Some of you seemed to think my post yesterday referred to a sort of apocalypse or disaster. That’s not what I meant. The only ominous part about it is that things we’ve learned to take for granted, like, oh, long distance travel and money enough to do it might not be for some for a while.
For the record, they weren’t when I was young. People are always puzzled that growing up in Europe, I never went to the major touristic points. Well, you know, I flew for the first time at 18 when I came to the US. And while I once had a Euro rail pass, I used it to get a summer job and travel to and from. And we were not poor, not by the time I was a teen. Oh, not rich, either, unless you were looking from very far down (say where mom started.) I once asked grandma what our “class” was because we were learning Marx, you know, and I’d had an argument with a friend whose father made about double what dad did, but spent it differently, and she said we were upper class because we had books, and we decorated our house better. So I asked. Grandma sat there for a while thinking, and then said “We’re the class that makes do.” Since then I’ve taken great pride in this. I was born the class that makes do. And we still are. (In fact, in my case, the great problem is whether I allow myself to not “make do.” Right now I’m debating whether to buy a tripod ladder to paint the front of the house. Look, I don’t want to fall. OTOH it’s expensive, and I have a ladder, and I can make do. Yeah. I know. I probably should buy it. Still cheaper than paying someone to do it. But argh. Either I’m old, or everything has gotten crazy expensive.) Anyway, that nice excursion on why class is insane aside, the truth is that we couldn’t afford to travel far or on a whim. Our big trips were train or bus, and usually for dire necessity. So, we might fall into that for a while. Which would be okay, if the country weren’t so large and my family here dispersed (let alone the ones overseas. I have not yet met great-nephews.)
The thing I’m warning about is not apocalypse, but major disruption. And a disruption neither I nor anyone can predict. In fact, the nature and size of this disruption should put paid to the notion of “rule by experts” to the extent the last three years haven’t yet.
Now will it disrupt travel? Or merely remove burdensome restrictions, so travel actually flourishes? I don’t know. Will food be scarce? Arguably, some places. If you haven’t yet and can, grow some. Or, you know, acquire some next Spring, if we get there intact, and dehydrate and store. Will electricity go away? For some time some places, probably. I mean, blackouts are always possible, and when the economy is in turmoil they’re even more possible. Will they lock us down again? Well, it depends. I think they’re going to try. If the try gets past what we had since we stopped being locked down, (Them:”There’s terrible disease X somewhere, be TERRRIFIED” Us: “Nah bra.” Them, run around in circles for a while, then “There’s terrible disease X somewhere, be TERRIFIED.”) is anyone’s guess. Some places, maybe. Will they try to inflict famine on the people? They’ve been trying, and failing that, they just keep publishing articles saying people are starving. Look, some people are very tight indeed and the rest of us are feeling a pinch. And I’ll fully believe more people are hitting the food banks. Particularly around this time, because I doubt the money for presents is high, and people will want to give the kids at least SOMETHING, so if they can get groceries for free. But we’re not Venezuela, let alone Ukraine during Holodomor. For one, if there were real hunger, not manufacture via survey hunger, the ubiquitous urban geese would be gone. And that deer who keeps nibbling your tomato plants would be in someone’s freezer.
We have a deep fund of wealth in real terms: much more clothing than we need, much more food than we need, houses that are weather-worthy (for the most part) and health better than our ancestors at the same age. We won’t be easy to topple.
Even in Ukraine, Holodomor was only possible because the army confiscated ever handful of grain people had stored. But you see…. we’re armed, and right now they’re not sure of the army. (Their attempts to enlist a foreign army is something else. Kind of like what Rome did, I guess. But even then, I betcha our veterans will eat their non-cohesive army of many pieces and indifferent literacy for breakfast and not notice.)
We really are a unique place in composition and living in a unique time. So their attempts to reduce us using historical techniques (they really only have one script) hasn’t worked and is as likely to work as their screams of “hand us all your guns now, this time we mean it.” And they don’t fully understand it. For which I shouldn’t sneer at them (oh, but I will. If nothing else, because they call themselves smart) because half on our side don’t understand it either.
Yes, history repeats, but not exactly the same, because factors are different. And the problem in accounting for every factor, and not just half a dozen cherry picked ones to support the speaker is why history is not scientific and ruled by formulas. For one, the individual human factor is, by itself, unaccountable. How many times do you think you know how someone will react — someone you know and have close association with — and they surprise you with something completely wonderful or horrible that you never even considered? Now multiply that by 300 million or so (Heaven only knows how many of us truly are.)
Look, the left is relatively easy to predict, because they have one guide book, and they adhere to it. And when not following it line by line, they follow the spirit of it and the bizarre idea that humanity are widgets, easily divided into groups, where everyone acts like everyone else in that group. So their errors of judgement and logic are easy to predict.
But reality is not leftist. In fact, since the nineties, it’s become increasingly obvious there’s a yawning chasm between what the left thinks they’re doing and what they are actually doing.
There are several bits of psy-ops floating around that amount to “Everything is proceeding the way the left wants it.”
That’s kind of easy to say, because we know — and have caught them at it — the left ultimately hates civilization, humanity, and life itself. (They’re sort of like the auditors in Terry Pratchett. Only immobile rocks would satisfy them.)
But the thing is that’s not their normal mode, or what they act from, or what they think they act from. They think they’re acting from good. They hate civilization, because the noble savage would flourish in concert with nature, and then everyone would be happy. They hate humanity because why do we refuse to be the noble savages of their dreams? They hate life itself, because why is nature red in tooth and claw? Can’t the lions be vegetarians already? And so on. Their “Hatred” is from a place of frustration because reality refuses to conform to their dreams. The problem is they really think that their crazy ideas, which they have been taught in schools since they were 3 or so will work and make everyone happy and contented in Marxist paradise.
When they say “you’ll own nothing and be happy” they really mean it, because they’ve been fed a lot of nonsense about a pre-history when there was no property and no war. (This has no relationship with real history or humans of any sort, but it is taught in schools, nonetheless. It is just really an heretical version of the Garden of Eden.) When they tell us to eat the bugs, they really really think that would work (look what they don’t know about animal husbandry, farming or nutrition could fill several blogs bigger than this one.) When they say they want to eliminate fossil fuels, it’s because they believe that there are solutions which the evil oil industry has been evilly suppressing to make money (for mustache wax, so they can twirl their mustaches, of course.)
My window into this was Occasional Cortex. And yes, I know we love to make fun of her as being very, very stupid. But I don’t think she is, in reality. I think she’s a midwit, maybe a little higher IQ than her cohort, and what most schools would call “gifted” (which means an ability to behave and kiss up to teacher, but that’s something else.) However, even if she were as dumb as we all think, her admission, buried in Green New Deal was a shock to me. What admission? She said we should maybe ask “Native Americans” how to live in harmony with and restore the environment.
This made my jaw drop. Even if you buy the whole noble savage in perfect harmony with the Earth thing — and you might, if you are completely lacking in historical knowledge at all — how on Earth did she miss that most “Native Americans” these days are mostly people living in reservations on the government dole, (not of their choice in the beginning, yeah, but inescapable now) or maybe successfully running casinos? Or you know, normal people who have some percentage of Amerindian? I mean, my husband has some (from certain issues in one of the sons), my DIL almost for sure, my prospective DIL almost for sure (they haven’t tested.) According to 23 and me I have more than Elizabeth Warren (not much, no. And probably from Brazil, since US tribes refuse to be tested, by and large. And no, no idea how or where, except my guess would be some ancestor brought a souvenir home.)
I don’t know guys, but I think the chances of “Native Americans” such as they exist in current days magically having some kind of magical ecological knowledge is fairly slim. Even if they’d ever had it.
But remember the left thinks of people as groups, and groups controlled by one characteristic, usually genetic (Lord love a duck, Hitler would adore them.) Therefore if you have Amerindian blood, you magically know how to “heal the environment.” You are in fact a Disney “Native American” singing while forests grow around you, and deer gambol with bears.
If you realize this crazy not only came from the pen of someone who is university educated, but was undoubtedly vetted by her staffers, and then embraced by her side of the isle, you realize what we’re up against.
It’s not so much that they’re at war with reality. It’s that they don’t realize what they were taught since they learned to toddle — in school, entertainment and “news” — isn’t really reality.
In other words, they know a lot of things that just ain’t so.
And that’s what’s brought us here. Because when they decided to perform a color revolution in 20, they really thought once they took over and instituted their great plans over the heads of the “idiot” populace utopia would come about, and we’d all love them and praise them.
There is a desperation in the way they keep insisting the economy is fine, or stomping their little hooves and trying to stamp out “disinformation.” It’s because they don’t understand why open borders, printing tons of money, insisting on DEI and a lot of other crazy hasn’t already ushered in extreme prosperity and improvement.
No, I’m serious. Remember for years I moved in the Science Fiction community, amid people of arguably much higher IQ than the general population and better “informed” and “read” than 98% of people.
If I had a dime for every time I heard them go on about how if only Carter had been elected and carried on with his “reforms” we’d now (circa early 2k) would be so wealthy, and the environment would be healed, and we’d already have colonies in space, I wouldn’t be at risk from even hyper inflation. I’d also have all the hair I pulled out in my hotel room while screaming in frustration at the total crazy. And yes, these were almost always people who’d lived under Carter.
… but that’s the problem.
Nothing has turned out as they expected. And things are coming apart in weird and scary ways they can’t comprehend. And their screaming and pointing at a scape goat (which in their minds is the real culprit, having hypnotized us all into not believing the wonderfulness of the economy and their rule.) isn’t working. Their importing vast numbers of people who can tan and are therefore enlightened and perfect Marxists also isn’t working. So all they can do is double down and believe twice as hard. (We haven’t reached the “offer sacrifices to the cargo cult yet.” or not widespread, yet.)
The problem is that the idiot children have hit so many things with hammers, and keep doing it as they double down, that we can’t predict it either.
I don’t pay any attention to their news and economics analysis, other than to point and laugh. Any coincidence with reality is mere … coincidence.
On the other hand, because of where and when I grew up, I speak fluent “other signs.” And because you are all spread all over the country and have more and diverse occupations than I could dream up if I tried, I get reports. And the reports are scaring me.
Now you could say — and would be right — that most of the Odds are in Odd occupations, even when they’re traditional. I think a lot of you work for yourselves, but there are also those who work for others, usually in strange, off-beat side occupations. You’d be right. And maybe we’re hit before the rest of the people, but I don’t think so. I think we just think about it.
You don’t hear of how much trouble people in tech are having finding jobs, because complaining is less likely to allow you to find a job, but I see it in my inbox, and it’s gone way beyond a blip. You don’t hear about how strained various social nets are with the influx of illegals, but I get pms and emails.
Now do I have a good picture? Oh, h*ll no. I have a lot of pieces of a vast jigsaw. But I can’t tell for sure where the pieces go. And the tail of the cat looks just like the rug. But I can still guess what’s assembling is not a beautiful, serene, fireside scene.
However, add to this that we were already headed for turmoil. Even if we had an ideal government, that left things mostly alone, we were headed for turmoil and upside down-ness.
As a lot of you pointed out in the comments, computers and the internet is a major disruption factor. One they (the broad left) didn’t see coming. (They ain’t very good at predicting.) They could tell space travel would be a majorly disruptive factor, because they have read the history of discoveries. So they’ve squatted on space travel and done everything possible to prevent it, including the ridiculous cry of “We should not go to space till we learn to take care of this planet.” BUT computers? They thought it was just something that would speed up calculations, and hey, it might help them control the people.
But it doesn’t work that way. Even with their attempts at censorship more information and reality escapes than it did when they just had to control newspapers. (Obama isn’t revered as FDR. The effort they made was arguably larger for Obama.) And much as they control the schools, kids keep escaping.
I don’t know what they thought they were going to achieve with lockdown. I have reason to believe, from their own bleatings (“the new normal”) that they thought they could keep us locked up for that, while they did as they pleased. However, I predicted then, and still am, what it actually did is bring “Telecommuting” from a wild and woolly strange way of living to “What most people who work via a computer” do. And they can scream and cry that’s only 20% of people. I’d bet these days it’s closer to 40%. But that’s not the point. it’s the knock on effects. Those people lived in cities, mostly, of necessity, and the countryside was dying. And the cities flourished with support professions: shop keepers, and restaurateurs, and various support people.
For twenty years, it’s been possible for some largish percentage of people to work from home. How many? I don’t know. Again, I suspect more than the talking heads think, but all the numbers are corrupt.
So, why weren’t we? The “normalcy” of what’s been for a long time holds sway over “what could be”. It always does. Innovation has to come as something small that slips in. Also, companies were invested in commercial real estate, and they didn’t want their offices to devalue. Also, people were used to going to work every day. I mean, it’s just the way it was.
Dan and I are weird in that, since our twenties, our ideal situation would have been to work from home. I did. He couldn’t though by 2018 he was, at least some days a week.
And then 2020.
And now most people simply don’t want to go back. This was never anticipated. The number of people that moved away from blue states, and away from large cities shocked the left.
What shocked them even more, and another number we can’t get, is how many people took kids out of the school system to homeschool. (And they should be terrified. Even people who, just before, told me they simply couldn’t, are somehow managing now. And any young couple you speak to, who is having kids, is already studying how to homeschool.) Speaking of and as a tangent, as it happens one of the things I have no visibility into is daycare. I wonder how those are doing. I realized recently, when I drove past one, that they’re far less visible than they were in the eighties, when I swear there was one in every block. Is this because we have fewer kids, or because fewer women are dropping their kids off at daycare at months old, in order to chase a great “career”? I don’t know.)
In fact, what 2020 and the crazy lockdowns did was let the potentiality for disruption of the computer revolution become fact. And now everything they try to do to recover pushes things in the other direction.
Look, most things that come out of the computer disruption will be good, I think. It’s much harder to tamp down a million voices than to simply purchase newspapers and infiltrate book publishers. And it’s harder to control — physically — a distributed country of small towns. And it’s healthier for kids to grow up with their parents than strangers.
But the way to the “eventually better” is massive Earthquake level disruption. No, Atlantis-sinking disruption. And some of those effects are already baked in. I came across some “expert” bleating that there would be a commercial real estate crisis and giggled. What, he got there now? Welcome to the party, pal.
Now pile on top of that that the people who are supposed to at the very least “shepherd” us through this kind of thing, by seeing what’s happening, and easing the fall so we don’t hurt too badly: perhaps ease regulations, so offices can become apartments; ease up on taxes while service people figure out how to position so they can serve the same population now distributed (I mean, people like repair people, doctors, nurses, retail, etc.), etc. are instead hitting things with a hammer trying to bring about utopia that can only exist in Disney movies, where people are drawn.
That is taking the chaos and taking it to the next level.
My feeling — and again, I could be wrong — is that the economy is coming apart at the seams. Things that “always worked this way” and associations that people used to listen to and things like the WHO or financial experts are coming apart.
Now add to it the demographic factor — which as BGE tells us (often) explains a lot of otherwise inexplicable phenomena — and realize that my generation (the not-boomers and not quite-x) were already massively badly taught. I mean, seriously, compared to my brother say, my training was ridiculous. We compensated for it, though, and because the boomers took so long to retire, we sure had a long apprenticeship. Now we’re…. well…. my husband has made noises about wanting to retire. Everyone our age seems to be doing that. Probably not for a while, I think, as we’re in our early sixties. Then again, some will.
And the people ten years older than us are already retiring or retired.
This would fine and dandy if there were a generation of eager 40 year olds who’ve been on the job for 20 years or so, and are more than ready to step into our shoes, no matter how bad their education was.
Except that because of the elephant-bulge of the boom, and what it did to jobs and economics, let alone what Marx did to education, kids are starting later and later. “jobs that aren’t temp by 30” is a dream for a lot of them.
So the people available to step in are poorly trained and bare beginners. Now some will take the load and do admirably. Hopefully most of our kids. But demographically? There is a huge gap in competency coming up just in the middle of all this.
Because things change as graves fill up, there is a chance for change, too. Real change, where the practical necessities force people to look at reality and not at the theory they were taught in school.
The fact that many companies are paying less attention to degrees, for instance, is one of those good things.
But what we’re looking at is not cataclysm, except to the extent that humans, let alone human societies, don’t deal well with change.
What we’re looking at is a whirlwind of bizarre things none of us can anticipate.
There used to be a poster in the eighties of a discovery ship falling off the edge of the flat Earth. I cannot find it for love or money. Never seems to have been digitized. And my attempts to get midjourney to reproduce something like have failed. (If you’re an artist and want to try it, do)
That image fully encapsulates what I see coming.
To a great extent we’ve been living on a flat Earth. It’s a lie, or at least not true, but for the purposes of our every day lives, it worked and allowed us to predict the future.
It is a construct of the early mass-industrial age, created and coddled by a take over of the mass-industrial-communication and art complex. It is infused with Marx, and doesn’t really fit reality, but it was so prevalent that even a lot of us have it in our heads. It explained the past (by lying), the present (by ignoring what didn’t fit) and the future (by lying again, but also by moving things forward continuously.) It was the “arrow of history” in which the future was always more “progressive”. It still lives in the starry eyes of the children saying “you’ll own nothing and be happy.”
But reality never fit it, or felt any need to obey it, just like the Earth never became flat because people believed it was.
And our ship — metaphorical — is about to sail off the edge of the construct and into reality. Because the construct isn’t holding.
The problem is that reality is unforgiving. There’s going to be a lot of crashing and splintering.
But reality is also not like in movies “and now everyone starves.” For everyone to starve you need a high level of communist control, which they don’t have. Even in Venezuela there are people who “make do” and live reasonably okay lives. There were some at the end of the USSR too.
So, what I was trying to say with the other post: There are things you can predict, and things you can’t. There’s something heading for us at speed, and I’d guess the first impact is somewhere very close, though the biggest might be 20 years from now, that we can’t predict. Not just because we’re not smart enough, or because it’s completely out of our experience, but because we can’t predict it. Period. It’s unpredictable. It’s not written.
Factors will careen into factors, the whole thing creating chaos.
I know it’s possible to continue when currency loses value completely, because this happened well before I was born, in Portugal. But it was a very different country, and I don’t know how they managed, not in details. And it would be different with modern tech anyway. (I’ll just say, feel free to boo, I don’t think crypto is the solution. No matter how much people would like it to be.)
What’s heading for us is… fractal. It will become clearer as we’re closer on. But right now, we just can’t predict it.
Will it be better? Some places, some things, some ways. Will it be worse? Some places, some things, some ways. Will it be catastrophic? Some places, some things, some ways.
In the end we win, they lose. In the middle, all is confusion and turmoil.
So, keep your hair on. It’s impossible to prepare for this, because you don’t know what this will be like, much less in your particular place, occupation, group.
Yeah, sure, basic preparations. Same you’d do if you expected a massive storm. And sure, travel now, because long distance travel is a fragile thing, dependent on a high level of stability and civilization.
And keep your hair on. Don’t go crazy and go imagining things. Suffice onto the day, etc.
If you get really stressed, learn something new, practical or not. Keep your mind nimble.
In the end, remember grandma: Our class of people are the people who make do.
We are free because we don’t ask permission from anyone to be free. We survive because we find ways to survive. We thrive because we find ways to thrive.
We make do. Continue doing so.
According To Hoyt 
Hey, NOW!
I wasn’t calling you out! 😀
I may have more hair than JP (or my Dad), but I’ve been losing hair. [Crazy Grin]
I thought you had scales? And horns! 😀
I also have (slightly) more hair than Mr. Kalishek. No offense taken here. As my Dad used to say, “The Good Lord Only made so many perfect heads the rest he covered with hair.”
😆
Dad used the same line! 😀
as does my brother.
I just shaved, too.
Having been dependent on food pantries for the past year or so, (along with our garden and food stamps), I can look at our pantry and see more beans, rice, macaroni, and spaghetti than we can use in a year. Maybe two.
A few weeks ago, we were listening to some people in church lament how the food pantry they support is not getting as much donations, especially from the government, as it has, while getting more people coming.
Last week we went to that one, and received 2 flats of Pillsbury biscuits (24 tubes), 1 flat of strawberries (8 pint boxes), 13 tubs of dip, 8 heads of lettuce, and a ridiculous amount of other things.
My sympathy went way down. We had to give away most of the food (composting the lettuce) because there was no way the two of us could even eat a quarter of that before it went bad.
Did they offer any way to just turn those things down, so it could stretch further for people who could use them?
I wasn’t at that particular one, but other food pantries just hand us bags, or put things in our car, and we don’t even see them.
The food shelf where I volunteer used to provide a dinner for our
clientsguests before attendants accompanied them through the lines where they could pick and choose from what we had available. Covid killed that. We went to the pre-packed box and bag in the back of the car model, and it ended up being so efficient that it looks like we’re sticking with it.I expect things to be better, and worse, and weird all across the board.
Pretty much, yes.
Especially the weird. After all, this is the US. We ARE weird.
I resemble that!
BUT computers? They thought it was just something that would speed up calculations, and hey, it might help them control the people.
Those idiots should have read Poul Anderson’s “Sam Hall”.
A fascist US government used a “super” computer to control the US but the man who ran the “super” computer used it to assist in bringing down that government. 😈
Yeah… AI is a lot like children, in that it will find the path of least resistance in meeting it’s metrics, which can and will include providing completely fake numbers if that’s what it takes to keep you happy.
I was doing some research for a book last week. The article in question was structurally perfect, each paragraph leading to the next, standard essay format. Except that when the AI that wrote it couldn’t find a supporting sentence, it seemed to pull things that were completely random. The icing was the concluding paragraph which had a good final sentence–if your essay was all about the advantages of using the Mayo clinic. The article was about reflexology or some such thing.
Someone wasn’t checking their AI’s output.
I fully expect once computer games start incorporating generative learning AI into NPCs, we will see issues with NPC players doing things like causing kernal faults to glitch the player out of the game and the like.
I think it helps to think of current “AI” as a particularly complex game of Mad-libs.
Sounds like a Demokrat. They pull nonsense numbers out of their asses, and all the proof in the world won’t make a dent in their lies. Like the 34 ‘Climate Crisis!’-es that haven’t happened. “The Arctic Ocean will melt down by 2005!” to quote
LurchKerry. When they’re proven wrong, again and again, they just carry on carrying on like it never happened. And idiots still listen to them!It makes an interesting contrast to 1984 because Anderson really thought the surveillance through.
Today at our food bank we gave out 75 of the 100 sets of boxes we put together yesterday. We’ll see what happens next week (the bank is only open the first two weeks of December). Seventy-five is an increase but noone knows what will happen next week. If we run put, we have the material to put more boxes together.
OTOH it’s expensive, and I have a ladder, and I can make do. Yeah. I know. I probably should buy it. Still cheaper than paying someone to do it.
I suppose the questions to really ask are “Will it actually do what I think it will do?” and “If I make do and it goes wrong, is the ladder that would have prevented the going-wrong more or less expensive than a visit to the ER?”
Really, it’s all about asking the right questions.
less than ER…. seems to do that from reading. But gosh, it’s….. sigh.
The Reader would loan you his except he is on the wrong side of the Mississippi River by a long way. Sarah, keep your hair on but get the right tool for the job if you are going to do it yourself.
You. Must. Not. Have. A. Fall.
Clear? 60+, this is life-essential.
You should be paying someone’s kid to do ladder work. The kid will heal, and probably spry enough to not fall anyway.
If you insist on doing ladder work (pot meet kettle, note color….), then invest in the best tools you can manage.
I should pay someone’s kid. IF I COULD GET SOMEONE. I’m considering it, because I haven’t been able to hire anyone to do it. Sigh.
Yeah, “Can’t get anyone”, even with the caveat of “Willing to pay above market rate” has been a thing for several years now.
It’s why my step dad, who absolutely would die if he fell off the scaffold, was up on the scaffold, installing ceiling.
He’s still got a better head for heights than I do, and has the strength to make the materials do what they should, which I don’t.
We finally have someone hubby is willing to let paint the house. Really didn’t want to paint the house this time around. Painting not so bad. Cleanup OTOH, yuk. What hubby originally wanted was someone to paint the high areas of the house. Even he admits the ladder situations he’d have to use isn’t a good idea for someone over 70. Worse for short stuff here, and I’m over 65. But we could not find someone to partly paint house. None. Contractors would not even consider it. We did get whole house quotes. Hubby has chosen a retiree he golfs with. (Will we probably help? Yes. Lower sections. With his equipment. He cleans.) The flip side of the whole “paint the house” is unlike the past home improvement, anymore it isn’t the labor that is the cost. With paint it is the cost of the paint is the high percentage cost of the job.
I agree with everyone else. The cost of the ladder is not only less than a trip to the ER, for even a minor oops. Plus the ladder can be used on other projects.
Perhaps your church youth program has some teenagers looking for work? Or Boy Scout Troop?
I get it. Plus, you are a Make-Do. So Make-Do with a real ladder that doesnt dump you on the ground.
Hmm. Need to talk to my church youth pastor about how to develop suitable young men for chores..
I was a home fix-it before I was 11, because Mom could not afford pros. She bought a home-maintenance book, and I pretty much absorbed it. I fixed pipes, wiring, sewer, gas appliances, excavvated the wellhead numerous times to repair stuff, dug up the whole septic drainfield once and esssentially regravelled it. (the quote for a backhoe and operator was insane.)
Today’s youth cant start a revolution any more than they can start a mower. And I bet most barely can start a fire with a lighter and accelerant, let alone a one-match no-diesel bonfire. (Watch a cabin of YMCA summer camp youth realize as the blaze rose above 10′ that they bet me -way- wrong…..)
Aah, back to my curmudgeoning…….
“Or Boy Scout Troop?”
Speaking as someone currently involved with the BSA, it is really hard to be able to get permissions on the liability end for actual scouts. (And they can’t use power tools.) However, if you ask for some names of Eagles who have aged out, that might be a go.
(If I get some ready cash together, I have several Eagles in mind for a project, said project being “let’s clear out the garage.” Just don’t have the back for it anymore.)
Most? Probably. But not none. BSA specializes in keeping youth in scouting because of campfires. At least during the all wet winter we have west of the Cascades. Even though we haven’t been involved in scouts now for 13 years. I doubt that has changed. Our scouts could take wood soaked in a bucket of water to start fires.
If you must get a ladder, get a good one. We bought a “Little Giant” when we got our house and that thing is as stable as whatever it is set on. (Which means that user error is a thing, so pick your surfaces wisely.)
I HAVE one of those.
I had the other brand, bought in the late ’90s. It failed and dumped me on my ass one day. Got around to looking at the ‘net, and found the mother-luvin’ thing had been recalled for that reason back in 2000. Sigh. (Not Little Giant. The name is forgotten, and my good step ladder is rated at 300 or 350 pounds. Werner, I think.)
Werner is pretty much top of the line for consumer ladders; I have a 10′ Werner fiberglass stepladder. It’s strong and stable, but compared to aluminum ladders that sucker is heavy!
It may be a long shot, but contact the local LDS ward. They usually have young men who are willing to do that kind of thing.
Our neighbour’s sent missionaries to our place when the moving truck showed up. I was at the office and got my wife’s text “Mormons are moving your booze”
LOL. Well, we used to be “Mormon Adjacent” where we lived because so many friends, and they all said “Don’t try to convert. They’re best friends with Becky and Alan and have been for years. If they decide to convert it will be a miracle.” BUT — here, I’m not sure.
grin – We’re everywhere, and I can confirm that there’s almost always at least one young man in the area looking to make some honest money.
If you look sufficiently desperate/tired while asking, the ward’ll turn it into a service project and you can just feed ’em lunch and say thank you. That, my friends, is how I got three weeks’ worth of garden work done in a Saturday morning (I had previously let the ward use our backyard/orchard for several events, but the point remains).
Oh, we CAN pay.
We live near a 1/2 way house for recovering addicts/drunks. Nice guys, the ones with ambition will work old jobs, moving stuff, lawn care in their spare time. I like to support sobriety efforts in a dir3ct way.
How high? Depending on the undisclosable location’s local market you might be able to rent a cherry picker for a day for less than buying a really good stable tall ladder.
16 feet to reach, so I figure 12 ft would do it.
If doing that, take training. Those things are not nearly as stable as they seem and they go from OK to oh shit in an instant.
Could you find something to rent? We ended up renting scaffolding to put up a curtain rod across the front of our open loft, at the top of a cathedral ceiling.
Tripod ladders were common where orchard work went on in Silicon Valley (a long time ago). They spook me something fierce. I’ve not fallen from a ladder, but above a certain level, my sense of survival overrides my “get-r-done” sense.
I had to paint fascia boards and install gutters this summer. I rented enough scaffolding to make a platform 7′ high by 21′ long. It was (barely) enough to let me paint the peak, but I could have done a double deck for that section. (And yeah, I should have had the siding painters do the fascia, but I can be an idiot. [shrugs]
It was a pain to set up three bays (not essential, but it made the long gutter run doable.), but once done, it was a whole lot more comfortable and safe. I only had to use a ladder to get to the scaffolding, and I was able to convince the sense of survival that I had it under control. Got-it-done.
Scaffolding is quite a bit nicer than ladders, especially when one must move horizontally to do a job
I definitely come from Make Do stock. Very smart, capable and well educated especially the self educated people like my dad.
Which is why it was extremely weird to have my 89 year old father say to me on Sunday, “I think we would all be better off if we asked the Native Americans how they ran things and do what they did.”
Weird because I hadn’t heard anything as dumb as that from him in the history of ever and weird because it just got mentioned as a thing going around these days.
He watches mainstream media all the time so I’m guessing he is getting this from there and it must be a big push.
He grew up in Reservation country, so I know he knows better.
I suppose it is in preparation to get us used to the idea of living an Authentic Human life of subsisting on bugs and scraps and dying in droves of starvation and cold in the dark every winter.
Yeah, I lived next to a very large reservation (in the town my mom grew up in), and if those people ever had access to any amazing “prospering in harmony with the earth” knowledge, they sure as hell don’t have it anymore.
Dirt-poor, drugged out, wasteful, and destructive was most of what I saw. (The reasons behind it are potentially many, not 100% their fault, and don’t bear on the present problem.) There were people out there who had the biggest TV you could buy and, back when satellite TV was unusual and expensive, a satellite dish — mounted on the roof of a dirt house. A lot of them parked better cars than my parents could afford in front of said dirt house, and their kids and grandkids are probably spending government handouts in exactly the same way 40 years later.
We’re not going to get anything useful out of that particular subculture/ethnic group, not in the way the progtard lefties think. To the extent that any of them are prospering, it’s only because they’ve managed to join the same economy the left is trying to kill.
I’ll eat the leftists before I eat a single damn bug.
The most successful Native tribes are those who have private property rights and worked- or work -at assimilating.
Visited the National Bison Range in Montana this summer. The local tribe set out to document they could care for the bison. They became contractors to the Feds and worked under contract. Until the Feds turned over the range – and a good bit of other “former” Tribal lands. This way worked for them.
Yep. Not you know some mystical “native” way of living.
The book Stay Away Joe, (also an Elvis Presley movie btw) was very descriptive of the kind of attitude you find on reservations. And also ghettos, actually. Low achievement communities tend to have the same MOs.
My dear SIL’s family are enrolled Lakota tribal members and none of the successful members live on the Rez.
Many very fine people from the Lakota, smart, educated, good family people. But they have to leave that toxic environment.
So, yeah, totally ask them for their tribal wisdom and do that.
A good friend of mine was enrolled in veterinary school. Another young man finished medical school (paid for by the tribe) and returned as promised to work as a doctor for the tribe. He was strung up, hanged for “getting above his place” within a week of returning.
No longer worth it. She dropped out of school.
Don’t eat the commies, you don’t know what they have been eating!
You could feed them to feral hogs and increase your bacon supply. If there are no feral hogs near you, add commies to your compost pile.
I really need to get one of these:
https://is.gd/7lFxhM
“And compost your enemies.”
One of the big banks is complaining that their staff isn’t turning over enough. Considering that this same bank is getting 5%+ of free money on money gifted them by we taxpayers ….. Tar, feathers, flames, pitchforks. They’re using that free money to put aside a severance reserve. Did I mention they made record profits, mostly from we taxpayers, whilst having huge unrealized losses? Or that bank senior management is paying themselves the surplus rather than passing it on to the shareholders?
Still, people are holding into jobs because jobs are actually hard to come by. The JOLTS report, which reports such things, just missed large and the last several months were adjusted down. It looks as though the reports are starting to catch up with the situation on the ground.
Well, Ok then. I have no dispute with anything that was said or the theories presented. My take is, while the blog article is right on, it will be more regional and geo dispersed.
As an example: Minnesota has gone hard left crazy and is becoming unlivable in the metro areas. The “progressives” in charge seem to be still charging down the same track that got them there and it ain’t getting any better. Friends who live there say taxes are up, security (police) is down and social affairs are restricted due to them either being “woke” and not worthwhile or not worth the risk of going to (bars, theater, movies, etc.).
A few miles away we have Iowa which is doing well economically and isn’t having near the social / political issues as our northern neighbor. Taxes are stable (went down for retired folks), security here is much like 15-20 years ago normal and the “woke” stuff is not very evident around here along with a commercial boom. There is susposed to be a “trans day of rage” or something in Iowa City around the University this weekend on the 8th. Nothing about it beyond a few burps in the local news last week and nothing after. It will be very interesting to see how that comes out in the next few days. Note too that Finals at the University start on the Monday after this little demonstration.
When (no if) major events begin to happen – places like the above Minnesota, in particular Minneapolis, will be flash points. Places like Iowa will have a few sparks but will for the most part be an overall place of stability. That doesn’t mean I will stop going armed, leave my doors unlocked or start hanging out with crowds but I think I’ll be OK here in my mid-west pocket.
From the prior post… Yeah, I was thinking the apocalypse was coming and I think it will but, (ah, yes the famous “but”) it will be as described today and not the end of the world totally. Eh, could be wrong.
And parts of states will have trouble: Madison WI but not up in the north so much, Houston and Aus-Tonio, the Metroplex (but only parts) and not Pecos or Lubbock [much] or the Edwards Plateau. Lincoln and Omaha NE but not the rest of the state.
Agreed – Chicago will be something special – but go down into southern Illinois and you will see a whole different reaction.
The “blue” cities and metro areas will be the most impacted, is my guess, along with bigger issues in “blue” state like California along with (likely rural) areas being more sane while a whole state implodes.
Just over 3 years ago, my husband and I bought a house in a small rural Illinois town of about 400-450 residents. We’ve been improving it gradually, starting with trimming some out of control trees, reseeding the back yard (which had been reduced to a mud flat by the previous owner’s large dogs), installing a new furnace and central air, etc. The neighbors have noticed and have complimented us on our work. We’ve also gotten to know several of our neighbors better and participated in some town wide events. There is also a Lutheran church in town that we’ve gone to some events at (even though we’re Catholic; closest Catholic parish is about 8 miles away) because the majority of people in town seem to belong to it, and it’s a good channel for getting to know them.
The conventional wisdom in the right leaning blogosphere is that no sane person should live in Illinois and if they do they should have packed up and moved out yesterday. I understand completely why they say that — I despise our state government, even though I work for it! — but at our age (I turn 60 next month), and with an autistic adult daughter who’s going to need people looking out for her after we’re gone, maybe putting down roots in a community is more important and more likely to help us all survive whatever’s coming down the pike. (This community is in a very “red” county, by the way, and we know there are a substantial number of hunters and firearm owners in town; exactly the kind of people you want to have your back when the fecal matter impacts the fan.)
This is wise. I mean, ideally you could move to a better state, as could I — but Chicago isn’t all of Illinois just like Seattle isn’t all of Washington. And nobody really gets to live the perfect ideal; everything is a compromise at some level. Living in a community that has some separation from the crazy and where you can build a support network is the most important thing.
And like San Francisco and L.A. are not even remotely all of California. (And I will also say this—a lot of people blame Sacramento for people that they sent here. Sacramento is only purple because of the legislature imports; it’s redder than people think.)
“Sacramento… is redder than people think”
Same for Springfield IL. The county we are in (Sangamon) is consistently red in POTUS and statewide elections, although the city itself is starting to tilt more to the blue, mainly due to a higher percentage of minority residents and not because of state employment (which has actually been gradually shrinking for about the past 20 years; the dominant industry in town is now healthcare as there are two hospitals and a medical school here).
Those people should stare at the IL 2A sanctuary county map until a few drips of wisdom eventually leak into their skull.
We choose our home because it was basically one floor (with basement – we installed a chair lift for that level). It is in a Democratic small city in OH. Still a sensible place, surrounded by rural/semi-rural land.
Why?
Access to medical care in close distance, if had to, could walk to local stores, close to family, older, but good, neighborhood.
Main police station right down the road, about 1/2 mile. Low crime rate.
If I were younger, I might do a more isolated living situation. But both my husband and I are too old, and too broken down physically to manage that.
I’m currently working on building up relationships in the community. And will be shoring up my ham radio/communications skills, and links to the ham community.
You do what you can. Keep in mind that the reddest communities will be a target for the Blue. They may be less safe than buried within flyover country, in strong local communities.
Umm, I think you forgot the fair community of East St. Louis, AKA Chicago South.
Sarah, could you please tell my hair to stay on? I’ve been stress-shedding more than usual this year.
And a new-to-RedQuarters white cat with red-tabby patches is about to arrive, so there WILL be hair on. On the floor, on the chairs, on my black skirts, black dresses, black pants, blue pants, green pants, grey pants …
Me too on stress shedding.
Bah.
I got that out of my system about the same time I could legally purchase alcohol.
Just remember to sit the white cat on your lap before monologue.
Oddly :-), the only Useful Arabic Word or Phrase I remember from my time in the Kingdom back in ’91 is (roughly transliterared), ‘La tentif shaara’, which means, “Keep your hair on.”
And as for Native American stewardship of the environment, I seem to recall that the most effective way of hunting buffalo was to run the herd off a cliff if one was available, and pick up the pieces afterwards.
LOL. i didn’t even know they used that.
Another bit on the Bison Range: when a tribesmen originally wanted to rescue bison calves, the Tribal elders said no….and as good consensus seekers, the man refrained. Later, his son brought it up again and this time, they were willing g. Which is the only reason the herd on the Bison Range exists. They rescued orphaned calves.
Pre horses and firearms, yes. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta is a national site. (Stampeding Buffalo over cliffs was a risky proposition, as one Crow youth found out, hence the name of the site).
Also one in Montana.
Also one by where I live.
In Spanish don’t they ‘Puling my hair’ meaning your pulling my leg or trying to fool me?
Maybe. Not in Portuguese.
So, we bought a cow. A Jersey calf that will be ready to breed and milk in about 2 years. Also have about 60 chickens (dual purpose, egg and meat) pair of horses, pair of cart ponies and a pair of mules for transportation and work if fossil fuels go away, about 45 goats (dairy and meat) and half a dozen livestock guard dogs to protect everything.
If things hold together for the next two years, we plan to move onto a few hundred acres on a ridge where my wife is blood kin to everyone within 5 miles.
You sir, are a Rock Star! One thing, are you open to adopting??
Be cautious and keep your powder dry; if the local gov’t knows about it they will be sure to run an “appropriation for the common good” raid if the SHTF.
“We’re the class that makes do.”
That sounds like an answer a Little Fuzzy would give.
Are you sure there aren’t any cute adorable aliens in your family tree?
“much more clothing than we need,”
/laugh
And half of it doesn’t fit anymore.
Fuzzy, yes. Alien arguably. Cute…. not so much.
I’m a Big Fuzzy and I make do. Alien and fuzzy and not cute.
Nod, “Cute means harmless” and we’re not “harmless”. 😈
https://img.ifunny.co/images/d67a18dcdd55d67a5060edf1cea50eb3deb44561f1b9f0b2ca6be0c0a7d37674_1.webp
(attempt 2)
(last try)
Is anyone going to tell them it’s not working? 😀
Can’t, too busy melting.
and ruin the shot?
Ewoks!
Have you noticed how much gov’t bureaucrats look like land prawns? Keep your shoppo-diggo sharp. 😉
I’m fairly certain choppo-diggo’s are on TSA’s proscribed items list. You’ll have to drive yourself to said gov’t bureaucrats. And only the fuzzy-sized ones are concealable.
Well, no alternative, then; nuke ’em from orbit…
I prefer Rods from God. Kinetic energy strikes don’t produce and significant radioactive fallout.
Point.
Perhaps you are thinking of the cover of the Kansas album “Point of Know Return”. That shows a ship sailing off the edge of a flat world.
No. It was a poster. I worked t discount pier-one and we sold it.
Sometimes album covers can become posters.
Here’s the cover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_Know_Return#/media/File:Kansas_-_Point_of_Know_Return.jpg
No. I know that cover. That wasn’t it. It was larger and multicolor, and almost photo-realistic. I don’t remember what the words on it were.
The one illustrating this article isn’t photorealistic but it is roughly the right vintage:
https://www.latitude38.com/lectronic/sailing-ends-sanity-flat-earth/
closer to that, yes. But not quite.
Well, at least I have something to download and feed to Midj when I get home.
A pizzeria in Santa Clara (“Chicago Pizza Dock”. I doubt it still exists.) had a mural like that in the dining room. They also had a green stripe in the carpet left over from Saint Paddy’s day. I laughed a lot at that.
(OTOH, there’s no nearby river to dye green…)
Well, it was worth a shot, anyway!
Bunch of different ones here:
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=588229662&sxsrf=AM9HkKnIDLob-Dk325A_QooIIsKKJF8gFA:1701828989684&q=ship+sailing+off+the+edge+of+the+world&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjh5peD3_mCAxXWAjQIHTUrBZoQ0pQJegQICxAB&biw=1566&bih=676&dpr=1
This was a close up, and you saw the sailors trying to lean way back.
I wonder if the Leftroids will try to lean way back when their train goes over the cliff? 😀
Well, well, well, lookie here. Apparently, not so Great Britain is telling it’s people to become “more resilient” and lay in emergency supplies of batteries etc. and prepare for internet outages.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/stock-up-on-batteries-in-case-of-grid-meltdown-britons-told-hpdwhlfql
Very interesting.
Behind a paywall. Still worrisome for my UK friends.
Even here in the US, power companies seem to be skimping on line maintenance. We’ve had more outages this year than I can remember since I moved here. Only one that lasted overnight (windstorm knocked out a transformer), but way too many “power flickers just enough to make stuff reset and computers crash” incidents. Still enough to make me wonder what could happen when things really start pulling loose.
I was already buying power packs for recharging our battery-powered devices, since we do outdoor events, but now I’m getting my desktop machines on UPS’s. Just finished reconditioning one I bought on eBay (once I figured out I needed to turn the batteries 90 degrees to get them into the compartment), and planning to get the big Mac Pro tower on it as soon as the charge tops off. Still have two more towers that need UPS’s (the two Mac Mini’s can share a UPS because they’re based on a laptop architecture and use much less power, and I hardly ever use both at once), but that may have to wait until after the first of the year (medical bills).
Things will continue to gain speed, down a hill toward a cliff and ultimately into a volcano. Our betters will continue to argue that acceleration is good, and “Look at the sunset we see over the hill! Isn’t it great?” until the fire licks at their feet. Then they’ll scream bloody murder and demand apologies from everyone who didn’t stop them from going over the cliff.
I do feel something big coming. Not sure what, but it will be disruptive. My feeling is that my focus needs to be water, food and fuel.
Water catchment is almost done. Firewood and propane.
Seeds for years, or for one year if I supply others, which I likely will.
In my line of work I’ve always maybe a point of ensuring that anything I think I know about the system I support (trading system software for major financial firms) is something I have verified by doing (i.e. reality) … when I say “Do this and that will happen” it not because the Online Help says its so or because someone else said its so but because with my own eyes I have SEEN it do it … (i.e. reality) … multiple times over the years I have had people challenge me with “You want to bet on that ?” to which I always say “Alot more than you are willing too.”
And this includes how to break the system too …
It all comes down to repeatability … and the Left never repeats anything … they claim X policy will solve the Y problem … and when it doesn’t instead of trying to understand why not they simply propose policy Z to solve Y … (and they make a million excuses why X didn’t work … “not REAL socialism” etc etc etc …)
No one seems to notice that a “livable wage” is always at least twice the minimum wage. And has been even though the minimum wage has more than doubled since I’ve been paying attention.
I remember when the minimum wage was raised to $7. 7.35? Whatever.
I was living in a small apartment, surrounded by people who were working multiple minimum wage jobs. The response was glee. Many of them went out, got new apartments, bought new cars, splurged on other things based on the expected new wealth.
When, predictably, prices went up, rents were higher, and that new car at 20% interest was eating everything they made, they couldn’t figure out why. They’re making more, surely…!
The people minimum wage laws are supposed to protect inevitably end up being those hurt by them. Partially because of basic economics, but also partly what put them in that position in the first place–the inability to make good financial decisions.
As the saying goes, the real minimum wage is always zero.
And for those who do not believe that…
Self-checkout pays… $0.00.
Pumping your gas pays… $0.00.
And I suspect a list could be made.
Minimum wage was intended to shut “undesirables” out of the job market.
Funny how many of the left’s hobby horses started out that way.
I don’t think their borrowed army will fight for them. They have already given them all the benefits of citizenship without the obligations.
Why would they then risk life and limb just to acquire the responsibilities? That would be foolish.
Was discussing this with the wife last night. I don’t think the question is whether they will fight (they will), but how, which probably poorly, but enough to create chaos and destruction in country in a civil war and police state oppression.
Dick Durbin’s proposal makes it pretty clear (even if not overt) that their full ‘citizenship’ is contingent upon a completed term of service. In other words, they either obey orders or no citizenship. Worse, they are part of the military now, and their civil rights are restricted by their military service. They ultimately can be jailed, even executed, for failing to follow orders. At a minimum, they would face dishonorable discharge and immediate deportation.
In other words, there is much to encourage compliance with orders.
The Deep State military has already been actively purging those members most likely to refuse an unlawful/unconstitutional order. They will now have soldiers who group up in societies where authoritarianism of varying degrees was the norm. Add to that many lived in places where life was considered cheap, and you a have the possibility of real atrocities should things get hot.
If this plan is allowed to move forward, you better believe our ruling cabal would leverage these guys to the hilt if their asses were on the line, which they would be.
They would. It won’t work. But they’ll try it.
I believe what is happening is the left is starting to eat itself alive. The left is composed of little factions of different groups of envy and victim-hood. Those factions are starting to hate each other and undermine each others positions. Since they all pray to different gods, ecology, or there version of eugenics, they are starting to hate those who don’t pray to their own pagan god and vision and blaming them for the failures of their concept of utopia via the tool of Marxism. They are the Mayan Priests cutting the hearts out of their victims in order to change the weather and failing to do so, kill even more. The peoples response was to walk away then, and they are now as well. You can’t walk away, we haven’t killed enough people yet, they cry.
“You can’t walk away, we haven’t killed enough people yet, they cry.”
I hope we don’t get to the point of shooting people in the legs to stop them.
I wouldn’t put it past them.
c4c
You counsel us that what’s to come may not be an apocalypse, but merely a heavy economic retrenchment. There is a large cohort in this nation so entitled, so accustomed to receiving whatever comforts they believe they merit by the accomplishment of being their enlightened selves, that will take such a retrenchment as a true apocalypse. Stock up on earplugs, because their shrieking will carry to whatever distant refuge you can find for yourself. It’s not going to be fun. Especially when they start demanding that the peons (i.e., anyone not them) start providing them with what they’ve lost. Now.
(I cannot even guarantee that I won’t be shrieking along with them. I’ve gotten accustomed to a whole lot of comforts myself. My best hope is in finding acceptable alternative comfort, or at least solace, in all of my books. Time enough at last … )
P.S. You mentioned
When they say “you’ll own nothing and be happy” they really mean it …
This favorite catchphrase of theirs is best understood with an application of grade-school grammar. It’s not a declarative sentence: it’s an imperative sentence.
Republica restituendae
et
Hamas delenda est.
To quote from a movie:
Q: What is best in life?
A: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
The lamentations of those that claim to be women shall also be acceptable…
I will tell you a significant reason why people in tech can’t find jobs, from firsthand experience. IT in the eastern/southern half of the country is absolutely dominated by Indians, whether folks here on visas or green cards, or naturalized citizens. We’re talking zeroth-generation, born in India and came here for jobs. And something odd happens–again, from firsthand experience–when these Indians work for years and make it into management positions.
They only hire Indians.
I’ve seen it happen firsthand at my employer. Our department head is Indian, been in place for about three years. Every single new hire at a team-leader level for 2+ years has been Indian. 17 new hires this year for management, lead, and engineer positions…16 Indian, one Indonesian. We aren’t even getting any American diversity hires anymore. Our department full-time staff is now about 70% Indian…the contract workers, almost 100%. And HR says nothing about it, because these all count as “diversity” and therefore improve the company’s ESG score, which at this point is apparently just as important as our earnings per share.
If you replaced “Indians” with “white Americans” in the previous paragraph, this sort of hiring would trigger screaming outrage and massive lawsuits. But in a situation where it’s clear as day that there is preferential hiring of a certain ethnic group going on, because they are still considered a “preferred” ethnic group despite being dominant in that particular industry or discipline, nothing gets done.
It’s a natural, logical conclusion of what happens when a country does not take the welfare of its existing citizens seriously. I have no beef with folks coming here from foreign countries, becoming citizens, and making a life for themselves. I DO have a beef with it when they’re allowed to hire “their own” preferentially instead of hiring the best person for a given job. Doesn’t matter whether it’s Indian, English, Jordanian, or even American.
THIS.
I’ve seen that.
Now wanna hear the scary one? It’s happening in medicine with … CHINESE.
Oh no doubt. And please understand that I don’t mind immigration in and of itself, obviously. But I think that immigration should be looked at as “does this benefit the nation” in addition to “does this benefit the immigrant.” Does it benefit the nation to import hundreds of thousands of Indian programmers/engineers and Chinese doctors when we already have plenty of programmer/engineers and doctors of all ethnicities already here? It’s a literal case of “they’re takin’ our jerbs.” My daughter has no interest in going into IT, thankfully, but if she did, I’d do everything in my power to stop her. Because there just aren’t any entry-level jobs in IT anymore if your name isn’t Prakesh or Sivasubramanian. (Or, on the West Coast, add in if your name isn’t Li or Cho, I guess, since the Chinese have a lot of tech jobs out there.) And I hate saying that because it sounds so racist, but damn it, it’s true.
Precisely. It should be examined as impact on the nation. Nohting against Chinese doctors. But gen 0 who are unsteady in English or prefer not to speak it can become an issue and they hire preferentially their own gen 0 fellows.
The interesting thing about this trend is that both these cultures are highly conformity driven. They excell when the rules are clear and they don’t have to make any decisions (such as following a computer data key for diagnosis). Not so much when everything falls apart and they have to figure things out on the fly.
This means they are excellent as middle managers or someone who simply has to follow a checklist. They don’t do nearly as well when thrown headfirst into chaos and they have no instructions.
This is so true. The best workers who have come over from India are as good as any native-born folks I’ve ever worked with, but that’s more the exception. The majority, yes, tend to work by rote. Their technical education is generally first-rate, especially the ones who make it over here. But the ability to do analysis, self-direct, and just have any sort of intuition–the “art” of programming or QA, if you will–is anywhere from limited to nonexistent. Tell them what to do and you’ll get it back competently and promptly because they will work ridiculous hours if needed. Just give them a problem to solve without details, and it’s a crapshoot. Most of the time they will not dig deep enough to come up with a solution, they will freeze. Especially since all of our offshore folks and a goodly number of the onshore ones are contractors, who aren’t always going to have the motivation or the deep understanding of FTEs.
I was assigned to a new Indian manager a few months ago. He has promptly destroyed morale in my group, especially among myself and one other long-term QA lead employee (me 10 years, her 14+) because he treats all of us like juniors. Constant badgering reminders about things, myriads of IM groups that we have to keep up with, micromanaging any document we produce, a complete and monomaniacal function on test automation over getting project work done, and a total inability to actually listen to anything we tell him. It’s literally his way or the highway. I’ve blasted him in skip-levels and a recent employee survey and I think it might’ve had an effect in that I’m getting moved back to my old boss, who is a real good guy. I’m trying to get the other QA lead moved with me. He is literally the ultimate negative stereotype of bad Indian top-down team management culture, right down to his accent being so thick that he’s almost impossible to understand when he gets rolling and his understanding of our English isn’t great either.
Would not do well in any of the jobs I did in programming between ’83 – ’16. All were “here are the tools”, sink or swim, miracle happens here, or quit, and “next victim”. To be fair, I don’t know what the ethnicity of prior victims, or of the Phd who I beat out on the last job I took in ’04. Oh, there were people I could go to, to bounce ideas off of (listen), or specific input (C-functions for hex/binary hardware access, he was the OS programmer). But how anything applied to what I was doing? Not a chance. Figure it out. Or fail. Honestly? It surprises me all IT/programming jobs aren’t this way.
What about “does it benefit the immigrant’s home country?”
I can’t imagine that having all their doctors move here is any good for that.
probably not. The whole thing is insane.
I don’t think whether it benefits the immigrants’ home country is our problem, TBH. Maybe that’s a very insular and non-progressive way to think of it but our immigration policy should be crafted to support America first while being fair to the people attempting to use it. And note that “fair” doesn’t mean “permissive.” My wife used to work in a lawyer’s office who specialized in immigration law for very specialized and high-end visas, way rarer and more selective than an H-1B (something about “national interest waivers”). This was 25 years ago, but our immigration laws back then were somewhere between Byzantine and Kafkaesque. One innocent mistake could literally negate 18 months of effort and a thousand pages of paperwork. The way it all worked was completely nonsensical. And these were for people with incredibly specialized cutting-edge knowledge, two PhDs, that kind of thing. Meanwhile, at the Rio Grande…y’all come on in, we need more landscapers and hog slaughterers to devastate the American working class!
It makes perfect sense when you understand that the Iron Law is absolute. The purpose of a bureaucracy is to employ ever more bureaucrats.
Yep. It’s like the tax code, or pretty much any longstanding laws, they get added onto piecemeal like somebody trying to turn a single-wide into the Biltmore Estate one room at a time. The tax code and immigration law both need to be blown up and rebuilt from the foundations into coherent, fair, and America-first bodies of law, because right now they are incoherent, unfair, and do nothing toward helping America and her citizens.
“I don’t think whether it benefits the immigrants’ home country is our problem, TBH.”
No, but it’s a way of looking at the problem that might be more persuasive to the kind of people that wants more foreigners here.
‘Yes it’s a great benefit to us, but at what cost to their homeland?” with a side order of “How can you be so selfish and [whatever]-centric as to not think of the plight of those poor Third Worlders deprived of their doctors by your desire to have ethnic food?”
Nope. I refuse to countenance this particular line of patronizing holier than thou bullshit.
If their home country wants to keep them, they can damn well be a country someone would find value in staying in. Otherwise kick the dust off of their feet.
That’s really (ahem) encouraging, because I was just notified that the 60-something female cardiologist I had been seeing once a year (mainly for blood pressure control issues) has retired, and is being replaced by a male doctor named Yang. This doctor went through med school, residency and everything following that in the U.S. and appears to be about 40-something. We’ll see how it goes when I see him in January.
Also I notice the practice to which this doc belongs seems to be divided between MDs mainly of foreign origin and nurse practitioners who are mainly, for lack of a better way to describe them, typical American women between 30 and 50. Is MD-level doctoring becoming yet another of those jobs Americans allegedly just won’t do?
Yes, or at least not at the pay rate they are allowed to earn.
And to be fair, most practices ABUSE doctors. I have a lot of friends in medicine.
Which is true of ANY profession which allows unlimited foreign replacements.
A-yup
From what I’ve heard of US medical school, there’s some insane level abuse going on, with added indulgence of severe mental illness.
We really need to get the limits taken off of how many folks are allowed to start training.
Americans are being selected against for things like Residency and Fellowship by departments dominated by foreigners, often not speaking English while at work.
My former boss in the Dept of the Army got a Masters and a doctorate online in logistics. He found himself training the incoming branch chiefs. It happened at least three times, and all our future new bosses were African-American. When it happened again, he asked why he wasn’t being considered, given upper management obviously thought he was competent. He was told no, no, that couldn’t happen.
He retired to become the head of the new School of Logistics at a local college.
I heard that the whole organization was disbanded after one of these diversity hires got caught doing stuff even the government couldn’t ignore. But I was long gone by then.
It doesn’t help that a lot of the hiring software is insistent on trying to keep up your ESG scores.
Friend of a friend had to hire a programmer, had some very specific requirements (works in a highly regulated industry, involving controllers for small-gage rail systems. It’s the sort of position that if something goes wrong and the company is at fault, the company is looking at a minimum of six-digit FEDERAL fines, let alone state fines. And has to be able to pass an FBI background check). So you need some very specific skills and experience. He’d love to hire someone to train them up, but that would require him to have this position filled in the first place.
Put the job up on LinkedIn and Indeed and a few other places…
…and started to get notes from Indeed that maybe he should adjust his requirements, that he doesn’t seem to be looking at “qualified” female candidates or people with “ethnic” last names…
Eventually, he found someone via a friend-of-a-friend contact, but I’ve been told that this isn’t unusual. I know that my previous job, I was literally the last person they chose, because they didn’t have a single “suitable” candidate (and I suspect that I was canned in less than two months because I was asking all of the wrong questions…). When I was applying for state and county jobs, I always seemed to be just under the cut-off point for the positions. Saw who was filling them, and glad that I’m not there…
(Got a standing offer for a job similar to my sister’s, but it would require a 90 minute commute each way, the pay is…meh…and I’d probably be one of the few guys in that part of the office.)
I think we’re seeing a lot of the “Gone Galt” by people that are just tired of trying to get into jobs where nobody will hire them because they’re white males. Or that they’re seeing what kind of disaster they’re walking into and want nothing of it.
I haven’t been looking super-aggressively, but honestly, the only nibbles I’ve been getting have been from Indian “body shops” with Indian recruiters sending me poorly-written emails for short-term contract positions. I’m not moving voluntarily without some stability in the new position. And right now I don’t think I need to move, exactly, but my employer is so obsessed with ESG and I’m so drowning in Indian top-down management culture, it’s turning into a real garbage place to work. But I’m a fat, Southern, Christian, white male in my 50s who wants to get away from that culture, so I’ve got so many strikes against me, who knows.
anony, have you sent me an email? Can you?
What I was seeing between ’02 – ’04 when I was looking. I am female. Didn’t help. White over 40 female with 20 years (too much) experience.
Its the tech indentured servitude thing, where tech industry lobbies the .gov to allow more green cards every year because “they can’t find US workers” (an actual requirement of hiring someone not a US Person) is basically because all those indentured servitude workers depress the starting wages so much that nobody else will take the jobs for that little.
Combine that with age discrimination so rampant in tech tossing all the experienced folks, and we’re going to end up in a bit of a corner if any international event causes a bunch of fill-in-the-blank country of origin workers to suddenly go home.
It blows my mind why the allegedly “worker-friendly” lefties love H-1Bs. Given that it is a version of indentured servitude, in a way, by massive corporations, it’s shocking that they aren’t raging against it. Bloody hypocrites.
And yeah, the legal requirements for the H-1B are completely disregarded by many if not most. 30 years ago I saw the posting at my employer at the time for a lead position, very similar to mine but database programming instead of wrangling COBOL. My position was listed at pay grade “14” in our internal system. The H-1B, who had basically the same requirements on a different platform, was listed at a grade “10.” That was a $20k/year difference in 1992 or 1993.
Oh, BTW, the infighting among Indian employees for an onshore American posting is ferocious. I worked for a major outsourcer for several years and only our very best Indian employees ever made it over here. The rest got to stay in Hyderabad and slave away. I had a very average offshore worker that I had to do an evaluation for…he was average, but tried, so I gave him basically good scores of around 3.5 out of 5. Next time we talked he bitterly complained. Turns out they inflated the scores over there so if you got a 3.5/5, you were terrible. 4 or even 4.5 was pretty average. Then the account manager told me I never should’ve been asked to give him a rating in the first place, I should have just been asked to give a paragraph of general feedback and let the offshore manager assign the numbers.
It’s not just the H1-Bs. In pretty much any tech job that interacts directly with users, if a customer evaluation comes back and isn’t across the board best possible survey results, its bad.
Buy any vehicle. “You will be getting a survey. If you can’t answer 10 on everything, please call and tell us how to make it better so you can answer 10. Please!” Emphasis always added.
The buyer satisfaction thing seems weird. Right after? Unless things are quite bad, it should all seem good. Now, in a year or two or five, then I (or someone) will KNOW the vehicle and be able to give a more accurate opinion. Of course, greater accuracy isn’t the point, fudging the metrics is.
Not generally about the vehicle purchased. About the sales force, facilities, loan, and delivery, information and process. Given we always have a hick up when we initiate the loan process we could downgrade. Our credit is atmospheric stellar. We also have it locked down. So we have to know which credit bureau gets used so we can unlock it for 48 hours.
The ‘please answer our survey’ was the last of a list of pressures when we bought our most recent car.
Believe me, salesdude, you do not want me to do that.
It drives me nuts when I’m asked to do a review and the instructions say “Anything below 5 is a fail! Call us first if…”
Blatant pressure ploy, but I have no doubt it’s real.
It is. Please remember that for Amazon. Yes, you might think that a 5 is for the maybe five in a lifetime reads, but Amazon idiocy thinks under five is “I hated it.”
I’ve mostly adjusted to this, based on comments here and at Mad Genius. If I would read the next in a series, the current gets five stars.
I can think of one exception: Cast in Time. It’s fairly dreadfully written, but I want to know what happens. It only gets four stars – I am reading the next one, after all, so it can’t be that bad.
I’ve noticed serious review inflation on Amazon, generally. I was looking for a new chair and reviews would be “it arrived damaged, I had to replace four screws, it wobbles, and the cushion is too hard: four stars!” Huh?
Let me give a practical example; I run a small etsy shop. One of the features of the site is “star seller” status, which once a shop has been running for a bit means that they quickly respond to questions, ship within the time they say they will ship, and have high ratings. Whether a shop gets this status is renewed at the beginning of each month, based on a rolling 3-month average.
The effect of having is is getting a badge on your listings, and while I don’t know their algorithm I can GUARANTEE you it effects search rankings.
PLUS
Buyers can check a box in the search settings to only show shops with Star Seller. So this matters.
In order to have a qualifying rating you need at least 4.8 stars average reviews in the last 3 months. That means that for every person who only gives 4-star ratings because they think that 5-star should be reserved for the truly exceptional, I need another 4 5-star ratings just to maintain the bare minimum.
When I leave ratings on Etsy or Amazon, I leave 5 star ratings. If I had problems or returned an item, I state it in the comments. No product, shipping, or delivery, is worth hurting the vendor, unless it is really, really, bad. Never had anything that was bad. Not what I needed. But never bad.
Yeah, I’m one of the on-site IT contractors at my office, and we constantly complain about the people manning the IT Service Desk. If it’s not on their diagnostics checklist, it might as well not exist. I had one ticket get moved to my queue from the Service Desk for a company employee who couldn’t get his laptop camera to work during online meetings. I checked over the notes, and noted that the service desk employee had checked to make sure that the drivers were up to date. But I noticed something conspicuously absent…
And so when I finally called the user (who was a remote user)…
Me: “I know this will sound really stupid, but I need to ask anyway. Have you checked your camera slide?”
User: “My what…?”
The Service Desk employee had never bothered to check whether the built-in camera slide that’s installed by default in the laptops the company uses was open or closed.
Been happening for 20 years. I’m looking forward to either “retirement” or joining a friends consultancy which makes a mint cleaning up messes left by the caste.
My money’s on November 2024 for the next Major Disruption, and I suspect we’ll be getting glimpses, hints, and previews all summer long.
Should be October if TPTB want to time it for the election.
I suspect the “major disruption” to which he’s referring might be the election and its results.
I think there will be shanenigans before that.
Before and during. If it all goes as I’m afraid it will, after should be…ummm…interesting… In the Chinese sense.
^
|
This To be honest. In 2020 the crap started in March and just kept coming. They will almost certainly try a variant of the St George Floyd ploy to show that demographic the Democrats Care. Similarly expect the Squads demographic to be appeased with allowing mass Palestinian protests. If they are running the Turnip in Chief and Willy Browns side piece expect them to still the waters sometime early September. If not whoever they run will be aided by groups calming the “protestors” for them. As our hostess has noted the mid and upper level Democrats are just clueless mediocrities and so having had this work for them once will try a slight variant, no one will notice will they? Well folks will notice but those folks won’t be in the press.
Christopher Rufo is saying we’ll see the same professionals who turned out for the BLM riots to appear again as pro-Palestinian rioters next year. He says there are multiple NGOs who basically handle logistics and a lot of folks who will come out for the cause du jour because as Marxists they’ll come out for anything that might weaken the government and society as a whole.
“we’ll see the same professionals who turned out for the BLM riots to appear again as pro-Palestinian rioters next year. ”
See, to me that makes the problem far more manageable. Identify and remove the professionals, and the looky-loos out for a fun night of burning down the town will disappear.
They always try the same game. ALWAYS. They want and need lockdowns. So, March/April.
Not quite. While it appears that nearly everyone has forgotten it at this point, the chaos began before 2020 even started, with the run up to Lobby Day.
The typical move is the “October Surprise”, something that is expected to swing voters toward one candidate immediately before the election. TPTB still want to act as of everything is normal, so I foresee an attempt to stampede voter sentiment at the last moment.
If more shenanigans happen later, it’s easier to get away with them if everyone is already sympathetic toward you.
Last time, the ‘October Surprise!’ was the Hunter Biden notebook computer, but they suppressed it. They’re still trying to suppress it. Hell, they’re still blocking Senator Blackburn’s subpoenas for Jeffrey Epstein’s records. What rot are they covering up now?
Like the meme 2 weeks ago: “I named this buck Jeffrey Epstein, because he clearly didn’t hang himself.”
ALL the rot. It’s all rot.
An “October Surprise” isn’t as effective anymore because there is no single Election Day any longer. It goes on week after week. You can’t drop an item with exquisite timing so it catches everybody in the full flood of initial response, before they’ve had a chance to look at it more critically or just let it fade into the background.
I think one party has figured this out, and gone on to more, ahem, sophisticated operations. I think the other party is acting like the old rules still apply. A lot of old rules, actually.
Republica restituendae.
Biden’s so infirm, I’m wondering if he’ll last another ten months. That’s when it’ll get really “interesting.”
We think of Trump as sturdy, but all this crap has to be wearing and he’s not young, either. Add in the possibility of the long knives coming out and only God knows how it’s turning out.
And the details of the lawfare are coming clear.
https://redstate.com/jeffc/2023/12/05/bombshell-jim-jordan-claims-fulton-county-da-colluded-with-j6-committee-to-indict-trump-n2167221
I think he’s one of those people who thrives on stress.
Objection: I believe you’re giving them WAAAAAY too much credit for good intentions.
Here’s the thing:
We all know that the Marxist theory of everything being Class Warfare is laughably obvious BS.
But they don’t.
They believe to the utter core of their beings that any power or privilege they have, comes directly from standing on the faces of others.
They virtue signal so obsessively, because their ideology implicitly damns them. They can purchase indulgences, but they cannot absolve their guilt.
In short, They Are The Ones Who Stay in Omelas.
Do not expect them to have a crisis of conscience when their vision of Utopia is on the line.
They’ve already made their decision, just not all of the rationalizations they’ll use to comfort themselves, afterwards.
“They believe to the utter core of their beings that any power or privilege they have, comes directly from standing on the faces of others.”
This is because, being the worst sort of aristos (or wannabe) it observable does. 2nd law of SJW if memory serves.
Or as I used to say many years before, if they’re yelling about you doing something, it is down to patent infringement
Compare and contrast:
The people paying attention to things like combat efficacy of kamikazi drones with drone-observed targeting and drone-relayed hardened jam-resistant comms as compared to multigazilliondollar-manned-jets, or how to work logistics across drone-observed ground when airspace is contested, or what works and doesn’t work in naval warfare these days
vs.
The people paying attention to pronouns and DEI and aggrieved-group-month(s).
Guess which one is military active duty.
And guess how many vets of the latest round of oh-we-didn’t-want-you-to-actually-WIN wars in the ‘stan or Iraq are now in tech, and playing with drones in their spare time…
I just read an article somewhere about Ukraine saying one of the great advantages they found was they discovered they had so many people who flew consumer drones before the war for fun who could easily be trained up after the war heated up. The article noted on the Rooskie side are vast swaths of almost illiterate distant-province mobiks who were so poor they had never seen indoor plumbing, let alone a multicopter drone.
I compare it to the innate advantage the US had in WWII when so many GIs had messed around with internal combustion engines back home, on cars or on the farm, where the German and Russian and even Brit kids had no such general exposure to that tech at all.
I personally would not want to get put in charge of a “US” unit made up of Guatemalan and Venezuelan border-crossers going up against a small group of US vets who know how much fun can be had with household chemicals plus a large group of techie kids who have been playing with drones for decades now.
Nope. Sorry sir. Got a toothache. Blinding, it is. Might pass out.
Twenty-somethings, a bunch of $400 drones, and some stolen hand grenades. Some assembly required.
Yep. When a German tank broke down, the crew waited for somebody to come and fix it. When an American tank broke down, the crew would have it fixed before the Germans even saw their designated repair team. Plus, the American tanks were designed for easy repair in the field. German tanks were designed to be Teh Greatest Battle Tank Evah! Repair? Who needs to repair this incredible German machine?
Let’s don’t mention the French, okay?
My reading is not so much that they thought it would never break down as that they were planning for European scale logistics and distances, where there would always be a railroad nearby to ship it back to the factory. All their opponents at least had enough experience with empire-type distances and operating conditions. It’s also why they never managed truly long range aircraft, even though they had at least some commercial overseas airlines up and running in the 30s.
Also, German equipment was constantly over-engineered. Something about the German culture and mechanical stuff, apparently.
Also the most unreliable ones were never meant to be “everyday drivers”. They were meant to crack hard problems, and then get recuperation and repair time.
Which doesn’t work so well when you start using those machines as the firemen of the western front.
The French who had to deal with their communist unions sabotaging their military hardware because Stalin and Hitler were frenz at the time? Those French?
The Arab-Israeli Wars saw a similar situation. After-action reviews by American observers noted that Arab tanks would require depot-level work for stuff that the Israelis (and Americans) would fix in the field
Even worse for the Arabs, the culture actively refuses to allow the troops to learn. American trainers introducing Arab troops to their new American vehicles have recounted stories of handing out the vehicle manuals to the new crews, and seeing the local officers immediately collect them all. Knowledge is power, and the officers want to keep all of the power to themselves.
They love to comment about the people fighting the military, yet, the military has twice had “primitives” with “lesser equipment” give them way too much trouble. in part due to ROE, but still. These were not peoples with MORE rifles than the US Military. iirc The USA now has more privately own arms than the rest of the World’s Militaries combined. And most of the owners know how to use them. We’ll not get into what we know of better forms of asymmetrical warfare.
Brain just spit out “Killdozer Drone”
Everything has gotten crazy expensive, but if you can afford it, I’d say go for the ladder. Falling hurts!
…And here’s a bit to add to your reports. Where I work, we had a guy show up with a tractor-trailer who “spoka no Englis” to make a delivery. To one of the main entrances, not the delivery dock. On SUNDAY.
I didn’t hear the outcome, but the place where I work doesn’t take deliveries on Sunday.
This does not give me a good feeling.
they’re suing one of the truck companies for not hiring illegals.
They’re suing SpaceX for not hiring illegals, at the same time that they’re telling Musk that he’s not allowed to employ them (since space is a sensitive industry).
What, you expect consistency from these idiots?
Hiring illegal aliens is a violation of federal law. They can’t drive trucks legally, and they can’t get insurance.
And yet American truck owner-operators are barred from Kalifornia ports because they’re not under the ‘protection’ of a union. Sounds like the Mafia version of ‘protection’ to me.
I know. but they’re being told it’s racist not to hire them.
Someone needs to sue the federal employees and offices that are bringing suits like that.
The Feds suing people for not violating Federal law has to, itself, be illegal.
SpaceX did countersue:
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4215332-spacex-countersues-doj-over-hiring-discrimination-case/
Good!
Oh, see, but what they’re being sued for is for requiring proof of eligibility to work. It has disparate impact on hiring minorities and foreign born. (Dry: You don’t say.)
Why am I not even surprised?
I mean the feds are.
Economy. They all too often think if they just believe hard enough, the nonsense will suddenly become viable and work.
Tinkerbell economists. Just clap loud enough….
and scream “We Believe!”
Just like trans activism.
Yep.
If they just find the right lie, and repeat it enough times, the universe will deliver their socialist utopia.
Somehow.
It will just happen.
———————————
In a Perfect World, nobody would need guns for self-defense; therefore, banning guns will make the world Perfect.
This is what passes for left-wing logic.
So…
Company that I started working for several months ago. I’m working in a large, multi-building office campus. Most employees are required to come into the office one day a week. Some are required to come into the office either the day before, or the day after that one day. No one comes in the other three days unless they have to (like I do) or want to (there are a few that like it, particularly when none of their co-workers are around).
And even on the “required” day, when the place is mostly full, there are still noticeable gaps in the desks that are filled, where no one is sitting.
The company has apparently gotten it into their heads to turn all of the desks on at least one entire floor (the building in question has three floors, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they decided to do the same on at least one more floor) of one of the multi-story office buildings into unassigned work desks, in small double-occupancy cubicles. Keep in mind that a number of these desks already aren’t being used, and certainly no one’s using the cubes in question for double occupancy. The space is just too cramped to work with someone else in the same cube.
But apparently someone’s gotten it into their heads that they’re going to need all of these “first come, first served”, cramped desks.
Or hoping to consolidate and sublease the unused area.
A BP rep I dealt with (2010-ish) said at that time all their office space was unassigned and everyone not management with their own orifice, hated the setup.
Due to the nature of my company’s business, there would likely be issues having non-cimpany employees wandering around. So I don’t think the sub-lease idea is likely.
I’ve worked in an open office before, and yeah, it sucked. Every time I settled into a desk location, someone new would start showing up earlier than I was and take that desk every day. It was very annoying. Of course, this was pre-shutdowns, when everyone had to come into the office five days a week.
We’ve had 4 different companies on site (us and 3 others). Then they leased the Office only building to another industry in town who moved the Feds into the place, but the Maintenance and house cleaning companies were left to find their own offices (two bosses, run the two together) and ended up here in my building. The 3rd place had offices attached to our manufacturing but recently built their own large office building on our site, freeing up office space for more of our staff who were stuffed 2 to a closet or cube.
Building is supposed to start on a new location and the space here in my building should open up a bit, though more will be in the space I am in (we be low on totem, but it is just two to a 20’x15′)
Didn’t have time to read ALL the comments, but wanted to leave this before getting back to work;
I have noticed the number of “Buy Gold for stability!” ads seem to have increased again.
This is surely a sign that other people are getting that sort of feeling, too.
The ‘don’t trust credit cards or digital currency’ crowd isn’t entirely sure
of ‘regular’ cash, either. So, OLDER forms of measuring value might be safe.
Which makes a certain sort of sense, but I am still left with “Who will I sell
this PHYSICAL gold to, and for what?” I know my wife has always taken a
loss when she sells some of her jewelry she doesn’t want anymore.
So, survival boxes of foodstuffs sounds good, but we have no basement
or other practical storage area, Just doing what we can with what we have.
Make do.
Invest in other metals, such as brass, lead and copper-nickel alloy. 😀
I need more brass.
and lead
and copper
and UN0509, UN0160, UN0161
Oh and UN0044, UN0377, and UN0378
But isn’t strange that the folks saying you shouldn’t trust the dollar… are selling things and expect to be paid for such in… dollars.
Besides the problem of selling the Physical Gold, there the fun-and-games of getting your gold if it’s in a vault miles away, assuming that the gold actually exists.
jewelry works best
Just don’t “O.G.” like Junebug
How’d he go to the bathroom with all that stuff on?
Maybe that’s what killed him?
Gold hitting $2K suggests soem folks are worried enough to spend heavily.
Then again, ammo prices are about to double again,and that is going to trigger another run…..
alcohol?
Tide pods.
Started with the liquid bottles, though.
https://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/
Currency mostly for drug deals and re-sale fencing.
Bonus history of the increase in our wardrobe size (not our sizes IN the wardrobe, but the number of clothes).
And this was rampant theft in the days BEFORE the Democrats made shop-lifting practically legal.
This!
Regarding Amerinds “living lightly on the Earth,” when Europeans moved into what is now southern California, they thought the locals were acorn-eaters who knew nothing of agriculture. What the reality was was that the locals had completely changed the forest ecology to favor a particular species of oak tree, which had large acorns with low tannic acid, so they didn’t require as much processing, and that was their main source of food. It was agriculture on a mass scale, but it was not a type done in Europe, so it was not recognized as agriculture until recently.
Or when the pilgrims came to colonize the eastern seaboard. The environment that now is primarily forests. Small scale, but the Iroquois, and other eastern seaboard nations had cleared the forests for agriculture. Just that the squash, corn, etc., are low maintenance crops. Just ask anyone today who puts them into their gardens, anywhere. What is the small town saying? “Lock your car when parking here in the fall. Why? It is squash season.” (Okay. Zucchini, but the same.)
Welp as of the end of the month Republicans now only have a 2 vote margin voer Democrats in the House, meaning that as soon as early next year it is very possible Democrats take control of the House, end all the investigations into the Biden Crime Family, and with the Senate being firmly in their control, they will be able to ram through their entire agenda that packs the Supreme Court and formally fixes the next election in their favor. The stupid party is doing it again.
(Carefully sews scalp back on)
“Events” (one could call them collapses) have a checkered sort of history. If you look at the major historical ones (I suppose Rome is the classic example, but post-Roman Britain comes to mind as well), a complete collapse was rare. It was, as Sarah points out, effectively in pockets. Located on the border of Hadrian’s wall or on route through Gaul to Hispania? Unfortunate news, friend. Whereas events could lay more lightly on other areas (often cities as they could physically defend themselves, but today’s cities do not have the ability to provide for themselves, let alone defend themselves).
The clinically interesting point will be the continually expanding reality of what will be going on versus what people believe is going on. I am still looking forward to the day that being told that working and paying all my taxes are not just a good idea, but my patriotic duty.
Recently read a book on the fall of Roman Britain.
John Lambshead
The Fall Of Roman Britain, and Why We Speak English
It was an interesting read.
A few of aspects of Roman Britain were: 1) Roman Britain was mainly just the major cities, 2) Roman society (outside of Britain) considered all Brits as barbarians, and 3) Roman Brits were especially targeted by the winners of the various wars for the Emperorship (when “British” forces were on the wrong side).
We are waaaaay past the point of minor disruptions from immigrants. We can only acculturate about 1 million new folks per year without causing significant problems. And Mr. 81 Million & Co. have at least quadrupled that figure each year for his entire Administration. So I would not be surprised at REAL insurrections and riots by the criminal invaders encouraged by Creepy Joe when they find that the Promised Land is not flowing with milk and honey, or even generic food and heating oil.
And considering how much they travelled to get here, getting to your exurb won’t be a stretch.
LOL. GO read the migrant horde posts again.
Walked my eye wash. They rode. Buses trains and airplanes.
Lisbon, AR. Not on a major highway, and not that many people. They’re making it there, according to the folks who, you know, actually live in Lisbon.
But hey…. what do THEY know?
The family own land there, and rent some of it. So we have contacts too.
Um…. sure. There will be some near the border. No contest there. But as an organized thing? Ah. Nah.
And look, yeah, they’re going to try weaponizing this. It’s going to be bad. But it will not go as they think. Remember, they’re not superhuman, either.
It’s the Central/South America to Mexico/US border part that is modern transport. Once they hit that point, THEN they start walking.
Meh. WHO came up with those numbers?
And people have been encouraged not to acculturate for 50 years now. NOT TO. I had to fight that, so I know.
No, this is resolved some other way.
And as for the illegals, the LEFT is plotting to put them in tents in isolated places, now. It’s come around three times, gathering momentum.
I wonder if they’ll recognize the trap?
Encouraged? I don’t think so. More like shocked. Just like they are shocked that the
invadersemigrants and homeless won’t be housed on federal land on the fringes of nowhere. After all they are giving them some place to live and all the free goodies, the ingrates.Yep.
I wear a hat to keep my hair on. But am the only one in the household who isn’t running around with it on fire at the moment. I have kidney surgery on Dec 27, and hopefully they will get it all. Have one roommate (68yoM) with a-fib who gets an ablation Jan 3, and another roommate (his wife, 62yoF) who has bipolar 1 and fibromyalgia. I hate being the adult in the room. We are hoping to get our medical issues dealt with before everything goes to slime. I get the feeling it is going to be sometime in the spring. Hopefully we can prep.
I also think it will be Spring.
Also, note my nephew was just declared free of lymphoma. So, there is life on the other side. (And I’m a very relieved aunt who will have a glass of port wine tonight, to celebrate.)
Yeah! Thanks be for good news! happy kitty dance
Very good news about your nephew!
That has been hanging over me all year. This kid was born on my prom evening, and I babysat him a lot before I got married.
Excellent news. And a darned good reason to celebrate!
Deo Gratias, Sarah.
Congratulations to him, his medical team, your nephew’s family, and you. Enjoy the glass of wine in celebration!
That’s excellent news! Thanks be to G_d.
Might be fun to ask Occasional Cortex if she knows what a buffalo jump is.
I suspect she would be (or has already been) a ‘buffalo catcher’ at the bottom of the cliff.
Need to be certain to get your share of bison bison. Percussive harvesting is all the rage.
The cover of Kansas’s album “Point of Know Return” has the best rendition of that meme I’ve ever seen.
Yeah, but it wasn’t that.
Either I’m old, or everything has gotten crazy expensive.
Embrace the power of “and” 🙂
and deer gambol with bears
I don’t think I’ve ever seen “gambol” without “lambs”. Obscure word of the day.
I could be wrong — is that the economy is coming apart at the seams
You could be, but I don’t think that’s the smart way to bet.
In relation to the the “very cheap, $7 lunch” comment from the other day, I had the cheapest fast-food lunch I’ve had in a long time at Popeye’s, yesterday: “only” $19 for two chicken sandwiches (meal, so two coleslaw and fountain drinks, too).