Good Intentions

The idiom 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions.' exists for a reason. Because it is true. We all intend good, when we do things, especially when they make us feel good about ourselves.

Buying a hybrid vehicle, eating free range chicken, eating organic vegetables, reducing the preservatives in food, because they are bad for us, helping the homeless with a little spare change, donating money to hurricane victims, sending food to the poor of the world, so they can eat.

All of those things have catastrophic consequences, if they continue in the path they are leading. I hope to explain why, here.

The path to hell is paved with good intentions, but if you pause to examine the consequences of your actions, we can steer the path away from Hell.

=Examples=

The Idea
Avoid conflict with your coworkers, friends and family by telling them little white lies about their accomplishments, and how proud you are of them. Give participant medals to kids to get them involved and feel they are competing and winning, because losing is difficult to cope with.

The Reality
When you avoid conflict by not addressing an issue you have with someone, you are telling them it is fine to continue acting in that manner. It's why you don't reward a misbehaving child with candy. You don't coddle people you love, you tell them the truth and help them grow, so they can handle it.

Sometimes your critique is needed to get the train of thought moving out of the station. Giving kids an award just for playing a game kills off the need to improve yourself by competing with the best. I cannot believe there are people out there who actually enjoy playing with people who are worse than themselves.

Coddling someone is not challenging them to grow, to mature, to improve. Coddling people is telling them that it's ok if you don't know the answer, you can have the brownie anyhow. What fucking sense does that make?

The Idea
Protecting the method of producing your product is an imperative in a world of open competition. The first one to file their idea and method, the first one who gets to control it, which certainly seems fair, and I agree that is the way it should be. The first person to come up with a means of doing something should be rewarded for their innovation.

The Reality
Once the patent is filed, the idea is under strict control of the patent holder. The patent holder in many cases isn't even the individual who came up with the idea; it is a corporation. A corporation is not going to be interested in giving up rights to royalties for their ideas. So they love the ability to just throw their ideas at a wall, see what shit sticks, file a patent, and then enforce the fuck out of it. Anyone who comes up with the same idea, they just have to point a finger at their patent, which spells out the method, and claim you're stealing their IP.

It'd be like me owning a patent on my recipe for chicken curry, and then I give it to you, to use. Maybe I sell it, a royalty fee, for my patented recipe. In this case, I have agreed to give you a license to my recipe, my method. If you improve on it, and call it your own, I'm going to be a little upset, you broke our arrangement.

If, however, my recipe is also freely available online, because I had to file it, in order to get my patent, and you never agree to a license with me, we have no arrangement. If you take my recipe, and improve upon it, the burden is on me, the creator, to prove that your recipe is derivative enough of mine.

The way it currently is, if someone comes up with an idea to benefit humanity and wants to help everyone and share the idea in Public Domain. If their method just happens to be owned by a Patent Troll and they are bullied into keeping quiet, they won't be allowed, to share. Even if they do share, against the will of the courts and patent holders, only the patent holder can use the method.

That seems retarded. What if someone had beaten Jonas Salk to the punch?

Like Apple's winning lawsuit against Samsung for having a 'Swipe to Unlock' method. How is that considered a protected patent? Anyone can come up with the method 'Swipe to Unlock'.

That. Is. Not. A. Secret.

A Solution?
What if you never saw my recipe, and you came up with the exact same dish, because the ingredients happened to be common and not complex. I see you release it, and file a patent, and call a foul. The government listens to me, and you have to prove you came up with the idea, on your own, even though it's in your browser history, because you were doing research on recipes?

What if, when I filed my recipe with the government, it wasn't made public. The name 'Chicken Curry 4326' would be all that's known, plus the patent number. When you come along, with your exact copy, and file your recipe, the ruling body determines if the recipes are similar enough to constitute being the same method, and splitting the royalties is up to you and me.

I filed my patent 10 years ago, so I've had some time to make money off my idea, you just got here, and came up with it, I might be tempted to offer a 40% cut. If you don't agree, you renegotiate, or claim you won't accept any royalties. Which is the last thing I want you to do, so you have power, to ask for a larger cut, if you want.

If we can't negotiate a cut that is agreeable, the patent defaults to Public Domain. You know this, so you ask for 90%, I scoff, and say 60%, we both have power. I have made a decent chunk of change from the recipe, maybe I don't need to make more, and I put it to Public Domain. That would be within my rights, and more than fair, since I was the first to patent, after all.

So we both have incentive to keep it private, and if either of us wanted it to be public, for everyone's benefit, we have that option, as well. Both of us came up with the idea, we both have the right to do what we feel is right with it. We can make money together, or we can share our ideas.

As more people come up with the recipe, on their own, the more people have to negotiate, and eventually someone will refuse to be bought out, and free the information to the Public Domain, so we all can advance.

Another solution, of course, would be to openly share methods, because we all benefit, and having the method doesn't necessarily imply the method to implement. Just because I have the source code for Windows '93 doesn't mean I can release my own version, and hope to sell it or make money from it. Unless I have the massive resources I earned through hard work of producing a product in the first place, and succeeding at selling it, and making a living off of building something.

Just because I know how to make a sword, because the metal composition is known and someone sat down and told me the exact method for making it, providing me with notes and counsel, doesn't mean I have the bellows of my own, the furnace, the hammer, the anvil, the energy, the strength or the time.

I would rather spend my money on a sword a craftsman forged than the time, energy and money on the resources, myself. If I wanted to learn how to make a sword, then that is up to me, I can find the directions and get the instruction or I can learn on my own.

If I am interested in making a better sword, I am going to begin with the basics and improve from there. If I cannot learn how to make a sword from someone, it is going to be an awful long time before I begin improving on a known concept.

If I want to make a better search engine than google, I would much rather start off with where Google is at than start from 'OK, so how do I find 'the' in a web page?' Thankfully, I do know how to crawl web pages already, and get keywords. However, the whole storing of data for ready access is something I would have to learn. Security, optimizations, pitfalls, best practices, etc etc. All learned from scratch. By the 1,000,000,000th person.

Once that many people know, shouldn't we all have access, EASY access?

The Idea
Save the forests from burning down, and prevent the loss of property and houses. This one's not rocket surgery. You want to stop fires before they hurt people.

The Reality
If we want to prevent people from suffering, then we would prevent them from building on dangerous ground. If you build in a firepit, you're going to get burned, especially when the fires are as predictable as they have become, these days.

It's exasperating camping with people, and starting a fire. Every stray ash and ember becomes an immediate concern because we somehow think the atmosphere around our campsite is explosive. Use some common sense people, if you see a small fire sprout of from an ash, piss on it.

If we would simply allow the forests to take care of themselves, the fires would be rarer and smaller. Once the main fire blows through, assuming the forests can even survive what that fire would be, we could rebuild, without fear of fire for a long time to come.

If we didn't prevent future, natural fires, they would be smaller, and take care of themselves. People get hit by lightning, it sucks. If your copse in the woods gets struck by lightning, bad-luck. But you can get away, and you can re-build, when the forest is done taking care of business.

Forest fires clean out the underbrush and cull the weak. This is a good thing when a fire burns through the forest, for example, pine-cones open up and release the seeds. "The most common form of serotiny is pyriscence, in which a resin binds the cones cones shut until melted by a forest fire.", granted that's from Wikipedia, but how about these benefits?

So, we are doing damage to the forests by stopping the natural cycles, causing more damage, by having fires crop up, unpredictably, instead of allowing residential areas to burn, and allow people to take it up with their insurance providers, and re-build after the wildfire goes through.

The area would be safe to live in, for another 25 years or so, while the brush re-accumulates. Smaller fires will come through from time to time, but if we allow the forests to stay clean, the fires will remain small. We don't need to put them out.

In addition, one of the largest contributors to carbon dioxide into the environment is from forest fires.

The Idea
Put laws in place to protect people from the random evil person. Speed limits, for example, serve a good intention, but sometimes 25mph is still too fast for a situation and 90mph is perfectly reasonable. Save people from criminals by enforcing mandatory prison sentences for repeat offenders. They can't learn, they shouldn't be allowed to roam freely, we need to protect ourselves, after all. Slap the white-collar guys on the wrist, so they learn their lesson, they don't need prison.

The Reality
People get pulled over for crossing the line briefly, failing to signal, accelerating too quickly, having a broken tail light or speeding. No one was harmed by the behavior, but the police are obligated to enforce the law, and sometimes are forced to enforce the law, thanks to lobbying from auto insurers.

While the officer is busy with you, for your minor infraction that you both think is ludicrous, something else requiring more of his attention could happen. Additionally, many people pulled over for these things are a little irate. They feel they did no harm, they are unwilling to accept they broke a law, period. So now the officer has to look forward to dealing with someone who is upset because they can't take responsibility for themselves. It's a wonder any police officers are polite.

More to the point, if that officer wasn't needed to do traffic duty, because there were better laws or other ways of ensuring criminals are punished, when a crime actually is committed, he could be working the beat somewhere, protecting my skinny ass. Laws put in place to protect us from ourselves, especially when no one, including the people who have to enforce them, take them seriously, serve no benefit.

I would rather see resources going toward catching criminals to prove to would-be criminals that if you commit a crime, you will be caught. The message most criminals receive now, is that crime pays, and you will get away with it. If you don't manage to get away with it, the justice system's hands are tied by ridiculous laws enforcing mandatory sentencing or castrated by not allowing the prescription of a more severe punishment.

It doesn't seem often that punishment fits the crimes any longer, when people like Madoff are allowed to live, after ruining people's lives, and savings. I actually have something to say about his kerfuffle that is a benefit to us; He showed us a giant flaw in the way we think about money, and our financial security has been questioned.

Food for thought: In California, you can carry a machete on your hip, a can of mace on your belt, a holstered firearm and a concealed folding knife. You cannot carry an expandable baton on your hip. Why?

An expandable baton, on your hip, is a visual deterrent to a would-be criminal, the sound of one coming out is enough to chill you, much like the racking of a shotgun, and if you do have to use it, it's easy to use and effective at disabling your opponent, non-lethally, so you can escape.

But I might commit a crime with one, so I have to resort to a pocket knife and a gun. With enough training, I could use those tools non-lethally, maybe.

The Idea
By buying a hybrid, you're saving the environment, by reducing your carbon footprint. You're telling others you support the movement, and you're one of the cool kids. You're helping the movement and saving humanity by cutting emissions, good on you!

The Reality
You are shaming people into being "green" like you. It makes you feel good to be able to look down your nose at those of us getting the full monetary value from our decades old dirty emission producing vehicles.

Who cares if the batteries used to drive you to work caused massive environmental damage thanks to strip mining? Who cares if child labor was used to build the batteries? Who cares that you still get power from polluting sources, the petrol in your car or coal plants?

In California, you're even permitted to use the diamond lane if you have a hybrid. So you can stick out even more, and shame people into being more "green", like you. People who use their decades old cars are saying "we want cars that last decades". They're also maximizing the value of the resources consumed to make and run the car, instead of jumping on the next model because it's fancier.

The Idea
Buying organic food from your grocer makes you feel good, supporting the guy wearing a straw hat and overalls down the block, tending his heirloom tomatoes and flock of sheep. We're all on the planet together, so we should support each other, I can get behind that.

The Reality
Organic food is such an ambitious name. All food is organic. Rocks are inorganic. We don't eat rocks. Organic has come to mean a stupider but more warm-fuzzy means of producing food. Many companies that sell organics make the rest of their money off the 'non-organic' food. Organic food comes in from China, Mexico, Canada, etc, it's not grown by your friend Ole MacDonald, down the road. Organic food means less precision in production, which means there are inherent inefficiencies in the process, which means they cost more money, for less quality.

We have begun to demand our foods be natural and have zero preservatives. Additionally we are being extraordinarily picky about the appearance of our food and refuse to buy produce or products that don't appear 'perfect.' This means a lot of food ends up in landfills, because you were too picky to buy it, before the best-by date, you requested our government enforce, to increase food standards. Insisting it all be organic and natural and have zero preservatives means it has an even shorter life on the shelf, before being tossed into a landfill.

The Idea
You don't have the time to make a difference, but you have money, and people need money to get things done. So you give the people at Green Peace a little money, and you do your part, you're helping save the world AND your friends can watch you do it on the corner of the street you're walking on. Win Win!

As you pat your beer gut, and watch TV, you see those poor starving children in Africa. Man, those poor kids, I want to save them, but... oh, hey, American Gladiators. The next time, you call, maybe they'll stop showing you starving kids, if you give them enough money.

The Reality
By giving Green Peace and Africa your money, you are simply shutting your eyes to the problems, and hoping others will know how to use your money, effectively. So why isn't the environment saved, if Green Peace is so efficient? Why is Africa still starving, and not growing their own crops and working to sustain themselves, instead of using lazy Americans?