Money-grubbing greedy fucks will be the end of us.
I really should stop watching documentaries.
If you’re one of a zillion or so people on the Net you may have recieved an email that looks an awful lot like this today. Apparently Sara Cho and Michael Lazar, two really dumb motherfuckers who can’t understand the difference between base-2 and base 10, and who, it seems, don’t do any research before buying a product (thus making them typical ignorant American consumer whores,) filed a lawsuit against Seagate. Because of their inability to perform simple calculations that one learns in primary school, think that somehow they are entitled to more drive space than they purchased.
They are wrong.
However, it appears that Seagate has decided they are worth more alive than dead, so to speak, as they are settling out of court for (what seems to me to be) a fairly unsubstantial amount - 5% of the purchase price of whomever is proven to be part of the class.
I, for one, won’t be filing anything even though I have purchased many, many Seagate hard drives in the time window specified. Why? Because I purchased a product knowing full well that the industry standard is, and has been for decades, to rate hard drive capacity in base-10 and not in base-2. This was not an attempt at deception, but rather simply an extension of how the devices store data. To file as a member of this ignorant, selfish class would be to take advantage of a company who has done nothing wrong.
Will someone please explain to me how a company following an admittedly confusing standard can somehow be held financially liable for that standard being confusing?
This is my example of private citizens being greedy bastards who, instead of forming some sort of educated protest (”Hey! This shit is really stupid and confusing!”) decide to litigate and claim that the product packaging was misleading, false advertising - in short, saying that the company somehow lied to them. This is complete fucking BS. The important thing to differentiate here is that there was no deception, no lie. The standard may be confusing, but the company didn’t lie by following it.
On the other hand…
While I was sitting on my ass thinking about the Seagate thing, I started watching The Future of Food, pretty much the other side of this idea. Big company (in this case, Monsanto) produces product, natural forces scatter said product into another farmer’s field. Monsanto sues little guy. Monsanto wins because their product was found in his field, even though it could have been placed there by any one of many processes outside the farmer’s control. Furthermore, it is found that should cross-pollenation occur between the big company’s product and the little farmer’s natural product, that the farmer’s product then becomes the property of the big company!
There have been many, many things wrong with American food production for a very long time. Anybody who lives in an agriculturally based community knows this. Farming has been dying for the last half-century or so. Companies like Monsanto seem to want to dredge as much money as possible out of it, before it dies a final death, and when it’s gone they will move on to other countries around the world and repeat.
This is greed. It’s not sustainable. It will be the end of us all. But the Monsantos and the ExxonMobils and the Walmarts and the Kaisers and the Blue Crosses continue to destroy markets and even countries, toting the flag of capitalism without regulation behind them.
And the regulators are even more corrupt than the companies themselves. It seems inevitable that any industry requiring oversight will eventually be subsumed by the industry in question, creating a self-serving, ineffective mess in which the people are even more decieved than ever - they think they have regulation but in reality the system exists only to serve the whims of the money generators. From the money flows the power.
So how do we fix it all?
We don’t. The problem is in the people and the greed. If corporations are an extension of us, then we’re well and truly fucked. Individually we have little ability to treat each other in a decent way. This blog is a shining example of it. All the anger I dump out in every one of these entries is very unproductive. But yet I have it anyway, and a huge amount of it is caused by idiotic bullshit like I describe in this entry. Thus, it becomes self-perpetuating. I can’t get rid of it. All I can do is really channel it into something else.
Like drinking.
When the revolution comes and the world burns, I want to be sitting on my front porch holding my Fubar, while drinking the last of my cold, colld beer, savoring the cold grainy goodness while the fire overtakes me.