I hate them, and I despise the people who work with them. It's raining outside, raining, and still the idiots who get paid to walk around the apartment building next to mine are out there with their damned leafblowers. Yesterday, it wasn't raining, but the ground was certainly soaked, so I got more than an hour of noise from the idiots hired to run leafblowers around this building. Even when it's dry, it takes our leafblower idiots 40 freakin minutes to clear the courtyard, which I could rake in 10 minutes on a bad day.
Their operators are stupid. They do not adapt, they do not focus on goals, they just stick to a mindless process. The maintenance people around here, who are undoubtedly the cheapest the building owners can find, do not think...period. All they know is that they are supposed to blow leaves a certain number of times a week. Every day allotted for this, they show and they blow, and they do it really slowly, so that an entire day's work consists in clearing leaves from around maybe 5 buildings. Conditions do not matter. The presence or absence of leaves does not matter.
As near as I can tell, grounds maintenance is essentially an epiphenomenon of certain scheduled processes being carried out regularly. No one ever stops and looks around and thinks, "lets do x, y, and z today, because that will make the place look nice."
When their compatriots are scheduled to trim plants that grow along the fence between the properties, you get similar stupidity (and no small degree of laziness). They simply hack away with very loud, gas powered machines along a straight line even with the top of the fence. The leaves and branches that fall on the other side of fence, they clear away. After all, the process concerns that side of the fence. All the junk that falls on this side of the fence, they just ignore. There is no goal of the sort, 'prune the bush so that it doesn't harm the fence and do whatever clean up follows thereupon;' there is only the process, 'on day X of each month, run the cutters along the top of the fence and throw away whatever leaves and branches fall at your feet.'
This concerns a large sector of the economy I think I could do without : unskilled men walking around gunning loud, gas powered machined. They aren't benefitting from mind-numbing, low paying work; the buildings are not benefitting from the mindless and sometimes pointless execution of processes; and I am certainly not benefitting from all the damned noise.
His funeral is in preparation.
Here's an idea for such a lover of his people. Send two unnamed thugs to grab his corpse, wrap it in a plain tarp, and dump it somewhere in a ditch in the middle of nowhere. Chances are, any such ditch in a remote area is likely to be the unmarked grave of at least a few of his victims.
That's probably more than he deserves, but I'll throw in $5 for a decent, used tarp.
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There was a very brief reference on the network news this week about how insurgents in Iraq used women and children as shields in their strongholds. That's all the information the news gave. As long as I am already obsessing about our dangerous new world, I thought I'd explain to what they were referring.
On this topic, I have insider information. One of my late father's best friends was a SEAL until recently, a medic more specifically, and he served for the first few years of the "war on terror." More than once I learned of things through this guy which didn't show up on the news for weeks or months. I was introduced to this human shield business back in April, when said ex-SEAL was visiting my father in the hospital.
Insurgents, as you know, hole up in pretty regular houses, houses where normal people live. The insurgents know that when special forces get a lead on such a "stronghold," they blow open the front door with charges and then rush in. This is smart for several reasons, most importantly, it nullifies any booby traps, and if they just tried to shoulder their way in, they'd get shot all to hell.
With this tactic in mind, the insurgents make any women and children in the house sleep on the floor, just inside the front door. This way, when the door gets blown up, the woman and children get horribly injured. So, the insurgents get plenty of warning without receiving any harm themselves, they get more opportunities to portray Amercians as baby killers, and they insure that the medic on the raid team is tied up treating the civilians instead of fighting. The situation, as you can imagine, also has a profound psychological effect on the troops.
As a medic, my dad's friend was always the first one through the door. I'll spare the reader the details of what sort of scenes he stepped into at those moments.
Anyway, that's the ugly truth, as far as I have learned it. People are free to politicize it in any way they wish, I don't really care. I do care about the troops and the civilians though, and I wonder why NBC didn't give any details beyond the statement paraphrased above.
I grew up during the Cold War, the later part. The Soviet Block fell apart early in my undergraduate days. The Cold War was simple : us vs. them, 2 sides, 2 distinct indeologies, submarines dancing around each other at 500 ft., bored Air Force Lieutenants in silos, dumb movies like Red Dawn and The Day After. It was all very simple, as long as you realized no one was stupid enough to initiate nuclear war and were ignorant of how mickey-mouse the electronic defense systems of the 2 sides were. Back then, few realized that our intelligence agencies were miserable failures, no one talked about how useless NATO's strategy for defending Western Europe was (thanks to West Germany) and no one openly acknowledged that Soviet armor wasn't positioned to invade Western Europe anyway. No one had to worry too much about religious fundamentalists, in the West at least, except for Iran and Libya a little, because the precursors to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, as well as Wahabists in Saudi Arabia were following the "my enemy's enemy is my friend" principle.
The Cold War was tremendously stupid, but also very simple, and simple is good sometimes. Today, there is no stalemate and no clear boundaries. Not only is there no viable scenario for achieving victory or peace or security, there also lacks any possibility of even obtaining a clear picture of what all the major threats are or of defining what a victory or post-Cold War peace would be.
I get nostalgic for the simplictly sometimes. I was especially affected by recent news that NORAD has basically been shut down. Good analogy for the new situation. Once upon a time, deep under a huge mountain, there was a control center for North American defense, run by U.S. and Canadian forces. You saw it in Wargames, you see it Stargate, SG-1. Cheyenne mountain. Now they say there is no need for a centralized command center. Our defense is now distributed here and there. There is no center.
For some reason there are still a ridiculous number of nukes, silos, ballistic subs, frigates for ASW, even a few squadrons of P-3's out there, but there is no center. There are no real targets for the missles, there are no enemy subs to track, there's not yet a missle defense screen (probably never will be), and there's no point to the old reactive or first-strike nuclear assault.
I can't say I quite know what the hell the new centerless system does. Maybe closing NORAD was a good idea. Sell it to Starbucks and move on.
Maybe Starbucks is the key to peace anyway. When everywhere in the world, people realize that attacking U.S. assets endangers their frappucino supply line, there will be peace.
In hoc signo vinces
What song gives you the most holiday cheer?
Submitted by Roxy.
Oh, and this one was very festive and topical a few years ago.
From an email message I received 10 years ago.
Subject: Algebraic Sociology (fwd)
After applying some simple algebra to some trite phrases and cliches a
new understanding can be reached of the secret to wealth and success.
Here it goes.
Knowledge is Power
Time is Money and as every engineer knows,
Power is Work over Time.
So, substituting algebraic equations for these time worn bits of
wisdom, we get:
K = P (1)
T = M (2)
P = W/T (3)
Now, do a few simple substitutions:
Put W/T in for P in equation (1), which yields:
K = W/T (4)
Put M in for T into equation (4), which yields:
K = W/M (5).
Now we've got something. Expanding back into English, we get:
Knowledge equals Work over Money.
What this MEANS is that:
1. The More You Know, the More Work You Do, and
2. The More You Know, the Less Money You Make.
Solving for Money, we get:
M = W/K (6)
Money equals Work Over Knowledge.
From equation (6) we see that Money approaches infinity as Knowledge approaches 0, regardless of the Work done.
What THIS MEANS is:
The More you Make, the Less you Know.
Solving for Work, we get
W = M K (7)
Work equals Money times Knowledge
From equation (7) we see that Work approaches 0 as Knowledge approaches 0.
What THIS MEANS is:
The stupid rich do little or no work.
Working out the socioeconomic implications of this breakthrough is left as an exercise for the reader.
What's your method for calculating a tip?
The difficulty of a proper tipping is a function of the cow's weight, the slope of the terrain, and the distance from the barbed wire fence.
