Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

How is it that certain catchphrases resonate so well with truly ignorant and clueless people? How is it that the stupidity is so powerful that it actually moves them to vote against their best interests? In Florida we now have “Joe the Plumber” commercials, where series of people try to show profound ignorance and lack of understanding of how the tax system works, the punchline being:

“I’m supposed to work harder just to pay more taxes?“

Yes, you dumb sack of shit, and that’s not called socialism, that is called capitalism.

The harder you work the more money you make and the more taxes you pay.

This is not a really new concept either, it’s been around since 1862, and started as a way to pay for the Civil War. Ever since then we’ve had a tax system (which actually started as a progressive tax system to begin with, charging 3% on the low end and 5% if you made more than 10K a year) under which you pay more taxes the more money you make.

This is the very foundation of capitalism — that greed is good part of Gordon Gecko’s speech. The harder you work the more money you make the more money you contribute to your community and your country and the more of it goes to eliminate poverty, educate the population, feed the hungry, build the roads, build schools, elevate the income and prosperity which feeds back to the prosperity of the entire country and with more expendable income go to exponentially benefit the richest and the hardest working among us.

Somehow this foundation of the federal government in a capitalist society seems to have gotten the “socialist” label over the past year or so. Spreading the wealth is such a mythical concept to the very same people that drive around on the public roads, send kids to public schools, collect social security, veterans benefits, apply for small business loans and try to build a business on top of the very same beneficiaries of all of the above.

I have a plea for Joe the Plumber and The Angry Villager Band – please quit your jobs and go work for McDonalds. You will make less than $15,000 a year, qualify for some government assistance and be able to pay less than 10% tax. Hard work is overrated, the harder you work the more money you make (which for this part of the argument should be ignored) and the socialists are going to take more and more of your money. If you make more than $23,100 they will try to take 15% of your money, over $43,550 they will try to take 25% of your money and if you work even harder they will take away 28%, or even 33% or oh my god, even 35%. And it gets even worse. If you get really rich and build houses and stock portfolios and cars and get wealthy the socialists will take even more money even after you die in terms of estate taxes. What is the incentive to work (aside from building wealth and raising your standard of living) if all it does is pay more taxes??????So to make sure you don’t pay more in taxes you should go work at McDonalds and aim to die as broke as you possibly can.

And please stop bitching about getting a tax refund. Greed is good. When there is prosperity ambitious people spot the opportunity and they build businesses around it that benefit more people and improve everyone that business touches – higher wages, higher tax brackets – higher standard of living. On the flip side, when the government is forced to cut programs that a lot of families rely on it causes those families to have parents cut hours or even quit working which decreases discretionary spending which decreases the consumerist nature which leads to more layoffs and more unemployed people which in turn leads to less tax revenues and an effective freeze in American prosperity that most of us have enjoyed for quite some time.

Patriotism goes beyond a bumper sticker. If you are Joe the Plumber and get the privilege of casting a vote this November 4th ask yourself if you are really voting for your and your family’s best interests.

Welcome to the wonderful world of business competition:

Dear Vladimir,

If you are concerned by published reports about DHL’s reduced capabilities, choose FedEx for all of your shipments, especially during the holidays.

Big s**t poppin and lil s**t stoppin…

Now I know some look at these developments and look for cover.. this is my third major global financial crisis and every time it comes around the mainstream media coverage is equivalent to the Jesus freaks quoting nonsense from the Book of Revelation, Nostradamus guys break out the quatrains and the hobo in front of Chris’s office change their cardboard signs.

In each instance the largest and the best clobber up their competitors, squeeze them and their accounts out and emerge on top.

So panic, compromise your values and offerings, batten down the hatches, cut spending and staff, hide from the storm and pray for the best. World needs pigs too and it’s slaughtering time.

Are you holding a knife or your own a**?

(Yes, it was an exceptionally motivational Monday morning squawk box call @ OWN. As of 24th we’ve crushed all previous revenue/growth numbers and are putting another month up on the wall.)

…. of traditional computing as we know it: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1671

In case you are curious about why this is such a game changer consider a note from one of my younger developers (age 23) that sent me this note from PDC:

“Its crazy there are a lot of people my age or younger here… There are even a few instances of ______ here lol”

These aren’t unemployed hobbyists trolling for a clue, these folks all had their employees part with at least $5K a pop to send their developers out to Los Angeles for a week.

People that write the software you use (or are in business of reselling and supporting) are betting that the above is the future. Trying to determine where that puts your business is the question you probably want to start figuring out an answer to right now, or perhaps when Karl Palachuk and I first told you this was where the industry was heading nearly two years ago.

Last week marked the launch of AWS upgrades across the board and the stable release of Amazon Web Services scalable cloud offerings powered by Linux and Windows.

Yesterday I met with Hank to go over the schedule for PDC going on in LA next week. Guess what at least 80% of the content is? Live services, cloud services, cloud-enabling and integrating peer services, Windows 7 integration with the cloud. Roughly 20% of it concerned actual desktop-server use, with the grand total of 1 session on Exchange development.

Things are changing out there…. The decision to be or not to be a mere Geek Squad employee five years from now is being made right now.

I think all the negative ads on TV are really turning me into a ruthless bastard. On my way to work this morning and I’m chatting with a fellow partner from Australia. His monkeys blew up clients migration and overwrote the Exchange 2000 database. Last backup was 24 hours ago, no replay logs. What to do, what to do.

Now, I can’t do magic… but I can do slimy vendor whore:

Vlad Mazek says:

and just say that the current backup technology that is in play only does daily snapshots so in the worst case scenario you will lose 1 day. It was a worst case scenario, you lost a day, you’re back in business. Now if this is significant we need to reevaluate our backup services and (sell you a huge) CDP solution 🙂

Remember kids, aaaaaalways be pimping.

You know why? Because NOBODY EVER thinks they will ever have an issue and they think they will totally deal with occasional outages and problems with rational sense that technology can sometimes fail and that there are other forms of communication,  after all it’s not life and death and it’s worth a risk of saving a few bucks.

Which is all nice and well until their Crackberry dies at 2:30 AM while they are arranging a booty call or trying to look up the password to their pr0n site (true story) and the world will end if they don’t have 99.999% uptime. That’s when I put my pimp hat on and tack another 0 at the end of the quote because if you can’t tollerate 99.9% uptime (basically one business day outage) a month you do not belong on a single point of failure solution. End of conversation.

You see, when people are pricing a solution they are buying the low percentage likelyhood that something will go wrong. When something goes wrong, they try to overestimate the cost of the outage.

My job is to help you meet me in the middle.

And I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you, with a lot more servers and experience that you can even imagine, believe me – it’s only a choice of when you will be paying and how much, not IF it will ever happen.

ABP.