"I Forgot You Were Here." Guardians of the Galaxy, Storytelling, & Associated Face Punches.

I can’t understand this. So many women are already the audience of these films. So many more would go if they weren’t belittled. Even in general, more moviegoers are women than men.

It’s bad business, and that’s what makes it puzzling. But business as I’ve noted is not just about profits, it’s also about power. This is another good example of that truth.

We made this tonight. It was very good.

We used chicken bouillon because it’s what we had on hand and we are not vegetarians. Also used onions instead of shallots.

One of the best new recipes we’ve tried lately.

One of the things that strikes me about the police having the vast arsenals of military-grade weaponry is that it is pretty unlikely that they have that much training on how to use it correctly or perhaps at all.

It’s just there to intimidate and to look impressive, and to satisfy authoritarian fantasies.

As a nation we have decided that the police have a job that is so dangerous (it isn’t) that they can do anything they want. It’s actually funny in a way, because all their violence and body armor and tanks just show that they are a bunch of wimps. Does a real man panic and put seven bullets in a boy because he doesn’t immediate respond to the officer’s command? Of course not.

Since I first wrote a draft of this post, there has been a whole spate of articles pointing out that the military actually has a better ops manual for how to treat protesters. That is perfectly correct. The Ferguson police are militarized, but only for show. They are not well-trained and certainly not well-intentioned.

The paperless office is finally starting to become a reality.

That’s interesting, though not too surprising. It takes a long time for habits to change, and sometimes you just have to wait for old generations to retire and allow new ones to take their place.

Like many things, it just takes the oldsters retiring and/or dying for processes and approaches to improve. Not that everyone old is hidebound, but one has to admit that it is a tendency. Mostly gone are the days of an executive having his or her assistant print out emails to read.

At a previous job, there were people who for some reason would print out documents and hand them to me. I would always say, “Ah, no! Don’t hand me yet more paper, please. Put it out on the share.”

What am I going to do with a piece of paper? I can’t search it. Can’t get it to anyone else easily. Can’t look at it on a tablet or another device when I’m outside of the office, and have to keep track of it and even file it if it’s important.

About tablets, that’s the one area in the workplace where they can have some use: as a supplementary device one can use to view documents in meetings or at client sites, or for taking orders, etc.

Not coincidentally, this is how tablets are already being used by many businesses.

Police Militarization In Ferguson.

The police in Ferguson – and most militarized police forces around the country — have more and better equipment than I did when I served in the army. And I wasn’t in some forgotten-about unit on a small base, either.

The police are largely now an occupation force arrayed against their own citizens, and have nothing to do with the credo “to protect and serve.”

This of course tends to happen in oligarchies.

Awake within a dream: lucid dreamers show greater insight in waking life.

I’ve been lucid dreaming since I was 10, in fifth grade, after I read about it in an Omni magazine and decided to try it.

There was another kid who was doing it with me, and we talked about building a “dream VCR” one day. We didn’t quite understand the extent of the technical problems involved in that at the time.

Something I realized is that if I were black and had done some of the things I actually did as a kid and young adult, I’d probably be dead now.

You’d think we would’ve moved on from just randomly killing “inconvenient” black people.

You’d be wrong.

Nearly every day I see DAs on Reddit post photos of insects impaled on fences or thorns talking about “one in a million accident.”

No, it’s a shrike.

People don’t go outside much, I guess.

Entry-level jobs are disappearing.

Part of this can be explained by the fact that unlike in the past, companies refuse to train workers as they once did. But part of it is real, and unavoidable, as technology progresses.

And the number of entry-level jobs in computer systems and public relations are expected to grow over the next decade.

Ha, I can tell you that the forecast of more entry-level jobs in computer systems is absolutely not going to happen. Whatever consultant came up with that is completely wrong.

Entry-level jobs in IT are already being eliminated. This is ramping up daily. With data centers, increased automation in every aspect of IT work combined with nearly-effortless virtualization, those lower-tier IT jobs are simply going away. They won’t come back.

Right now, this fact is probably hidden in the numbers as more consultants are hired temporarily to put these new systems in place and to assist in the transition.

But once that’s done, nearly all of the lower-level entry ramp IT jobs such as help desk and junior system administrator will simply disappear. It’s already happening.

A company I used to work for recently automated many things that were manual, and is already getting by on roughly 30% fewer helpdesk staff.

That is happening in every field, not just IT. But that is the one I know best and I see evidence of it every day.

What’s been really odd to me lately is companies refusing to pay their workers more even when it hurts their bottom line and stock prices.

Even long term, this is not rational behavior. It is just spite, and a variety of class warfare.

Consider this: The American Trucking Associations has estimated that there was a shortage of 30,000 qualified drivers earlier this year, a number on track to rise to 200,000 over the next decade. Trucking companies are turning down business for want of workers.

Yet the idea that there is a huge shortage of truck drivers flies in the face of a jobless rate of more than 6 percent, not to mention Economics 101. The most basic of economic theories would suggest that when supply isn’t enough to meet demand, it’s because the price — in this case, truckers’ wages — is too low. Raise wages, and an ample supply of workers should follow.

But corporate America has become so parsimonious about paying workers outside the executive suite that meaningful wage increases may seem an unacceptable affront.

If businesses were truly rational – and run for profit only – then workers would be paid more as it would also make the business more profits. The evidence shows this clearly.

However, it wasn’t until I was in the business world for a number of years until I realized that profit is not the only story, and often isn’t even the primary narrative. Power matters just as much if not more than profits, despite what you might read elsewhere.

It is not well-known, but GM nearly financially destroyed itself in the 80s to fight unions. It would’ve made far more profits if it had worked with the unions. There are hundreds of examples of this, of course, even though it’s not discussed that much because “profits only” is the simplistic narrative that elides far too much and elucidates far too little.

I’ve personally worked at a company where an entire, very-profitable business unit was eviscerated after a merger so that executives elsewhere did not feel threatened by the more-competent unit.

Tell me what that has to do with profit. Nothing, of course. Like the lack of paying well even when it hurts the bottom line and the stock (thus bonuses, etc.), it’s often about power and its exercise.

I am too lazy to find all the studies – find them yourself, if you want – but most people don’t realize just how much richer are the rich than the rest of us, and how much better they live.

This is a vet clinic, by the way.

We go down another marble floored hallway and we go to the second concierge: this one is bigger since people sit there to pick up their pets after being left overnight. I had no wait time to make another appointment and we were immediately out of the concierge with the cherry wood, granite, and pristine marble where we were able to see our unsullied reflections.

I remember my mom going to the free clinic and waiting 4-6 hours to be seen. And how terrible the standard of care there was.

In this country, we allow the rich to treat their pets better than we treat our most vulnerable people. It is just disgusting.

I generally read and even enjoy bad military fiction, but this is just too far. Too far.

Freedom Is Never Free – After the President closes Guantanamo Bay to hold civilian trials for the terrorists, some of them are relocated to Hell’s Gate Prison in West Texas. Until a group of fanatical sleeper-cell shock troops launch an all-out assault to “liberate” their jailed comrades. There’s just one problem: they don’t know that Army Ranger Lucas Kincaid is working at Hell’s Gate. With the town’s high school team held hostage and in danger of being executed one by one, Kincaid assembles a ragtag band of survivors and aging hardcore cons into a lethal fighting force to keep the unholy warriors from their deadly mission. And Kincaid and his men are on their own – everyone, from the President on down, orders Kincaid to give in to the terrorists’ demands. But warrior Lucas Kincaid, out-numbered and out-gunned, won’t back down. One thing’s for sure: when the enemy gets to Hell, they’ll know America sent them.

I am laughing over here. Damn. What in the hell.

“…to keep the unholy warriors from their deadly mission…”

This book. It really exists. It does.

What the what?

Does no one know any history?

Wikipedia shows Anne Applebaum graduated from Yale, among other esteemed institutions of higher learning. Therefore she should know that this theory that trade partners would not go to war was thoroughly debunked by the outbreak of WWI.

Pre-WWI was the first great era of globalization – after that, global trade actually fell markedly for a variety of reasons.

Anyway, I’m not here to declaim about global trade other than to note that often even very educated people aren’t all that smart.

The five idiotic things (most of) the Left believes:

1) That communism can work, just that no one has yet done it correctly.

2) That there are absolutely no identifiable racial genetic differences, even when this harms people medically (diabetes, heart disease, etc. all  have racial genetic differing etiologies).

3) That absolutely no human evolution occurred above the neck.

4) That spewing more data at people is likely to change their minds.

5) That cultural relativism applied outside of an academic setting has any real value, or leads to greater freedom.

This is harder, because there are so, so many idiotic things the right (and in this I am including Libertarians) accepts as doctrine, but here are five idiotic things (most of) the Right believes:

1) That evolution did not occur at all.

2) That profit/affluence determines someone’s moral worth (ends justify means outlook, essentially).

3) That beating/hurting/killing someone is likely to change anyone’s or any group’s mind.

4) That women are subhuman.

5) That markets are self-regulating, a natural occurrence, and if the government would just get out of the way, we’d have a laissez-faire renaissance of the antediluvian free market bonanza.

Note that often these aren’t explicitly-stated beliefs, as either they are too outré to be stated aloud or written down, or they are just the subconscious machinations of group id that lead to observed action. But nevertheless, this is a pretty good encapsulation – at least as a first draft – of the manias that drive both sides to do the things they do.