The Competency Crisis

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Recently, in a conversation between friends, the hypothesis was floated: what if all the burning farms, derailed trains, crop failures, etc. etc. etc. etc. ad scary nauseam aren’t really enemy action, but more a competency crisis.

As in these things happen not because big-bad is plotting against us, but because no one knows how to do the things they purportedly do anymore. Some kind of know, but they are hampered, slow, and sometimes hemmed in by counterproductive regulation or the result of previous “strokes of genius” decisions that broke the system.

I’m not going to bore anyone with what I know to be a massive crisis of competency plus inherited factors breaking ability to function in the field. I already did that at Mad Genius Club this morning, and am not unpacking the whole thing again.

But here’s the thing: All of us can live without a functioning fiction writing/selling market. Maybe not as pleasantly/happily, at least for those of us addicted to reading, but we can survive. We have old books to re-read, and if we get really desperate we can write our own fanfic.

It’s another thing when you talk of transportation or medicine, or farming, or– Well, everything else.

I have friends and fans in a lot of places. And almost everyone’s story is of being caught in the middle of a system where nobody knows or can do much of anything. It’s all the way the cogs and bureaucracy move. And the way they move is completely divorced from what needs done, or what anyone knows how to do.

To give an example: Suppose you were hired to haul buckets from a well. But when you actually get the job, you find out, no. Because of inherited systems, and what your superiors expect, you’re supposed to climb down the wall, hand over hand, and bring up water by the cupfull. And there are regulations in the works to make that by the spoonfull. However, you’ll be fully held to account if you can’t provide the amount of water the company is contracted for. You. Personally.

So, you do what you can. You fudge the books. On paper, you’re getting all this water up. Where the water goes no one knows, every one down stream (pardon the pun) from you does the same.

If this sounds like the soviet system? It is. It’s just that the directives don’t come directly and traceably from the government. (Though under the infestation of Bidentia they increasingly do.) Instead, they come from “experts” “scientists” “Studies” “marketing gurus.” And sometimes they are curtailed or made worse by agencies and regulations.

Yes, the managerial or worse “expert” class is the same that furnishes government. These are not your friends, are not meant to be your friends, and are convinced they know much more than you do.

What they know in fact is “how to manage.” But it’s not how to manage anything. They know theory of management (or whatever) derived from no reality (mostly from the writings of Marx, if you dig a little) and pushed ALL THE WAY DOWN.

It’s like — exactly like — being run by “experts” who memorized the Little Red Book. It might please those in power, but it has nothing to do with accomplishing the actual job in front of you.

Part of this has to do with colleges. Remember all those student demonstrations of the 60s? If you’re like me, and didn’t hit college till the eighties or younger, you might think these are, as the movies show, all anti-war and for civil rights, and all that jazz.

Unspoken to any of us is the fact that half of these demonstrations were to DUMB DOWN THE CURRICULUM. To demand easier grading. And social factors taken into account. And to “update” to “relevant things.”

The idea being that we were in a sort of an year zero and anything else, in the long storied glories of Western civ no longer counted, except for us to declare ourselves superior to it.

Hence, Liberal arts majors who don’t know Latin or classical history (or really any history except maybe ‘history of pop music’ and that watered down.) And economists who don’t understand the basics of economics (hello, AOC), etc. etc. etc.

It gets worse from there.

My own job ad hoc and has more or less always been self taught. But the degree I have is the closest thing to preparation for it. (If you ignore the languages part and look at the literature.) What this means is that I had to unlearn all my training before I became even passably competent.

Again, my job is non-essential. But I hear the same story from everyone Either being taught the “current thing” which is actually wrong, or being taught relatively correct things, but not what came before, so there are holes in your knowledge you don’t even know are there and don’t find out until you trip and fall headfirst into them. If you survive, you start learning. But sometimes…. well, there’s a fire or a derailment.

Now imagine that at every step of the way. Every. Step. Of. The. Way.

The problem is not that we have so many fires and destruction of infrastructure. The problem is that we’re averting maybe 9 in ten through sheer stupid luck and inertia. Which won’t last forever.

A friend was bitching about a newly-laid down road, which already had potholes. This is sort of emblematic of our situation.

My generation, and I say this as a studious kid who learned everything she could, was half taught. I’m still filling in holes in my knowledge, both of routine everyday things relating to the household, and of my job and how to do it. I’m not alone in this. I’m 60.

But I know, from reading, that my father’s generation was already, for whatever reason half-prepared. Which means I’m more like a quarter prepared. And the kids…

Well, I saw what they were teaching mine which amounted to making it impossible for them to learn anything real. So I taught them as much as I could around/over/under the school. This means they’re good on the basics. But I didn’t do their professional training. They’re trying to do that over/around/despite the schools/system. Yeah….

So, what we have is a crisis of competency. Some of it might be the end result of what happens in a top-down system, including education.

And some is the results of that maleducation. Sometimes I think the only thing preventing a total crash is that people are working later and later. That at this point that means my generation is holding up the tent is horrifying, because I know how badly prepared we are.

Ladies, gentlemen and cats — Indy is lying across my wrists and biting my knuckles as I type. Sometimes he rolls across the keyboard. It’s not why this is so late, but it’s not helping — we’re in trouble.

We keep waiting for the adults to come in and rescue us. We are the adults. See that white horse? Get on it and ride to the rescue.

Or in other terms: it is our honor and our very great privilege to be the generation with our butts in the bear trap in the crucial place at the crucial time.

You know where you’re weak and where your system of work is absurd. I know you’re tired. But you can’t say “apres moi le deluge.” It’s the future of humanity at stake. Not just the west, not just civilization. If we fall, humanity falls, and I don’t know when and if we climb again.

Learn, learn, learn. Become aware of the holes, and fill them. And teach, teach teach. Yeah, yeah, the children are the future. Only they’re now middle aged, and the future presents itself lost and uneducated. Go fix that.

Do it now. We might not have tomorrow. With incompetence winning this war, we’re skating over the abyss by our lucky charms.

And luck is an unreliable mistress.

469 thoughts on “The Competency Crisis”

  1. I think there’s also differential work vs rewards.

    Why do all that, when your co-worker gets paid the same for just showing up? Personal pride carries one only so far in a sea of indifference.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. That is how the soviets fell, no reward for hard work. You work hard and your co-workers turn you in as a counter revolutionary. Your boss doesn’t mind, he gets to keep his job which you were threatening, besides your wife might be better looking than his. The secret police don’t mind this proves that they are needed. No goods get produced beyond bare minimum.

      Same then with Unions.

      Liked by 2 people

      2. Also a factor with the Amana Colonies. Eventually, the hard workers got tired of receiving the same benefits as the slackers. (They also had a fire in their main factory, plus the kids wanting “modern conveniences,” like lipstick).

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        1. The Oneida commune, too. The women did as they pleased and the men who were hard workers could hope for . . . something. Later. Rewards and effort were disconnected. Somebody was able to retain the real estate and create a flatware company, but they had to quit with all the Socialized rewards and effort jazz.

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    2. In some jobs, you can’t even do what a good worker wants/needs- usually fixing a prior issue with legal sledge hammers. Say, required unpaid overtime morphs into “you will leave, by the back door, immediately after your shift. You will not show up more than five minutes prior, and you cannot shop before you start your shift.”

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        2. OMG do not get my husband started. It irritated the heck out of him that the response to someone not doing the job “can’t be fired”. His response was always “Yes. They. Can. Be. Fired. You” supervisors and management “aren’t willing to do your job!” Luckily hubby’s job did not rely on team work. Do your own job and keep your head down. None of my programming jobs relied on others either. Did have to deal with legacy code but it was up to me (usually) on how to deal with it.

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          1. My old office (Navy shop) got a guy fired.

            It still mostly worked because he did stuff that was documentable as cheating– was leaving early an coming in late.

            Still took a long time, and while yeah he lost his retirement (for the job where he was going to be the calibrator for the entire base…and hten he deliberately flunked calibration school, so he could only do physical/dimensional, not electronic. As a guy with an electronics degree, paid in accordance with) he still got paid for YEARS to sit there and read a newspaper, pulling in more than the entire rest of the (active duty) shop.

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            1. It’s possible to fire a Federal Civil Servant. My former boss did it several times. But the system is designed to fix problem employees if possible.

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              2. Yep, more usual to put the problem employee in charge of the Combined Federal Campaign.
                Though I saw one truly sadistic alternative to firing an underperforming supervisor. He forgot to do his section’s performance appraisals, making us ineligible for awards, promotions, etc. So the PTB created a section for him with a single subordinate…a neurotic perfectionist who once drove me into, “let me rip you a new one,” mode. (My new boss said to me after that was over: “You know you shouldn’t have done that. But I understand”)
                The offending supervisor retired in six months.

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        4. It’s NOT a “union shop” where I am, and I work nights when few are around. This means that I can, when I finally realize it (ox slow…) make that helpful change – that is obvious in retrospect. Now, what bugs me is that ox slow… but nobody ELSE got to it, so… ouch?

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      2. The Inspirationists in Amana went to private ownership (in 1932! Talk about bucking a trend), abolished the communal kitchens and founded the Amana Co, creators of the microwave oven (i.e., the Amana Radar Range). Now they do tourism. Very nice place to while away some time.

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    3. I just retired early because I was sick of carrying a bunch of idiots – and not getting paid for the extra work. A month after leaving they wanted me to do some critical work but are balking at my quoted rate. I am really the only person who can do it. My “informers” report there is a lot of angst over my rates but they are going to accept my quote. I let him know that that was in April – with Bidenomics I’m upping my rate by $100/hour!

      You can ignore reality. but the consequences of reality will not ignore you!

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  2. My dearest is the manager of an Auto Parts store. It was bought out by a regional chain in January.

    The supply chain between stores and the warehouses has been broken to the point that if he orders a part there is no way to tell if it is actually coming to the store or where it is coming from. (warehouse or other store that has extra or where). They cross their fingers and hope and when it doesn’t show up they send out an email to the other managers asking if someone has it. When they get stuff they didn’t order they send out a manager email letting the other managers know.

    It is absolutely crazy town that this is how it works at a chain with 250 + stores and it is all because they have the crappiest inventory and sales software in the known universe.

    The thing is there seems to no interest whatsoever in fixing this. Hubby is stressed beyond belief. And he knows he shouldn’t care more than the company does but he has been doing this for 45 years and his customers are friends who are counting on him.

    Other long time managers know this is NOT how it should work but the company seems to be happy to have the old guard give up in disgust so they can hire $16 an hour counter people who can’t actually help anyone with anything.

    He’d be thrilled to teach a young pup the parts business. But this ain’t it.

    One hopes it resolves sooner rather than later. But I’m sure his isn’t the only industry that has this sort of story behind it. They can talk about lack of employees all they want, but it’s not that, it’s just broken.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. My husband works for Really Big Company. His job is partially logistics, though his job title doesn’t reflect all of what he does. He is known (and compensated) for being one of the People Who Can Fix Things, and a lot of their back-of-house systems are based on his thinking. He’s fairly happy at his job.

      BUT…

      You know how they say that people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers? He had one of those. It’s several years back, now, but it was seriously stressing him out to the point of talking of quitting. Among the things that she did was she ignored Chesterton’s Fence and did away with a couple of positions in his division.

      Note that said division is about 4-5 people, running the domestic end of an international company.

      So earlier this year, one person in the division retired. There’s nobody to replace that person, there’s no money to replace that person (see diversion of funds away from that division with removing positions), and guess what? All the extra work is falling on him. They’re doing what they can to back fill, including having a “temporary” position on the team (which they are trying to budget the money to make permanent), but overall, it means he’s spending all of his energy dealing with a workload that isn’t sustainable.

      I’ll reiterate that they DO appreciate him in the way that matters (financial compensation), but it’s not easy even when that’s the case, because all it took was one person with the wrong idea of how the group worked to kneecap it badly for years.

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        1. Thankfully, they have redirected this particular manager to someplace that better fits her skills. (Not precisely Peter Principle; she’s apparently decent at the customer-facing skills sets. Horrible when dealing with self-directed types.)

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      2. We had an Evil Genius in a management role. Did damage. EG wasnt -quite- as smart as EG believed. Well, EG is now an “Example Of Someone Who Used To Work Here” and my reputation as a forecaster is enhanced.

        19 years, 11 months, assorted days, and counting…. (Kzin grin)

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    2. Used to do route deliveries then sales for a jobber autoparts supply. Back then, down the Bayou, there was only NAPA to compete with. When I started it was One guy/wife owned, him and his son-in-law doing sales,4 full-time workers and two part-time (they worked at UPS in the AM loading deliveries). We got bought by one of our suppliers, not really bigger, 2 brothers and a brother-in-law. NAPA Franchise guy and I were at one customer chatting and he related how on a tour of HQ was shown a room of people who did suppler negotiations, and he asked did they give up easy or what? They boggled at him and he related that My first employer, “One Guy who started with a truck” (this tour was before the brothers bought us) was able to SELL certain parts to the customers, he used Autolite sparkplugs as an example, for less than NAPA was charging his stores (at the time we sold common numbers for 99¢ v NAPA charging him $1.10 for the same plug) and really we got them from yet another supplier who got them from Autolite. Autozone has since moved in down there, but I see his stores are still there.

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  4. In any large corporate entity, Government or private, Competency is neither requested or appreciated. In fact, more often it is discouraged because anyone who stands out from the herd calls in to question why all the other ‘non-competent’ are on the payroll. That makes the outstanding a threat, and a target. In my area, the local power co. is run by the mayor of the town that is the county seat. when she took office she ran off the utilities’ general manager and set herself up as ‘acting General Manager’ (I assume she got the $ too) then fired the outside contractors who were clearing the trees on the power line right of way, ran off 3/4 of the linemen who were supposed to maintain the system and looted the rate payer’s $$ to fund city priorities. The system has collapsed in less than two years. There are entire new subdivisions in the district that have been built, and the houses sold without the power lines being run to the area, much less to each home. When asked, the employees of the utility district simply lie to the customers.
    I was at a meeting of some state representatives who were in town to see what the hell was going on, as the bad press was making it hot all they way to the state capitol, and the senior staff member from the utility co. who dared to attend the meeting told the crowd that if they had a complement of 50 linemen, -which is about twice what they used to have- it would take ten years to make the system stable again. TEN F’N YEARS!!! The mayor did not attend the meeting, and has told citizens who have tried to contact her to hose off. I’m sitting here looking at my options.
    1. A complete off-grid solar system (About 15K)
    2. a whole house generator (12k)
    3. move.

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    1. The Reader sees Ayn Rand smiling here. He also suggests that option 3 is your only viable one. In the environment you describe, having power when no one else does will make you a target.

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        1. A show I was involved with experienced a power outage due to a mylar balloon—during the introduction. “I was GOING to say ‘in the event of an emergency…'” (It was on tape, even.)

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    3. Complete offgrid should cost substantially more than $15K. I did a 3.6 kW system for our pumphouse (circa 2018) and (disregarding the ground mount system) spent $14K. The ground mount stuff (pipe, and contracting mounting them in the ground) was an additional $7K. Roof mount is cheaper if you want to go that way.

      That system gives me 110V, 30A. I could add a transformer to get 220V, but it’s still 3.6 kWe.

      Some (former, long story) friends did a whole-house on the cheap with only 900W worth of panels, but the big generator is running every day. If you needed to stay off grid, I’d do both solar and a generator.

      Option 3 might be viable. Is recalling the mayor an option?

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      1. Complete offgrid should cost substantially more than $15K.

        It is. I think my parents are into their for at least twice that, partially because the lead-acid batteries they started with began going bad within about 3 years. They’ve switched over to… Lithium ion (iron?) phosphate, I think. At this point, they’re at $20k for batteries alone.

        And they’ve worn out one “back-up” generator.

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        1. Lead Acid batteries can last a long time, if a) you don’t discharge them too far, and b) you watch the water level. The power trailer, circa 2016 is on its first set of Rolls-Surrette batteries (very good, very expensive batteries), and the pumphouse is in its first set of Trojans (one half the amp-hours, one third the cost). I check and replenish the pumphouse batteries every month, and usually every other month for the trailer. The R-S batteries have a lot of extra electrolyte; I got away with (ignorantly) neglecting the levels for a year and a half when I first installed them, but needed close to two gallons of water for the four batteries. Learned my lesson, and the Trojans usually need about a third of a gallon each month.

          I never tried the lithium batteries. The 8 Trojans cost me a bit over a thousand…

          On the other hand, I have a 12V system for the garage. It’s seldom used, and I’ve had to add water to the battery once, and that might have been an underfill when I bought it.

          (I’ve done 4 systems, of which 3 are in use. Planning to reuse System #1 when I get the round tuit.)

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          1. I would stay away from lithium for anything big. While the chance might be remote, they’re a huge problem if they catch fire (or spontaneously combust).

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            1. LiFePO are far more stable. iirc they are more temp sensitive (cold drops voltage/amperage) but they are not the type to combust of their own accord. That is the makeup of the typical automotive or motorcycle starter battery. I see them used in boats and campers for the lightness for capacity compared to Lead Acid.
              But a room of Lead Acid or Lifepo batteries burning is a lawnchair rule of thumb event. (back off until the event is covered by your thumb at arm’s length and set down in the lawn chair and enjoy the show) Lifepo is just a bit more eventful, but less than the kinds used for Teslas or Chevys.

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              1. Upwind… don’t forget to move upwind with the lawn chair.
                Nickle-Iron batteries for static storage.
                Why use the lightweight exotics if weight is not a concern?

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        2. A big generator on a partial load that runs moderately slow lasts -much- longer than small generator that always runs flat out.

          Similar to vehicles.

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          1. Aye. Power systems should ‘loaf along’. Do I “need” the kilowatt-capable supply for the computer? Technically, no. BUT… I’ve not had to replace the “excessive” supply, unlike the “properly rated” (100% load, plus a bit) things that might as well been on a subscription.

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          2. Undoubtedly.

            Theirs is 15kWh. I think that was the largest available.

            My stepdad thinks the system would work better if we split the power coming in (from generator or PV panels) between two or three inverters so that the batteries would charge faster. Then the generator wouldn’t run so much.

            And that project is on our list of Things To Do… right after shingling the tower roof and re-weather-proofing the exterior walls of the house. And fixing the improperly angled eave next to the tower wall.

            Of course, there wouldn’t be nearly as much load on the electrical system if the fifth-wheel RV with the leaking water heater tank (it drips on the pilot light so we can’t heat with propane, but since it leaks, it’s pretty much constantly running the electrical heating element…) weren’t hooked up to it, but until we get the master bathroom in the house up and running we can’t take it off.

            Which I suppose could happen any day now, if my stepdad is diligent about tiling the shower this weekend, and the wall behind the toilet gets painted.

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        1. Considering that the issue at hand is the power grid, that certainly suggests one -cute.

          Unfortunately, the same issue makes the suggested -cute rather more difficult.

          Liked by 1 person

    5. Sounds like your mayor is related to the governor of a Certain State. The roads are memorable (bad), and the economy is a disaster in little towns that depended on tourism and mining/timber/natural resources extraction. The fact that certain areas that got locked down harder in 2020 happened (by sheer coincidence) to often be those that voted less enthusiasticly for said individual is pure coincidence. It was almost painful to see how badly towns are doing – hotels closed, shops and cafes gone, well-known local enterprises now boarded up …

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Sounds like PA during Lockdown. The western side of the state got locked down HARD. But the eastern side of the state, especially the area around Filthydelphia, could pretty much do whatever they wanted. And exceptions/waivers to the restrictions were more or less handed out “arbitrarily,” i.e. whoever made the largest donation to the Appropriate Political Party (Governor is in a lame-duck term, thank God) could not only get their business exempted from the restrictions but get any and all waivers their competitors had yanked without warning.

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      2. I suspect that plurals would work. Certain State(s) and governor(s) seem to fit much of that description. Much of Flyover Falls survived, though one restaurant only survived because it a) refused to go along with the lockdown, and b) the county commissioners told the county board of health to ignore any Stern Letters from the state. Several other places shut down and barely survived or folded. OTOH, our former governor wasn’t above trying to sic Child disServices on a beauty parlor Westside whose proprietor actually wanted to stay in business.

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  5. College is educational. It teaches you that all play and no work make Jack the Student into Jack The Guy Holding The Stop/Slow Sign In The Heat. It teaches you how to spot the blithering incompetents in positions of authority above you and how to posture and speak in order to slip past them. It teaches you that all people are examples. Some positive, some negative. Some Oh-My-God Negative Never Do Anything Like That. It teaches you that the people you step on during your climb up the ladder are the people you wind up calling to beg for a job later, so step carefully. And it taught me to pay attention to my fellow students, in particular the young bashful lady who sat next to me in Accelerated Chem and poked me in the ribs to keep me awake. We’ll be married forty years next year.

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    1. Attending college at one the University of Berkley’s Midwest campuses taught me that no way in hell did I want to think, sound or look like the leftist loons running the place.

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    2. Jack The Guy Holding The Stop/Slow Sign In The Heat.

      Who may just make more money in that one summer than the diligent student can all year…

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    3. I learned that first over three summers helping on a Coca-Cola truck. Those cases of 16-ounce drinks (in glass, no less) were a bear.

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      1. Had a friend while I was in the National Guard who worked trucks/warehouse for a soft drinks distributor. Did you do the exploding bottle wars, too?

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    4. May depend on the tertiary school.

      Killing time in pretty much an asylum may mostly acculturate you to insane.

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  6. So I hit 70 this year and only have 10 years on you but I’ve been concerned about the whole “competency” thing for a long time.

    My first real world smack along side the head was back in early 1999 I was tasked with updating a shared computer program that ran state wide with all Sheriff and Police offices which tracked detention information. We had to hire a guy who knew Assembly Language which was left over from the 1970’s. We got it to work (dodged any Y2K crap) and last I knew it was still running to this day. However, I was that last person that actually knew what was “under the hood” and could work fixes. A few years ago I heard second hand that even if the system was throwing errors it was all they had.

    Jump to just four years ago (as of this week) – I filed all my paperwork for retirement and walked out the door. The whiz kid that figured she knew better than me was called on to run the systems I left – last I knew the program had been de-centralized and what I built up faded away. Oh well, I don’t worry about it anymore and I did what I could for them prior to leaving. The people left and that have since come in are much more concerned about “inclusion” and “disparity” than reality. I’m glad I left when I did as I would have gone crazy trying to make all the “feel good” and happy-happy crap work.

    With all that said, I will still step up and help if I’m called on. It may just be me as the old fart at the intersection counting traffic but I’ll put my effort in when/where needed.

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    1. It became clear around 2015 that people in management no longer knew good work from bad. That was worse than pure incompetence –these people think the incompetent are competent. Brawndo’s got what plants crave, you see.

      I remember when in 2016 my previously perfect payroll processor Paychex managed to make a series of at least 6 months of errors in an ongoing attempt at fixing one month of monthly payroll for our 2 person company. They had chopped off or replaced or outsourced the previously competent and the new humans+new sw knew nothing. Airlines, retail and service automotive dealers, restaurants, hardware stores, everyone lost their skills and acted like it was normal to have none. During covid when no one went to work, our propane distributor ran people’s tanks to 0 because their customer service order system went to /dev/null while the human truckers who deliver sat around waiting for calls. Then there was the Colonial Pipeline incident, when the execs admitted to Congress no one knew how to restart the pipeline by hand because they had fired or retired all the old (white men) employees who knew how. Then there was the recent cyber random attack in a county in long island that stopped every single electronic action, from being able to record title transfers on property like houses and car to dispatching police. Cops told to write paper tickets didn’t know how. Operators had to have runners with slips of paper going to the PD to tell cops about crimes. It is even worse in k-12 and College education. The teachers and admins also know nothing now. They can only do with the software checklist days to do.

      The connection between cause and effect is now a shock to people. But being liberal means never recognizing the inevitable, predictable effect of one’s actions, so they don’t mind. Notice this collapse of competency went perfectly along with the timing of people knowingly openly lying that men become women and the past could be changed as well (“Caitlyn Jenner won the Olympic men’s decathlon and is the mother of…”) and vice versa. The ability to say things at odds with reality became more important for that promotion. So here we are, with managers at all levels who have no idea of cause and effect.

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      1. Years ago there was a huge power outage in San Diego county. C and I had dinner (back then we had a gas stove!) and then went out for a walk. All the stores that were usually open were closed, not being able to take money, because their cash registers were down. But somehow the bars had all figured out how to handle money and were doing a thriving business.

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        2. This one I know about from dealing with running some vendor stalls and dealing with various taxes.

          The maximum number of drinks I have seen at a bar is a fraction of the prices I have seen at even a mini-mart.

          And you don’t have different taxing requirements based on which drink you ordered.

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            1. Straight liquor is taxed different than beer, but I am FAIRLY sure that in a drink it’s taxed the same, like how meals are all taxed the same but food at the grocery is taxed dependent on other factors.

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              1. But making up three dozen tax categories for different types of alcoholic liquids would occupy thousands of bureaucrats and provide endless opportunities to harass hapless bar and store employees! Best of all, the ATF could implement it just by writing up some new rules.

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                1. You know, those kind of jokes tend to make one lazy, mentally.

                  It’s not like the reasoning behind the different tax rates are obscure. Folks can be wrong without being evil, or mean, or even just stupid.

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                  1. Several decades of experience with the government tells me that evil, mean AND stupid is the way to bet. Less chance of being unpleasantly surprised, at least. It has only grown worse under the Biden* Regime.

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                    2. So? Consider Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schiff, AOC, Swalwell, Bush, Fauxi, Mayorkis, Garland, Milley, Austin, Wray…I could go on, and on.

                      How would you describe them, other than ‘Evil, mean and stupid’?

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                    3. As a former government employee I can say things would be worse if a lot of us weren’t working over and around as much as possible. But it gets wearing..

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  7. I am reminded that despite a lifetime of YGBFSM hard luck, I also have the occasional good luck.

    I work in a place that values and grows competence. They pay well. They respect that folks have lives and families outside the office, and expect us to balance things. Incompetence is either corrected or fired. Assholes eventually get fired. Good people stick around.

    Not perfect. Sometimes maddening. But 20 years next month. And I stumbled over it by sheer luck.

    I was in a pit of despair when I found it. Glad I refused to quit.

    Never quit.

    Especially never quit on yourself.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. This is how my beloved ran his business. He sold it to two employees he thought he’d trained. They are busily dismantling everything he did.
      Since we’re getting a payout we hope they succeed, but it’s very disappointing

      Like

  8. Suppose you were hired to haul buckets from a well. But when you actually get the job, you find out, no. Because of inherited systems, and what your superiors expect, you’re supposed to climb down the wall, hand over hand, and bring up water by the cupfull. And there are regulations in the works to make that by the spoonfull. However, you’ll be fully held to account if you can’t provide the amount of water the company is contracted for. You. Personally.

    This. Exactly this. Almost all social systems have been run, for a generation or two at least, by people whose primary goal is to separate themselves from accountability, so that they can enact their ignorant dreams and put the consequences on nobodies when things don’t work.

    This is why the “smart” people hate free market competition, because it ruins their dreams (shows they don’t work) and rewards competence, when Everybody Knows rewards must always and ever go to the “smart” people, not to morons who only know how to do things, rather than discourse on gender queer diverse socialist hyper trans semiotic theory.

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    1. Avoidance of accountability is one of the core tenants of marxism. And probably part of what lead to the French Revolution, as I recall.

      Which is kinds of funny, because just last night I was listening to Whatifalthist’s thing on why he is concerned the US may go through something like that soon: our leadership class is so completely divorced from reality they can’t even comprehend the problems the majority of the population is facing, similar to how the French nobility couldn’t in the run-up to that collapse. And they got there by separating themselves from any accountability for their actions or inactions…

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Avoidance of accountability is one of the core tenants of marxism.

        It’s one of the core drives of human beings, seemingly. Certainly, the managerial/bureaucrat class always push to avoid accountability, whether or not they are marxist.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. Well, we shall separate their empty heads from their shoulders. I think of the job opportunities. :-)

        (Take a close look at my avatar for ideas)

        Like

    2. I, for one, am hopeful about Artificial Intelligence, for we have seen the results of a century of Artificial Stupidity.

      Like

    3. My husband once tried to get a position teaching medicine. He’d been doing clinical medicine for 20 years at that point. At the interview, they told him he wasn’t as qualified to teach because he was “tainted by the real world”. So your doctors learn best from people who never take care of patients. But they do mouth the liberal line well……

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      1. One of the comments on Larry Correia’s post ‘An Opinion On Gun Control’ puts forth the curious notion that Larry is not qualified to discuss gun control because he’s an experienced subject matter expert.

        I suppose Internet Rando has a point, though; only the woefully ignorant can believe in gun control.
        ———————————
        The Democrats trust violent criminals and terrorists with guns more than they trust you.

        Like

      2. This is exactly the function of teaching licensing laws. Not to ensure teachers know their subjects, but to ensure they conform the the unions’ platforms, which have been pure indoctrination for a century. Got to keep actual experience out out out, you know.

        Like

        1. Yep. I can teach languages. What’s preventing me? I don’t have the appropriate degree. (Well, actually NOW they recognize my degree. BUT NOW they couldn’t pay me enough. Back when we were young and starving? Yeah.)

          Liked by 1 person

          1. I never really saw an adult afraid before I suggested to one of my high school teachers that licensing blocked experts in subjects from teaching those subjects in high school, and that therefore a teaching license should only be based on whether the person licensed had a sufficient command of the subject to instruct sub-university level students in it.

            Like

  9. Given todays news regarding the Biden Syndicate, this article was perfectly timed.

    These idiots couldn’t even put the fix in competently. What a bunch of maroons.

    Like

    1. My beloved said he thought the lawyer to called up the court yesterday and lied to the clerk about being on the Congresscritter’s legal staff thought it was no big deal. I said I thought she thought she was being clever, showing initiative,and so forth. We both wonder if she’ll be working next week.

      Liked by 1 person

      3. They must really be panicking about what might be coming down the pike if they resort to desperate moves like this.

        It seems like avoiding a trial by any means necessary is somehow important.

        And now I am curious why that would be

        Liked by 1 person

        1. There’s enough that’s come out to make it clear why. Even the New York Times was forced to acknowledge today that Hunter Biden’s plea deal was a very unusual one that was weighted very heavily in his favor.

          Liked by 1 person

            1. Yes, I believe it is. But it’s also quite possibly the first time that a plea deal has been used in an attempt to cover up such an absurdly huge amount of corruption.

              Liked by 1 person

                1. Yes, something is needed to distract from the news about Hunter’s very strange day in court. A new Trump indictment is just the thing to provide a different topic for the political wags.

                  Liked by 1 person

              3. quite possibly the first time that a plea deal has been used in an attempt to cover up such an absurdly huge amount of corruption.
                ……………..

                As pointed out on the View this Thursday morning “If you are going to engage in a conspiracy between DOJ, prosecutors, and the defense, in a courtroom, make sure the judge is in on the conspiracy too.” I will add. In light of the recent on going corruption hearings regarding the tax fraud and money shenanigans the prosecutors left holes to cover their asses.

                The other piece I found irritating is the DOJ at the top were “appointed by President Trump”. So? President Trump isn’t infallible. That is why he has a history of firing people when they don’t do their jobs, or in retrospect turn out to be corruptible. DOJ appointed by President Trump have proven they need to be fired, along with a very deep house cleaning. If I, the most politically unaware ever (although I seem to be getting better) can see this, why can’t others?

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      5. Watched a youtube of a federal district court (3 judge panel) hearing an appeal of denial of sovereign immunity for a number of child welfare workers being sued for fabricating evidence for a child removal case.
        The government lawyer was arguing that the workers should retain immunity since they could not know that lying to the court was wrong because there was no established case law for that exact circumstance.
        Very happy that the lawyer was having a hard grilling from all three judges, but surprised that the oath when taking the stand was not brought up – “whole truth, nothing but the truth…”

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        1. Reminds me of a comment from a California legislator after one of his co-workers got busted by the FBI for weapons smuggling. He complained that the members of the legislature had no way of knowing that weapons smuggling was inappropriate because it wasn’t covered in the ethics training for legislators.

          Like

    2. Yup.
      I saw a comment, regarding the discovery of drugs at the White House – wondering Hunter Biden isn’t the only crackhead living/working there.
      The sheer bloody incompetence on display, the arrogance and incompetence … really, one has to wonder how many of them are on drugs… legal and otherwise.

      Like

      2. I read a piece by a former WH staffer who suggested the coke belonged to a staffer. They’re notorious for forming cliques and trying everything they think they can get away with, just because they can. So one screws up and the rest of the clique rallied ’round to protect one of their own. Seems plausible.

        Like

          1. If Robert Barnes is correct, it’s too early for Joe to pardon Hunter. The game plan, in his hypothesis, is to wait till after the election when, regardless of outcome, he can pardon everybody (including Trump) and slip in pardons for himself and Hunter, hiding behind a cloak of magnanimity toward all.

            Like

                1. “…utterly corrupt.” I think that horse escaped long ago, at least among those capable of looking at evidence rationally and drawing logical conclusions.

                  WRT the “strange powder found in the White House (somewhere; don’t know the latest claim), look at Circle & Square:

                  https://www.tumblr.com/circleandsquarecomic

                  The last panel is priceless. :-)

                  Like

                    1. If she isn’t the poster child for Dunning-Kruger she should be; dumb as a bag of hammers, and convinced she’s brilliant.

                      Liked by 1 person

    3. My own admittedly pessimistic take is that most of these people won’t face justice until after death.

      Like

      1. Thing is, they WILL face justice — or, rather, Justice — after death. That’s the comforting thing about the Christian worldview. There is a Judge who knows everything, cannot be bribed, and will not pervert justice for the sake of politics or expediency. And if you think you’re indignant about people getting away with the injustices they carry out? That anger you feel is but a candle flame compared to the bonfire of righteous rage He feels — He who is Justice personified — at the mockery that unjust judges make of their duty.

        There are many who find the Christian doctrine of Hell to be hard to accept. I used to have trouble with it, too, when I was younger. As I’ve seen more and more injustice in the world, what I’m now having to face is the difficulties with the doctrine of Heaven, and of mercy. Not difficulties with believing the doctrine, but difficulties in accepting it emotionally. Because all of those people perpetrating injustice, that I want to see punished for it? If any of them turn to God and say, “I’m sorry. What I did was wrong; I admit it. Please forgive me.” Then He will forgive them. Freely and completely — and they will not face punishment for their sins. (And neither will I face punishment for my own sins, which — if I were to be truly honest with myself — are just as bad, albeit of a different character, as theirs.)

        So how does God reconcile that mercy, and complete forgiveness, with His justice? Simple. Not easy, but simple. He doesn’t have to punish them because He already punished Himself for those sins. This is the incredible part of Christian doctrine, the part where Christianity is truly unique among world religions as far as I know. Every other religion I know of talks about what you need to do to earn a place in heaven, and/or to avoid being punished. Only Christianity has the doctrine that someone else has already been punished on your behalf, and therefore God, while remaining just, can forgive you.

        Anyway, theological digression over. Hopefully it was interesting to read for someone. I’m becoming fascinated by how deep the concept is, and I wanted to share that interest with you. I understood the basics of this — that Jesus had taken my punishment on Himself, so I could simply ask God for forgiveness and He would give it to me — at age five. But the older I get, and the more I see and understand injustice, the deeper my appreciation is for God’s justice, and also for His mercy.

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        1. Yes. I reread Dorothy Sayers’ translation of The Divine Comedy, about once a year, as much for her commentary as the poetry. Her commentary on the concept of Purgatory is very interesting, and debunks some of the common misconceptions.

          Like

        2. There are two parts to forgiveness—and the second part is accepting it. (Asking for it with sincerity is part of accepting it.)

          Hell is not a punishment. Hell is what happens when your choices bring you out of alignment with God. And in this case, I’m thinking more like magnetic alignment, where it will push away in certain directions. Forgiveness is what brings you back into alignment.

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  10. What this means is that I had to unlearn all my training before I became even passably competent.

    One of my basic Intel Officers courses was taught largely by NCOs that had not been coopted by Air Training Command.

    So, for example, in a 4 week block of instruction the first two weeks was covering what was on the test, then taking the test for that block. The rest of the allotted time was focused on training us on what we actually needed to know to do our jobs in the field.

    They would have been seriously busted by ATC (AKA the American Toy Company, Mickey Mouse is it’s president) if it had come out. But they planned to go back out into the field (none had volunteered for Instructor duty) and wanted to make sure they could rely on us if we met up again.

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  11. Who ever said your job was non-essential? All of our jobs are essential, except our overlords…

    Like

  12. We keep waiting for the adults to come in and rescue us.

    No one is coming to save you.

    Even if they are, I remember a passage from Heinlein’s Space Cadet. Basically summed up as we’re on our own, we are going to get to work getting ourselves out of here, if a rescue team does stumble on us, they are going to find us working as hard as we can to get ourselves out of here, and if they find our bodies, they will find evidence we died trying.

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    1. One of the memorable quotes from the movie “Wind River” (cold-country murder mystery and so much more)…

      FBI agent (young, female, competent): Shouldn’t we call for backup? (more or less)

      Tribal Police chief: “This is not the land of Backup. This is the land of You’re On Your Own.”

      Too much like the past few / several years, in too many ways. But otherwise, a magnificent line from a really good movie.

      Like

      1. Me mumbling on hiking treks when we chew up more total mileage than I can handle, usually hit about 1/3 to half way back. Mumble “No one else is hauling your ass out of here. Keep moving.”

        Like

  13. A competency crisis. Somehow, this makes me feel better about things. Of course, it’s a competency crisis. And you’ve given us a case study with trad vs indie. Trad pub is dead or dying and who cares? Indie writers have created something that DOES work, and now more writers than ever are finding an audience.

    Everyone rebuilds what they can where they are. With the advantage of knowing what has been done, and having access to orders of magnitude more information than before. We don’t have to start again from scratch. We won’t be re-creating what was before, exactly. We’ll be working things out with the knowledge we have now, and testing it, small, locally.

    Like indie writing, we won’t be building an “Auto Parts Store” chain. We won’t be aiming for “best-seller” but for mid-list. Maybe not an Auto Parts Store chain, but a “parts store” that prints 3D parts to order for the locals. Who knows? Some of you already do.

    Heck, maybe we’ll bring back steam engines for some areas. I think there are more young people out there restoring steam trains than learning how to maintain electric cars. We’ll take it where we take it.

    Like

    1. “Maybe not an Auto Parts Store chain, but a “parts store” that prints 3D parts to order for the locals.”

      As long as you can get all the ingredients, from the 3D printer to the 50 blends of 3D printstock that make up the layers of the part you are planning to build….. if someone builds the software template for that particular part.

      “How to make a Pencil” still applies.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. It isn’t actually possible for 3 employees of an auto parts store in a rural area to 3D print a part for every kind of outfit the customers own.
        Think about the recent post on bearings and races. Then imagine trying to reinvent manufacturing every single part from belts, to spark plugs, to crankcases, to oil, and wiper fluid, etc. Not going to happen.

        And that’s just automotive stuff. You’d need heavy equipment, mining equipment, etc

        What he HAS been doing, though, is maxing out the company credit card every month buying stuff from Amazon, eBay, and anyone else he can source things from.

        If you order from Amazon, for instance, you at least know if it’s coming or not.

        If the company doesn’t care enough about where their stores get product from to ensure their warehouses can get it to the stores, why should he? He cares about his customers.

        Liked by 1 person

  14. Today, one of our incoming grad students didn’t know how to calculate the cost of gas for his field-work trips.

    To his credit, he asked me to explain when I offered to.

    But seriously, what have they been teaching these kids?

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Having been hiring people for forty years, my level of disgust has reached its zenith. I confess to being exhausted from people who cannot make change, cannot calculate ten percent of something in their head. It is insane.
      The Grammer of the average email (and spelling) would have sent dear old mom into a fit of rage.
      The assumption at the corporate level for the chain of stores (500 strong) that we work for them instead of them servicing us so we can take the customers money is beyond the pale.
      My dog knows more than most of these folks.

      Like

      1. My former boss (a friend, before and after he was my supervisor) and I are both notorious grammar fanatics. Partly by nature, partly Navy Test Pilot School (precision report writing being a major part of the curriculum).

        Like

      2. Back around 1980, I tutored a pleasant young woman in accounting. I offered her an illustrative problem that involved figuring 1% of a million dollars. She came up with a thousand dollars. I said that wasn’t right, and she said, “A hundred thousand dollars?” So I asked her to get out her calculator . . .

        Like

    2. I was once in Yreka when a college student walked up to me and asked how you pump gas. To be fair, she was from Oregon (where you can’t do self-serve), and I explained that it really was as simple as it seemed on the package.

      As for calculation, sheesh, even my car knows its MPG. On the fly.

      Like

      1. K, this one I’ve seen.

        They’re bluescreening because MATH IS HARD AND PAINFUL AND NOT USEFUL.

        …as they’ve been taught it, it is.

        All the complicated stuff they were taught was written to be complicated, not to accurately model complex uses.

        WHY do they do that? Because it’s easier on the folks writing the problem.

        And yeah it’s dang near criminal for basic algebra and geometry.

        For cost of a drive, you’d want to have miles driven on the trip, you’re going to want your receipts, and your starting miles, and the miles when you gassed up last time, and what the cost was, and….

        Yeah, that’s really obvious to figure out– and even implement in a practical way, I write the odometer and the trip meter on the top of each receipt, doing the math is the work of moments– because I have been taught how to actually do that.

        They have the math.

        They DON’T have how it works.

        Or, like… I freaked out some folks on the 4th because I knew roughly how to estimate the height of a firework, because I know sound has a speed, and light for this discussion was effectively instant, and it was going straight up, so we could figure it out with A^2+B^2=C^2’s fact triangle of C^2-B^2=A^2.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. On Friday, my eldest is taking a pre-calculus challenge test so that he can go straight to calculus next year. As a sophomore. For which he’s been teaching himself straight out of a textbook that he acquired from my sister one Christmas several years back because he was leafing through it and her kids were heading to college.

          I mean, I was pretty decent at math back in the day (700 SAT), but… not like that.

          Liked by 1 person

      2. I know how to pump gas even though we live in Oregon (we lived in Washington for a few years). But I got stymied in 2022 in Baker, Oregon (area never went back to can’t self pump). Don’t remember the problem now, but it was not clear. Attendant admitted others had problems first time used too even if they were coming from Idaho. We do have a little fun with ourselves when we travel out of state, because this happens every single time immediately after crossing the Oregon border out of the state and our first fuel stop. Pull in and wait. “Where is everyone? Are they closed?” … “Oh. Wait. We are out of Oregon now.” Naturally we then have to pay attention to when we are back in Oregon, again, which is just as comical. Stop. Get out. Start to grab pump. “Oh. Wait. We are back in Oregon. Can’t pump.” As for that changing, our wonderful governor never signed the bill. The topic needs to go back to the voters for approval, again.

        Like

        1. As memory serves, U-pumpit became common in California sometime in the mid-1970s. There’s enough muscle memory so that on the two out of state road trips I’ve done since settling in Oregon, it hasn’t been a problem.

          The only Covidiocy executive order that I appreciated was the few months where we were allowed to pump our own gas. I had hopes, but very faint ones.

          Like

          1. Kept my fuel pumping skill more or less current for a few years there. When I checked out a fleet vehicle they used self pump card locks. Hard part there was remembering to get the mileage. Well that and those pumps were never covered. Pumping when there is pouring down sleet is not fun. Even as much as we have been traveling out of state, I still haven’t pumped gas. That is hubby’s job. Mine is to take pup on her break and subsequent cleanup duty.

            Like

        2. Oh…I thought it was a done deal. We pumped our own gas in Oregon just this weekend, but it must have been the rural/small-town exception.

          Like

          1. Very Eastern Oregon has U-pump allowances. I thought it was for off hours, but Flyover County isn’t rural enough (60K people in the county; the next one east of us is around 5K) to qualify.

            Like

      3. To be fair, the student wouldn’t have had the MPG information (he was asking about fuel costs for our Motor Pool vehicles), and started out by asking how much the fuel cost would be for a 6 day trip.

        Me in my mind “IDK, how far are you going and over what terrain? Are you driving the entire time or sitting in camp and walking to your monitoring locations?”

        Me in the email: “Mileage is a more useful way to calculate that and here’s the basic formula… plus an example, plus an estimate of the MPG of our vehicles and a reasonable guess at the average price of fuel”

        …hopefully the kid was able to make use of the information…

        Like

      1. I can fix things if I must, I learned that in the Navy. Being old makes that harder. What is needed is a good library, to discover what you don’t know. Problem being, have you scene the state of most Library’s these days, all woke and no reference.

        For others who don’t know, You Tube has a great DIY library on most mechanical things. If it can’t answer your questions, it can steer you in the right direction.

        Like

  16. Wait, Obama was right about something? “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

    Ye gods.

    Oh no! It’s worse than I ever could have possibly imagined.

    Like

      1. Until you hold up what our historical Revolutionaries did. And thought up.

        “Not That Kind of Revolutionary!” they all scream.

        When in the course of human events…

        Well.

        I quite like the idea of freedom. It requires responsibility. Something distinctly lacking when you look Eastward towards the old swamp on the coast and its inhabitant blood sucking parasites. And mosquitoes, too.

        Things could be a lot worse, as they stand now. Will get worse, no matter how we try, for at least a little bit. Unsnarling the mess we’re in is impossible for one man. It’s going to take all of us, working where we’re at, or moving where we can, and doing the job that needs doing.

        Future generations, for those of us fortunate enough to have them of our own, are depending on us. They’ve their own burden to bear. But if we can make that one a bit lighter? That’s a legacy worth sacrificing for.

        To our lives, built upon the foundations laid by our fathers and our fathers’ fathers. And to the next generation. May they rise to the occasion and succeed beyond what we are able.

        Like

          1. The Marxists only wish that their pile of mildewing scribbles were radical.
            The Declaration of Independence and the federalist papers that supported our Republic’s foundation is still the most radical documents ever in mankind’s history. That is why even after all these years, everyone else in the world is still trying to destroy us. Now from within. Truth be told, those have always been with us, they were called the Torrie’s during the revolution. The Democrat party hasn’t changed from them in all this time. They still seek Europe’s approval and still seek to destroy freedom and impose their elitist rule. As far as seeking Europe’s approval that is a fantasy that will never happen, Just ask Russia or the Poles, Italians, etc, etc, etc.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. “About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”

              — Calvin Coolidge

              For once not being silent, or sparing with words.

              https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/speech-on-the-occasion-of-the-one-hundred-and-fiftieth-anniversary-of-the-declaration-of-independence/

              Like

                1. The country quite firmly rejected Wilson when it elected Harding. Sadly, Harding was ineffectual. But his selection of Coolidge az his Vice President was a huge stroke of luck for the country.

                  Like

                  1. “Harding was ineffectual.”

                    Not really. We would have had a Great Depression in 1921 if Harding had reacted to a market crash the way Wilson would have, or Hoover and FDR went on to do. Instead, he acted much as Coolidge went on to do, and the economy boomed after a brief correction, boomed so much the decade became The Roaring Twenties.

                    If that’s “ineffectual”, I’ll take a double with large fries.

                    Like

                    1. IIRC, Harding had plans to roll back the still-remaining Wilson crap, and also cut the government bureaucracy. But he didn’t get much of it done, possibly due to his personality. It was left to Coolidge to do after Harding died in office

                      Thus why I called him “ineffectual”.

                      Government governing less is the ideal. But that requires the President take an active hand keeping the departments in check.

                      Liked by 2 people

                    2. Well, Harding had a scandal that he had to deal with, which probably gummed up the works a bit, too. Not having looked into that one, I’m inclined to think it was ginned up by Wilsonites, purely on the basis of the fact that it was taught in my high school history class only by name, without ANY description of what the actual scandal was, thus seeming to be a means to tar Harding’s reputation even seventy years after his death.

                      Liked by 1 person

                    3. I’ve listened to Amity Schlaes’ book on Coolidge. According to Schlaes, Harding had good intentions. But he had trouble saying no, and he also made some bad choices in friends and allies. The result was corruption around him, even if he was largely clean.

                      Keep in mind that Harding used the word “bloviate” to describe what he, himself, did. I think you can get a general impression of what he probably was like. Surprisingly, IIRC he and Coolidge got along well, despite their very different social attitudes.

                      Teapot Dome was the biggest scandal of his administration. IIRC, the Navy had stored fuel in a mountain called Teapot Dome (because it looked like a teapot). The Sec Interior okayed the sale of the oil to private oil companies via no bid contracts. Congress investigated, and determined that bribes had been paid to the Secretary by the oil companies.

                      Liked by 1 person

      2. And maybe we are — maybe we, and/or the next generation, will have to be.

        But, dear Barry, we’re not going to be the ones fighting off the barbarians trying to abort your glorious leftist revolution. We’re going to be the barbarians, trying to kill off your gloriously noxious weed for good and all.

        And the worst (for you) of it is, we’re not the barbarians at the gates.

        We’re already well inside the gates. Watching and listening, everywhere. Ready to re-do the playbook from a couple centuries back, on all your Redcoats, just as little and just as gently as we can possibly get away with… and still win.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Yeah, I’m beginning to get a “we’re not trapped in here with you, your trapped in here with us!” Kind of feeling.

          Whatifalthist is right, the “elites” have no clue how incredibly enraged with them we really are….

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Ever take a car trip to a slightly rural area with elite-educated know-nothings? I did. In the mid-1990s. Circa twenty-five years ago they were visibly uncomfortable and nervous, and making Deliverance jokes to break the tension only they were feeling.

            Now, granted, that was probably more the fear of ignorance than the fear of knowing they deserved it or were as hated as they clearly hated where they were going, but still, the fear was palpable. And kinda hilarious.

            Like

            1. Heck, I’ve made Deliverance, jokes, and I’ve lived in a small town. But it wasn’t because I hated the place. It was a very rural gas station where it turned out there was a plumber working on the ladies’ toilet and three rough-looking guys in overalls were hanging around the gas pump. Given our next stop was a gas station/Elvis memorabilia store (with working plumbing), I think we’re clear of “city snobbery”.
              Gotta love the South. The upper Midwest and far West (aside from the coast) are great, too.

              Liked by 2 people

              1. There’s saying “squeal like a pig” as a joke, and saying it nervously and trying to pass it off as a joke. It wasn’t the joke itself, it was the context.

                Like

        2. Yeah, I’m beginning to get a “we’re not trapped in here with you, your trapped in here with us!” Kind of feeling.

          Whatifalthist is right, the “elites” have no clue how incredibly enraged with them we really are….

          Like

  17. Look at Sam Brinton. Now imagine that there are thousands of Sam Brintons in positions of authority across the country.

    Pleasant dreams.

    Like

    1. Now realize that you’re not dreaming; there really are thousands of incompetent idiots in positions of authority.

      Hell, the Biden* Regime has managed to assemble an entire administration without including one single competent individual, even by accident. That couldn’t have been easy. Was it the result of some bizarre sort of anti-competence? I mean, I thought ‘Circle Back’ Psaki was bad, but Mop Head makes her look like an eloquent genius.

      “I know! Let’s get a White House Press Secretary whose whole job is pretending to answer questions by not answering them!”

      I have to mute the TV when they show a clip of Kamela; I can feel brain cells dying in agony if I listen to that.
      ———————————
      The President is a mumbling, bumbling, stumbling buffoon, the Vice President believes her inane blather is profound wisdom, the Department Of Justice is practicing injustice, the Secretary Of State is clueless about international diplomacy, the Secretary Of Defense and Chairman Of The Joint Chiefs Of Staff blundered their way through one of the worst military debacles in our history, the Transportation Secretary knows nothing about transportation, the Energy Secretary knows nothing about energy and the Treasury Secretary knows nothing about the economy.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I mean, I say Brinton as the most extreme example, but plug in the name of any other Biden appointee and it still works.

        Like

      2. I have to mute the TV when they show a clip of Kamela; I can feel brain cells dying in agony if I listen to that.

        Tyrus (on Gutfeld!) discovered that accompanying Kamala’s word salads with bongos makes it much less awful – it’s like listening to a 50’s beat poet.

        Like

      5. As maddening as she was, Circleback Psaki was not incompetent. She did exactly what she was hired to do, and did it well enough to annoy those of us not on the left. (Unlike the Mop, who clearly pisses off even friendly reporters.)

        Liked by 1 person

  18. Oh, yes, and on a related note, I totally believe government officials to tell me the truth about aliens when they think Earth is “billions of light-years” from other solar systems. Clearly they know what they’re talking about. Trust them.

    Like

  19. So now the government of Canuckistan is gleefully promoting the next ‘reform’ of their euthanasia law: ‘eligibility’ will be extended to people with mental health problems. Depression, eating disorders and PTSD have been mentioned as ‘qualifying conditions’, particularly when ‘treatment is not available’.

    Call me cynical, but I have suspicions about how ‘available’ treatment will be.

    When they first proposed the law they screeched ‘Slippery Slope Fallacy’ to silence any criticism. “Medically Assisted Dying will only be offered to people with terminal conditions!” they claimed, hoping we would forget that life is a terminal condition. Nobody has survived yet. :-P

    Now they’ve slid half-way down the slope and they’re still protesting.

    Of course Europe has already led the way. In Belgium last year a woman who survived the 2016 Brussels airport bombing was ‘assisted’ due to continuing PTSD. The treatment was successful; she doesn’t have PTSD any more. Or anything else.

    Such are the elitists that have proclaimed themselves ‘Better’ than us Deplorables. They are far too Enlightened and Sophisticated to consider executing terrorists that commit atrocities and murder dozens of people, but they’re perfectly OK with offing the victims, should they prove inconvenient.
    ———————————
    How can Leftroids create a Perfect World when everything they do makes this one worse?

    Like

      1. “Slippery slope is a fallacy” is an invitation to explain formal logic, and the fallacy fallacy, to the person who thinks that “the slipper slope is a fallacy” means “this will not happen.”

        All that “fallacy” means, in the context of the slippery slope, is that a conclusion is not formally supported as a logical conclusion from the given support.
        Which is to say to the “that’s a fallacy!” guys… “congrats, dummy, you just now discovered that what cannot keep on happening, won’t? Do you REALLY want to go into formal logic for this? Because I’m pretty sure your stuff is not logically supported in the least, and your conclusion that fallacy means won’t happen is, itself, a fallacy.”

        Liked by 2 people

          1. “You screamed that would never happen the last six times; it is not mechanically determined, but you sure are pushing hard for the stuff you insist won’t happen.”

            Like

            1. I forget who said it, but he gave a circle something like this:
              That’s not happening!
              You’re crazy to believe that’s happening!
              (Incontrovertible evidence it’s happening):
              All right, it happens sometimes.
              It’s always been done that way and a good thing, too!

              Like

  20. Again, my job is non-essential. But I hear the same story from everyone Either being taught the “current thing” which is actually wrong, or being taught relatively correct things, but not what came before, so there are holes in your knowledge you don’t even know are there and don’t find out until you trip and fall headfirst into them.

    History is the easiest place to see this– look at how much of the nonsense we get is “correcting the record” but the folks they’re teaching never got taught the stuff they’re correcting, and half the time neither did the teacher.

    I got so much sneering about how the first thanksgiving didn’t have turkey and they didn’t wear buckles on their hats and….
    Only place I’d ever seen anything like it was generally teh coloring page that came with the sneer.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I make it a point to explain why I am correcting the book when I do it. “New material from the archive/archaeology/book is shorthand and here’s the actual reason why [thing] happened that way …” I can give sources if the students want. Some of them do.

      Liked by 1 person

  21. My oldest son told me to get on TikTok, and explained how the algorithm worked. The transmission of information is astonishing. (Algorithm: If you like dancing girls, dancing girls is what you will see. Chicken husbandry, goat rearing, tomato growing, and how to can things? That’s what you’ll see.)

    A few months ago, Chickentok — don’t laugh — was all about how the Purina brands were causing hens to stop laying eggs. Change the brands, which everyone did, and hens started laying. I have watched toks about mudding and taping drywall, building a greenhouse, and the occasional flat earth video. I know I’m in the right place in the weirdness when I’m watching turtles floating through space.

    Our youth are not learning in college. They’re learning via alternate streams, and I see it on Youtube and Rumble and on the Toks and I think it’s a gigantic river, GenZ is not interested in the levers of authority and expertise. They want to make things. I think there’s a lot more of them than there are in the parasite class. And they’re having kids.

    Liked by 2 people

  22. Think of the competency crisis as an opportunity. If you’ve got skills and knowledge, you have the world by the throat.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. The Reader thinks you are correct, but not yet. Exactly how long before it gets bad enough to demand competency remains to be determined.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. The Will and knowledge are there, but at 77 the Able has mostly departed. As a totally imaginary :-) example, sniping YES; amphibious assault NO.

        Liked by 1 person

    4. …But I also end up working really long hours, because it’s really damned difficult to find, hire, and train a competent replacement, and when I do, everybody else wants them and keeps hiring them away for LOTS more money than I can offer.

      I can’t begrudge them their success, but I really could use more trained, competent, self-motivated help around here…

      Liked by 1 person

    6. I often reiterate my homeschooled kids will be overlords in the future, sitting on their high pedestals in the gulag, explaining basic physics like projectiles follow parabolic trajectories or how to make an electrical circuit.

      Like

  23. The Reader saw this coming at the Great Big Defense Contractor two decades ago. In fact he made his career during those two decades by fixing messes the middle management couldn’t deal with (and breaking a lot of the ‘rules’ along the way). For most of that period a few senior executives covered me as long as stuff got fixed. When they had all retired it was time for me to go as well.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Nothing so… exciting?… but when $BigBoss came back from running another site in an another state (withheld to avoid flamewar) there was a marked change. Suddenly he wasn’t super-critical (at times nearly supercritical…) at every little thing real or imagined. Instead it was, in effect, ‘Person is moving, things are getting done, so.. leave them be to continue that.’ There is still some intervention, but now it seems only for actual Big Deals.

      Like

      1. “…super-critical (at times nearly supercritical…)…”

        Beautiful! I’m definitely remembering that one! ;-)

        Like

  24. I’m wondering if the so-called Woke Watchdogs consider “competency” part of White Supremacy? :twisted:

    Like

    4. Pretty much. Certain individuals have openly declared things such as “showing up on time” to be white supremacy.

      Like

  25. This is not new. Worse perhaps, but not new. Mark Twain’s comment on how ignorant his father was in Twain’s youth and how much the old man learned by the time Twain matured, was really an observation of how much of real value we (can)learn as adults (if we make the effort). I think a big problem over the last couple of decades is that a lot of people have lost the drive to keep learning.
    Go look up some issues of Popular Mechanics or Popular Science from the 1920s and 1930s. Google has them all scanned in. The covers and articles are interesting, but what you should look at are the ads at the back of the magazines. Every third ad is for a course or lessons in some skill or ability. Some are of little use, like the classic “They laughed when I sat down to play” ads for piano lessons by mail, but many are very useful.
    For example, shoe making and shoe repair. I’ve wondered, when the source of “cheap” Chinese rubber and canvas shoes runs out, will we just run around barefoot? Back in 1920, dad would just resole the kid’s shoes, (on a steel last that you can’t find anymore save possibly on ebay), and those kids could get back to wearing them out again.
    Now look at a modern magazine or look online. Other than YouTube, where you have to search out your own curriculum, there is very little instruction available. By the way, I was one of the non-demonstrating students in the 1960s and I agree with you that all that crap about peace and justice was just cover for getting an easy slide through college and a nice soft position in academia afterward. One of the stupidest ideas of the time was for students to devise their own curricula. Why bother going to college if you already know it all? And if you don’t, how do you expect to know what you should study and in what order? A curriculum is a map. Without it you can jump around You Tube and the rest of the internet, flitting and sipping at whatever looks interesting. In a few years you will know something about the subject, but you won’t have mastered it. That probably will require learning some parts that are difficult and, likely boring. Unless someone tells you about them, you won’t know you need them.
    I’m in the fifth decade of a STEM field. I got a good base in college, meaning that I understood the terminology at the time and got most of the basic principles down. At least 90% of what I now know and use came after, sometimes long after, college. I am in a field where continuous study is essential. I have watched many of my colleagues fall by the wayside because they wouldn’t or didn’t think they could learn more. Sometimes it was a new technology and sometimes it was an old one that they had missed and needed to learn. I’m not smarter or more energetic than they were, I was just lucky enough to have been ejected from the corporate side of the business early enough to start having to figure things out on my own without the company leading me by the hand.
    I started by saying that a lot of people have lost the drive to keep learning. When you are a specialist in a big corporate structure, you don’t need to do any more than keep up with your area, and the company will often even pay for short courses for you. I think that as corporations downsize and people have to find their own way again, the drive to learn will come back.
    There may be a decent entrepreneurial opportunity here. Really, go look at those old magazine ads and think about it. If you come up with a good, reasonably priced course, I’d be interested.

    Like

    1. I think a big problem over the last couple of decades is that a lot of people have lost the drive to keep learning.

      Looking at businesses, they stopped teaching.

      I suspect it has to do with the Boomers– not as in it’s a moral flaw, but as in they are a big lump in the snake, and by the time they would’ve been training people, they’d all already BEEN trained. So you ahve a lapse…and the nobody knows how to train, and nobody budgets to train anybody, and then they wonder why stuff goes to pot.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. You are correct, within the employer/employee framework. My point was that people have lost the drive to learn or rather that they don’t see the need to take the initiative to learn. If someone is willing to train you-great, but if not, why wait around for something that may never come.
        That big lump in the snake has been very comfortable for many of the people in it. For now.

        Like

        1. Ah, but they’re not waiting. They’ve just gone elsewhere.

          Hillbilly Kitchen; Dad, how do I?; Tasting History with Max Miller; Skill Tree; a million videos on how to do This Thing with That Thing, and that’s besides gaming walk-throughs and philosophy stuff.

          The information is there, now, just largely for free, because you can’t make a living selling books on how to do it anymore.

          Although, oddly enough, we did just get Baking Yesteryear by B. Dylan Hollis, literally an hour and a half ago, and his channel is all “how do you actually do these old recipes, and do they work?”

          https://www.youtube.com/@BDylanHollis/featured

          Liked by 2 people

            1. Part of what got my attention is that the guy actually tried stuff, and tries to do good reviews.

              A lot of folks picked up that nasty habit of “be nasty, pretend it’s impressive to find a negative in a pile of hundreds.”

              Liked by 1 person

        2. Uh. This is not true. it’s not those darn kids.
          Look, there are entire channels on youtube where people make a living from teaching stupid things: How too cook. How to iron. How to change a tire.
          The problem is these kids were SO badly taught most don’t know what they don’t know. And that’s the issue.
          Heck, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

          Like

          1. My mother has had to teach college students how to tie shoes and take off button-down shirts… mostly so she didn’t have to spend hours sewing the buttons back on the costumes after the students try to take them off like they’re hoodies.

            Liked by 1 person

        3. COVID did something similar with Scout troops, at least here where the lockdowns went stupid long. We had a bad knowledge gap when it came to camping and cooking, because the ones who were good at it missed the teaching time, so all the newbies were flailing.

          A year is a huge amount of time for that sort of thing, and it was a good 18-22 months before most troops could get camping again.

          Like

        4. Not lost, was deliberately beaten out of them.

          Which is what the schools were always intended to do, its just that for a while it was necessary to pretend to teach some useful things.

          Like

      2. As far as teaching goes, companies also started doing the bare minimum for employee retention in the interest of saving money. Which meant they had no confidence in retaining an employee they’d spent money training, and why spend money to train employees that were going use that training to jump ship to a competitor that was going to pay better then you were?

        It’s worth pointing out that the start of the problem is treating your employees as expendable, but that has immediate savings that you can point at as an accomplishment, so that’s what got done.

        Like

        2. started doing the bare minimum for employee retention in the interest of saving money.
          …………..

          So, frustrating. My first two jobs after getting the second degree, if I could justify going to specific training, I could go. Even got some skills updating (jump start) from the state under dislocated workers program when the first job (timber company) went away. Third job, not a chance that ice has in that hot place.

          I was never apposed to learning new skills, whether on the job or not. The problem was if not on the job then it became “When?” seriously, “When?!?!” It isn’t like we weren’t learning new skills when not imparting our previously hard learned skills, and even teaching, or at least guiding those teaching, but those skills weren’t particularly applicable to the current or any future job.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. When? is a real problem. Parkinson’s Law says work will expand to fill the time available. That applies to everything beside work too. Unless you are so blessed with extra time that you can sit and watch the clouds pass by, your days will be filled with something.
            I have found that keeping a book handy for times that I have to wait on something or someone keeps that time from being a complete waste. If you are single and eat alone, a book or video during dinner won’t cut into other things.
            Otherwise, you have to look at all those things that have filled the available time and decide which can be pared back to leave time for study.
            Have you ever started a novel that “you couldn’t put down? I have repeatedly. I snuck time to read bits of them on a nearly addictive basis. I also set other things aside so I could
            finish them. I finally realized I could use the same approach on, for example, The Art of Electronics as I could on Mickey Spillane.
            Taking Fate by the Throat is something that you have to do for yourself. It has costs.

            Like

            1. I have time now. Just not interested in continuing learning for something I am done with :-) During working years, it was family time that ate up spare hours outside of work; and while working “what is lunch time?” While I was between jobs I did take the time to update skills, on our dime if I had to. Just so whatever could go onto subsequent resumes that went out. Paid off. Otherwise the skill set list and experience screamed “I can and will learn anything I need to.”

              Like

        3. A big part of the reason for doing the bare minimum for employee retention is that financialization has led to an acquisition/divestiture cycle in which the new owner of a company -for which he had to pay top dollar to beat his competition – has to find a way to make the stock price rise in the next couple of quarters. He isn’t too interested in the long term value of this asset. He has an ‘exit strategy’ which is to get the stock price up and flip it to the next buyer in a year or so. There are a whole vocabulary of euphemisms for this: Building Value is a favorite. Usually this amounts to outsourcing your customer service to New Delhi and replacing your tech staff with consultants (who may be the same people as before, but with a severance package and now no pension or benefits or emotional investment in the job). Your overall payroll is much lower and profits appear to be up.
          Teaching? Pshaw!

          Liked by 1 person

        4. Catch 22. Why stay with a company that won’t train you or pay what you’re worth?,
          Why train an employee who will leave for greener pastures as soon as he receives the certificate of training?

          Like

          1. “A term of indenture” used to be the solution for that.

            These days it’s usually phrased as “We will pay for your training if you work for us for three years afterwards.”

            Like

      3. I have some recent experience that really drives this home, and gives some hope.

        I just switched careers from teaching to manufacturing. I am astounded by the stark difference between the terrible way things are done at the school, and the much better way at my new job.

        From talking with my co-workers I do think I have gotten lucky in finding a good company, but even so the one-on-one attention and training I am getting is astounding after coming from the mass production of people style of the school system.

        Like

    2. Worn out tires make decent replacement boot/shoe soles. Once can make sandals out of them. OK, So the tire sandals blacken your feet….. Granted, cutting up a steel-belted radial is not exactly like slicing leather….. Some car mats also work.

      The tricky part is recessing the holes for the rope/cord, so you dont wear through the cordage.

      Folks, being able to shod folks feet is a killer survival skill.

      Like

      1. My calculus professor wore shorts, Hawaiian shirts and old-tire sandals most of the time.

        He did know how to teach calculus, so sartorial oddities didn’t matter much.

        Like

      2. Barge shoe cement is the best thing I have found to repair soles that have separated from the shoe. I’ve tried clamping them overnight with poor results. I finally read the instructions and found that letting the cement dry for ten minutes or so then hammering the soles on to the bottom of the shoe works well. I have an old bricklayers hammer that I put in a vise for a last. Some day I want to get a real last.
        I look back fondly to the past, when the shoe outlasted the laces.

        Like

        1. Since I have learned to weld and do some minor metal working, my internal opinion on hard to find tools has changed from “purchase – if I can find one” to “hmm… I can make that.”

          Like

    3. There are a lot of on-line learning options available these days. Want to learn how to repair something in your home? It’s on YouTube. Want to learn how to use SQL? Take an online class.

      And there are a lot of sites (I just finished the Google Cybersecurity Certificate on Coursera, for example) where you can learn stuff. It’s a big business.

      It’s not that the desire for learning has gone away. It’s that the teaching medium has changed. Correspondence courses no longer exist because they’ve been replaced by online courses.

      Liked by 1 person

    4. I suspect the Twain thing wasn’t a comment on his father’s actual increase in knowledge over time. It was a realization that, despite the not atypical belief by young men that their elders are old fuddy duddies, as they mature themselves they realize that, “Hey, the Old Man was right!”

      Like

    5. –I’m in the fifth decade of a STEM field. I got a good base in college, meaning that I understood the terminology at the time and got most of the basic principles down. At least 90% of what I now know and use came after, sometimes long after, college. I am in a field where continuous study is essential.

      This is true of almost every profession (or the profession simply ceases to exist.) Yes, in ME, Newton’s three laws still apply, but the tech and situations they are applied in keeps changing. Everything else in places new discoveries. Even if you don’t need to learn a new skill in your subject matter field per se, you need to learn new tools, new methods of communication, new personal skills like training someone else.

      It’s all built on learning to learn, which was what previously college and high school were about–some absolute basic skills to mastery after which you could bootstrap knowledge because you’d learned to learn. And you have for decades.

      Neither hs nor college teaches that skill of learning to learn anymore. They barely teach any skills to mastery, and what they teach is spoonfed with make work, so young people who can’t find the answer on stackoverflow or reddit in 2.5 minutes quit. Because they lack basic mastery of arithmetic and reading comprehension or writing a grammatically correct sentence, they can’t dig in and just pore over something, do problems, build a prototype. They don’t know how to RTFM because they don’t know how to read for content.

      This is why they can’t become competent. It will take young people who learned to learn.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. My BigTechCompany employer is pushing for certifications, by our training or others. Those seem to matter more than degrees. Furthermore, they expect them to be maintained at current knowledge..

          Liked by 1 person

  27. In local supermarkets, I have had two striking experiences:
    My purchases came to something over $90. I handed the cashier five twenties. She was confused and couldn’t figure out what amount to enter into the cash register. She asked the bagger for help and the bagger told her to put in $100.
    On a different purchase (earlier today, in fact), the cashier could figure out that problem. But when the register told her I had $5.94 coming back, she handed me a five, and counted out three quarters—and then paused, looking confused, and started to take out a fourth quarter, and then put it back. I said, “You need a dime, a nickel, and some pennies.” She was able to figure out that I should get four pennies.
    Here were two different young women who could not do the simple addition and subtraction of a cashier’s job. It seems that they must never have learned grade school arithmetic. I must say I was rather dumbfounded the first time . . .
    (I’ll note that the second young women said something about never using cash to buy things. Perhaps debit cards and phone apps are depriving an entire generation of regular practice in arithmetic.)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. One of the side effects of that innumeracy is that it makes the friction of trying to use physical currency higher. Especially when you try to get rid of pennies and singles by passing the cashier more money than is strictly necessary. As an example, paying a bill of $6.51 with a twenty, two singles, and a penny… and then they look at you like you’ve grown a third head, because the twenty obviously covers the whole thing. Followed shortly by a look of wonder like it’s some kind of magic trick when the register tells them the change comes to $15.50.

      Heaven forfend you find your penny after they’ve entered the amount. The best is when they still decide they need to break a new penny roll.

      Like

      1. In some systems, entering an amount other than what you are given is a fired-for-cause offense.

        Because folks figured out how to steal from the register that way.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. Not a new problem: innumeracy has been around long enough to have its own book.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_(book)
        Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences is a 1988 book by mathematician John Allen Paulos about innumeracy (deficiency of numeracy) as the mathematical equivalent of illiteracy: incompetence with numbers rather than words. Innumeracy is a problem with many otherwise educated and knowledgeable people.
        …
        Paulos speaks mainly of the common misconceptions about, and inability to deal comfortably with, numbers, and the logic and meaning that they represent
        ….
        Paulos discusses innumeracy with quirky anecdotes, scenarios, and facts, encouraging readers in the end to look at their world in a more quantitative way.
        …
        He also stresses the problem between the actual number of occurrences of various risks and popular perceptions of those risks happening. The problems of innumeracy come at a great cost to society. Topics include probability and coincidence, innumeracy in pseudoscience, statistics, and trade-offs in society.

        Like

      3. That last bit is why, when I’m wanting to use up my change, I’ve taken to always handing the cashier the coins first, and waiting to hand over the $20 until last. Because i’ve seen so many cashiers take the $20, punch it into the register, and then stare at me blankly when I try to hand them the three pennies that would make my $1.22 change into $1.25.

        It’s always the young cashiers, too. If they’re older, and especially (in my experience) if they’re older women who look Hispanic, I’ve found they can usually do mental math even faster than I can (and I’m no slouch). It’s the young ones who don’t know how to do it in their heads.

        Like

        1. The self-checkout machines around here have a recorded voice saying “Insert coins before bills.” I suspect it’s specifically to deal with this issue.

          Like

          1. In the case of the machines, they can’t look at you and see if you’re still digging in your pocket for change. (Well, they do have cameras, so in theory you could write video-analysis AI to figure that out, it’s just not worth the very expensive cost). So the programmers who wrote their software had two options:

            1) After you insert a $20, require you to press an on-screen to say “I’m done inserting cash, now please give me my change,” or else wait a while before deciding “Yep, no coins forthcoming, let’s just change that $20.”

            2) Make change immediately as soon as the cash inserted is over the amount due, and require coins before bills if you’re planning to use coins.

            Obviously, they picked option 2, and quite rightly IMHO. Because it would have gotten very annoying to have to insert a $20, then wait 30 seconds for the machine to decide that no more coins were forthcoming. Multiply that wait by the number of customers using a self-service machine over the course of a year and you’ve wasted lots and LOTS of people’s time. And people would also have gotten annoyed by having to push an extra button to say “I’m done inserting cash”. “You stupid machine,” they would be saying, “don’t you know that $20 is more than $19.76? I’m done, I shouldn’t have to tell you that!” They might or might not realize that inserting one more penny would get them a quarter in change: they might realize it but be out of pennies, for example.

            Anyway, yes, the “insert coins before bills” thing is indeed to deal with that specific issue.

            Like

      4. To be fair, sometimes it is just tiredness and the breaking of a routine. I personally have the math and can make change, but sometimes Mr. Brain does not want to change gears.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. I don’t see that with being handed five twenties for an amount in the nineties. That’s got to be the single most common cash payment in that case. But she couldn’t even count “twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred.”
          And for that matter, giving ninety-four cents in change ought to be a standard things to have to do. It isn’t as if she had to calculate the amount; she just had to hand me coins that added up to it.
          I’ll grant that the second might be disrupted by tiredness. But I don’t see either case as a plausible breaking of routine.

          Like

        2. The other day I used a calculator to figure out how old I am. Look, yes, I know. Also, I can do that in my head, since it’s an exact number. But my mind refused to engage and I couldn’t remember.
          Yes, I find those moments very frightening but I understand they’re normal.

          Like

      2. And this is why it’s worth the slightly longer wait to get in the longer line with the little old lady at the register, instead of going right to the front of the line with the kid at the register – usually.

        Like

        2. Yes. I have strong preferences for cashiers at the megamarts. Unfortunately, with the peculiar hours at the Kroger affiliate, there’s no guarantee that any of the desired people will be on shift. I’ve learned minor appreciation for the self checkout lane. The independent store doesn’t muck with hours, but the really sarcastic cashier is way too popular. She’s fun. :)

          I did get the third-head experience somewhere when I added some change to reduce the ballast in my pockets. Took them a while to figure it out.

          Like

    3. They don’t know how to tell time on an analog clock, measure anything with a ruler or tape measure, cut anything accurately with scissors or read cursive either.

      I am finding that kids coming into middle school don’t actually know that “sign here” to check out your computer means writing your first and last name on the line.

      “Dear, we have 3 Nevaehs in 6th grade you need to write your last name too.”

      Blank Stare.

      Like

      1. Grin. I pity son’s schools. Son’s first name is very common with his peers. Our last name is not uncommon. So, schools had to require students to sign with their full name, first, middle, and last. Not even middle initial was enough. Oh. Wait. I guess that is why they had student numbers.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Doing school photography, there was one school where we had to start having students sign in with their student ID (this is prior to the computers being able to do it at the cameras and they still had camera cards.) It was somewhere around the fourth Jennifer Vang that they realized it…

          Like

        2. Way back when I was a keypunch operator for our school, they decided that one, let’s say, Sally Helen Jones was going to be Sally H Jones and the other one just Sally Jones.

          Like

          1. In Longview WA, which is a small town. Specialty clinic had clients from not only Longview, but Kelso, and surrounding rural towns. Still compared to Portland clinics, very small set of clientele. They pulled 9 charts before they found mine. Same first name, same last name, same middle initial, 3 with the same middle name. None with same address or phone number, or birthday. Pre-computer storage, so had to open files to get further information. Added my maiden name to the file folder. That was one combination that was going to be unique.

            Son’s case they just had the boys use their full middle name. Same first initial but none had the same middle name.

            Like

      2. Show them vernier calipers and watch their little brains short out. Some of them would have trouble with dial calipers. A slide rule would make them catatonic.

        I can’t help remembering that Isaac Asimov story about the guy considered an eccentric genius because he’d figured out how to do simple arithmetic without a calculator.

        Big miss on the ending, though — microcontrollers are so cheap nobody would even think of making human-piloted guided missiles. You can get a PIC a million times more powerful than the computers used on Apollo for a quarter. 20¢ each if you buy a thousand.
        ———————————
        He’s a lumberjack, and he’s OK.

        Like

        1. Well, it was a politician suggesting a human-piloted missile, iirc, so allowances must be made.

          :P

          Like

        2. For the record, the Asimov story is “The Feeling of Power”.
          https://archive.org/details/1958-02_IF/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater

          Imaginos is correct about the technological obsolescence of Asimov’s predictions (no one is infallible!); however, as I read the story, it’s less a prophecy than a satirical take on all the mad scientist tales where the evil genius unleashes horror with a fiendish scientific invention.
          Humans are quite capable of destruction without any technology at all.

          One of the few things the new generations remain competent at.

          Like

      3. “time on an analog clock”

        The last summer camp I went to, some previous troop had left a cheap analog clock attached to a tree. I did have one scout ask what time it was, and when I pointed at the clock, said he couldn’t read it. (The rest of them did fine, though.)

        Like

        2. ” I did have one scout ask what time it was”

          Just before I left Cub Scouting, the “Bear Claws” knife carving requirements were amended by adding an option to the actual carving project: use a knife to open a letter, open a taped package, and cut a piece of string.

          Like

      4. “I am finding that kids coming into middle school don’t actually know that “sign here” to check out your computer means writing your first and last name on the line.”

        Which may be because you can “sign” with any squiggle of sufficient length and the signature screens in retail, etc. will take it.

        Like

      5. I’m having flashbacks to my 10th-grade Spanish class. By freak coincidence, there were four Raptors in the class, and for reasons that elude me, the teacher – who was a miserable waste of space (seriously, she’s the kind of person who is perpetually miserable and wants everyone else to be as miserable as her) put all four of us right next to each other. Then she’d call on us, usually when none of us had our hands raised, and then get mad when the correct Raptor didn’t respond.

        Actually, I take that back: I think she just wasn’t paying attention when she put the seating chart together because about 3/4 of the way through the year she FINALLY realized that all four of us were sitting next to each other. Of course she didn’t apologize for all the threats of punishment when the “correct” Raptor didn’t answer her questions.

        Like

    4. It rings up for 8.86. I give the cashier 10.11. She tries to give me back the coins. I say, Ring it in, which usually works. A manager has to tell her to ring it it in.

      Two dollars and a quarter later, she is a little illuminated.

      Like

      2. “Please don’t disturb me right now. The grade I mis-add might be yours.”

        Boggle in Student “Um, yes, ma’am?”

        Second student: “Dude, she does it in her head!”

        Collective boggle in Student

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Oh, I impressed my three year younger cousin with being able to do math in my head when I was 19…. :D To him it was unobtanium. raised in france, poor kid.

          Like

    6. Yes, they don’t handle cash ever. In many chains, they are simply not allowed to handle money, So they’re not taught to “count up” as a simple strategy for making correct change.

      So it doesn’t matter if it’s taught in school 3 days a year, because no one ever practice the skill beyond that.

      But deeper, kids do not know basic arithmetic or number sense. They don’t know multiplication facts to automatically, they don’t know pairs of numbers that make a hundred, they don’t know what 100 hundreds is. They’re not taught it. I know this sounds absurd but it’s true. They’re taught math appreciation in school, not math. “Look at how pretty this is! How would you think about this problem?” Then they move onto rising sea levels and dying polar bears and crayola curriculum.

      Like

      1. The Reader’s son hated that the Reader drilled him with flash cards. However, he is one of the few 30 somethings that I’ve found that can do basic arithmetic in his head. He thanked me for it a couple of years ago.

        Like

          1. But I commonly pay with cash. I’ve yet to have a cashier tell me, “I’m sorry, I can’t accept that” or “I’m sorry, I can’t give you change.”

            Like

            1. Depends on where you shop…. and what their hiring pool is. If they’re hiring immigrants who’ve had to deal with currency all their lives…..

              Like

                2. I’ve never seen one of those. Not in any of the four grocery stores we use now, or in the drugstore, or the convenience stores where we get gas. They all take cash. Often enough they have only one line open, so they can’t very well have special rules for it.

                  And it was in grocery stores that I encountered those two cashiers who couldn’t do the arithmetic of making change.

                  What was distinctive about them was that they were both comparatively young. . . .

                  Like

            2. I have been told it rather often. At fast food or a local coffeeshop, they actually say “we don’t take cash.” At the grocery store, they take it but they don’t have to give change, the machine does. But at a Panera or similar chain, I usually wait while the poor attendant goes to find a manager. In the worst case, they stand around waiting for a manager because they don’t want to initiate asking for help, but wait hoping someone will come up and tell them what to do.

              Liked by 1 person

                1. Old barracks lawyer story, not true.

                  Legal tender for debts, not for all transactions; when you made the food order, you accept the limitations.

                  Came about because of folks doing stuff like changing the terms after a debt was established– “oh, I will only accept payment in 13th century gold stamped with Caesar’s head. Tee-hee, you didn’t have it! Forfeit!”

                  Some local areas have laws that require accepting cash, but even then it’s on pain of fine, not “you get it free.”

                  https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm

                  Is it legal for a business in the United States to refuse cash as a form of payment?
                  There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law that says otherwise.

                  Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled “Legal tender,” states: “United States coins and currency [including Federal Reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal Reserve Banks and national banks] are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues.” This statute means that all U.S. money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor.

                  Like

              2. The only chain we eat at is Chipotle; C and I both have food restrictions, different sets, and they have food we can both eat. They take cash or my debit card with no fuss. The one restriction is that they don’t provide for tipping with a debit card.

                Other than that: two national chains of supermarkets and one that’s more local, a national chain of drugstores, a haircutting chain, FedEx, UPS, USPS, a national chain of coffee houses and a couple of local chains, a mineral store, a hippie merchandise store, a used bookstore, I think a jeweler (not sure if I’ve given them cash, but maybe for a watch battery), a couple of museums, a zoo, a toll road . . . can’t think of anyplace that hesitates to accept cash. I suppose various medical, dental, and optometric practices may not be set up for it; I haven’t tested in those cases. We’re in the bluest city in eastern Kansas, and I don’t think “we don’t take cash” is even on the horizon here.

                I prefer to get out cash every week or so, and pay small and routine expenses out of that. It makes it easier to have an intuitive sense of how much I’m spending.

                Like

            3. Some places (mostly gas stations/convenience stores), the registers have little gizmos on them that automatically dispense coins. Cashiers still hand over bills, but they never touch coins aside from reloading the dispenser (and I think managers might have to do that? Never seen one actually run out before, so… yeah).

              Like

  28. saw what they were teaching mine which amounted to making it impossible for them to learn anything real. So I taught them as much as I could around/over/under the school. This means they’re good on the basics. But I didn’t do their professional training. They’re trying to do that over/around/despite the schools/system. Yeah….
    …………….

    Us too. What was hilarious is we were used to getting push back from school teachers on how we weren’t doing our son “any favors” by tutoring him and going ahead of the class and beyond the curriculum. Rolls eyes. Not like we didn’t make the kid do the work.

    Like

    1. You realize you were not only talking to a willing slave, but to a willing stupid, yes? make sure your kids see it and understand.

      Like

  29. Pingback: Links and Comments | Rockport Conservatives

  31. Couple of things occur to me.

    First, despite having been trained in hand-tool and machine cabinet making, what I don’t know about hand tools would fill volumes. The same is true for a lot of other things I was trained at, including physical therapy and Anthropology.

    Training, generally in my experience, does not survive contact with the Real World.

    But notwithstanding that voluminous gap, I get stuff done. I know most of what I need to get by. Anything I don’t know I can look up or McGyver. I am what those pointed-head, pencil-necked Educators call a Life Long Learner.

    And WHY IS THAT, REALLY?!!! How is it that a smarter that average geezer like myself is still screwing around trying to learn new stuff all the time? I’m old! I should be retired! Most old guys my age are not trying to learn how to use generative AI to make cover art. But I am, because I have to.

    Which brings up the other thing, we are living in a changing environment. Taking publishing as an example, literally everything anyone knew about publishing 20 years ago was obsolete 10 years ago. What was current in 2014 was obsolete in 2019. Where we are now, absolutely nobody has any idea. Anyone who says they do is selling something.

    Because we have never been here before. Never once, in all of Human history, have we been faced with circumstances like this, with tools like this. We are in a age of not just change, not just rapid change, but -accelerating- change.

    And that, I believe, may be what is contributing to the appearance that so many people are incompetent. The opportunity to build expertise in most trades now is gone. Things change so fast that by the time you figure out what you’re doing, it is already obsolete.

    Take woodworking. The people doing serious commercial woodworking spend all their time editing CAD drawings, fiddling with 5-axis routers, and tending their logistics chain. From inspiration to shipping out the finished product, no one ever touches a hand tool. No one even touches the product if it can be arranged, because human labour is ludicrously expensive. When did it get like this? Around the 1990s to 2000s.

    What’s next for woodworking? They really want to eliminate all those guys editing CAD drawings. I expect a lot of furniture design companies like IKEA have high hopes for generative AI. It’s 2023 today, by 2028 or sooner I expect an awful lot of CAD wranglers will be learning to code, as the saying goes.

    Which will look like an extreme shortage of competent AI wranglers, but what it will really be is an unprecedented tool entering the marketplace so fast that nobody knows how to use it yet. By the time they figure it out, there will be a new release. By the time -schools- start teaching it, it’ll be obsolete and the next thing will come along.

    So don’t put your faith in schools. Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach become apparatchiks at universities.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Even programming. How many tools are 4th and 5th code generation? I used to joke that the reason I had a job is because non-coders but “programmers” could use the tools but not get everything wanted. One of the most frustrating marketing tools TPTB at my job from ’96 to ’02 was a pull through tool that “allowed non-programmers to write programs for the hardware”. No. It allowed non-C programmers to write C code, that compiled into programs for the hardware. Still needed to be a programmer if they were writing anything complicated.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Programming changes faster than anything. Tools that were current 10 years ago were relegated to the dustbin of history 7 years ago, we’re three or four generations on from that now, and what’s Hot has been around for 6 months.

        This seems not to have penetrated to HR. I keep seeing job postings wanting two years experience with tools that debuted six months ago.

        Like

        1. keep seeing job postings wanting two years experience with tools that debuted six months ago.
          ………….

          Not new. I ran directly into this in the ’80s, ’90s, and early ’00s. Son ran into it early ’10s. This is why practicing programmers sign up for beta programs. Still a stretch to say two years experience. But at least better than however long since official release.

          Third hand, minimum, but hubby golfed with someone whose sister’s husband worked at a job recruiting company. Essentially the word was that the software for those job boards won’t let less than 2 years experience on any specific tool set to be entered, unless it is an entry job situation. This was in response to our son having difficulty getting work without the two year required experience (not programming, but principle applies). My question what was their excuse 30 – 40 years ago where software wasn’t behind the job postings, just HR.

          I got around the requirements not by lying but by pointing out how the experience I did have translated to what the were asking for. After all, it is impossible to beta everything coming out, and who knows what is going to take off in the popularity contest? Got the correct buzz words on the cover letter and resume so took actual person to reject VS a program scanning. Always put through resume and cover letter through proper channels, but also tried to identify the correct target who needed to make the hire. Got me a lot of interviews, if not a lot of job offers. OTOH some of those not job offers were hidden blessings (as in companies going out of business, either because door shut, or purchased and raided, a few years after not getting that job).

          Liked by 1 person

          1. This explains a lot.

            What is your opinion on the software engineering job market this year? Where is a new engineer’s job search best concentrated if they want to do full-stack development?

            Inquiring minds want to know.

            Like

            1. I do not know.

              I’ve been out of the development for 7 1/2 years. Touched on web front end briefly while learning C# in ’02. Never got there for full development. Did do full stack development (user interface through back end data storage retrieval, manipulation, and reporting) with workstations (where software ran) and servers (data and programs stored) all the software I worked on, but not user interface using browsers and over the internet (unless you count VPN). Love how the terminology has changed for something that has been happening in small companies forever.

              Seriously. What you want to look for is small companies where they need people who can work on all aspects of systems, and have the ability to figure things out.

              That said. Check out Cascade Software Systems – https://www.cascadegovsoftware.com/. While the main system runs on servers with workstations, or via VPN. I know there is a transition going on to allow web and app access. Big complication is what happens when no Cell Service (county wanting this in 2016 is Shasta, where work areas with no cell, no satellite, and no traditional landline access happens).

              I also know Cascade programmers work from home (as of the pandemic, and never going back, physical office was downsized). Worth a shot to inquire at any rate. Oh. Cascade Software Systems is one of those companies that was orphaned and purchased by a Canadian private equity that collects these companies. Current manager was the designated heir until he and his wife declined to purchase the company. Been there 25 – 30 years. Other long term employees have been there 20+ years too. Manager and one programmer work out of the office by choice (programmer matter of internet connectivity at residence). Other long term employee works out of Redmond, Oregon. IT manager works out of Creswell, Oregon. Company hired a programmer who is based out of Portland last year (lasted? That I don’t know. New employees don’t have a good track record of sticking. Don’t know why. I can guess.) I worked there from ’04 through Jan 2016 before retiring (reason I pulled the plug wouldn’t apply working from home, and that drama is long gone now). That all written, I do not know if they are hiring or not. Repeating – worth checking out.

              Liked by 1 person

              2. “Big complication is what happens when no Cell Service (county wanting this in 2016 is Shasta, where work areas with no cell, no satellite, and no traditional landline access happens).”

                Check Starlink.

                Like

                1. Check Starlink.
                  ……….

                  Now. Yes. Even then not sure bandwidth is enough. Even internet hard lines in some areas have/had major bandwidth VPN issues. Which is why there were the Intermec handheld data collection programs (very simple data collection programs).

                  Like

                1. Welcome. Good Luck.

                  Did I mention? Or just imply, that job also involves user support, not only programming both front end and back end code. Not a bad thing. I learned as much from long term customers (how system was used and why) as I did reading code or going to the boss then, current manager, and co-workers. I mean there were days I wanted to toss the phone out the window because stupid thing wouldn’t stop ringing. But didn’t happen that often. Most the clients I dealt with learned to email, with pictures, unless emergency. The only part I didn’t participate in were system demo and sales, and group training whether onsite at clients, in our office (which was rare), or online (new since pandemic).

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. The only part I didn’t participate in were system demo and sales, and group training whether onsite at clients, in our office (which was rare), or online (new since pandemic).

                    This was nearly my favorite thing. I was lead tester on a fairly complicated product, and I asked to attend the corporate training they were offering.

                    Wound up teaching about the last 1/4 of the class; I had access to all my test installations to show stuff.

                    My favorite thing was test results. Either everything worked fine, so one could be happy it all worked, or it would fail spectacularly or weirdly, and I could laugh at it and go show the developer.

                    Like

                    1. Oh. We got calls from the boss when he was onsite training all the time. Drop what you are doing and get the change to the Boss and the Client’s install immediately if not faster. Not always fixes, in fact rarely fixes. More like what about? Triggering turning on switches, tweaks to new clients forms, etc. Another ongoing issue was when forms weren’t auto installed either for the boss or the new client. That one I finally got the chance to solve once and for all. All form programs had default generic forms compiled into the program, modified by basic client information automatically. Took care of 85% of the clients (given new clients before generally got “make custom form from prior client’s form”). The other 15% the program checked for a custom form and used that. No custom form. Use generic generated. Solved a lot of new client problems.

                      Not that I didn’t do training. Did all the time one on one over the phone. Also wrote a lot of “I really do not want to go over this, again” documents for clients. While the software had documentation, the this field is. It did not have How, Why, or software for dummies without the cartoons new user, be long term clients with new user, or new clients. Some of the documentation was written to outline “Okay. Here is how this feature changed and why. Here are your options for requesting these types of additions.” Also did the same for my coworkers not entirely because I knew I was retiring and there were parts of the system only I worked on. Not universal, but the system is so huge, it worked out that each of us had their little pockets of expertise.

                      Like

          1. tired of being the essential person at his essential job. VERY.
            …………..

            If you are essential to the job you are on then you don’t get to work on anything new coming up, or allowed to leave (somehow it happens).

            That is the time to get out. Or at minimum start scheduling the exit, even if not immediate. (One is allowed to dream.) Yes, I know. A lot easier to write than to do, and timing sucks.

            I handled mine with passwords. Starting with: “IAmSoOutofHere1” and variations (hey they made us change it monthly, I got creative) ending with “20160131Done” and variations once I had a pull the plug date. Granted by that time I was at 6 months and counting, even if I didn’t give notice until after the yearly bonus check was cashed. Done. Not stupid.

            Liked by 1 person

      2. CS kids don’t even build their own computer in a breadboard anymore in their major. There aren’t any kits you can buy even if you want to teach it yourself to young people. The colleges all use simulation software. They’re so far removed from reality into systemsthat I don’t think anyone under 40 could boot up anything from scratch. The folks doing drones/robotics/sensors are still aware of building actual circuits with a resistor or transistor, but the guys doing it are old men with money and time, not young kids. It’s not an inexpensive hobby.

        Like

        1. I am 66. Finished my BSCS in ’89. I never built a computer from scratch to get the degree. One of the Discrete Math classes went over circuit gate diagrams and the math related. Never saw anything beyond that.

          Took a hardware seminar when employed by the major international company division. That was one of my duties was dealing with the division hardware PC’s (not the mainframe). By the time I took the seminar I’d been into the guts of an IBM type PC many times already upgrading (also had already been inside our Apple IIe a number of times). I can deal with hardware, still do -ish (home stuff, and now all ours are laptops), don’t like to. But can.

          One exception is son’s desktop which he researched and built from scratch, after college (’12) and continues to upgrade. No help from me except giving him the name of the IT person at work. Also the hardware seminar, the first thing the instructor asked was “who here has broken components when upgrading hardware?” Not one female (not that there were many of us) raised their hands. My excuse? If it had to be forced, I physically couldn’t force it in anyway short of a sledge hammer which with computer stuff is the wrong choice. Just meant I was trying to put it in wrong but hadn’t figured out why I was trying to put it in wrong. FYI, correct answer. The other advantage I had? I have small hands. My hands fit where a lot of guys hands do not. I still do not like dealing with hardware. OTOH most IT guys hate dealing with end user software (OS software excluded). Each to our own computer niche, whatever that be.

          Like

    2. My job literally didn’t exist when I was a kid (post-production for digital photography), and looks MASSIVELY different than it did when I started. Heck, I was testing a potential tool this spring that could speed up my workflow even more—which I honestly don’t mind, because it’s dealing with a particularly nasty time suck that, while it doesn’t come up very often, is awful when it does.

      Most of what I’m doing today wasn’t possible a decade ago. I have no idea what’s going to be possible next decade. But my major marketable skill is learning these things fast—and it’s why my job loves having me on for the season. (Roughly August to April. Works well with summer camp and other Scouting things.)

      Liked by 1 person

      1. “I have no idea what’s going to be possible next decade.”

        Yes. This is the majority of the problem, isn’t it? The thing we’re trying to get ready for hasn’t even been invented yet. There’s a new “Jacquard Loom”- sized upheaval in some area of society about every five years now.

        I’d guess, based on how Techies think, that A) anything that requires a lot of human attention will be the targets for being automated, and B) that will create new, different things requiring a lot of human attention.

        Example, new job in the art world, spotting AI generated content. That job did not exist one year ago, but it does now. Efforts to automate it have so far not been very good.

        Like

          1. It appears that this year there is a Big Problem in the educational establishment with kids using AI for term papers. Teachers want an automated way to identify AI term papers.

            I predict a great deal of expense, uproar and waste motion will result, all of it solving nothing.

            Like

              1. Too much work for the teachers, no ability to research or cite– unless you have computers accessible, in which case they can be writing down the generated paper anyways– and a classroom is frankly horrible for a work environment.

                All of this is before how even when people usually wrote papers out longhand, they did not do so in a single go–writing three solid pages would put even someone who routinely wrote longhand would cause issues.

                Like

                1. Most of the current crop can’t write longhand. Cursive is becoming a lost skill, which frankly does not bode well for the future. Just like basic arithmetic. (Which I despise and suck at, incidentally. Thank you, New Math.) For that matter, -reading- is becoming a lost skill.

                  I’m imagining the uproar if a new rule requiring hand-written homework were suddenly imposed. The mind boggles.

                  Like

                  1. Not sure what your sample is– the folks I know aren’t taught it in school, but they’re perfectly able to write it. Won’t brag about it, because that gets every idiot for five miles to come complain because you use a different script than the one they were taught, and they’ll change on the fly if they need to. (ever seen the color someone turns when you point to THEIR writing with a format of a letter they just were yelling at you about, because “nobody” uses that?)

                    Same way that they freak out if you call it MATH, but they can do figuring just fine. You just have to not make them go OMG MATH AAAAAAH.

                    Similarly, you know reading isn’t lost. They wouldn’t be screaming about social media so much if it were.
                    People aren’t reading the approved things, and many aspects of critical thinking needed for higher level reading comprehension are not common.
                    Which has been a complaint going well back into the 70s.

                    MOST of these complaints were in the old Reader’s Digest from the 70s, which suggests it’s a “kids these days” thing, more than an actual disaster.

                    Liked by 2 people

                    1. City schools. Statistics indicate that a large minority of students in the USA (and Canada, we’re no better) are graduating unable to read a newspaper.

                      I’ll be delighted to find that those statistics are nothing but scare-mongering, which I’m increasingly starting to suspect.

                      Like

                    2. :snort:

                      Would YOU put in the work to volunteer to get abused? For zero profit for yourself?

                      And that’s before one considers the number of those tests that are never done at all, not just done badly.

                      When you get dinged for someone dropping out, but not for being “truant,” guess what gets recorded.

                      Liked by 2 people

                    3. “Would YOU put in the work to volunteer to get abused? For zero profit for yourself?”

                      There’s not enough money in the world to get me to work in one of those places. Socialized education is the same as socialized medicine, but more savage because the stakes are lower. (Plus I’m an Odd, they’d come for me in waves.)

                      Increasingly in Ontario I’m seeing news articles about teachers walking away from their iron rice bowls because they’re afraid of being killed by the “students” or because they’ve been run-off by the official diversity weenies. In fact we had a Toronto school principle kill himself the other day thanks to DEI “training’ that seems to have pushed him over the edge.

                      I’m a big fan of home schooling. Say what you want about School of Dad, at least the kids won’t get knifed in the stairwell.

                      Liked by 2 people

              2. That’s what they are doing at Day Job. Classes are small enough that it can be done. Students print out the citation format in advance, then build from there for English lit papers. English research papers are a little different, but they are working on-line in class, with the teacher or Yours Truly observing and providing some direction (“no, that’s not a good site. Go back and check your search parameters.”)

                I always require in-class, hand-written essays, but that’s the nature of the material and how I test.

                Like

                1. What you’re doing is cutting-edge work in this devolved environment.

                  I went to high school in the 1970s, to a very snooty private school no less, and also to the public school in my town. I did not learn how to research and write a proper paper, with citations, until I was in second year university. In Anthropology no less, not English or Classics where you’re supposed to learn that stuff. One good teacher, right?

                  I did not learn how to properly READ and UNDERSTAND medical research papers until I became irritated with gun control as a grown man and went and read them all. Doing a masters in physical therapy didn’t hurt, that taught me how to analyze study designs and spot the logical flaws in them. Another good teacher.

                  If all you manage to communicate to the little skulls full of mush is how to tell a trustworthy website from the vast sea of crap, that will be a great service to Humanity.

                  Like

            2. The smart kids use the LLM to generate most of it, and then tweak the result.

              The teachers / bureaucrats won’t find that one without tearing their whole wordcel world to pices.

              Liked by 1 person

              2. It rather calls the whole “factory” model of education into question, doesn’t it? I would argue that most of the teachers/bureaucrats I’ve interacted with over the years lacked the ability to properly read and understand the difference between an LLM response and a student response.

                The good ones would spot a phony of course, but I’ve known maybe five or six good ones in a looooong career of too much schooling.

                If you view your job as presenting the curriculum and then grading the “product” created by the students, LLMs mean that your job is now defunct.

                Not a tragedy, given that the topic today is competency crisis created by the WOEFUL failure of the current education establishment.

                Liked by 1 person

                1. I have experimented with ChatGPT. Fairly consistently, it turns out essays that read like something written by a college freshman who hasn’t actually done the reading and is trying to bluff their way past the question. Since that’s also how college students often write without AI help, I don’t know if it matters if I can tell whether it came from a human brain or not.

                  However, I’ve heard from one of C’s oldest friends that she and her husband, who are both college faculty, have given up essay questions on all their lower division courses, because hardly any of their students can produce acceptable responses. It’s all multiple choice. So I guess if AI could give them understandable essays, they’d know it wasn’t humanly generated . . .

                  Liked by 2 people

      1. Which is the precise, perfect opposite of what they actually teach.

        Which is to despise learning and avoid it at all costs.

        I’m merely more pig-headed and resistant than most, I learn in spite of them. Or possibly TO spite them, that could be a thing as well. >:D

        Like

    4. What’s next for woodworking? They really want to eliminate all those guys editing CAD drawings. I expect a lot of furniture design companies like IKEA have high hopes for generative AI. It’s 2023 today, by 2028 or sooner I expect an awful lot of CAD wranglers will be learning to code, as the saying goes.

      OpenSCAD already exists. LLMs tuned to its domain are a matter of when someone feels like spending some GPU time to the training run.

      Like

  32. Been living this since Saturday trying to get the customer service people at T-Mobile to fix the carrier lock on my wife’s phone. Now I’ve had to resort to airing my grievances about the process on Twitter in the hopes they escalate it to someone with enough competence and authority to actually fix the problem which should take seconds to do.

    Like

    1. (Me screaming.) Do not get me started on T-Mobile! (To be fair sister and BIL have T-Mobile on a 10+ family plan. Carry over from another company that T-Mobile acquired. They, mom, and their kids, love T-Mobile.) We had T-Mobile for 3 months. For whatever reason one phone would be dropped out of the carrier and never reacquire a tower without restarting the phone. Fought support for 3 months. Luckily we purchased our phones outright. We moved to Verizon. No problems. Note, not the phones. We have the same phones we had at T-Mobile. Switching from T-Mobile to Verizon was a PIA, and took about 5 hours. I let the Kiosk tech deal with T-Mobile. Only dealing I had with the T-Mobile techs was to say “Talk to …”. Back to reading my book.

      Like

        1. She’s in charge of a division in an industry she’s never really worked in before, but she has a Black Belt in Kaizen! (sat in classes to learn how to tell people to clean and organize a work area)

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Oh, for [even more mumbled swearing, bumping desk with head]

            Did they teach her to get the hell out of the way and let the boys work? One hopes, right?

            Like

      2. OMG. Worked in the western division of an international timber company. I didn’t have to deal with the IT bigwigs directly. OTOH another program’s programmers worked on a program/data system that was on the surface the same as a corporate program that all other US and international divisions used. Every time there was an audit of systems company wide, out would come the bigwigs to get justification for the western division program. Easy answer. The corporate system tracked biomass removed from a logging unit (maybe by species? Don’t know enough about that system to say.) Western division program tracked tagged log, by unit (unit brand), species, length, net board feet, net cubic feet, and grade. In the PNW one log is not the entire tree, usually (Lodgepole Pine or Juniper exempted), let alone an entire unit biomass. First the audit of the program itself, then a field trip to visually see 18 – 24 soon to be entries (3 to 4 logging truck loads), picked to make a point.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. Some of the logs in the western database were headed for pulp. While pulp was not part of the division I worked for, the division was required to ensure that the pulp mills, in a different division of the same company, but same area, had chips for pulp, and responsible to for tracking the hauling of said chips (no matter how purchased. Which is why I ended up writing the chip haul payment system). A few logs were sold for domestic milling (lumber), but most logs went export. Biggest difference was the numbers. Didn’t take many logs to exceed the cubic feet maximum of a corporate system record, sometimes just one log biomass cubic feet.

            difference between pulp logs and lumber
            ………….

            Difference between southern pine plantations and Douglas Fir, Hemlock, even Alder (Lodgepole Pine and Ponderosa Pine N/A, lands were Oregon/Washington Coastal). Don’t know how the NE hardwood divisions handled the problem. Indications were those divisions used corporate app.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Reminds me of something my husband had to deal with. Him: “Excel doesn’t work well with million-line spreadsheets.” Them: “You have million-line spreadsheets?”

              Like

              1. Them. Got the data wanted from the Timber Stand system, imported what was needed into dBASE (back then IV). Created the report. But, (insert business whine) the report isn’t what we want. Report isn’t what we want repeat for: Chip Load Payments, Log Truck Hauling, Seedling Inventory and Billing/Payment, etc., systems. these are just a few I ended up writing. “I can’t quite get what I/we want” out of spreadsheets and database select to use for report, is why I had a job for years.

                Like

  34. The competency crisis is a real thing. I realize it even in my small company where the younger people (employees and contractors) are simply poorly educated. Most of them are keen to learn and do so, but they have decent credentials on paper that mean they should already be able to do most of the things we have to teach them.

    Basic things like writing a blog post with final a call to action are apparently new ideas for someone with a degree in Marketing for example. Not that the person in question couldn’t do it perfectly fine when it was pointed out, but it seems the entire degree failed to mention this as a key step (or gave her a degree with out her learning it)

    Liked by 1 person

  35. I have the same problem with this that I had when the tweets proposing the idea first surfaced.

    It is the political equivalent of a groundbreaking expose to propose the earth shattering theory that the earth is not in fact supported by a spaceturtle.

    Anyone who seriously held to the idea that there was sabotage in the sense of actually destroying factories going on;

    has environmentalist levels of understanding how the economy works.
    is engaging in the standard conservative fetish that everything which happens must be according to the grand plan because the planners have said so and the planners have never lied about anything.
    has erased the existence of 2020 from their minds.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. WPDE makes any number-and-a-dot at the beginning of a line disappear. If you want to start a line with a number and a dot in spite of WPDE, you have to use the HTML entity .

        1. Like this.

        Like

  36. Comments indicate that there is a big difference between ignorance and stupidity: the former covers people who have not been taught what they need to know but can learn; the latter, those who may have been “taught,” but are incapable of learning.

    Those who have never been taught properly, and couldn’t learn if they were, are a distinct case, and include far too many people these days.

    The fourth case are the people who we are all in awe of — even if some of us are like that ourselves — because of how rare they are.
    The description of said case is intuitively obvious and is left as an exercise for the reader (as one of my math profs was fond of saying).

    Liked by 1 person

  37. You’ve neatly summed up my theory of why we’re seeing so many things blowing up, burning down, or falling into crumbling decay.

    It’s because the generation that took over management of all the systems of the “Great Machine, that America built from 1910-1970” were truly Mal-educated, to the point of being incompetent at the basic tasks needed to maintain the tech and systems they inherited, but are not capable of learning, or self-education either. They were not only mal-educated, they were kept that way beyond the time when their brain’s plasticity had hardened up.

    So, for 20 years or so, the the physical systems of the Great Machine, the bricks, mortar, water and sewage, electrical, mechanical, and structural components have been decaying, and have started to decay rapidly, and terminally, causing more and more failure cascades. And it’s no good yelling at the younger folk (under 40) to fix it…for the most part, they truly don’t know how, and can’t be taught.

    15 years ago, as the feminists and affirmative action types were crowing about throwing the “old white guys” out of management, and out of positions of authority. I’d observe to myself that in “winning,” those people were sowing the seeds of their own destruction because the people doing the crowing would never be able to keep the Great Machine running once they had power.

    I didn’t think this would become super-critical for another 20 years, so I’m a bit bummed that it’s happening this soon, but there you go.

    Liked by 1 person

  38. I know you’re tired. But you can’t say “apres moi le deluge.” It’s the future of humanity at stake.

    But we can and while we weren’t quite raised to, they tried very hard. There is the encouraging us not to have kids that I always harp on, but it is deeper.

    And I think it is intentional. Read the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement article on Wikipedia. That is drawn from the same educated pool our leaders and our teachers are drawn from.

    Yesterday I read a Tweet whose author said he used to think the biggest plot hole in The Three Body Problem is it required humans who wanted to see aliens wipe out humans and would help said aliens to exist.

    He no longer believed that. Now, maybe he has lapped me in misanthropy (it’s not that there aren’t days I’d be happy to see humanity gone, but I’ll be damned if anyone but God or ourselves get the privilege if I can help it) or maybe he’s just meant enough people that it is no longer a plot hole.

    Either is a bad sign.

    It’s also what the Boomers on have been increasingly raised to.

    Jordan Peterson’s description of Cain is apt, the desire to punish God for the crime of existence. We live in a world run by Cains.

    Like

    2. A recurring theme in my books is the VALUE of Humanity. The very existence of humans, their raging -consciousness- and ability to survive Nature and even prosper in the hostile natural environment always comes as an immense shock to aliens. They can’t believe what they’re seeing.

      People like the [expletive deleted] communist who wrote Three Body Problem exist in a deep pool of hatred. They can’t imagine anything else.

      Personally I’ve got plenty of reasons to hate the Normies, but I also realize Humanity is the only game in town. We, here on the Blue Marble, are It. If not for us, there’s nothing to do here.

      Therefore, in my fiction at least, I try to put myself in the alien’s shoes. A whole freaking planet with 6 billion conscious beings on it, each one with a unique story? My bet is they will want to come and hang out.

      Besides, why would you cross the light years in a tin can to conquer an alien planet where every single thing on it, from the weather to the entire biological food chain, is trying to kill you? Is there -anything- on Earth you couldn’t find on a bare rock orbiting Barnard’s Star? Any resource? No.

      Like

      2. The communist who wrote Three Body Problem is Chinese. They’re surrounded by a deep pool of hatred. They have struggle sessions written into the text as history.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. Thank you. I had actually looked at that book (with the fulsome blurbs of praise) and wondered oif it was worthwhile.
        I should have remembered the book, I read a few years ago by a Soviet author which was being praised (by people who should have known better) as a brilliant anti-Communist novel. Read it and muttered, “That’s classic Marxist doctrine, the only thing was it was set in a dictatorship, not an obviously capitalist country.” Sheesh.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. As a counter, I found it very worthwhile. It’s sequel as well although that takes much longer to get into.

          Yes, the worldview is bleak compared to the US, but I suspect closer to the plurality of people than not (fights over exact population aside, enough population grew up under communism that they’re going to have something similar).

          And among the TriSolarians there is at least one who tried to warn the human and hide them. He survives to the end of the second book and is glad that Earth and humanity found a way to save themselves if a bleak one.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Given that several hard-core libertarian friends of mine liked it, I don’t think it could be too “communism yeah, yeah!” No, I have not set aside time to read it yet.

            Like

        2. Full disclosure, I have not read the book beyond the cover blurb, but I -have- read a long article in the New Yorker about the author.

          https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds

          I decided based on the article that the book would not be to my taste, and furthermore that the author was not someone I wanted to support with either money or sales. Full Communist, no redeeming features evident.

          Three Body Problem won a Hugo, another strike against both author and book.

          In my not particularly humble opinion, the book represents pretty much every hackneyed ancient anti-human trope and stupid plot point that ever irritated me in past SF. The one that hacked me off the most was the aliens considered humans to be insect-level pests. How many times have we seen that one?

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          1. Okay, all the lefties thought the book was communism Rah rah rah.
            But the left doesn’t read very well. They gloss over.
            My friends whom I trust tell me it’s not communist at all, and there are several knives in it against the CCP.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. More than several.

              Is it communist? No. Is it anti-communist? No, except in an “I hate Mao and his successors” way.

              If I had to put any philosophy to it, I’d say it’s something Nietzche would understand but not admire. He’d see the townspeople who laugh at the madman crying “God is dead” until the madman reminds them they are the ones who killed him. Yet, most don’t have the strength to move in accordance with that philosopher for the most part (a handful do…all but a handful of that handful are killed).

              My understanding of the third book, which I haven’t read yet, is it concerns characters trying to escape the mutual distrust of the Dark Forest stance.

              Like

                1. That was my thought. The New Yorker article confirms it. Zero anti-Communism. Plus the book made it past the censors, right?

                  Whatever he might think -privately-, we are not going see it in print.

                  Like

          2. Ah.

            I know next to nothing about the author that isn’t in his note to the first book. At this point, I’ve learned better than wanting to know details, especially if I enjoyed it.

            As for the Hugo that kept me away from it until this year when a member of my trivia team talked me into giving it a go. I’m glad I did.

            As for the insect-level pest thing, that’s pretty much the last line by an alien in the first book, “You are bugs”, but one character who is central to both books took those who heard the alien and were despondent out to see a locus swarm. The point was we’d never wiped out the insects so the aliens shouldn’t count on doing so to us.

            And given the one space battle, in the second book, the tech level was relevant. Yet, one man figured out the thing the Trisolarians hid from us and feared and thus won the war.

            The tropes are there, but in the end, it isn’t anti-human (if that was the intent it failed) and they are done competently at worst and well a few times. To the degree he had anti-human characters, I think he captured our current “elite” quite well. I suspect that is one reason it resonated with me.

            Like

      4. In fairness to the author of TTBP, his principal characters in the first and second book are about saving humanity. Even the woman who, in the depths of hatred after her family’s treatment in the Cultural Revolution, provides the seeds that ensure humanity knows and is ultimately saved.

        I didn’t get the impression he hated humanity, although he has a bleak view of competition among species (born and started growing up in the CR, go figure), but the books, especially the second, aren’t as bleak.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. You’re a better man than I, Herb. I can no longer find personal value in those types of books.

          It’s sad that the author had to see the Cultural Revolution, but I do not want to give up any cranial space to a guy who thinks the CR was justified, and who thinks anybody who magically replaced Winnie the Pooh would be forced to do exactly as WP has done. Bro does not get my money or my time.

          Like

          1. I never got the impression he felt it was justified. The opposite if anything.

            Even if he did, the fact I got an insight into the Cultural Revolution in a way I never had gave the book value to me. Especially seeing how closely our own cultural warriors are modeled on their Chinese inspiration.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. I recommend When Huai flowers bloom : stories of the Cultural Revolution by Shu Jiang Lu for insight. (It also touches on story telling.)

              Like

      5. As for what Earth has that a bare rock orbiting Barnard’s Star wouldn’t?

        A functioning and compatible biosphere in a single-star system, much more stable than Centaurius.

        Argue they’re poorly thought out on the genocidal level, but the preference for Earth over a rock somewhere is easy thing to understand.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Earth has pesky mammals and insects and fish, all trying to kill you. Not to mention nematodes that can survive being frozen for 40,000 years. (Did you see they found some?) And molds that can survive space. Viruses. Etc.
          Earth has a deep gravity well.
          Earth has an exceptionally corrosive oxygen-rich atmosphere, and WATER everywhere. Water can defeat almost anything, given time.

          Also, the notion that biological, carbon-based beings similar to Humans will be the ones traveling through space is looking more far-fetched every year. The engineering problem of moving viable biological material between stars is looking pretty tough these days. Tougher than it did 20 years ago, for sure.

          A space-faring AI being would logically avoid Earth in favor of asteroids, unless they wanted to talk to the crazy monkeys. Fred Saberhagen had a great story of the Berserker ship killed by mold. Loved it. ~:D

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          1. Did you read all of TBP? Several of those points are addressed in it. I also think the quasi-religious nature of the invasion on the part of the Trisolarians plays a role.

            Remember, all those things you mention do not exclude them considering Earth a relative paradise.

            Unlike Earth, they do have periods of hibernating through essentially being a barren rock where life has to re-evolve to sentience. The book is quite explicit that the civilizations of their world are not all of the same sentient species. That’s one aspect I wish had been explored more.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. I did not read TBP. Its pretty much the acme of everything I dislike about SF since 2010. The other shining star of things I can’t stand is Fifth Season. (ew.)

              It is worth noting that Earth is not even a paradise for US, and we are custom-made to survive in this place. If you drop a human stark naked anywhere on Earth except for a few select places, he’s going to die in a week. Our “natural” habitat is pretty small really, and not that friendly to us on an individual level.

              We get by on technology, starting with fire and going from there. Thanks to the big brain and the opposable thumb, most of the problems we have are with each other. But it took 200,000++ years for us to get here, and most of the progress was done in the last 300. (By Scotsmen, as it happens. >:D )

              This is why I really don’t like stories like TBP. For example, the mere notion of a race of -intelligent- beings that would hibernate like that and WAIT for sentience to re-evolve? That’s idiotic. I am actively averse to reading about it.

              Intelligent beings, IMHO, do not wait for things to happen. They -make- things happen.

              Nematodes wait.

              Like

              1. I might have created some confusion.

                They evolve to hibernation during come periods of the three suns creating harsh, but survivable conditions. Eventually the three suns create a environment that they cannot survive at all and go extinct.

                When conditions return to more life friendly new intelligent species arise and discover remnants of the old.

                No offense, but I think you’re way past being able to reasonable discuss the book. You can choose not to read based on what you know, I certainly have books in that category, where basic outlines and author statements are enough to tell me I probably will not enjoy it put my time elsewhere. Hell, based on the Hugo it got, TBP was in that category for years for me.

                But I don’t try to take apart its finer points, requiring more and more detail from some who read it to fix misunderstanding in my arguments.

                Liked by 1 person

                1. “No offense, but I think you’re way past being able to reasonable discuss the book.”

                  I entirely agree. I haven’t read it, and I’m not going to read it. I can’t discuss it reasonably except in the broadest terms from resources like the Wiki article, reviews etc.

                  Like

          2. Google foo is failing me tonight. Link has been posted here before by someone else. Thought I’d saved it (of coarse not).

            Best alien story ever is a human is abducted. Aliens want the most dangerous thing on Earth to prove that they, the aliens, are dangerous. So, human proceeds to oblige, more or less. Aliens abduct bears, snakes, tigers, oh my, domestic animals (including house cat) and on down the list, ending with a skunk. In the end aliens decide that humans have to be the most dangerous in the universe because humans are so casual about what cohabit their home planet. Human returned home, aliens depart.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. This is more up my ally. Humans EAT lions and tigers and and bears.

              Something else I thought of, if we were visited by a machine intelligence that had been around for a couple million years, they’d be pretty cocky. For a minute, until the met a Human. Or a bear, or a dog, mosquito, lobster etc.

              We have four -billion- years of ruthless optimization in every system in our bodies. They’ve only got a couple million, and somebody -built- them to start with. Our blood vessels would have more design depth than their whole body.

              I’m very extremely massively not interested in reading about the Mighty Alien Overlords tolerating the disgusting Humans and making them behave, or as in this case the rag-tag defeated crudlings of the universe kicking our asses because they are so super-duper superior and we are just useless pond scum. I’m just not having it. No money from The Phantom for that stuff anymore.

              And you know, it might be that I’m being unfair to the author and the book as well. I’m willing to admit that as a possibility. To that, I can only answer that it is MY friggin’ money and MY reading time, and I shall spend it as I please. Unfair as that may be.

              Like

              1. Mighty Alien Overlords tolerating the disgusting Humans and making them behave, or as in this case the rag-tag defeated crudlings of the universe kicking our asses because they are so super-duper superior and we are just useless pond scum. I’m just not having it. No money from The Phantom for that stuff anymore.
                …………

                Don’t disagree. I pass too if I think that is the theme and the only theme. Which near I can tell the stuff being pushed by the usual suspects, I don’t bother with.

                Liked by 1 person

                1. This is what I loved about John Ringo’s “Troy Rising” series. Alien overlords getting their -asses- handed to them by the insane Humans. Awesome!

                  We do not bow to tyrants. We crush and destroy them in interesting and novel ways. >:D

                  Like

                  1. Alien overlords getting their -asses- handed to them by the insane Humans. Awesome!
                    We do not bow to tyrants. We crush and destroy them in interesting and novel ways.
                    ……………

                    ^^ This ^^

                    Started to write that to respond to your post but couldn’t succinctly. I don’t care if the story has the insane Humans crushing and destroying them overtly or covertly, as long as it is clear that the aliens are being crushed and destroyed in interesting and novel ways.

                    Liked by 1 person

                  2. One thing that really bothered me about Troy was the ‘internal levers’ that supposedly made the gravity drives more effective at rotating the station.

                    Wrong! Moving the drives closer to the center of mass would make them LESS effective. They need to be as far from the center of mass as possible! I don’t see how nobody caught that.

                    Now, the external levers they used to stop it from spinning would work as intended because they did move the drives far out from the center of mass. Internal levers, though? AAARRRGGH!

                    I know, it’s a peeve, but it grates every time I read it.

                    Other than that, they’re great. Every couple of chapters some alien is sputtering “But— but that’s not the way it’s done you crazy monkeys!”

                    If it’s crazy but it works, it ain’t crazy. Like getting more out of the A.I.s by treating them with respect.
                    ———————————
                    Granadica complains about her workload.

                    “If the Rangora win, they’ll wipe your personality and set you to cranking out boring widgets forever.”

                    “—Oh. I’ll get right on it, then.”

                    Liked by 1 person

  39. Pingback: Instead of a malignant conspiracy, consider the possibility it’s really a society-wide dearth of competence « Quotulatiousness

  40. This hit hard. I am recently retired from banking where my expertise was in risk management of the type that sunk Silicon Valley Bank. I was deeply insulted that they could not anticipate and mitigate their potential failure. This article would explain that they were not lazy, but that they were incapable. They did not have the background education and did not have sound thought processes.
    They were never going to adequately anticipate any black swan event disrupting their vision of their corporate future.
    The SVB risk manager was so proud of her DEI accomplishments. I am going to have to learn more of how the language we know or use structures our thinking patterns. Can it be that the terminology and concepts the risk manager and other executives learned and used with all the DIE or DEI tsunami, diminished their capabilities to meet their responsibilities as leaders and managers?
    I think of all the examiners (regulators) and auditors I had to “teach” what they were examining. Now I feel even more like that when I retired I was taking important knowledge of banking from the system.

    Like

    1. Yep. Because they are afraid of being cancelled, not afraid of collapsing.
      Search “Roll left and die” in my search bar, though I will be honest and say I don’t know if the article is here or on PJM. It will explain the other side of this.

      Like

    2. feel even more like that when I retired I was taking important knowledge of banking from the system.
      ……………..

      OMG. Last few years working. I am a programmer. I am not an accountant. I do not know what the various requirements are for each user is working under, which is why the software system I worked on had so many options. I don’t know what percentage the auditors are going to bash. Which is why that is decided by the user, their supervisors, supervisors managers, and on up the command chain (ending with county and state level requirements). I could tell the user what was in the software, and where and how it used. That is it. Granted after dealing with end users, auditors, and digging into the software for 12 years, I had more knowledge than that and could steer them into finding the correct answers by asking questions. But bottom line. Not the accountant.

      Like

  41. I just recalled a conversation that might have some long foreshadowing on the competence issue.

    Set the time machine to late December, 1973. I was taking a Practical Astronomy course* for a tech elective, and was chatting with an Astro major about things. Heinlein came up with respect to favorite authors, and $SOMEDUDE mentioned that he didn’t like RAH. Reason being “RAH’s concept of the Competent Man”. Boggles.

    Said Astro major had fond hopes of a career in observational astronomy, but one wonders how he expected to be successful at it.

    (*) Lots of Spherical Trig, which my mind doesn’t process all that well. I’m a rectilinear guy with The Chicken Cordon** Mathmatical Gap Blues.

    (**) H/T Steve Goodman. You died way too early, Sir.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. I inherited the trait. Grampa Pete was a carpenter/general contractor, and he and Dad did a lot of remodeling of our 1903 vintage house. I trained as an EE in college, but happily took the Theoretical and Applied Mechanics course. It was dropped as a requirement just before the drop-it deadline, but I had a solid A going…

        Remodeled a couple of houses in Silly Valley, including replacing two outer walls on the 1935 vintage bonus addon. I’m rotten at taping sheetrock, but a decent carpenter and can do serviceable, if not beautiful concrete. So-so at welding, but the critical welds haven’t failed. (I won’t talk about the attempt at tarp stakes with rebar. Oops for one of them.)

        I’m old enough to realize that the strongest muscles belong to other people, so some jobs get farmed out. The siding company will finish painting the re-sided house tomorrow, leaving me time to do a bunch of other projects. New paint and floor in the master bedroom, a new deck for the front porch, and a walkway/patio. We’ll see what gets finished by snowfall. (The priority list is set. Bedroom, then deck, then walkway. Then curl up and sleep a few months.)

        Liked by 1 person

    2. “I’ve got ten pounds of brown rice and 5 more of beans. 5 pounds of granola and you know what means. I’m just a regular fellow with the chicken cordon blues.”

      He did indeed pass too soon.

      I always liked RAH’s list via LL of things a human should be able to do.

      Like

  42. Part of it is the silos, and that silo training can lead one to be at least marginally functional inside the silo, and an ineffective or destructive generalist outside of it.

    Suppose a young partly trained physicist.

    He knows the physics hearsay about the design process, of math and concept.

    He does not know about engineers, not really, nor technicians, nor the role that users play in adoption, retention, and improvement of designs. Might be pretty obvious, to someone without physics training, with common sense, or who is a generalist.

    But, worked hard to get into the silo training program, so silo training must be better.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. And don’t they get annoyed when some gear-head comes along and tells them how to stop their telescope from vibrating for an hour after they move it? >:D

      Like

      1. I agree…. depending on whether they can “avoid any…. Federal entanglements” such as deposit insurance, or have any customers / clients in blue states.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. Trust me that there are ways around this. But yeah, it’s painful and annoying. The good (?) side is that by forcing us to do the work arounds, they kill themselves. We are the majority.

      Like

    1. Postcards from Barsoom — a delightful name for a confirmed Burroughs fan — has an excellent analysis of the problem of incompetency (hint: it’s the elite universities) and an innovative solution. His description of what is essentially crowd-sourced skills & knowledge credentialing reminded me of our son’s martial arts progression: study where and with whom you want; pay for the test by the recognized master, given in public; pass and get the belt, or not and try again.

      And I love his neologism “incompetocracy,” which aptly describes most of our elite class.

      Liked by 1 person

  45. One of the key problems is that the more we learn, as a species, the more there is to know.

    As just one example, can any one person know enough medicine to really be a competent and informed doctor? No. Each has to rely on other specialists. The same applies in every technical field. It even applies to things like history. You could argue that we are getting too smart for our own good, in more ways than one.

    This would all be fine if we had all, or even mostly, ethical people. But Darwin and the death of Christianity, combined with the rise of collectivism, has had the side-effect of lowering ethics throughout the West to almost non-existent levels. When we’re cutting the genitals off of our children, I call that “almost non-existent”.

    So now we’ve got a problem. Like a child with a loaded. 38, we have more power than it is safe for us to have. We could lose the power, but that would be ugly, very ugly. A whole awful lot of people and things would die. Or, we could try and grow up, and learn how to handle the power safely.

    To do that, I think the first thing to work on is to understand ourselves. Who are we? Why do we do the things we do? What motivates us? What do we need to thrive? What social and life arrangements would further that? The answers are starting to come, I think, from evolutionary psychology. It is early days, but we “know” vastly more than we did 20 or even 10 years ago. We’re moving from unknown unknowns to known unknowns. We’re starting to see “what” (imo), but “how” is a whole ‘nother question.

    We will solve this problem of what humans need to thrive, and how to arrange society to that end, or die. That’s what I think. Oh, “die” doesn’t mean extinction; we are tougher than that, but it might well mean quite a bit of societal fall.

    I don’t have much longer to go; I mostly won’t have to deal with all this, y’all will. All I can tell you is what I think from “up here” (in years). Make of it what you will.

    Like

    1. So now we’ve got a problem. Like a child with a loaded. 38, we have more power than it is safe for us to have.

      There is NO amount of power that it is “safe” for a human to have. Not so long as we have free will.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. And the people who claim that a power is “too dangerous” for “the people” to have don’t seem to realize that the subset of the people that they want to limit it to are still people and it’s no less dangerous in their hands–perhaps more so, in fact. As I often point out, it would take 6000 years equivalent to the highest year ever of criminal homicides in the US to equal the number of people (at a conservative estimate) killed by their own governments in the 20th century.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. “People can’t be trusted with guns! Only the government should have guns!”

          “The government? But what is the government?”

          “What do you mean?”

          “Isn’t the government just a bunch of people? They’re not any smarter or better than anybody else. In fact, government seems to attract the worst sorts of people.”

          “Uhhhh…”

          Like

          1. Sadly, a lot of people visualize Government as this great, benevolent power that knows everything and will take care of you.
            God, in other words.

            Like

            1. …and being part of the government makes them part of God. With all the powers and privileges that entails.
              ———————————
              Governments can only print money; they can’t make it worth anything. They can make it worth nothing.

              Like

    3. “Like a child with a loaded. 38, we have more power than it is safe for us to have.”

      Man, I get so tired of this argument. People are stupid, they must be controlled. Yeah, freedom is dangerous so shut up and get back in line peasants.

      You want more China? Because this is how you get more China. Maybe put down the black pills, eh? Try the red one, it’s strawberry.

      Liked by 1 person

    4. Can a person learn enough to be a competent and informed doctor?

      Yes, actually.

      It helps if they’re not being required to spend half their day charting in order to fight the insurance companies and the government bureaucracies just to get paid, and can actually see the patient for more than 6 minutes, and have spare time and brain cells to spend learning more about medicine. It helps if they are encouraged to use their judgement, and not be constantly told “If the government decides you’re wrong, even if you’re right, they’ll fine you and probably pull your license.” It helps if those 6 minutes aren’t crowded by “You should talk to your patients about Government-mandated social position!”

      You know why Family medicine farms people out to so many specialists? Because they’re overworked, underpaid (see: why the med students, looking at workload and pay scales, quickly go for specialties instead of family medicine, thus exacerbating the problem), overlitigated, and buried in an avalanche of government regulation and paperwork.

      If I pay cash to go to a concierge doctor, so they’re cut free of the insurance/medicare/medicaid billing system and all its paperwork, suddenly the doctors are amazingly competent, informed, and easy to work with. Funny, ain’t that?

      Although I did look at one really funny and say “Um, I’m pretty sure this is viral. Why are you giving me antibiotics as well as steroids?”
      She gave me a dead level look, and said, “Because you’re an asthmatic, living with a cardiac patient. The number of times you’ve already had a sinus infection settle into bronchitis and slide into pneumonia means I’m cutting that cycle short right now, so you can’t infect your husband with anything, and I won’t see you back here in 4 weeks when your husband overrides your stubborn ass and drags you in.”

      “…oh.”

      (Go figure… universal “everybody knows” guidelines are not, in fact, always applicable.)

      Like

  46. Pingback: Thursday, payday (for me) and not quite end of week | Dio's Workshop

  47. They sent us new triangular boxes for single slices of pizza, which means they need to be at least ten and a quarter inches across the top, probably more for big slices to fit nicely.

    Spoiler: They are not that big.

    Spoiler: Fitting things into a triangular box is difficult.

    Spoiler: The tab closure is dumb and does not work, and the flaps (with printed info and flavor identification checkboxes) only work if you put them inside the lower flaps, where the info cannot be read.

    Spoiler: The boxes are made out of department store giftbox cardboard, like for shirts.

    Nobody went to a store and tested these boxes, unless Arkansas stores are pulling the same dough, but only making 15 inch pizzas and just calling them 16 inch.

    (Which might explain the newer official pizza paddles/peels being too small by at least an inch of diameter….)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I forgot to say that 16 inch pizzas officially have five slices. So I guess I could sell you one slice, cut it in half, and put it into two triangular boxes; and then they would each fit. But nobody wants that. Ugh.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. This strongly reeks of “these are cheaper, they’ll do” being uttered in a marketing meeting by a VP.

        There’s a strong thread of “nobody cares about you peons and your little problems” that runs through American (Canadian, European) management. Shop floor gets to scramble and make the Management vision a reality, no matter how idiotic it may be.

        Liked by 1 person

  48. Pingback: “Woke capitalism” and the decadence of a second-rate elite | Spin, strangeness, and charm

  49. A thought has just occurred to me. If anyone on the left wants to blame Trumps resurgence on anyone? They can blame Nancy Pelosi. Yes Nancy Pelosi. Her abject hatred on Donald Trump shown by the two phony Impeachments has insulated The Trumpster from anything the left throws up. We saw the phony evidence, we saw the rigged prosecution, we heard Cheney, Schiffty, Swallowwell, Whineingzer, lie through their teeth, we saw the press lie threw their teeth. Now we know the game is fixed and if we ever want a chance to at least break even, Orange Man must win. They have effectively coated the Donald in Teflon and with every phony indictment, they thicken his armor. They now have only one choice, retire with their pensions, or start Civil War. In any case, they lose, so does the press, so does leftism everywhere. The Muslims are already starting to turn on them, its only a matter of time before enough of their other groups do the same. They are starting to get real shaky with the blue collar unions as well.

    Like

    1. Cracks are starting to form in Cali, Oakland NAACP, hardly a bastion of Conservatism, just called for a state of Emergency on Crime. Newsom is done as far as this election, all anyone needs do is run adds about California’s crime, homeless populations, and how people are fleeing the state. Newsom is not the Democrats great white hope.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. The real question is how much of their far flung coalition can they maintain while they push their insanity on everyday Americans? The Continuing of ‘Just give us time is starting to fail’. Long term Democrat Politicians are starting to flee the party, you have school Boards in Cali standing up to the insanity. Unions and Ranchers on the left are pissed at Biden, NAACP is pissed at Soros and his DA’s. Their incompetence is really starting to take a toll. And that is double for Mitch the bitch, and Romney and their ILK. Paul Ryan has destroyed FOX news. Oh, my they are still beating MSNBC and CNNlol? Big deal, so is Nicklelodeon and reruns of Mattlock. I dare say the Flintstones at the right time would beat all three. Tucker, on a website with no huge news resources behind him beats everyone. Good Job Paul Backstabbing Bitch Ryan. The end result is the same, we win, they lose. Paul Ryan can kiss my sweaty, hairy ass.

        Like

        1. The Reader thinks there is a lot of ruin yet to come. We will need to see a preference cascade triggered though the ‘normals’ and while the Reader sees it starting to build in his neck of the woods, it has quite a ways to go. Sigh.

          Liked by 1 person

        1. Yes they have Cali, for the moment, that grip is tenuous at best, especially with the words of London Breed the other day about eliminating all business taxes to try and stave off the business and people fleeing in a mass exodus from San Fran. Add to that the NAACP in Oakland going off the reservation on of all things CRIME. They can’t Fraud Nation Wide again or that will start the second civil war. They have no Troops, if they think the lowlifes and scum from their inner cities will make up an army for them, they are bigger fools then I think they are. We know Antifa was AstroTurf from other places, no bodies there. And if they try and draft in their cities, because face it they don’t have the want to enlist now, those citizens will burn the cities down around their ears. Not to mention the fact that a modern military has complicated machines that do most of the dirty work. Those citizens for the most part are simply ignorant and could not run nor maintain those machines of war. The Illegals have no stake in this fight, no matter what the Democrats think, they start trying to draft them and a reverse exodus of Illegals occurs, Mexico would shut down their border if that happens. The Cartels sensing a weakness would step up. No, the Democrats have delusions and that is it. There is reason to hope.

          Like

          1. Cali is in real trouble, one of the reasons Newscum tried to insinuate himself in the Actors/Writers strike is to keep people working and money coming into the states till. They are facing a shortfall of billions and it is getting worse with every day. Add to that the cities are crumbling under mismanagement, the exodus from Cali is accelerating, which is putting even more pressure on the state coffers. All the illegals have been told they can live free on the state of Cali, more pressure. And why do these mayors of these supposed wonderful cities complain about a couple of busses of illegals showing Up, a city of millions should have no problem taking in a few thousand refugees. or at least you would think so now wouldn’t you? But there are thousands of others making it to their cities on their own, the Liberal Cities are bleeding to death, and that is money. How many others just like you have left Cali, or Colo. or NY? And taken all your money and wealth with you, that they can’t replace, not with Illegals who can’t speak and have been told they don’t have to work for a living. Even if they do work, they aren’t paying their taxes, they work under the table as a sub contractor, tax time rolls around and they are in another state with another name. More bleeding money the state can’t get back. There is reason to hope, they the leftoids have over played their hand. Time to call their bluff.

            Like

          2. “They have no Troops, if they think the lowlifes and scum from their inner cities will make up an army for them, they are bigger fools then I think they are.”

            Which is why they’ve opened the floodgates for military age Chinese males. “Come to America for a bride raid!” Now, do I think that will work? Maybe maybe not. But it certainly won’t make it EASIER.

            Like

              1. All I know is that what is being reported is that the illegals being caught are showing an increasing number of that demographic. Where their loyalties lie is the question. As Captain Mancuso asked in Hunt for Red October: “You willing to bet your life on that?”

                Of course, at this point, that wager has been made and the dice are tumbling. I just pray we don’t crap out.

                Like

  50. Late entry. In Feb I was called about an engineering position at a nuke plant. Work I have done before and a place I have worked before.
    Days pass. Nothing. Weeks and I forgot about it. Then mid June I get a call. The manager wants to interview me. Great. This gives me good odds.
    Phone call comes….it was supposed to be video interview but they couldnt get it working on their end. So a phone interview….oh day before the interview the head hunter calls and tells me they will have questions covering different scenarios and I should think about them. Ok. That is normal.
    The questions had nothing to do with engineering or my experience.
    In a diverse group how did you deal with people…..
    In my career I have worked with all races gays lesbians aggressive bisexuals every major religion wiccans and one man to woman post op trans.
    In my personal life my two best friends from high school came iut as gay to me in high school. In my 20s several lesbians I got to know socially told me they werent that gay and so on.
    My wife and kids are multiracial. So working with diverse engineers….they werent d8verse. There was nothing but engineering.
    I did not get the job and I fully expect to hear that the plant closed.

    Liked by 2 people

    2. The Reader actually hopes that plant shuts down before the inmates discover that a nuclear power plant is not an asylum.

      Liked by 1 person

  51. Pingback: Competence and the Economy | nebraskaenergyobserver

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