Cash Pours in for Student with $1 Million Web Idea

Quantum Logic writes "Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, earned a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet. Selling porn? Dealing prescription drugs? Nope. All he sells are pixels. The idea: turn his home page into a billboard made up of a million dots, and sell them for a dollar a dot to anyone who wants to put up their logo. A 10 by 10 dot square, roughly the size of a letter of type, costs $100. He sold a few to his brothers and some friends, and when he had made $1,000, he issued a press release. That was picked up by the news media, spread around the Internet, and soon advertisers for everything from dating sites to casinos to real estate agents to The Times of London were putting up real cash for pixels, with links to their own sites."

Comments

Re:rest of the article

[kubis]

You are right, sir. I can't imagine to drive daily almost an hour there and back by car in rainy / stormy weather or sitting like a duck in a traffic jam. Daily commuting with train and bus takes the same time, is usually cheaper and besides that i can have a quite good breakfast with newspaper in the train. Or i can read some websites or e-mails on my ntbk before i get to work. So why should i buy a car...

Piixels, land, domain names, ip addrs, etc.

[Baldrson]

Renting pixels is a clear demonstration of land value taxation's basis in economic rent. The same principle should be applied to tax domain names and IP addresses to fund ICANN and the government(s) that enforce domain name property rights. It applies also to things like spectrum and orbital slots for communications satellites.

Ultimately this principle applies to taxing net assets in general.

Since the primary function of government is the protection of non-subsistence property rights, it is sensible to charge a use fee for those rights. Note, I said "non-subsistence" property rights. The point here is that house and tools of the trade are protected from confiscation under bankruptcy law precisely because they are subsistence assets. Where government does not exist, subsistence properties are typically defended by the occupant, whose life is sustained by those assets. Government brings precisely the property rights we associate with civilization -- assets beyond home and tools of the trade.

Given the relatively liquid nature of civilization, it makes sense to define "subsistence" in some dollar value of assets. Various ways of defining the dollar value are all approximately equal:

• The median price of housing a person plus the median price of capitalizing a job.
• The threshold used by the SEC for "qualified investor".
• The level of savings insured by the FDIC.
• Or, for the historically inclined: The market price of 20 arable acres in the Confederate south, a mule, a plow and a small house on such land.

Until a citizen accumulates the subsistence net asset level, they should pay no tax and then pay tax only on the net assets they own above subsistence.

Assessment should be by the owner, thereby establishing a "fair market value" for the exercise of eminent domain. Net assets only would be taxed and would be calculated by subtracting the fair market value of debts against the estate from the self-assessment of the occupant.

Other forms of taxation could be eliminated in a revenue neutral way if net assets, in excess of subsistence levels, were taxed at the risk free interest rate (approximately the interest rate on the national debt).

Indeed, given the centralization of asset ownership that has resulted from the subsidy of non-subsistence property, a subsidy inherent in civilization, it may be the failure to use this tax base is the ultimate cause of the repeated decay of civilizations from ancient times.

Re:Holy old news.

[peterpi]

I was going to put a comment up going 'hey, check out this funny page' with a link to hampsterdance.com.

But it has been mercilessly fucked up.

Do not click on http://www.hampsterdance.com/