Just recently, I moved across the country from Michigan to Texas. In the process of moving, I started to liquidate a lot of the stuff that I had at he old apartment, including numerous computers and electronic equipment. So I went onto several selling sites to get rid of some of this stuff, and what I discovered is that the trolling scammers are practically everywhere now, and they’re pretty bold and not all that concerned with being caught either. So, having been through a bunch of attempts to scam me, I thought I would point out some warning signs for those who might think that selling something is a good idea, and also make the mistake in believing that the majority of people who respond are actually people you can trust and not annoying asshats that are going to do everything possible to separate you from you money.
1. The Responder in a Hurry: This is usually someone who needs to take care of this transaction right now. Not tomorrow, or even in a couple of hours. He or she needs to take care of this right now and you should understand his or her need for speed because of some really badly doctored rationale that even my college student slackers know better than to attempt to try to get over with me using. One standard one I received no less than a half dozen times was “my son (or whatever relation) is in Iraq/Afghanistan and I’m buying this for him/her, and because he needs it quickly, I need to take care of this right now. Now, if this was the only situation involved, it might be somewhat believable, but quite often it’s coupled with one of the other examples as well.
2. The Paypal Only Guy: One of my stipulations in m ads is that the deal must be carried out in person, and in cash. I don’t take checks (people will offer to pay with a check) or any other weird currency, including “can I trade you something for your item?” Look, if I wanted something else I couldn’t sell, I’d take you up on your offer, but as I’m trying to sell something to get it out of my house, I don’t want your junk, too! Anyway, the paypal guy is the one that says that he has no way of paying you in cash (usually he’s “out of town”) so it has to be done over Paypal. I turn these down each and every time as almost always they are coupled with another one of the scamming activities, which tells me that there’s a lot more going on than just a legitimate exchange over Paypal. I haven’t figured out the nuances of what they do to scam you through that process but as so many scammers have offered to pay me over Paypal, I’m extremely apprehensive. Now, I’ve done business using Paypal in the past, but it’s usually with legitimate businesses or entities I trust, so there’s that.
3. “I’m not local to you” guy: This is the most definite scammer of all the ones I keep running across. Years back, I was scammed by an Ebay buyer who did the infamous “I will send you the money through (name some nefarious process) and I need you to send it to me in some weird place that has no jurisdiction over legal matters, but I promise you it will be all okay.” Yeah, I’m kind of exaggerating about it, but you get the idea. Almost always this “offer” promises to send a few hundred dollars over the cost of the item (to handle my inconvenience) and things start to go downhill from there. Now, whenever someone says “I need you to send it to….” I respond, no, I don’t send anything anywhere. Sorry.
Those are the three main ways that I know a scam is involved. In addition to that, I thought I would mention one of the other problems that occurs with online selling in these matters, and that’s the concept of texting. I can’t tell you how many people have responded to my ads with a text, basically repeating exactly what I wrote in my ad (as if that’s a question somehow). Example: I type in “Selling a computer for $700. Call this number.” The text response is “Selling a computer for $700. Call this number.” Basically, it leaves me just staring at my phone thinking, did I just get contacted by one of those alien races that sends back messages of those they intercepted, convinced that this will lead to a future of conversation between two civilizations in the galaxy? What this has finally done to me is to pretty much give up on any instance that starts with someone who texted me. Almost always, anyone that continues the conversation and says he or she is interested, it ends up in a flake situation where I’m waiting somewhere for the person to show up, and they never do. And I never hear from them again. Now, I’ve gotten to the point where I say “call me when you reach the location” mainly because I don’t believe they’re going to show up to begin with.
In addition, I write in EVERY ad, “do not text me as those do not get answered” and almost always they text me as the only way to contact me. I almost threw my phone into a wall the last time because I stupidly wrote back and said, “DO NOT TEXT ME. PHONE ME INSTEAD.” So he texted me as a response. I ignored him after that, even though he wrote a few times asking for more information.
So, those are my thoughts on scammers. It’s almost made it not worth selling anything online any more. However, a few people were pretty good, but when you’re inundated by stupid scammers, it sometimes makes the whole thing not worth it.
A week or so ago, I moved across the country from Michigan to Texas. It was one of those stressful times, but I finally got here, and now I’m starting t, try to rebuild my life on the other side of the country. Except, one thing hasn’t changed. No matter what I do, some company or other goes out of its way to screw me, even if I’ve gone through a lot of work to make sure it won’t happen.
Example: The housing complex where I lived (Cambridge Apartments), I went to their management and explained that I was offered a job where I would have to be there in a week. so I was going to have to be vacating immediately. I explained there was very little time, so I would end up leaving some stuff behind. They went through the charges that would be made should I leave large items and smaller items. I looked it over and figured I could live with those charges. I also had one more month of time left in my lease, which I said I would pay the next month and then we would be square on that. I figured I’d get charged for the stuff left over, any cleaning and then lose whatever security deposit I gave. I figured that it would probably cost me $500 to $1000 beyond the last month’s payment, and I would settle with them on that.
So imagine my surprise a few days after I left when I discovered they reported me to credit bureaus for all sorts of infractions, like damages and such. There was no damage to the apartment. At all. Yet, they reported nonpayment in addition to all of that, even though in normal circumstances, I would have had until the 5th to pay this month’s rent. On the 31st of LAST month, they reported me for nonpayment for a month that hadn’t even started yet, when I explained I was going to pay it normally through the online service they have (even had the process explained to me so that it wouldn’t be a problem for me while in Texas). Instead, they basically declared war on me without first ever having waited for me to do exactly what I promised in the first place. Now, I’m thinking, “screw you” as I’m really, REALLY pissed right now.
What this has resulted in is the place where I was applying for to live has now turned me down. I can’t get my electricity turned on properly with my new place without having to pay an outrageous deposit (because of this report they made…everything had been fine before this moment). And sure enough, within a few days, I won’t be surprised to start hearing from bill collectors for an account that is seriously not actually even due to be paid for days that have yet to come.
You know, if this was one company doing this sort of thing, I could chalk it up to a company with really bad business procedures. But this isn’t the first time I”ve dealt with a company that basically went nuts without reason, almost as if the person who started the action was one of those who sits at his or her desk and imagines slights being perpetrated against him or her rather than just picking up a phone and saying, “hey, what’s up with that situation?”
I guess what really bothers me is that I was living in that housing complex for four years, paying each month and trying to be a good neighbor. The second I leave, I become public enemy number one, and that’s even before I actually did anything that would have substantiated such a designation.
To sum it up, I”m so sick and tired of being screwed over by companies like this. So sick and tired of it.
When I was back at the Academy, we used to get a copy of the New York Times every morning, and it was required reading for all West Point cadets. When you were a freshman, you’d be grilled by upperclassmen about what was in the paper, and you’d better be sure you knew exactly what was on the front page. Over the years, I continued reading the newspaper, mainly because I was introduced to it in the beginning and sort of thought of it as the newspaper everyone should be reading. Well, over the years, the quality has diminished, and it’s no longer the master newspaper it used to be, especially as the Internet has basically made their entire foundation far less than it ever was. But, of course, no one bothered to tell the New York Times that. They’re still convinced they’re the greatest newspaper out there. And they may be. What they don’t realize is that all newspapers, including theirs, has fallen into a cesspool of crappy journalism so that pretty much none of them are as relevant as they used to be.
So, some years back, I discontinued my paper delivery of the New York Times and even though I tried getting it online a few times in the past, I discovered it really didn’t have the breaking news that I needed as a consumer of daily news.
Now, my reasons for discontinuing the paper way back then didn’t even involve the quality of the paper back then. I shut down my subscription because the deliverer couldn’t seem to get the paper to my door. At first, he started delivering to the wrong apartment, meaning I had to grab it before my neighbor realized that he had a free newspaper for the day, and then the deliverer got really lazy and just started throwing it in front of my apartment complex, meaning that I had to be lucky enough to get it before 74 other families passed it on their way to work. When I couldn’t resolve this problem, I resolved it by walking away.
But the NYT continued to believe that I “needed” their newspaper, so they have continued sending me endless emails about how coming back to their newspaper will somehow benefit me. And each time their “benefit” seems to be an absolutely low price (for the first four or six weeks) before it turns into some normal price, of which never gets mentioned in any correspondence they send to me. So I don’t sign up. And they keep sending me these great “offers” to me, and it just continues to piss me off because I equate it to the old bait and switch routine, which is backed up by foot in the door processes. They figure that once I have their wonderful newspaper again, I’ll do anything to keep it after the low rate expires.
What they don’t seem to understand is that if I NEVER pay them a cent ever, that price NEVER goes up. And I don’t lose anything when I decide that their price increase was too much for me.
Unfortunately, the newspaper isn’t the only one who does this. I remember in the old days when I had Comcast. They did the same thing by hooking me in with some ridiculously low three for one deal that was massively affordable. Six months later, that $99 price then became something like $214. All other options that were affordable were almost like having no service at all, so in the end, I dumped Comcast and decided that watching television wasn’t all that beneficial with the working model they were trying to sell us.
So, whenever I see one of these “deals”, and I see them ALL THE FREAKING TIME, I opt out. I then feel that whatever company tried to lure me in was doing so for nefarious purposes and I tend to do no business with them in the future. That’s really been the only way I can respond and feel good about myself.
Today, I attended mandatory training for active shooters on campus, meaning that the campus police sat a bunch of us down and told us how we should handle ourselves in the case of an active shooter on campus. I’ve always found these types of exercises bizarre because as good-intentioned as they are, they almost always rely on the hope that in the case of a disaster/emergency, the people who need to do the right thing are going to be capable of actually doing it. And quite often, if you listen to the conversations of the other people in the room, a lot of people have great expectations of themselves about what they’ll do in an emergency. But the only real way to figure out what you’re going to do in an emergency is to either go through one, or train extensively until you go through one. Neither of those methods is one that is appropriate for most people and most crowds. So, as I’m quite apt to do, let me tell you a story.
Some years ago, I was out of the service and working for a hotel in San Francisco. I was the hotel investigator, which for all argumentation meant that I was in the management of the Security Department. The rank structure went kind of like Security Director, Assistant Security Director, Fire/Safety Director, Investigator, and then Shift Supervisor. So, in most circumstances, the investigator (me) was usually not someone who had to exercise a whole lot of authority. However, one day, as these things usually happen in bizarre circumstances, there was a radio call in the hotel indicating a chemical spill in the sub-basement level (which is where Engineering houses its staff and headquarters). A laundry person had accidentally mixed some solvent with another that shouldn’t be mixed with, started a chemical reaction and was immediately knocked unconscious. Then everyone on that floor collapsed and went unconscious as well.
When we received the call, the Security Director, the Fire/Safety Director and the shift supervisor were all in a meeting with the director, in which his office happened to be located right next to the stairwell leading directly down to the sub-basement. So, they all rushed out of the Security Office, down the stairwell, and in a few moments were completely incapacitated right smack where the chemical reaction was still flowing. I happened to be walking back to the office at this time, heard the call and was about ten seconds behind the people rushing down to the sub-basement. What I did differently than the rest of the leadership going down the stairwell was notice that the path took us down one set of stairs, down the hallway and then back down another set of stairs. On the way to that second set of stairs was a laundry deposit room, and by instinct, I grabbed about ten towels that were damp from having just gone through a wash cycle (they were in a basket in our path and wet, about to be transferred to a dryer). Having heard “chemical spill” from the radio, my first thought was to throw a bunch of those blankets over my face and breathe through them. No instruction manual or class ever taught me to do that, but it just seemed to be a logical thing to do for someone who has been trained to react to emergency situations from my time in the service.
Anyway, when I got down to the sub-basement, the first thing I noticed was the leadership of my department coughing and wheezing from complete lack of oxygen, so I grabbed the nearest one, wrapped a towel around his face and turned him around, forcing him back towards the stairwell where he had emerged only a short bit ago. I did the same thing for the Fire/Safety Director and maneuvered him over to the shift supervisor, who was incoherent and wandering aimlessly, putting the Fire/Safety Director’s arm around him and pushing them both towards the stairwell, so they could use each other to push each other up the stairs.
I, breathing through wet towels, found a stumbling engineer, pushed a towel over his face and had him take me back to Engineering where there were tons of oxygen masks they used just in case of a disaster like this. Fitting masks onto the people who collapsed in Engineering, the engineer and I grabbed the one worker who had started the chemical reaction and carried his unconscious self by dragging him up the stairs with us.
Once on the main level, I got on the radio with Security and started relaying orders, like taking elevators out of service, as we were getting reports of employees going down to the sub-basement level and breathing in gas fumes. In a short bit of time, we had the situation under control.
When I wandered back to the main Security dispatch office (which is different from the administrative Security office), I noticed the assistant shift supervisor standing in the room with the dispatcher, not sure what to do. I asked him what his instructions were, figuring the security supervisor is going to be more up to speed on what to do than someone who was only in a leadership position because of title (and rarely exercised it). But he was even more incapacitated than the management of the department, except his incapacitation came from panic, not from not knowing what to do. So I turned to the dispatcher, asked her if there were any open calls that needed handling, which she said a couple of doors needed unlocking, so I sent the assistant security supervisor off to take those calls and then decided to continue running security until someone higher up was on site to relieve me (which didn’t happen for another two hours because what I hadn’t realized was that the rest of the management was now in ambulances that had been brought onto site, and I was basically the only one left in charge).
Two hours later, the assistant director of security, who was off site when this happened, showed up, and I turned over control to her, which ironically the next day she tried to explain to everyone how she had swooped in and saved everyone during the incident, to which the entire staff blew a gasket because they all knew she wasn’t there and knew exactly what DID happen. But that’s another story.
What I did learn at that moment is that often people don’t know how they’re going to react to a situation until the situation happens. We had all sorts of standard operating procedures and training, but until an incident occurred, no one knew what they would do, and those who thought they would do one thing did the complete opposite. The expectation that leadership would respond in some way went out the window when the senior membership was wiped out in the first few minutes of the situation.
I guess that’s why I sometimes have a hard time with these “active shooter” types of classes. I hope no one ever has to experience a real incident, but I’m not sure that I would be all that comfortable with the other people there, regardless of whether or not they attended a 1.5 hour class on how to respond. But I guess it’s better than nothing.
USA Today has a nice little article/movie on the most dangerous places to use your debit, titled 4 places you should not swipe your debit card. Now, in most cases, such a list would be great, and I’d be thankful that they took the time to present this. But let’s look at their list, shall we?
1. Gas stations
2. Restaurants
3. Stores
4. Online
Okay, if this was an Onion article, I’d accept it, but let’s be a little frank here. That’s practically EVERY place you would EVER use a debit card. That means the title of the article should be DON’T EVER USE YOUR DEBIT CARD AGAIN. When I read the first one, I thought, wow, that sucks, but then read on to see where else I would be in jeopardy. And then it just got worse. Every one of those entries shows that the author of this story did absolutely no work, no investigation and no thought whatsoever to come up with a story. It would be like my next article, which I’ll highlight right here:
Duane’s new article: HOW TO DATE SUPERMODELS
Step One: Find a supermodel
Step Two: Date her.
Yeah, it’s essentially true, but at the same time probably not all that useful to anyone reading it. That’s the feeling I get after reading an article like this. A “real” story would have pointed out certain gas stations that are negligent in their protections of debit card information. Or particular stores where the staff are negligent in the same process. “Online”? Really? Was this article written by a cave man discovering fire for the first time?
The time finally came for me to have to decide on what medical plan I was going to choose for myself as I no longer hold the job I used to hold, and my options are either find health care for myself, or pay extortion rates to fund COBRA from the last job. As anyone who has ever used COBRA before knows, it’s massively expensive and really not worth the amount they require you to pay.
So, I went on the health care exchange network, and let’s just say that they don’t give a whole lot of qualify information. Oh, they give information, but it’s a lot of numbers and charts that when you start to analyze it, well, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I kind of wanted a list of what I’d actually be paying for, but because our system is so badly designed, the information is constantly hidden behind numerous clicks of continuous clicks.
I used to be with Priority Health (which was my employer’s plan of choice because, well, they owned it). Turns out, it’s horrible when you have to actually pay for it. Turns out, it wasn’t all that beneficial back when I actually had it. It was ALWAYS expensive, no matter how many “We’re the best plan around and here’s a six page document explaining why” notices we kept receiving from the company.
So, I’ve been trying to get actual information on which plan to choose right now, and let’s just say that I’ve been kind of going back and forth, trying to get that information. I called one plan to ask information, and after two hours on hold, I finally got someone who sounded like he knew less about their plans than I did. Not good.
So, that’s kind of where I am right now. Hopefully, I’ll have this fixed, in this century.
Edit: Got off the phone with Blue Cross/Blue Shield a few minutes ago. They solved the whole situation for me. So, no more complaints, which means I now have to go out of my way to find something to complain about. Sheesh.
Here’s a confession. I read the newspaper every day. And some days are more informative than others. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the news over the last couple of months has been really crappy, almost to the point of where I sometimes suspect that today’s newspaper might have been recycled from a few weeks ago and sold to me as brand new. I’ve been feeling this a lot lately. It’s like there’s no interesting news any more, and that worries me because I’m a newshound, constantly in need of news gratification. So, here’s a quick rehash of what I’ve found to be the “significant” news stories for the immediate past (and present).
1. Justin Beiber did something. Don’t know what it was, but for some reason when he does something, the news wants to tell me about it. I get it. Teen girls like him, mainly because teen girls haven’t matured to a point where their brains actually generate understandable logic. So this “heart throb” did something that may or may not have been controversial, and as a result the media is in a frenzy making sure that we know all about it. I don’t care. Please stop telling me about it. It’s taking up space where I could be reading about…well, honestly, I don’t have anything else I’m following, which is a part of this whole post in the first place. As a corollary, please don’t tell me about Selena Gomez either. The only reason I know who she is is because she’s often mentioned in the same sentence as Justin Bieber, which makes her even less significant than someone I find of absolutely no significance.
2. Congress voted to not vote on anything. That’s about the length of the summary of the latest stories involving Congress. They’ve spent the last two years arguing over how they don’t agree with each other, with the president, with the people, and with the color of the sky. I get it. They don’t get along, and they believe that they need to get rid of the people they don’t get along with in order to get anything done. As a result, they’re going to have to justify their ridiculous salaries and excellent health benefits ( that are not upto the standards found in Forest Hills urgent care clinic and also they are the not the same as anyone they vote to approve health benefits for, such as the poor, the military or, well, anyone else), so they need to pretend to be doing something. And because the media can’t just report: TODAY, CONGRESS PROVED IT’S USELESS AND DID NOTHING, they report all of the horse race crap, and we end up with stories that tell us absolutely nothing.
3. School shootings are on the increase. I’m not happy about this, and at the same time I kind of want to stop hearing about it because statistically, they’re not actually increasing. We’re just hearing more about them because they fit the “if it’s on fire, then it’s a story” paradigm of national news outlets. Most people don’t realize that kids have been stupid for about as long as kids have been around. What is different is that the media is in such a need of stories to fill a 24 hour news cycle that whenever someone shoots someone, pulls out a gun, draws a picture of a gun, bullies someone, thinks about bullying someone, says mean things, or whatever, we’re going to hear a national story about it. And then commentators are going to get on the news and talk about the “tragedy” and how it never used to be that way “back in my day”. Yes, it was. It just didn’t happen in your particular school at the time you’re remembering back on. But it happened in the school down the street, which means that “back in your day” these things were happening but because they didn’t happen in YOUR school, you weren’t paying attention, and because most people didn’t pay attention to news back then (as most of it was from the 3 networks and boring as hell), there’s a belief that it was much different back then. Statistically, the only thing that really changed was we have more access to national information than we had before, which means that something that happens in Colorado when you live in New York gets put in front of your TV screen, making you feel that it’s happening in your neighborhood, when it’s thousands of miles away from where you live.
4. The most important story in the country is gay marriage. Well, you’d get that impression from the amount of rhetoric focused on it. Yes, I agree that it should be an important story, but it’s not really, and it affects so few people in comparison to the grand total of people who think they’re affected. Disclaimer: I’m not gay, which means that the issues involved in this continuously involving “issue” doesn’t actually affect me. Reality: That’s not completely true. It does affect me, but not in the way that seems to be the focus of so much attention. Let me explain.
You see, there are people in the world who are not heterosexual. I’m not one of them, yet because I’m heterosexual, if I was a total dweeb and rude person, I could say that how someone lives his or her own life somehow has an impact on my life. Reality: It doesn’t. If two men want to marry each other, and they live next door to me, the total effect after doing all of the mathematics is…um, zero. What does affect me is how much noise they make playing their stereo, or in what seems to be my personal experience, how much of a complaint they have about the fact that I sometimes play mine too loud. You might notice that how loud their stereo is has absolutely NO connection to whether or not they happen to be gay or straight. So, their impact AS A RESULT OF THEM BEING GAY, is none.
Then the argument comes in about how gay marriage somehow diminishes the status of marriage in general. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I believe that divorce has a much larger impact on the status of marriage. I feel that if NO ONE ever got divorced, then marriage would be sanctified and never in fear of danger. Not only that, I think that if spouses NEVER cheated on each other, then marriage would be strengthened that much better. So, from now on, I think that anytime someone talks about a divorce, that person should be shunned, thrown out of the country and declared a heathen of all good thinking Americans. Come to think of it, if people didn’t get married in the first place, then perhaps the fear of divorce would never happen, which would strengthen the very value of partnership. Or perhaps partnership is the problem, and that it’s kind of unnatural, as God originally intended for every person to be alone, which is why He didn’t create people as partners but designed each person to be capable of functioning without another person. I’m sure there’s a verse somewhere in one of the many different interpretations of religious texts out there that says exactly that, although it might say it in different words that need to be translated by some priest who has spent too much time reading the book and pretty much nothing else.
The point: How does the way someone else lives affect me when it doesn’t have an effect on me? I can have all sorts of bad feelings about how someone else lives, but I guarantee that someone else is probably having bad feelings about the way I live for some random reason, no matter how wonderful I live my life in the constant vigilance to the ideals put forward by the Shania (if my religion happens to be the worship of all things Shania Twain). Unfortunately, no matter what you do, someone else is going to disagree with how you live your life and think that he or she knows better than you do, and then for bizarre reasons DEMAND you live another way. I like the old George Carlin belief system that people need to just leave people alone (to paraphrase several great speeches he’s given over the years).
5. Which brings me to the story lines of national politics. As I read stories on national news, I find absolutely nothing in the way of interest for any story because none of them make a single difference to me whatsoever. The stories that do are glossed over and treated as afterthoughts, meaning no one seems to care about things we should care about. So, what kinds of subjects should we hear about. Well, I have a few:
A. Health care. I’m not talking about Obamacare or how badly the health care exchanges were implemented. Although I will say that those stories COULD have started off a conversation about things that NEED to be discussed, but never will. What needs to be discussed then? Cost. Health insurance is expensive, and it shouldn’t be. Because our government has taken a hands off approach for so long, we have the worst health care system in the world, aside from dictatorships that use firing squads as a health care remedy. For the first and second world, our health care is abysmal because we allowed the whole system to evolve from a really bad premise to begin with. Government has been playing catch up with our system since day one, and that means that any solutions aren’t going to happen from half measures; the whole system needs a restart and the old money profiteers need to be put out of the system so that we can put together something that shows we are, in fact, the one first world nation in all ways. What does that mean? Everyone gets health care covering pretty much everything they need. We start to create a system that is proactive rather than reactive, meaning that you don’t seek health care for the first time AFTER you’re already starting to get sick. One of our largest problems in this country is diabetes, which if you understand the disease, all of our efforts to combat it are to alleviate the symptoms, and that’s it. We do the same thing for cancer. Instead of massive money being spent on “curing” cancer, most of our procedures are designed around helping people “live with cancer” instead. I don’t advocate stopping the reactive measures, but I’d really like to see us work on the proactive measures. This would mean a completely change to our health care mentality, and that’s never going to happen as long as these decisions are being made by people who are so indoctrinated by this payment system plan, because they are completely incapable of seeing any other alternative. And a personal belief of mine is that pharmaceutical companies might be a huge part of the problem as well, although there’s lots of room for debate in that one. An example: I was dealing with some depression issues a few years back and went to a therapist, who I immediately discontinued seeing because her “solution” to practically everything was medication. I didn’t need medication to stop being depressed. I needed to feel better about my situation by finding solutions to my situation. Medication was a stupid solution, but this therapist saw no other alternative. A friend of mine was diagnosed with “stress” and prescribed lots of medication. She started on it for a few months before she dumped it and took an alternative route NOT condoned by her prescriber. Her “new” route consisted of paying for massages, and she’s doing a lot better these days. The interesting side bar to that is that her health coverage didn’t cover massage therapy but did cover medication. Again, the eye is on the wrong ball, and as long as we’re a part of this system, it’s never going to change. Additionally, for those struggling with severe issues and looking for alternative approaches, seeking help from a private rehab centre might be a viable option to consider.
B. Elections and Representation. Every election you hear people start complaining about how so few people participate int eh voting process. There’s a reason for that. It’s not because they’re apathetic, happy with the system as is, or lazy. Many people don’t participate because they don’t feel they have a voice, no matter how hard political parties try to convince them otherwise. This was seen during the whole Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. In case you weren’t completely following what was happening, people were dissatisfied with government and their lack of influence on it, so they tried mobilizing outside of the power structure that already exists. What they discovered was that the entrenched power system gave them no voice, and when they made a stink about it, the powers that be ridiculed the protesters and treated them as crazy people. Occupy Wall Street was defeated early in its infancy as the media treated it as a joke, constantly ridiculing its members by pointing out that they had no better ideas, were disorganized and weren’t making any headway in their protests. Having watched the back and forth, I came away with a different perspective, albeit a more economic one. The media responded as the powerful business interests they were, seeing Occupy Wall Street as a financial threat, which caused the media to treat them as outliers and a humorous joke. Wall Street itself, responded in kind, as they were the financial target of these people who were upset with how there has been little oversight over economic impact issues from this part of the political system, and because of such a response, there never will be.
The Tea Party has been an even more interesting animal, mainly because this was a protest from an actual economic power base that couldn’t be ignored in the same way. Remember, Occupy Wall Street was coming from the poor, disenfranchised side of the political spectrum, much easier to knock its wind out right from the beginning. But the Tea Party was a disorganized response to dissatisfaction from the political right, which is inhabited by those with financial clout, meaning the people Occupy Wall Street were actually protesting against. As they were now organized against OWS, they came about immediately after with a power base that demanded the Republican Party (its main level of constituency) to respond. As a result, they’ve entrenched themselves as a part of that party. What we’re starting to discover is that they only represent an elite economic power base, which has its own representation mainly because it can afford to make its message known through financial clout during elections. We’re starting to see this with their attacks on Obamacare, and specifically the members of the Senate who supported it. We’re going to see a lot more of this in the months to come.
But what it means is that the average person has less and less touching of the strings of government. And this means that as we move closer to the next election, people have come away from these previous two movements convinced that nothing is going to change because when they did try to become organized, nothing happened, unless they were already rich and powerful. To participate in that environment is a lesson in futility, and nothing that either political party says is going to change that. The Republicans don’t have any intentions of representing the disenfranchised, having sold their souls to the very franchised economic elite, and the Democratic Party is counting on these disenfranchised souls to somehow embolden them with the ability to maintain power in a system that still rewards the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised. Basically, the Democrats have to convince people who bought into “hope and change” that more years of their control will somehow bring about “hope and change” when the originator of that message did very little for them other than try and fail. The alternative is to opt out of participation, and sadly enough the expectation is that rhetoric can somehow make this different. Good luck on that.
C. The economic future. This is really what should be the main focus right now. There is no lack of books on the concept of low-hanging fruit that has disappeared from the process, meaning that all of our advantages we used to have available (like continued open spaces for colonizing land, economic opportunities for business growth, and access to untapped natural resources) are practically gone. We no longer produce new things but seem to have fallen into a rut of continuous reinvention of old things, like the consumer electronics show that instead of showing us new technologies on the horizon continues to show us new variations of television sets that keep reinventing the old technology. When every house in America that needs a television has pretty much already bought one, we’re forcing a false need on people that they’re no longer responding to with checkbooks. The last few major advancements in technology that drove need have been around for some time (televisions, microwave ovens, computers and cellphones), meaning that we’re not producing anything that’s changing the paradigm to move us towards new need. Sure, you can argue the iPad was a new invention of this nature, but it just gathered a number of different products and combined them into one, which, if you think about it, actually is a step back on the production of new things list. As long as our future consists of combinations and reinventions of old things, we don’t have a lot of progress to take advantage of, which would explain why industry innovation has focused a lot more on consolidation than progress, meaning the idea of expansion by robotizing a labor force and outsourcing to countries where its cheaper to produce something.
Anyway, this has gotten much longer than I originally intended to write, so I’ll stop there for now. I would hope, by now, the basic idea has been relayed.
Last year or so, EA/Maxis released the latest version of Sim City, the continued offspring of one of the originally wonderful games to come out on PC. Unfortunately, it had some things wrong with it. Okay, I’m being nice. It had a LOT wrong with it. So much that after a week of trying to play it, I deleted it from my hard drive. But that wasn’t enough. I then burned my hard drive, pulled it out of my computer, threw the hard drive out the window, installed a brand new hard drive and even replaced my operating system so that there would be no hint of that game ANYWHERE near my computer. Okay, not exactly the events that happened, although all of the events DID happen. But the rest of that had nothing to do with Sim City. My hard drive crashed for another reason, but I hated Sim City so much that I’m now blaming all of that on Sim City. It’s kind of like how I blame all of my bad relationships that I’ve had with women on Anne. Not because Anne did anything wrong, but she gets blamed and happened to be at the right place at the wrong time when it came time to forever blame every bad relationship on someone.
But I digress….
The problem with Sim City was that it was designed with great mechanics but horrible mathematics. Let me explain. Imagine a town where its population is made up of tens of thousands of people. And then you throw a big party so that lots of other people come to your town. Well, and then after the party was over, instead of leaving town and going back to their own towns, all the people stay and then move into any available house that happens to be located anywhere nearby. If someone already lives there, that’s okay. They’ll just stay there and the person who lived there before can drive around the town all day, making it impossible for fire trucks to get to fires because everyone’s on the road without an actual place where they actually live. Then add more people (cause they called everyone on their cell phones and told them about the grate party), and then you have a cluster**** of people driving around and walking down the streets all day long, and anyone can work in any job because education no longer is important. Just people.
And you get an idea of why the game kind of goes nuts once you start to actually get any decent population.
But the biggest complaint was that the game forced you to play online (on EA’s servers). And quite often, they’d crash. Or just stop working. Or whatever.
People demanded an offline mode (because that’s what every previous version of Sim City was), but EA said that was impossible. And then people abandoned the game. So EA has announced that is NOW going to allow offline play, which by the way I did mention they said was completely impossible, right? All along, I got the idea that EA was trying to sell us stuff in real money, and the only way to do that was to make sure everyone had to play online, kind of like Blizzard is doing with its current crap load of games, like Diablo III, another game I abandoned shortly after a few weeks of realizing it was a shadow of its original versions.
So, will this cause me to go back to Sim City? No. Not a bit. I own the game and haven’t reinstalled it on my computer mainly because they screwed it up enough that I saw no reason to ever do so again.
What I do know is that I will NEVER buy another Sim City game again. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: I used to work at Maxis and used to love everything about Sim City and the Sims. Not any longer.
Yesterday, I received an email from some entrepreneur in San Francisco who “offered” to sit down with me for lunch in San Francisco in a very expensive location (described in detail in the email as if that location was somehow a selling point of having a casual lunch with some woman I don’t know). Anyway, she was appealing to the fact that I was a writer who needed to “move to the next level”. And I guess that somehow this lunch “date” was going to make this happen in some bizarre way.
I should point out that the lunch “date” we were going to have was going to cost me $350, but if I was one of the first responders, I’d save $100.
So, being bored with my life, I googled her name and discovered that she seems to be under all sorts of very interesting legal scrutiny for a bunch of really interesting decisions she made over the years, some involving marital spats of a friend of client of hers and some actions she may or may not have taken as a part of some domestic dispute.
But I didn’t find anything to indicate that she was successful in helping anyone’s career along, which made me wonder why would someone, out of the blue, contact me about something like this when the only thing she had going to her name was somewhat of a scandal involving domestic abuse. And I really couldn’t come up with an answer.
So it got me wondering if there’s a whole industry of people like this who devote most of their time and energy to taking advantage of hopeful writers (inventors, game creators, or whatever) and offering them to somehow put them in touch with their elusive dreams. Cause it was a nice little appeal when I first read it. Of course, being the kind of person I am, I’m always going to investigate it first, but I wondered how many other people someone like this ropes in on such schemes. Hell, for all I know she’s legit and secretly has been the success behind Stephen King and Brad Pitt. I doubt it, but I’ve never been considered all-knowing.
What it does tell me is that people in my field need to be really careful because these sorts of leeches are out there seeing gold in the paths of dreamers and believers. Those of us who are the creative type constantly want to believe that our passion can bring success, and people like that are constantly there to make sure we stupidly take these types of leaps right before emptying our wallets and disappearing into the woodwork again.
