let's take a moment and examine massie's votes on tax cuts https://t.co/VIvSrsj4t7
— John Cole (@Johngcole) February 3, 2023
Massie’s not as illiterate as he pretends to be during primary seasons… nor is he as ‘educated’ about economics as he assumes his MIT degree makes him:
The copper-cased ticker affixed to Massie’s lapel is a debt clock, tracking the country’s debt in real time using a complicated algorithm of the Kentucky Republican’s design. https://t.co/UyB3oLxPsi
— Roll Call (@rollcall) February 3, 2023
One of the problems we’re facing right now is that many of the people who make decisions (CEOs, consultants, and a smattering of others) often lack deep knowledge of anything anyone does, and mostly just make shit up that sounds good enough to fool the right people.
— Courtney Milan 🦖 (@courtneymilan) February 1, 2023
This whole excellent thread seemed relevant:
This in and of itself isn’t necessarily a problem—there’s a time and a place for someone who can give a high level overview that gets the job done.
The problem comes in because these people always see themselves as the smartest person in the room.
They cannot comprehend that their shallow understanding of a situation is not the BEST understanding, that they aren’t the “smartest person in the room,” whatever that means, and most importantly, that “smartest person” does not mean “most skilled person in this scenario.”
Because they’re the smartest (in their view), and because they “get it” (in their view), everyone else in the room with real skills they have spent decades honing must be worse than them, and therefore, they are full of shit, and are *also* making things up on the fly.
This has a lot of consequences.
1. They don’t understand that their workers have knowledge, which means they see them as easily replaceable.
Their workers are not easily replaceable.
2. They don’t understand that their workers have limits, because they think that their workers are just widgets that cost money per hour, and with the right measures you can make them work arbitrarily hard for an arbitrary amount of time.
3. Funding flows in *abundance* to people who know how to schmooze with these folk, meaning that poorly thought out ventures that have a catchy tagline get millions and actual, thoughtful things with a real chance of making the world a better place languish…
4. They make real policy recommendations based on models that sound good and are easily explained but have no relationship to reality, and those recommendations are adopted by policy makers, to all of our vast detriments…
They are going to come up with a catchy slogan that will convince someone to roll out a marketing campaign that will make people think it’s going to be okay, while meanwhile, the world will continue functioning in the same way it has always functioned.
I googled nimrod, because I’ve learned to be cautious: Today, it’s generally understood to mean ‘a foolish person, an idiot’. But when I was growing up, it (still) meant a hunter, if one not necessarily as skilled as his self-perception, an inflection I assumed at the time was influenced by Bugs Bunny insulting Elmer Fudd. Folk-historically, though, Nimrod is supposed to have been the ‘mighty king’ who ordered the construction of the Tower of Babel, with dire results for the whole world…
WaterGirl
I saw this title in the dashboard and I have been looking forward to seeing what this is about!
Baud
The debt clock thing is like when Republicans wave the flag to hide the fact that Putin owns them.
Baud
Given that Looney Toons isn’t a thing anymore, how do kids today get exposed to classical music?
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: (Checks with a non-boomer.)
Tiktok.
NotMax
@Baud
In bach alleys?
Baud
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: So it’s like every thing else in the world.
@NotMax: You will be illegal when I’m president.
narya
When I was working, I did a ton of grantwriting–federally or state-funded stuff, not fundraising–and the absolute best way to tell a good story was to ask the people who did the work about that work–and then LISTEN to them. I learned so damn much–and it enabled me to see connections, cross-fertilization of ideas, etc., that made proposals better and made programs easier to start if they were funded. I can tell the story, but someone else knows what the plot is, who the characters are, etc. Was I “smarter” than the people in the room? About some things, sure, but NOT about the work. My second book (if I had gotten a job as a professor) was going to be about how the idea of “management” (and MBAs) ruined the world.
Suzanne
@Baud: In my day, it was from BEEF: IT’S WHAT’S FOR DINNER and CHEEEEEEEEEEESE TO THE RESCUE commercials.
trollhattan
Nimrod.
Always wondered how the pilots answered their kids when they asked “What kind of aeroplane did you fly, father?” expecting Spitfire or something.
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
I realize people are dismissing the balloon incident as a bunch of hot air, but this will force Biden to establish a Balloon Force branch of the military.
We can not let a balloon-gap endanger our birthday an New Year’s Eve parties.
NotMax
@Suzanne
Carlton beer.
kalakal
@narya: I would buy that book
Narya
@kalakal: I still think about it a lot. Now that I’m retired I suppose I could write it, but I already have the experience of writing a manuscript almost no one has read….
Suzanne
@NotMax: So there is a local gourmet grocery chain in Phoenix that uses “Take Five” in all their commercials. So now, every time I her that song, I think it’s time to get flowers and a holiday ham.
James E Powell
I agree with Courtney Milan except for the “right now” part at the beginning. The disconnect between C suites & front lines has been like this for a long time.
It defines my current employment – public education – in every way. It was bad when I started in 2005 and it’s gotten worse every year.
NotMax
@Suzanne
At least it’s not for a pub named Brewbeck’s.
:)
James E Powell
@narya:
A book? How quaint. You should be thinking tiktok, tweet thread, or youtube video.
ian
@David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch: I don’t have a subscription for the WSJ, but apparently they beat you to the punch
Link
mali muso
Courtney Milan is a good follow on Twitter and an excellent romance author to boot. She actually has a background in law, clerked for Sandra Day O’Connor (iirc) prior to her writing career. As for the thread, I think we’ve probably all seen this in our professional worlds; I know I have observed it in higher ed.
kalakal
@NotMax: Ouch!
That is an amazing advert
Baud
Hey AL, I don’t know if this will affect your ability to post tweets.
HumboldtBlue
Consideringn the state of Twitter and the fact that I no longer see the roster of military historiuans I follow, here’s an excellent thread on the actors in the Guns of Navarone.
Narya
@James E Powell: my dissertation was in part about teachers and administrators fighting about whether teachers were “workers” or “professionals” (I.e. whether they could/should unionize).
Gin & Tonic
@Suzanne: Did you know that all royalties from that tune go to the Red Cross? Paul Desmond died with no heirs, and that was one of the terms of his will.
HumboldtBlue
@Baud:
I’ve asked that question numerous times on r/classicalmusic and the people that know, know, and the ones who don’t always display their ignorance of just how impactful those cartoon scores were.
@Gin & Tonic:
Wow, I did not know that.
Feathers
I love the fact that Hayes Code Hollywood was strictly limited in what they could use as insults, especially in “family” entertainment. So the Warners cartoon unit had Bugs Bunny calling Elmer a “nimrod.” As Anne said above, it means hunter, taken from the name of an Old Testament hunter. Look censors, nothing to see here! But Bugs said it like it was an insult and now that’s the usual meaning of the word.
zhena gogolia
@HumboldtBlue: Cool!
I don’t think Peck did anything, though.
kalakal
@HumboldtBlue: That’s an excellent thread thanks.
Urza
I wholeheartedly agree with the thread on poor decision making by those at the top. But unless someone has an idea of how to fix it, I can’t imagine anyone at the top of anything having more than the vaguest idea what the lower echelons are doing (other than the bits they may have done themself on the way up, and generally focus to much on those once they reach the top). No one has time to learn everything and relies on the level below them to keep them informed, but that gets abstracted at each level until its generally meaningless.
NotMax
@Feathers
Hays code.
(just in case anyone needs to look it up.)
zhena gogolia
@NotMax: Not because of pedantry, not at all.
hells littlest angel
I believe Bugs Bunny — or rather his 1940s audience — is entirely responsible for the change in meaning of nimrod. Bugs was using the word sarcastically, but the audience just accepted it as they they did other Bugsisms such as “maroon” or “ta-ra-ra-goon-dee-ay.”
Feathers
@Baud: My best ever Looney Tunes experience was at an AFI film preservation festival. They were showing cartoons (Technicolor prints on an actual silver screen!) before the films. We lucked out and got What’s Opera Doc. There must have been some Wagner buffs in the audience, because there were two distinct sets of laughter, one for the Bugs Bunny jokes, and another for the opera buff in-jokes.
Yes, the term “silver screen” comes from the fact that fancy movie theaters used to have screens with silver embedded in the coating to make it extra reflective. Coolidge Corner Theater outside Boston is one that still has it’s silver screen. Or did fairly recently. Can’t imagine they got rid of it.
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
Not in this case. Simply for clarification.
Autocorrect is a harsh mistress.
hells littlest angel
@Baud: The pianist Lang Lang said he was inspired to play when as a child he saw “Rhapsody Rabbit.” He then proceeded to play the hands-down worst rendition of Hungarian Rhapsody #6 I have ever heard.
HumboldtBlue
@Feathers:
The British operated a submarine hunter airplane, the Nimrod, served in the Royal Navy for a couple of decades. Bugs did make it an insult, however. Speaking of Bugs, BG and I had a Twitter discussion about how Bugs was the first cartoon drag queen we were introduced to as kids and who looked fabulous doing it. Bugs was regularly dressed in drag, as were dozens of male actors from Monty Python to Jack Lemmon to Robin Williams, Tony Curtis, the list is endless, and we were entertained as kids not molested.
The molesting was left to the churches.
@zhena gogolia: @kalakal:
I like learning new stuff (is it possible to learn old stuff?), and the roster of actors who served in the war is very long.
He was exempt, a back injury he suffered while taking dancing and acting lessons with Martha Graham. He and I do share one thing, however, a deep interest in the Civil War.
NotMax
@HumboldtBlue
See: Memento.
;)
zhena gogolia
@Feathers: I teach that cartoon in one of my courses. The students love it.
indycat32
I interrupt this conversation to say INDIANA beat PURDUE!!!
zhena gogolia
@HumboldtBlue: There used to be a website dedicated to Bugs in drag. He does it in What’s Opera, Doc? very effectively.
SpaceUnit
Nimrod was once a brand of travel camper that you could tow behind your vehicle. My family rented one when I was a kid for a vacation road trip. You had to crank the thing up once you got to your campground.
I can vividly remember watching from the car as my dad was trying in vain to crank it up and swearing his head off in the middle of a torrential downpour. It was somewhere in the midwest.
The thing was a piece of shit.
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
Then there’s Dietrich in male drag.
kalakal
@HumboldtBlue:
The equivalent thread for The Longest Day would be immense. One interesting link in that would be Richard Todd who was a paratroop captain at Pegasus Bridge where he worked with Major John Howard who was in command of the operation. In the film he played Howard
Kent
Probably on TikTok
dm
@Feathers: The Brattle Theater in Cambridge does a Bugs Bunny film festival every “school vacation week” which usually happens in February.
@Narya: surely that book idea has been done? Probably by someone associated with The American Prospect? It seems to me it’s an idea that I’ve had for quite some time (and never bring up to my MBA brother).
Oh, Massie. Sigh. It’s a real shame he got into politics. He’s got a solid electrical engineering and mechanical engineering background, and could be doing good in the world with it instead of what he’s doing in Congress.
It’s hard to imagine him anything but a Russian asset. He’s always one of the “five Republicans in the House” voting for something vile or against something good, especially when it comes to things like Ukraine. He’s also the representative famous for his family’s gun-laden Christmas Card.
Rich Gardner
Heh! In terms of being the “Smartest person in the room,” I worked internal security at a department store. I had been there about four years when a group of us, including a woman executive who had been there about six months, made a suggestion. It was a good suggestion, but I pointed out that we tried that years earlier and it didn’t work. She did a double-take. She was flabbergasted that a mere non-executive could make a sensible contribution to the conversation!
trollhattan
At this juncture I think the way to respond is to send balloons over Gyna, although I’m not sure from where you would launch them, some stan I guess. The balloons must be shaped like Winnie the Pooh.
Frankensteinbeck
@zhena gogolia:
Chuck Jones said he wasn’t thinking about Bugs as trans or nonbinary, but when people started bringing it up, he thinks it’s great and if queer people want to see Bugs that way, more power to them.
HumboldtBlue
@kalakal:
Yes! There are a dozen more, and always remember that Scottie — James Doohan — from Star Trek, landed on the beaches on D Day as well.
And I can’t be the only one who hates John Wayne in that movie.
Jay
@Urza:
the Tech Company I worked for at one time, “made” everybody from Engineers up to the Office Suites, spend 6 months in various positions on the floor. It worked well for almost a decade, then we got bought by a Fortune 100, and they changed the internal work track, and suddenly, more and more idiot decisions came down the food chain. It didn’t help that the Fortune 100 kept bringing in “Tech Genius’s” who had killed Ontario’s innovative small tech industry.
zhena gogolia
@Frankensteinbeck: Bugs observes no strictures imposed from without.
zhena gogolia
@HumboldtBlue: the ONLY movie in which I can stand John Wayne is They Were Expendable. I am not sure why. I always hate him otherwise.
Gin & Tonic
@HumboldtBlue: Desmond was known for his many liaisons with women, but none of them were long-term.
NotMax
@HumboldtBlue
And left a finger there.
Tom Levenson
@Feathers: A point of pride: my grandfather, Max, known to his family as Puppy, along with a great uncle and one unrelated partner, were the three guys who founded the Coolidge Corner Theater, which is about six blocks from where I now live.
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
For me it would be Stagecoach.
SpaceUnit
@trollhattan:
I would have it shaped like a giant saucer and made of silver Mylar. Folks might think twice about shooting at it.
Suzanne
@HumboldtBlue:
Hey now. Don’t forget the Boy Scouts.
RSA
I’m on the other side right now, after a mid- to late-career shift from research in academia and government to program management in government. That is, instead of writing (small) proposals and doing the research, I’m reading others’ proposals and making judgments about what should be funded.
When I attend meetings with principal investigators, it’s sometimes obvious (to me at least) that I’m the exact opposite of the smartest guy in the room. It’s a very rewarding job, still. Among other things, I’m in the room with really smart people!
Spanky
I think we should pepper Gyna with a couple thousand of these balloons.
SpaceUnit
@Spanky:
That would be terrorism.
Spanky
@RSA: My best, most fun jobs were when I was the least smart one there. There’s a lot to be said for shutting up and listening.
Wasn’t much of a blow to my ego since the PIs on one won the Nobel Prize in physics. The others weren’t too shabby, either.
zhena gogolia
@NotMax: I’ve never seen that one.
Oh, I guess I was impressed by him in The Searchers.
Tom Levenson
@RSA: One of the hardest lessons in teaching MIT kids about science writing is that it’s ok not be the smartest person in the room-in fact that’s the point. You want to be talking to brilliant people, and you don’t want to miss getting the story by pretending (or being unable to admit that you don’t) to know more than you do.
If/when you get over that hurdle, it’s a great job: you get to call amazing folks up and (most of the time) they’re happy to talk to you about what they do.
Eyeroller
@hells littlest angel: Elmer was, of course, a not-so-mighty hunter, so the sarcasm was appropriate. But it’s a pretty obscure Biblical reference.
HumboldtBlue
BG gonna be mad he missed this thread, this is right (write?) up his alley
Anne Laurie
As far as I can tell (since I’m still not signed up for twitter), what it means — if the extremely negative blowback doesn’t cause Musk to announce it was ‘just a joke’ — is that people who’ve been posting ‘automated’ tweets will have to pay to do so. Not a deterrent for the spambots the change is supposed aimed at, but it will mean that a lot of small artists, and the sort of people who set up accounts with ‘capybara every hour’ or ‘weird historical trivia’ give up posting. Which, if Musk is *intentionally trying to destroy Twitter — good job, Apartheid Princeling!
kalakal
@HumboldtBlue: You’re not the only one who hates John Wayne in that movie.
In British politics by the time you reached the 70s nearly all the gung ho ones (Thatcher, Hesseltine) had grown up in WW2, while the more dovish (Heath, Callaghan) fought in it. Dennis Healey had a pretty distinguished military career, including being beach master at Anzio
HumboldtBlue
@NotMax:
And Julie Andrews, and Meryl Streep. And whoever played Peter Pan, what’s-her-name.
WaterGirl
@ian: I snorted when I saw the title. Literally.
kalakal
@zhena gogolia: They’re both really good films
CarolPW
@HumboldtBlue:
Mary Martin.
Amir Khalid
@HumboldtBlue:
Mary Martin, who was also Larry Hagman’s mother.
Ixnay
@Baud: everything I know about opera I learned from a cross dressing rabbit.
Mike in NC
Read that the latest ‘thing’ for Republicans in Congress is to wear an AR-15 lapel pin, just as the Founding Fathers wanted.
SiubhanDuinne
@AL top:
”Let Nimrod, the mighty hunter,
Tie a leopard to the altar
And consecrate his spear to the Lord.”
— Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno
(Set by Benjamin Britten as Rejoice in the Lamb. The “Nimrod” section begins at 1:25.)
HumboldtBlue
@kalakal:
That makes perfect sense to me. My parents grew up in the war, dad turned 18 just in time for Korea and being the smart man he is, joined the Coast Guard.
Bill Arnold
Related to Courtney Milan’s thread about corporate/leadership incompetence,
When those rising in rank in a hierarchical organization become aware that they are a part of an organizational hive mind, they sometimes freak out.
Summary, at Harvard Business Review:
Can You Know Too Much About Your Organization? (Ruthanne Huising, December 04, 2019)
Paper
Paywalled. (Accessible through the usual means.)
Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates (Ruthanne Huising, 26 Jun 2019)
kalakal
@HumboldtBlue: Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, and Terence Stamp in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Years since I’ve seen it but I remember enjoying it
HinTN
@Jay:
Juran’s concept of Self Control was premised on the fact that those closest to the process know the most about it. I tell early career engineers that they’d better see what the craft think about something before plunging ahead.
Josie
@HumboldtBlue: I don’t know about that movie, but I dislike John Wayne in general. Will that do?
James E Powell
@zhena gogolia:
My favorite John Wayne films are, in ascending order, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Sons of Katie Elder, The Searchers, The Cowboys, and The Shootist.
Another Scott
@Bill Arnold: My step mom was a corporate VP in IT. She said she heard from some consultant that the best thing to do when joining a new organization is to fire all the IT people who are essential. Because they’re too dangerous to the company.
She didn’t agree with it. And even if one can see the logic (it’s dangerous to have corporate knowledge locked up in a single person rather than documented in a process in case that person goes berserk or gets hit by a bus or whatever), the solution is to change the process and not get rid of the people.
So, yeah, it’s possible to “know too much”, but that merely indicates that the corporate governance is broken. And probably indicates there are other problems lurking.
Cheers,
Scott.
HumboldtBlue
@Josie:
I dislike him in general as well, so that’ll do.
hueyplong
I generally take a pass on all John Wayne movies. You can see Monument Valley in Once Upon A Time In The West.
trollhattan
@James E Powell: I saw “The Quiet Man” years and years after having seen all his oaters, so it was a nice break from horses and six-shooters.
James E Powell
An extended discussion in some form of Art vs Artist or movies vs the lives of the directors & actors who made them would be a worthy Medium Cool topic.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: I had a boss once who said if they had an indispensable employee, they would fire them. Seems crazy to me.
HumboldtBlue
And now for something completely different.
Buster the cat just made me laugh out loud.
James E Powell
@Narya:
Anyone who doubts that “professionals” can also be “workers” in every sense need only check out the lives of associate attorneys.
James E Powell
@HumboldtBlue:
Kim Basinger in 9-1/2 Weeks.
SiubhanDuinne
@Josie:
@HumboldtBlue:
@hueyplong:
For non-filmic reasons, I have a great affection for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but otherwise have no use at all for John Wayne. However, I do love Nathan Lane trying to walk like JW in that one scene in The Birdcage. Physical comedy at its best.
Jay
@HinTN:
yeah, early on, the Engineer’s would run it by the line guys and girls, before taking the proposed changes further,…….
later, it was top down with the lines sometimes being shut down for weeks, because what the C Suite and the Engineers had changed by edict, was unworkable.
I ran the ECIB, (Engineering Change Board) for over a decade, and it went from being mostly a piece of cake, to being a nightmare. It used to be just making sure that somebody had done the “task” they were assigned to complete to faccilitate the change, to bitter fights with VP’s.
gwangung
@Anne Laurie: Well, as the top postings point out, Apartheid Clyde can’t conceive of anyone else other than himself (a rich, white dude) bringing anything of value to Twitter.
HumboldtBlue
@trollhattan:
I remember watching that movie at the firehouse with a colleague who really enjoyed it. I recall my jaw hitting the floor when Wayne and the Irish lug began dragging the gorgeous Maureen O’Hara through the fields like she was a bag of oats to be bargained and haggled over.
Which, I guess in the custom of the day, she was. That scene floored me with its misogyny.
zhena gogolia
@HumboldtBlue: yeah can’t stand it
mvr
You wrote “the representative , , ,” You mean there is only one of those?
Gin & Tonic
@WaterGirl: I had a boss who repeatedly said nobody is irreplaceable. Then he died and proved his point.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
They Were Expendable is a great movie. I think John Wayne is more than usually palatable in it because he was working for (I think) his favorite—or at least most trusted—director, John Ford, and his performance fits in with the film’s elegiac undertone of “We’re [temporarily] losing the war!”
I have to admit I have a soft spot for Wayne in The Quiet Man, but at this point the sexism is taken so literally that I could be exiled from polite society. I think that even at the time the sexism was a good-natured(?) poke at semi-imaginary Irish folkways. But I’m willing to be proven wrong.
kalakal
@WaterGirl:
De Gaulle was fond of that argument when carrying out political reshuffles
“The graveyards are full of indispensable men”
kalakal
@zhena gogolia: Wayne’s last movie The Shootist is pretty good. In some ways it bookends the Westerns that started his career. He plays an ageing gunfighter dying of cancer, and of course he himself was dying of cancer
HumboldtBlue
@Steeplejack:
It’s actually a pretty good movie and has more than one memorable scene, and Michaeleen steals every scene he appears in.
But that scene stuck with me, and the more I thought on it, the more distasteful I found it.
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack: I just can’t get past it. Bruce dern loved him though.
dm
@mvr: I think he may have started the trend
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: Your phrasing made me laugh.
RSA
Yes! My job, roughly speaking, is to say, “Here’s a general kind of problem we would like to solve,” or “Here’s a new area that seems important but under-studied,” or the like. And then I’ll listen to what very smart people have to say. They may start to think in new directions, formalize problems in mathematical or computational terms, figure out how to solve the problems (if they’re even solvable!) … In the best case they may establish the foundations for a new and important area of research. I’ll have very little if anything to say about the how, but I’ll be happy contributing toward the initial what and why.
Again, yes! It’s for different reasons than people talking to science writers, but it is pretty exciting to find out how things work.
Feathers
@NotMax: Gah. I knew that, but still autotyped Hayes. Thanks.
Steeplejack
Other palatable John Wayne movies: Sands of Iwo Jima (1950), Trouble Along the Way (1953), North to Alaska (1960).
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I would also add this to Milan’s list;
5. Stock Analyst – who demand corporations meet arbitrary metrics these Analysts make up during their daily cocaine bing.
The place I working at righting now is looking at going private because the BOD got fed up with this – we are a DOD contractor and the Masters of the Universe are apparently demanding we offshore to China, never mind what the US government says on the contracts.
Steeplejack
@HumboldtBlue:
Which scene?
@zhena gogolia:
“It”? The sexism?
brendancalling
“They make real policy recommendations based on models that sound good and are easily explained but have no relationship to reality, and those recommendations are adopted by policy makers, to all of our vast detriments…
They are going to come up with a catchy slogan that will convince someone to roll out a marketing campaign that will make people think it’s going to be okay, while meanwhile, the world will continue functioning in the same way it has always functioned.”
I teach high school. This is my life now. Even before I was teaching, I worked in educational nonprofits, and this bullshit is endemic. Every year or so it’s some poorly-thought out blanket policy that is poorly-implemented and gets no results. Lather rinse repeat. “Zero tolerance.” “Grit.” “Resilience.” This year it’s “trauma-informed.”
And every year my school district spends big bucks for consultants and professional development that has no relation to reality at all.
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack: Yeah, but probably mainly the scene Humboldt Blue referenced.
HumboldtBlue
@Steeplejack:
That one.
@kalakal:
You wanted the Longest Day, you get the Longest Day.
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
I see which scene you mean. Reading comments somewhat out of order.
David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@SpaceUnit: Klaatu barada nikto
David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Best John Wayne movies would have to be “The Alamo” and “Green Berets”. So much realism and truth.
Kay
@brendancalling:
What do you think of “trauma- informed”? It’s big in the juveline justice system too. I read “The Body Keeps the Score” – I’m not finished with it- in an effort to understand it but I don’t know what I think yet. A lot of them are definitely traumatized.
Steeplejack
@David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
😹
Another Scott
ICYMI, a good thread discussing the +68 point swing red in SW Virginia between 2008 and 2020: BlueVirginia.US
Every generalization is false, but it’s worth looking at changes and trying to think clear-headedly about what they mean. And how to win given changing circumstances. No, it doesn’t mean trying to win the votes of monsters. But it means having to come up with ways to counter the message and the tactics of the monsters.
Cheers,
Scott.
Origuy
I joined Tandem Computers in 1990 when they had a six-week sabbatical every four years. Basically a long vacation that you had to take all at once. It meant that people had to plan for you to be gone long enough that someone else had to cover for you. I only know of one time when someone was called back from a sabbatical–for a problem where a customer system would not stay up. They weren’t the only Silicon Valley company that did that. The program ended when we got bought out by Compaq.
James E Powell
@Another Scott:
But the monsters are the voters.
LiminalOwl
@Eyeroller: Not all that obscure, to those of us who read Laura Ingalls Wilder repeatedly in childhood.
Ruckus
@narya:
Management, MustBeAssholes, and wealthy, big stock holders always think they are the smartest in the room, no matter the room, no matter the reason they are there. All humans need to actually think and all people in charge of making things work better have to understand that the goal is to make the product, supply, production, service need to be better.
But most of them don’t.
And that is because most businesses are not about the product or service, they are about making money. And of course ALL businesses have to make money, or at some point they won’t be a business. But it’s the making the profit level the most important, the bank account the largest, the salaries biggest that most of the upper levels of most every business work towards. It’s humanity, the better/larger any segment of business makes the profit, the more secure their job is and very likely the larger their paycheck is. Most large businesses look at every employee as a profit possibility and if they don’t meet expectations – remove and/or replace them. Some small businesses do the same.
Now this may be different in other parts of the world, for better or worse. But the US is based upon profit. Normally the most profit possible. As a person who has owned 2 businesses for over 1/3 of my lifetime, I’ve seen this up close and personal. If done reasonably a profit can be made without screwing over everyone and everything but your bank account. But the head person has to be about the product or service first and maximum profit about fiftieth or higher. Our economic system is normally, for most companies, especially bigger ones, about raising profit above all else.
LiminalOwl
@Kay: IMO (as a psychotherapist) trauma-informed care is real, and important—and the term has indeed become a buzzword to the point where it is often meaningless. The Body Keeps the Score is a good foundational book, though problematic for many in the trauma-treatment community (because of Bessel van der Kolk’s own reported issues, among other things). There is a wealth of more current material now; feel free to email me if you’d like suggestions.
AnonPhenom
AnonPhenom
AnonPhenom
Brit in Chicago
@AnonPhenom: Or, as William Butler Yeats put it:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
Trust the poets to get there first.
jashead
I worked in the film industry as a cameraman before moving to Directing. An early lesson was that the people who came to Direct, many of whom had never done it, assumed the title of Director meant you knew everything already and every decision you made would be the best available. This fallacy resulted in them ignoring the one hundred people behind them with a combined experience of one thousand years or more. Needless to say, the results were often disappointing if not another cinematic catastrophe. There was also a lot of unnecessary yelling.
Aj
@narya: you must worked in a special place where the people that kept the wheels turning were actually consulted and heard..
I didn’t get to experience it. After too many years of pendulum swinging management(the try this and xyrs later try that ) and 3 word slogans and clueless management who are incapable of retaining younger workers or even older ones I retired after almost 3 yr working from home( subsidizing my employer by doing so and unless you are self employed you can’t get any tax benefit for the office in your home). I no longer have to face North and Hope(science of hope bs). I never want to hear PR words like innovation again. Got tired of management checking off their boxes to look good while waisting our time with their agenda that didn’t help get the job done and kept us from any of our goals.
All of the article in the box quote is absolutely true. The cool kids attitude is just the icing on a rotten cake.
SteverinoCT
@Baud: waaay late, and I haven’t read the comments, but current cartoons do sprinkle some classical in there. “Bluie”, from Australia, goes out of its way to have classical in the bg. I have done a YouTube search for “classical music in bluie”, and there are compilation videos. In one episode, the dad says, “here is ‘Rondo Alla Turca’,” and begins singing the tune while playing it on Bluie’s belly. And the tune continues from there as the episode’s theme.
I bought a CD of Strauss waltzes to play while working, and I can’t help but remember the particular Bugs cartoon it was in.
Paul in KY
I think building a tower to ‘heaven’ with only mudbrick technology might be seen as foolish.