Friday, December 8, 2006

It's for your own good

I wish big brother wouldn't try so hard to protect me.

The Man has got to try so hard to make this world fool-proof. It can't be done, why does he have to keep trying. Doing so only makes life more frustrating for those of us who aren't fools, or at least are willing to accept responsibility for our foolish actions. By The Man, I mean of course the government, but also much more than that, corporations, small businesses and each of us really. The litigious, nothing is my fault, bad things require recompense type of mentality drives me crazy.

Shit happens.

Deal with it.

There is not someone at fault for every bad thing that happens to you. You are not owed money or any other form of compensation for every bad thing that happens to you. Sometimes not even if it was preventable. We've got to be reasonable here. Take things back about 100 years or so to when people took some responsibility for their actions. No, take it back a thousand years to when the stupid people just flat didn't make it. The world was dangerous and not all survived it to old age. Maybe we shouldn't try so hard to keep stupid people alive. It brings down the average and makes society a more cluttered and inefficient system. They slow down the machine and reduce the quality of its output.

As a business owner, this is even more frustrating now than it's ever been before. I've got to to try to predict what kinds of stupid things people might do with my product, things that common sense would prevent most from doing. The fact that they might choose to do things that are a bad idea is one thing--hell, i do that pretty frequently myself--where it gets worse is when they pretend that they never heard the voice in their head telling them that it was a bad idea. That's when they say that I, being the expert, should have told them it was a bad idea.

I'm being vague here because it doesn't matter what my product is; every company that provides a product or service has to worry about this mentality. The mentality that feigns ignorance, that plays dumb, that refuses to acknowledge the truth. The truth is, I knew better but I thought I could get away with it so I did it anyway, it didn't work, shit happened, and now instead of accepting responsibility, I'm going to get mad at the company because they have money and I can sue them.

The process people and companies go through in an attempt to protect themselves from such litigation is called Risk Management. It should be called Retard Management. I've got to think that the earth would be a smoother running and more sustainable machine if it didn't now have to support all those who before would have perished. Of course i'm recalling the principle of survival of the fittest. Would society not be better off without that bottom layer that contributes nothing, yet consumes many benefits provided by those who do?

I'm mixing my issues here. Not all ridiculous lawsuits are filed by "that bottom layer" of society, and the supposed upper levels of society are often not above filing such suits themselves. I suppose you get the idea though. It's a bit of a wandering rant, but probably clear despite that.

On an entirely different note: The weather has been beautiful here in Central Oregon lately. The other morning I was driving to work and the mountains seemed to be suspended in the atmosphere. It was an odd light and although the sky all around the mountains was fairly dark and grey, and there was a heavy haze covering the foothills, the mountains themselves seemed to glow in the sun. the effect was that the haze and the sky melded together all above, around and below the mountain, so that it appeared to levitate like some meditating monolith. The effect was particularly pronounced for Mt. Jefferson. It was very cool. We've had some great sunsets and evening light too, but i'm out of corny stuff to write for now.

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