The value of Time

What is the value of time?

People say time is money but that is not true. You can in fact make more money, you can magnify how much money you make in a variety of ways; legal, illegal, risky or safe, but you can never make more time for yourself.

To make matters worse no one knows how much time they will have on this earth. Those old fucks who live to be 97 screw someone else over to make the average in the US around 74 or so, someone has to die quite young to make those averages work out don't they?

It is like musical chairs but you don't win a pie, you just win the right to keep getting up in the morning and going to work, putting the pants on one leg at a time, pet the dog, kiss the wife, call mom once in a while and see what's on TV tonight.
Where I work there are actuarial tables which show if "retire" and move on at 45 your life expectancy is 85, however if you work till 65 your life expectancy is 66.5! Yet people stay on because of medical insurance and "not having quite enough money to get the Lexus paid off first". Of course getting the Lexus paid off is a metaphor because the Lexus of life will never be paid off will it? Just as Sisyphus' boulder will never be up at the top of the hill and set to rest, the Lexus will never be paid off.

I tell the young bucks at work to think about their last day on earth and laying on their deathbed tallying up their lives. Will the new car, the jetski or the 56" TV matter then? Not a whip.

Recently a guy at work, an athlete actually, died at the age of 52, he was a bicycler. At first people said he was 48 and I was comforted just a bit when I saw he was born April of 57. He was always first in his races and first up the hills and now he is first toward the bright light I suppose. The last time I saw him his eyes were red and he was obviously stressed out and irritable, he said he "just didn't have the time for this project" he was supposed to be part of and walked out. Now it would seem he has plenty of time to slow down, be last in races and enjoy things.

So I try and take things one-day-at-a-time and really spend all those minutes in the day as wisely as I can. I think about when I was a child and went to the penny candy store called "Harry Heads" (his actual name), I would look at my small fist "monies" and really calculate how much I would get, how much candy bang for the penny I could figure out. My pennies were precious, and time not so much, time seemed forever and I longed to grow up and have the power to make my own decisions in life and do whatever I wanted.

Now I realize what I really want is to make more time, but more time is not to be made.

http://www.shurupov.ru/time/

Black and White and bleeding Red all over: Newspapers

Everybody around the Seattle area (and a few others), has been bemoaning the loss of the Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper, for a week at least, which published its last hard copy paper edition today, although they will continue online.

The Times crying for the PI is the funniest, since they have been at each other’s throats litigiously for a long time now. Clearly, if a major paper is to survive at all they will have to stand alone and also make major changes in the way they try and do business, and quickly.
Ian Furness is another funny one. Being a DJ on sports talk 950AM radio in Seattle, he lamented the loss of the PI, saying he needed a hard copy of the sports page for his morning constitutional. Hey guess what Ian, you sloppy jackass? KJR talk radio is one of the reasons I don’t need the sports page! THINK!

Using the sports page as an example of the larger issue, many forms of information were not available before. ESPN and FOX NW sports and so on, were not there to compete in the newspaper heyday. Neither were sports radio shows. And of course the internet was not there either.
I find it funny that some people think bloggers have nothing to add as they don’t have enough inside poop to be valuable. I have heard it said that bloggers simply rehash what has been written about in the newspapers, apparently to some they are idea-less. I don’t agree with this of course and find it silly.

Websites like Craigslist are hurting the papers more than bloggers I think. People really can’t see paying for classified ads when a better service is free for the taking. How could the brains behind the PI not see that one coming? I think the Times will have to come up with special promotions to sell papers. They need a craigslist free posting board but better and more locally integrated. They could start charging a nominal fee for subscription to the online site. I would personally be willing to pay $10 a year to keep them open.

Mumbai Massacre: Ruins Thanksgiving in Seattle

I am very busy lately, this holiday season, like most. I am working full time and also attending school. I had a job interview yesterday and today I have to put up a curtain rod thing before guests arrive for Thanksgiving dinner, do some reading for school and sometime this weekend I need to get a paper done. I have the Lions/Titans game on the radio, and am drinking coffee at my computer, a typical Holiday morning. So I click on the Seattle Times link and am SHOCKED to see in their infinite editorial wisdom they have some yahoos in India running around with rifles and building burning, and the news medias’ favorite word Terrorism on the front page.

So I read a bit thinking ‘well this must have something to do with me or it wouldn’t be there”, but it does not. Other than a mentioned feeling, that because some programmers at Microsoft came from India, there is no connection whatever to me and mine or this area. I am here to tell you that irritates me. I thought this paper was the “Seattle Times” not the “World Terrorism Watch” or the “Disaster News”. Pulling this wrong-headed stunt today, on a holiday the Seattle Times is their dupe, their scary news whore and it saddens me.
Apparently the Times thing is going for shock value.

Apparently, the Times can’t come up with a story people would want to read. Apparently, the Times have no writers that can write, about this area, on this holiday weekend. Apparently, they are just knee jerk hacks that publish anything someone else gives them with no ability to produce original, content of their own that has something to do with Seattle, on Thanksgiving.
I don’t have any problem with it being in the paper. But if all they are is a newsprint version of disaster TV channel CNN, and they feel to get on the front page, it has to be about killing, they have nothing to offer me as a reader. It should be noted here the number two story is the “South Center Mall Shooter”!!

Jesus H!@

Anyway Times, since you are clearly struggling, let me help you. Here is my idea, it will massively get you in the news, and you might even be able to charge people for on-line subscriptions. Just as you already have a sports section, a local section, religion or whatever you can now have a section called: BLOOD AND GORE.

You can name it whatever you want SHOOTINGS AND SHOOTERS, DEAD PEOPLE, TERROISM TIMES. This would be where you would put stories like the India massacre on the front page today. You could publish full color foldouts of death and violence. In addition things like photos of horrific car crashes that are still published in South American newspapers could be reinstituted. You could have celebrity autopsy photos, and all manner of blood and death. There clearly is a market for this, why not mine it?

Mumbai Terror: Cancels Seattle Thanksgiving

I am very busy lately, this holiday season, like most. I am working full time and also attending school. I had a job interview yesterday and today I have to put up a curtain rod thing before guests arrive for Thanksgiving dinner, do some reading for school and sometime this weekend I need to get a paper done. I have the Lions/Titans game on the radio, and am drinking coffee at my computer, a typical Holiday morning. So I click on the Seattle Times link and am SHOCKED to see in their infinite editorial wisdom they have some yahoos in India running around with rifles and building burning, and the news medias’ favorite word Terrorism on the front page.

So I read a bit thinking ‘well this must have something to do with me or it wouldn’t be there”, but it does not. Other than a mentioned feeling, that because some programmers at Microsoft came from India, there is no connection whatever to me and mine or this area. I am here to tell you that irritates me. I thought this paper was the “Seattle Times” not the “World Terrorism Watch” or the “Disaster News”. Pulling this wrong-headed stunt today, on a holiday, the Seattle Times is their dupe, their scary news whore and it saddens me.

Apparently the Times thing is going for shock value.

Apparently, the Times can’t come up with a story people would want to read. Apparently, the Times have no writers that can write, about this area, on this holiday weekend. Apparently, they are just knee jerk hacks that publish anything someone else gives them with no ability to produce original, content of their own that has something to do with Seattle, on Thanksgiving.
I don’t have any problem with it being in the paper. But if all they are is a newsprint version of disaster TV channel CNN, and they feel to get on the front page, it has to be about killing, they have nothing to offer me as a reader. It should be noted here the number two story is the “South Center Mall Shooter”!! Amazingly, the third story down I s about a 18karat gold bookmark stolen from an auction house in Madrid in 2002 by a Romanian and his arrest in Bellevue.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008441903_bookmark27m.html

Jesus H!@

Anyway Times, since you are clearly struggling, let me help you. Here is my idea, it will massively get you in the news, and you might even be able to charge people for on-line subscriptions. Just as you already have a sports section, a local section, religion or whatever you can now have a section called: BLOOD AND GORE.

You can name it whatever you want SHOOTINGS AND SHOOTERS, DEAD PEOPLE, TERROISM TIMES. This would be where you would put stories like the India massacre on the front page today. You could publish full color foldouts of death and violence. In addition things like photos of horrific car crashes that are still published in South American newspapers could be reinstituted. You could have celebrity autopsy photos, and all manner of blood and death. There clearly is a market for this, why not mine it?