“Fear is the mind-killer…”; Frank Herbert hit on a deep insight there. Fear is our most primal motivator, absolutely nothing comes close. It drives our pattern processing capability – if we are in a situation that doesn’t fit a known pattern, fear puts us on edge. Fear primes the fight or flight response. To live with no fear would be non-surviving behavior – being oblivious to danger when danger is near. Living in constant fear also is non-surviving behavior – too much energy expended for no benefit. We are the product of tens of thousands of generations of survival behavior – buried in our genetic and psychic inheritance.
We fear the unknown, with death being the greatest unknown. The irony being, we’ve known for countless millennia that death is the single most certain thing in this life. Though we generally prefer certainty to uncertainty (and I will touch on this again), not so much in this case. It is fear of death, or the less pessimistic take – desire to live, that is the main motivation of life. All life has the ‘desire’ to survive, even if lacking the awareness of that or the ultimate fate of death. We cheat oblivion by spiritual means (a uniquely human thing) and/or propagation of our genes (as common to nearly all life).
We have of course evolved a great deal in the last 100,000 years (let alone say the preceding 1,000,000+ years). The fascist metaphor somewhat fits – we are weaker individually than we are collectively, thus our social evolution into larger, more sophisticated social groups in that time. That isn’t always comfortable because our inheritance, our deep behavior, was ingrained under different circumstances. And deepest of all lies fear, too ready to leap forward and push aside all other mental processes. Because of this, we are susceptible to manipulation by someone playing on our fear, just as we would reasonably be in fear of a credible threat of violence (intentional or not) directed at us. Fear is the lever that moves humans whether subtle or overt.
In the last 10,000 years we reach back to where history morphs into mythology. In the last 1,000 years we have roughly the modern world, and yet how few of us can actually trace our personal history (ancestry) back that far? Even our personal history becomes mythological in that time frame. What is remarkable is how different for most people the world today is from what is was 1,000 years ago. It is a real effort to find cultures that haven’t radically altered. Yet how different are we from the people of 1,000 years ago – as much as from those 10,000 years ago? 100,000 years? I tend to believe the veneer of our civility doesn’t run all that deep, and given the barbarism (primarily in Europe) of only 80-110 years back, we can be stripped down to an ugly human form far more easily than it is comfortable to contemplate. If that doesn’t send a small frisson of fear down your neck, you may be the master of your own fears.
I will posit that all social effort (i.e. between two or more people) can be defined as operating under one of only two conditions: cooperation (wherein the parties are voluntarily participating) or coercion (where at least one participant is engaged under some threat of force). The action of fear in coercion is obvious – punishment, up to death, for non-compliance. Fear in cooperation isn’t so obvious, but that doesn’t mean it is never in play. So social effort is built on what motivates all the individuals in the social organization, and while fear may feature in motivation, outside of coercion it isn’t the main factor. Motivation thus becomes a more refined thing where relative comfort, status and many other elements can rise to prominence in why an individual is moved to act.
The next interesting thing to consider about social effort is the group will have a leader or leaders, and followers. Scale it up, scale it down, that fundamental won’t change. Leadership may be temporary or life-long but there will never be no leadership because the followers can’t tolerate that. They can tolerate bad leadership but not a leadership void – it is the social equivalent of nature abhorring a vacuum. You may or may not have other hierarchies, but you will have this division. I tend to suspect (from the little I’ve delved into it) this may be the root cause of failure in anarchist theory – being out of accord with a human fundamental. Anarchists are people that are by natural inclination leaders even if they don’t want to be followed, because even more so they don’t want to be led. The humans that constitute the masses (or the public if you prefer) are precisely those who do want to follow. I won’t restate Hoffer here, but I will take him as reasonably authoritative toward this point. So any theory of governance, or of business or other organization, that doesn’t account for this is fundamentally flawed.
Leadership exercises power, setting the course for the organization (up to and including government) and putting the tasks and performers into place. Power in a cooperative effort usually isn’t terribly threatening to the followers, typically facing the loss of compensation or some status for poor performance (excommunication maybe being the one that threatens the most dire consequences). Naturally, power in a coercive situation is an entirely different beast. Which isn’t to say that power under coercion is the only time that power will be abused. Jim Jones, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite and countless others have proven that sufficiently charismatic persuasion can be as fatal as the commands of a Stalin or a Pharaoh. So given that leadership is unavoidable, so too is some employment of power. The inevitable problem is power attracts the worst kind of people – the very ones that should never have any degree of power. Plato’s notion [conceit?] of a philosopher-king is that a philosophic mind is indifferent to power and thus most suited to using it and less likely to abuse it. Despite some leaders pretensions, this hasn’t even been an unusual condition; it is a theoretical one only.
Alright, so where does this leave us. I would say that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau (and consequently none that trace back to either) have natural man at all right. We are neither under constant assault from all other humans, nor under such casual interaction that no other human was ever a threat. We are social creatures from our earliest development, but we aren’t ants or bees. We value our own life enough to accept conditions of living under duress, e.g. slavery, when we would escape such if given the opportunity. The overwhelming majority of our social behavior is dictated by cooperation not coercion, and yet we can’t abandon coercion entirely. We still operate with a fear sensitivity not appropriate to our social environment – not even of the last 100 years let alone the last 1,000. We are, individually and collectively, too easily frightened; and once in that state, too susceptible to manipulation by leaders – who probably shouldn’t be leading given their desire to have and use power. If that sounds like a mess I would say that is because it is one.
Which brings me back to the point I skipped over earlier of our desire for certainty over uncertainty. That is the Sirens’ call and may be part of what engenders followership in us. When presented with some thing that provides certainty, we no longer really have to think about that thing and let’s be honest, that comes as a relief. Maybe the thing that is hardest of all about science is accepting that you are wrong about a thing that you were sure you knew as a certainty. The discipline of scientific thinking is a challenge even for the most dedicated scientist – because it cuts against our underlying human desire. Kuhn wasn’t wrong about how tightly scientists will cling to a theory, particularly if they have made a significant contribution to it. If the most disciplined thinking available to human beings still suffers from the foibles of human desires/motivations, how broken might be all of our other thinking. How convenient do various certainties become? From certainties, dogmas arise and dissent becomes heresy or treason. What I described in the preceding paragraph was a world saturated in uncertainty, and we don’t like it. What do we do?
The irony being, we’ve known for countless millennia that death is the single most certain thing in this life.
If Mises saw present day SF he’d tell you the only two things certain in life are meth and praxis.
Bravo
Speaking of SF (alluding to both the city and our beloved Glib), I guess I’m going to have to emulate Kamala to avoid a dead time slot!
The nature of the world of human interaction has structure. You might want to look at some of the work of Alfred Schulz, early 20th century phenomenologist and sociologist.
His analysis of ‘project’, in the sense of ‘undertaking’ or ‘group effort’ is one bit I took value from and found relevant to thinking about project management. Agile development efforts, before they were skin suited by the PMI and the abomination SCRUM became, are interesting from a ‘self organizing’ perspective.
The problem with the purely natural view of the world, and fitting humans into it, is we aren’t really predators – though we can do that, but we aren’t a pure natural predatory species. And we aren’t really prey either, particularly in the last couple of hundred generations – a predator might kill us, but doesn’t trim our herd so to speak. To the extent we are predator and prey in that timeframe, it is mostly with respect to other members of our own species.
Aren’t we predators who domesticated our prey?
Certain in its inevitability, but the inability of anyone who has undergone the experience to describe it means that we all face it uniquely. That’s the source of the uncertainty and consequent fear. I’m not afraid of being dead, but I am afraid of experiencing the process of my body and mind switching off for the last time, and knowing it’s for the last time.
I agree. I would even extend that to minarchist libertarianism. The reason this ideology is rejected by basically everyone, to our left as well as our right, is because New Libertarian Man is as much an aberration as New Soviet Man. When your ideology requires that human beings behave in ways that human beings do not actually behave, it’s self-defeating. I had considered writing up something on the subject to submit, but that’s basically the long and short of it stripped of my pretentious wankery and rationalizations, so there you go.
I’m not a big think-person but yeah, my guide is human nature and I scoff at anything that rejects it.
As I often tell Tres V 2.0, “People are assholes”
That’s the spirit.
True, even if incomplete.
So the piece on Kropotkin I linked (twice) this week talked about the romanticization of the Russian peasantry – very Rousseauvian. And Kropotkin’s plan to go out into the people and so engage with them, educate them and raise them into a state of rebellion was a colossal failure – because of course the peasants didn’t respond the way they were supposed to. What’s brutally ironic is how the Bolsheviks would repeat that history – they weren’t but a generation removed from it.
“New Libertarian Man is as much an aberration as New Soviet Man”
The very topic of an inchoate article I’ve never gotten around to writing.
“We still operate with a fear sensitivity not appropriate to our social environment – not even of the last 100 years let alone the last 1,000. We are, individually and collectively, too easily frightened; and once in that state, too susceptible to manipulation by leaders – who probably shouldn’t be leading given their desire to have and use power. ”
This is at the core of a lot of conspiracy theory. I’ve got a vague idea for a piece on ct for the site.
Oh yeah, I’d throw in there the pattern-forming/pattern-matching run wild. The sparser the evidence, the better the pattern can fit around it!
Right. This has come up in more recent history analysis of conspiracy theory: pattern-matching from humanity’s evolution on the African veldt.
Pattern matching is the difference between eating and being eaten.
Yep, at the very deep level, not quite so much in more recent time.
Just finished listening to a Michael Sugrue lecture on Nietzsche and picked up one of the deep problems with Nietzsche. He hypothesized the two forms of moral systems as master and slave, tied to the archtypes of warrior[/aristocrat] and priest. Those are both later social constructions, they aren’t primal (which was seemingly Nietzsche’s view). They are both predicated on coercion with no consideration of cooperation, just which side of coercion you are looking at – are you the one coercing or being coerced. What a huge category mistake!
Nietzsche was really playing out the Churchillian view of German character: the Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet.
Nietzsche’s power dynamics are not dissimilar to Marx’s. If all is, ultimately, merely power and its exercise, then cooperation could be an illusory psychological justification concocted by the lesser power to rationalize its yielding to the greater (false consciousness in the Marxist construction).
Nietzsche’s might be a bit worse than Marx’s actually, since he apparently imputes the desire to dominate other people to everyone. Marx, following Rousseau, sees it as the social structure (class conflict) that perverts the underlying natural condition (of peaceful brotherhood).
It takes a more dismal view of human nature, certainly, but could arguably be said to have been vindicated by the reality of Marx’s disciples exercising something much closer to Nietzsche’s will to power without ever moving beyond it to Marx’s utopian brotherhood of man once the bourgeoisie had been dispossessed of the means of production. Perhaps Nietzsche committed a category error in presuming the universality of master/slave morality at an individual level, but it holds up pretty well at an institutional level, ultimately creating a distinction without a difference. We may as individuals be capable of cooperation (whether altruistic or selfish), but we’re willing to surrender our power to those who aren’t.
Well, we do end up under either coercion or cooperation with social organizations and the absolute break within those between leadership and followers. And leaders must exercise power to direct that social entity. If you have any notion that leadership is a fundamental human error, then your theory is broken right there. There is equally the problem that those attracted to power are the people that shouldn’t be allowed it.
That’s more or less what I was getting at. Nietzsche’s moral paradigm may only be applicable to the small minority of people who are sociopaths or have strong sociopathic tendencies, but it’s likely that small minority will always occupy most or all of the positions of power in social institutions – even voluntary ones – because of its outsized desire for it. If so, then the effect is that even if Nietzsche’s moral paradigm is not universal, it’s going to be the guiding principle of the institutions to which we are all subject, so in that way it’s a useful framework.
What both fail to recognize is that we’re all still animals. And behave as such. The “classic” philosophers try to elevate us beyond primates. But thats what we are.
Ah, but that’s my point – mammals we may be, but that doesn’t mean we really operate like all other members of the animal kingdom. Rousseau thought our pre-social being was cattle-like, and that all our woe is because we socialized. Even Nietzsche thinks the slave morality is herd oriented. I don’t think that gets at our heritage at all.
Not quite dead yet. I got about half way thru while waiting for a train. Scotch has been poured. Now just organizing todo for tomorrow.
New York Post of all people running a hit piece on Crowder claiming he has exposed himself to his staff on multiple occasions (not claimed to females).
This is why we need to destigmatize the penis.
Seriously, I don’t even see how this is some gotcha. Some are using it to argue that he obviously isn’t the Christian he pretends to be because liking raunchy humor (a fact we already knew about him – just watch his show) means you aren’t Christian.
Even the former anonymous staff in the article admit they just chucked it up to joking around between guys. It is Trumpian locker room talk or antics in this case.
If people think he’s an abusive fuck, that’s fine. But coming after a guy, a Youtube entertainer, because he fucks around with his staff? I’m aware he could be su4ed if its true. Christ, there’s probably a DA that would try and charge him with a crime. But who do they think really cares about this nonsense? If you liked him, it really shouldn’t surprise you that he and the people he employs would find this sort of thing funny in a gross out sort of way.
Stick to calling him a gaslighting abuser….
Hello smart people. I am looking for a brief explanation of place value in terms of economics. All google is giving me is mathematics and decimal points/places.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13574809.2018.1472523
My eyes glazed over after a couple paragraphs of “what is place value” and the ensuing gobbledygook.
Welp…
Oh hell, a journal of urban planning? No, just no!
I can’t recall having encountered that exact term in my econ texts, but this might be the concept being described.
Can you supply some more context, because like Pat, that’s not a term that leaps to mind from my education in that dark art those many years ago.
Maybe it’s a fancy way of saying location, location, location?
A pressure bandage 50 miles away has no value to the man with a sucking chest wound.
Word. Just landed back in Dallas. Ready to be home.
Promise I will read this tomorrow, Juris.
Thanks, JI. I will read this in more depth tomorrow. However, since you led off with fear, I would say this: “The only thing stronger than fear is routine.” I read it in a book. It rings true for me. How often do people ignore their trepidation in favor of carrying out their routine?
Is this related to having to sit through Ludacris in order to hear Janet?
It applies.
For Ted and other movie buffs – found out about Vinegar Syndrome from Red Letter Media a little while back with their New York Ninja review. Starting summer last year I started picking up some of the Russian remastered blu-rays from their imprint Deaf Crocodile as well as a variety of other titles – they have some big ones like a 4K Road House and others.
Of course, 80% of the titles listed on their site I wouldn’t touch with a 10ft pole, but the variety is pretty nice and it’s great to see so many weird flicks getting solid hi-def remasters. (just a tier or 2 down from Kino or Cohen Media).
Just wanted to pimp them again since I just pre-ordered “The Saragossa Manuscript” (blind buy – never heard of it) and “The Tale of Tsar Saltan”.
“The beautiful thing [about Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom] is me and my partner wrote… a 50-page treatment, and a lot of it has to deal with me talking to the U.N. about what’s happening with the melting ice caps.” – Jason Momoa
I am breathless with anticipation.
Oh, fuck me. I thought he knew his audience. I don’t want to hear that tripe.
FFS
https://babylonbee.com/news/10-things-men-will-do-instead-of-going-to-therapy
Dammit Bee.
Sip a beer and watch a sunset while commenting on the foliage: “Them junipers are comin’ in niiice and green, eh, Lenny?”
Now questioning if Animal is our crossover writer…
Ha! I only do seven of those things.
Word.
Guilty as charged,
OK, that’s pretty good.
Play a 7-hour game of Axis & Allies with the fellas: Push the pain deep down inside and make the blitz toward Moscow.
Apropos
There’s others in the list that match me… but that A&A one is special.
Youngest scored what I hope doesn’t end up being a stolen vehicle. $5400 for a 2013 Ford Focus in mint condition. Good catch
That sounds about right. Why do you think it may be hot?
I guess cause most are trying to milk out 10k for 10 year old cars…so maybe my view is askew. I would think normally in normal times it was about the right price.
Sorry just watched our VP and one of her speeches…
I just saw my first Joe Biden YouTube ad. The guy looks fragile. If that’s the best they can do to make him look healthy, then his days are numbered.
They are going to lean in on it. Already seen ridiculous comparisons to other older people doing things and its okay!
I don’t know. He has the look of thin skin, literally, and extremely thin hair you see in very old men. He no longer looks older. He looks ooooooold.
“How did you get that bruise?”
“The wind.”
Fear is the mind killer. True enough. The door is open but the stairs are steep! I haven’t ventured outside in over a month. I’m allowed to be afraid when falling down is guaranteed to happen. Just occurred again last night. I’m not a superman like TOK, this stuff has happened really quickly. Legs are heavy.
Less than a year ago I was trucking through ten miles per night. Now I use a walker. Doctor threw me in the bin because my lipids were not great. Did it right in front of my Wife. Whatever. I wish that I would have known beforehand. Probably wouldn’t have changed my behaviour but it might have turned out differently if I knew how quickly it would fuck me up. Now I am crippled and just waiting around to die.
Sorry for the bitch and moan. You guys deserve better.
Unload away Festus
It is ok, you can yell at us.
Sorry Festus.
That sucks.
I wish I had something better to say.
Sorry Festus.
Hi Festus. That sucks. Prayers incoming whether you want them or not.
*loads prayer cannon*
Morning Glibs.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wuSOJhNzuiE
🎶🎶
This day, in history:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Annual_Grammy_Awards
https://youtu.be/MH0xue81_oU
I read that as “Granny Awards”. WTF?
“Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Domenico Modugno, Ross Bagdasarian, and Henry Mancini, each won 2 awards.”
Dang. Some real heavyweights.
suh’ fam
whats goody
Happy May 4th!
https://youtu.be/W3Y6sBl9JaA
The discipline of scientific thinking is a challenge even for the most dedicated scientist
Just ask Fauci.
Better if you asked a real scientist.
Mornin’ all. Off to the gym. Office day today. Yay.
Mornin’
Good morning, Shirley, homey, Sean, and DEG (wherever you are)! Happy Star Wars Day, I guess?
Very late to the party, but I see a flaw in the implied bifurcation into leaders and followers as if it were an absolute. Show me a leader who isn’t, in some other facet of his like, a follower, and vice versa. This is, if not overlooked, at least inadequately touched on, and, I think, changes the direction and outcome of any ‘leader/follower’ analysis.
How do the loners, for lack of a better term (not outright anarchists,) fit into this analysis? Not necessarily the cabin-in-the-woods hermits, but the ones who perhaps participate in the group only grudgingly and stay as much on the periphery as possible, looking askance at the others? Not that anyone here would be like that. 🙄
‘ Anarchists are people that are by natural inclination leaders even if they don’t want to be followed, because even more so they don’t want to be led.’
I’ve experienced this myself in a friend group in, Middle school. Somehow I became the group leader without wanting to lead anyone at all.
The self-organizing nature of groups leads to this. But I think it also exposes a critical ambiguity in the term ‘leader.’
Other facets of life would be other social organizations – sure a leader can be a follower in other contexts. It isn’t a rigid physical distinction for any individual – leaders may even be (and most often are) temporary in any organization. When the leader is permanent you’re probably talking a cult.
The part I’m keying in on is there will be leaders, because most people want to follow. This is where I’ll probably part ways with Nietzsche, or at least look to go beyond him! Because his concern is with how the few transcend their ‘mere’ humanity and become ‘more’ human. I’d say this is where Nietzsche’s appeal to the sociopathic part of the population peaks. I consider one of the fundamental problems of humanity as the will to power, the desire to dominate and that’s what he wanted to unleash.
I agree completely re: will to power & socio- / psycho- pathic domination.
But I don’t buy ‘compartmentalizing’ social organization into pieces/parts for analysis, except perhaps as a first tentative step that will be dismantled in further analysis. Social organizations inter-penetrate, overlap, directly and indirectly influence each other, and so on.
But I suspect we’re much closer to ‘violent agreement’ than serious disagreement.
So long as the desire to dominate is constrained to dominating oneself or one’s inanimate surroundings through rigorous discipline and effort, it is not an issue.
It’s that pesky application of it to the rest of society that becomes the problem.
Yes
Precisely what Nietzsche believed – that everyone wants to dominate everyone else. I think that is as wrong as Rousseau’s notion of pure man being cow like.
“Good and bad, I define these terms,
quite clear, no doubt, somehow.
Ah but I was so much older then…”
Bolsonaro raided in Brazil for…forging Covid vax records?
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/bolsonaro-raided-aide-arrested-amid-fake-covid-19-vaccination-records-investigation
Lula is such a bitch.
As paredes estão se fechando.
“and given the barbarism (primarily in Europe) of only 80-110 years back,”
Certainly should not be confined to Europe, it was everywhere and is still in many places today, barbarous.
Europe just got the press. There’s not a place on the planet where human beings have been present where barbarism didn’t/doesn’t rule.
Indeed.
If we look at things from a wholly libertarian perspective (maybe anarchist?) the world is very much still barbarous, with society-wide theft tolerated and even celebrated, among many other rights violations.
“I will posit that all social effort (i.e. between two or more people) can be defined as operating under one of only two conditions: cooperation (wherein the parties are voluntarily participating) or coercion (where at least one participant is engaged under some threat of force). The action of fear in coercion is obvious – punishment, up to death, for non-compliance. Fear in cooperation isn’t so obvious, but that doesn’t mean it is never in play. So social effort is built on what motivates all the individuals in the social organization, and while fear may feature in motivation, outside of coercion it isn’t the main factor. Motivation thus becomes a more refined thing where relative comfort, status and many other elements can rise to prominence in why an individual is moved to act.”
Interesting spectrum there- and interesting how you put hidden coercion (fear in cooperation) under the banner of cooperation?
I was watching a TV show last night with the wifey, long story short, teen romance, unrequited, the male in the romance ‘Bob’ finds information on the girl’s (Jane) brother- Bob never threatens to use it in a bad way, but to get him to delete it Jane offers sex. To my wife that was rape. Where do you draw the line when fear provokes cooperation?
Is it rape when a hooker offers sex for money?
hidden coercion (fear in cooperation) under the banner of cooperation
At the risk of sounding Randian – no, there is no hidden coercion. If I threaten to excommunicate you from the eternal life, that isn’t coercion even though it certainly plays on fear.
How is it not?? All of Christianity rests on ‘do what I (God) say or else!’. If that’s not coercion, nothing is.
Whew – that’s a big one to unpack. I’ll say I accept Nietzsche’s premise about god.
Well, not to get into it on this thread, but….no. That’s not it at all.
Of course it is. From Abraham forward, Job through Paul, and beyond, under the billions of words of handwaving justificatory perfume poured on the pig, the bottom line is ‘My way or eternal hellfire.’
Pretty sure OT sins weren’t eternal on your soul, because soul is a Greek not Judaic concept. The sins of the father would be visited upon his sons and all.
‘Plato’s notion [conceit?] of a philosopher-king is that a philosophic mind is indifferent to power and thus most suited to using it and less likely to abuse it. ‘
I think it is certainly a conceit. It reads very much as ‘if only I were in charge’, especially given how much power was going to be in the hands of the theoretical philosopher-king.
Mornin’, reprobates!
Good morning, ‘patzie! How are you today?
Asleep.
Pretty much. Got some catching up to do.
Attaboy! 👍🏼 Try not to wake up any more than you have to.
I just want my eyes to focus on my screen text better so I can actually do something.
At times like this, Zoom (the display function, NOT the online meeting application) is your little friend.
Irrelevant preening — I can trace my ancestry with some fairly high degree of certainty back to about 1046.
To what corner(s) of the world, if you don’t mind me asking?
My ancestor accompanied William the Conquerer to Britain. An aunt supposedly has traced his lineage back a ways in France, but I have no details and am a tad skeptical. The Wm. the Conq. association is well attested, though. (I’m assuming he was at least 20 in 1066, thus my posted date.)
Antarctica. Those Shoggoths kept great records.
I can do that with exactly one ancestor. My entire paternal line was deliberately obscured. Family legend has it father’s grandfather was a murderer on the run and father’s mother has one of (((them))) that needed to be erased.
For me history starts with my grandparents that I never knew. Ellis Island was the first vacation spot, circa 1905.
My grandmother was a ‘blood will tell’ wannabe aristocrat; she bullied my grandfather into writing what turned out to be the definitive genealogy of the family in America, with supplemental highlights from the UK. Grandmother lost interest when plenty of horse thieves and scoundrels were found lol. Plenty of 2nd order notables, but sure kicked her ‘purity of the blood’ and ‘blood will tell’ nonsense right in the ass.
My dad is the one in my family who wanted the geneology, though I don’t know his motives.
He turned up a lot of very run of the mill people. Not sure of any scoundrels per se.
All-hands meeting announced on less that 24 hours notice with extended Q&A session after! Oh, this is surely delightful news they couldn’t wait to put in an email.
Ominous.
All-hands meeting = license to goof off for two hours.
Only if it’s a standing meeting. A surprise all-hands is usually bad news.
I had a few of these over the past 2-3 weeks. The big “R” word is coming for me and my team, group, and division.
Lost two VPs and many others over the past weeks. All of the last VOs were supportive of my group. The new ones don’t know jack about what we do. Time for the re-org express.
Hurray!!!!
JI,
Great thought provoking article. Fear motivated actions are a great survival skill, but lead to the worst aspects of us. As we all have seen demonstrated over the past 25 years, the US has replaced the fear of Soviet nuclear destruction with Middle East terrorism and ecological disaster. Now that that phase is over it seems like the war on “——“ will be with us forever.
The fear of the population over each issue gets diluted as time goes on, so eventually something new and scary needs to be found with increasing regularity. The short attention span of the population won’t allow another 50 year long Cold War. They need to keep it fresh to make sure we are permanently afraid.
The issue is that we are still fighting all of the last 80 years of the war on “—-“. There is vested interest in keeping the country spending on drugs, the Middle East, the Cold War, and the eco doom. Surprise , the racket ratchet of government driven fear funding only goes one way.
Saw the first returning robin, Spring is officially here!
Huzzah!
Boing!
Going to any Coronation parties?
I’m waiting for notice that I’m going to be formally named Duke of New York.
You better ride around in a big old caddy with chandeliers on it.
I’d make the investment for formal appearances.
Good morning Glibbernam! I guess someone overslept today?
Alas, it was not me.
Nor I. No day needs two 3:17s
*switches Shirley’s clock to 26-hour setting*
There you go. Don’t mind the drift.
I did, but it was a remote day, so I was still able to connect on time.
Maybe if I post something fun, that will inspire the links to show up.
the only reason I’d have sheep:
https://twitter.com/Yoda4ever/status/1653362448051699712
I know someone whose border collie rounded up a flock of ducks – and herded them into her house.
I dated a girl who used border collies to move goats and cows. Unfortunately we broke up before the pup were weaned so I never got the one she p[romised me.
That’s how you get the links out.
Are links late or am I hallucinating because I haven’t slept in over 24 hours?
Mom’s in surgery today (planned), so once again I am partaking in my guilty pleasure … hospital cafeteria food.
Your hospital cafeteria must have better food than what’s available around here.
The hospital cafeteria very close to where I live is pretty famous in town for its food. People go there to eat instead of IHOP or HyVee because it’s good, it’s plentiful, and it’s cheap. I’m at a different hospital. Food’s good here too.
Then again, it’s hard to mess up breakfast food.
When I was a yute our hospital’s cafeteria was like that, It upset many old people when they shut it down in the 90s.
Sadly the local hospital closed their cafeteria cafeteria when they relocated and opened some modernist cafe in the new building.
Panic! Panic!
CDC is working with the Georgia Department of Health to conduct a rapid epidemiological assessment of confirmed COVID-19 cases that appear to be connected to the 2023 EIS Conference to determine transmission patterns,” CDC spokesperson Kristen Nordlund said in an email.
Nordlund said the CDC reported the cases to state health officials who have authority over the location where the conference occurred. Attendees said many people at the gathering did not mask, socially distance or take other precautions that the CDC had recommended earlier in the pandemic. . . . “This is, unfortunately, the new normal,” Jay Varma, an infectious-disease expert at Weill Cornell Medicine, wrote in a text message. . . . Varma added that individuals and organizations should continue to take coronavirus precautions to protect themselves and the most vulnerable as needed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/05/02/covid-outbreak-cdc-annual-conference/
How about, if you’re not feeling well, don’t go to work or conferences?
Free trip!
Mc Kinsey Consultant – “You know how you can extract a one time benefit of lowering your inventory costs and make earnings and your bonus?”
Ford CEO – “No. That sounds great! How do I do it?”
Mc Kinsey Consultant – “Let me explain about Just In Time Inventory and Supplier Financing”.
Ford Hits Production Snag on F-150 Trucks Due to Missing Door Handles
Auto maker is building trucks with temporary door handles and then parking them until correct ones are available
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ford-hits-production-snag-on-f-150-trucks-due-to-missing-door-handles-5e8dbe06?st=l3kkf18infqq0e1&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
I’m surprised there’s unique handles. Every car seems to have the same pull loop ones now.
Painted wrong color some with locks or some without.
Once again why do they need so many SKUs?
Ford’s unveils new modular door handle!
I’ve seen on the truck forums previously that people are gunshy about trucks from the last shortages that were parked and sitting for months before getting dumped into the dealership pipeline.
One is 8 inches long the other 6 inches long. But since they have a 90 degree hinge the 6 inch model needs a balance shaft for easy opening.
ugh…
How to destroy the resiliency of your production line in two easy steps.
*checks the horoscope from Sunday*
Yep.
Links are up.