Wal-Mart’s customers are so poor that they can’t even afford to shop at Wal-Mart any longer.
I’ve always wondered what would happen when corporations and the rich so gutted middle class wages that those wages would no longer suffice to support an economy and the very corporations doing the economic disembowelment.
Looks like we are well on the way to finding out.
Wow, OMG, Windows 8 lets your run two applications at once!
Holy shit! Will the innovations never cease!
Yeah, ok, my Windows 7 allows me to run as many applications as I have memory and processing power to run, all at the same time. Amazing.
For instance, right now I have nine different applications up that I am actually using and/or looking at.
Usually it’s much more but I rebooted my computer not too long ago.
Funny that multi-tasking is being taken away, and then sort-of given back, and presented like it’s something new.
In the army, my nickname was “Chill” due to my laid-back nature.
But in basic training, my nickname was “Psycho” due to a fight I got into, or rather that someone chose to get into with me.
I guess to them it seemed safe to pick on someone about half their size.
I believe that’s the only time I’ve ever put someone in the hospital.
And nope, I don’t regret it a bit. I’d do it again. Bullies should be smacked down, hard.
The drill sergeants actually thanked me afterward for getting rid of that idiot.
I faced no penalties at all.
Why “Psycho,” though?
Because after the guy was already dazed, even though I am not very coordinated, I was so annoyed and tired of this guy, I did some weird spin move and kicked the guy in the side of the head.
I’m sure it wasn’t elegant or like in an action movie, as my feet are about as coordinated as a bag of biscuits, but as I said the guy was already dazed, and I was awash in not quite “rage,” but the sort of controlled focused awareness one gets when fighting.
That kick up side the head was the whole “hospital” part.
I should’ve stopped before that, but I was fucking fed up with this dude and might’ve killed him if the drills hadn’t stopped me.
I’m glad they did, but I regret not at all what I did.
I believe that’s the first time I’ve ever told anyone that nickname, or that story, as I’m not proud of it really, but it’s true about me and it’s my life. Anyway, only 2-3 people read this blog, and I know and like them all. Anyone else stumbles across it? Such is life.
I had two thoughts while reading this:
1) Banks are evil.
2) I need to make sure most of my assets are overseas sooner rather than later.
When you have enough money that it’s worth it for someone to steal it, but not enough to buy a government, guess you make a pretty good target.
Time to become a harder target.
I was going to write something inane about soulmates, but it might be a useful concept to some. Let them have it.
A few years ago, I was eating lunch with a girl from work. She looked at me strangely for a moment and said, “You’re weird. I think if a few guys with guns came into this restaurant and started shooting the place up, the expression on your face wouldn’t even change.”
I said, “Well, depends on if they shot me or not.”
She said, “See? You’re weird.”
As an addendum to the below, in high school I wrote a 1,200 word paper that was one long grammatically-correct sentence. That was difficult, but fun.
There are many reasons this “result” is invalid, but the main one is that these tests of complexity are skewed by archaic words that were used (surprise!) more frequently as one goes back in time.
There is also the fact that the circumlocutory style used up until about the early 1960s in formal writing and speech is profoundly unnatural and actually more difficult to understand than phrasings without a hundred barely-connected dependent clauses. (This style of writing is now almost exclusively found in academic papers where it is used as a signaling mechanism.)
Speech and writing complexity does not equal conveyed information or intelligence. Most often, it’s deliberately obfuscatory.
Try reading Richard Feynman write about something extremely complicated and see how clear it can be, and then try reading an average paper about the very same topic to see what I mean.
As another for instance, Shakespeare is only difficult to understand for modern readers due to the archaic and obsolete words, not due to textual complexity. I always laugh when people cite Shakespeare for its awesome complexity, when it’s mostly about as complex for its time as the average Firefly episode.
But it’s greater for that reason, not in spite of it.
I could go on, but don’t put much credence in things like this as it totally ignores the cross-cultural differences, obsolete and archaic words, not to mention that the complexity tests themselves are not in any way a good method of assessment for information actually conveyed.
As if the interface of Office 2013 were not shitty enough, there’s this too.
Only install it on one computer – ever.
Terrible interface, user-hostile licensing, bloated and with no compelling reason to use it. Great job of competing with Google Docs, there.
This is a list of some of the things wrong with our old place, the one that we hated so much. Some of these we perhaps could have realized before we moved in, but others you only learn by experience. Bitter, terrible experience.
That list is not comprehensive. That place was worse than many places I’ve lived in and stayed at in the 3rd World. So glad to be gone.
*A combination of wiggling it, cursing, and wishing for an arsonist to burn the whole fucking place to the ground.
I am not a gamer, not even really a casual one, but I’d never, ever buy a game console that blocked the playing of used games.
Not in a million fucking years.
If I feel so strongly about it, just guess how real gamers feel about it. And then guess how well that console will do.
I remember hating these standardized tests because they seemed like a huge waste of time, not because I didn’t do well on them. For instance in nearly every subject, I scored in the 99th percentile and in 5th grade scoring in the 99th percentile of high school students in science, social studies and reading comprehension. (And maybe other subjects; those are just the three I liked so I remember them.)
So, yeah, I never gave a shit about them either way, didn’t prepare for them and barely bothered to read most questions. I knew even then that my future was not in a college classroom.
Looking back, it wouldn’t have mattered a whit if I’d just filled them in randomly, but back then I took more pride in my intellectual prowess* than I should have and knew I could blow those tests out of the water with no effort. Which I did.
But standardized tests tell you very little about someone, really. I’d make a terrible college student, which is what many of them propose to predict, as I learn about what I want to when I wish to learn about it. Putting me in a college classroom, especially at age 18, wouldn’t have really changed that.
I just can’t believe we are going to base a society and so many people’s place in it on some test that many of the luminaries of science and technology from ages past would’ve failed utterly, or neglected to show up for altogether.
*I report my results not to brag about them, but to show that I am not inveighing against these tests because I did poorly on them – no, I destroyed them like the fist of an angry god.
We’ve moved to a new place. There are coyotes yowling and howling in the area behind our building.
This is much better than where we used to live, which was pretty much an expensive dump.
I like the coyotes, and the nice new windows we have here.
On my other blog, I linked to the parent post, but this comment reminded me of how true this is.
Next time you’re traveling and see someone stopped to help someone that has broken down by the road, if the break-down isn’t with the vehicle of a pretty girl, pay attention to who has stopped to help. It won’t be a late model Mercedes, Beemer or Cadillac driven by someone well dressed that’s stopped to lend assistance. It will be someone working class, or poor. Almost always.
One time I lost control a little on the ice in NC and not wanting to crash into oncoming traffic, I took it off the road. No real danger, but it would not move after that. Completely stuck in the thick mud-ice crappiness that NC gets a lot.
This was before cell phones were common, and I was looking at the car pondering what to do. Not a lot of options. Long way to walk back to civilization in the bitter cold.
Then out of the darkness comes this ratty-ass pickup that looked like it had been through an apocalypse. Guy pulls up beside me, wearing clothes and a hat that looked like they might’ve been new in 1975, and said, “Need some help, padnuh?” in a thick Appalachian accent.
He then spent 30 minutes of his time in the hellish cold pulling me out of the muck and asks for nothing in return for it at all. One of the nicest guys I’ve ever met, and just judging by external appearances (which isn’t always accurate, but in this case, probably was) probably never cleared more than 15K in a year.
If you think this has no veracity, where do you think you’d most likely get help if you broke down in an old car:
1) In or near a gated community in an upscale neighborhood.
2) In a poor or lower-middle-class neighborhood.
Well, in America at least, you’d likely get arrested in scenario 1, and almost certainly would if you were to make the mistake of being black or Hispanic. So I guess at least you wouldn’t have to worry about your broken car anymore.
What the fuck does being straight or not – or even male – have to do with making cheesecakes or brownies?
Some days, I beg for the asteroid to come kill us all.
Thinking about the below, the US might be the first rich Third World country.
Our infrastructure is failing, our social programs that make society itself prosper are being dismantled, and we have a higher GINI coefficient than even some of the former standard-bearers of inequality.
We have a lot of wealth, but the average person lives a precarious life where one mistake, one missed paycheck or one arrest could destroy them forever
There aren’t a lot of people starving, but contrary to popular belief in most Third World countries that is also true.
I don’t even like the term “Third World.” I’ve lived in the so-called “Third World” and it’s all just people trying to get along, like anywhere else.
That said, it’s a useful term still.
Yes, I do think the US is the first rich Third World country. Things are only going to get worse from here, too.