The cost of lies: A Mineserver story

(2020)I'd hope anyone who saw "Plane Crazy" would know better than to back a Robert X. Cringely Kickstarter, and I'd expect anyone who followed his tech takes for a bit would have acquired some salt to take with any claims he made.There seem(ed) to be a number of folks absolutely obsessed with hounding Cringely (apparently dead, I know) over the Kickstarter in his irregular posts. Given the highest tier was $200 and the whole of the Kickstarter was $35.5k USD, seems like a lot of throwing good time/energy after a bad Kickstarter call. I'd be overjoyed if that was the worst case of someone walking off with my money I'd ever faced.They are, or were I guess, free to do so, but it seems wasteful to spend the amount of time in his comments they did.

This has bothered me from the start. I was not one of the buyers, so I have a different take on the issue. From all his writings, you get a sense that Cringely was a big-idea man, but he had very little ability to follow through on his next great idea or venture. It seems like he would lose interest once the hard part of building a business started to appear. In this case, it looks like someone revved him up on the idea of selling a low-cost Mineserver, I think it was his son, but he probably mispriced the true cost and did not calculate the amount of work it would take to get the project finished. I don't think he started out with the idea of not delivering the product. He was just not capable of following through on his grand ideas. Some people are dreamers, and others are doers. He was a dreamer, and you could sense it in all of his writings.That's the thing with Kickstarter you never really know if you will ever get the product. This project just became one of the many Kickstarter projects that failed.

>Cringely posted pictures of the boards, the SD cards that would hold the open-source Minecraft server software, and the plastic shells etched by a laser cutter that would serve as the cases.For others who have played plenty of Minecraft but never heard the term "mineserver" used, sounds like he was trying to rewrite the Minecraft game server software.

>There is no scenario where you have enough time to pick up a bunch of clothes but nobody thinks to grab the irreplaceable electronic parts that you spent $90,000 on.Gonna have to disagree on this one. A handful of clothes can be held in your hands. A bunch of electronics can't. That's for insurance to sort out at that point.

In Sikhism, God is understood as 'Truth' ("The name of God is Truth" is the first line in their holy book), and to be aligned with God is to be aligned with the Truth.I don't claim to be a paragon of honesty or virtue, but through my experiences I've generally understood that lack of virtue can and does trap one in cycles of misery, anxiety & suffering.