O.k. read this message below first. FYI, friendster is a relatively new internet site where you can post your picture and other info about yourself and have all your friends join you and meet new people through all your friends. Its very cool and very popular right now in America. The creators started it as a free service just to test the market and work out all the kinks. Now they are saying they are about to start charging a fee for the service (duh) and a lot of the people who use the service are freaking out and trying to stop them. Read below for an example of what people post:

friendster fee update:  Its Working. Friendster owner held back the  paying shyt fee another month. Hopefully if you  all jus keep on copying this to your bulletin  boards. The friendster staff will not go through  with the paying plan on friendster. I know I  don’t want to have to pay for friendster and so  do you to get full privileges right? Come on and  and repost this bulletin on your friendster  account to get this world wide. PLEASE DONT REPLY TO THIS. JUST  SIMPLY COPY  AND  PASTE IT ON YOUR BULLETIN BOARD.  Here's the address to the corporate HQ for  Friendster.com: Friendster, Inc.  415 N. Mary Ave., Suite 112-280  Sunnyvale, CA 94085  Phone: (650) 618-2638  Fax: (650) 618-2527  Check-it: You know about the whole paying  thing fuck-it. This 6 degrees of separation  thing is super powerful. That's why network  marketing exists today. My personal network  says  something like 800,000  people or some shit.  If  we post this bulletin all over friendster we  could possibly pressure Friendster to not  charge.  Forget the email thing cuz anyone at the corp.  HQ can just delete like 1000  emails, but if we  all bring it back to the old school and snail  mail their asses to NOT start charging, we  could flood them. yay!!!!!!!!!!! Everyone should repost this message on the  bulletin board!!!

I find this hysterical. Lets be real for a second. The people who post messages like this and who don't want to pay for things are usually young people, college or just out, and usually poor. Not in a derogatory sense at all. Just you know, people who don't have any money. They don't have any money so they can’t pay for a lot of stuff. So they download (shoplift) tons of music and movies and whatever else they can get their hands on and they don't pay for it. That’s what your supposed to do when you’re a kid. But I think what happens when you get older, and I don't mean chronologically, but when you cross that line, from being broke and wanting everything for nothing, to having some money of your own and knowing what its like to work hard for that money, is that you develop a real respect for the value of things, and the value of people. When you’re poor you hate everyone who’s rich. You think everything should be free and you’re mad at the world that everything isn't free. And then all of a sudden after a rather rough and tumble decade in your twenties you wake up one day and you have stuff. You have money. You realize that you just worked your ass off for the last few years and you value that. You value yourself. And you value others around you who also have stuff. Who have money. And who have goods and services that you want. Because all of a sudden you have found your niche. You know your own value and you don't mind profiting from it. In fact you welcome it. You realize that this fair exchange of my goods and services for your money or goods or services is a wonderful thing, and vice versa. And life goes on in a very prosperous free enterprise system for all of us. 

If you're smart and work hard and God knows its not easy---its not supposed to be---you will start to develop a real sense of value, not just of yourself, but of others too. And pretty soon, you’re making money, and you got some money in the bank too. And man that's cool. And when people talk about how everything should be free just so they don't have to pay for it, you start looking at them kind of funny, like there’s just things that they don't get yet. Like maybe they just don't know their own value yet, so they don't know the value of other people yet. They don't mind someone else working their ass off and not getting paid for it, because they just haven't spent enough time working their own ass off yet. you start looking at them as a kind of a problem in society because they go around spreading this lack mentality, as if we are all supposed to be broke and not want to pay for things that we want, rather than just respecting where they are in their life, and finding a way to up their level somehow. Hey we all had to do it. Anyone can. And one of the first steps is just realizing your own value and the value of other people. And how do you do it? start paying for stuff and stop asking for handouts, stop complaining about how broke you are, and stop complaining about other people who have money, and stop pretending to yourself that rich people are somehow bad or evil in some way, and stop justifying stealing and ripping other people off because you want more than you are able to pay for.

Hey if you want to stay broke all your life, keep it up. Keep asking Friendster to be for free for you because you are a poor loser who can’t afford to pay for it. But anyone will be surprised at how well this works, at how it starts to change things for them. Like all these people who spend hours a day on the Friendster website and then don't want the owner of friendster to charge them for it. uhhhh could that be because they never spent 24 hours a day for 12 months straight locked in a huge warehouse or office somewhere with a bunch of other guys designing some amazing new business/website that everyone wants to use. So they just have no clue what it took to put it together, cause they haven't done it themselves yet. This is just a hunch I have but I think this is one of the problems with giving anything away for free if you want to maintain a top notch capitalist civilization: you attract the wrong kind of people to your business. And also, you minimize the value perception of what you’re selling. I've written about this before. I've thought about it a lot. Made a lot of observations, studied the phenomenon of it a lot. Some people are the types that when they hear or see free, they just want it. They come running. Even if they don't want it, they want it. They don't even value it. They just kind of mumble to you “what the hell? It was free.” Their houses are filled with stuff that was “for free.” The Ferret is like this. he has all this worthless stuff lying around his house because it was “for free...”

Myself, if I see free I don't even look at it. I'm not totally sure why that is, but I think its just because I figure what kind of value is it really going to have if its just sitting there free? In college we used to talk about it non stop. We were in college. We were broke. We wanted everything free. We would get stoned and talk for hours about how why can’t everything be free. And why can’t we all just trade stuff with each other. We’d go all the way back to the beginning of civilization and just start with like a little tribe of people trading stuff, and within an hour we would be back at having money and charging each other for stuff. Everytime. It was uncanny. No matter how you do it, it always comes back to creating money as a way to buy and sell stuff to each other. 

Its just the way it is. Unless you want to live in a communist civilization which isn't much of a civilization at all because it is system that promises equality but inherently makes it impossible for anything to be equal among its people. Pretty soon the value of everything is just totally screwed. Really stupid people are making not much less than geniuses. Innovative hardworking entrepreneurial types are earning not much more than lazy TV watching lets go to the bar types. And before you know it, the smart ones are all defecting, or they just lose their will to be hardworking innovative entrepreneurial types. I remember my friend Stephano in Germany always telling me about how their system sucks there because the government gives them so much money if they are unemployed or homeless, that many people find it easier to just sit at home and collect money from the government than to go to work. So you have this whole sector of your society who probably could do something and make a valuable contribution to society but they just don't because they are not forced to. Too bad. I hope this doesn’t happen in America. There's this whole generation cropping up that just don't want to pay for anything. They really seem to hate the capitalist system. They resent people with money for some reason. They just want everything to be free. Its like they are trapped in a box and they don't realize that they can get themselves out on their own. They think its someone else's fault that they are trapped (people with money who want to charge them for stuff) and so they blame these people for all the wickedness of the world and think its fun to steal from them etc.... they think the only way out of the box is through other people. They don't realize that they can get out on their own. Just by working smart. We are so lucky here. Truly the most prosperous time and place in the history of the human species. America. Anyone can make a fucking fortune here if they wanted to. I wish more people realized this.