March 13, 2023:
The only way the world improves is one death at a time.
February 03, 2023:
It's been 26 years - since 1997 - that I first had a company flack lie to my face and tell me that employees care far more about non-tangible things, like employee discounts and "perceived coolness of the job" (his idiot words) than they did about how much they were getting paid.
I still read this all the time. It's a C-suite plcating lie. Straight up: a lie. I have managed enough people in my life to know that what employees want is the most amount of pay and benefits for the least amount of work, period. Anyone who tells you otherwise is deliberately lying to your face. Call them on that shit. It's a myth that just needs to die ASAP.
February 01, 2023:
Thinking of de-registering to vote. Just a thought.
January 31, 2023:
It's easy to assume that everyone is a lunatic, but the truth is the vast majority of people you interact with every day just simply aren't. Even most of the ones who strike you as acting a bit weird are not, like the woman in the grocery store yesterday who told me about the time she ate an entire fried chicken in her car. She laughed: "you're a complete stranger so I can tell you this". I laughed too. She was right: you shouldn't eat fried chicken in your car, but sometimes these things just happen.
January 11, 2023:
Almost one quarter of the way in and there is still a very weird reluctance on the part of, well, pretty much everyone I know to treat the 20th century as "old news". Why we still look to those days for guidance or a template on how we deal with today's issues is beyond me. Things are very different now.
January 02, 2023:
Been at the same job for twenty years as of today.
January 01, 2023:
My dog got me up at 1:53am to go outside. Once outside, he did not do his business. He instead charged the family of skunks that I hadn't seen, getting once again within a few inches of them.
For what must be the ninth time, he did not get sprayed. He's never been sprayed. I truly don't understand how this is possible.
At any rate, Happy New Year. Seriously. A non-skunked dog is something to celebrate.
December 19, 2022:
A flight from Phoenix to Honolulu left 36 people hurt, with 11 suffering serious injuries, after the plane experienced "severe turbulence," officials said Sunday. A total of 20 people aboard Hawaiian Airlines Flight 35 were taken to two local hospitals, Honolulu Emergency Medical Services confirmed. Nine of those 20 sustained minor injuries with 11 suffering serious injuries, according to EMS.
My father is a retired airline pilot. He always made us fasten our seat belts while we were in our seats and didn't let us go running all over the plane, AND THIS IS WHY. A 2g drop - not at all uncommon - turns that fall from your seat to the ceiling the equivalent of falling off the roof of a single story house - headfirst.
Stay in your seat and keep that seatbelt fastened. There's a reason they tell you that.
December 01, 2022:
Christine McVie was, by a long shot, the most talented member of Fleetwood Mac. A band which was one of the best of their era.
November 04, 2022:
An interesting post by what I strongly suspect is a covertly funded Chinese government source. This does not mean that it is wrong, it's just something to keep in mind:
OBSERVED PATTERNS:
1. A period of extremely right wing rule causes a reaction that brings the center left or centrists back to power – Biden after Trump, Gantz/Bennet after Netanyahu, & Lula after Balsonaro
2. However, the center left return on much narrower margins than should be the case, indicating an increasing percentage of the population are conditioned to tolerate the ever more reactionary extremism, the shifting Overton Window, becoming ever more radicalized
3. Current & future economic conditions around the world will be increasingly tough in the coming years, due to both structural (increasing protectionism, trade wars, polycrises in much of the Global South, the developing Sino-US technological decoupling that drives the world toward 2 blocks) & cyclic forces (such as the recession in the consumer electronics & semiconductor industries)
4. Under such tough economic macro environment, when nativism, paranoia, & over-securitization of everything are already increasingly evident everywhere, the center left currently in power faces strong headwinds in the coming elections
5. When the right wing return to power, they are more extremist than the previous iteration.
6. The EU unity over Russian invasion of Ukraine is masking, for now, the rising reactionary right wing that will put it under severe stress going forward, such increasingly illiberal forces are already in power in Hungary, Poland, Italy & Sweden, & gaining momentum in Germany & France
I still see no signs of the highlighted part. Technological parity with the US, almost there. Largely through theft of IP. But innovation? Not seeing it. Not saying they can't do it; they can. But they aren't.
November 02, 2022
Happy Día De Los Muertos.
There hasn't been a lot of death in my life, which means it's simply being backfilled; it's all gonna come at once and hard. Notable mentions:
My grandparents
Doctor Anthony Armino
Eric Friedmann
Britt Rushing
Hannah Rushing
Enzo and Scooby and Gidget
Suzanne Cloud
Joe Lizarraras
William "Bill" Jones (who deserves an entire post on the value of what may seem like small, inconsequential actions)
There are others and it's early in the morning and I can't think of them. But they aren't forgotten. They'll come up when they need to.
I miss all of you.
October 17, 2022
33 years since the Loma Prieta earthquake.
I'd normally call my buddy Eric Friedmann today, but he died back in 2020. We called each other every October 17th. Something about going through a near-death experience with someone really does bind you to them.
I miss Eric.
I don't miss the "anniversary of" that used to hit all the Bay Area media every 10/17. Looked around. Couldn't find a single one this morning.
Part of me is really, really glad for that. If they've let it go, I guess I can too.
Wish you were here, Eric, my old buddy. Really really do.
September 27, 2022
Watching an old video of some friends playing back in the 1990s. VCR camera.
How is it 2022 already?
September 04, 2022
Still miss Hannah. I'm going to feel guilty about that dog for the rest of my life. You don't know what you don't know, and I just didn't know how to be a good dog father back then. I wasn't bad - there are a lot of people who are just awful to their animals - but I could have been a lot better. Spencer owes you a lot, baby girl. I miss you.
July 28, 2022
It is really an amazing experience to listen to a song an ex wrote about me and to realize that pretty much every word of it was true.
July 27, 2022
You will not find the truth on the internet. Facets of the truth hide in many places, some easy to find, some very hard to find. But none of them here.
May 14, 2022
There have always been toasters.
Think about the times that were before you were born. Can you prove they even existed? I mean, there are artifacts, there are accounts, but you can find those at Disneyland. All you really know about the past are the stories thereof, and stories - humankind's defining achievement - are in the end, just stories. They can be true, false, or a combination of the two.
All I know is that there have always been toasters.
Oh, you can read stories about a time when there were not toasters. I don't believe it, myself. So far as I know, toasters have always been part of the world.