It's because our Federal Government doesn't know SQUAT about small business. I do. I run one. Did anyone ask me?
Bailing out GM is just treating a symptom. That's just idiotic. Why don't we solve the problem?


"...The stimuli plans were supposed to be job plans. The auto/bank bailouts cum nationalizations were supposed to be about saving jobs, not 'Wall Street'. So given two record breaking stimuli within two years, why isn't America hiring?

America isn't hiring precisely because of government policy. Small business owners, who are usually the first into and the first out of the job pool, are standing by the fence and watching. They are paralyzed by regulatory uncertainty. If they hire someone who ends up doing poorly, will they be able to fire that person? Will they have to pay their health care bills after they've been terminated? If so, for how long? Who will pay for all these stimulus checks? If it will turn out to be small business, why would they hire instead of keeping costs low to prepare for the big tax bill? Where will the market move? Are you in the right business or are your clients in a politically disfavored industry? Are your clients in health care (being nationalized), autos (already nationalized), banking (somewhat nationalized) or any energy production process which uses carbon (pulverized)? Until you know, you don't grow, and until you grow your market, you don't grow your payroll.

Jobs aren't languishing despite the government's best efforts. They're languishing because of them.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/31692578



"...Owning a small business has always been a challenge — half wind up failing within the first few years. But the financial crisis has dealt them a one-two punch, as big banks cut the credit card lines that many entrepreneurs were forced to lean on when a once-abundant supply of loans dried up.

As of April, 59 percent of America’s small firms relied on credit cards to help finance their day-to-day operations, up from 44 percent at the end of last year, according to the National Small Business Association."

"...“The way that the economy is going to come out of a recession is not by big business hiring but by small business hiring,” said Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, who is championing the measure. Denying small businesses access to credit is having “spiraling” effect on the economy, she added."

http://www.cnbc.com/id/31445083



Why aren't the stimuli working?

"...White House adviser David Axelrod urged patience for President Barack Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package in the face of sliding poll numbers. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a past and potentially future presidential candidate, said the spending was ill-designed and served only to expand the size of government.

Republicans have seized on the public's growing unease over government debt and spending to challenge the popular president. Sensing their own vulnerabilities, Obama's top advisers have ramped up their defense of spending that is incomplete and going slower than many had hoped.

"You know, we take the long view on this. Look, when the president signed the stimulus package - the economic recovery package - he said it's going to take a while for this to work," Axelrod said. "And we're going to go through some rough times, and unemployment is going to go up, and ... we have to work our way through this."

Some economists and business leaders have called for a second spending bill designed to help guide the economy through a downturn that has left millions without jobs. Axelrod said it's too early to know if more spending would be needed or if the administration would seek more money from Congress.

"Most of the stimulus money - the economic recovery money - is yet to be spent. Let's see what impact that has," Axelrod said. "I'm not going to make any judgment as to whether we need more. We have confidence that the things we're doing are going to help, but we've said repeatedly, it's going to take time, and it will take time. It took years to get into the mess we're in. It's not going to take months to get out of it."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/29/politics/main5120588.shtml

Here are some Great Tricks!!!
10 Youtube URL Tricks You Should Know About:

1. View high quality videos
2. Embed Higher Quality Videos
3. Cut the chase and link to the interesting part
4. Hide the search box
5. Embed only a part of Video
6. Autoplay an embedded video
7. Loop an embedded video
8. Disable Related Videos
9. Bypass Youtube Regional Filtering
10. Download Video


1. View high quality videos
Youtube gives you the option to switch to high quality videos for some of the videos, however you can check if a video is available in high quality format by appending ‘&fmt=18′(stereo, 480 x 270 resolution) or ‘&fmt=22′(stereo, 1280 x 720 resolution) for even higher quality.

2. Embed Higher Quality Videos
While the above trick works for playback, if however you want to embed hig quality videos you need to append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ and “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″ to the embed url.

3. Cut the chase and link to the interesting part
Linking to a video where the real action starts at 3 minutes 22 seconds, wondered if you could make it start at 03:22? You are in luck. All you have to do is add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY seconds) to the end of the URL.

4. Hide the search box
The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.

5. Embed only a part of Video
Just append ‘&start=30′ to skip first 30s of the video. In general you can modify the value after start= to the number of seconds you want to skip the video for.

6. Autoplay an embedded video
Normally when you embed a Youtube video and load the page, the player is loaded and it sits there waiting for you to hit the play button. You can make the video play automatically by adding ‘&autoplay=1′ to the url part of the embed code.

7. Loop an embedded video
Append ‘&loop=1′ to make the video start again without user intervention after it reaches the end.

8. Disable Related Videos
Publishing your content in the form of Youtube video? Don’t want people to see other people’s content that may be related but may as well be in competition to you? Just add ‘&rel=0′ to the end of the url part of the embed code and you just turned off the related video suggestions!

9. Bypass Youtube Regional Filtering
Some videos are only available in certain parts of the world. Your IP Address is used to determine your location and then allow or deny access to the video. Change the url from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<somecode> to http://www.youtube.com/v/<somecode>

10. Download Video
Although not inherently a youtube trick but useful all the same for downloading videos. Just change youtube to kickyoutube in the url of the video and it will take you to kickyoutube.com with all the options for downloading the video you were watching.


All these can be found Here:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-youtube-url-tricks-you-should-know-about/
There are some extra graphics on the site to help with the explanations!</somecode></somecode>

And what a beautiful uniform it is!

MikesHL has been supplying the sift with a lot of funny videos. A lot of standup and classic Seinfeld spring to mind. Everything this guy submits just seems to fly through the queue. Speaking of queues, have a look at his pqueue.

Congratulations, MikesHL, and thanks for all the upvotes! As schmawy likes pointing out, Sift life starts at 100 - so go live, design uniforms and continue to post great vids! Just remember; NO CAPES!

I've noticed that the stars seem to be rather unfairly distributed around here. A handful of sifters have over 1000 stars while many have only a few dozen or hundred, and the vast majority haven't even a single star to their name. Its almost as if we are split into distinct classes; the vast majority existing in a state of poverty – beggars, killers, devoid of any meaningful invocation, and resented for their burden on siftbot’s resources; a broad, hard working middle class with a respectable standard of promotion; and a brutal, unrelenting ruling class who has concentrated all the channels and stars in their greedy hands.

It is for these reasons, that we as sifters, in order to form a more perfect Sift, establish a fair and balanced top 15, insure channel tranquility, provide for a common defense against trolls, promote the general queue, and secure the blessings of Dag to our ourselves and our power points, should establish the following system of fair distribution:

0-10 stars earned in the last year: 10%
10-25 stars earned in the last year: 15%
25-50 stars earned in the last year: 25%
50-100 stars earned in the last year: 28%
250-500 stars earned in the last year: 33%
Over 500 stars earned in the last year: 35%

The stars collected from each years earnings shall then be re-distributed to those living star to star, who can hardly afford to sift a video a week. I think you will find these brackets fair and equitable, as those earning the most stars can surely afford to part with such a pittance of their yearly bounty.

Furthermore, in light of these tough times, I also move that we construct with haste a script to generate 10,000 new stars; to be sent out as a stimulus to help those in need of an increase in the size of their queues. By giving these lower-class sifters an fair start, they will have an equal chance at bringing themselves out of the sad ranks of the unsiftables, the un-starred and scarlet P's.

Did you guys miss me? I was on a practically-internetless stint for a while there, but now I've got high speed nets again and I'll be active once more.

So you might be wondering to yourselves, what has JAPR been up to? Or not. Either way, this is what's going on with me:

*Taking a semester off of school and spending the time with my girlfriend

*Just entered a copy band contest to win a free trip to see my favorite band ever at their 20th anniversary concert at Budoukan (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ62a3RlNHY if you want to check it out)

*Trying to find a job for the time off...might end up doing door-to-door "hey give us some money to push for environmental policies" junk

So how's the Sift been? KP, Blank, Issy, DFT, you guys all still around?

	Awesome	(9 votes)
	Pretty Good	(29 votes)
	Meh	(24 votes)
	Not so good	(11 votes)
	Terrible	(3 votes)

Haven't seen a poll up in awhile, so I thought why not judge the performance of our collective brutha-in-chief?

This is your last chance to get the original VidoSift t-shirt. They will not be for sale again! These are the final ones in our private reserve and we don't have many left. Here are the counts:

XL - 7 6 4 3
M - 5 5 4 3
S - 10 8

The price is $15 + $5 airmail shipping to anywhere in the world. Use the button below to purchase one through PayPal. After you have purchased it be sure to leave me a private profile comment with your email address and shipping address. Here are some examples of what the shirt looks like. Dag, GourmetEmu, TheSnipe, DeathCow and of course my video of all the shirts when they arrived back in the day.

We're looking for between 10 and 20 Sifters to help test out the new VideoSift 4.0 interface over the next couple of weeks. Here's the kind of criteria that would help us:

Very familiar with the way VideoSift functions now

critical eye to detail

We need Sifters who use different browsers and OSs (Opera, Safari, Mac, Linux etc)

Able to take screenshots and send them to us

Discreet - (no spilling the beans )

If you're interested- leave a comment with your OS and browser of choice. Testing will kick off within the next week or so.

VideoSift just crowned another member, brothers and sisters, and this one is a man of the people. It's none other than Sift newsman and politico NetRunner, Now many of you know that NetRunner started his meteoric rise a little over a year ago, but actually he's been here for almost 3 years. That is, if you can trust his birth certificate. In any event, he's brought us a lot of great political discussions via his video selections, and his News channel has become a valuable addition to this place. He also brought us Mrs. NetRunner, better known as mintbbb, and even though she's taking some time off she's also brought a lot of great videos to this place. They've both had a very positive impact on this place, so I'm really glad that NetRunner decided to become active.

So let's congratulate our Obamunist friend, unless you want him to send you to the gulags Obama is having built at this very moment. He's already mad with power, I tell you.

It's time for our weekly update from Sift parter Neatorama.com. Check out the neat stories below and their site for lots of great stories (and material to submit to the Sift ).


Misconceptions About Neanderthals

I admit that I am a bit speciesist and have stereotypes about neanderthals having sloped brows and being generally kind of thick. This is a great post that sheds some light on those common misconceptions. I love the pic in this thumbnail too. (bigger version after the link)

4 Holy Women Transformed by Cheese

This article delivers. These are indeed holy women, and they were effected by cheese. Yes, it does include the grilled cheese sandwich lady.

Barbie Foot: Barbie Foosball Table

Finally something that satisfies my fantasy of managing a female soccer teem of improbably proportioned players.

Beautiful Rapid Prototyping Art: Chrysanthemum by Michaella Janse van Vuuren

If you're like me- you like your art both nerdy and aesthetically pleasing. I found this work extremely beautiful- and would love to have something like this in the Dag house.

Couple gets hitched in the vomit comet

Hopefully they didn't throw up a little bit in their mouths while taking the vows.

There are now one thousand video submissions with the tag *media.
Is it time for a dedicated channel for this hot topic?

Horribly sad sad footage and situation. So sad that I watched it once and I do not want to ever see it again. Since then, I've seen about 100 videos on the sift of what appears to be the same thing. Since I don't want to watch it again, I can't really determine if these vids are technically dupes. In my opinion, there's no reason for having 4 videos of different close up angles, that would be exploitation. Furthermore, since the first one I saw posted, was taken down by the submitter because some of us agreed it was snuff, I don't see why others should be sifted. It's not fair to the orignal sifter...

If somebody could do a bit of dirty work for me, I've got some promotes in there for you. I know it's not much, but I think it'd benefit the sift in the long run...

&hearts
Rotten Marshy

from time to time i notice that siftbot is censoring my comments.

<paranoia>
this seems to only happen when my queue is filled up with hair raising femme sifts.

im pretty sure thats a clear sign that my anarcho-feminist views are being stifled, suppressed by the male-centric robot regime.

my official protest begins now.
</paranoia>

This Dutchman hasn't exactly been flying through the ranks of the sift. Instead he has climbed the ladder slowly with an eclectic collection of obscure music videos, which just makes it even more impressive.

Paul is also a friendly and respectful guy who always seems to keep his cool. He's probably too busy going ice-skating and picking tulips anyway (that's all the dutch national stereotypes I know of ).

Good going, Paul, and congrats on getting to 100 stars! I'm sure we'll see plenty of weird shit promoted from this quality sifter. Be sure to check out his PQUEUE, it desperatly needs some attention.