Xero's other waste of space

This is something that’s bothered me for longer then ever and comes up way too often, I can’t believe I haven’t written about it until now. Apple, you all know them, the computer company who started as a bunch of hippy hackers and later turned into trendy marketing bullshit combined with overpriced fashion-agreeable computer hardware with an elitist following.

I have nothing personal against apple’s hardware, after all the IBM PowerPC chip that they all use isn’t a terrible one. It’s the trendy bullshit that apple’s marketing pushes that pisses me off the most, and the elitist following it’s made for apple.

There’s some apple users who know this and don’t buy into it. Though they are far and a few, I won’t deny they exist. I’m talking about the people who are blind apple followers, or somewhat blind. Even the people in the middle are usually just as bad as it just encourages others. How the hell do you go from a computer company to trendy bullshit anyway?

Step 1. Colorful computer cases
These days “modded” pc’s are all the rage with people putting windows and neon lights in their cases, with fancy temperature readouts and fan speed monitors mounted on the front of the case, it’s become a fad for the pseudo-geeks. I say pseudo-geeks because they’re more like partial-idiots then they are geeks. Anyway you buy an apple and get some fancy shiny case with tons of plastic or shiny metal in whatever color.

Step 2. Trendy marketing
You’ve all seen the annoying apple commercials on tv, either the old ones with the kids talking about how they like apple products or the newer ones with the people wearing ipods in a silhouette style drawing with pop music playing and dancing. It’s like the mcdonalds commercials but slightly less pathetic.

Step 3. Middle to middle-high end hardware marketed as high end
This one works for sony too, make middle to middle-high end equipment and market it as high end equipment. Charge the same price as high end equipment too, they’ll never know the difference because they’re too stupid to think for themselves and look around for higher quality parts. With apple you really don’t even have another place to look as you’re pretty much locked into whatever they sell you. Getting a good deal on apple equipment is pretty much impossible as they basically won’t sell to any reseller who drops the price lower then apple’s own price. Price fixing indeed.

Step 4. It’s good for media production!!!
Apple’s reputation with being good with media applications such as music making or video editing is entirely apple propaganda aimed at getting clients in the media industry, it’s not really that hard to understand. Apple hardware is usually tied, or slower than the equivalent in PC hardware, and rarely much faster. Paying an extra thousand dollars for a 2% speed boost in one specific photoshop filter, and being slower in all the rest, is not exactly something I’d consider to be smart decision making.

Step 5. Propaganda believing elitist following
Due to the trendy and high end image that apple has now presented at this point their followers will now think it’s the hip thing instead of looking at possible alternative products that would better suit them. I’d much rather an iRiver portable mp3 player then apple’s acclaimed iPod for it’s nicer range of features and the better value for the price.

Step 6. Monopoly tactics.
Mac OSX only works on Apple’s own PowerPC hardware, not on all PowerPC hardware. You want to use OSX? You’re locked into paying apple’s insanely high prices and also pay them for the software itself. Don’t you feel lucky, you’re supporting a monopoly!

Microsoft bashing is counter-productive when here you have a company that’s even worse then them and yet is rewarded for it by it’s huge elitist following. Not even microsoft has done many of the things apple has when it’s come to spreading propaganda and locking people into specific hardware. And while microsoft is far from being evil-free apple is damn well just as evil if not worse. Microsoft’s propaganda is usually very obvious and no one really falls for it. Apple’s is based on trendiness and other hip factors and people are willing to buy into it, they think it’s the cool thing to do. And in rich suburban type areas, this whole situation is even worse with school kids and showing off or what not.

Apple is a company supported almost entirely by propaganda and elitist followers, and while there are few who don’t buy into it, they still are paying apple for the hardware and I do consider them part of the problem. I just don’t hold it against those people personally as much as I would your average teenager bragging about their new iPod.

What could be better then an ignorant patriot then an ignoramus of the exact opposite? The ignorant anti-american conspirator. You know the people, they say they hate bush but only defend it with unproven facts and allegations. You know who you are, the people who hate bush just because it seems like the cool thing to do, instead of hating him for the actual things he has done.

As if the things he has done aren’t bad enough for you, so you have to make up some more and make the situation sound like it’s about a thousand times worse then it actually is. Yes, bush is taking away civil rights, yes he’s passed bad laws, yes he continued a war on iraq. Can you prove he did it just for the oil though?

People seem to overestimate the role of the president and also his motives. Can you honestly believe he’d invade a country just because there was oil there? Do you really think just because he’s been a fan of oil that he’d go to that length? Let’s do the proverbial put “your self in their shoes.” Some rich governor gets into the office through a damn close election which the true outcome never probably would have been determined to begin with, then soon after some muslim fundamentalists crash planes into some buildings.

Did you expect him to sit around asking for an apology? No, of course not, but now he has something that he can use to get some laws passed that he claimed he would in his election campaign. It sure made it a lot easier for him, and if you would really paranoid, you could even say he plotted it on purpose. Let’s not even go there, at that point reality is completely disregarded. So anyway, he slaps in some anti-drug propaganda with the new war on terror propaganda to make the message easier to distribute that bush doesn’t like either of the two items.

Of course the message is completely ineffective so later newer propaganda is made which is pretty much just as ineffective. Guilt trippy messages that are supposed to make parents feel bad and make kids think they should expose every detail of their life to their parents just so you can get their moral approval. Not a very good system for promoting thought-independence, but a typical conservative christian perspective on the issue.

You can’t really expect bush to be something he isn’t, and to me he’s basically some conservative christian who thinks he’s doing the right thing, the same way that the muslim fundamentalists think they’re doing the right thing. It’s all perspective but don’t stretch it too far, you’ll be the one lost from reality before you know it.

Now here comes the fun part, Iraq, a country we gave tons of weapons to, including biological ones. We say get rid of them and they don’t, or so they say. At this point, it’s pretty hard to tell but even so it still doesn’t prove he did it just for oil. Against protest (like every war) we go after them and catch the leader guy, Saddam Hussein, which at this point probably doesn’t mean a damn thing anymore. It’s the kind of thing that makes everyone think “hey we’ve won” but in reality doesn’t mean much.

On the other side of the story you get the people questioning all his motives with paranoid conspiracy sounding stuff. Yes, he did it for the oil! That’s way too easy to say though, it’s laughable. Where’s the proof? Don’t you think someone would notice him shipping out tons of barrels of oil? What do you think they’re going to do it in stealth cargo carriers? I don’t think so. Do you think other countries would allow bush to take iraq’s oil so easily? I don’t think so.

People tell me all the time they can prove it but never do. Sure, it’s a possibility, and one that could seem likely due to the fact that bush likes oil, but you’d be completely forgetting how the president doesn’t have that much control, and how bad that’d make us look, considering it’d be pretty much impossible to do undetected. I doubt bush would even be in office long enough for any oil transporting plan to come into effect even if he does get reelected.

There’s also the people who hate him and don’t even have a reason why, they just hate him to be cool I suppose. I don’t have to go into that subject very much because I think we all know those kind of people and they’d probably jump off a bridge if you told them it was cool.

I’m all open to the possibility that he is doing it for the oil but right now the proof for it seems to be just as good as the proof that there’s a higher power. There is none, other then what the supporters tell you. Self-defined proof is delusion in my book.

Fuck the music industry. At this point american music has degraded so much that it all sounds the same. I don’t care how “personalized” you feel because you think you listen to some kind of “indie” label or what not which turns out to be a sub-label of you guessed it, some huge label under the RIAA’s jurisdiction. Music isn’t personal anyway.

You think copyright is good? You must be thinking only in terms of personal gain in that case. Copyright is the prohibition of thought and patents are the prohibition of the thought process. I don’t care that you feel you deserve reimbursement for your long and hard efforts, I sure as hell didn’t force you to make anything. Or sign a contract legally binding you to make money from selling your “intellectual property” or else you’ll be in debt to your RIAA sponsored label.

Intellectual property is somewhat of an oxymoron, because if anyone using it was truly intellectual they certainly wouldn’t be so unwilling to share their ideas. Sorry, this is capitalism so being trained like a robot to do a certain task is the way to be, even if your task is an artistic one. The whole meaning of art is destroyed at this point so I don’t need to hear any mushy mushy bullshit about the starving artists. Let’s get to the facts.

The big corporations are the main reason they’re starving, and the little guys are screwed whether or not copyright is protecting them so at this point any argument that you’re helping the little guy is quite null. If the government didn’t waste so much money on useless things and all the money that the RIAA extorts went back to the public, all the basic living needs could be covered while still being able to pursue a hobby of your choice. Any inefficiencies can be made into beneficial things with a little effort and greed is no excuse to keep a broken system.

At this point with more and more corrupt laws coming into effect as we speak the possibility for any change seems slimmer and slimmer and with most people still believing incorrect facts or that think they should be compensated for their hard work instead of looking at the alternatives which not only would benefit the average person more it’d also take a huge chunk out of the current corporate corruption making the advantages much greater then any disadvantages, of which I can’t even think of any.

Right now the only companies I can even think of that benefit off intellectual property are huge monopolies, media companies, software companies, and basically companies which consistently screw over the public. Occasionally the artist gets some of the profit, and this accounts for some of the few that still support it. Service based payments seem to be the future of art and or paying for the original. These days the original is not worth any more then a copy for certain media types making the laws protecting it outdated and exploitable by large corporations looking to make money off of a product which costs them nothing to produce.

You could say that a small software company would get screwed by removing copyright but you know what? There’s a huge free software movement going on right now, maybe they should stop trying to make money off an outdated system and get with the future before complaining that they’re being screwed. Provide services, and physical products, not digitalized thoughts.

Keeping this outdated system will screw any small company even more as it lets competitors crush them easily since only the huge companies can support themselves after the losses that an intellectual property based product causes, usually using unfair business tactics and locking people into the product by making it proprietary, in which you can then go after a few corporate users with lots of cash to bring in some money and scare others to pay up as well using that method. The music industry is using the same scare tactics against individual consumers, which tends to make people a little bit more angry as the individual doesn’t have as much money as a large company.

I’d think that an original painting is usually worth more then a copy as I’d think the master recording by an artist would be. One cd is no different from another though, and when it can be digitalized and copied without any effort at all the value of the media is now gone. Maybe someone would pay extra for some included artwork or the master (which probably isn’t on any common format to begin with (DAT or multi-track tape probably,) but for a digitalized format any reason to pay someone at this point is only for sentimental reasons or greediness of the seller.

At this point in time I only hear the same repetitive arguments about starving artists and the little guys but the little guys get hurt no matter what, if you think you’re helping by paying them you’re not, you’re just supporting the system which hurts the consumers more, benefits the little guy slightly if at all, and helps the corrupt monopoly vastly.