$100 no problem, so long as I could still lurk… I don’t post too often any more anyway, and when I do I’m usually drunk and just get myself in trouble.
My thoughts exactly. My first response is “no fucking way.” But then I’d get into the moral dilemma. Could I accept the money, donate all of it toward furthering my side of the issue, and do more good than I would do harm by perjuring myself on the issue? Probably so, and if so, is it mere ego and pride that would stand in the way of my doing so?
Once I’m being asked to lie about something I believe to be important, THEN the hypothetical suddenly has an ethical edge to it. And I would not agree to do so for any sum of money for myself.
Daniel
I’d like for someone to give me some money. And if I had to leave these boards, I’m sure I’d mope for a while, then recover and find something new, BUT I can’t really connect these two things up in my conscience. I’m sure there would be a price that my troubled conscience would find sufficiently soothing, but I have no idea what that price is.
Ironically, one of the things that I could imagine acting as a serious disincentive to staying, would be if this turns into a place where the moderators/administrators tolerate the practice of members paying other members to go away. I think it’s a terrible idea.
He’s a prison doctor.
What he said.
I know my major difference with most other people is that I am simply not motivated by money. I know people who would slit your throad for $100, but I wouldn’t do something I didn’t want to do for a roomful of gold bricks (Erma Bombeck’s agent said that about her).
I don’t have a throad, but if I did, you could slit it when you pry the little critter out of my cold, dead hand. I assume we’re talking about some kind of small amphibian here.
I’d take $500 to stay away for two years. I can’t imagine that any of my opinion are so odious to anyone that I’d be offered money to shut up, but even if it happened, I don’t see that I’d be harming anyone by taking the money. I’m not the only fish in the sea, opinion-wise. And do the opinions expressed here even have any carryover in the real world? At best only a little, and the incremental weight of one poster’s opinions is vanishingly small.
But in a sense what I’d really like to know is the opposite of what the OP has proposed: what monetary value do *other *people place on my continuing to post here? In other words, if I threatened to stop posting unless people stumped up, how much could I collect?
Not much. I’d be theoretically sorry to see you gone(although if you actually tried threatening to quit posting unless we paid, my estimation of what your opinions are worth would diminish), but as an individual poster, your opinions aren’t worth a whole lot. Even posters like Qadgop the Mercotan who are filled with knowledge, wisdom, wit, etc. aren’t worth as much to me as an individual as the aggregate of many different people are.
Well, I’m already a whoring sell-out, since I work for a commercial radio station, so I don’t have any scruples standing in the way. I would need at least $70,000, and I’d forget SDMB ever existed. That’d pay off my education loans, pay for the rest of grad school and let me quit work to devote myself to my master’s thesis.
Of course, I wouldn’t really be the one missing out. I already stalked out one day when i got pissed at a moderator, stayed away two months and didn’t miss it one bit. But then I realized that I was denying the rest of you the benefit of my insight and wisdom, so I reluctantly returned. I promise, I’ll never leave you guys again. Unless someone comes up with $70,000, that is.
$29,000 up-front (that’s my share, not agent’s commissions), $300 per week drawing fund from a $7500 per quarter non-posting bonus, $32,000 for overseas non-posting rights, $43,000 to guarantee non-trolling, $308,240 at the end of two consecutive years, 100% matching contribution to be paid to an annuity to be mature in five years, 40% of monies generated from related merchandising, action figures, image or post replication, or cookbook tie-ins, and 100% of all revenues from personal non-appearances. All to be paid in hard currency delivered by Nigerian or Libyan eunuchs driving yellow vans, no less than 30% to be in form of Canadian $2 coins and the residue Turkish lira, Sacagawea dollars, and those Wisconsin quarters with the double-stamped corn cob. I will supply the Diet Coke and jerked goat.
If someone offered me $500 not to post, I’d definitely take it — unless I believed that I was saving the world from irrational fools. Then I wouldn’t take any amount of money.
Guess you’re here to stay then.
I’d leave for $500, but it has to be cash in hand. None of that after-quibbling, “I will gladly pay you some Tuesday in 2009” act, no dice.
You know, money holding power in DC has always bothered me. It bothered me that politicians could never self-govern themselves out of / away from monetary influence and that money and the people who have it could buy and sell votes & opinions in government on almost anything. I could never see selling myself out that way, and it bothered me that they could with such ease.
In a small sense, I always thought of this Board as a type of Representative Democracy. There are posters here from almost every end of the political spectrum, over a vast geography and from almost every walk of life. We trade opinions, ideas & barbs on a daily basis and no matter how different a POV a poster has, I’ve always welcomed reading their post in the hopes of learning (or remembering) something.
Maybe I’m the odd duck here or maybe these responses are all just whooshes.
I’m not rich and I do have debts. I work on holidays and I don’t have a very important sounding title above my desk. Still, if you had all the time in the world and unrestricted access to the Franklin Mint, you couldn’t print enough money to buy me or buy my opinion or bribe me into silence. What’s more, I’m positive that I’m not alone on the Board in this.
So was Samuel Mudd.
I found out a declawed cat could still hunt and mouse. Where else would I get that kind of info. We have had computer questions and problems dealt with by professionals and intelligent hobbyists. We have argued and discussed sports with people who didn’t realize Detroit is the best sports town in the World. But all believe now.
Where else can you find a board where the atheists have managed to convince the Godists that they were wrong and now they have have found the way.?
On this board the conservatives have confessed the error of their selfish little ways too. Where else can you have such fun.?
I’d leave for $500, sure. I like reading better than posting, and I don’t think any of my posts are so original that they aren’t similarly expressed by someone else here. I like the boards a lot, hence I pay up my subscription each year, but I see it kind of like subscribing to a good magazine. I would give up any of my favorite magazines for $500 too even though I like some of them a lot.
There aren’t that many things that I just have to get my say in about. I’m more of a “gather information” person than a “spread it” type. I’d probably just find myself talking at the computer screen at all of you instead of typing it out.
It’s not that $500 would make a big difference in my life, just that it would be an easy payoff. It’s not often I get paid not to do something.
Two years for $500? Make it £500 and I’d do it. To never post again I would take a few thousand.
Not so much whooshes as a certain amount of modesty about the value of our contributions – not to mention the realization that no one is actually going to pay us small fry to stop posting, any more than they’re going to pay us to keep posting.
$1200 (two months worth of rent).
$1000 in cash. Up front. Unmarked bills. Out of sequence.
I will entertain all reasonable offers.
Hmm. I get more of a kick out of reading others’ posts than posting myself, and I don’t think I post enough to have developed a persona on here (my name is not one of the recognizable ones). If I could lurk. Sure. Maybe I’m a bit of a voyeur.