Monthly Archives: July 2011

Technology Companies Still Don’t Understand Their Business IS Customers

Business, Technology, , , , , , ,

Sprint PCS is ramping up its engines to try to gain new customers because their managers realize they’re just not cutting it as the third biggest cell phone company. If you looked at them on paper, they’d have everything to sell, such as the only big cell phone service that still offers an unlimited data plan (unless grandfathered in), a great all in one wireless satellite service (Clear Wire), and they’re generally cheaper. So why aren’t they defeating everyone else?

Well, let’s look at that for a moment. I had Sprint, and I currently still have Clear as my additional service. When I had Sprint as a cell phone, the first thing I noticed is that I rarely could get a solid signal. And if I did, I’d lose it. When I went in to complain, the response wasn’t “Oh, we’ll look into that” but “They’re aware of it, and we’re waiting to hear something new”. In other words, they knew they had problems and they did absolutely nothing to fix it. I had Sprint for six months before I gave up on it. When I gave up on it, of course they wanted to charge me they’re punishment fee, even though I was dropping the service because it never worked. A smart company would have said: “You’re right. It’s our fault, so we’ll pick up the charge.” That way, I might look back at Sprint with a sense of “Hey, they at least treated me with respect.” But that’s not how I left.

As for Clear, I like it, but it’s a generally shitty service for the price that I pay. I was using it at home and at work. At work, I would sometimes lose signal for a week (and no tech person on their end could fix it, other than the classic: “Have you tried restarting your computer?”). I still have it, and I paid for the modem straight out (which means there should be no fee whenever I do disconnect), but I’ll bet you every dollar the United States doesn’t have to pay its bills that they’ll try to tack on a disconnect fee, even though the disconnect fee is supposed to pay for the “great discount” I would have gotten on the equipment, which I paid full price for because they didn’t have a deal, and I really didn’t feel like renting their shit.

So, Sprint is now having trouble gaining new customers. You might think word of mouth might be their biggest problem. The woman who works in the next cubicle over from me has had nothing but nightmares with Sprint phones and service. I was on the shuttle bus going home from work last night, and two women started a chorus of how much Sprint sucks as they discussed their lousy phone service.

Now, this could be just in Grand Rapids, but I’m suspecting that if they’re screwing it up here, they’re probably screwing it up in a lot more places. Big companies are a lot like that. I’ve hated Comcast practically every city where I’ve had them, and I’ve had them in Grand Rapids, Stockton and a few other places that aren’t coming to my Alzheimerish mind right now.

Netflix is another one of those companies that doesn’t seem to get it. Oh, they think they do, and they’re all meta-like, acting like they’re on top of things with their knowledge of psychology and how people will eventually get over their price hikes, but rather than first telling their customers that the price of new content requires more money to pay for it, they just upped the price and pretty much told everyone to either live with it or leave, and then did this sanctimonious crap about how they’re the best deal in town so either live with it or stare at the walls in silence because they won’t have Netflix to watch instead.

This is NOT the way to treat your customers, especially the ones who stuck by you all of these years when you were growing and struggling to grow. Right now, I’m royally pissed at Netflix, and when September comes around I will cancel their services completely. Not drop down to the streaming only, or the disks only, but dump them completely like a cheating girlfriend who was never really good in bed in the first place. Okay, that’s a bit vulgar. How about: Like an ice cream flavor that doesn’t taste as good as…ah, never mind. Go with the first, vulgar one. It works well enough.

It’s almost as if major companies are less concerned about public relations and more concerned with handling damage control. And if your company’s focus is always how to minimize your negativity from customers, then something’s seriously wrong with your business model. My advice there is fire all of your executives, hire a bunch of kids who have watched a lot of Elmo on Sesame Street, and start over.

Too Much Information About the Sex Lives of Creepy People

News, Relationships, Religion, Television, , , , ,

Today, on the front page of CNN.com, I saw stories that wanted to tell me that Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriend reveals that Hugh could only last two seconds, and then a follow-up story where Hugh says women think he’s a great performer in bed. Uh huh. Right under that, there’s an in depth interview with a young 16 year old girl who talks sex with her 51 year old, creepy husband actor who dated her when she was way too young to even know how to spell the word “consent”. Personally, I think she probably still can’t but that’s another story completely.

Why is the news constantly trying to push stories on me that are designed to creep me out? Yeah, I can ignore these things, but I can’t seem to escape them because they come on the news constantly, and they show up everywhere else I look. And then people want to talk about them. At what point do people start to realize that an aging, oversexed man whose claim to fame is smut magazines isn’t a story because he somehow bamboozled yet another 21 year old blond bimbo into thinking he’s the cat’s pajamas, or that he wears cat’s pajamas, or she wears cat-like pajamas because they turn him on, or whatever.

Look, I understand the media in the United States is overly consumed with sex information and somehow thinks that the fact that they don’t have any relevant news to report means that somehow they’re going to have to run with the “sex sells” as a substitute. But some of this stuff is really inappropriate, and I don’t even mean on a prurient level. I just mean that some stuff really should be private and left in that area. When I first discovered that some aging actor married a 16 year old girl, I was somewhat disgusted, but I pushed the story aside, thinking, “well, it really doesn’t have anything to do with me, and people do what people do.” But then the media keeps throwing it back at me, as if I’m supposed to care, or that somehow because I’m human I’m supposed to be involved, or get involved.

Please stop. I don’t care. I don’t want to be an accomplice to this story. I understand that sex sells, but at some point somebody in the media has to be able to tell a colleague, you know maybe we shouldn’t be running this trash as news. If it’s news, great. But if the purpose is to try to shock people who were minding their own business, it’s the news equivalent of terrorism. It’s done to disrupt, shock and cause people to change their normal routines for the sake of some hidden profit. If I was interested in stories about older men with children, I’d seek it out on the Internet like everyone else, at least until Chris Hanson caught me and embarrassed me on national television. If I seek it out, let me be ashamed. If you throw it in my face, don’t be surprised if more and more people who were oblivious don’t start seeking it out themselves because you helped them get used to it.

The Death of Amy Winehouse & the Problem with Santimonious People

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The singer Amy Winehouse died a few days ago in London. From my understanding, she suffered from alcohol abuse and had a difficult time breaking away from the addiction. In the end, she lost her battle, and the world lost a talented young musician. She, like a number of others before her, died at the early age of 27.

I’ll go out on a limb here. I’ve never heard any of her music before. I was not a fan. To be honest, I rarely even followed her antics, other than peripherally hearing about them much like I heard about Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and various other celebrity names that had very little relevance on my normal, daily life. But I did hear about her, and secretly, it always bothered me that everything I heard about her indicated that this was a young woman constantly on a projectory towards where it eventually led her. Many others would point out that they saw it coming, but no one ever really “sees” it coming, and unfortunately, she’s lost, and her talent will never have a chance to create again.

So why am I writing about this? Well, the amount of chatter about her death has started to really bother me. The blogosphere, and the conversations that come from the usual suspects has really gotten on my nerves. People can’t be satisfied with pointing out that her life developed towards a tragic end and then move on from there. Instead, whenever I read about her and saw “common people” comment, I couldn’t help but read how some people can be so really mean towards another human being, even if they may have disapproved of her antics, her lifestyle and/or her way of handling her demons.

Part of the fame of Amy Winehouse involves a direct tie to her battle with alcoholism. There really can’t be any disputing that. She’s one of those artists who created while suffering, and I would argue that a lot of her creativity probably needed a touch of her suffering to make it work. It’s sad, but there have been great artists who needed that sort of connection to develop the work they did. Van Gogh was that type. I suspect so was Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain, and Ernest Hemingway. She may or may not have her own place in artistic history, or she might not, but at the same time there are a lot of people who were touched by her music, and I think it does a horrible disservice to their memories for people to go on message boards ridiculing them, her and the music she created. There’s a lot of hatred in this world, and it really makes itself seen whenever an event like this takes place.

Part of the tragedy of Winehouse’s death is that it came at time where it cannot be examined without someone else believing it has to be compared to something else. Salon has a great article on this, where the author Mary Williams talks about how people have ridiculed her death by comparing the tragedy to horrific events in Somalia and even the recent horrible actions of some crazy right-winger in Norway. At what point did we make it so that people cannot mourn the losses they feel without having to be felt that their tragedy is not worthy?

One of the things that started bothering me about this incident was on the weekend when I heard about her death. I was on itunes, and I noticed that the service was trying to milk its customers by selling her most popular work, as if paying Apple money would be “honoring” the artist rather than helping executives at Apple profit from her demise. Then I found out that Amazon was doing something similar, and after awhile you just start to shake your head and realize that we live in a very greedy society that will do anything to make a buck. At some point I really should stop being surprised.

The biggest tragedy to me is that her music might have been great, and I never bothered to pay attention when she was still around. I kind of had that same feeling with Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. I never got to know the music until after he died. Others, however, were big fans long before that happened.

For me, I’ll probably start listening to her work to see if I can ascertain the message she was trying to deliver. She was an artist, and for me it’s important to try to find out what the artist was trying to share. Sometimes, the message is brilliant, and trascends time and space. Other times, the artist just wanted to make you snap your fingers and maybe tap your foot to the beat. And sometimes, we forget that that is important, too. I’ll listen and try to figure it out. If her message is knowledge, I’ll try to discover it. If it was just to make me sway with the rhythmn, that’s okay, too. The tragedy is in never bothering to listen in the first place.

Patent Trolls Not Content Hiding Under Bridges

Business, Economics, News, Politics, Technology, , , , , , ,

One of the things that constantly hinders creativity is the ability of lazy people to jump on an idea and try to leech off its creators until there’s nothing left of the innovation but a bunch of pissed off designers who figure it’s probably not worth it to continue. That’s going on right now in technology. A long time ago, US companies were innovative with some great ideas that pushed ideas into manufacturing. For years, the USA was known for quality products that you really couldn’t find anywhere else. And then a bunch of leeches started copying everything these companies were doing and distributing almost the same product but cheaper (and not as well made). This caused US companies to have to compromise on standards, and then the race downhill began. Now, if you go to buy some product in the US, it’s almost guaranteed to be somewhat crappy made, and the company that sells it to you will try to get you to pay for an extended warranty because they know you know that your product isn’t going to last long without it. Quality got traded for cheap and quick. We’ve never really recovered.

Well, now we have a new problem. And that’s the problem of patent trolls. Someone comes up with an idea, patents it, and then all innovation in that direction is forever hindered by some bottom-feeding company that doesn’t manufacture anything itself but sues companies for making products. A company named Lodsys is suing a whole bunch of companies that have done nothing other than make apps for smartphones. Claiming that they invented some obscure technology that they never produced, Lodsys has now gone out of its way to sue pretty much any company that dares to make an app for the Android and Apple app markets. Apple jumped in and decided to respond as a plaintiff on the side of the people being sued, but it hasn’t stopped this company from continuing to go after any company it thinks it can get to settle for some cash. As it doesn’t produce any products other than lawsuits (to anyone’s knowledge), they really don’t have anything to lose. Recently, they decided to sue the makers of Angry Birds, which means they see big dollar signs, and they’re not afraid to go after it.

The problem with this is that it sets up a chilling effect in the design marketplace. As someone who will be making Apple apps myself, I see this as a real problem because who in his right mind would want to create anything for a platform that is guaranteeing a lawsuit the second you actually start to make any money? If Apple and Android don’t get Lodsys to cease and desist, it’s going to seriously hinder the marketplace.

That’s what patent trolls do. They make it so that people don’t want to develop anything because what’s the purpose when some bottom-feeder is going to try to steal your money anyway? It’s a lot like the movie industry today. I have a friend of mine who makes independent films. He doesn’t make a lot of money from it because everyone in this industry is practically a bottom-feeder, from the people who do the color correction, the people who adjust the sound, the people who manufacture the commercial dvds, the agents who promise great things but really don’t do anything other than promise great things and the many “producers” who take money but don’t do anything other than promise great results before stating “Man, it’s a tough market. Perhaps if you ponied up another $16,000, I might be able to do something”, the people actually making products have less and less incentive to do so when all of the money happens to be in the peripheral service industry that doesn’t actually create anything.

Unfortunately, the solution to this situation isn’t ever going to happen because the ones who benefit from the problem is a band of lawyers who speak the same language as the people who need to be fixing this situation. Politicians and lawyers work hand in hand so that the people who create things, the designers, the movie-makers, the writers and the manufacturers, have no say so in the outcome but remain at the mercy of people who historically don’t understand the very nature of the word.

A Creature of Habit

Memoirs, Relationships, Uncategorized, Writing

I’m what you would call a creature of habit. Well, other people have lots of other names for me, but I’m going to go with that one for now.

You see, I kind of like things stabilized and normal. Yet, at the same time I tend to have a habit of picking up and starting over from scratch because I get tired of the same kind of life after awhile. No, it doesn’t make sense to me either.

However, I was getting lunch today, when it dawned on me that I get the same thing for lunch every day. And it didn’t dawn on me because I’m really cognizant over those kinds of things. It dawned on me because the cashier remarked “I’ve noticed you get the same thing every day, except for Fridays. That’s when you switch chicken strips for wings.” And she was right. Come Friday, I will get the exact same lunch at work I get every Friday because I’m what I’ve already called a creature of habit.

On the weekend, I will eat breakfast at Burger King. I don’t even order my meal any more. I walk up to the counter and whoever is working there will charge me $6.87 and eventually someone will bring me EXACTLY the same breakfast I get on Saturday and Sunday. It doesn’t change.

I don’t date, which is why I don’t really have to worry about someone else deciding, “You know, I’d like to eat at some strange restaurant we’ve never tried before.” I’d like to date, but I can’t find anyone interesting in my neck of the woods. And I gave up looking. Besides, someone new might want to eat somewhere other than where I normally eat.

The problem is I’m not sure if it’s a problem or not. I guess it could be, especially because I’m a big fan of making abrupt, huge life-changing changes. But I haven’t changed anything in a long time. Aside from socks and underwear. And a couple of months ago, I changed the oil in my car. But right after I did so, I drove to Burger King and had breakfast.

Something don’t ever change.

Some Thoughts on Current Events

Business, Economics, Education, Memoirs, News, Politics, Relationships, Social Networking, Technology, Television

Okay, haven’t done a recap in a bit. And I’ve been kind of busy, so here goes:

1. News of the World. Okay, I don’t know an easier way to say this, but I’m finding the whole situation with Robert Murdoch and his evil empire to be somewhat hilarious. Yes, he’s evil, and his empire is evil. And they’ve been discovered to be doing evil things. Not really all that surprised. He wants to own the world, and when you want to own the world, chances are pretty good that you don’t care who you destroy on the way to doing it. Some people are glad this has happened because they are liberals and hate Murdoch because he’s anti-liberal. I’m not like that. I just find it hilarious. I do want to add, however, that I think Rebecca Brooks, the one who lost her job because of being Darth Vader to Murdoch’s Dark Emperor, is kind of hot. I’m just saying….

2. Charlie Sheen is going to have a new TV show. I don’t care. Didn’t watch his old show. Won’t watch his new one. Next story.

3. Rebecca Black Has a Follow-up Song to “Friday”. Never heard “Friday”. Don’t care that she has a new one. Basically, someone who was ridiculed for a really bad song has managed to create a music career out of the ridiculousness and now wants to be taken seriously. But she wasn’t taken seriously before. Next story.

4. Universal pulled the plug on Dark Tower movies. Ron Howard was going to direct Stephen King’s epic series about Roland the Gunslinger. Was looking forward to it. Now, I’m disappointed. I’ll move on now….

5. Reporters Are Trying to Find out Where Casey Alexander is Hiding Out. Really? Get over it. The story of the century (or the last few months) is over. Move onto something else. Isn’t there an ambulance somewhere that can be chased?

6. Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez crashed some wedding. Supposedly, Bieber’s song was playing so loud while they were driving by that he went in and became a part of the wedding party celebration. First, I was thinking my first act as the groom would have been to deck the guy for showing up at my wedding. The second thought was to immediately not get married because my future wife decided to play Justin Bieber music at my wedding reception. And then I realized that if they were listening to the twirp, who cares? They were probably overjoyed to see him, much as I would be if Shania Twain showed up to my wedding (assuming she didn’t show up to be IN my wedding as the bride). So I really shouldn’t be commenting here.

7. The Debt Ceiling. They’ll either come to an agreement. Or they won’t. I’m going to assume that they’re still going to collect my taxes and that we’ll still be at war with countries I don’t want to be at war with. So I really don’t care. I’m not important enough so that anything I do is of any concern to them, so I”m not really concerned at anything they do either. For them, it’s a tragedy because they’re the ones with the money, and they’re the ones who stand to lose a lot. For me, I stand to go from being kind of poor to being really poor. Not going to make much of a relevant difference. I’ve stopped being significant a long time ago. Come to think of it, I never really was.

8. Apparently US students still suck at geography. This caused me to pull out a map to see if I could figure out where the US was to see how close it was to Michigan, just so I could get an idea of where this place might be. Couldn’t find it, so I assume it was probably some small country somewhere unimportant.

9. Google and Facebook appear to have changed their relationship status to “It’s Complicated”. Ironically, that’s my life status as well.

10. Number 9 was really my last item. I just like having 10 items whenever I can.

For Whom Would a Default Really Be a Problem?

Business, Economics, News, Politics, , , , , , ,

There’s something people haven’t been discussing about the whole potential default of the United States. We hear lots of economists, bankers, businessmen and politicians talk about how horrific a default might be if our country defaults in the beginning of August. But not once have I ever heard a construction worker, an administrative assistant or the guy who empties the trash from the office ever discuss the default, other than “I heard about it on the news” and even then, they don’t really have an opinion. You might suspect the reason why they don’t comment on it or have an opinion is because they don’t know enough about it, like the really smart economists, bankers, businessmen and politicians. But I’m beginning to suspect that even if the construction workers, administrative assistants or the guy who empties the trash from the office might just not care, even if they knew and understood all of the details.

You see, the people who are shouting all doom and gloom are generally the people who are most affected by the potential doom and gloom. That would be economists, bankers, businessmen and politicians. In case you haven’t really thought about it, those positions I just mentioned don’t actually do anything to contribute anything to society. They handle money, or they handle the policies that deal with money. Physically, they don’t do anything other than figure out how to move money around. In the olden days, they were called the “money changers” and you might remember a story where some guy named Jesus threw them out of a temple, or something like that. Or maybe it was Noah. Or Moses. There might have been an ark. Or was that what Indiana Jones was looking for. Either way, the point is that a bunch of people who deal with money all day are acting like it’s some kind of tragedy that government is about to default on a subject of, yes, money, and it’s important to them because in the end, they’re not getting what they want, which is money.

To the non-banker, or person without major wads of cash, an issue of  money is unimportant, so they’re not really going to care. Sure, you can argue that it will affect them in the long run, as the money markets to eventually affect everyone, but I’m sometimes wondering about that as well, because I have this sneaking suspicion that even if everything that had to do with profit was destroyed, people would still be doing what they normally do, and people would still be out there working, making things and getting things done.

Strangely enough, if you think about it, if our government collapsed financially, the chances of it collapsing politically are not guaranteed. Sure, money wouldn’t be the foundation of the every day decisions, but politics would, and unfortunately we’ve become a finance driven system, to where our very foundation appears to be about money. Not every government is really like that, and in the end, if the strings that tie government and money together were to collapse, I’m not sure it would really be all that bad. Granted, a lot of people right now would probably suffer, and we’d hear all sorts of doom and gloom until people woke up and realized that money really doesn’t make the world go around. People, cooperation and food does. Money just makes it easy to forget that.

But we will never get back to that foundation because someone will panic enough to cause some kind of last minute compromise and the “crisis” will be averted. At least until the next one. And we’ll kick a few more cans down the road.

Is anyone else getting a little tired of the kicking the can down the road analogy? Yeah, it’s getting kind of old.

Saving Private Netflix…and dealing with cheating whores

Business, Economics, Movies, News, Technology, Television, , , , , , , ,

In the movie Saving Private Ryan, there’s a scene where Tom Hanks, playing the special ops captain who has just risked life and lost really good men, tells a young Private Ryan that he’d better do something great with his life, like invent a new brand of toothpaste or something, something to have made the sacrifices of his men worthwhile. And the young private, now grown up, asks his wife if she felt he contributed something important to the world, and she tells him he has. And all I was left thinking was, that captain played by Tom Hanks wanted something a bit more, not just that Private Ryan would make some family happy, and to be honest, I never really felt that Private Ryan lived up to the expectations that Tom Hanks’s dying character really demanded.

I’m kind of left with that same feeling when I received an email from Netflix yesterday informing me that it was going to be raising my rates 60 percent to give me exactly what I have always been receiving. In other words, rather than raise my rates AND give me a little more value, they’re giving me exactly what they always give me, and charging me more for it. Not very impressive.

And that action has caused all sorts of backlash from the community that makes up the customer base of Netflix. You see, they tried to do this a long time ago, and it failed miserably. Some years ago, they tried to raise rates BIG TIME, and most of their customers revolted. I did, too. Instead of quitting Netflix, I decided to switch from three DVDs at a time to 1 DVD at a time. The result was that I ended up paying less than what they were receiving from me before the change. A month or so later, Netflix completely reversed course, lowered their rates back to the original amount, and then people started to come back; I personally went back to my 3 DVDs a month.

Recently, they quietly raised prices on us. Not a huge amount, but enough to be noticeable. I thought about leaving but then just decided it wasn’t a big enough increase to cause me to leave. Kind of like the frog in a warm pot who doesn’t jump out even as the water slowly begins to boil. The slow burn and the slow increase of heat remains comfortable until you cook to death and die.

Well, this change is much different. They’ve decided that they want to be a mainly streaming company now, which is not what they were designed to be in the first place. There’s a whole lot of literature in Economics 101 about how a company shouldn’t change what it does best or to try to do more products than it is known for, but Netflix has always felt that it could buck the trend and win the brass ring no matter what it did. Rather than just increase rates, they’ve decided to charge people for both streaming AND DVDs, where they used to be lumped together in the past. I think they believe that people will respond by dropping one or the other, but I don’t think they realize the real implication, and that’s that they’re about to lose customers forever. I’m not talking about people getting pissed and changing their options until Netflix backs down. I mean people leaving in droves and being so pissed at Netflix that no turnaround will cause them to come back.

That’s where I am right now. I’m in the middle of watching Rescue Me through streaming, and when that show finishes its run (in other words, I get through the last season), I’m ending my Netflix subscription forever. I haven’t really watched any DVDs in a long time, having held onto the same ones for a long time, so that’s not a big deal. And I’ve never been all that much of a fan of their streaming service as most of the choices have been crap, and when I have watched something, half of the time the connection is not good enough to where I’m constantly watching a smooth experience. The continuous buffering thing gets old, and I won’t miss that.

What Netflix doesn’t seem to get is that they are not part of a necessity for most people. Television and movies is a luxury, and to be honest, I really won’t miss it all that much. Yeah, I could go find alternatives to seeing the same programming, but most of it has generally been crap. Every now and then a good show comes on that I’ll watch through its run, but quite often almost everything I watch has been a waste of time. Movies are almost always a waste of time because Hollywood has been making nothing but crap for years now, and for the five movies I’ve enjoyed, I’ve probably watched a hundred I didn’t. The odds just don’t make it worth it.

For the longest time, I’ve stayed with Netflix more out of nostalgia than anything else. It was convenient and comfortable. That’s it. It hasn’t been that useful. Years ago, when there were lots of things in my queue, it was wonderful. But years later, I’ve gone through my queue, and where I used to have blockbusters in it before, I have mostly second rate choices that were put in there and constantly pushed to the bottom of my queue so I could watch stuff that seemed more interesting. With that to look forward to, Netflix doesn’t offer a whole lot of wonderful things for the future.

So I’ll be dumping them like a girlfriend who has been cheating on me for years, and I’ve just been too busy at work to sit down and explain to her that we need to see other people. Well, the rhetorical job just told me to take my vacation, and I’m realizing I now have to spend a week with the cheating girlfriend, and the girl next door has been giving me the eye. Okay, it’s a bad analogy, and unfortunately all it does is remind me that I don’t actually have a girlfriend, and even worse, a social life. But at least I won’t have Netflix either. I’m dumping that cheating whore.

Why the Class War Has Not Yet Begun

News, Politics, , , , , , ,

I keep hearing a lot of talk about class warfare these days, but as of this day, I have yet to see an actual class battle take place. But the signs of impending doom seem to be all around, and yet it’s almost as if no one seems to believe such a thing is possible, so they don’t prepare for any such thing. Yet, it’s so hard not to see all of the signs of problems all around us, and then wonder if people are just jumping over backwards to do everything to avoid the inevitability of calamity. I don’t know. It just seems like it should be so obvious, but people are so not interested in changing their status quo, that they’ll do anything to avoid thinking about it.

But things are bad all over. We know that the power and all of the goods are quickly being hoarded by very few who pretend that it’s the “natural order of things”. And whenever people point it out, they’re accused of being socialists, communists or what ever “ist” can be thought of at the time.

But things are really bad. I don’t just mean the economy. I mean the economy ebbs and flows. That’s what economies do. But there are so many people who are falling to a hopeless despair and giving up. At least during the Great Depression, there was a sense that after people hunker through the hard times, at least there will be a sense of good times to come. Now, you don’t feel that. You get a sense that a few very rich people want all of the resources, and if they don’t get it, then they’ll do whatever necessary to put down anyone who gets in their way. The ones who are suffering don’t see a future sense of prosperity. They see either eventual death, a moment of respite that might last until they die, or despair. You don’t really see that much different than that.

In the past, you used to be able to at least see another place you could go where things are better, but when you’re in one of the most powerful countries in the world, where are you supposed to go instead? Europe isn’t doing that well. Anywhere else is a cesspool, filled with people killing each other over stupid, little things that make no sense other than to brutal people who live in brutal times.

It seems like there’s a class war about to begin, but everyone keeps waiting for someone else to make the first move. I’m not even looking for a future leader to make things better. I’ve pretty much given up on that. I’m waiting for something else, something that resembles Mad Max and Tina Turner singing about a place called Thunderdome. At least they had cool cars that chased each other back then. I guess it’s something to look forward to.

Should Lying Be a Crime?

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Recently, the Casey Anthony trial took all of the breath out of America, as people focused day and night on whether some young woman killed her kid. Personally, I wasn’t all that transfixed by the trial, but I do pay a lot of attention to what other people obsess over. I am a communications scholar, after all.

However, one thing that caught my attention is the crime she was eventually convicted for, in lieu of the major ones for which she was exonerated by the jury (as long as Nancy Grace isn’t considered one of her peers, as that woman doesn’t know the meaning of the word “impartial”), was lying to the police. They couldn’t get her for murder, neglect or bad parking, but they got her for lying to police.

Personally, I have a real problem with this. I’ve always been a strong advocate to not liking whenever government tries to get a foothold in control over its people, ever. And one area is the crossroads of compliance and truth. I don’t think people understand what a trauma it can be to have the police questioning you, trying to get you to slip up in a conversation so that they can use it against you in a court of law. The police are not your friends, your allies, or anyone with whom you have any allegiance. Yet, somewhere down the line, there’s this belief that if the police ask you a question, you have to answer truthfully.

I disagree. If I’m ever accused of anything, I would like to think it is in my personal rights to do everything possible to keep the government from suppressing my personal rights of freedom. They may have a responsibility to figure out the truth, but that doesn’t equal a responsiblity on my part to help them do that. Government is NEVER on your side, no matter how many political ads try to say otherwise in hopes of getting another corrupt politician elected. The police work with the sole purpose of convicting people who they suspect of crimes. When you are in their headlights, you stopped being protected by the government and become a target for all sorts of abuse. And historically, government and police are well known of doing everything possible to take advantage of that abuse. Lately, the Supreme Court has been siding with them on quite a few cases, meaning that if you’re ever suspected of anything, kiss your ass good bye because there is no one left to protect you from the system itself. Certainly not the truth.

I’ve seen the truth manipulated in ways that would make a politician spin. As an investigator, I remember working on cases where very directed investigators would go after a suspect with such a zeal that you wonder what kept them from launching it in the first place. I’ve seen people who could have been very innocent who were railroaded because some inquisitor “felt” that was his target, and all other logic was irrelevant. I remember having a conversation with an investigator when I pointed out that the “suspect” couldn’t have been guilty because of the logic of the facts, and being told “Well, I’m sure she’s guilty of something.” That’s the mindset that leaves me realizing that in no circumstance would I ever want to have to rely on the “truth” as being the difference between my freedom and my incarceration.

There have been a few cases recently where politicians have been brought down strictly on the lying crime. Most of them I didn’t like because I generally don’t like politicians anyway, but at the same time, I’ve liked the whole “crime of lying” thing even worse. I think we have something really to worry about when we’re more concerned about putting someone in prison because our interrogation tripped someone up into saying something he or she may not have meant, or we threw so much information at someone that 1 + 1 doesn’t equal 2 to them anymore. I’ve seen it happen, and it’s a sad day when we put someone away because we didn’t like them (like Casey Anthony) but said nothing about the way we did it because we didn’t like them in the first place.

I figure most people will disagree with me because of how they feel about the Casey Anthony case. That, unfortunately, is practically my point, but people stop listening once they let their passions do their thinking for them.