Marking my territory with digital feces.
When I see crap like this, I keep thinking of the old adage:
Be nice to your kids. Someday they’ll choose which nursing home you get to die in.
Within only a decade or two, those "loiterers" will be lawyers, doctors, senators, CEO’s, and congressmembers. And I’m sure those "mosquito" waves will still be echoing in their ears when it comes time for them to vote on, say, whether to continue to fund Social Security for you short-sighted morons.
One of the more annoying tasks I have to deal with, is managing people’s expectations.
I always make a point of warning people, ahead of time, that I suck.
I have learned to do this through a lifetime of hard experience. I also have learned to play it a lot cooler when starting any new thing.
The problem is that I tend to enjoy learning new things and jumping into totally new fields. I can hide my enthusiasm for a little while but not too long. After a while it comes through. And then, despite all my warnings, people decide that I’m much better than I am. They mistake enthusiasm for comptence, or even aptitude, when I have neither. As soon as I start to get a clue what I’m doing, the inevitable disaster is set to follow. Because then everyone’s expectations start to rise. Even though I told them I couldn’t meet them.
And then, finally, every time, the awful moment eventually comes when they realize, hey, this guy sucks. He has no idea what he’s doing. He shouldn’t be doing this. He’s totally wrong for this. What were we thinking?
It annoys me every time this happens, because, I warned them. I suck. I’m not meant for this. I can’t really do this; I’m just faking it because I happen to be good at faking it. And I told everyone I was faking it. But every time they are surprised. Stop being surprised! And don’t dare be disappointed either. I told you I suck.
The dollar is dead. The American Century is so over.
I wanted to order a t-shirt from a great European nu-jazz band that I like a lot. Their t-shirts are silk-screened in Sweden by some friends of the band.
They are 20 Euros each. Apparently that’s pretty cheap/normal for a T-shirt there.
I can get t-shirts silk-screened here for US$15. So I figure a t-shirt is not a hugely expensive thing to make.
Then I looked it up… and 20 Euros would be like US$40!! Forty bucks for a fucking t-shirt??! Not including shipping, of course. No way.
That’s nuts. I emailed the band, and they kind of shrugged, apparently 20 Euros is not a lot of money over there.
I can imagine now what it must have been like to have lived in the Soviet Union just before it collapsed, when a pair of French or American designer bluejeans cost the equivalent of six months’ wages in Roubles.
The USA is in a steep decline, and I’d say a collapse is imminent.
Forty dollars for a t-shirt! I’ll just make my own American (Chinese, really) T-shirts instead, thank you.
This one is beautiful. Here is an ultra-right-wing libertarian “stink tank”, defending an inefficient and incompetent government agency wasting taxpayer dollars.
James Jay Carafano, a domestic security expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said TSA critics might have unrealistic expectations. “The system is never going to be perfect, it’s never going to stop everything,” he said.
Of course. It’s perfectly OK for the gummint to waste your tax dollars, as long as it’s Bush and the Repugs doing the wasting.
These clowns have gone beyond being parodies of themselves, to a whole new level of meta-satire.
In this world, there are leaders, there are followers, and there is roadkill.
At this stage in my life, I’ve discovered I’m definitely not a leader– though I tried for a long time. And I’ve never been, nor will I ever be, much of a follower.
The remainder explains my lot in life, nearly all of my history, and presents a future with a level of inevitability that makes me feel surprisingly comfortable and content.
Back in the 90’s, I was making ridiculous money in Silicon Valley, and hanging out with lots of fellow relatively-young people who were doing the same, for the first time in our lives (and, for some of us, the last time).
My bachelor party occurred just as this wealth was peaking (or, for me, had just peaked). We went out. We acted like complete fuckwits. Rather than do the tit-bar thing (I’d had enough of tit bars by then), we did the skatepunk-kid thing instead. We went to an afternoon punk concert. We went out for food and drinks afterwards. We were rude to waitstaff, got into a food fight at a yuppie bar (!), and made everything right just by waving money around. We stole posters (”souvenirs!”) from a BART train and got hassled by BART cops. It was pretty ridiculous. We were acting like 9th graders with six-figure incomes. We were quick to justify it: “We work hard, we’re at the forefront of the greatest creation of wealth in the history of the world, and we’re just blowing off steam!”
At random intervals during this event, my brother kept shaking his head with embarassment, and muttering “rich assholes”. Which, he perceived (probably correctly), is what everyone in the path of our group must have thought of us.
On the way home, we hit a quiet, mellow local dive bar filled mostly with working-class Mexican guys playing pool. We were loud and obnoxious. One of my friends bought a round for the house– loudly. My brother looked at me, “See? Drinks for aaaallll my friends! Rich assholes.” On the way home (in a low-income Hispanic neighborhood), one of the six-figure-income revelers dove headfirst into the neighbors’ carefully manicured shrubs, and another one grabbed a neighbor’s plastic garbage-can lid and sledded down the middle of the street in it.
“Rich assholes” is what I kept muttering to myself while reading this (read the whole page to get the full humiliating flavor of it):
The next day I e-mail Brickwork, one of the companies Friedman mentions in his book. Brickwork– based in Bangalore, India– offers “remote executive assistants,” mostly to financial firms and health-care companies that want data processed. I explain that I’d like to hire someone to help with Esquire-related tasks: doing research, formatting memos, like that. The company’s CEO, Vivek Kulkarni, responds, “It would be a great pleasure to be talking to a person of your stature.” Already I’m liking this. I’ve never had stature before. In America, I barely command respect from a Bennigan’s maitre d’, so it’s nice to know that in India I have stature.
No, you don’t have “stature”. Someone is sticking their tongue up your ass. And you’re not even embarassed about it. You should be. You are a rich asshole. No wonder the Bennigan’s waiter doesn’t respect you.
And, you’re taking advice from Thomas Friedman? What a douche bag.
I live in the district of Congressman Tom Lantos. He’s pretty progressive on most domestic issues, but tends to be an awful Bush-like warmonger on foreign affairs issues.
I was Googling around trying to find his email address, to urge him to sponsor HR676, the Universal Health Care bill, and came across this nightmare instead:
Lantos, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, said all of Israel’s accomplishments “will not matter” if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
Wha??! Will not matter? Um, Tom, I hate to tell you, but Iran’s neighbor Pakistan has had nuclear weapons for years, as well as plenty of missiles capable of delivering them. I don’t expect to see Pakistan donating to B’Nai Brith anytime soon. But, you know what? Israel’s accomplishments seem to have done just fine.
Oh, oh, but Iran is scaaary! Them’s dangerous fundamentalists! Horseshit. Iran’s population is young and modern and ripe for rising up against the geriatric religious mafia that is still trying to pretend that they run the place. Whereas, the only Islamic country which has working nuclear weapons, Pakistan, also has Al Queda operating openly within its borders!
Oh, but Pakistan is different, eh? Let’s see… what’s different about Pakistan? Wait, I got it! Pakistan has been engaged diplomatically by the US government, and we don’t have high-profile Congressmen lobbying to start a fucking war with them. Even though Pakistanis probable hate America and Israel more than Iranians do, we have thoroughly co-opted Pakistan by providing them all kinds of military aid, including recently selling them a shitload of F-16 fighters.
See, Pakistan is much more worried about India than it is about Israel or the USA. And I’m willing to bet that Iran is much more worried about Pakistan, and, um, the various factions wrestling for control of Iraq, and all its other immediate neighbors, than it is about a competing theocracy halfway across the continent over on the Mediterranean.
Please, can we cut the saber-rattling and warmongering now? It’s not helpful.
For a while now, I’ve been wondering why the term “Web 2.0″ has become popular, and because of whom. It certainly seems content-free from a technical standpoint. Most of the people I know working on the technology consider the term– along with “AJAX”– to be anywhere from meaningless to beneath contempt.
Then someone sent me a real-estate related article about the “resurging” office-space market in SoMa in San Francisco, for “Web 2.0″ businesses.
And I suddenly realised that “Web 2.0″ means “Internet Bubble 2.0, the Sequel”, and the “audience” for the term is those who, keeping in mind the phrase “you can’t cheat an honest man”, are both predators and prey in the 2.0 swindle.
It’s Sand Hill Road. It’s VC’s and investment banks.
As in: “Remember that great Web bubble in the 90’s? Yeah, we made out like bandits! Then the suckers who were dumb enough to stay in too long lost their asses. Well, ho ho ho, guess what? It’s coming back! It’s a sequel! Get in now! It’s Web 2.0. Buy, buy buy!”
1.0 was Pets.com and that ilk. 2.0 is Fleeble, Zlorkpu, Bramski, and Glorkle, or whatever the names of these dumb-ass companies is nowadays.
I suppose that the hangers-on of the industry– like the trade press, real estate agents and developers, executive recruiters, etc.– are also similarly interested in a “New! Improved!” version of the late 1990’s, and similarly excited by “Web 2.0″.
It’s been 6 years now since I left that circus. I will never go back. My “President’s Day” thought this year was that there should be a picture of P.T. Barnum on the U.S. Dollar instead of George Washington.
I’d have to say Wolcott is by far the best writer in the blogosphere:
There have been times when I have been yanked, and grateful afterwards, even willing to make a small donation, but that was in a desert motel long ago, and I prefer to preserve those memories in my own private album, if you don’t mind.
In the above post, Wolcott quotes from the excreable Peggy Noonan a stellar example of the “Culture of Bullshit” I have come to regard as toxic to, well, everything really. And then, in that one sentence above, he gives such Gleeful Bullshit exactly the ridicule it deserves, in words far better than I can muster. Yay Wolcott!
Whenever I stumble upon an opportunity to do so, I shill for a friend's business, NearlyFreeSpeech.net. In addition to being my web hoster– and a damn good one–, I believe in their philosophy, and I've become even more convinced of the vital need for the service they provide whenever I see crap like the telecom industry's attacks on net neutrality. The Internet is not a broadcast television, and must never be allowed to become one.
For the last 4 years, I've included NearlyFreeSpeech.net's tagline as my email .sig; since I know how hard it is to compete with huge MegaCorporations and their massive ad budgets, I figure a little guerrilla marketing goes a long way.
I sometimes felt guilty about being such a shameless shill. But then I read this:
They had 12 people working there full time, and were hiring 10 more. You do the math. No wait, I'll do it for you: that's 880 posts a day (if minimum was met). However he said the better ones could do around 8 or 10 an hour.
So I guess a lot of guerilla marketing goes an even longer way. The idea of some mega-corp renting out a boiler room of paid shills pretending to be actual members of some community or other… eek. I've seen those ads that said "GET PAID TO SURF THE INTERNET", and went, heh, yeah, that's funny, who's gonna fall for that. Well, maybe it's not so funny.
Invasion of the credibility snatchers.
