America is Broken

I’ve been sitting here for a while writing, re-writing, and what it comes down to is these three words: America is broken.

I’ve really tried to believe that America, “the land of the free, the home of the brave” is everything its cracked up to be, but at every turn I’ve been proven wrong.

If anyone should be on the side of America it’s me. I’ve had amazing financial and business success, gone to the best schools, golfed on the best golf courses, eaten at the nicest restaurants, owned the nicest cars, on and on. Still, it did nothing for me and now more than ever I see how broken it is.

We are actively invading countries and taking away civil liberties (ours and theirs). America's standard of living is going down and our national debt is going up. Our healthcare is atrocious. Our public educational institutions are awful and more expensive then most of the worlds. We are practicing torture and holding people without trial. We are at war with drugs and terrorism, neither of which we can negotiate with or end.

What are we doing? How did we get here? This isn’t America, it’s some weird fifth dimensional twilight zone episode.

Don’t blame Bush either. He’s an easy target, possessing the I.Q. of a urinal puck, but we (well not me) elected him and haven’t removed him. Even in the face of sheer overt deception nothing. Clinton gets a hummer and is impeached; Bush invades one of the largest oil producing countries in the world under false pretenses and nothing. Lambs to the slaughter I tell ya.

I think the problem is much larger than Bush, the cabinet, foreign policy, economic policy, or our feeble energy policy. It has to do with what America and Americans have become. More to the point it has to do with capitalism. This country may have been founded on the principals of democracy with equal representation for all, but it’s become defined and run by capitalism.

I’m not talking about white washed, middle of the road, capitalism either. I’m talking about the kind of extreme, unbridled capitalism that Karl Marx warned about. (It would do you good to read some of his stuff, not because he’s right about communism, which he's not, but there's a lot of good stuff in there on capitalism, labor and the class divide – don’t worry they won’t throw you in jail for it yet, but watch the hits on my page go up from Langley, VA. seriously).

I don’t know how we don’t see it. The average person is not represented in our system. Nor do they have any power. If it represented the average Joe you would think that healthcare would be free, college would be paid for, minimum wage would be something you could live on and our work weeks would be getting shorter not longer. That’s the way it works in the rest of the modern world.

As it stands the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, that’s not a cliché it’s a fact. Last year Exxon had more profit than any other company in the history of the world ever. As we are plundering our natural resources and destroying our environment we are also sinking deeper into debt.

On top of that, the race for our next President looks more like the dot com frenzy then a discussion about real issues, it’s about the buzz word “change” and money leaders, but where’s the beef. With a media owned by corporate conglomerates I’m not sure we can have a real honest open discussions about issues anymore. General Electric (NBC) Westinghoue (CBS), Disney Corp (ABC), Time-Warner (CNN), News Corp. (Fox).

But again, it’s not about them it’s about us. Were the ones letting it happen. If I’ve seen one thing in 15 years of running companies it’s this, people will sacrifice their beliefs in a heartbeat if the alternate is even close to thinking about finding a new job. Once you’ve crossed that line it’s a slippery slope downhill. If it happens to you, you need to stick up for yourself the very first time, every time, and not back down.

Capitalism plays hardball, all day, every day. That may be the way our culture wants to go, hard driving, A-type, heart attack, die early, living, but then again, that might just be the tail wagging the dog. It doesn’t seem to be working very well for most Americans. Hopefully it will get better, either way, I hear the scuba diving in Belize is pretty nice and they have universal healthcare. =)

Vista 64bit!

I really wanted to believe, I really wanted it to work, I really thought 64 bit would speed up my computer with that dual core… and vista looked pretty cool, but alas, it sucks. I’ve been using it for a year and I don’t see the point:

Besides being slower than hell, I’ve had nothing but problems.

True, it ran relatively error free for a while, but then again, it never REALLY worked; that is to say, there were always unsupported driver issues (like my HP printer and iPod). It doesn’t like the other Vista 32 machines on my network, i.e. I can’t share the printer without bombing the drivers and having to reinstall. It doesn’t support my iPhone (an Apple issue, as they haven’t released iTunes for 64bit Vista, and quite frankly I don’t blame them).

Plus, it continually, perpetually, pops up an ‘administrator’ security window for any program that automatically updates, which is most of them now; even if you set them to “run as administrator”. That Microsoft thought that would be a good strategy for security shows their true inability to view the world as a computer user, novice or expert. I would assume a novice user would either say “YES” or “NO” every time the thing popped up regardless of what it was warning them about, and for an expert user, it’s annoying and I don’t see the point. I have yet to see the window pop up because of some malicious viral software code. Oh there may be some point, and I’m sure some code monkey is going to sharp shoot me on this, but really I don’t care, it blows.

Worse yet it has HUGE problems with high end video games. “But Professor Brooks you don’t play computer games do you”… umm... well…. ok… yes I play computer games, there I said it - I’m a geek. When I’m not out trying to save the world, feed the hungry or meditating in my cave somewhere, I play Everquest II.

To solve lag problems, I most recently upgraded my nVidia 7800GT 256MB card to a nVidia 8800GT 512MB card figuring that would solve it but guess what… nothing… AND I received the message that I now had to re-register my Vista Ultimate 64bit software with Microsoft because I changed too much hardware…. THE VIDEO CARD?! Sheesh. IBM never became “Big Brother” but we all know who did. It ALMOST makes me what to install the bio’s workaround so I don’t have to register, but, I do own the software and it should work without hacks! (For you computer folks thinking it might be the internet connection, I’m on dedicated fiber, so that should be fine.)

So, with all the glory that is Microsoft I had to wait online trying to get my O.S. reactivated before my computer turned off. I spent two days trying to do that. One day on the phone with a tech support guy saying his name was Steve but when I received his email his name was “Rajesh Khatavkar with Microsoft Windows Technical Support.” He was a very nice guy and quite frankly some of the best technical support I’ve received, (without actually solving my problem of course), seriously, there is something wrong when you make your people change their name to provide phone support, DO YOU THINK YOUR FOOLING ANYONE?! I knew he was probably from India or Sri Lanka the minute he answered the phone, that he said his name was Steve only made me think… great… Microsoft is lying to me in the first 15 seconds of this phone call, not a good way to start. Since he couldn’t get to the activation folks, the next day, when my computer popped up “your computer will stop working unless you register today” I franticly called registration and waited on hold FOREVER. Of course everyone and their brother received a new video cards for Christmas so you can image the hold time was long but the “exceptionally heavy call volume” should have been anticipated by Microsoft as they were the ones who booby trapped their software and they should have known when it was going to explode.

You would think this would be the end. I’ve upgraded my drives, my video card, received my ‘new’ activation code. Nope. No joy. There are four other Vista 64bit “hot fixes” I have to download that don’t auto-magically get loaded on to my machine, I have to go hunt them down. Worse yet I have to submit to MS the actual problems I’m having and 24 hours later they sent me an additional encrypted, password protected, piece of code to help with the video problems. I’ve jumped though a lot of hoops now, does any of this help?! Nope, still no joy. The performance is exactly the same.

I’ve got two more gigs of RAM arriving today taking me to 4GB. You would think I would just dump Vista 64 and go back to 32bit or XP (which I should do) but that would mean wiping my whole system (re-formatting) reinstalling everything, probably having to reactivate, and I can tell you from past experience that is at least a 1-2 day job.

If you are thinking about Vista 64bit, STOP. Take a deep breath, put the box down, and slowly back away.

Wade

- w00t! My RAM just arrived. =)

Follow up: As these things go, I received my RAM, installed it, and low and behold, only 3GB posts WTH?! That’s a typical Win32 issues but I’m on 64bit Vista this shouldn’t be happening. I google around, I change some of my bios settings; I get ready to call a buddy of mine who was a Sys. Admin. I know the first thing he's going to ask me is if my bios is up to date, which it isn’t (current is 1013 and I’m at 1010). The Asus website says the motherboard supports 4GB so that’s good. Now, time to update my bios. With this box that's' no easy task as I don’t have a floppy drive, I wish I could blame the manufactures but I built it and figured I wouldn’t need one.

I look around for how to build a DOS boot CD-ROM. Forget it, I’ll cannibalize one of the floppy drives from my kids computer. I tear it out, cable it up, dig through a stack of crap in the closet trying to find a floppy disk. I find one that works! (On the second try even.) Load up AWDFLASH (none of the other ASUS bios utilities supports Vista 64bit, of course, so I have to resort to doing it old school), load up the bios, change my bios setting to see the floppy and boot from the floppy, boot into dos:

>A:/
>A:/run awardflash
>A:/
>A:/run awardflash.exe
>A:/
>A:/RUN AWDFLASH.EXE
>A:/
>A:/AWDFLASH

Finely….Bingo, restart and awwway we go, it boots up with 4GB! W007.

W.