Scott Adams' recent interaction with "the creators of the simulation" had me wondering what it would take to get this guy out of his materialist worldview.
Ricciardo is known for being very weak technically. He drives by instinct, but he is in the dark, so to speak, when a car needs to be developed. Lando was on record as saying the car frustrated him in 2022, as well. Charles and Lando will both be looking around for better seats given their teams’ disappointing performance.
I don’t see Ricciardo going to AlphaTauri - he’s only interested in seats that are conceivably race winning. Nyck probably has a pretty firm second year.
AlphaTauri could very well be for sale right now given the post-Mateschitz fallout.
I feel like the Last of the Late Brakers suffers from poor management. He just hasn’t done himself any favours jumping around from team to team after his departure from RBR
I lack to words to express how much I too hate Will Farrell. His whole career seems to be an attempt to see how stupod a thing audiences will laugh at.
Jim Clark was Colin Chapman's best friend. After Clark died (practicing in a F2 Lotus I believe), Chapman responded by never getting that close to a driver again.
Frank Williams viewed the drivers as unimportant in the grand scheme; he was all too willing to let a championship winning driver go, given that they would command a higher price than he was willing to pay.
E.g., Damon Hill wins the title for Williams in 1996 and ends up at … Arrows, a perennial backmarker team, in 1997.
Recall that JV came into Williams as a heavily feted driver:
1994 - CART debut
1995 - Indy 500 victory and CART title
1996 - F1 debut; almost won his first race (!)
1997 - F1 title against Schumi
It turned out that that was the high water mark, but he is only a plum Hypercar seat away from a motorsport “triple crown” (his Peugeot finished second in 2008).
The Bruce Dickinson joke earned genuine laughter. Related: I've always wondered about Jimmy Page's fascination with Crowley, and if the shark story was somehow an homage to the man.
In which Avoidable contact ceases to be an automotive and misadventure blog, and plunges headlong into its inevitable transformation into the Journal of Buggery and the Occult.
Mudshark, and according to Carmine Appice, Page wasn't even in the room, though Plant and his wife originally were.
Speaking of Page, many years ago the National Lampoon ran an odd little comic about an English rock star taking a groupie up to his room, where she thinks she's going to have sex with him, only to discover that his personal fetish is whipping a plant he carries with him on tour, or something like that, it's been a while. From what I've heard it might have been an oblique reference to a certain English guitar player who is reportedly a masochist.
It's like you plucked this topic from my brain. I'm struggling with it mightily. To stay and be a cog in a small system where all the good happens because you're a part of it? Or, to take a chance and put your whole world at stake just so that billionare doesn't make another dime off YOUR hard work?
I'm perplexed. This is no good or right answer when thinking about it. We live in a world so interconnected and the lizard people just seek to take more and more options away from us. Like, wtf am I supposed to do when I cannot move because land costs significantly more now and I cannot get more for my house because the market has stalled out? This is a real problem that people who aren't focused on timing are running up against. So what do we do? We stay. We stay in that situation longer and longer because there doesn't look like there is an opportunity to get out.
So much of life feels like being in an abusive relationship. Maybe I'm just being over dramatic, but it never sounded like it was supposed to be this way.
How could that movie not have made $eriou$ buckS ?! .
I remember my peers, some of whom were cubicle rats (? is that a proper name for them ?) told me it was a terrible movie so I didn't see it in the theater, much later I rented it and thought it crude but dead on point .
Exploitation has been a part of the human experience ever since some bright fellow realized you could store some of this year's grain in a hut for next year, thus creating the concept of wealth. I'd suggest that the primary difference between today and the 1850s is that we no longer have privacy of any sort. Everybody has to live their life in public to some degree. I know more than one person who has been coerced into joining social media as a condition of employment. And it's not enough to join. You have to say the right things.
The loss of privacy and the simultaneous loss of local community are interesting. No one has privacy and it's harder than ever to really know anything about anyone.
I'll state that the notion of a social credit score has merit when you understand Eeyore can still get money from people instead of being a known pariah.
Both the US and China have social credit scores. The difference is that China's is based on socially constructive behavior whereas ours is secretive and largely rewards you based on how hard you're willing to work to give people sexual access to children.
I would correct that to, "...China's is based on what the CCP thinks is socially constructive behavior..." The CCP is horrifyingly (terrifyingly?) dysfunctional and corrupt (Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Zero Covid, the looming real estate bubble burst, Winnie the Pooh's self-appointment as El Presidente for life, etc). The US certainly has issues, but China's are deeper and more acute, perhaps due to the fact that they have thousands of years of insanity baked into them compared to our mere hundreds.
I saw a lot of this coming a very long time ago. I have several internet cut-outs that are so old now, that there's no way they can be tied to me because they pre-exist the web. While I don't need them anymore, because I'm old and self-employed and no longer give a damn, for a long time they benefited me tremendously.
You have to find your little acts of rebellion and plan your little escapes years in advance, so if and when the time comes, it's there. Smart governments always leave a few bolt-holes to let the 'malcontents' escape the system, less said malcontents start a revolution and put said government up against the wall.
According to the Bible, when God found out that Adam and Eve disobeyed Him, He kicked them out of Eden and told them that from that point forward, they would only eat if they worked.
The same reason we don't think less of a dog for coming when you call him. Nature is hierarchical. If there is a God then we must kneel before Him. But why kneel before another man?
God created us equal to each other, which is why no human being wields Authority over any other human being, with the sole exception being parents over their minor children. This is not to say that humans don't have Power, but Authority being the right to rule without the consent of the governed, there's none where adults are concerned.
I think that is misunderstood. Nazism is the ultimate perversion. That is an example of taking a true and good thing and turning into the thing they did.
This is true, but in Genesis 1, God originally created Adam on the sixth day, the final day of creation, to *work*:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.
---
So Adam was working from the literal beginning. Work is a great thing. Solomon points out in Ecclesiastes the uniquely sweet joy that comes from working hard and enjoying the fruit of your labor. But working in a field choked with thorns? Yeah, not as fun as the original design.
Good point. And his work was to tend God's creation, not extract a meal from the ground. In many ways it is a parable for the transition from hunter/gatherer to agriculture.
You're right, but in that perfect beginning, work wasn't work. It was a group of jobs to be completed yes, but it wasn't a miserable slog. One imagines Adam being very happy and contented with the work God had tasked him to do.
Every milestone moment in my life seems to have met a very large challenge. I hate it. It also means that I should appreciate the easier moments. There are many things historically that were FAR FAR WORSE than anything me or my generation has went through. The difference really feels like the lack of privacy and the lizard people.
We bought but now our home is "valued" so highly that it wouldn't sell quickly given the market tanking. And, anywhere we want to live is just insanely overpriced.
I got lucky last year and managed a 6% raise. It finally took some pressure off healthcare and such. I then shut off my 401k to have more take home. Well what do you know... all our other costs ballooned further. It has been as if I had done none of that stuff for some time. Now I'm the guy spending 600 bucks while making 300. It aint good.
I'll be printing out my county's deeds next week. I wonder how much we're tanking. I keep waiting for it to happen, but still... not yet... But up here we're like a whole different country, so who knows?
I restructured my contract at work this year and got about a 12k bump. I was hoping to use it to pay down my mortgage faster and put the money towards other useful things. Instead, it’s basically being eaten up in inflation.
My history lessons would seem to indicate the collapse - though to those in charge they'll be thinking it's the success, right up to the moment where it turns on a dime like a flock of birds.
The EU is currently trying to shut down the majority of its food production. If you think this year is getting scary, wait until next year.
In the parlance of our times: I'm not a collapsetard nor am I doompilled but I want to see an end to our system, even if it means some hardship (complete collapse being an unfavorable scenario), because it appears to be slowly smothering humanity.
What it comes down to is that Klaus Schwab guy wants to take over the world. And he's got a lot of people in power who are all in with him. Yeah, he's nuttier than a fruitcake but he pretty much controls most of the western governments at this point.
Who controls him? No idea. Maybe nobody. Maybe the devil. Again, no idea.
Anyways these brilliant people who we've ceded control to because we allowed so many people who will vote for them because they're mental midgets to move into our country, these brilliant people think they've got it all figured out.
Meanwhile China is screwing with them every chance they get.
Putin is also screwing with them in ways that they can't see how they're being taken advantage of, because, again, these people just ain't that smart.
I don't know when it's going to reach critical mass and blow up, only tht once it does, it's gonna be really bad. I mean you have people believing now that nitrogen is a pollutant. It's 80 percent of the atmosphere!
As you well know from my rantings, if the company isn’t pick pocketing your soul for profit, the government will gladly take over both halves the share to steal anyways.
I hate all of it. But even in my darkest days I don’t think I can go back to a cog. Your job brings untold joy to children. It’s basically like you’re a modern Christmas elf. There is merit there despite it all. I just make people money. It’s not really the same.
Life is a tough thing to navigate because everyone has competing interests. I'd argue that a benefit of Capitalism is that you can at least turn your worth into something fungible and move it around to places of greatest return. Not always easy, but Good Business is Where You Find It..
You're like the Babylon Bee for cars, not only did that Corvette EV hit but also Dodge of all manufacturers seems to have an... unnatural grip on their V8 engines still.
It is really (and I mean seriously) hard to feel sorry for the soy-/pumpkin spice latte crowd that CONSUMED 50 billion-with-a-B dollars at Meta to build a virtual world that would barely qualify as a graduation project from my ex-university. Or the self-conscious DEI crowd at Twitter that cost the company 4mio/day in losses. (I am in no way angry at them, that video I did where I cut together all those young athletes falling down clutchin their chests between '20 and '22 and put it to "Young Hearts" by Candi Staton, that was a bit much, I agree to my suspension).
BTW should anyone be interested, Peter Windsor is on Twitch of all places and does videos, interviews, tells stories, et cetera. Just don't ask him about that Team USF1 stuff.
I wonder if the performative aspect is a journalism thing.
I’ve been an engineer most of my career, and while I’ve had to eat my fair share of shit like anyone in a corporate job, I’ve certainly never felt compelled to lie publicly about how good it tasted. Lie by omission in actual interviews, certainly, but to actually write a post like the one in question seems crazy.
My LinkedIn goes long stretches without being updated, I don’t follow my employers or coworkers or generally interact with anyone there unless I’m “Open To Work”, and yet when I need or want to change jobs, it’s been helpful.
Maybe I’ve missed out on chances I could have had by playing the game better. And yet, I’m reasonably satisfied with where I am. I think it’s easy to overthink things like this.
It’s true in the sense that I’ve gotten a ton of mileage out of the stereotype that engineers aren’t expected to be fashionable, modern, or literate. In some cases, I don’t even need to pretend…
My father-in-law based his entire career on that. The college money went to pay for correcting his daughter's crossed eyes, but he ended up working on much the same jobs and doing the same things as he would have if he'd gotten his engineering degree, largely through sheer determination.
This works for tax lawyers as well. I'm the nerdy guy that the shark in a $10k suit calls in when the questions start getting hard. That position allows me to get away with amazing things.
I'm gonna steal the trade-adjacent term. I travel to customer sites and I fix or commission semi complicated electrical systems. They pretty much let me do what I want as long as stuff gets fixed, the customer is happy, and there's no strippers on my expense report. But there's hell to pay if I don't fix it on time.
I hit upon a trick and a mindset when I would go to interviews and when I would work at places. Simply put: I'm doing YOU a FAVOR by working here. You NEED me more than I need you.
You have no idea how well that went over with management. The last job I had I told them I already had my dream job and was making a good living at it, I just wanted to work for them because I figured it'd be fun and something to do on the side. I had an offer an hour after hanging up the phone.
Sort of like when you look back at that one girl you had a bad crush on in high school, but you came to realize the only reason you liked her was that she represented the top end of the Attainable Scale.
If I could say one thing to my 15-year-old self about this matter, it would be: "Yes, you absolutely have a shot at her. On the far side of 30 years, two kids, an ugly divorce and 60 extra pounds."
Once I started use game tactics I was easily able to get past HR recruiting bimbos. Really! Jerkboy confidence, cocky arrogance, and negging. Shouldn’t work, and it’s certainly no way to run a company.
100% you have to pose yourself as "high value". My current employer significantly increased their offer when for a moment it seemed they couldn't have me. Also, during the interviews I interviewed them harder than they interviewed me, "so I can make sure this is a good fit for me". I highly recommend this approach, even if you are desperate. Desperation stinks and HR/women can smell it. Confidence is the deodorant.
It would be funny if they applied their own diversity requirements to themselves.
Interestingly, where I work now the head of HR is a straight white dude who seems like a genuinely decent person. All of his underlings are typical HR women. So far, they've at least been helpful, but I really don't need so many wellness checks.
Crowley is also antecedent of the white man's curious belief about "two spirit" people in some Indian tribes if I remember my convoluted paths right. One of his acolytes involved in it. Not sure if I am going to be able to find the threads, though, so ignore this until I can find the pages.
I found what I was thinking about with 'berdache' and I had the mapping wrong. Mea culpa, it was Harry Hay and a different secret society and I was remembering a reference with Cecil Rhodes and Hay's father who were contemporaneous with Crowley.
Anyways it's here and he lists his sources at the bottom
Thank god I was smart enough and contributing enough that I didn’t have to totally prostrate myself in fortune 50 hell. But it didn’t even seem like these were affronts to the midwits. Whereas the smartest find these situations pretty unbearable.
In law you have partners who can and sometimes become horrible people than the client who are just as bad, but know what you mean. Just getting ready to make a move to avoid the sucking.
I wish MSU affiliates didn't have such an inferiority complex. Nobody made you guys get Bs in high school.
The reason why State grads hire Michigan grads is that they are smart enough to know that the Michigan grads have learned a thing or two in A2 and are probably smarter than they themselves are. At the risk of killing the joke, that's why it's funny, eggheads working for practical folks.
While I respect MSU as my father's alma mater in veterinary medicine (my mom said he also got a MS in cytology while earning his DVM but her memory was going by then) the fact remains that Michigan is one of less than a handful of public schools that are considered elite, along with Berkley and maybe Wisconsin.
Agree with you but having family that have gone to both the best and second best schools in the state up north as well as ND I chose tOSU after being accepted to U of M.
It’s all semantics. What you do with the knowledge after is all that matters. But I enjoy the tribe pride and rivalries.
Enjoy the family diversity and be glad they are not inbred Ivy League.
The only universal trait of my friends that make a lot of money is that they are OCD or perfectionists. They have an intense desire for things to be new, clean, neat and orderly. This desire drives their motivation to earn more money in order to attain them. Conscientiousness is maybe a better descriptor.
The testable IQs and education are variable, medicine, law, entrepreneurship, real estate, pilot.
Yeah these people work far more than I am willing to, as well as playing all of the political games.
And the unfortunate fact is that in a large corporation these positions are far rarer than the people willing to do anything to get them, so your shelf-life is short. They are highly replaceable and interchangeable.
I agree that the humiliation rituals are actually ENJOYABLE to a lot of people, most of whom are women. They LOVE the performative aspects of it, just like they LOVED being able to call themselves "heroes" for getting a shot or wearing a mask or showing up to pull a shift at Whole Foods.
The ox rarely feels his yoke, but try putting one on a lion.
I could never give an answer for where I saw myself in 5 years. “On a boat with instagram models a million miles away from ever smelling an Indian here again”
That stuff is all fairly easy, too. High social rewards with absolutely minimal effort, just like staying home to flatten the curve "for two weeks."
Our landlord was the director of a local homeless shelter for a while and does a lot of hard work trying to help them out. I think he's received an occasional beating for his effort, judging from the black eye he was sporting earlier this year. When we move out he's going to transition our half of his house into a sort of homeless-family-relief thing. Right in the middle of a neighborhood where houses regularly sell for $0.5mil to obnoxiously self-righteous professors and lawyers with yards full of political signs. I wonder how they'll feel about issues they "care about" being moved in right next door...
EDIT: edited comment to show house prices at half a million instead of five million because I'm a dumbass and didn't catch the absent decimal when I proofread it before hitting post.
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman
Experts necessarily are backwards looking but science looks forward into the unknown. If science was "settled" why bother with experiments? Does Newton work at subatomic levels?
"Science" apparently means testing the same hypothesis over and over again expecting new results. Or frankly, simply stating the results are opposite. Most people who cry "science!" don't even know what a hypothesis is. In my most autistic moments, I'd only retort by shouting back which logical fallacies the person was committed. APPEAL TO AUTHORITY!!1!
I'm thankful that one of my neighbors had a sign telling me how to vote on a state proposal. Around here you sometimes have to vote no to mean yes so I wasn't sure about Prop 2 till I saw this neighbor supported it, so I knew to vote no.
I'd love to see a DeSantis-vs-Martha's-Vineyard thing play out, only without the national guard coming in to rescue the professors and lawyers. At least, once we're securely in the hills.
My biggest regret in my career is not finding a niche skill set with my brain. I romanticized the ‘humiliation’ of industrials that get offshored by low intellect MBA kiddos. Even my controls knowledge isn’t special to anyone in particular. Should have been a skilled trade.
Low intellect MBA's is an understatement. I got laughed at in a meeting because I made the point that people who break the law aren't necessarily criminals. Yikes.
Oh they know. Farley was walking around a plant tour amongst his lowly hourly drones with armed body guards that were 6’ tall. They weren’t always obvious, but I could see their Glocks printing through their shitty suits. Hinrichs wouldn’t have been this out of touch.
It gets better. The head of security didn't contact me directly. He asked a woman in the company to tell me. There's nothing particularly frightening about me so I guess maybe they just had nothing to do.
Note: That was originally just going to be a joke about their song Peg but then I realized it worked even better because of the Wm Burroughs reference.
A few years ago I was leaving the preview of the RM auction held in connection with the Detroit concours. The preview was always worth getting media creds and I got a number of good stories out of it. I was already near my car, talking to a chef working the event, when some manlet accompanied by a bruiser comes up to me and says he's in charge of auction security and that I'm not welcome and shouldn't return the next day for the auction. Understand that I'm 5'6" myself so I'm hardly physically imposing or threatening so I didn't understand the need for muscle. When I asked the guy what the problem was he just repeated himself. Maybe I said the wrong thing to some rich rectal orifice. I told him that I wasn't actually planning on coming back the next day but that I'd be happy to tell all the collectors that I know that RM employs some real dickheads.
Jack, as someone that keeps your Linked-in profile booked makes as a model for offering advice to my colleagues as how to write a well put together selling tool. Today’s post makes me think of how when living in a china shop one should not invite a pack of German Sheppards to visit. Nothing there about the CEO of the begat shop laying off people in order to get the beget shop’s best customer to sponsor an event. Or said best customer who single handily was created a consumer product named after an ancient Mexican Indian tribe that drove a company into the ground. Or how the same customer was promoted to over see an operation in the South Pacific and likewise drive it into extinction. And then was promoted to oversee all company promotions and used that position to extract penance on a single line worker at the begat company…:-) :-)
I was doing fine until you threw in "leveraging synergies". Nothing irks me more in the corporate world than that phrase. As for LinkedIn, is it useful to keep updated? I haven't used it in a long time.
I work for a state agency here in Pennsylvania and we have a group of employees that send out these non-sensical emails twice a week for "Workforce Wednesday" and "Transformation Tuesday." It all looks like cut-and-paste mumbo jumbo to me. Good thing we have 4 people on our staff to work on this crap...
Heh, had a neighbor who put in 20 at GM in research only to be packed off to Delphi so his pension, and the pensions of thousands like him, could get adjusted in the bankruptcy.
Being forced to use for any serious length of time a wheelchair is a miserable and sometimes just plain impossible proposition.
There, I fixed/mangled it for you .
Interesting you posted this today, yesterday I was out raking up dog poop and leaves and thinking the same thing ~ I know very few who will do any serious manual labor .
You and me both. I can't believe how bad the HR maze is now.
Also, I've been pre-emptively screened out of multiple jobs because.... I don't speak Hindi.
Scott Adams' recent interaction with "the creators of the simulation" had me wondering what it would take to get this guy out of his materialist worldview.
A lot, apparently.
Hang in there ! .
Psycho-bitch nearly killed me but I'm still here.......
-Nate
Yah... what the FOOK is happening with him?
Didn’t all of the best car owners treat their drivers this way?
And look at them bringing Danny Ric back after his utter trouncing at the hands of a mid-grade talent.
I suspect Daniel Ricciardo is:
(0) Not getting paid much (if anything) from RBR; he IS getting paid handsomely by McLaren NOT to race for them.
(1) Valued for his commercial appeal as a driver for demonstrations / events; he’s very popular.
(2) A cheap way to remind Sergio Perez of his role as Max’s butler.
Ricciardo is known for being very weak technically. He drives by instinct, but he is in the dark, so to speak, when a car needs to be developed. Lando was on record as saying the car frustrated him in 2022, as well. Charles and Lando will both be looking around for better seats given their teams’ disappointing performance.
I don’t see Ricciardo going to AlphaTauri - he’s only interested in seats that are conceivably race winning. Nyck probably has a pretty firm second year.
AlphaTauri could very well be for sale right now given the post-Mateschitz fallout.
I feel like the Last of the Late Brakers suffers from poor management. He just hasn’t done himself any favours jumping around from team to team after his departure from RBR
And the drivers felt this way as well.
Heck I feel that way NOW. If you told me that I could win LeMans in 2023 then burn to death in the car at the very next race, I'd take that deal.
Literal blaze of glory
I lack to words to express how much I too hate Will Farrell. His whole career seems to be an attempt to see how stupod a thing audiences will laugh at.
It's so damn hot, milk was a bad choice.
I have seen people take that deal. One of them almost got me killed (and did kill 10 other people).
Jim Clark was Colin Chapman's best friend. After Clark died (practicing in a F2 Lotus I believe), Chapman responded by never getting that close to a driver again.
Frank Williams viewed the drivers as unimportant in the grand scheme; he was all too willing to let a championship winning driver go, given that they would command a higher price than he was willing to pay.
E.g., Damon Hill wins the title for Williams in 1996 and ends up at … Arrows, a perennial backmarker team, in 1997.
His comment that JV "made heavy weather" of winning the WDC makes me laugh.
Recall that JV came into Williams as a heavily feted driver:
1994 - CART debut
1995 - Indy 500 victory and CART title
1996 - F1 debut; almost won his first race (!)
1997 - F1 title against Schumi
It turned out that that was the high water mark, but he is only a plum Hypercar seat away from a motorsport “triple crown” (his Peugeot finished second in 2008).
Who was the better driver, Jacques or Gilles?
Jacques.
The Bruce Dickinson joke earned genuine laughter. Related: I've always wondered about Jimmy Page's fascination with Crowley, and if the shark story was somehow an homage to the man.
Come back later this week... I left Pagey out for a reason!
I did think of Jimmy Page, but it was Ozzy singing Mr. Crowley in my head every time I see the old bastard's name.
You should check out Mac Sabbath.
Look them up on YouTube.
Hilarious and inspired. Now I want a cheeseburger.
By your command
In which Avoidable contact ceases to be an automotive and misadventure blog, and plunges headlong into its inevitable transformation into the Journal of Buggery and the Occult.
We should be so lucky
Mudshark, and according to Carmine Appice, Page wasn't even in the room, though Plant and his wife originally were.
Speaking of Page, many years ago the National Lampoon ran an odd little comic about an English rock star taking a groupie up to his room, where she thinks she's going to have sex with him, only to discover that his personal fetish is whipping a plant he carries with him on tour, or something like that, it's been a while. From what I've heard it might have been an oblique reference to a certain English guitar player who is reportedly a masochist.
"Tree chopping" ~ that was in an underground comic book .
-Nate
I didn't think I imagined it. Thanks.
No one said you did, now they might think so .
-Nate
It's like you plucked this topic from my brain. I'm struggling with it mightily. To stay and be a cog in a small system where all the good happens because you're a part of it? Or, to take a chance and put your whole world at stake just so that billionare doesn't make another dime off YOUR hard work?
I'm perplexed. This is no good or right answer when thinking about it. We live in a world so interconnected and the lizard people just seek to take more and more options away from us. Like, wtf am I supposed to do when I cannot move because land costs significantly more now and I cannot get more for my house because the market has stalled out? This is a real problem that people who aren't focused on timing are running up against. So what do we do? We stay. We stay in that situation longer and longer because there doesn't look like there is an opportunity to get out.
So much of life feels like being in an abusive relationship. Maybe I'm just being over dramatic, but it never sounded like it was supposed to be this way.
How could that movie not have made $eriou$ buckS ?! .
I remember my peers, some of whom were cubicle rats (? is that a proper name for them ?) told me it was a terrible movie so I didn't see it in the theater, much later I rented it and thought it crude but dead on point .
-Nate
I made a TPS reports joke at Chemical Abstracts Society in 2003. Turns out they actually HAD a TPS report. My contract was not renewed.
Exploitation has been a part of the human experience ever since some bright fellow realized you could store some of this year's grain in a hut for next year, thus creating the concept of wealth. I'd suggest that the primary difference between today and the 1850s is that we no longer have privacy of any sort. Everybody has to live their life in public to some degree. I know more than one person who has been coerced into joining social media as a condition of employment. And it's not enough to join. You have to say the right things.
The loss of privacy and the simultaneous loss of local community are interesting. No one has privacy and it's harder than ever to really know anything about anyone.
I'll state that the notion of a social credit score has merit when you understand Eeyore can still get money from people instead of being a known pariah.
Both the US and China have social credit scores. The difference is that China's is based on socially constructive behavior whereas ours is secretive and largely rewards you based on how hard you're willing to work to give people sexual access to children.
I would correct that to, "...China's is based on what the CCP thinks is socially constructive behavior..." The CCP is horrifyingly (terrifyingly?) dysfunctional and corrupt (Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Zero Covid, the looming real estate bubble burst, Winnie the Pooh's self-appointment as El Presidente for life, etc). The US certainly has issues, but China's are deeper and more acute, perhaps due to the fact that they have thousands of years of insanity baked into them compared to our mere hundreds.
Some day, the CCP's "mandate from heaven" will run out, like all of China's previous rulers.
One hopes .
-Nate
I saw a lot of this coming a very long time ago. I have several internet cut-outs that are so old now, that there's no way they can be tied to me because they pre-exist the web. While I don't need them anymore, because I'm old and self-employed and no longer give a damn, for a long time they benefited me tremendously.
You have to find your little acts of rebellion and plan your little escapes years in advance, so if and when the time comes, it's there. Smart governments always leave a few bolt-holes to let the 'malcontents' escape the system, less said malcontents start a revolution and put said government up against the wall.
According to the Bible, when God found out that Adam and Eve disobeyed Him, He kicked them out of Eden and told them that from that point forward, they would only eat if they worked.
Employment was the first punishment.
Or it was the initial step towards freedom.....
-Nate
The same reason we don't think less of a dog for coming when you call him. Nature is hierarchical. If there is a God then we must kneel before Him. But why kneel before another man?
God created us equal to each other, which is why no human being wields Authority over any other human being, with the sole exception being parents over their minor children. This is not to say that humans don't have Power, but Authority being the right to rule without the consent of the governed, there's none where adults are concerned.
Heinlein had an interesting view of this in Methuselah's Children.
Because God is real, there is a natural order, and you don’t get to choose not to serve, you just choose what you serve.
I think that is misunderstood. Nazism is the ultimate perversion. That is an example of taking a true and good thing and turning into the thing they did.
This is true, but in Genesis 1, God originally created Adam on the sixth day, the final day of creation, to *work*:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.
---
So Adam was working from the literal beginning. Work is a great thing. Solomon points out in Ecclesiastes the uniquely sweet joy that comes from working hard and enjoying the fruit of your labor. But working in a field choked with thorns? Yeah, not as fun as the original design.
Good point. And his work was to tend God's creation, not extract a meal from the ground. In many ways it is a parable for the transition from hunter/gatherer to agriculture.
You're right, but in that perfect beginning, work wasn't work. It was a group of jobs to be completed yes, but it wasn't a miserable slog. One imagines Adam being very happy and contented with the work God had tasked him to do.
I hate living during what increasingly appears to be one of history's pivot points.
Every milestone moment in my life seems to have met a very large challenge. I hate it. It also means that I should appreciate the easier moments. There are many things historically that were FAR FAR WORSE than anything me or my generation has went through. The difference really feels like the lack of privacy and the lizard people.
I'm in a rental, when I moved in the house was valued at ~$400k.
Last estimates were almost +50% in 4 years. I'm not earning 50% more money.
We bought but now our home is "valued" so highly that it wouldn't sell quickly given the market tanking. And, anywhere we want to live is just insanely overpriced.
I got lucky last year and managed a 6% raise. It finally took some pressure off healthcare and such. I then shut off my 401k to have more take home. Well what do you know... all our other costs ballooned further. It has been as if I had done none of that stuff for some time. Now I'm the guy spending 600 bucks while making 300. It aint good.
I'll be printing out my county's deeds next week. I wonder how much we're tanking. I keep waiting for it to happen, but still... not yet... But up here we're like a whole different country, so who knows?
I restructured my contract at work this year and got about a 12k bump. I was hoping to use it to pay down my mortgage faster and put the money towards other useful things. Instead, it’s basically being eaten up in inflation.
Are we just being narcissists?
I am (naturally) inclined to say no because I swear it feels like there's something big moving just 'neath everyone's senses.
What you're feeling is either the triumph or collapse of The System. I just don't know which it is.
Or which is worse?
My history lessons would seem to indicate the collapse - though to those in charge they'll be thinking it's the success, right up to the moment where it turns on a dime like a flock of birds.
The EU is currently trying to shut down the majority of its food production. If you think this year is getting scary, wait until next year.
In the parlance of our times: I'm not a collapsetard nor am I doompilled but I want to see an end to our system, even if it means some hardship (complete collapse being an unfavorable scenario), because it appears to be slowly smothering humanity.
What it comes down to is that Klaus Schwab guy wants to take over the world. And he's got a lot of people in power who are all in with him. Yeah, he's nuttier than a fruitcake but he pretty much controls most of the western governments at this point.
Who controls him? No idea. Maybe nobody. Maybe the devil. Again, no idea.
Anyways these brilliant people who we've ceded control to because we allowed so many people who will vote for them because they're mental midgets to move into our country, these brilliant people think they've got it all figured out.
Meanwhile China is screwing with them every chance they get.
Putin is also screwing with them in ways that they can't see how they're being taken advantage of, because, again, these people just ain't that smart.
I don't know when it's going to reach critical mass and blow up, only tht once it does, it's gonna be really bad. I mean you have people believing now that nitrogen is a pollutant. It's 80 percent of the atmosphere!
But these are the people in charge now.
Hey, i've been in an abusive relationship with the concept of employment since I was 16.
As you well know from my rantings, if the company isn’t pick pocketing your soul for profit, the government will gladly take over both halves the share to steal anyways.
I hate all of it. But even in my darkest days I don’t think I can go back to a cog. Your job brings untold joy to children. It’s basically like you’re a modern Christmas elf. There is merit there despite it all. I just make people money. It’s not really the same.
There's a lot of truth right there in what you say. That joy is what keeps me going some days.
Life is a tough thing to navigate because everyone has competing interests. I'd argue that a benefit of Capitalism is that you can at least turn your worth into something fungible and move it around to places of greatest return. Not always easy, but Good Business is Where You Find It..
You're like the Babylon Bee for cars, not only did that Corvette EV hit but also Dodge of all manufacturers seems to have an... unnatural grip on their V8 engines still.
It is really (and I mean seriously) hard to feel sorry for the soy-/pumpkin spice latte crowd that CONSUMED 50 billion-with-a-B dollars at Meta to build a virtual world that would barely qualify as a graduation project from my ex-university. Or the self-conscious DEI crowd at Twitter that cost the company 4mio/day in losses. (I am in no way angry at them, that video I did where I cut together all those young athletes falling down clutchin their chests between '20 and '22 and put it to "Young Hearts" by Candi Staton, that was a bit much, I agree to my suspension).
BTW should anyone be interested, Peter Windsor is on Twitch of all places and does videos, interviews, tells stories, et cetera. Just don't ask him about that Team USF1 stuff.
Amazing how Twitter didn't take concrete action against child porn until the "Trust and Safety" people got the boot.
I'm utterly convinced that the most powerful people in the world are nothing more than moneyed, narcississtic sexual predators.
These fuckers have the gall to broadcast to the world that Twitter under Musk sans CP is "unsafe." Yoel Roth, former head of T&S!
https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-not-safer-under-elon-musk-says-former-head-trust-safety-conference-2022-11-29/?taid=6386cf6812d50700015dbf32&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
The USF1 story is the one we all want to hear. I remember being practically glued to the Speed TV forum and watching it all implode.
go to his twitch now, he said that while he drives from the UK to Spain he might tell the story of USF1
I wonder if the performative aspect is a journalism thing.
I’ve been an engineer most of my career, and while I’ve had to eat my fair share of shit like anyone in a corporate job, I’ve certainly never felt compelled to lie publicly about how good it tasted. Lie by omission in actual interviews, certainly, but to actually write a post like the one in question seems crazy.
My LinkedIn goes long stretches without being updated, I don’t follow my employers or coworkers or generally interact with anyone there unless I’m “Open To Work”, and yet when I need or want to change jobs, it’s been helpful.
Maybe I’ve missed out on chances I could have had by playing the game better. And yet, I’m reasonably satisfied with where I am. I think it’s easy to overthink things like this.
Engineers are trade-adjacent in that respect.
It’s true in the sense that I’ve gotten a ton of mileage out of the stereotype that engineers aren’t expected to be fashionable, modern, or literate. In some cases, I don’t even need to pretend…
I'm not an engineer, but I play one at work.
My father-in-law based his entire career on that. The college money went to pay for correcting his daughter's crossed eyes, but he ended up working on much the same jobs and doing the same things as he would have if he'd gotten his engineering degree, largely through sheer determination.
This works for tax lawyers as well. I'm the nerdy guy that the shark in a $10k suit calls in when the questions start getting hard. That position allows me to get away with amazing things.
I'm gonna steal the trade-adjacent term. I travel to customer sites and I fix or commission semi complicated electrical systems. They pretty much let me do what I want as long as stuff gets fixed, the customer is happy, and there's no strippers on my expense report. But there's hell to pay if I don't fix it on time.
To some degree, you can tell how important a job is to society by how strictly its practitioners are tone policed.
I hate playing games. "Games" implies being jerked around. And pretending I want to be somebody's employee is a game.
"No, I don't want to work here for a paycheck. Ever since I was a little kid, I dreamed of selling insurance."
I hit upon a trick and a mindset when I would go to interviews and when I would work at places. Simply put: I'm doing YOU a FAVOR by working here. You NEED me more than I need you.
You have no idea how well that went over with management. The last job I had I told them I already had my dream job and was making a good living at it, I just wanted to work for them because I figured it'd be fun and something to do on the side. I had an offer an hour after hanging up the phone.
Sort of like when you look back at that one girl you had a bad crush on in high school, but you came to realize the only reason you liked her was that she represented the top end of the Attainable Scale.
If I could say one thing to my 15-year-old self about this matter, it would be: "Yes, you absolutely have a shot at her. On the far side of 30 years, two kids, an ugly divorce and 60 extra pounds."
Once I started use game tactics I was easily able to get past HR recruiting bimbos. Really! Jerkboy confidence, cocky arrogance, and negging. Shouldn’t work, and it’s certainly no way to run a company.
100% you have to pose yourself as "high value". My current employer significantly increased their offer when for a moment it seemed they couldn't have me. Also, during the interviews I interviewed them harder than they interviewed me, "so I can make sure this is a good fit for me". I highly recommend this approach, even if you are desperate. Desperation stinks and HR/women can smell it. Confidence is the deodorant.
Isn't it funny that almost all HR staff are women now?
It would be funny if they applied their own diversity requirements to themselves.
Interestingly, where I work now the head of HR is a straight white dude who seems like a genuinely decent person. All of his underlings are typical HR women. So far, they've at least been helpful, but I really don't need so many wellness checks.
Crowley is also antecedent of the white man's curious belief about "two spirit" people in some Indian tribes if I remember my convoluted paths right. One of his acolytes involved in it. Not sure if I am going to be able to find the threads, though, so ignore this until I can find the pages.
I found what I was thinking about with 'berdache' and I had the mapping wrong. Mea culpa, it was Harry Hay and a different secret society and I was remembering a reference with Cecil Rhodes and Hay's father who were contemporaneous with Crowley.
Anyways it's here and he lists his sources at the bottom
https://stoneageherbalist.substack.com/p/the-origin-of-two-spirit-and-the
Still worth reading.
Thank god I was smart enough and contributing enough that I didn’t have to totally prostrate myself in fortune 50 hell. But it didn’t even seem like these were affronts to the midwits. Whereas the smartest find these situations pretty unbearable.
The joke here in Michigan is "What do University of Michigan graduates call Michigan State graduates? Boss."
Dan Gilbert brings up the average, the rest of them are dopes.
Maybe the smartest realize that being a boss of a lot of people is actually a pain in the ass.
Well that’s what they get for going to the second best school in the state. Should have gone to Michigan State.
Honestly, having employees and working for large org, being a boss in a bureaucratic organization sucks balls.
In law you have partners who can and sometimes become horrible people than the client who are just as bad, but know what you mean. Just getting ready to make a move to avoid the sucking.
Indeed. Instead of being simply ass fucked, being in middle management is being spit roasted.
Unfortunately that is too accurate and hits to home.
I wish MSU affiliates didn't have such an inferiority complex. Nobody made you guys get Bs in high school.
The reason why State grads hire Michigan grads is that they are smart enough to know that the Michigan grads have learned a thing or two in A2 and are probably smarter than they themselves are. At the risk of killing the joke, that's why it's funny, eggheads working for practical folks.
While I respect MSU as my father's alma mater in veterinary medicine (my mom said he also got a MS in cytology while earning his DVM but her memory was going by then) the fact remains that Michigan is one of less than a handful of public schools that are considered elite, along with Berkley and maybe Wisconsin.
Agree with you but having family that have gone to both the best and second best schools in the state up north as well as ND I chose tOSU after being accepted to U of M.
It’s all semantics. What you do with the knowledge after is all that matters. But I enjoy the tribe pride and rivalries.
Enjoy the family diversity and be glad they are not inbred Ivy League.
The only universal trait of my friends that make a lot of money is that they are OCD or perfectionists. They have an intense desire for things to be new, clean, neat and orderly. This desire drives their motivation to earn more money in order to attain them. Conscientiousness is maybe a better descriptor.
The testable IQs and education are variable, medicine, law, entrepreneurship, real estate, pilot.
Yeah these people work far more than I am willing to, as well as playing all of the political games.
And the unfortunate fact is that in a large corporation these positions are far rarer than the people willing to do anything to get them, so your shelf-life is short. They are highly replaceable and interchangeable.
In my corporate days, bonus size was explicitly linked to your making the right contributions. No bonus, no contribution. QED.
I agree that the humiliation rituals are actually ENJOYABLE to a lot of people, most of whom are women. They LOVE the performative aspects of it, just like they LOVED being able to call themselves "heroes" for getting a shot or wearing a mask or showing up to pull a shift at Whole Foods.
The ox rarely feels his yoke, but try putting one on a lion.
Why feminization of men is actually good for TBTB.
Well, yeah. Women seek alliances and nancies cower before your stormtroopers. A man will hunt you down and make an example of you.
I could never give an answer for where I saw myself in 5 years. “On a boat with instagram models a million miles away from ever smelling an Indian here again”
That stuff is all fairly easy, too. High social rewards with absolutely minimal effort, just like staying home to flatten the curve "for two weeks."
Our landlord was the director of a local homeless shelter for a while and does a lot of hard work trying to help them out. I think he's received an occasional beating for his effort, judging from the black eye he was sporting earlier this year. When we move out he's going to transition our half of his house into a sort of homeless-family-relief thing. Right in the middle of a neighborhood where houses regularly sell for $0.5mil to obnoxiously self-righteous professors and lawyers with yards full of political signs. I wonder how they'll feel about issues they "care about" being moved in right next door...
EDIT: edited comment to show house prices at half a million instead of five million because I'm a dumbass and didn't catch the absent decimal when I proofread it before hitting post.
"This house believes in science blah blah blah"
Strange how people who "believe in science" never want to subject their beliefs to empirical analysis, isn't it?
People should look at the evidence! Think for themselves! So long as they only come to the same conclusions I do.
(Sadly, I'm guilty of this sentiment myself.)
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman
Experts necessarily are backwards looking but science looks forward into the unknown. If science was "settled" why bother with experiments? Does Newton work at subatomic levels?
"Science" apparently means testing the same hypothesis over and over again expecting new results. Or frankly, simply stating the results are opposite. Most people who cry "science!" don't even know what a hypothesis is. In my most autistic moments, I'd only retort by shouting back which logical fallacies the person was committed. APPEAL TO AUTHORITY!!1!
I'm thankful that one of my neighbors had a sign telling me how to vote on a state proposal. Around here you sometimes have to vote no to mean yes so I wasn't sure about Prop 2 till I saw this neighbor supported it, so I knew to vote no.
I hope the homeless escape, so to speak, and trash the neighborhood. It would be bad for your friend, but it would be instructive for everyone else.
I'd love to see a DeSantis-vs-Martha's-Vineyard thing play out, only without the national guard coming in to rescue the professors and lawyers. At least, once we're securely in the hills.
My biggest regret in my career is not finding a niche skill set with my brain. I romanticized the ‘humiliation’ of industrials that get offshored by low intellect MBA kiddos. Even my controls knowledge isn’t special to anyone in particular. Should have been a skilled trade.
Low intellect MBA's is an understatement. I got laughed at in a meeting because I made the point that people who break the law aren't necessarily criminals. Yikes.
And those who do completely legal things don't necessarily have clean hands.
Never a truer phrase spoken.
Oh they know. Farley was walking around a plant tour amongst his lowly hourly drones with armed body guards that were 6’ tall. They weren’t always obvious, but I could see their Glocks printing through their shitty suits. Hinrichs wouldn’t have been this out of touch.
Last year, when I was at the Amelia Concours, Hagerty security told me to leave the green because I was wearing a Heckler&Koch shirt.
It gets better. The head of security didn't contact me directly. He asked a woman in the company to tell me. There's nothing particularly frightening about me so I guess maybe they just had nothing to do.
Pile on the honorifics if they're not happy.
Your Grace, Your Lordship, etc.
Maybe they had you pegged and would rather listen to a woman over a guy?
Sir they did NOT have me "pegged" I don't like what you're implying!
I thought you liked Steely Dan.
Note: That was originally just going to be a joke about their song Peg but then I realized it worked even better because of the Wm Burroughs reference.
Concours security? How'd that go? Did he look at you nervously while saying to his phone, "Maniac has responded with a scornful remark."
A few years ago I was leaving the preview of the RM auction held in connection with the Detroit concours. The preview was always worth getting media creds and I got a number of good stories out of it. I was already near my car, talking to a chef working the event, when some manlet accompanied by a bruiser comes up to me and says he's in charge of auction security and that I'm not welcome and shouldn't return the next day for the auction. Understand that I'm 5'6" myself so I'm hardly physically imposing or threatening so I didn't understand the need for muscle. When I asked the guy what the problem was he just repeated himself. Maybe I said the wrong thing to some rich rectal orifice. I told him that I wasn't actually planning on coming back the next day but that I'd be happy to tell all the collectors that I know that RM employs some real dickheads.
I got kicked out of Trump's airport rally in 2020 for taking pictures. Paranoia was high with those guys.
Funny thing is, I had been taking photos of the rallies since 2016 and was never hassled.
Who kicked you out? Trump's people?
They had a good squad doing all the security. By 2020 they were deeply paranoid of anyone not vetted. Yes, Trumps own guys bounced me right out.
At least they knew what H&K make.
There was a picture of a USP on the back, so maybe not
Jack, as someone that keeps your Linked-in profile booked makes as a model for offering advice to my colleagues as how to write a well put together selling tool. Today’s post makes me think of how when living in a china shop one should not invite a pack of German Sheppards to visit. Nothing there about the CEO of the begat shop laying off people in order to get the beget shop’s best customer to sponsor an event. Or said best customer who single handily was created a consumer product named after an ancient Mexican Indian tribe that drove a company into the ground. Or how the same customer was promoted to over see an operation in the South Pacific and likewise drive it into extinction. And then was promoted to oversee all company promotions and used that position to extract penance on a single line worker at the begat company…:-) :-)
Only nobodies fail downward.
If I had your height and your looks I could get away with saying all of that!
The true Mark of Excellence.
I was doing fine until you threw in "leveraging synergies". Nothing irks me more in the corporate world than that phrase. As for LinkedIn, is it useful to keep updated? I haven't used it in a long time.
"We're embracing the Agile methodology"
Which is why we're going to formalize the process and give you hell if you so much as step outside the lines.
Oh how I hate Agile. Biggest friggin scam every pulled.
Reminds me of "Agilista Angi" whose primary skill was taking it Crowley style... sheesh, I should write that one up, too.
Authentic LOL.
Yes Jack ;
You _should_ write it up, that's why we're paying you....
As far as the word soup, that was coming in hot and heavy just before I retired and few if any had any idea what they were talking about .
I didn't either and was fairly vocal about it, asked what they meant and so on, this didn't make me any brownie points .
-Nate
I work for a state agency here in Pennsylvania and we have a group of employees that send out these non-sensical emails twice a week for "Workforce Wednesday" and "Transformation Tuesday." It all looks like cut-and-paste mumbo jumbo to me. Good thing we have 4 people on our staff to work on this crap...
Taxpayers' dollars, hard(ly) at work.
Name names on the bagel place. That way I can reflexively opine that they bagels were terrible because they don't use the right water.
What a great piece. Thank you, Jack.
It struck me very close to home. I was sacked from GM after 13 lousy years and felt that humiliation clearly. Never more.
Heh, had a neighbor who put in 20 at GM in research only to be packed off to Delphi so his pension, and the pensions of thousands like him, could get adjusted in the bankruptcy.
Being forced to use for any serious length of time a wheelchair is a miserable and sometimes just plain impossible proposition.
There, I fixed/mangled it for you .
Interesting you posted this today, yesterday I was out raking up dog poop and leaves and thinking the same thing ~ I know very few who will do any serious manual labor .
Me, I live by it .
-Nate
I know this, Nate, I've spent more than a year of my life in one. :)
Yes but your audience may not really grasp it .
I spent two years in wheelchairs thankfully not consecutively .
And yet, I still ride, go figure .
-Nate