Economics, Piracy and Choice

I’m not going to lie to you… I come from the Napster generation. I discovered early on after I entered collage that if I applied a little brainpower, I could get most digital content for free. Software, Games, Movies, Music… it didn’t matter. If it was in digital form, and I desired it, I simply just downloaded it.

Fast forward to today. I may be unemployed at the moment, but I’m still used to having way more money than I did in college. If I really wanted a particular song, I could probably pay for it. But that’s just the problem… I still know how to get things for free. It’s hard to really want to pay for things if you know you can get them for free. Morality doesn’t enter into it. It’s simply economics– free beats paid, always and forever.

Some people will call it stealing. Like you wouldn’t walk into a CD store and just take a CD off the shelf. Would you do it if nobody stopped you? Me personally, I wouldn’t. For some reason that feels wrong to me (I don’t know why). Maybe its because there’s a store that will be hurt if I steal from them. There are real people there- the employees, the managers, etc. (Personally I couldn’t give a flip about the company itself.)

Where downloading something for free doesn’t feel wrong. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been doing it so long. Is it an addiction, that I can’t stop? No. I’ve paid for a few programs I thought were pretty good. And sometimes I decide that it sucks “stealing” things and I want to take the high road, so I pay for whatever it is. But it doesn’t happen that often. (How many movies out there do you desire watching vs how many do you have the money to pay for?)

The problem is, I now have the power to choose, where I didn’t before. If I was broke and couldn’t afford a CD, I had to let it sit on the shelf. I was forced to restrain myself and not partake in life. But the power has shifted. Now I feel like I can choose to pay for it, or I can choose not to. If I don’t like what a company is doing or how they are presenting their product, I can still enjoy the thing I love (like watching a movie) without doing some kind of political message… not paying for the content, in some mis-guided attempt to get the company to change (like that will ever happen.)

This is the real reason why executives want to label people who download as criminals. They have to make it sound evil to try to guilt you into stop doing it. Because they know if you decide to continue, their very fabric of doing things will come crumbling down.

What the downloading generation has taught us is that the middlemen will die. If I want content, I want it now. And if you don’t do it my way, then I’ll just pirate it. That the other real advantage pirating has. If I want some content, I fire up bittorrent and just download it. I don’t have to wait, I don’t have to worry about DRM, I just get what I want.

Most companies are not in the business of really providing exactly what people want. They make it “good enough” that you will accept the price for it, or the method they decide. The downloading generation will force companies to become like real companies again– providing a superior product/service the public actually wants. Not like these fake companies out there that tried to rig the system so that you have no choice but to do things their way. Those companies will die. And so they should.

Businesses, products are about economics. And economics say that the best solution wins. Piracy has real advantages over doing things the old way. I get lots of content, for free, whenever I want and in the method I want. It is not bad to want the best solution for yourself. And you can’t shame people into being “moral” or some crap. It just won’t work. If you were a good little robot, you’d go out and buy every “cool” product the second it came out, because the nice little companies tell you to. If you don’t do that, then you’re ripping the company off from the sale.

Me personally, I just want to enjoy life. If a company gets in the way of me doing that, then goodbye company.

2008 Election… Why actions should trump character

It must be hard running for president- you have to appeal to so many different people, and each of them are looking for you to be something different. “Are you a christian?” “Will you affirm this law I like?” “Do you support my special interest group?” People talk about what values the president should have, but what they are really saying is “I want my new president to think and do like I would.” In other words, the president has to have OUR values, or none at all.

God forbid a presidential candidate speak their mind or have their own views on things. Or god forbid they talk about what they are going to do as president or what kind of plan they have. We seem as a country to care way more about which intern our president slept with rather then what actually happened while they were president.

I know people really want to have the world look on our president as some kind of moral and spiritual leader. But if you are a christian (and I am), you would know that the whole reason we need a savior is because people are foulable. We sin and make mistakes. Trying to put a person up on some kind of moral pedestal or “guiding light” is not only pointless, completely doomed to failure. That person WILL screw up something, because they are human. It’s how we are made.

So in my opinion, values should be a distant second to results. To me, electing a president is like hiring a man to do a job. How well will this person do the job? When you hire someone, you don’t ask them what their family life is like at home. You don’t ask them what religion they practice or if they support gay marriage. You look at their record and you find out if they can do the job.

For example, why does it matter to people if Obama is a Muslim or not? Will that somehow stop him from being a good president? Will he make poor decisions because he believes in the wrong religion? What happened to FREEDOM of religion anyway? Are we back in the 60s when intollorance was the norm? Have we learned nothing from history?

I don’t try to tell anyone who to vote for. It’s not my decision, it’s someone elses, and they have a right to make it. But let me at least offer a simple question. Are people actually better or worse off since Bush became president? Have the ideals and decisions Bush and the people around him have made and lifted up made things better or worse? McCain very closely follows Bush and what decisions he have made. So if you’ve like the way things have gone, vote for McCain. I won’t stop you. All I ask is you not be blinded. If you think a president has to share your idiology to govern, then you are letting your beliefs cloud what has actually happened over the course of the last 8 years.

Update: Obama got elected, thank God. But he still has a lot of work to do… let’s hope he picked some wise advisors to help him.

The Firefox Extensions Post

First let’s go over the best resources for firefox info, tips, and tricks.

1. Know your firefox shortcuts
2. Check out lifehacker’s Firefox 3 Power User Guide
3. Tweakguide’s Firefox tweaks
4. Bookmarks backup and view on any computer with the delicious plugin or foxmarks (discussed below)

First let’s go over the best resources on the web for top firefox plugins:

1. QuickOnlineTips’ “50 Best Firefox Extensions”
2. BestCollegesOnline’s “50 Firefox Plugins that Will Change the Way You Surf”
3. eConsultant’s “I want a Firefox extension to…” (BTW eConsultant has some killer tool lists)
4. Mashable’s “FIREFOX GOD: 300 tools for firefox”

More will be added to this list as I discover additonal resources.

Ok, so here is my outstanding firefox plugin list:

1. Adblock Plus with Easylist subscription:  blocks web advertizing
2. All-in-One Sidebar:  provides an easier-to-manage interface for firefox features
3. Autofill Forms:  Auto-fills web forms. But personally, I use 1Password on the mac.
4. BugMeNot
5. Delicious Bookmarks:  Replaces the firefox bookmark function: this is Bookmarks On Steroids. I use it to throw any useful useful bookmarks in there that I find on the web.
6. DownloadHelper
7. DownThemAll
8. Fast Dial
9. Firebug
10. FireGestures:  Essential. Allows most firefox features to be applied by simply moving the mouse.
11. Foxmarks:  Essential resource for backing up your firefox bookmarks, if you don’t use delicious.com
12. Gmail Manager:  Useful if you need a persistant gmail checker and you don’t have another program that does this.
13. Greasemonkey:  Some people swear by this. It can add custom features to your favorite websites.
14. GTDInbox
15. IE Tab:  Important for firefox on windows. Switches to viewing the current page in Internet Explorer (if firefox isn’t viewing it properly, which is a rare event unless it’s some stupid Silverlight site you’re trying to look at.)
16. Link Diagnosis
17. SeoQuake
18. Web Developer
19. Yoono