Thursday, October 09, 2008

Poison Rationality

You know Panic at the Disco song: "I chime in with a haven't you people have heard of closing the [expletive deleted] door. No it's much better to face these kind of things with a sense of Poison Rationality."

I like the term "Poison Rationality".

To me, Poison Rationality is anything that makes no sense to me, but apparently makes lots of sense to someone else out there. For instance, the fact that drug companies spend so much money putting out commercials for prescription drugs makes no sense to me, but obviously it makes enough sense to someone to spend millions of dollars doing it.

Poison Rationality.

The fact that news outlets spend so much time "reporting" on problems celebrities, or family members of celebrities are having with drugs or un-married pregnancies or whatever is another example of Poison Rationality. I just don't care, but I see this sort of thing running something ALL THE TIME on news channels that are on when I am working out. To be fair, I do not usually tune in enough to know what is being said, but I am able to tell from graphics and text on the screen that they are spending hours talking about "famous" people and their problems. It makes no sense to me that this is news. But, apparently Fox News (as the biggest example I have seen) thinks this is something they need to spend hours and hours talking about.

Poison Rationality.

The most recent thing that strikes me as Poison Rationality is the presidential "debates". I do not understand why they are called debates. I don't understand why they have a moderator. Both candidates talk about whatever the heck they want to talk about. I did not watch very much last night because I was frustrated, but while I was watching, neither candidate answered any of the questions that were actually asked. They might as well have started off each answer with "I'm going to ignore that question, but here is what I would really like to talk about for the next few minutes." I suppose that would have just been redundant and wasted time because anyone who was watching for more than a couple of minutes could tell that none of the answers had anything to do with the questions.

Poison Rationality.

Another thing that has been bothering me is that how 90% of the campaign adds don't actually advertise the person who the add is "for". Most of the adds tell us how terrible the "other guy" is. If you are basing your decision on T.V. or radio adds, you have no idea what your guy thinks about anything or what his positive qualities for the job might be. All you really know is what the other guy sucks at. And, of course, it makes no sense to me, but it is pretty common knowledge that these sorts of adds are effective. Again, if they were not effective, there would not be so many negative campaign adds on T.V.

Poison Rationality.

I just officially "passed" on a business opportunity. My buddy Derry Roth, who really came up with the idea for Auction Automations has another business he is trying to get going, and offered to bring me on board to help with the software development. We never really talked about details, but basically the idea would be I would trade development hours for an ownership stake in the company. The Poison Rationality here is that I think this opportunity has the potential of being extremely lucrative. I never thought Auction Automations would be the kind of thing that would be able to make much money. I still have my doubts about Auction Automations. I don't absolutely know about this other opportunity, but it sure seems like a great idea that has lots of interest. And, it is geared toward selling useful software and services to customers who can afford to and would want to pay well. So, basically, I said yes to the opportunity I did not believe in and no to the one I think will work out great financially. If he would have come to me with this opportunity first, I would be working on this, and not Auction Automations.

The way things work out in my life, I am sure it will turn out that I made the right decision, but at the moment, it sure does not seem logical.

Poison Rationality.

Ok... the song's words are a little bit different. "Poison Rationality" is actually Poise and Rationality but the actual words do not match what I am trying to blog about here. Plus, whenever the song, I hear Poison Rationality.

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