Google is the Future

Recently there's been a lot of reasons to want to make sweet, passionate love to whatever idol of Google you can acquire. Whether it be advanced cellphones, cheap and reliable internet infrastructure, their support of an open internet, availability of free and awesome apps including the collaborative online office-clone suite Google docs, Google maps, Gmail, blogger (the platform that this blog is written from), driver-less cars, the Google search engine, Google is the best and brightest that the technology world has to offer.

Technology people fucking love Google. If any company is going to take us into the future it's going to be Google. You can basically guarantee that almost* anything they put their effort into will be shaken to its core and innovated.

* Social media notwithstanding

So why not just throw in our lot with the Googs? Clearly they are the tech dynamo end all and be all, and basically can do no wrong.

What do we see when a company finally hits critical mass? There's always contraction and what appears to be calcification; companies lose relevance. We've seen it with countless other institutions, right now basically every cell phone company in the world at one time or another offered unlimited data plans for a large sum. As prices went down², our options to even have it dried up! I have an unlimited data plan because I was grandfathered in with my last contract but now if I upgrade I'll have to choose a plan that costs the same amount as my current one, but no longer offers unlimited data.

Forget that, unlimited texting costs me almost half my phone bill each month when the actual cost of sending and receiving a text is 140 bytes³. How much does a voice call cost? That information isn't freely available from phone companies but Skype, a leader in VOIP, claims you need 30kb per second⁴ just to maintain a call at low quality. As a point of reference, one kilobyte is equal to 1024 bytes. So you would have to send 219 text messages to equal 1 second of a voice call, and yet the price difference for these two plans is negligible. Ho-hum.

We are in a country where it pays to be lazy and mysterious. Telecoms want you to pay huge premiums on newer technologies even if those technologies are a hundred times more cost effective then anything else they offer. The United States infrastructure in third-world in quality and despite making hundreds of millions of dollars these companies are doing nothing to help you. Oh wait, Time Warner bumped a lower tier's internet speed up by 5mbps to 15mbps for free. They also started making people pay a surcharge of $5 to lease their modems, a service that has been free for the last 10 years.

Google is currently offering Google Fiber in small areas as a way of threatening these other companies with competition. Google's internet is a Gigabit upload download for $70 a month or free for life for a one-time construction fee of $300. If you'd like to compare Time Warner, we'd do the unit conversion of 1 gigabit = 128 mbs. Yes, you read that right. No, I didn't fuck up the math.

There is a sad thing that seems to happen when it comes to companies now, people think that no matter what you do you're a shill for them or you have some kind of vested interest in their well-being that supports a little fervor.

This post is no different. I'm definitely a shill for Google. But it you're going to be a shill for any company, let it be one that threatens you with innovation instead of stifling our progress.

1http://stopthecap.com/2012/11/05/time-warner-cable-will-increase-standard-broadband-speed-to-151mbps-nationwide/

2http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/capping_the_nation_s_broadband_future

3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_messaging

4https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA1417/how-much-bandwidth-does-skype-need

Hello again!

Okay, wow, so it's been a while huh?

I always considered myself to be really careful with things, finances, my words, my actions, all that other stuff. I like to temper my optimism with realism and sometimes that can come up and bite me in the ass. I try to take on like ten things at once and keep up with it for the briefest flash in the saucepan and next thing I know I got nothing again.

A few years ago after a breakup my cousin invited me to the gym and I got really into it. I had just spent a lot of time losing weight and I was excited to be working out, which was awesome. I spent many days of my week out with that group of people and lifting, we went to some shows in the city and off in some further away places and it was grand. At some point I picked up the guitar again and started taking lessons, and a bit further down the line started rock climbing and joined a book club. Everything was in balance, and I was improving myself in a wide arc. I could have mastered all those things over the course of a few years if I had the single-mindedness to continue with everything at once.

I met a very special lady, we hit it off and have been together ever since. We go on all sorts of adventures (some of which I wrote about in this blog - Ireland is a biggie!)

I picked up my writing more frequently. I'd never tried to give it structure before, instead working only when I fancied to on an impulse. So I picked two days a week and started writing on those days, which further locked down my weeks.

I overextended. six out of seven days a week I was spoken for and people were asking me to make time on the remaining day. The stress of all that was too much.

I finally hit the tipping point though, something had to give. I stayed with rock climbing but was running out of time to work out, so I toned it down to just running. I kept up with the guitar but I wasn't watching my finances. When I realized it I started cutting back - the lessons went but I tried to keep it up. I injured myself running and never really got it back together. I occasionally break out and go for one and realize I'm pushing it too far too fast and get frustrated. I promise myself I'll give more and never get around to it.

Life is hard. It's not supposed to be easy, not by a longshot. We all do the best we can, but at the end of the day we all have a limit. I push mine in leaps and bounds and sometimes need to take a break. It seems like I hit that point with this blog as well, and let it languish.

I'm going to try to resurrect it soon - I've got plenty of other projects I'd like to explore and work on. I'm especially interested in Buddhism at the moment, in addition to financial stuff I was going to explore in another blog but I realized I didn't have the experience to really work on that and give advice. I might need to consolidate and just give my personal experience in the areas of finance, spirituality and entertainment from a central spot. That doesn't jive with my original plan - that this be a blog for my writing - but I don't produce at the rate that a blog like this needs to be relevant.

So I'll be back, and will be posting things differently.