage boy started screaming that it was all a fake setup!
Conclusion:
We made OVER DOUBLE the minimum wage of $5.85 almost every single day of the experiment, and best of all it was TAX FREE!
Summary of how much was made each day:
Dog day: $13.20/hr
Exwife day: $3.30/hr
Ninjas day: $13.65/hr
Beer day: $10.15/hr + 5 beers valued at say 72 cents beer = $11.95/hr
Wheelchair day: $23.59/hr
How much would that be a year working 40 hours a week:
Dog day: $27,456
Exwife day: $6,864
Ninjas day: $28,392
Beer day: $24,856
Wheelchair day: $49,067
Homeless people do not pay taxes. If they did pay taxes, this is what the above salaries would look like on what they’re taking home:
Dog day: $31,574.40
Exwife day: $7,550.40
Ninjas day: $32,650.80
Beer day: $28,584.40
Wheelchair day: $61,333.75
In 2006 the poverty line for a single person under 65 was $10,488 dollars. So we definitely wouldn’t be considered homeless based off of what we earned. In fact, we would be making more money then most college graduates!
According to money.cnn.com
The average college graduate made the below salary for each field:
Information sciences and systems: $47,182
Economics/finance: $44,588
Civil engineering: $46,084
Chemical engineering: $56,269
Accounting: $44,928
Business administration/management: $41,155
History: $33,071
Mechanical engineering: $51,732
Electrical engineering: $53,500
Psychology: $30,369
Computer science: $50,744
Political science and government: $33,094
English: $31,385
Sociology: $31,096
It’s no wonder we have so many homeless people in Houston! All you need to do is sit in a wheelchair and pretend to be homeless to make more than almost any college graduate! If anyone ever tells you you’re going to be homeless, just counter that with, “if I were, I would be making more than a college graduate!”
I’m sure many will argue since we only worked from 5 to 7 that the numbers are going to be inflated. Here’s a few facts to consider:
We picked the closest road to our office. Like most things in life bumming is all about location. This is what we made at our first and only location! I’d imagine with some road testing a bum could easily double the income we made.
The road we used receives most of the traffic in the morning due to people heading downtown to work. Our study took place during the evening which means the road wasn’t that busy due to most people heading home on the other side of the freeway.
About half the time we were bumming there was another bum working the same street corner. One bum on a corner = more money.
Neither Chris or I accepted any money from people we know.
I apologize if this blog post has offended you. It was meant to be educational and give you a better insight on the true financials of homeless people. There are a lot of sick people out there that will rip off your generosity as much as they can. If you truly want to help the homeless don’t give them cash or beer. Do you think they are making a daily deposit at their local bank? Unless they are a fake homeless person, I highly doubt they do this! If you feel they truly need help, get them food, water, or clothes. Heck get them a tent if you’re feeling like Santa Claus.
The only two legitimate reasons I can think of to be homeless are:
If you’re truly crazy the chance of finding a job is slim. Most of the homeless crazies have gone insane from drug abuse. If you give them money they’re most likely going to use it on more drugs.
You’re too sick to move in which case you wouldn’t be able to move to collect the money.
There are 10’s of thousands of hardworking Americans that work from wheelchairs every day. If you’re strong enough to push yourself around taking money all day you’re strong enough to work a desk job!
Bumming may sound like a pretty sweat deal but with the high income salary comes a few cons:
You can be seriously injured in a bum turf war.
You can be beat up by one of those psychos out there that prey on the homeless.
You could be hit by a car at any time.
A friend or family member could drive by and see you. This actually happened to Chris one day. A friend of his family said, “Chris are you homeless?”
You have to deal with yourself being a leech on society.
Not everybody is cut out to be a bum. Our first bum was our Chat Tech Sean. We had to fire him shortly after his first session. (Don’t worry, he’s still a chat tech) I gave Sean many tips on how to be a bum, but for whatever reason he could not follow my directions. I told him half a dozen times that he had to hold the signs towards the cars, unfortunately this proved to be too complicated for him. That, or he couldn’t handle the heat, because almost everytime I went to check on him he was sitting down in the shade somewhere. Our numbers could not be accurate if he wasn’t working the street, so we had no choice but to replace Sean. When I asked him about his experience, he said that dumpster Dan kept “mumbling gibberish at him”, which made him very nervous.
We were offered many jobs during the experiment. Sean received a strange one. A woman wanted to pay him to live in her shed, and be her gardener. Sean politely declined the position, but the woman would not take no for an answer. She circled around three different times, harrassing him to live in her shed.
I’m sure that many of you are going to be upset about us tricking people into giving us money. But before you get upset please be aware that all of the money we made, $109.47, is being donated to the local soup kitchen. On top of that we’re going to continue this experiment with a test. We are going to drive around town offering bums the choice between a one dollar bill and two beers. The first bum that chooses the dollar bill is going to be given an additional $109 dollars and 47 cents courtesy of HostGator. I’m curious to see how many stops we will make before the money is chosen. We’ll be sure to update this post with the results of the next test!
Posted in Brent Oxley | 61 Comments »
