My not posting forecasts directly to this bulletin board has nothing to do with not being paid to do that. It has everything to do with the politics of forecasting earthquakes.

If you wish to get people out of the way of an earthquake and save some lives then you have to have the cooperation of government officials in that country. And those people do not like to be forced to do anything. If you circulate a forecast in public, news service coverage in that country may force government officials to act on it. But then those people may come to regard you as something of a threat. And they will probably not want to talk with you in the future.

If you instead send them your forecast data without any publicity and tell them that it is not being circulated in public then they might not take any action on it. But they at least do not decide that you represent some type of threat. And if the earthquake does occur as you predicted or even if it does not, then the next time you contact them they will be more inclined to listen to what you have to say.

The problem here is that there are no national or international organizations which I know about which are collecting earthquake precursor data, evaluating it, and distributing it to governments around the world. And so, if you want to accomplish anything with your earthquake forecasts then you yourself have to learn what the rules are for doing that. I have repeatedly advised different governments and groups to visit each of the earthquake forecasting Web sites listed on my Earthquake Forecasting Resources Web page and determine if forecasts being generated at those sites might be helpful to them. And to the best of my knowledge, not one of them has ever done that. Without being advised to do so at specific points in time they will not even visit this EarthWaves bulletin board to check the forecasts which are posted here.

As I have proposed before, with earthquake forecasting, to a large extent you are on your own.

These are my personal opinions.