Tag: Dave Winer

There’s an interesting exchange at Scripting.Com between David Winer and Jamie Vornov over the value of money. Winer wrote the other day advising people to, “probe your dreams at a deeper level and see if you can’t find a way to do the things you want to do with your life, even if you have no money. You can save yourself a lot of years, learning the old adage, money doesn’t buy happiness.”

On the other hand from a strictly economic point of view, Vornov points out that there is no such thing as having too much wealth since unlimited wealth has unlimited utility.

As a writer, I’m a big believer in Dr. Ben Johnson’s adage that “nobody but a fool ever wrote for anything but money,” but on the other hand I agree more with Winer than Vornov. Vornov is certainly correct that unlimited wealth has unlimited utility. All other things being equal, it would be far better to have unlimited wealth than to not have unlimited wealth.

Unfortunately from a purely economic point of view one can indeed have too much money — you just have to not forget about the opportunity cost involved in obtaining wealth.

If I could obtain unlimited wealth by simply waving my hand, then certainly I’d want it. But the reality is that the creation of wealth typically requires a number of other inputs, the one that concerns me the most right now being time.

Wealth can only be converted into time in a very roundabout way. Certainly my ability to buy a faster computer or an appliance like a dishwasher allows me to do more things within the time I have, but it doesn’t allow me to manufacture more time. The general exception to this is medical advances where having enough money to afford say a liver transplant should I ever need one would directly translate into additional time. But for the most part, I doubt highly that a person making say $100,000/year is able to convert that into significantly more time than someone making $50,000/year.

And here’s the kicker — I’ve seen what people have to do to make $100,000/year, and I want no part of it. I’ve seen people wanting to climb the corporate ladder put in 70 hour weeks on a regular basis. Their entire lives were pretty much the company. They made a lot more than I did but I definitely did not envy them.

Regardless of what money can do, I suspect for most people time has far more utility than money once they reach a comfortable living standards. All of Bill Gates’ money, for example, can’t do anything to increase the amount of time he is able to spend with his child on a daily basis.

A few weeks ago I had a talk with my current boss that I’ve had with the last few people I’ve worked for — why the heck are you working here, they ask? Based on my resume I’m way overqualified for the current job I have now, but I clearly have absolutely no ambitions to move up either. Why? Because at the moment spending time with my family is much more important to me than making more money.

This doesn’t mean, by the way, that it’s necessarily wrong to decide what you really want out of life is to make a lot of money — unlike some people I actually think that’s a pretty admirable goal. Just be aware that you are explicitly making that choice because sometimes the pursuit of wealth does interfere with other values people hold more dearly.

Dave Winer writes about abusive e-mail that he and other people get. Winer says,

A word of encouragement to people who write publicly, passing on something that was said to me a few years ago by a journalist. Look at the Letters to the Editor page in magazines. You’ll see abusive people saying nasty personal things about public writers. This isn’t a new thing. If you go through it, you’ll be a better writer. Not sure if this is true, but mean readers are a fact of life. Email makes communication easier, and that includes abusive communication.

As someone who has worked as a journalist here’s my take: the only way you know you’re having an impact on people is when some of them start sending you hate mail. Ignore it.

Personally, abusive e-mail is pretty easy to deal with. I zap such messages into my archives folder without giving them another thought. Life’s busy enough without having to deal with profanity filled, poorly written rants (legitimate criticism, however, I read carefully).

On the other hand when I wrote for a print newspaper I came home once to find a death threat on my answering machine, and I know other people who had irate readers try to physically intimidate them.

Abusive e-mail is much easier to deal with.

BTW, just an example of what I mean about the beauty of David Winer’s vision of the web. On Scripting News, Winer linked to a Fortune magazine featuring his views/impressions of the whole dot-com phenomenon:

It’s boring. Money is boring. And party conversation about money is even more boring. I want to know what people think, and I want to know what their passions are. I want to be inspired by them. I want them to do beautiful things that entertain me. I want my beautiful things to entertain them. The Internet is a fantastic technology that helps me do these things.

Exactly.

David Winer posted an Alice Walker quote originally posted at the Book Notes web log. Walker is quoted as saying, “No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”

The problem with this quote is that Walker is a complete hypocrite. In 1989, Walker wrote a piece called, What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?. After a long diatribe, Walker concludes that the only thing white men should say is, “I will agree to sit quietly for a century or so, and meditate on this.”

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

One of my writer friends, one of Walker’s hated white males, is diabetic and requires regular injections of insulin to survive. Alice Walker, on the other hand, is an avowed animal rights activist who has compared the sorts of experiments that resulted in insulin therapy to slavery in 18th and 17th century United States. Ban such experiments she says.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or demands you right to grow. Add ” …or survive” to the end of that, and you have a perfect description of everything that Walker stand opposed to, despite the phony sentiment she tries to convey in this quote.

Dave Winer is at it again, throwing down with Tim O’Reilly. I’m not even going to bother quoting or linking to the specific posts in question — you can go to Winer site above and search on O’Reilly to follow the sordid tale.

To sum it up, Winer always tends to make outlandish accusations very publicly and then gets upset when people point out that he’s acting rudely. In the latest blowup Winer was actually angry at O’Reilly for posting a very public explanation of why he didn’t invite Winer to participate in a Peer-To-Peer conference, saying essentially that Winer is too disruptive.

And why, you’re asking yourself, should I care? Because it’s a great illustration of how you can have the greatest product in the world and still get yourself into a lot of trouble unless you have rudimentary people skills. Winer has written incredible programs, but he tends to alienate folks and burn a lot of bridges with people who should be his strongest supporters. It’s almost like he’s intent on sabotaging himself.

One of the most difficult things in the world for most people to do is to accept criticism without it eating at their self-respect or self-esteem, especially if the person receiving the criticism thinks that it is unfair. Winer doesn’t seem to have learned how to do that, and moreover like many people he compounds the problem by regularly dishing out unfair criticism (such as his bizarre suggestion that O’Reilly backstabbed him over RSS), which inevitably provokes tons of fair and unfair criticism in return.

It amazes me that after all those years we spent as kids singing silly “Sticks and Stones” rhymes that people still freak out because of comments made by others. Seth Dillingham mentions a common situation where relatives in an extended family say one thing or another about each other and then those things tend to snowball.

I have a similar experience both in that most of the people in my extended family really don’t understand pretty much every decision my wife and I have made and a lot of it comes back to us through the grapevine, but who cares? The bottom line is that if you are secure in who you are and know where you want to go with your life, what somebody else thinks is a minor annoyance at worst.

The key in dealing with other people, from my experience, is to become good at distinguishing between unreasonable requests and opinions, which can be safely dismissed and ignored, and between reasonable suggestions and views which are worth listening to and considering even if you do ultimately go your own way.