the united states practices this to a degree... but only ever in hindsight. when the market wobbles, or collapses, the government is there to make everything better. laws are made to make sure whatever happened will never happen again. whatever these laws are on their introduction appear to maybe, possibly have a bite and by the time they land on the president's desk have had other, completely unrelated things tacked on and have been emasculated to the point of irrelevance. if the failed enterprise or broken market segment was bad enough, it is rewarded with a cash injection and we are told that this is a good thing for all of us. all politicians do this -- republicans and democrats. this is not ever going to change.
corporations use their influence in our government to have regulations enacted that hinder their competitors. a great example of this is the fcc. the fcc has become a tool of the mega media corporations. colin powell's son ran it for years, handing out all kinds of goodies to companies like viacom and news corp and making it harder for smaller entities to compete.
at this point, the corporate parasite can never have it's death grip upon our government loosened. it needs the government host in order to survive, through the government dole and occasional regulation. all the while, some of us beg for increased regulation that we know will never happen. there is only enough oversight to keep things from collapsing entirely -- to keep the system alive. and all the while, the folks who supposedly demand less government intervention, encourage regulation that limits competition and removes regulation that encourages it and also freely accepts taxpayer handouts without complaint.
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being an avid reader of bloomberg, the economist and reuters, i read firsthand, the official capitalist reaction to the occupy movement. there were the occasional young idealists who feebly attempted to admit the failure of the current capitalist model and express sympathy for the movement. then there were the well established columnists who disdained the movement and heaped scorn upon it to obviously protect their own interests.
the most common criticism of the movement was that it had no agenda. my sense of the movement was that people got sick and tired of the 1% getting away with fucking our country all the way to the bank. they simply wanted to say "we see what you are doing and are tired of it." the only tangible thing i did sense was a desire for change, though no one could, or would define what that change actually would have been. it seemed to be simply a desire to move away from our broken economic model that works well for a few people and not at all for others.
so, now that the cops have run out of pepper spray and rubber bullets and the camps have all been cleared out and the movement is effectively over, how do we make things better? do we beg our government to make things more equitable like we've been doing for the past few hundred years? fat chance. do we elect a new generation of politicians, to be inevitably bought by exxon, koch, tyco, and everyone else? there seem to be no real options. even after the near collapse of our economy, the only thing that has come out of it is a handful of underwhelming regulations and a shitload of money paid out to arrogant assholes like aig, general motors, citi(can you say citi field?) and a host of others. i mean their hands weren't even properly fucking slapped. nothing has been done to keep it from happening again, and guess what? we are supposedly headed into another recession. out of the frying pan and into the fire.
so, again, how do we fix this?
the end result of any unregulated economy is failure, so my answer is, we don't fix it. we stop trying to fix it. we stop regulating the economy altogether.
remove the fed. eliminate all patents and intellellectual property. remove government intervention in the marketplace completely, with the exception of environmental regulations. legalize drugs. eliminate all subsidies(food, oil, etc.), domestically and appearing as aid to other countries. allow monopolies in all industries and watch competition and innovation disappear. allow monopolies to fix prices and gouge us. have a flat corporate tax rate. allow insider trading. allow companies to lie about their revenues with no repercussions. allow giant bonuses for the 1% and let them pay their workers nothing. allow banks to lose everyone's money and ruin the economy. eliminate the minimum wage. allow individuals to run away with retirees life savings with no consequences. allow industries to crumble under their own corruption and incompetence.
once the bandaids have been removed, you will be able to see just how fucked up and incapable this system is. even the obama hatin', joe-the-plumber lovin', git-r-done sayin', permanently unemployed ex-drywaller won't be able to deny that there needs to be definitive change.
we will never move forward until we stop trying to keep it alive. leave it alone and let it die.
also, the overuse of popups is seizure inducing. accidentally hover over a link for too long and all of a sudden, something you didn't want to happen just did. this bit stems from facebook's psychotic quest to cram an insane amount of information and functionality into a tiny space. all this is doing is degrading the experience of using facebook.
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i left myspace for facebook because myspace had become an unusable monster. it was overrun with hackers, had massive pages that wouldn't load and the interface hindered whatever task i had set about doing to the point where i no longer had any desire to use it. plus, my privacy was at risk. i left friendster for myspace because that website was so incredibly slow, it was unusable. we all left myspace at the same time -- the time when revenue goals trumped usability. rupert murdoch's first major failure.
as an aside, i half read an article in the new york times yesterday on how facebook is trying to move into the realm of defining consumer habits or some crap like that with this latest release and this strategy ties directly into mr. zuckerberg's famous "privacy is over" philosophy. the thing about privacy and facebook is that while you are logged in, with every single website you visit facebook compiles and sells that data to a third party. how do i know this? a co-worker's girlfriend works at the company that buys all of your web-surfing data. that means if you forget to log out and buy yourself a salad shooter, check your bank balance or indulge your daily fetish, this information is in now the public realm. if you think privacy is an issue on facebook with this release, just wait until everyone can see all the sites you visit on some future iteration. “donald zechariah rainwater is on ladyboycentral.com.” like!
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now, i am not a typical social media user. i am an admitted ux(user experience) snob. though ux is what i do for a living, i like a simple user experience not for any academic requirements, but because i am admittedly not all that bright. things is, the fact that many of my friends, who are smarter and more “typical” users than i am are fed up is interesting. most of these folks came over to facebook from myspace around the same time i did and for the same reason.
when companies enter the phase of placing priority on revenue as opposed to usability, there is no going back. investors must be appeased with more and more cash. and getting this cash means making the user's experience less and less pleasant. the product declines. people go elsewhere. this is how the cycle works.
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i had a conversation with someone recently about facebook and their position in the industry. they were adamant that facebook will always be on top of the heap and were genuinely confused when i disagreed with them.
look at myspace, dell, microsoft, ebay(dare i say), the american auto industry and other ginormous companies currently in some mode of decline. there is no such thing as consumer loyalty. if there is a “better” product, people will use it. i also think there is a limit to how much people will allow their privacy to be compromised.
every time the top dog slips, there are others waiting to step into the ring, with a simpler and better product. after all, facebook wouldn't be where it is if it hadn't fit that description at the right time. any loss in momentum for a company like this can be catastrophic.
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don’t get me wrong, i’m not a hater. i really don’t care about facebook, one way or the other. it’s just that, as a user advocate, i would like to remind y’all that if you want your companies to succeed, always give your users / customers / whatever top priority and tell your investors to take a back seat.
"Most government entities have pensions and benefits plans that far outstrip comparable private sector pensions and benefits. As NASA closes down the space shuttle program, we're learning that the contracts guarantee the retirements plans for the contractor's employees whether they work or not. These unfunded obligations are said to actually triple the debt the government is owning up to--and it's one area every Tea Party group can look into."
the line that gets me is "As NASA closes down the space shuttle program, we're learning that the contracts guarantee the retirements plans for the contractor's employees whether they work or not." are you supposed to work until the day you die to receive your pension? if that is the case, it is not a pension, is it?
my best friend from high school recently retired from a lifetime(20 years) of military service and now receives a pension from the us army, "whether he works or not." are you outraged about that? are you outraged that soldiers get college educations paid for by the government after devoting a few years to this country? what is your logic?
to the best of my ability, i have tried learning about the tea party with an objective eye, but the more i learn about the it the more i see this sort of selective outrage.
what this means is that the more successful this blog is, the more they will be paying in unnecessary bandwidth. talk about wasteful spending!
not to mention this is a total ux fail. only users who can afford the fastest connections can even load this page in a timely manner. at my job, with it's t-whatever, it took over 15 seconds to load this one page. if i was using dsl, fuggedaboutit. seems funny that a political "movement" that parades and parrots the founding fathers' ideas of things like equality and stuff would fuck americans who can't afford such a connection.
as an aside, the post that this image is inside of is the blog's introductory post. it describes the author as a woman named donna wiesner keene. this woman apparently worked in the 2nd bush administration. i wonder where her tea party hat was when he was writing blank checks for his deficit busting trillion dollar wars.
does any gun owner in this country honestly believe that their colt .45 is going to stop an abrams m1? are they going to be able to stop a cruise missile? can they shoot down an f-117?
military hardware since the beginning of the 20th century has shifted the balance so much that there is no way any militia in this country could ever overtake this government, ever. sure, one or two militias may have a .50 caliber machine gun laying around in someone's basement, but that is hardly enough firepower to overtake the american military, which reports directly to the commander in chief.
the argument is nonsense.
this is another nugget: "It found that 80 percent of Americans recognize that childhood obesity is a significant and growing national challenge, and 50 percent think childhood obesity is so important that money should be spent now to address it."
that's what get's me, that people are so concerned that they want their elected officials to borrow more money we don't have from china to solve this. instead of maybe getting their kids off the xbox and away from the cheetos, the same government everybody loves to hate, because it's always in everybody's business must step in and become the nanny for these ignorant parents.
and how is the government supposed to take care of this problem, as people are so averse to regulation? what other solution is there than another useless ad campaign, reminding people not to be stupid. this could come in the form of an ad that is easily skipped over on peoples' tivos.
i've got another solution. let them die. really. let evolution do what it's been doing for billions of years.
it is not the government's obligation to keep people from killing themselves who are too stupid to understand that eating fast food all day long isn't good for them. all this does is perpetuate people's laziness -- "let the government sort out my problems", insead of "i'm not going to eat that bag of lays and go for a bike ride."
seriously, the only way these idiots are going to get on board is if the coddling ceases. seriously, let them perish.
heaven knows i'm no fan of apple. i can't stand the fanboys. i can't stand the smugness, the elitism. i can't stand the culture.
i went to the mall recently and literally saw a velvet rope set up in front of it's apple store for all the morons waiting to buy the ipad. it was pathetic. i mean, a red velvet rope. please, like it's some kind of privilege to buy something anyone can buy.
another thing i can't stand is apple's support for it's legacy products.
i remember back in the day, apple released it's last non-power pc laptop, the powerbook 190. it was the last apple product to use motorola's 6800x0 risc processors. what i remember about the powerbook 190 was that about a year after they stopped selling the thing, they made an announcement, stating that it would no longer be including support for pre-power pc macs in future operating system releases, thus instantly rendering all 0x0 macs irrelevant and useless, including this powerbook, barely past warranty. people had just shelled out $2,200 a year ago and now they were being made to shell out another few grand on new hardware they shouldn’t have to buy just to stay current.
i've seen the company do this with their operating system time and time again. they rush out a new version of the operating system every few years and refuse to support the previous version, often making some excuse that the features of new software are incompatible with the older operating system. i am still running os 10.4.11, because i don't want to give the bozos any money. i am told i must upgrade the operating system all the time. but meanwhile, every time i open itunes i am asked if i want to upgrade to the latest version. the reason is obvious -- itunes is a cash cow. they will support itunes because it brings in revenue no matter what version of os x you are running and simultaneously not support anything else, forcing you to spend $$$ on an os upgrade and possibly a hardware upgrade.
apple doesn't bring in anywhere near the revenue from it's software offerings as it does it's hardware. so, the more often a user is required to upgrade software, the more opportunity apple has to peddle it's pricey hardware. the operating system is the ruse and it's a good one. i've said it before and i will say it again. os x is better than anything else, period. but the apple's hardware just plain sucks, period. it looks neat, but is consistently overpriced and underpowered, which is why my next mac will be a pc.
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i have a 2nd generation ipod touch that is a little over a year old. i was thrilled to hear about how i was going to be able to use my ipod as a dedicated skype phone, with the impending release of iphone os 4 and it's addition of multitasking, but guess what? multitasking isn't available for 2nd generation ipods, so my new ipod is useless.
this means that apple wants me to go out and shell out at least another $200 for a new piece of gear i don't need, because the company won't even support hardware that is barely out of warranty, again. 1st generation ipod touch owners can't even upgrade to the new operating system.
apple had the balls to charge me $10 to upgrade to os 3. os 2 could barely be passed off as a beta and they wanted to charge me to put an os on the thing that should have been it's 1.0 release.
funny thing is that apple tends to screw it's early adopters. anybody remember the iphone price reduction fiasco? all the fanboys camping out got royally screwed by apple. my old boss was one of those people. his reward for camping out in front of an apple store was for apple to stick it in his ass and laugh about it all the way to the bank. only after getting called on it in the media did apple do anything about it.
i'm anxious to see how apple screws it's first gen ipad owners.
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apple's revenues are always sky high, come it's quarterly earnings reports. excessively high revenues mean that a company is charging way more for it's products than it costs to make them.
a few months back, someone opened an ipad and summed up the cost of manufacturing for each unit. apparently apple is charging around twice what it costs to make an ipad. being as companies tend to have consistent revenue philosophies across their product line, i would gather that all of their products have the same cost/revenue ratio.
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i mean, duh. apple wants money, just like every other asshole multi-national corporation. there is nothing inherently wrong with that. but, beyond the fact that apple is perpetually trying to squeeze money out of it's user base and overcharge them for the "privilege" of using it's products, the thing that irks me the most and the point i've finally made it to is that while this "genius" laden company has the image as being some kind of enlightened, smart, hip company, apple's planned-obsolescense-revenue-generating-tactics do little more than create landfill, which is the opposite of smart. this is not enlightened. this is not smart. this is destructive and ignorant.
i'm not buying another ipod, apple. you can go fuck yourself.
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last week, i walked past a chronicle newspaper stand and saw a headline stating that an attempt to block california's environmental mandate will be on the ballot come this election season. this came after a headline, that ran a few weeks ago stated that the high speed rail initiative, which was already fought for and approved by voters, is heading back to the ballot as well.
i am in disbelief as to just how clusterfucked this state is when it comes to politics.
this is the same state that replaced it's governor it just elected with one liner movie star, famous for being nothing more than a total idiot on screen. and now they hate him. truth be told, i think he has done a better job than anyone gives him credit for. yeah, his hubris really screwed him up in the beginning, but his setbacks made him a more shrewd politician. the only reason people hate him now is because of the economy, which he ultimately has little over. generally, people don't like or trust politicians -- less so in times of recession.
now, regardless of where you stand on these aforementioned issues, this flip-flop behavior is a collosal waste of everyone's time and money. it impedes any progess and momentum.
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there are two major problems with california.
problem one is that california has a significant population of strict partisans -- government hating righties and government acknowledging lefties. these two factions don't work together at all. it's my way or the highway. this was the reason why there was no budget for quite a while. instead of working together and realizing that the solution may be a combination of both tactics, the righties wouldn't allow higher taxes and the lefties wouldn't allow budget cuts. in the end the righties won, as they always do, but it would have been nice if these people could play together and spared the state the shame of looking like a bozo state.
problem two is the fact that the people have too much power. ordinary people should not be involved in politics. i mean, look at how poorly people drive. you want these same idiots driving your state? the same state that, on it's own has an economy as large as a successful western european country?
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i had a rule when living in new york, never trust a californian.
at one point i needed a roommate to fill in the spare bedroom of my bitchin' south williamsburg loft. i get a call from an old san francisco dj named jon howard. he was pretty well known back in the day. i remember seeing his name on many fliers. so, mister howard comes over to my apartment and says he wants the room. he is really excited about it and assures me the that we have a deal. we set the move in date and he takes off. the day of his move in, i make it a point to be around, to help him out. the time when he was supposed to show up rolls by, i don't see him or hear from him. then an hour passes. two hours. i call the dude up and ask him where the fuck he is. he tells me this crazy story about how, just the day before, he'd been walking around in soho and ran into a friend, who had a room for rent in his apartment on tompkins street. he took the room after we had our agreement and never even bothered to tell me.
this is why you never trust a californian and this is why ordinary californians should be as far away from any power as possible -- they are unreliable.
yes, this state is run by a bunch of morons -- it's people. california would be better off outsourcing it's politics to some other state.
i had a further epiphany, here in san francsico when trying to cross 19th avenue. 19th avenue is a notoriously busy street that requires you to push the button and i had just missed getting to the intersection to push the button. i had to wait an entire extra traffic cycle just to cross the street. it happened again, when trying to cross the great highway to get to the boardwalk -- the button was broken and i couldn't even cross the street without being run over.
cars are automatically, through passive sensors, accounted for and influence the traffic cycles for each intersection where there is a stoplight. why can't this be done for pedestrians as well?
the idea is this; on the stoplight sits a sensor that accounts for people waiting underneath it. when a certain number of people are seen to be waiting, or when a small number of people have waiting for the maximum amount of time, the light changes and gives the pedestrians the hand signal.
simple and effective, but it doesn't stop there.
as we've all seen before, there are always older people, of handicapped folks, who take much longer to cross. the contemporary, timed approach embodies discrimination and a possible violation of the american's with disabilities act. if i can't make it across the street in the given amount of time and i'm stuck in the middle of the intersection, when the light has changed and get hit, you can bet i'm gonna sue whatever city is responsible for this.
so, in addition to the sensors that determine if people are waiting, there is a radar system that keeps track of the numbers and speed of people crossing the street. each pole has sensors pointed towards the other poles, determining the position of people in the street. the timed approach would be scrapped entirely. this would benefit both drivers and pedestrians. if i'm a quick walking pedestrian and cross the street really fast, the cars wouldn't need to wait for all that extra time. if i'm older and it takes me more time to cross, i would have that time, enough time to cross and not have to live my life in constant fear.
this system of radar or some kind of sensor could possibly even be used to replace the underground sensors that only detect automobiles and not bicycles as well. i've sat at so many intersections, waiting for the light to change, because bikes don't set off the sensors.
the 20th century tools we are given to do the important things in our lives simply do not work for us. this needs to change.
the shows incorporated live acting, dancing, projected sets onto a screen that had a patented ratio of dots per inch. this allowed the audience to see through the screen, so that the actors behind it would appear to be interacting with whatever images were on the screen. george eventually sold this patent. if you ever wondered where all the buses with giant ads, from top to bottom came from, it was this patent.
now, we threw all sorts of projections on that screen, there were film projections, video projections and computer animated projections. fun stuff. also of note, is that all the projections were in 3-d, a full 15 years before the 3-d film trend has hit theaters.
we received most of our hardware as donations from whoever george new. one day; a new silicon graphics monster would arrive, another; a new mac, and another; a sparcstation. i remember the first time i laid eyes on a quadra 840av. wow, what a machine.
anyway, at one point, steve jobs made a most interesting donation. he donated prototypes of a computer that apple fully developed, but would never bring to market. the computer was a powerbook 5300, without a screen, just a pen to write stuff on the screen, like a newton. it had a 3.5" floppy drive, ethernet and other stuff, like any powerbook would. it was the world's first tablet computer. the operating system was a hybrid of os 7.5 and the newton os. it functioned like a mac, but had handwriting recognition, so you could run any mac application.
apple knew they were way ahead of their time and could never market it, so they gave them to george in order for him to make them into something. the only thing he did with them was stick them in actor's hands and tell them to run around with them and touch the screen every once in a while. i remember them often being dropped. i doubt any of them even work now.
this is a true story. don't believe me? ask adam savage, another ex-coates employee and great guy.
now, what is the point of this post?
the ipad is a $500 iphone on steroids. it doesn't run osx, not even a hybrid, but an os made for a cell phone and mp3 player and yet wants to parade itself as the real deal. os x is a mature operating system, with about 40 years(if you count all the unix stuff) of development done on it. it works, well. it is stable and multi-threaded. presently, the iphone os can only run one application at a time. push notifications have been hobbled by apple. one can only load apple sanctioned software onto it, for fear of someone else's building any app that competes with their own. it's a toy operating system. i can't believe they made the decision to run the iphone/itouch os on it. this was obviously a decision made in the marketing department in steve's absence. this decision will forever hinder this product.
apple has hastily announced plans to upgrade the os to 4.0. so what? how long will it take for the iphone os to catch up?
then there's connectivity. what, it has a single wired interface? no usb ports? no firewire? why would i spend money on this? oh yeah, and it costs $700 for the 64gb non-3g model? honey, please! for about $300, i can buy a netbook and install os x on it and have a fully functioning operating system that runs photoshop and has a real fucking keyboard and can connect shit to it.
apple has apparently sold 300,000 of them already and declared it a success. this only points out that there are 300,000 fanboys and girls who have at least $500 in their wallets to hand over to their favorite company, which they would do anyway. i'm not saying it won't take off and won't make apple a bazillion dollars, but i won't shell out money for any product i know in my heart is inferior.
