The first 10 on today’s playlist:
Day: January 9, 2019, 11:56 PM
Dejection
I feel like men *would* offer me a seat, but the women just react so quickly to the sight of a mother carrying a toddler that they never get a chance! https://t.co/wwkLgbN6Lt
— Robyn Doolittle (@robyndoolittle) January 7, 2019
The hesitation is because decent men are scared of being labelled a harasser, worried that they’ll get the “I have a boyfriend” line when they’re just trying to do something nice, or otherwise be rejected/cold shouldered in some bizarre way. Just as women are harassed constantly, this sort of thing happens to men constantly.
If a woman speaks to me in public is about the only time I will engage with a woman I don’t know, and even then I keep it as cursory, neutral, and clipped as possible no matter what she says/does. Most men who aren’t bastards will be doing the same these days.
Yes, it’s a bad equilibrium for everyone, but what’s the alternative?
Prudence
And supposedly, we aren’t getting more prudish. Right.
Mation
So You Automated Your Coworkers Out of a Job.
I have done this. It sucks but is also not really capable of being stopped. Sometimes, people have been doing tasks for 20+ years that really can be done by a small shell script these days. One place that a company worked for took over, we easily got rid of six IT staff (including an Oracle DBA who made well over 250K a year) by automating backups and other tasks, converting to MS SQL, removing some ancient Citrix environments, reducing support for old platforms, improving VPN, and putting in self-service password resets and a real ticketing system. It’s not that these six people were doing nothing, but what they were doing was a complete waste of time in several different ways that actually hurt the company more than it helped.
This churn would not be a bad thing if we had a real safety net in this country. It helps no one to have people scurrying around doing useless tasks that a machine can do in 0.001 seconds. And frankly, if you are doing these sort of tasks, sooner or later (probably sooner) someone is going to notice, and then say, “This girl/guy appears to be here to hit a button every 10 minutes. They’ve been doing it for the past 20 years.”
Boss: “Well, can you automate it?”
Me: “Yes, I automated it already. Here’s the two-line script that I just wrote while I was talking to you.”
If you have that kind of job, well, you probably won’t for much longer given the way things are moving.
Wall Wall Wall, What Have We Here
I don’t give a crap, really, about Trump’s wall either way. It’s stupid, but it’s minor stupid. It won’t help much, won’t hurt much, and the main negative impact will be ecological.
For the left and so-called liberals, I think their de facto open borders stance is a huge loser and a bad idea generally. I suspect that if they mostly backed away from open borders fetishism and virtue signaling, they could probably pick up another 5ish percent of Republican-leaning voters and win far more elections.
I will never understand how it can be that many leftists and progressives tend to value people who aren’t citizens and don’t live here over legal residents and American citizens, but they truly do and it’s pretty disgusting.