Good for One but Bad for All

     Monopoly laws seem pretty cut and straightforward, don't they? Just make sure that you don't dominate over a certain percentage of the market you are participating in and the government or competitors won't have a reason to rise a case against you. But there are so many antitrust cases which all deal with this problem but why is that so important? Does it really matter that you have a little more dominance than someone else? Without laws like this put in place the world would probably succumb to a vastly rich and overpowered company that would wipe others out of oblivion and is theorized to have exploiting a company into something else entirely. Develop a new system, get a personalized army, rule over a country. After all, it has happened before.

     With Apple hitting a market cap of 770 billion dollars it is obvious that it is the most profitable modern company and makes you wonder if it is the greatest of all time. The keyword here is modern, it is true to so based on the last century no company could have ever surpassed it but what if we were to look further back than that? Have you ever heard of the Dutch East India Company? Probably not, but it is responsible for most of the economic aspects you see today not the mention the numerous inventions that they were the sole root of.

     The Dutch East India Company was originally established as a charter company, and in those the intentions the Dutch government had granted them a 21 year monopoly on the Dutch spice trade. It grew to be known as the world's first transcontinental corporation and the very first company to issue bonds and shares of stock to the general public. In other words it was the first publicly traded company. And as the first model of a quasi-fictional mash up of mega corporations it received a share of somewhat governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, imprison and execute convicts, negotiate treaties, strike its own coin, and even establish companies.

     It is also thought to have been the first and greatest company of all time, since statistically it has overshadowed it's own competitors for over 200 years. When looking at what made this company so profitable there are three main factors it is important to remember. Jay Huygens a Ditch navigator who worked for the Portuguese revealed the important trade rules which allow the Dutch and British to catch up and break the monopoly. The Dutch launched the first ever Initial Public Offering of shares, allowing them to raise enormous financial powers and compete with bigger countries. While enjoying the already established trade route via Batavia, they established direct roots later on to ship tea faster and manage the quality better.

     But whatever the greatest company that ever was is, there will never be one again, at least, not under the current national laws, but with good reason too, if one company is the best all others would be indefinitely forced to be at mercy under its will. It takes interest to note that there is no best of both worlds in this situation, only everyone can be mediocre, or one can prosper while others fail.

Separate but Equal

     Nowadays a highly emphasized is equality, for all. Equality for all races, equality for all genders, equality for all religions. But something widely disregarded among these acts of impartiality is fair and equal treatment at "correctional facilities". The eighth banned the use or cruel or unusual punishment toward convicts yet it happens every single day. Each and every day Americans are discounting the host of terrible mistreatment that they prisoners are contempt to. Not only is this nefarious and constitutionally unacceptable, it's bad practice for when these same exact people cycle back into the community after serving their sentences. Imagine the retribution they would seek in order to combat the injustice they were traumatized with. Contempt for the government, contempt for any security guards or police offers, good or bad, and even contempt towards everyone else for not standing up and helping them.
     Now I am not saying that this over cedes whichever crime they enacted, but it is incomparable to have a larcenist having his food thrown and splattered all over him each and every day. There are cases of a man being chained to his bed in his underwear for months, a man having his cell right next to broken pipes for toilets which often made it reek of urine and feces, and even four people being stuffed in a cell meant for two with only one bunk bed subjecting the other (usually weaker) two have to sleep and the cold, hard ground. Cells are sometimes exceedingly hot or cold, the water is also either blazing hot or freezing cold, and when toilets break or overflow there is no hurry to fix them.
     This may also be in use to demonstrate what happens to criminals and to act as a way to keep people in check in an indirect way. Sound familiar? It's just like the Salem Witch trials. Most people think that the trials were due to the superstitious nature of the people in that time who used quips like this to feel more safe themselves, but the actuality was very different, people were very aware that these people probably weren't even part of the supernatural but just used this as a medium to keep communities in Massachusetts to instill fear. Similarly the prisons seem to be rehabilitation centers when really they are just inflicting greater pain onto the people who fall under there facilities.
     Maybe this vile practice was useful in harming enemy soldiers taken in as prisoners but there is no reason to continue those practices now, especially to your own citizens. Think of it like this, the qwerty keyboard was first put in place in order to space out the most used words apart in order to keep the jamming of keys in a type writer. But it's different now, keyboards work differently so things like that won't happen anymore but we still use the exact system. There are many benefits towards other designs, most obviously one that goes in alphabetical in order to aid kids learning their abc's to gain a better understanding of them. There are also models that increase speed that we don't use, which is just incredulous. If there are no visible benefits to this system why should we still use it? After all isn't this the object of the various revolutions and tyranny's through history?
     There is one last subject I want to touch one, capital punishment. In October 16, 2002 a black man beat his neighbors daughter with a bat. Now he is serving a life sentence for an injustice he committed when he was 13 years old! He has nothing to look forward to in his life and he will never get out unless on the off chance the evidence in his case was obtained illegally or there was some other factor abhorring a mistrial. Now I know this is an unpopular view but I believe that he should get the choice to die or serve out his sentence. It's his life, it should be his choice as each decision would consequentially result in people like him rid of the world one by the means of being forgotten and shunned and the other by peacefully succumbing to an eternal darkness. The latter would also result in less depleted resources and missed agony he would receive from his fellow prisoners.
     But regardless of my personal opinions there is one thing that should be considered. America is a land built on law order and justice. If the Constitution is held is held as the highest law in the land what does that tell you about us when we directly contradict what it states?

The Pyrrhic Debacle

    It's Friday night. You walk along a pier near your house and stop at the end, taking in the air and the sights. There's no person in view just a whimper. You look under the wood and find a little girl along the sand, cold and alone. You take her back to your place and you discover that her parents were insane and abusive. You go to court and become her legal guardian and for months the two of you live happily together. But then her uncle shows up and he wants to move in and soon after so do all her friends and relatives. Soon enough you complain to the landlord who you explain that they are trying to kick yourself out and he advises that you to it to court. There it is established that it is as much theirs as much and yours and you also discover that all of those people came from some dysfunctional history where they were treated worse than you are right now. Should they be forced to wander from place to place seeking refuge for their entire lives purely because they were born to a certain culture or should there be a domino effect where they kick out one family who kicks out another, and which becomes and ever ending cycle.

    Though this is not a perfect example, at its basis this is the moral quandary presented in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. This collision is the most grand scale, contemporary model that outside forces shouldn't dictate what happens between two civil forces. Jews were recoiling back from World War Two and were trying to find a permanent refuge, considering the Americas and Africa, but finally settling on Palestine. Palestinians were cool with them here but later when their masses increased they became more and more worried. And soon there was conflict on whose state it was and how to settle the conflict. The UN was the first to mediate, from external pressure faced from the Zionists they came to the decision of giving Jews the majority of the land, even though they one made up a third of the population. Later when the war broke out Israel conquered the Gaza Strip and the West Bank but since it is international law that one cannot conquer land through war anymore they simply inhabited that area.

    There are many different proposed solutions to try to get them to peacefully coexist but there is one in particular which may seem crazy for the outsider but is becoming more apparent due to demography and geography reasons. The proposition to combine Israel and Palestine into one single country. But of course like every compromise, there comes with a set of problems.

    Firstly, the Jews would have to give up their dream of ever being part of their own country. Self determinations was the sole motive for the Zionist project and to give up on a country built on sacrificing 23,320 men, women, and children is just too much to bear for some.

    Secondly the change in the community is improbable to be adaptable for each side. What protected minority is safe in the Middle East? The Coptic Christians who are experiencing the worst violence since the 14th century, according to scholar Samuel Taros. The Kurds, who are under systematic discrimination? The Yazidi people who are under risk of genocide? The Bahia, whose temple is in Israel because it's the one place in the Middle East they can practice freely? And let's not forget the fate of Jews in Arab countries whose protected status was revoked at whim? Syrian, Egyptian, Libyan, Iraqi and Lebanese Jews remember far too well, how quickly relations could turn sour and deadly. Its impossible for Christians, Muslims, and Jews to live side by side, not only because Israel won't come to terms with it, but also because Arabs and Islams just don't experience it. Jews and Christians don't even live together in the Palestine Diaspora so how could they be expected to live side by side today in equality?

    Thirdly how can they find a way to live together without being aggressive towards each other? A constitution sounds like a good idea but the issue of this is different from everyone that precedes it. How could we be sure that it would be enforced? Would Jews have to give up their homes to compensate for the 5 million Palestinians that are incoming? What if a secular democracy becomes voted out for a religious fundamentalist view? What if the new government decides to persecute the Jews who played any part in the occupation? What if they decide to totally imprison them, scour their homes, and give them the ultimate penalty. Considering the support for the Hamas it would be dangerous for any I would be most wary of this line of events happening.

    And lastly, looking from an economic viewpoint this convergence would create an economic gridlock. Combining a third world economy and a first world economy would only lead to economic misery. Israel couldn't accept so many civilians without having their social systems collapse. Start Up Nation would be evacuated, as millions of penniless refugees would pour in. Google, Apple, Teva, all of those brain industries would flee, as would anyone with a passport. A bankrupt economy would follow, as the overextended Israeli social welfare system would burst at the seams.

    The two state solutions aren't much better, they all are either barbaric and use backwards thinking or they would lead to an automatic Arab opposition  they could exorcise their Zoabis and Tibi demons and put secular nationalists out. And of course the U.S. intervention of paying them 8 million each day to help Israeli to control the radical and rebelling is just giving them more military power which in turn makes rebelling Palestinians more extreme and innocent Palestinians more scared.

    There is no clear solution to this never ending conflict but there is a silver lining in all this, as the form of a lesson. Even if there comes to be a solution the losses will be too heavy to call it an accord. Intervention should always be used as a last resort and when it is used it shouldn't be at the mercy of one side. Because peace cannot come from a lack conflict. But peace is handling conflict in peaceful means. It's through this sight that those two opposing sides are forever plagued with discord.

When Mediocrity is Better

    Some time ago, department managers (hourly employees) would voluntarily wander in on their free time and clean up their departments (like on Sundays when they did shopping as they all used to have weekends off). Later on a department manager was passed over for a promotion because her department wasn't as clean as her peers. She sued her boss and won. During the court hearing, she claimed that she was the only department manager who refused to ever do work off the clock. When she said that to her store manager, he replied that “Everybody else did what it took to get the job done.” She claimed that it was an unfair advantage. The store leadership team claimed that they never put such pressure on employees and in fact weren't responsible for what people did on their time off. It turned out under cross examination the store manager and district manager were asked if it were okay for an employee to work off the clock. They said no. Then they were asked if they'd ever told employees never to work off the clock. They said yes. Then they were asked if they'd ever terminated an employee for working off the clock. They said no.
     Ching! Game over and they knew it. Why? It comes down to American corporate norms and the long held legal view that: “a rule that is not backed up with both the threat of corrective action AND a consistent track record of corrective action is not a bona-fide rule.” Walmart lost the court case and had to pay millions in fines and class action money. The reason you wonder? “An environment where employees are allowed to work for free creates an environment where other employees feel pressured to work for free to be considered good performers. This deprives them of their rights and an even playing field when it comes to annual appraisals and opportunities for promotion.” No employer is permitted —even if you as ab employee offer it voluntarily— to ever allow an employee to work for free or work when they are not scheduled to without submitting it into their time card.

     Of course this has its own set of problems along with it, it pressures the employees to work better and make smarter decisions during their working hours because they don't receive the extra time to compensate. Furthermore it also creates money to be the soul head of the entire project, neglecting learning or communicating better. And of course all this could have been avoided if all the employees were equally motivated or as apathetic as the next but everyone is different in such a wide population array it is near impossible for all of them to concede with one concrete thing.

     But in such a workplace where complete strangers come together to interact closely for 8-12 hours within the day I think such a mediocre level is important, helpful, and maybe even needed. If you befriend a mediocre person you won't become threatening to them.  Not too smart, not too pretty, not too much of a work of art, not too witty. Not too anything. 

When the Fog Lifts

     It's obvious that certain emotions is the only requirement to destroy any relationship, sparing it of any natural death but rather killing it with attitude, ignorance, and, of course, ego. It creates misunderstandings that could have just as simply went away just as it came by simply asking what else this incident could mean to the. Emotions cloud judgement more than anything else can. But when the fog lifts will what is left really be satisfactory, or will you despise your premonitions and which the change the causes of such a raw deal?
     We only see each other through a pane of window tinted with the flaws of our own egos. This narrowed perspective causes misconceptions that can make, but usually break our biggest desires. Competition, vanity, fear, desire-- all are such distortions from our own egos-- train our jarring viewpoint of those in relation to us. Combine the jarring details of our own windows and put them together, alongside the entire worlds and you'll realize how cloudy the glass must become in which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is cause enough for an individual to see through the opacity and see the naked truth of what lies there.

     Warren Buffet is a critically acclaimed investor with an brilliant company. Now everyone thinks that him buying Berkshire Hathaway was a stroke of genius but he himself admits that it was the worst qualitative decisions he has ever made.  Berkshire Hathaway was not always a financial powerhouse; it was once a struggling textile mill. In 1965 Buffet had noticed a trading pattern in Berkshire’s stock; when the company would sell off an under performing mill, it would use the proceeds to buy back stock, which would temporarily boost the stock price. Buffet's strategy was to buy Berkshire stock each time it sold a mill and then sell the company its stock back in the share repurchase for a small, tidy profit. But then ego got in the way. Buffet and Berkshire’s CEO had a gentleman’s agreement on a tender offer price. But when the office offer arrived in the mail, Buffett noticed that the CEO’s offer price was 1/8 of a point lower than they had agreed previously. Taking the offer as a personal insult, Buffett bought a controlling interest in the company so that he could have the pleasure of firing its CEO. And though it might have given him satisfaction at the time, Buffett later called the move a “200-billion-dollar mistake.”

     You see if he hadn't bought out the entire company and simply invested the same amount of money into something else that he was originally planning to do, an insurance company, take Geico for example, in 1951 he had invest half his net worth in it but later ignored it focusing on smart maneuvers such as with Berkshire Hathaway and later in the 70's increased his investment in Geico since they were reeling in from heavy losses had recieved a double fold in dividends. In 2000 when he was buying Geico he remarked he should have done it long ago.

      Of course you need to have emotions, many rich and famous people have them and perhaps its what makes them so great. But the key lies not in not having emotions, but in not using them.

What Bears out at the Edge of Doom

     Tennessee Williams once wrote, 'We all live in a house of fire. No fire department to call. No way out. Just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down… with us trapped, locked in it.” I’ve deplored his plays because they accented altruism, that we should all sacrifice for others and painted out selfishness to be a brute. I do believe selflessness is only helpful to be hindering, rewarding to impotent, cordial to be aloof. I do believe all the misery comes from wishing joy to others and all the joy comes from wishing joy to oneself. I do believe selfishness is the way to happiness, to stop the fire and every decision is selfish.
     In the real world selfishness can be seen through capitalism and selflessness is socialism. If the goal of your society was to reap equal benefits for everyone then what would be the point, the motive, the aspiration for striving to be better? Nothing. Do you consider the productive being paid and the lazy to not immoral? Do you consider working on your values to be egotistic? Do you consider expecting others to help you when you help them selfish? The Golden Rule itself is a selfish principle. It is based on the fact that your behaviors promote and justify to others the way in which to treat you. There is no daylight between selfishness and happiness while there is a chasm between happiness and selflessness.
     I used to stand in as a therapist at a rehab center and at the end of summer I could assess one person and was allowed to give him access to attend his mom’s funeral. I met with him, and his dad who pleaded me to let him go, and though deep down inside I knew he wasn’t ready but I reasoned it was for a good cause and his mom would want him to, so I gave him permission. If something bad happened I would be in deep trouble but I put his interests above my own. The next evening I heard he overdosed and later learned he had a hypoxic brain injury. That’s the problem with altruism, you give but you never really know whether your sacrifice was justified or not. Social Contract Theory, a belief that a group of individuals follow a contract, as old as philosophy itself holds Thomas Hobbes belief in Psychological Egoism, that everyone essentially holds a selfish gene to be true. I was selfless to be selfish. To be a god who brings stoic families together for my own pleasure was my objective. It's easy to see things in black and white all you need is a body, but to see color you need will. There is a thirst for power in an act of generosity, despair in deception, shame in altruism, ambition in revenge, even drive within resignation.I won't. I won't lie. I won't lie anymore about the most obvious origin of the most obvious truth of the most obvious misconception. The greatest robbery Robin Hood ever pulled was convincing the world he was a man of good morals.
     I’ve read of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Proust. And I learned the assertion that I should work on myself, for myself, by myself, that internal change is what propels an individual. You know that one person in your life that you love so much in your life that you would be willing to do anything for? Right, now, make that person yourself and do whatever you want. Because later, when your memories become pictures, and you become known as someone’s uncle or mom, or mentor, you’ll find yourself in front of the edge of doom. Then will your will have willed your willing right? Or will your willingness will into the abyss of the unfortunately unwilled?