Well, I sold both pairs of Van Halen tickets, for about 300 bucks, after all the eBay fees, and Paypal fees. So I lost about 75 bucks. Not the worst thing in the world. I am still going to the show, and it is still costing me around $425.00 (including parking). Will it be worth it? I don't know. This makes me wonder about something.

How do you determine what something is worth? What is your car worth? What about your house? These types of material possessions are relatively easy to place a market value on. But what about the intangible things that cannot exactly be measured, such as enjoyment. If I go to Van Halen, and I spend $425.00 and I really have a lot of good fun, is it then worth $425.00? If I go and have a shitty time, and the show sucks, then it seems evident that it was not worth the money. What if I have only a mediocre time? I suppose that this is something that can only be determined by the actor, and no one else. If I go to Van Halen and I really enjoy it, and it is worth every single cent, then ultimately no one can tell me that it was not worth it, because they would not know.

I suppose time is another concept that is hard to place a value on. I can relate to this in terms of my industry. If your server is down, and I fix it for you, and I charge you 500$, is it worth it? Your business is back up and running and generating profit again. So, I assume that the fixee would say that yes, it is worth it. Now, what if in that exact same scenario, the fix took me all of 3 minutes to implement. Is the fix suddenly not worth $500? The end user gets the same result, so it would seem that yes, it is still worth it, although, this would also indicate that my time could worth $10,000.00 on hour. What if it is not work related time? What if it is time spent sitting at home with your favorite woman watching prime time TV for two hours. Can that value be measured? To me, personal time is worth more than work time. Not in terms of cost sitting there, but in terms of how much it would cost someone to get me to not sit there. As an interesting side note, I used to go around claiming at work that my personal time was worth approximately 4x the amount of value as work time. So, if I was required to spend 2 hours of my own personal time working, I would then be owed 8 hours of work time. So effectively, for every 2 hours I had to spend working off hours, I would get a free day off. Fortunately I had a really excellent manager at the time that agreed with me. I have a different but still excellent manager now, but I usually don't use that same ratio, and I have no idea why. I think I could still get away with it.

Next on the list would be the value of living things. Not just necessarily people, but pets, livestock, and the like. If you had a pet dog, and it was 6 years old, and to you, the pet was your best friend in the entire world, what would it be worth? If someone killed it, on purpose, how much money do you think that would be worth? What if it was an accident? What if it was self defense? What if it was not your best friend, the dog? What if instead, it was a cow you were raising for beef? Would it be worth the same or less than the dog? What if it was not an animal at all, what if it was your sister? Ultimately, the dog, the cow, and your sister are all living things. Each of them has 5 senses, each of them has feelings, each of them can learn, and each of them can communicate. So, in the grand scheme of things, why typically in society, is the value of your sister greater than the value of your cow?

This post has a lot of question marks, and I do not have the answers to them any of them, so we can conclude that this should lead to some serious introspection. I want each of you to seriously spend a few minutes thinking about these things, particularly about the cow.