What are some things women complain about men that you believe is projection?

Locker room talk.

This is not really a thing that men do. Women engage in locker room talk (though not generally in a locker room) far, far more than any men do, ever. The idea of locker room talk is all projection on women’s part — because most women do in fact engage in extremely graphic descriptions of their partner’s sexual practices, anatomical characteristics, frequency and performance. With very rare exceptions, men do not do this while many women do almost as a matter of course. (And excuse it as “just girl talk.”)

And yes, I do know, because I have more than a few close female friends.

What men actually talk about in locker rooms if they talk about women at all (usually it’s just goofing around):

Man 1: Did you see Kristina? She looked hot!

Man 2: Damn she did! What are we doing for lunch?

Women’s locker room talk:

Woman 1: And then he took his pants off and his cock reminded me of my ex-boyfriends but I didn’t say anything even though it turned me off right away. And he kind of stood like he wanted me to do something, but I didn’t know what so I just laid down and he touched my thigh, but his hand was rough and that made me pull back a little so then he kissed me and that was ok but I couldn’t stop thinking about how his dick looked like my ex’s….

Woman 2: Yeah, I know what you mean. When my husband gets all sweaty and such it really turns me off and he likes to do it doggy but he’s so small so I don’t really feel anything, and so I like to use my toy but he gets upset when I do so I feel like he wishes he were bigger. And he doesn’t like it when I suck him off when he’s too tired but that’s the most fun for me because he doesn’t want to spend an hour having sex because it makes me too exhausted….

Men’s locker room talk, largely, is just not a thing. Trust me on this. Women’s locker room talk, though, is if anything even more explicit than what I wrote above.

Gah Standard Time sucks so much and is terrible in every way. Getting dark at 4 fucking PM….FUCK THAT CLOWN SHIT

I hate speech to text and anything to do with it. It always works like crap and makes comments and texts incomprehensible most of the time. If it were better tech, it’d be great.

But it ain’t and it’s not.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

The shit people ask IT.

I’ve never understood why we believe computers — now vital for a job — should be something that people are just allowed to know nothing about with no consequences. If a welder comes in to a welding job and doesn’t know how to turn on the welding machine or do the simplest tig weld, they’d rightly be fired the same damn day.

Yet if a user comes in and even after using a computer for 20+ years and can’t open the application they use daily and can’t find a file that is located right in their Documents folder, we excuse it. And I don’t think we should. I think the incompetent should be trained and if that doesn’t work they should be fired just as the welder would be. If you cannot use a vital tool for your job, you should not have the job. It’s as simple as that.

Recently where I work, a new person was hired who did not even know how to open Outlook and could not do the simplest things on her computer. One of my staff helped her a bit and got her going, but she still complained to HR that we “hadn’t trained her enough” and that our assistance was inadequate. HR came after my team, which has nothing to do with training and is in no way responsible for any of that.

I defended my person and fought back; I observed that if HR was hiring people clearly unqualified for the job (which absolutely requires competent computer use), and that they should also organize training and some sort of evaluation pre-hire for the needed computer skills — and, furthermore, I could not find “training” in any job title in my group.

That one died because of course it did. A lot of stuff gets shoveled over to IT — as I’ve observed before — as it’s often the only generally-competent department in an organization. And I’ve gotten better at pushing back over the years as I’ve gotten more senior.

This puts a lot of my points below quite eloquently:

Boomers V. Millennials: Debt and Financial Stability Gap Getting Wider.

This supports what I wrote in my little essay below. It’s even worse for Gen Z, of course, because they won’t even have the opportunities that the Millennials did while the cost of living for them will be absurdly high.

Hey, at least my generation — Gen X — made it onto the chart. We’re usually completely ignored these days for some reason.

Why are older people arguing that the economy is booming?

Because Boomers bounced into the most bountiful boomtime in a bunch of years and thought their flourishing was because they were just so special, so amazing — but it was just an historical accident. Now they have that legacy of good fortune going for them and they believe that people under 45 aren’t prospering because they just don’t work hard enough and eat too much avocado toast. The reality is that the material conditions for younger cohorts have worsened enormously. Here’s why Boomers had and still retain huge advantages:

1) Boomers benefited from the greatest stock market long-term rally in all of history. If you put $10,000 in the S&P 500 in 1969 (the year the first Boomers turned 25) and left it until today, you’d have $215,300 right now. Yes, that is inflation-adjusted and includes dividend re-investment. If you bought a house for the average price in 1969 for $26,000, in many places it’d be worth around $1 million+ now (that is not inflation-adjusted because housing is a bit different, but if it were that’d be $218,052).

2) Boomers had far more job security; many worked for the same place for 30+ years.

3) Many Boomers had (and have) generous pensions and were union members while working.

4) Social Security was assured for them.

5) Cars, health care and education were far cheaper when they were consuming most of those items the most. For most Boomers, higher education was free or nearly so.

Most people are fairly narcissistic. That’s obvious if you’ve ever interacted with any humans. Boomers, though, are extremely, ridiculously narcissistic due to the circumstances of their blessed lives. The Boomer gen simply cannot understand that someone making $12 an hour at three undependable hustles simply cannot fucking afford the now-million dollar house that Boomers bought back in 1965 with pocket change and a handshake.

The world might not be better when the Boomers all die off, but it won’t be worse, that’s for sure.

Anger can be a powerful motivator to achieve major life goals.

Hell yes. Anger and spite have fueled me my entire life in acheiving what I want to. Praise and positivity do nothing at all for me. On the other hand, telling me I cannot do something I intend to do gives me superpowers.

Why has fast food gotten insanely pricey?

I’ve been wondering the same. The quality of fast food is actually far worse now post-pandemic, but the price delta between fast food and a far higher-quality restaurant meal is much diminished compared to what it was four years ago. Sometimes for lunch (where restaurants have lunch prices and portions), fast food is actually more expensive.

This all makes no sense and I have no insight into it at all. But I do miss in the army where I could get an ok meal (Whopper value meal, to be specific) at Burger King for $2.99 — that’d be $5.54 in today’s money. Now the price is higher and the quality is much, much worse.

Here’s proof; this ad is from 1995 but this price held until the early 2000s — in fact, often just the Whopper itself was only $0.99, which was a frequent sale price. Sometimes I’d buy two Whoppers for that amount and call it good. Anyway, the ad:

The first ten on today’s playlist:

I hate programming so, so much.

I stopped renewing some of my certs because it felt like I was spending my entire life studying for damn certification tests or doing training, but I still have my CISSP and just renewed my CCNP as my two highest-level certs.

A lot of people have the CISSP and a lot of people have the CCNP. Very, very few have both together as each one of them is really frickin’ hard. I’m pretty proud of that.

Both are lovingly dedicated to my father who said I’d never achieve anything.

They’ve been getting away with this for forever. It’s gotta stop!

The problem is buying something so damn nasty as Pop Tarts. Buy crap, get crap. Seems obvious to me. Pop Tarts: a food so fucking nasty only an American could love it.

Natalie performed this live at the concert we went to in Spokane. It’s a good song even in studio form, but in concert it was really excellent. Just great, and much more powerful than this version.

Some people you can just see the intelligence in their eyes, emanating from how they look at the world. Natalie is one of those people. Reminds me of one of the greatest compliments anyone has ever paid to me. A friend of mine was looking at a photo of me and my date that was taken during a military ball I attended in the army. She said, “I can just look at your eyes in this photo and know how crazy smart you are.”

I didn’t know what she meant at first until I thought about Natalie and realized that, yeah, I did know.