I will just put this out there to the community to discuss - some people complain about ads.   Granted, the people who complain about ads are probably not working for free and the most vocal critics on other sites who write 'for free' are being paid by tax dollars and using free software that is owned by large corporations.   This is free in the same sense as Wordpress or Blogger.  No one has to buy anything to write here or read here.  

But Blogger and Wordpress can at least appear to be free so we can make it possible for you to go ad free as well.  If you want to have no ads on your articles, send me a mail.  Since everyone gets paid to write here I will disable payments for each interested columnist and remove ads from their columns.   It will look really barren in two spots so I will put a banner for us or the kids site or some clever insider joke on occasion but it won't be a paid ad.

Over time, we can also implement an automated system for readers so when people have been here a certain number of times, we give them the option to not see any ads.    People may think it's all evil corporations out there but if I tell advertisers the only people seeing their ads really want to see ads the value of them being here goes up.