Posts Tagged Rant
We Are Screwed!
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life, Values on August 26, 2009
Did you know that those who intend to break the rules and laws set about today are not afraid of digital rights management? Did you know that a person who is accustom to breaking the law and shooting people with a gun will not be worried about a new gun law? Do you think a rule is going to all of a sudden mean anything to someone who cares nothing about the law in the first place? Did you know that any encryption can and will be broken, any copy protection will be thwarted and it is guaranteed to be a level playing ground shortly after any encryption or copy protection is invented? Did you know I could do anything on the internet with full knowledge that no one can track me because organizations do not cooperate or work together? Did you know that anyone could do that if they knew enough?
Where does that leave us? If less and less people believe in God, who will settle all accounts, and bring about people to experience their own values, then everything is ok, as long as we can get away with it, righ? If all the rules in the world can be gotten around at some point in time, and people only care about getting caught or not, then how can order be kept? Crime and punishment, yay, how far do you think that can really keep things going? One police officer per person, maybe that would work, but who would police the police, because I am sure there are just as many law breaking law enforcers as there are law breaking people in the general public, percentage wise. Don’t you think we would run out of money fairly quick to pay all of the law enforcement? Throw them all in prison or jail, someone might say. Do you know how much money that costs just to keep those going? Don’t you think something is missing from our equation, because if you really think it out, and follow how things are going, it does not quite work out.
I think at some point maybe some focus should be put on teaching people why it is best to follow the rules. Do you know why the rules are the way they are, or where they come from, or even why it is best to do things a certain way? I am exploring that myself. It seems that somewhere along the line, love and truth come into the picture, along with justice and good. I am no hippie, and I have a very different idea of love than what I have been hearing the world scream since childhood. I had to take some time to define things in my life, like sex, love, feelings, truth, right, wrong, and the differences of each one. I had most of them confused, and wrongly connected to each other, some leading me to another, and in wrong orders. Without God in my life, or in my world view, I think it would have been really hard or impossible to define a lot of these points. Love is most simply defined at its most pure by this, if you are willing to die for someone, then you love them. Love is not a feeling or an accident (falling in love is a little off), it is a choice, and feelings are involved, but feelings should not be your lead, or you will eventually fall out of love, and then leave. Feelings are wonderful, but they should not guide your life any more than which way the wind blows. Steering back on course, I think we take so much for granted. We are living in a world that is graced by the benefits of principalities and values and we have forgotten where it all originated. If each of us would only get a glimpse of what the world would look like if everyone held our own values, we would have to rethink things a bit. We need to know where we have come from, the origin of the good laws we hold, and we need to understand that we came from God, who designed and created us for a purpose, who knows what is best for us as a master mechanic knows his engine, and has graced us time and time again with priceless information on how were were intended to function, how things were meant to be and be done, and we should be able to make the clear connection that when things are not done the way they were intended to be done, we run into problems, ultimately leading to destruction.
Hah, as if I have all the answers. I don’t, but I would hope that people would take a moment and think about it before they have no other choice and the clear natural results come knocking.
The Hated Honest Deal
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in Business Ethics, Life on August 17, 2009
Lately I have been thinking a lot about hosting companies, customers, and what people care about, what their motives are and if an honest deal is at all appealing to many people these days. I just have been noticing a trend, which makes me sad, where honest companies asking for an honest price, can not get it anymore, because to the general public, it seems like it is asking too much. We are not talking big prices either, we are talking stuff that a kid could afford on an allowance. It just makes my skin crawl to hear someone say that for their business $45 dollars a month is just too much, and then in 2 days they spend that much money on just 2 of their 90 meals in a month, some spend that in one meal, I know I have. I am talking about business people, and people just doing it for the fun of it, they both seem to have that same outlook.
Why are people saying that it is too much? That is a good question that takes a bit to answer, and I am sure I do not have all of the aspects crystal clear, but I think I might have some of them nailed down. One of them is that larger companies who already were cash positive and had some money to work with, decided that they could diversify and start doing website hosting in addition to the services they already provided, such as domain name registration, Internet access, and many others. I am not sure if it was part of the plan to begin with, or if it just happened that they did not actually calculate how much hosting actually costs from the ground up, but they are selling their hosting for a fraction of what it actually costs, and they are eating the difference. Being that the attitude of the public in general is to watch out for themselves, not really caring about others or the impact that an unbalanced transaction has on an organization or the people that make it up, I would not at all be surprised to hear that a direct and intentional decision was made to undercut other companies pricing, for the purpose of stomping out competition (causing other companies to fail, and jobs to be lost, with hard times all around). That is just one idea that I am certain is panning out and in full play these days. I know that in some places people are able to purchase bandwidth, hardware, and datacenter space, for less, but in general this can not be big enough of an impact to explain the extreme trends seen today. There are also those people out there with very poor business planning abilities and they half-assed start a business selling hosting for insane prices before they realize that it takes more than they have to follow through with keeping the business going like that, but those die out fairly quickly. This too is a cause of the general perspective that people in the public will get from looking for hosting, but once again, I think this is minimal and not the main issue.
There are also the people involved that are the ones with the perspectives that say an honest price is too much. I guess one part of the issue with people is that they want to pay as little as they can for what ever they get. People are commended for getting a “deal” or the lowest price, as if it is a real good find and that it is great. But is it really? In the hosting industry, that question is not asked nearly enough… hell in any industry that question is not asked enough. Why does no one ask how that low price impacts the people and company that provide the service, or if it is at cost, and is a fair value?, which should be synonymous. Often the price directly reflects the quality of service, the more you pay, the more you get. No one really wants to hear that it seems. They just seem to be shooting for the lowest price and then crying foul when they do not get what they want, even if the clearest cut logic simply shows that, “well sir, you did not pay for that”, or “the amount you are paying for does not cover that level of service”. They want to believe that they will get everything they need for that lowest price they find, and so they do, and then blame the “horrible” hosting company for not honoring their delusions. Simply put, they believe what they want to believe, and then get angry when they are forced to see and deal with the reality that what they believe is not true, no matter how much they want it to be true.
People care about getting the most for the least amount of money, effort, time, and work. This is as far as their thought process goes, they do not contemplate the consequences to other companies, or the people that make them up. I can agree that today, it would be hard to calculate the actual cost of a given hosting account, especially from the end user’s point of view, but I guess my point is that even if it were as trackable as the “Dow Jones” (very interesting idea), not many people would even care enough to look. These days we seem to breed and train people to be selfish and independent, to watch out for your own interests at what ever the cost, and for the most part, to even not pay any attention to the cost or consequences of their actions. I have been that way myself, at least for most of my 31 years, but these days, things are looking a little different to me as I live life and see what that kind of attitude can do from a tiny scale to a massive scale.
In the end, I am left asking, what can an honest company do, when an honest deal is no longer appealing.
This rant was inspired by chatting with someone who was looking for hosting and had this all too common attitude. After thinking about everything he said, and evaluating his reasonings and purposes, I said this to my friend:
me: it is sad that today people do not value getting things at what they cost, they only care about getting things at the lowest cost to them, fair means nothing. Taking advantage, letting the person on the other end take a loss, that is attractive. Steal if you can get away with it, that is good to many these days. And doing things as they are intended to be done is often though as offensive to some, especially when labeling “doing things in a way they were not intended to be done” as wrong.
The Importance of What We Don’t Know
Posted by Jonathan Kinney in God, Life, Values on August 4, 2009
It is good to acknowledge what we know, but we damn well better acknowledge what we don’t know and hold it to equal value. If we hold what we know as more important that what we don’t know, we are holding tight to such a tiny sliver of understanding and perspective, we are quite likely screwed. We would be delusional and believe that what we know is the most important things to know, and that anything we do not know is of little consequence, without anything valid to back that belief up. We would have little encouragement to learn what we do not already know because we already know what is important, and it takes effort to learn. I would also speak from experience that learning things we do not know reveals things that we believed that were not correct in the first place, and that is a painful process, but a needed part of growing as a person. I would also state that learning something new, something that we do not already know is also quite uncomfortable. If you noticed, I just listed a bunch of things that grate against our selfish desires. We want to know important things, not be missing them, because it makes us feel important. We want to sit back and effortlessly do what ever we want, effort is not attractive to us. Who relishes feeling pain of any sort, we want to live a pain free existence, for some of us that is a major goal in life. Most of us hold high a lifestyle of comfort, we would rather our seats not be lumpy, or that we be cool on a hot on a summer car trip, and dread the though of being sticky at the end of a hot sweaty day. All in all, our selfishness, if given into, would totally prevent any growth, except for the uncontrollable things that happen in day to day life, and even then we hate, fear, and resist that.
Another aspect that plays into this is the fact that in play with our selfish desires, we believe what we want to believe and turn a blind eye to anything that contradicts it, depending on our level of selfishness. If we live a life holding highest the things we do know, and what we don’t know is unimportant, we will build a life on what we know, and as time goes, our vested interest in what we know will grow and grow, we may even write books on what we know. How much greater would we then defend what we know, even if all logic and truth point to us being wrong. We would turn to manipulation, sabotage, control, and other means to smash out anything that would contradict us in our world. That is another end that would totally suck, because it would mean you have grown the least, and end up being the least logical, and most emotional about what ever you believe in, no matter how devoid of truth it is. I have seen this too much, it makes me upset at times when I see people like this. They tend to also be the loudest, most publicized, as they try and convince people to believe them, and that they are right, because in their selfishness, that is what they want.
What percentage of everything there is to know do you say you have? Think about it. I would argue an unprovable argument that we would be dealing with infinity when measuring everything there is to know, but for argument sake, say there was a cap, we will put it at everything that everyone in the world knows about the functioning of the universe and everything in it. If you were super conceited and delusional you might say you could know at this point in time 50% of everything. Now with it in those terms, which is more important, what you know, or what you don’t know? In what areas of understanding would you assign that part you do not know, and really how would you know? isn’t that sorta the bummer dealing with what you don’t know, you also do not know what areas of knowledge or understanding you can assign it? I would argue that the odds are high that as a child to where you are now, you have not been lead to learn the most important things in life, considering how common it is to find people asking questions relating to that all the time. I myself have asked what the purpose of life is, I have even asked God to tell me a real reason to live, something that is worth something. Breathing for breathing’s sake is worthless, I would even argue that fun and pleasure are worthless and fleeting, they are a part of life, but that is not enough for me to live for.
If we could just realize, that it is of very high importance that we value what we do not know, equally with what we do know, then perhaps we could grow. I think selfishness is at the core of it. How do we deal with that one…. Perhaps that is where God comes in. Love is the opposite of selfishness, and maybe we just need to see more of Him, and that will help subside the selfishness so that we can grow. We only live 100 years, few even that long, and yet fewer past. I want to grow as much as humanly possible in the breath that God has given me, for his will, because that gives life meaning and worth.