Tag Archives: economy

Why Don’t People Trust Facebook?

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There’s an article today on MSNBC, indicating that according to a poll, people generally don’t trust Facebook. The reasons the article comes up with are interesting, but it left me wondering if there’s not something a bit simpler going on in the minds of people who are focusing on the social networking site. Let me put it into my theory:

1. People don’t trust a company that continues to chip away at something it claims it’s not trying to do, and by that, I’m referring to compromising privacy. Since day one, Facebook has been trying to gain more and more information about people and then use that information for its own personal profit. When called on it, they back down, a bit, and then turn around and try another attempt at circumventing their own rules, while pretending that’s not what they’re doing. It’s like a romantic partner who claims never to cheat, and you keep finding him/her with someone from the opposite sex, and once confronted, he/she claims it will never happen again. And then next week, it does. That’s the main problem with trusting Facebook. It’s almost as if they feel they’re too big to be held responsible for their actions. And when confronted, they really don’t care.

2. People don’t trust a company created by young people who galavant around as rich, privileged asses. Since Zuckerberg became the new billionaire on the block, people generally don’t like him. The corporate world doesn’t like him because he shows up at fancy meetings in a hoodie. The common people don’t like him because he’s that geek kid that screwed you over in secret and then tried to pretend it was someone else. Girls don’t like him because he’s a womanizing prick who wouldn’t ever get a girl if he didn’t also happen to be a billionaire. Face it. Every social situation that appears around him displays him as an ass. Sure, he could be the greatest, nicest guy around, but the movie about him makes him look like a backstabbing smart kid who even screwed over his own best friend for money. It’s hard to trust someone like that, even if the movie was completely false and it turns out he’s nicer than Mother Teresa.

3. Facebook doesn’t actually do anything to generate an actual profit. You see, that’s the thing that’s been bothering me since day one. It’s a social networking site where THE MEMBERS are the ones actually doing all of the socializing. Facebook is like the road you drive on to get somewhere. It isn’t cool. It doesn’t make your trip more enjoyable. It’s just there to get you from one place to the next. Yet, it’s like the road then sending you a message indicating that it’s now going to take all of your vital information and sell it to all of your friends (and then charge you for it) because you decided to actually drive on the road to get to work once. The analogy is a bit strained, but I’m sure you get the idea.

I have a few friends of mine who gave up Facebook when it first started to become big. They haven’t looked back since. Sure, it’s harder to keep in touch with them, but I don’t get the impression that they’re hurting for their decision. They didn’t trust Facebook since day one, and as a result they gave it up. To be honest, I may end up doing the same thing myself because it hasn’t proved to be all that useful to me over the long haul. My writing business hasn’t improved, and when I go onto Facebook, all I see is the same kind of messages I used to see before, except now it seems like Facebook has changed its algorithms again so that not everything is showing up as it should. And recently they announced that they want to charge people in order to make their updates appear. To me, that’s bordering on final straw territory. So, I may disappear soon, but not because of anger or anything, but because like the majority of the people in that poll: I don’t trust Facebook.

But worse, rather than just not trust Facebook, I’m starting to realize I may not even want Facebook. It doesn’t really serve much of a purpose for me if it wants to monetize me rather than monetize stuff I do and give me a cut of the profits. I work for a company that monetizes me as part of its agreement to pay me a salary. Facebook doesn’t do that. It expects the activity for free and then wants to profit even more off of it.

Which brings me to the soon to come public release of Facebook on Nasdaq. The owners of Facebook are trying to push that phantom value even higher and profit even more. But secretly, I suspect that there’s really no value in a paper tiger that doesn’t actually do anything other than rely on its constituents to fill in the active feeds. Without the people, Facebook is just another web site, like Myspace and someone useless like a Netscape browser. Talk about bubbles. This seems like the most ridiculous helium bubble we’ve ever manufactured, and when it bursts, I hate to be covered with the Myspace residue that is going to explode over everyone.

What Political Issues Should Be Focused On?

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Every time we come close to a major national election, I’m left scratching my head at the innane subjects that end up becoming “important” politically. You know the things I’m talking about. Stuff like abortion, stem cell research, soccer moms and legalizing marijuana. Sure, some people find them important, but for the most part, they’re fringe topics that tend to get people galvanized around unimportant issues that end up costing votes for elections. And we fall for it every time. So, I decided to look into a couple of topics I thought SHOULD be issues, and then ask if you have any thoughts or ideas of your own.

1. While the economy is an important subject, just focusing on “the economy” or “jobs” are useless endeavors because they really don’t get down to the point of actually doing anything. Sure, I could run for office and say “Duane is FOR a good economy and believes we SHOULD put people to work! So vote me for me!” Sadly enough, a bunch of politicians are probably already preparing their campaigns to say almost that. In rhetoric, it works great. In substance, well, not so much. Mainly because it doesn’t mean anything. Killing puppies is bad, but no one is actually advocating killing puppies, so getting on the side of the pro-puppy crowd doesn’t lead anywhere but to banal arguments that don’t lead anywhere. That’s the economy problem.

So, if I was going to talk about fixing the economy, I could probably focus on taxes, even though those often fall into banal areas as well, because then we end up in a pro-left “more taxes” or pro-right “taxes are bad”. Instead, I say that we k now that taxes are inevitable, so why don’t we focus on what exactly we’re taxing in the first place. And I don’t mean whom, such as rich versus poor. Yeah, I think the rich could probably afford to pay more taxes, but let’s be honest and think about the possibility that perhaps that’s not exactly right either. While they CAN afford more taxes, is it really right to say they SHOULD be paying more taxes? While I could argue that they’ve probably benefited more from capitalism than someone who is poor (which WOULD be a good argument), I’m going to take a different tact and focus on what should be taxed, because I think there are avenues where we are completely missing the boat.

Here me out here. What I propose is that we legalize prostitution and then tax anything and everything that has any ties to sexual barter exchanges. Right now, there is a HUGE blackmarket industry that is nothing but this type of behavior, and the only reason we don’t tax it is because the people who would pay those taxes are afraid to report it because they’d probably then get arrested for all sorts of blue laws we have instituted in our scared of sex morality that exists in our society. Face it. There are people paying other people for sexual behavior, some of it pretty innocent and some of it pretty damn bizarre involving all sorts of devices, machines, trapeze-apparatus mechanisms and some involving things that still shock the crap out of me. But I know it takes place because there are people out there doing it and enjoying it. None of them are evil, bad, dishonest or any other letter-wearing designation either. They’re normal people who have decided that that is how they interact with each other. And some people throw a fit because it doesn’t fit into their sense of morality.

Get over it. If you don’t like it, don’t participate in it. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be acknowledging it and taxing it. Believe me, there’s a LOT of money that changes hands here in this area, and once it becomes legal, you start to clean it up as well. Sure, people are still going to do their naughty things, but legalizing it gets organized crime, gangs and predators out of the business. It also allows women to have an easier avenue to protect themselves from some of the problematic people out there who prey on them because they figure the illegal nature of the business keeps them from every having to face justice.

Now, we could also legalize drugs, but at the same time I realize there’s a more health-related problem involved here that needs to be dealt with. Perhaps if we went into it with all eyes open, we might see drug behavior as a problem that needs to be dealt with through therapy and positive actions, rather than having someone try to get off drugs while in lockdown, waiting for his court case for possessing illegal substances.

2. International Diplomacy. We haven’t gotten this right in over a hundred years now. We’re still dealing with foreign entities as if we’re still part of the Napoleonic era. Governments aren’t that way any more. Major powers don’t really deal with each other on the international stage as they used to with detente and brinkmanship. What is needed is a different perspective, involving a more game theoretic foundation of tit for tat and compliance understanding than “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” nonsense. If you look at the problems the US is having with Middle Eastern countries, almost all of them stem from brinkmanship and religious intolerance (from both sides) than it does from actually attempting to engage with people as part of a give and take relationship. Right now, our foreign policy has more to do with where we might get our next barrel of oil than it does with how we get along with people who like types of music you can find on iTunes, yet much of our actual engagement comes from those avenues through social networking sites than they ever will through economic business ties being handled by corporate entities trying to corner the market on petroleum.

Years ago, I used to have disagreements with a young man who was fresh from Iran (shortly after the Shah was deposed). He was a strongly ideological Persian who believed in east versus west superiority (for whatever reasons, which surprisingly were not religious), but we actually became friends and arguments and conflicts practically ended overnight when I discovered he was a fan of Madonna, and I managed to get him a copy of Madonna’s “Sex” book that he so wanted but couldn’t bring it to himself to buy for himself. To be honest, I never heard an anti-western comment from him after the day he received that book. While I can’t verify he still didn’t feel that way, it was amazing what a sea change was made over such a simplistic gesture.

That our government has NEVER figured this out shocks me more and more as the world becomes a much more dangerous place while still moving towards some bizarre sense of a global economy.

3. Education. This, to me, is probably the most important issue that our country should be dealing with on a daily basis, almost with the same sense we gave to putting men on the Moon. Our whole country should be rallied around the idea of improving our educational system not so that we somehow obtain minimal standards, but that we start to surpass the very dreams we had back in the 1960s about the great civilization we hoped to one day become. Children should be taught calculus by sixth grade as a standardization and expectation because it should be almost second nature. Parents should be irrate that their children don’t know more than they did at their age and do everything possible to make sure that we don’t continue to churn out stupid people. Reality show programming should be seen as the embarrassment to America that it really is, instead of some kind of ideal that people look up to. My god, there are people who want to be Snooki and the Situation, and somehow seem proud of that. College should be an expectation for all, not because it’s an enlightened goal of the few, but because it’s necessary to build a society of free thinkers who should be challenging everyone about practically everything. I would like to see a presidential debate that is moderated by the audience who shows up to the event wanting to know the answers to real questions, not just packaged answers to questions pre-screened by candidate panels beforehand.

That’s all I’ll go with for now, because now I’ve depressed myself as I realize we’re never going to achieve any of this, and we’re doomed to go another century with people striving for the lowest standards possible, mainly because they never learned to challenge themselves.

2 Factors That Will Seriously Influence the 2012 Presidential Election

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The Ivory Tower I live in where everything makes much more sense

Unfortunately, whenever it comes to political topics, almost every article or piece of analysis is so tied into someone’s personal political perspective that very little information is ever shared. The 2012 Presidential election is no different. If someone is a diehard Republican, the person probably doesn’t like President Obama and will argue all sorts of things negative about him, his current administration and his future prospects. If someone is a diehard Democrat, chances are pretty good that the person will see only great things about President Obama and horrible things about any conservative, and blinders will lead the conversation that way. Almost always, someone on one side of the fence will see any analysis that favors the other side as biased, and everything that favors his or her side as on the level. Some things rarely change.

I’ll come straight out and say it. I don’t really care who wins the presidency in 2012. If Obama wins, great. If a random Republican wins, I’m fine with it. If Zippy the Wonder Clown wins, I’ll dust off my clown shoes and laugh right alongside him. Again, I don’t have a stake in this race.

What I do have is a perspective that is seeing where things are starting to come out right now. And two factors will make the biggest difference for 2010. Not really anything else, aside from some cataclysmic event or great deal of fortune that no one has anticipated. Those sorts of things always make a difference, and as I can’t predict those sors of things, I’ll just leave it at that. So, let’s talk about the two factors.

1. The Economy and Jobs. Right now, this is probably the one factor that will make or break a reelection for President Obama. And unfortunately, most economists don’t seem to have a clue on this one, so I’ve stopped listening to them because most of them are myopic tunnel breathers who are so stuck in their own thoughts that they haven’t come up for air to realize what’s really going on. First off, the economy is not the stock market, or even the housing market. It’s not the banks. It’s not the future of Google, Best Buy, IBM, Microsoft, GM, Ford or Texaco. What really matters right now is the perception of jobs. And I don’t mean Steve Jobs. People are out of work, and the job outcome is getting worse, not better. Just as the Bush Administration tried to lie its ass off and pretend that it was creating new jobs, the Obama Administration is doing the same thing. And like before, people don’t buy hype and crap for long. When people are out of work, see other people losing their jobs, hear nothing but horrific stories of the job market, a Wall Street economist talking about how great the job market is means very little.

Just today, the Navy announced it was going to be letting sailors go and not approving as many for continuing their careers. The Air Force is about to do the same thing. The Army is about to move into a wind-down with its conflicts, and the obvious next step is going to be the same kind of layoffs there as well. Government has decided the military is no longer off limits for cuts, so cutting is exactly what’s going to happen. More people are going to lose jobs and be tossed out of the military when their tours are complete. This means a whole bunch of young people are going to be pushed out into an already depressed job market. More people are going to be competing for the same soft labor jobs that have been so scarce already.

What exactly does that mean? Well, let me ask you this. Do you really want thousands of people who just came back from war put into no-win labor markets where they trade stability for dispair and uncertainty? I’m not sure I do. But then no one really asks me these things. I’m not exactly sure I feel all that comfortable with discouraged, out of work, young men who have been carrying around guns for the last few years with people who hated them shooting at them as their former career. I don’t see a lot of good things coming out of that mix.

But the point is: If Obama doesn’t find himself in a situation where jobs are being created left and right, his reelection chances are pretty slim. All other factors are irrelevant. Much as the first Clinton election proved, it really is all about the economy. The economy took a previously popular war president and made him unemployed. Without something changing quickly, Obama doesn’t look like he has a great chance at a sure-fire reelection.

2. The Republican Candidate. Now that I said Obama needs to turn around the economy before the election, there is one factor that might make the economy somewhat irrelevant. If the Republicans don’t come up with someone they can rally behind, then a bunch of ghosts yelling profanities at the president aren’t going to lead to an election that pushes the incumbent out if there’s no one there to replace him. Right now, the Republican front runners are horrifically lacking in any merit. None of them have any real charisma. None of them have a futuristic vision, aside from “Obama sucks”, and none of them have any ideas that sound any different than “stop Democrats from taxing us” and “cut spending”. Neither of those ideas are worthy of rallying a group of people towards a positive election.

As long as the Republicans continue to run around with no head and spend their energy taking pot shots from behind the barn, Obama may just win by default, even with the worst economy in recent history, even with no jobs created, and even with defaulting the government because the president is incapable of providing enough leadership to cause an actual brokered deal. There’s only so much, “the Republicans are evil” that the public will take. But again, if the Republicans (evil or not) can’t come up with a solid hitter to back for the election, none of it makes a difference.

Which leaves us with a very dismal election that might end up being the lowest turnout in many decades because people may just give up on the whole enterprise. The 2008 election caused people to become invigorated with the idea of changing government for the better, but because it hasn’t really changed, other than a new group of incompetent leaders replaced a group of previously incompetent leaders, that wave of energy may just sit out the whole next election. And that would be a horrible result, because the one thing I hate more than incompetence, corruption and narcissistic leaders is a country of people who don’t care because they don’t feel their input really matters and that things are going to suck no matter who they put into office.

Now, the funny part of this article is that if it gets any review at all, it will probably be massively negative because neither side will come away from the reading thinking I was on its side, and therefore, they will disapprove. That’s somewhat ironic because that’s the problem our country is going through right now. And no matter how much I try to point it out and push us to a better place, you can’t make a horse drink even after leading it to water. Sometimes, you have to get a new horse and let the old one starve.

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

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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.

When it comes to the deficit, the numbers are just too much for the American people

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There’s a brilliant scene in one of the Austin Powers movies where Dr. Evil, played by Mike Meyers, is announcing to the UN, or world council, or whatever fictitious organization was in charge of the world in those movies, that if they do not give him what he wants, he will unleash his viciously evil plan. What he asks for is “a MILLION DOLLARS” and his advisor tells him that a million dollars isn’t a lot of money anymore, so he has to up his demand to “a TRILLION DOLLARS.” They replay that same scene in a subsequent movie where he time travels back to the 1960s and he demands “a TRILLION DOLLARS”, causing the world council people to laugh at him because they recognize there’s not a trillion dollars in existence in that 1960s period.

Fast-forward to today, and the United States is trying to figure out its budget. The Republicans, the Democrats and President Obama are stuck on how to do it, how much to do it with, and what exactly they should be doing in the first place. The architect of the Republican plan, some guy previously unknown to anyone named Ryan, proposed a future budget cut over years of some numbers of trillions of dollars. President Obama, as of today, is announcing a plan to cut the budget by $4 trillion. Currently, we’re trying to head off a government collapse because our debt ceiling needs to be raised beyond its current level of $14.3 trillion, so there’s this request to raise the debt level even higher.

Here’s the problem. It’s not the fact that the government is now spending enough money that we’re currently $14.3 trillion in debt. Okay, that’s a problem. But the real problem is that $14.3 trillion means absolutely nothing to the average American, because the average American is lucky if he or she has $50,000 to access at any one time, and it’s easily arguable that most Americans are lucky to have $20 in their wallets at any one time. So talking about $14.3 trillion in debt is like saying we have a gazillion dollars that we have to cut because we’re already spending a quazillion each year. In other words, the numbers have absolutely no relevance to anyone.

Years ago, when the debt was somewhere around $1.2 billion, the news media used to do really inventive little games like say something along the lines of “if you lined up dollar bills all the way across the planet, you’d still have money left over after crossing the entire globe” or other equally interesting, yet ridiculously ludicrous examples. It would always cause the listener/reader to go, “wow, that’s a lot” but that’s usually all it would do. Then they’d go back to being oblivious to the events of the day because, to be honest, the events of the day didn’t really matter to them. Archie Bunker was on TV, so it was more important to get home and watch that.

Now, we have politicians on all sides of the aisle trying to convince the American people that this outrageous amount of money is important to the average American. But it’s not. Because it’s so much money, and so much out of control, that people just laugh at it and pretend it wasn’t mentioned. I mean, who wants to deal with the some ridiculous amount of debt when you might have debts of your own to deal with? I have a student loan I’m trying to pay off, so that number of thousands of dollars is far more significant to me than $14.3 trillion that was racked up without me ever having a say so whatsoever. Because when it comes down to it, they’re either going to figure out what to do with it, or the country is going to collapse. But no matter what they do, I’m still going to owe thousands of dollars in student loans. NO ONE is going to bail me out. Because no one cares about me like they seem to care about a phantom amount of money that was spent by people who were spending money that was never theirs to begin with.

And that’s the problem right there. The money we’re talking about was spent by people who took it upon themselves to dole it out any way they saw fit because it was never theirs to have to worry about in the first place. It was all fiat money that they imagined, yet they spent it as if it was real, lining the pockets of very rich people and very well-connected corporations. But when it came time to pay the piper, they turned back to us, the people, and said it was our responsibility to pay for what they fucked up because they never gave the implications a second thought when mom and dad went out of town and left them the keys to the liquor cabinet, the car and a credit card with no limit.

So, when the president gets on the horn and tells the rest of us that the debt is out of control, and WE need to do something about fixing it, he should sort of understand that rest of us really don’t give a fuck. We were never involved in the spending of that money, no matter how many arguments are made about how “we” put them in power to abuse the system in the first place. People we didn’t know had access to spending money they never should have spent, and now it’s time to pay up. Well, none of us are all that concerned. As a matter of fact, we see a lot of the bickering going back and forth between politicians as whines about how they don’t have access to more money to blow and spend like there’s no tomorrow. We don’t see the Republicans as the “fiscal conservatives” no matter how many times they try to pretend they are. And we don’t see the Democrats as the keepers of responsible government. All we see are a bunch of kids who had access to mom and dad’s credit card and now that mom and dad are at home, seeing the bill from the credit card company for the first time, there’s not a whole lot of compassion from the American people towards these kids who are now arguing about how we should raise their allowance because they already spent their money on video games.

So, if you’re going to try to convince the American people that they should care, you have a great deal of work in front of you. And so far, not a single politician has ever even attempted to do that.

The Real Reason No One Can Beat the Ipad 2: Everyone Else is a Moron

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Believe it or not, this isn’t a rant against the Ipad 2, or even for it. It’s a rant against everyone who keeps trying to “beat” the Ipad with their crappy knock offs. Let me explain.

The Xoom. Okay, this should be the best thing since sliced bread to beat the Ipad. It’s an Android tablet. But what’s the first thing they do? They overprice it. Where they could have sold a gazillion of them, they decided they had to make as much money on each one, so now it’s just a slight alternative, which most people will look at and say, “well, no thanks. An Ipad is still a bit cheaper and a better product.” And it is.

Then there came Samsung. Their Galaxy tab seemed like it would be the thing to really do it. It even advertised at a pretty nice competing price. But what does Samsung do? Rather than just let the thing speak for itself, they do the next worst thing. They speak for it, and pretend it’s speaking for itself. What am I talking about? Samsung decided that they would post a lot of on the street interviews about their tablet, but they’re not really on the street people who are who they claim to be. They’re ALL actors, paid by Samsung to say exactly what Samsung wants you to hear.

Now, everyone is laughing at Samsung, and the Galaxy tab is a joke on itself. Great job, Samsung. And I was actually pulling for you until this crap.

Bah, Samsung!

Taxation Gurus Just Don’t Seem to Get It

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CNN Money ran an article today from Jeanne Sahadi advocating the need to raise taxes “because the looming debt problem is just too big”. Her argument goes on to say that Republicans are misthinking the whole issue because as long as the debt remains large, the country can never go forward.

Well, my response is twofold. First, we need to stop putting taxation into a partisan framework. That never solves anything but makes the issues so tied to other agendas that there’s no way to have a rational conversation about the issue in the first place. By making it partisan, any response of negativity to Sahadi immediately gets lumped into a “he’s a Republican, and therefore he is only limited to Republican talking points.” Whenever the conversation moves to the next level of analysis, the responder can immediately throw it, “oh yeah, but Republicans also believe (fill in the blank, and you realize why no rational debate is then possible).”

Second, and this is really my more important point, at what point did government become so important that it became the elephant we SEE in the room rather than the one hiding in the background? In other words, why is government always the most important factor for the debate? Why isn’t the individual considered more important?

Think about it this way. If we go back to the original foundation theories of government and agree that people came together in a Hobbesian fashion to escape from our evil surroundings, we understand that we then gave up a little bit of our freedom to achieve security. Now, no matter whether you buy Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau, at no point did we ever really give up the original reason for getting together, meaning that we got together because it was mutually beneficial to us, NOT because we were all desiring to create a government. At no point did the foundation of government ever supercede our reason for creating government. In other words, those who create a government are always more important than the government itself, not the other way around. Yet, in every one of these arguments, especially the one put forth by Sahadi, government is the reason we do the things we do, so that we are required to sacrifice at the altar of government, instead of the other way around.

I pay taxes. I’m not rich, but because I am low middle class, I pay money into taxes that really makes an impact on my daily life. The majority of people who pay taxes are like me, lower middle class people who don’t make a lot of money. Any increase in taxes to us hurts big time, yet we’re rarely ever represented in these conversations about taxation and government. Instead, the Republicans represent the interests of the very rich, and the Democrats represent government attempting to fund more money for governmental programs. In a fair world, we’d have another party that actually represented a social class of common people, but we don’t have that in this country. Oh, both sides claim to be that representative, but they never are. They represent their own interests and those interests are never ours.

What it comes down to for the majority of us is a question of how much we value government. I, personally, don’t value government all that much. I see it as a mechanism to keep gangs and drug dealers from killing me on a daily basis. And to be honest, government doesn’t even do that very well. Serious amounts of money are spent on a drug war that fuels this continuous battle between mean streets and the common person, and the common person is rarely seen as the one to which government answers. An example: A few years ago, I was beaten and robbed by gang members who targeted me because of my color. Instead of a serious response to the victim, which you would expect in a case like this, or at least might see on television played by actors who don’t represent real police officers, I ended up in a bizarre situation where two police agencies argued IN FRONT OF ME over which one was responsible for taking the report. Neither one of them wanted the responsibility. Of course, after all was said and done, the culprits were never caught, and I suspect they were never even pursued. Over the next few weeks, before I finally moved across the country to get away from the cesspool that is Hayward, California, I read the blotter reports in the newspapers about how the same individuals were continuing to target citizens in the EXACT SAME AREA EVERY DAY, and even escalating to public buses, convenient stores and train stations. In other words, government didn’t care one bit whatsoever.

Yet, when it comes to taxation, Sahadi believes that if government is starting to fail financially, it is within our requirements to respond immediately and fix it. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Right now, we spend so much money on things that have very little to do with the average American who does pay taxes. Let’s go over a bit of that list.

Wars in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq: Who benefits from this? Me? I don’t think so. Did I care about freedom in Iraq to begin with? No, not really. I’ve never had contact with anyone from Iraq before. Nor have I had contact with anyone from Afghanistan or Libya. Sure, I buy gas, and some of that comes from some of those places, but if we weren’t fighting a war in these places, we’d still be buying gas from these places regardless. I don’t even suspect it would cost that much more because prices are controlled by OPEC, not tin foil hat dictators.

That pretty much translates to our entire military budget. Yes, it is responsible for protecting America from foreign enemies, but honestly, we’re not actually doing that with our military. We are located in countries that are not ours, fighting for issues that have nothing to do with freedom in the United States. And in order to conduct these wars, we have had presidents (the last two specifically) advocating to suppress our freedoms, which means we’re fighting to lessen our freedoms, which is ironic in its own cynical way. If we were defending America specifically, I’d be happy, but we’re not. We’re pushing agendas of people who are not the lower middle class. And we’re backing up those issues by sending young lower middle class soldiers into wars to support people who rarely serve in the military themselves.

Most governmental agencies that the common person desires are usually handled by the states. My education is handled by the states. The federal government does nothing but institute standards that no one ever achieves. Our federal government has no idea how to educate the youth of America, yet they feel worthy of forcing their standards on the states regardless. I don’t see the value in this. Sure, I can see the value of making sure we don’t teach creationism in school, but nowadays, federal government isn’t even doing that; it’s doing the exact opposite and then fighting with itself over those specific, political standards. Not necessary and not helpful.

Heath care seems like it’s important, but when you threw it into politics, it starts to get useless. Tylor Cowen, in his excellent article, The Great Stagnation, points out that even though the United States spends more money than most countries on health care, we have some of the lowest levels of life-expectancy and our health success rates are dismal at best in comparison to nations that actually spend less of their GDP of health care. Like most governmental issues, we do horrible with our money because we keep believing in American exceptionalism, when we don’t realize that exceptionalism doesn’t always mean better. Part of our problem is that we have a lot of money already in the mix that should be spent better, not a need for more money to be spent on doing the wrong things more often. That last sentence is probably the most significant of this essay but will echo with no one.

In the end, it will come down to partisan drivel politics again where we have people who have a stake in winning an argument over issues that should never be decided by partisan politics. But we don’t seem to care because we’ve gone way beyond caring about what’s important and care more about winning arguments that don’t benefit us even when we do.

As a taxpayer who pays what he believes to be enough taxes, I don’t subscribe to the theory that more money is necessary to fix the problems of bad spending. Unfortunately, the people we have in government are not the best people when it comes to spending wisely; they never have been. Instead, we have the people who are best at convincing people to vote for them because they’re good at making people feel better about themselves, especially when we live in a country of people who should be a lot more critical of their own shortcomings. We’re educating ourselves horribly, we’re grossly overweight, and we let ourselves be ruled by foolish passions over issues that require serious contemplation. But this will fall on deaf ears because we’re a nation of people who likes to hear that we’re great, and when that person comes along who strokes our ego, we’ll vote for him, and we’ll wonder why no one ever does anything about fixing our country. We certainly won’t get the answers from anyone who is paid to tell us what we already keep hearing, but then we’d stop paying them if they didn’t. We’re pretty good at creating vicious circles in this country. Another thing we’re good at, eh?

The Future of America is in its Past

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In case you haven’t noticed it lately, America has stagnated and isn’t really moving forward anymore. I know most people don’t want to face that possibility, and most people reading this (which means anyone aside from my stuffed animals and imaginary friends) will probably just ignore it and hope for the best. Unfortunately, we’re a bit beyond that option, and even though most people will attempt to embrace that plan, we’re kind of screwed if we do.

You see, according to Tyler Cowen’s thesis, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, we’ve pretty much exhausted all of our free ranges for expansion and exploration, leaving us with pretty much nothing but what we already have. And America was never designed around resting on its laurels; it was designed to expand and develop out, something it can’t do if there’s nowhere else left to go. Now that we’ve entered this inevitable recession, we’re hitting a point where we start to realize that there’s nowhere else for us to go, and that all of those jobs that we expect to come back might just not, and thus, we’re going to have to figure out how to make lemonaide out of already eaten apples. Yeah, I’ve run out of metaphors, similes and allusions. I’m a lot like my country.

Americans live in a system that promises that anyone can do wonders with little as long as that someone is willing to put forth a bit of elbow grease. Unfortunately, that’s kind of a lie, something we’ve been telling each other for generations, even though the lie relied on a lot of extra room to grow that we figured would always be there for expansion. Once that land started running out and the resources as well, we felt we could keep telling the stories long enough to pull a bait and switch, figuring no one would live long enough to really ask any important questions, at least not before we retired and/or died first. Well, we’ve reached the saturation point of that possibility, so now we’re kind of stuck in a future that relies on the lies of the past never being called, like markers in a poker game where we’ve been holding two aces, hoping its the best hand in the game, even though someone else may have had three twos showing all along. Yeah, more bad analogies, metaphors and similies. I’m just full of it today. Or them. Whatever.

Which leaves me with an observation that is probably important because we’re now hitting a point where we’ve already been called on our bluff. Everyone wants to see the hands of the cards we played, and all of the money is already on the table. Man, I’m just going to push this bad analogy all the way to the bank.

So what do we do? We’re in the middle of the unending recession, and we’ve been pushing forward with the belief that it had to end eventually because that’s what recessions tend to do. But if our economy doesn’t really have the power to pull us out of the doldrums, then where do we go from there? What if the recession we’re in happens to be the harbinger of doom that we should have been expecting from the beginning? What if all we have left is that Pandoran conclusion and hope just isn’t enough? Where does a rapidly expanding nation go if there’s no more room within which it can expand?

Part of the solution was the possibility of an untapped area of manifest destiny that offered a never-ending canvas for exploration. By that, I mean the Internet and the ever-expanding territory of a cyber universe. Unfortunately, even that has its limits, as we’ve realized that eventually everything explored in that world has to have some ties to the old world as well. While it might be fascinating to think one could live within a cyberworld, in reality, one still has to maintain a certain existence within normal society, even if to fulfill certain Maslowian needs. Forever expansion means little if someone still has to eat, drink and sleep in normal civilization. The days of Matrix-like exixtence are not yet achievable, so we’re still stuck with having to full basic, simple needs.

Which leaves us with having to find ourselves new frontiers in a walled garden of our own civilizations. The United States could offer endless expansion in the days of praries that went on forever, but once we hit the Pacific Ocean, we started to limit our ability to travel further. Now, everything has been spoken for, so any further expansion comes at a step backwards, a sort of inward despansion, for lack of better word. Much as cell growth is halted and the cells begin to collapse within themselves, feeding off one cell to sustain another, our future is now a tendency to cave in on our progress and trade resources amongst our already established infrastructure as we consolidate and seek to find new frontiers within those already explored. Our future expansion then becomes within, rather than out, mainly because we are without.

If we’re going to survive this change in perspective, we need to realize that we can no longer cannibalize upon outside resources to which we no longer have access. For territory, we must look at that which we already control. For fuel, we can no longer just take from nations that have weak military forces as the world is becoming savvy to that approach and compensating to it as well. We are going to have to consolidate amongst our own people to determine new ways to fuel our movement by either designing new technologies that allow us to use our own resources or to lessen our movement. The simple endothermic physics involved should go without saying, but we’re often not that intelligent when it comes to such matters.

If we’re ever going to figure out our future, we need to look to the rest of the world and see how it has compensated for our future situation already. When Europe ran out of space, it sent colonists to the new world to explore. We are a result of just that. However, when we rebelled and declared ourselves independent, we cut off an avenue of expansion for Europeans, and thus, forced them to realize that their expansion was forever finished, that they would have to learn to live with what they already had. We didn’t think about their reactions or thoughts because we were too busy thinking about how unique we were in comparison to the rest of the world. But in reality, all we were was lucky enough to still have room to grow. Now, we don’t.

So, our future should very much be the same future that was faced by Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries. When they ran out of space to explore, they consolidated. They began to move back over themselves and create from within. They didn’t just stagnate and disappear as we seem to think will happen to us if we stop expanding and growing. If we’re smart, and sometimes we can be, we would realize that we need to start looking to our future by examining what others like us did in the past. If not, we’re going to continue to try to expand as Germany tried to do in the 1930s, before the rest of the world rose up and stopped them. We might not see ourselves in this light, but if we believe that our expansion is never-ending, and we see ourselves as exceptional to other nations, it’s hard not to see us moving that way. That’s never a good thing.

Unfortunately, I doubt anyone will really listen, and we’ll go that direction regardless of any common sense or rational thinking. American exceptionalism relies on the very nature of believing in irrational outcomes to rational thinking. Think of it as a game theory where the result is an expectation of the highest payoff with the least possible chance of happening, but expecting it nonetheless. That’s kind of where we are today. I’d say more but American Idol is coming on soon, and we all know what’s more important.

What it All Comes Down to

Computer Games, Economics, Memoirs, Movies, Politics, Social Networking, Television, Writing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I guess it’s time for another update on what’s going on, what’s on my mind, and where I think things are going.

1. My Readership. I suspect I really don’t have anyone reading this blog (my main one). It gets printed also on Open Salon, which might grant me a few readers there, but even there it’s a crap shoot as to whether or not anyone actually reads (or cares about) anything I have to say. I also import my blogs to my Facebook profile, and even though I have a bunch of “friends” there, I suspect practically no one reads anything I have to say there either.

It’s a real problem for a writer who wants to be taken seriously when no one reads anything he has to say. It gets really frustrating. I mean, Snooki can write a book and it becomes a bestseller based on her outrageous behavior alone, but a consistent writer generally has to kill someone in order to get anyone to read his stuff. And they wonder why so many literary types kill themselves before they ever become famous, often discovered after they blew their brains out over the frustration of trying to actually make it as a writer or an artist.

This means when I post my blog, I get tons of traffic, but I suspect it’s a bunch of bots that are trying to get people to buy their shit rather than actual people reading my blog. My spam filter logs dozens of spam messages a day, which are all the type that say something like: “Read your posting, and I completely agree with you. You should try out this new version of sex medication which can be found at….” Yeah, it gets really annoying and frustrating.

But just because I suspect one of my stuffed animals might be reading this by tapping into my wifi at home, I’ll continue….

2. Snow. I really hate it. I do. I’m not from Michigan, even though I live here. I’m from California, and if I could afford to live there or could have ever found a job there, I would be there right now. I hate the snow. I hate the cold. I turned on my heater two nights ago for the first time (been using an electrical set of heaters all Winter long), and it was so much nicer than just being able to heat up one small room, and not very well either. Even though my electrical heater could get the room up to about 70 or so, it felt like it was 45. I’m now using my real heater, even though it’s expensive as hell. But I can’t take the cold any more. I really hate it here.

3. The Whole Nook vs. Kindle Debate. I’ve written a few articles on this because I bought both a Nook Color and the $189 Kindle 3G + Wifi. I’ve completely given up on the Nook. I had two subscriptions to magazines with the Nook Color (Consumer Reports and the New York Times Book Review). I gave up trying to get the Nook to download Consumer Reports. It would start to download and then just stop. I would check the wifi signal, and it would register as fine. After three days of trying to download a magazine I already paid for, I gave up, cancelled my subscriptions and I will never use the Nook again. Contest over. The Kindle wins. It might not look as nice, but at least I can actually get content onto it. The Nook Color is a piece of shit that should never have been sold to people. I will never recommend it to anyone ever again.

4. Egypt. Things are probably going to get really interesting now that Mubarak went on the air and basically told the protesters: “I hear you, but I just wanted to say go fuck yourselves. Have a nice day.” He’s decided that even though people are out in the streets risking their lives, he’s not leaving. The Army has now backed him, which means that one of two things are probably going to happen. They’ll crack down on the protesters, and this will be one of those sorry moments in human history that people try to forget when talking about how great a people we are, or the people are going to end up going the way of the French Revolution, overthrowing the government and killing Mubarak if he doesn’t escape out of the country first. If you’re a dictator, and you pretty much give the finger to your people when they demand you step down, you really don’t have a lot of options that can play out from that moment on. I mean, all sorts of things can happen, but right now, it’s going to be a slaughter of people unless a whole lot of people back down, and when people are backed into a corner, they usually strike back instead of back down. Unless they’re Americans. Then they either sue you or back down and say that they want to spend more time with their families.

5. Relationships. I don’t know anything about this subject. I’m not in one. I don’t recognize one when I am in one. I don’t even know what women are, although I see movies with them in it, so I do believe they might exist, although I can’t verify it in person.

6. Politics in the USA. We’re going to be heading towards another presidential election with no electable people in the Republican Party, a current president who has done nothing to be reelected, other than make arousing speeches that don’t translate to actual action, and a whole lot of self-important politicians who think they deserve to be the next leaders of the free (in theory, at least) world. Right now, the front runners for the Republican Party seem to be Sarah Palin (the joke that keeps giving), Newt Gingrich (a pompous airbag that comes installed as standard equipment), a just-announced “I’m seriously considering it” Donald Trump (another rich buffoon who thinks that being rich translates to leadership potential), and a bunch of other people no one knows, has ever heard of, or cares one iota about whatsoever. So, right now, I’m calling it a boring presidential election where we reelect Jimmy Carter, um, Obama.

7. The Academy Awards. A bunch of movies I didn’t see, don’t want to see, and don’t care about, are competing for the top honors this year. As you can guess, I’m holding my breath in anticipation.

8. SyFy Becomes Shark Attack Channel. I don’t know when this happened, but my favorite channel (I remember actually asking a television station provider if they carried the SyFy Channel and not caring about any others) went from being a station with original science fiction programming with shows like Stargate SG1. Atlantis, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Battlestar Galactica (then Caprica), some variation of Star Trek, and lots of that sort of stuff. Now, it’s Man-Killing Shark and really bizarre movie of the week crap that stars Erik Estrada as a small town sheriff who is fighting a shark that has grown feet and chases people on the beach, but Estrada, who plays Skip William, is afraid of sharks because a shark killed his family in a drive-by shooting in Compton. Okay, that’s not a real show, but it should be. Who stole my SyFy Channel?

9. The Federal Budget is Out of Control. Um, when has it ever not been? We’re approaching the debt ceiling in February, when they told us that if we didn’t do things right, we’d be hitting that debt ceiling by September. Um, it’s FEBRUARY and we’re already arguing for having to increase the limit. And this is the government that’s trying to FIX the economy? Really?

10. Facebook Went Public. I laughed my ass off when I heard it was going to happen. If ever there was a bubble corporation that has absolutely no value whatsoever being sold for so many billions, I couldn’t find one. At least GM makes cars. At least Microsoft puts out a browser or operating system every now and then. But what does Facebook actually produce? Your content. Your friends. Your information. In other words, not a damn thing. Yet, they’re bad boy of leadership is now a multi-billionaire, and they’ve been launched as a fake IPO (a real one wasn’t done because the SEC would have hit them with all sorts of legal injunctions, which should automatically tell everyone something’s not on the up and up, but even that doesn’t cause people to take notice). Yeah, I use Facebook, but it’s such a non-entity in the grand scheme of things and is really only as important as it is at any one moment, knowing that it can go the way of Myspace in a second. Or like AOL, which still tries to regain some importance. Or sadly, like Blockbuster, that sad commentary of a video rental store that hasn’t realized it was obsolete ten years ago.

11. Verizon’s iPhone. Finally. Not that I want an iPhone on Verizon, but now I don’t have to read 10,000 stories manufactured by CNN about how great it would be to have the iPhone on Verizon. It’s there now. Leave me alone and stop hyping the stupid thing on your news site. Nobody really cares, as we discovered when no one lined up at the early Verizon Store openings that day, letting the event come and go without much fanfare. Nobody really cared.

12. Groupon’s Super Bowl Ad. All of the people who are upset about this incident don’t want to even deal with the ramifications of what really happened. First off, they all got upset at the ad where Groupon poked fun at itself by using the controversy of China and Tibet as its canvas. Well, here’s what they’re not getting, won’t get, and especially won’t ever own up to. The humor went over their heads. Not that they didn’t get it. It went OVER their heads, meaning they had to be smart enough to realize what was going on. Consider the source. It came from the direction of Christopher Guest, who is well known for creating comedy that not everyone gets, mainly because it pokes fun at people who are on stage and represents entire groups of people who when they watch it don’t always realize they’re being seen as the morons they really are because they’re so locked into their own little worlds that they are incapable of realizing the rest of the world sees them as ridiculous. It was the exact same humor used with Groupon, and of course, the people watching it were not Christopher Guest fans. They were Super Bowl fans, which I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’re talking about two completely different intellectual mindsets here. Fill in the blanks to figure out which one I’m probably insulting here. I don’t really care. I’m not selling ads. Those people just didn’t get it and went nuts against Groupon. Why am I not surprised? I’m also not surprised that no one else is either.

13. Lindsay Lohan’s Theft Charge. Okay, I’ll admit it. I enjoy reading about the many demises of Lindsay Lohan. I don’t know her, I’m not a fan, and I probably shouldn’t care. But it’s like watching a train wreck happen in front of me. I probably should call 911 for help, but I can’t stop watching. I don’t get the same trill out of Charlie Sheen. Nothing about him fascinates me, nor does his drama. Lohan’s, on the other hand, completely fascinates me because I keep thinking that ir probably won’t get any worse, and then it does. I don’t even think she stole the thing, but that’s not even what keeps me interested. What keeps me interested is how someone can take her fame and continue to destroy her career, her future and any support from the community that she might ever have. Just the other day, her legal team says that it’s not going to deal with the allegations in public; they’ll deal with it in court. Then the first day of the trial, Lohan tweets her whole ordeal to the public, trying it out in the public again, even though that’s exactly what they said they wouldn’t do.

I can’t stop watching.

14. Writing. I’m taking a break from my current novel and working on a screenplay. Then I’ll be working on a word text game app that I’m designing for the android platform. I realized recently that there aren’t a whole lot of word text games out there any more, and I think it would be fun to create a new one. I remember how fun they were to create back when we were first designing computer games for the early systems, before graphics took over the industry.

That’s really it for now. If you’re actually reading this, let me know. I’d really like to know that there are people actually reading the blog.

Amazon, Please Stop Trying to Sell Me a Cover for My Kindle

Economics, , , , , ,

A few weeks ago, I bought an Amazon Kindle. It wasn’t the cheapest one but the one with both wi-fi and 3G. I realized I needed one at home, and I don’t have wi-fi there, nor do I want to get wi-fi just so I can use my Kindle. Anyway, I’ve been really happy with it. I’ve downloaded a few books, and now I get the Washington Post delivered to my Kindle each and every day so I don’t have to buy a hard copy of USA Today (which I’ve described as trying to eat candy for breakfast…no substance, lots of news). So I’ve been happy.

Well, when I bought the Kindle, I realized I needed a cover for it, so I bought a really nice M-Edge cover. I’m happy with it, too.

Well, every time I try to sign onto Amazon, Amazon tries to sell me a Kindle cover. I’m good. I’ve got one. Thanks. But it has a huge presentation at the center of my Amazon screen. Rather than try to sell me books (which would be useful on this book reader I just bought), Amazon is convinced it needs to sell me a cover.

I don’t need a cover. I bought a cover. I’m good. Let’s move onto books.

OUTFIT YOUR KINDLE, the ad tells me in very large letters with a spread of new covers that I don’t need.

I looked for some kind of procedure to disable these ads, just in hope that I might be able to start seeing ads for books I might want to buy. But no, there was nothing I could find.

So, now that I’ve decided not to buy a Kindle cover based on these ads, Amazon has now started emailing me about my “need” for a Kindle cover. I received two separate emails in the last week, all designed to “assist” me in finding a new cover/holder that I already have.

Look, Amazon, I understand how you want to monopolize and make as much money as you can, but let’s be frank here. I don’t need two covers for my Kindle. I am happy with the one I bought. Stop trying to sell me crap I don’t need, because I already bought it when I bought the damn Kindle in the first place.