Kevin Pezzi, MD

Disagree with something I wrote? So do I! Read more

“To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”

— Elbert Hubbard, American editor, publisher, and writer (1856–1915)

Trivia: He and his wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, the noted feminist and writer, died aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915, when they were heading to Europe to cover the war and interview Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

If you disagree with something I wrote, feel free to challenge it. Some of my viewpoints are the antithesis (exact opposite) of what they once were. That isn't flip-flopping; that is changing opinions with scant evidence to support them into convictions with a firmer foundation of facts.

My political philosophy is an amalgamation of libertarian, conservative, and liberal principles. My opinions have changed so significantly that my conservative friends might be horrified by how I strongly believe that liberals are correct on certain issues. I've previously written about some of them, but to make this more fun, I will present others as challenges in which I offer $100,000 to the first person who can refute the logic I used in forming that opinion. Please note that due to my limited time and difficulty using my hands after I broke my neck, I cannot quickly update my previously published opinions. However, now that I am balancing the promptings of head and heart, I strongly disagree with many opinions I expressed in my writings.

I like finding people who make me think, not necessarily those who agree with me. Genius Robert Heinlein said, “I never learned from a man who agreed with me.” If you can educate me, I'm all ears.

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
— Albert Einstein

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
— Albert Einstein

“What I would like to see more often in this nation is an open and intelligent conversation, not people just casting aspersions at each other … it's unbelievable to me the way people act like third graders. And if somebody doesn't agree with them, they're this and they're that … it comes from both sides. And it's just so infantile.”
— Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon

“The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about and refuse to investigate.”
— Dr. Wayne Dyer

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
— General George Patton

“Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

“A lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years—may not ever. So I like to support people that are risking their lives.”
— ex-Microsoft billionaire brainiac Nathan Myhrvold speaking about Jill Tarter, who inspired the character played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. It takes a brilliant person to see that others who go against the grain of conventional wisdom may be sages although lesser minds often ridicule their ideas.

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
— Oscar Wilde

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
— Winston Churchill

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
— Euripides, Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)

“It is socially unacceptable to be right too early.”
— Robert Heinlein

“I'd rather stand alone on the truth than with millions on a lie.”

“The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.”
— Arthur H. R. Fairchild

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
— Abraham Lincoln

This reminds me of something stressed by one of my psychology professors, who said that society imposes rigid boundaries for what behavior is acceptable, and applies tremendous pressure trying to force people to conform to the behavioral expectations. Some of the most brilliant and productive outside-the-box thinkers led unconventional lives. One of the side effects of forcing people to think inside the box is that by lopping off outside-the-box behavior, potentially great outside-the-box ideas are lost, too.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
— Edward R. Murrow, American journalist (1908-1965)

“You will not do incredible things without an incredible dream.”
— John Eliot

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Why I dumped Google Checkout

Customers who order from me can no longer pay by Google Checkout. Why did I dump them? Gee whiz, where do I begin?

Google suffers from the “We're #1, so we don't have to try” syndrome. They value their time, but not their users' time, which they have zero respect for. When I was still dumb enough to do business with a company too big to care, every time I received an e-mail from Google notifying me of an order, they sent the message as soon as the order was initiated, not completed! That makes no sense; no online merchant needs to know when an order is initiated; we need to know that the order was completed with a valid credit card. Google never sent a message to inform me that an order was completed, so if the customer's card wasn't valid, or the order wasn't yet confirmed by the customer, I'd need to log in to Google (often repeatedly) to see if the order was completed or not.

Logging into Google Checkout was needlessly byzantine. I'd log in, click on a Google Checkout link, then click a couple more links before I could see my orders. Shortly before they began integrating Checkout with Google Wallet, I'd always need to enter my password again, seconds after I'd already logged in. For several days, I and many others couldn't find our orders; in transitioning to Wallet, Google was acting as if their services were used only to pay money, not receive it.

Google also wasted many hours of my time by not offering any automated way for customers to access downloadable books as soon as they pay (something many other online payment services do, but not PayPal, the other too-big-to-care payment service). Hence, I'd need to check my e-mail multiple times per day and send individual messages to customers to give them book download links.

Whenever Google changes its user agreement, it forces us to read the entire lengthy document, searching for what's changed. If Google had even a bit of concern for user time, it would point out the changes, which might be one new sentence or paragraph in a sea of small print.

Google has another very unpleasant surprise for merchants who do business with them: at the end of each year, the merchant must manually add up each sale to determine his or her total yearly income, with another total for in-state sales to calculate sales tax due! This is a ridiculous waste of time that manifests Google's arrogance; they think so much of themselves, and so little of its users. The data for those calculations is already in their database; they just need to have a programmer give users a page on which they could access their yearly sales reports.

I hope that Google's programmers know much more than I do, and can program faster than me, but even I could write that code in less than a day. Think about it: one programmer working less than one day, or potentially millions of users adding up billions of individual sales EACH AND EVERY YEAR! This is precisely the type of number crunching that databases can easily handle and should handle. In the 21^st century, manually adding up such numbers, à la Miss Hathaway in The Beverly Hillbillies, is just plain nuts.

Not only is manually adding up numbers a great way to waste hours, days, or weeks, but it also invites human errors. Cognizant of the potential for error, I add up the numbers two or three times to verify that I added correctly, then—for good measure—I cross my fingers and hope I didn't make a mistake.

One of the many users complaining about this inexcusable omission wrote:

What is going on is that Google is too big to care. Google prefers that users waste many millions of hours per year every year adding up numbers that a database could calculate in a tiny fraction of a second after one programmer spent a few hours once writing code for that, which is Database 101 stuff.

I've written to Google and PayPal several times over the years, imploring them to do what anyone with common sense would do from Day One: give users year-end total and in-state sales. That's child's play for a database and programmers, but a nightmare for users.

One of the Japanese computer manufacturers is so arrogant that it has the gall to tell disgruntled customers to “go pound sand.” In other words, “get lost,” “go fly a kite,” or “buzz off little peon, we're too big and powerful to listen to you.” Essentially, they are telling justifiably upset customers to f--k off. That's not a wise strategy for dealing with discontentment, yet it is the foremost customer service rule for many big companies: the ones that usually fizzle out.

General Motors once was the most valuable corporation in the world, but it would have gone bankrupt without the massive transfusion of cash from taxpayers. Customers got tired of their products (as an ER doc, I know some of their vehicles are built by people stoned on drugs or have a blood alcohol level about three times the legal limit), and customers also tired of their “go pound sand” customer service.

Microsoft has even worse products and customer service. Predictably, they are slipping and will eventually be a pathetic has-been, like MySpace, once King of the Social Networking Hill, and now about as popular as herpes. Want to buy MySpace at a fire-sale price? Its current owner is looking for a buyer, but they haven't yet found anyone dumb enough to pay for a site seemingly destined for bankruptcy.

Similarly, people will eventually tire of the endless Facebook privacy nightmares, bugs, and hassles that stem from what is likely a manifestation of Zuckerberg's psychopathology and contempt for his users that prompted him to call them “dumb fucks” for trusting him. Facebook's customer service is about as friendly and responsive as the SS in Nazi Germany. Have a problem with Facebook? Zuckerberg doesn't care. To him, you're just a “dumb fuck.” If you tolerate the myriad Facebook annoyances, Zuckerberg might like you more, but respect you even less; to him, such suckers are just the sort of “dumb fucks” he needs.

Then there's Google, with a seemingly endless number of products, and an endless way of annoying, disappointing, frustrating, or screwing its users. But the good news? Google won't tell you to go pound sand. Instead, they probably won't even bother replying to you. They're too busy having a great time with all of the money being thrown at them.

I gave Google chance after chance to get its act together and stop behaving like immature teenagers ignoring their homework, but my patience was exhausted. Google will continue to ride high until it is displaced by an equally or more brilliant company that isn't dumb enough to overlook the small but important details, like year-end sales summaries and caring about people. Ultimately, all businesses are about people, but tech companies frequently forget who made them successful, which often leads to ephemeral success by CEOs who know how to make customers burning mad: treat 'em like dirt.

I'm not going to waste any more of my time with Google because they don't respect my time—or yours.

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