Archive: Opinions

The world has turned upside down, or, as my wife loves to assert, civilization is crumbling.  The news is about stuff people say rather than what they do.  And companies are making decisions based on some arbitrary company feud thing rather than what their customers want.  In other words, stuff doesn't make sense.

I keep coming back to the presidential tweets because I just don't understand them.  Well, I do to an extent, but I don't understand why they are news.  I can't even imagine how much 'ink' has been wasted reporting on things the President tweets.  Are those tweets official policy?  Nope.  A lot of times they are a man lashing out at perceived enemies.  I remember during the Nixon administration that people were seriously shocked when it came out that the Pres had an 'enemies list'.  How is the rabid public name calling both by our current Fearless Leader and the reprisal name calling by his opponents not as inappropriate and shocking?

This unfiltered chatter seems to be interesting to a lot of people, but how does it enhance the national debate?  Sticks and stone are supposed to break my bones, but words?  This gratuitous social chatter is meaningless except that it tells us that someone in a serious position is willing to diminish it with petty public tweeting.  Tweet doesn't even sound like a serious word.

I don't suppose I would mind so much if the news had just a little something about actual initiatives and events, but if they're there they are so drowned out by the tsunami of tweet reporting that they are hard to find.  I have been just cruising along, hoping that when the current four year term is over we'll elect someone who is allergic to tweeting and who will conduct himself or herself with gravitas.  Our country is a pretty serious force in the world.  Tweeting diminishes us.

The Amazon Prime video app just landed on AppleTVs Wednesday.  This has been a long-awaited event that was supposed to occur by the end of summer.  Thank heavens they finally did it -- I have been more aggravated about its absence from the AppleTV since they promised it and then it kept not coming.

Prior to that anyone with an AppleTV who wanted to watch shows or movies on Amazon Prime also needed an expensive Apple phone or pad computer from which they could use 'Airplay' to stream the video to the AppleTV.  The problem is that Airplay isn't all that steady, and I have found that I am often ejected from shows in the middle because Airplay disconnects.

Why do it that way?  Because Amazon wanted their app on Apple devices, but didn't want to have to give up their ability to sell to their customers without Apple taking a huge chunk.  In fact they were so mad they refused to sell AppleTVs on Amazon.  Rumor has it that now that their app is on the AppleTV they will start selling AppleTVs again.

I don't think I am much different from most people who like both Amazon and Apple.  And where their markets seem to converge, why wouldn't they would want to make things easier for their customers?  people would buy more stuff from both of them.

When the Kindle App first came out for the iPhone you could buy books directly from within the app, which was very convenient.  But the companies clashed, and that ability was taken away, forcing customers to go to the Amazon Web site to buy books, and then come back to the Kindle app to read them.  People soon found they could go buy books on Amazon on their phones anyway -- they just had to use the browser.  So the only thing Apple accomplished was making loyal customers have to go through more steps to do the same thing.  Annoying.

While I am thrilled that I can now watch Prime content sans Airplay, I have to wonder if these company feuds are really worth it.  I am most of the way through Bud Friedman's new book about the history of The Improv, the iconic comedy club.  He seems to feel that once he finally had competition it was good for the marketplace, and he benefited by a loose, amicable relationship with his competition in New York once he got over the fact that he had competition.  He chronicles the negative impact an adversary relationship had to his west coast club when his vindictive competitor refused to play nice (to the point where some comics who liked her better burned down his club).

The reality is that Apple, Amazon, Google... all of those universes actually exist on the same planet.  The impact of putting their feuds ahead of customer satisfaction simply means that customers will be mad at them.  Stupid, because people use them all, not just one.  Evidently they believe that if they block each other customers will exclusively use their services.  That AppleTV owners won't use Amazon Prime, or that Amazon Prime users won't get AppleTVs.

That doesn't make sense.  That's like the time a Microsoft executive announced at a technical conference that his team had made Windows harder to use to force annoyed customers to hassle third party software developers into doing things Microsoft's way.  Yeah, that really happened.

It may make some sort of Escher-esque corporate illogic, but it doesn't make sense, especially when corporate products and content are used by the masses in their everyday lives, meaning that they are producing a huge load of irritation every day, aimed squarely back at themselves.  There has to be some kind of karma thing, like Apple being forced to pay the EU billions in back taxes that Ireland didn't want to collect (also a story, if you can find it among all the tweet reporting).

I blame the cable news networks.  In their desperate striving to fill 24 hours of programming every day reporting on tweets is easy, especially since our nation's Head Gazaba is so willing to oblige.  The constant rat-a-tat-tat of reporting on what someone said instead of actually what is being done... well, if I were a conspiracy theorist I would say the White House does it on purpose to obscure what it is actually doing.  But I really think the sad fact is that the level of public discourse has descended to such a low level that it is nothing better than a children's spat elevated to the level of news.  And it is plenty annoying.  Like that Prime Video thing was annoying.  Gratuitously annoying.

I am gratuitously annoyed.  Stuff doesn't make sense any more.  Civilization is crumbling.

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