Our Government’s Purpose is to Protect Government and Rich People

Memoirs, News, Politics, Writing, , ,

In case you haven’t figured it out, the reason our government exists isn’t to protect the rest of us. It’s to protect very wealthy people and other people in government. An example is the current event involving e coli poisoning. For the last week or so, we were told there’s absolutely no fear of any spread in the United States, even as the same articles were reporting that were sporadic cases of infection in the United States. It’s almost like no one even pays attention to what’s really going on and then just continues business as usual. Well, guess what? There are actual cases of e coli spread in the United States now. Imagine that.

I’ve been stating this for a long time, but no one seems to care (and they still won’t): Our government isn’t really representative of the rest of us. It’s representative of very wealthy people who continue to believe themselves worthy of raiding the government coffers for themselves. They’ll justify it under all sorts of different rationalizations, like “giving back to the poor” or “the wealthy pay the most taxes” or whatever makes them feel best. But in the end, when it comes down to a simple yes or no decision, rational actors decide what is best for them, not for the greater good. This is why we can have a story where the claim is made that oil companies are profiting off of people by doing horrific things to other people and the environment, and then when challenged by “government”, they’ll still continue to do horrific things to other people and the environment, and then turn around and claim “PROFIT!” before giving out absurd sums of money to their executives in bonuses, right before turning to the government and claiming a loss in the same breath that they tell stockholders they are raking in more money than ever before. And the rest of us? We’re so insignificant that they don’t care what we think.

Right now, we have a party in power that got into power by claiming the other party was doing evil things. Rather than stop those evil things, they continued doing the same evil things, claiming the issue is “complicated”, and have asked for four more years to continue doing the same things to make things better by doing the same evil things that have been done for decades. And we’ll vote them that extra time. Why? Because we’re morons. And they know it, so they’ll lie to our faces and tell us everything’s great. And we’ll buy it. Not only that, but we’ll donate to their campaigns to make sure they keep doing it.

And a few of us will complain. And no one will listen because we’re not listened to by anyone. Hell, we can’t even get a major distributor to give us a voice for other people to hear. Instead, the people who get heard are the mainstream people who keep doing the same shit over and over again. And then someone will try to sell us Lady Gaga as if that’s “extreme”. Or they’ll talk about how outrageous Charlie Sheen is. And we’ll buy into it. Why? Because we’re morons. And they know it.

That’s really all I have to say. Which is okay because I’m not important to have anyone pay attention to me anyway.

Have a nice day.

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Exploring the Ipad 2 & the desire to own every new piece of technology

Business, Economics, Social Networking, Technology, Writing, , , , , , , , , , , ,

I finally broke down and bought an Ipad 2. I had bought a Motorola Xoom some months ago, and I had been very disappointed in that product, mainly because it has turned into a glorified doorstop. I’m often the victim of techno hype, in that too many reviewers acted like it was the great alternative to the ipad, but then when I finally got it, I discovered it wasn’t ready, nor was it really as compatible as it should have been with the things that I wanted to use. I could never get any of my music to be recognized by its music reader (people told me to download a different music player than the one installed), the books really sucked, as google books was never the solution to the e-reader issue (people told me to download another book reader), the movie player didn’t play ANYTHING (people told me to find another video player, which I did, and I never did succeed at getting a decent enough one that really worked on the Xoom). Basically, everything I did on the Xoom was subpar and not up to speed. Great doorstop. Or great e-mail reader, if you have wi fi only.

So, I went to the Apple store and they finally had iPads in. I bought the AT&T 3G version, which so far is great, although I suspect the 3G aspect of it is massively overpriced no matter what model you buy. That’s one thing NONE of the cellular companies have figured out in the United States. It’s like we’re in the Middle Ages here, and no one will do anything to make it better.

But my problem is really that I tend to buy whatever new technology thing comes out as soon as it does, and I sometimes pay the consequence for doing so. I bought a Nook Color when they came out, and I was severely underwhelmed by it. They’ve made great innovations with their current ones, but because I bought the first rendition of the Nook Color, I’m left with yet another very expensive doorstop that people tell me is so much better in a later edition. One of my other failings is that when I’ve been screwed once, I don’t give the company a second chance. So I won’t be buying a new Nook. Sorry. Once bitten and all that.

But so far, I love the ipad. I haven’t gone all crazy with it yet, but I’m slowly moving towards getting rid of my Washington Post subscription on the Kindle and choosing alternatives on the iPad. It’s so mucy nicer carrying that thing around (it’s a lot lighter and easier to carry than the Kindle). So far, I haven’t turned on my Kindle once since buying the Ipad. The only thing is: I have no intentions of buying books on the Ipad because their selection is horrid, and their prices, like most Apple offerings, are atrociously way too high. The only advantage I’ve seen so far with the Kindle offering of the Washington Post is that you download the whole thing at once and then don’t have to have a connection to read it. With the iPad, every time I read something, it seems to want to have a connection to the server in order to turn the page. Tried reading the Washington Post on it, and again was seriously underwhelmed. I’ve also noticed that with the Kindle I would read an entire article because you scrolled through them one by one. With the iPad, I scan articles and read very little, kind of like the old way I used to read a newspaper, and that’s definitely not something I like, and it’s a hard habit to break when met with the opportunity.

I’ll let you know further how I do with the Ipad. I’m trying to use the wifi more often than the cellular connection because after the third day, I checked my usage, and man, I was not impressed with how quickly I am using up my monthly amount. Again, while this is more a complaint against AT&T and Verizon, that’s something they need to fix, or they’re going to price themselves out of the cellular market. I think they believe they’ll continue to win because they’re the only game on the block, but what’s going to happen is that someone is going to invent something that circumvents the need for them, and people will jump ship really freaking fast, eliminating them overnight. It’s what normally happens with business and economics; they just don’t seem to believe it’s right around the corner, a lot like Comcast doesn’t realize it’s on its death bed because of how shitty it treated its customers over the years.

Anyway, haven’t posted much lately, mainly because I’ve had very little to say. My writing career has somewhat sucked, and as that was pretty much all I had in my corner, I find myself not very happy these days.

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 668

21st Century Technology for a World Stuck in the Middle Ages

News, Relationships, Social Networking, , , , , ,

Sometimes when I read the news, I’m just too amazed to believe that what I’m reading isn’t in fact something from the Onion, rather than from the actual news. The other day, I caught the story where an Egyptian general, who is still a general today, indicated that female protesters who were arrested were administered virginity tests because, and this part still floors me, they wanted to make sure that when the women claimed they were raped, they could be proved liars because:

“We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place,” he told the American network. “None of them were [virgins].”

What really gets me is the gall the guy had to actually make some kind of in your face comment that somehow any claims of rape would be false because they weren’t actually virgins, the translation meaning that in Egypt, a woman can’t be raped if she’s not actually a virgin. Think about that for a second. Now think about it for a minute. Did any more time somehow make that come off as making any more sense than the ridiculousness of when you first read it? I would hope not. Or you’re a part of the problem, and you really should be reading comic books instead of this blog. No, I take that back. Comic books shouldn’t get that kind of an insult.

Every day, I read more and more ridiculous stories like the one I just mentioned, and every day they just keep on coming. It’s like we don’t learn anything, and the stories just get worse. To add even more insult to this injury, I can’t even feel comforted by saying, well, that just happens in some obscure part of the world. Way too often the stories are coming right from the United States, where you read of some politician who makes some kind of statement that you feel even a general in Egypt wouldn’t be stupid enough to make. Like the subject of abortion. Recently, it’s been used as justification for all sorts of ridiculousness, so that whenever it’s brought up in subject, people throw all sorts of common sense out through the window. Male politicians in this country, who would never advocate that raping a woman is an okay thing, will then turn around and say, “well, it’s probably God’s way” if someone raped a woman and some anti-abortion person doesn’t want to use this to justify why she shouldn’t carry a baby to term, specifically one that came from someone who raped her. It’s like people have a tendency to turn off the “common sense” knob whenever we start talking about political issues.

But when it comes to relations between men and women, this country, this planet, is like some kind of purgatory for the Middle Ages because we’ve stopped learning anything and suddenly no longer think in common sense terms. I’m reminded of the Civil Rights movement, which most people who have some sense of common sense will argue on the right side, but when it comes to offering those same civil rights to gender, suddenly we’re back in Dred Scott days. So few people even realize that at one point, African-Americans were finally able to gain the right to vote, specifically through an alliance they made with women, who put off their own struggle for equality by dealing with the race issue first. But when it came to the Equal Rights Amendment, suddenly African-American men immediately remembered they were men first before being black men, and they turned completely against the same people who offered them assistance in their most needed hour. There’s something about gender that people just don’t seem to get.

In the 1970s, there was a huge battle in gender roles, mainly because men didn’t seem to see any actual issue when it came to rape. Believe it or not, in the 1970s, a woman had to prove that she wasn’t a slut before she was able to prove that someone may have taken liberties that he shouldn’t have taken. But you’d think that we’d gotten over that. Instead, every now and then, you’ll see some court case appear where some company is being sued by a group of women because it is STILL acting like its mentality is stuck in a loop in the 1970s, not the 21st century. And people will STILL side against women, as if the issue is brand new. And then you’ll get sniping from other guys who start to yell “reverse discrimination” and all sorts of other things, mainly because there’s still this belief that women need to be in the kitchen making dinner, or in the bedroom making babies. It’s amazing how quickly we fall into these roles yet again.

Anyway, I found myself reading the newspaper today again, and I began to wonder if I was stuck in a time loop again. But I guess I’m not. I have a feeling this is going to be the way things are for a very long time to come. So women, I guess you’re going to just have to learn to live with it, because apparently, I’m the only one who seems to care.

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Cell Phones and Cancer

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It turns out that there may be a link between cell phones and cancer after all. About a decade ago, there was a lot of talk about the potential for cancer being caused by using cell phones, but as we’re apt to do in a capitalist society, we ignored it and trusted the companies that make products to tell us the truth. Why are we surprised that model has yielded bad results again?

I’ve always suspected there was some kind of risk when it came to cell phones, which is why I’ve always been glad that I don’t really use one that often. Yes, I have one, and I take calls on it when people call me, but I’m not the social type, so my amount of use on my cell phone is minimal, which means my chances of getting cancer are a lot less than most other people. Had I been a constant user of my cell phone, I probably would have been a lot more concerned, but I’ve always kept it in the back of my mind that there’s probably something wrong here with this picture.

Now, having an iPhone, there’s no way for me to know that just carrying the thing around isn’t causing some kind of damage, which has always been one of my other concerns. But I figure that over the average lifespan of a human, I’m probably not going to be around that much longer to make a difference anyway. I’m just glad I don’t hold that thing up to my ear on a constant basis like so many other people do.

What does concern me is the sort of thing that we have no control over, and that’s the bigger picture. I mean, there are cell phone towers all over the place, which means these signals are floating all over constantly. To me, this has always felt like I’m being subjected to potentially dangerous signals, but I’ve also realized that there’s nothing I can do about it. In order for Muffy and her friends to have 24/7 phones stuck to their ears, I may end up dying of cancer just because I exist. Unfortunately, that’s one of those sign-offs I never got to sign off on at any particular time.

But what doesn’t surprise me is that corporations went out of their way to debunk any criticism against cell phones, mainly because they want to sell you shit, and information often gets in the way of doing just that. Because the cell phone industry is so interwoven into our society, I doubt anything will be done even if there’s hard evidence that proves that cell phones are definitely killing you. People just aren’t willing to give up their convenience in order to let a few other people live. We’re not designed that way.

Which means that we’ll continue killing ourselves, if these phones are, in fact, killing us. 20 years ago, had the manufacturers been a bit more honest, it might have made a difference, but when there’s a dollar to be made, I don’t have a lot of confidence that the “right thing” is going to be done. Why should we start doing that now when we’ve been going the opposite direction for as long as we’ve had a civilization?

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Thor–my review of the movie

Movies

Thor movie stills-3

I’ll admit it. I went into this movie not expecting a lot of great things, but having always been a Kenneth Branaugh fan, I figured it couldn’t be that bad. And as a Shakespearean fan, I figured a touch of the bard into a superhero movie couldn’t be bad either.

First off, it wasn’t bad. It was cute, and it was one of those movies that does what it’s supposed to do. And that’s really about it.

Okay, that’s not about it. I did have a few more things to say. Like, for one, why can’t they just make a movie once that takes us right into the middle of the franchise, instead of having us have to go with the whole backstory thing, as if we’re too stupid to figure it out ourselves. As a result, we end up with one movie after another that is essentially retelling Superman the Movie, except by inserting another superhero into the role. We got this with Batman (twice), Iron Man, Spiderman, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the XMen (twice, or at least restarted again), Jonah Hex (or at least what should have been a properly done movie, but what can you expect when you put Megan Fox in a movie where it’s not porn?), Daredevil, Electra, and practically every other superhero movie that has tried to retell the same story that we already all know very well.

And that’s the problem. We all know the story. We know how the hero got to be what he or she is. It would be kind of nice to just start off in the middle of a franchise and see what happens.

And that’s what we got with Watchmen, and strangely enough, I kind of thought that was what we were going to be getting with Thor. I mean, think about it. We weren’t going to go back and do the birth of Thor, but we were going to see a series that took place about a Norse god that was already established. Turns out I was wrong, as we even got bits and pieces of him as a kid with his brother Loki growing up.

The movie did what it had to do, and that’s keep us entertained. It had the big crescendo moment where the hero becomes his big bad self, and then he takes out the bad guy. The problem, however, was that most of the action that shows up on the screen is kind of the fault of the hero himself. I mean, the movie starts because (spoiler alert!) Thor’s brother Loki manufactures a plan to get the frost giants, or whatever they were, to start up a war that’s been under a cease fire for centuries. But the war doesn’t really get going until Thor decides he needs to be the bad ass that he is and takes his buddies to frozen world to pick a fight with the frost giants. This leads to both Thor’s banishment, and the eventual war between the frost giants and the Norse gods. I hate when that happens. So, in the end, when Thor gets his powers back, he basically beats some monster that has been sent to Earth to kill Thor, saving everyone. And then goes back to Valhalla to save Valhalla from the gods who are angry at Valhalla because of something Thor did before he was banished. In other words, while Loki kind of started it all, Thor is equally responsible for the war, and in the end, he kind of fixes what he broke by destroying the enemies of Odin, people who became their enemies because Thor wanted to look cool. In other words, it was a lot about nothing. A lot of speeches get made, and a lot of posturing gets postured, and in the end, we’re left with the Norse gods not able to get back to America because they had to destroy the bridge to save the world. Kind of confusing, but yeah, Norse mythology can be that way. At least it didn’t end with any ABBA songs.

I did have to add as an aside that Dr Pepper is doing an interesting tie-in with Thor, where they advertise the Warriors III, the three warriors who serve alongside Thor. Only, in the movie, there are four of them. The Dr Pepper ad conveniently dropped the girl of the four members, which makes me wonder if she was added at the last minute, or Dr Pepper just hates women. I’m curious to know. Either way, she was the hottest of the four (being a guy myself, one can understand why I might say that), but she was also the toughest of the group. One seemed like he was trying to be Jet Li, one a human variation of Chewbacca, and the other guy some kind of pansy who fights with a sword. One of the secret service guys who points out the girl made the best attribution when he called her Xena. Couldn’t have said it any better. But she was too demonstrative of a character for Dr Pepper to have left her out of the campaign. It wasn’t a Warriors III thing as there were most definitely IV.

As I drove home from the theater, I reflected on the movie, and one thing seemed to sum up my experience: I forgot my umbrella at the theater, meaning that when it rained next, I would be without protection, much like Earth will be now that Thor destroyed the bridge that lets him come back, something significant because he’s supposed to return when the Avengers come out as a movie in a few years. So, let’s hope they have a Corps of Engineers in Valhalla building a new earthly bridge. Until then, I’ll buy a new umbrella and hope it doesn’t rain.

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Make Coupons Optional Plz!

Business, Economics, Technology, , , , , , , ,

I shop at Meijer’s stores for groceries. I really like it. It’s one of those grocery stores that have pretty much everything you need, and I’ve been happy with it. Unlike most supermarkets in California, this one actually sells everything. And I’ve learned to like it.

What I haven’t learned to like is how they want to force coupons on me. I’m not a coupon kind of person. I just don’t like cutting them out and bringing them in. I’ve also come to the conclusion that coupons force people into buying products they wouldn’t normally buy anyway. I might buy a package of Charmin, but just because I have a coupon for it doesn’t mean I really want to go shopping for it. If it was convenient, I might think about it, but cutting out coupons, storing them for future use and remembering to bring the right one just seems like a waste of time. Sure, you save money, but sometimes convenience of peace of mind is much more economical than actual cost savings.

But I can’t get Meijer to stop handing me a handful of stupid coupons that I don’t want. And they’re rarely for anything I’ll ever buy anyway. They’re always for things that are kind of like the thing I bought, but not exactly it. In other words, they’re trying to intice me into buying things I don’t normally buy. And I don’t play that way.

So, I’m stuck leaving Meijer each time I shop with a handful of useless coupons that I then feel guilty for having to throw into the trash can. And I don’t do it immediately because they wrapped those coupons around my final receipt, so that receipt goes into my pocket, and then a few days later, it gets pulled out with a gob of useless coupons that end up on my counter, and they accumulate because they join the other coupons I’ll never use. Basically, Meijer is contributing to more and more trash that I end up having to throw out of my house, adding to landfills in a way that wouldn’t have been necessary if they would just give me an option at the beginning that says: “Paper or plastic and coupons or no coupons.”

Simple as that. And we’d all be happy.

I’m just saying.

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 1,974

Why Hire Reporters? Just Have Your Staff Rewrite Someone Else’s Story.

Business, News, Writing, , , , , , ,

An interesting story has been going around the news waves lately. According to the Guardian, Chinese prisoners are being forced to play World of Warcraft and farm gold to sell to players of the game. If you play this game, or one like it, this is an all too common story, and it’s often been on the periphery of the game. Lots of lazy players tend to want to take the easy road by using real world money to buy the work it would take them to actually play through a lot of the drudgery of the game itself. However, it’s not the gold selling story that I want to focus on, but on the telling of the story itself.

The original article appeared in the British news site paper, The Guardian, and it can be found here. However, when I first read the story, it was reposted on a World of Warcraft official forum, after having been reposted from an article that appeared on Mashable, which appears here. The first article was written by Danny Vincent, in Beijing, for The Guardian. The Mashable article was written by Lauren Idvik. In Idvick’s article, she essentially paraphrased the original article, quoted actual quotes from the actual article, and acted like it was a brand new story. As I read this second article, all I kept thinking to myself was: What purpose did rewriting someone’s article actually do? There’s one piece of “new” information offered in the newer article, and that’s a borrow from the New York Times, in which the author paraphrases that $2 billion of virtual currency was traded in 2008.

This is a common problem that has started to occur with blogs. Rather than actual articles, we’re receiving a lot of rephrased articles from bloggers who are paraphrasing articles actually published from more legitimate sources, kind of like a Twitter of news articles with the attribution (mostly) but a fantasy put forth that the new article is actually offering new insight. In the beginning, this wasn’t that bad because most of the time, bloggers were offering new information, or commentary that supplemented the original article itself, but now, like this one article, the rephrasing of the article doesn’t actually offer anything new, but rehashes the exact same story and puts someone else’s byline on it.

Having been alerted to this phenomenon, I started looking at this same story, following the Google links to see where else they might bring me. Digital Trends has an article by Andrew Couts, who uses the same information from the Guardian article AND includes the $2 billion piece of information but gives no attribution to where that information occurred (missing the fact that Idvick’s article at least attributed to the New York Times). Couts’s article has a one paragraph introduction to the concept, but after that almost all of the information is rephrased from the original Guardian article.

Techspot‘s Matthew DeCarlo uses the same article from the Guardian as well, and when he then uses the $2 billion figure, he indicates the information comes from the China Internet Center, whatever that may be. According to the original New York Times article that seems to be sporadically used by others without attribution, “nearly $2 billion in virtual currency was traded in China, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.” That article was actually written by David Barboza on June 30, 2009.

I’m not saying anyone’s actually doing anything dishonest, but at the same time there seems to be a lot of reporting going on based off of previous sources that aren’t getting the credit that they probably deserve. It’s one thing to quote a story, or even to post a story and then comment on it, but what seems to be happening is we’re getting a lot of stories being rewritten for the sake of sounding like they’re brand new and from other sources. There’s not been any actual attempt to hide the original sources, but that doesn’t mean we’re getting a lot of transparency at the same time. A lot of “reporters” seem to be making a career out of reporting other reporter’s stories, and that concerns me.

Now, having said that, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve done something similar in the past, although not to this extreme, but having pointed this out, I will definitely go out of my way to make sure that when I print someone else’s information, I do it because I want to give attention to someone else’s story, not somehow try to act like I’m the original reporter of information I did nothing more than read in another newspaper just like anyone else could have done.

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Why is the News Obsessed with Unimportant, Marginalized People?

News, Politics, , , , , , , ,

ABC News ran a story today warning informing us that Sarah Palin may in fact be running for president. As a news junkie, my immediate thought wasn’t (to the shock of many) “wow” or “isn’t that interesting” but “who cares?” I mean, honestly, this is such a non-story that the level of ridiculousness borders of a word that would have to be more ridiculous than “ridiculous”. Maybe super-ridiculous. Let’s be honest for a moment here, kids. Sarah Palin has as much of a chance being elected president as I do. Yeah, not kidding here. I have as much chance of being elected president as Sarah Palin does. The only way she would ever be elected president is if 70 percent of the country had a lobotomy the day before the election, which is exactly, not surprisingly, the requirements it would take for the American population to write me in as a write-in candidate in all fifty states, garnering me enough electoral votes to finally call Starving Students to move my furniture into the White House. Then again, with a $400,000 a year salary, I’d probably just leave all my stuff in place and buy all new shit, because I’d definitely be living a completely different life. I’d keep my stuffed animals, and maybe my Playstation 3 (because it gets my streaming Netflix movies, and you know I’d be wanting Netflix in the White House). But the rest of it can go to Good Will, or Good Will Hunting, or wherever it is that you send things when you finally get elected president by a write-in vote because the country has decided it doesn’t want Sarah Palin in the White House.

But I’m starting to digress here. What I really wanted to talk about was Taylor Swift and her new album. Oh wait, that’s not what I wanted to talk about, although I will admit it’s a great album, and I really have enjoyed continuously playing it in my car each and every time I get into it. No, what I wanted to get back to was the subject of how the news seems obsessed with such unimportant stories.

Take Charlie Sheen for instance. Why has the news spent so much time talking about him? Before his ridiculous melt-down, he was really unimportant, insignificant and compartmentalized to a television show that relegated itself to the importance of appearing next to Big Bang Theory. Seriously. And somehow, because he blew up one day, he’s the next most important thing since, well, I don’t have a comparison because it still doesn’t make any sense. Yet, the news, for weeks, was obsessed with all things Charlie Sheen, and honestly, he wasn’t all that significant before it all happened, and now that it’s finally blowing over, I wonder if they’re not all thinking to themselves, “how exactly did that happen?”

Which is what brings me to the obsession itself. Why do they get so obsessed with such unimportant figures in celebrity? We live in an era where people are becoming famous for being famous, and I just don’t understand it. Kim Kardasian recently announced she’s engaged to be married. Who is this person? Why is she a celebrity? Why do we care? Why is she getting so much attention when she hasn’t done a single significant thing ever. Yeah, I understand she was some kind of reality star, but really, is that enough to substantiate all of the attention? Yeah, she’s a bit attractive, but so are a lot of people. They’re not made into media sensations that require booking agents and sit down sessions with David Letterman.

Why aren’t we hyping people for doing great things? That’s one thing I’ve never understood. If a scientist discovers a property that might change humanity and civilization, that person is important and should be considered seriously significant. But rarely is such a person treated that way by anyone outside of his or her scientific discipline or academic community. Instead, we over-hype really ridiculous characters who perform stupid antics, and then make a media career out of that one moment in time.

Could this be a symptom of our need for a 24 hour news cycle, but the reality is that we don’t have 24 hours worth of news to fill that cycle? Is that the problem here? Are we so obsessed with pretending that we have news that we’ll do anything to sell an unimportant story because we don’t want to admit that on a daily basis, nothing really significant tends to happen? Congress can’t come up with a budget. Is that news? Not really. But the day that they do come up with a budget IS news. Then it should be reported. Instead, because we have no news to report, we’ll focus endlesslessy on gridlock as if that’s a story itself. It’s not. Gridlock means you can’t make a decision, or a consensus of a decision. Try to sell that as a story, and you start to see the problem that we seem to be experiencing in our daily lives. We have nothing to report, so we report unimportant events as “events” and then we hype the hell out of them until the rest of us suddenly feel it’s important.

So, what’s our solution? Stop paying attention. Really. That’s it. Discontinue watching news that hypes stupid shit as actual news. It may mean looking for alernative avenues of news because the old avenues don’t know how to stop hyping crap as news. However, I suspect that most of us are addicted to this crap, so we’re kind of doomed to a continuous process of receiving fake news as news, and our attention will continue to be focused on unimportant people doing unimportant things while the rest of us are told to treat it as important. Mainly because we don’t have any other way of looking at the situation.

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The Implications of Politicians Not Understanding What’s Important About the Economy

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

Politicians don’t get the economy. Ever. I mean, they might even be economists, but they don’t seem to understand what is significant about the economy. You may wonder what I’m talking about considering the fact that the “economy” has been in the news constantly lately, and it would be very difficult to understand how anyone would miss this type of story. Well, let me explain what’s going on, and perhaps we might start to recognize some very obvious signs that seem to keep getting missed.

First, the average American doesn’t care one iota about the deficit. Oh, they care, but they don’t really care. It’s like when a guy tells his girlfriend he loves her. He’s the politician in this equation. He probably truly loves her. Now, when a woman tells a guy she loves him, she might actually mean she LOVES him, as in she would drag herself across the desert over jagged glass for him, or she loves him, which means she tolerates his presence and thinks he’s kind of okay, but there’s no way in the world he’s ever getting to third base with her. Yeah, when making these analogies, I sometimes use really sophomoric examples that I wouldn’t normally use in every day conversation. I don’t think I’ve referred to women, dating and baseball analogies in the same setting ever before in normal conversations.

Anyway, the point is: while our politicians might understand the economy, they don’t understand what’s important about the economy that matters to the average American. Because when it comes down to it, that’s ALL that is going to make a difference during an election. Think about that for a moment. We keep hearing gloom and doom predictions about the economy, especially if we don’t raise the debt ceiling, don’t stop the deficit from getting out of control and don’t fix the sinking ship (or whatever stupid analogy we use at any particular time). The average American is thinking: Do I have a job right now, and do I expect to have a decent one in the very near future? That’s about it. Whether or not the debt ceiling is reached, whether or not the US ever pays off its debts, or whether or not the US is perceived as still being a global, economic superpower, the average American doesn’t care. All he or she cares about is what matters to him or her at any particular time.

Which means the average person doesn’t feel any ties to the deficit of this country at all. Yes, on a surface level, they know that they are part of the mix of people who have to pay for it all. But we’ve been kicking this can down the road for so long that the average American thinks that his or her grandkids will pay for it, not him or her. We’re talking such big numbers that they’ve completely lost all sense of ability to pertain to individuals. When I’m told that the deficit is approaching $13 trillion, they may as well tell me it’s $13 BAZILLION because a trillion is an amount that my little head is never going to grasp. I’m still having a hard time grasping the thousands that one day I have to pay off for student loans. Trillions is bordering on ludicrous to me. So multiply that by 300 million people (equally ridiculous) and you start to understand why the average person doesn’t care one bit.

In the end, the average American is convinced one of two things will happen: The debt will somehow disappear, or we’ll continue to kick the can down the road for a few more decades and never deal with it in our lifetimes. The other alternative, which is the more obvious one, is that the entire system will collapse, and the US will fall into some sense of anarchy, where people will have to fend for themselves until a bunch of rich people create a new government that they argue is “for the people”. The average person, like average people throughout time, really have no say so in the whole matter and figure that the affairs of state are better left to the people who seem to enrich themselves regardless of the type of government we have. The very concept of the US collapsing is laughable to most every American, for the simple reason that it has never happened before. Sure, we’ve had revolutions (one), and we’ve had civil wars (one), but for the most part, the system has been in place for multiple generations where not a single person alive today living n the United States has ever seen this country as anything other than the government we have today. The very possibility of collapse is unimaginable.

Which means that when it happens, no one will see it coming. And that will make the anarchy that much more like a hell on Earth, kind of like St. Augustine talked about when the Roman Empire finally collapsed. No one saw it coming then, and they danced in the streets while the empire burned. And then they woke up from their drunken spree through anarchy to realize that they had to try to put it all back together again.

They didn’t call it the dark ages for nothing.

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 3,158

Drowning in Misleading Information About Technology

Business, News, Technology, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

About six months ago, I decided to give up my iPhone for an Android phone. I’ve never been a real fan of Apple, the company, although I have somewhat been on the sidelines for Apple, the technology. The iPhone was definitely one of their best products ever, and I bought one when they first emerged. Then I upgraded to the second generation of the phone, which I believe was the 3G or 3GS (I get them confused). One of the things I really liked about the cell phone (my first real smart phone) was its long battery life. There were times when I went several days before recharging it.

One of the problems with the original iPhone was that you had to go through AT&T. That’s another one of those companies that I’ve learned to live to love and hate, sometimes in the same sentence. Their customer service is atrocious, no matter how hard their PR people try to make it seem otherwise. And sometimes dealing with them as a customer can be a freaking nightmare. But when you don’t have to deal with that side of the house, they do what they need to do, and things generally go smoothly. Not exactly a five-star endorsement, but you take what you can get, I guess.

Well, I discovered at one point that I couldn’t block calls on my iPhone no matter what I did. I was getting nonstop calls from telemarketers and bill collectors (most not even for me), and it was becoming really frustrating. So I looked to Apple to see if there was an app to fix this. There’s not. Apple doesn’t like you to block things, and if Steve Jobs doesn’t like something, that’s just the way every customer will experience the customer experience. Also, AT&T sucks in this area, as they couldn’t figure out a way to stop this other than to block a call (each one), to which they would charge me a nominal ($10) price to do so EACH TIME. That wasn’t a solution.

So, I bought a Sprint Samsung Epic phone (after trying out a few crappy Sprint phones). So far, I’ve been massively disappointed in Sprint. I mean MASSIVELY. They drop calls constantly, and they have finally acknowledged that there’s something wrong in Grand Rapids, although they can’t figure out what it is, but they’re not willing to really do anything to make the experience better other than to offer a different phone (on the same crappy service, which is actually the problem).

And the smart phone isn’t really that smart. In so many ways, Android fails. Miserably. I use Touchdown to link my work email, and whenever I have an appointment on my calendar, any change to the at calender appointment adds a brand new apointment (AND) leaves the old one in place, so that even though I’ve changed my appointment, my phone constantly wants to remind me at the old time that there’s an appointment, even if there no longer is one. When you work in a place where people are changing their appointments all of the time, this makes your calendar somewhat useless. Again, failure of miserable proportions.

The other day, my phone stopped working. For no reason. And then the next day, it started working again. No explanation. Meanwhile, two people phoned me and kept getting voicemail, which they left messages. No messages, of course, ever went through because, well, Sprint sucks.

So I contacted AT&T again, trying to figure out if there’s some way to get the new iPhone 4, and it turns out that I’m in my upgrade range now. What I didn’t know, until I asked a few colleagues who had iPhone 4s on both AT&T and Verizon, that the battery life of the iPhone 4 is no better than my crappy Samsung epic. For some reason, Apple made a brand new phone that is worse than the previous version. My 3G goes for days; the iPhone 4 doesn’t go longer than a half of a day, which seems to be the life span (battery wise) of almost all smart phones these days. That’s just crappy.

So, it looks like I may end up staying with my old iPhone 3G because it’s still the best phone on the market. It doesn’t matter that we’re already into an iPhone 4, and probably moving to an iPhone 5. I doubt it’s going to be much better itself. And every Android phone made is massively dysfunctional, yet it’s branded as the “thing to beat Apple”. If that’s the case, then we’re still a few years away from ever getting something decent out on the market that fills the need of the rest of us.

And that sucks.

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 706