I just...

had a huge get land in my lap as a DJ. It's weird. It's like being the bar owner when Garth Brooks shows up for a secret show like he did back in the '90s except the show isn't for four days and you can't tell anyone. Like, we're putting out press releases under embargo so that nobody knows what crazy shit is gonna happen at midnight on a Sunday.

And it looks like a letter I wrote a couple-three weeks ago is going to make about 50 hard-working women about $30m a year. Which is CRAZY but a couple people i know who between them have been the head of benefits for like six giant corporations you've heard of said "normally this would be commissioned by inside counsel to get drafted by outside counsel by the company you're sending it to, not the other way around, and they honestly couldn't have written something this good. They're going to have to pay it and if they don't the insurance commissioner is going to have their hides."

I've been reading Malcolm Harris' Palo Alto. It's basically a Tankie history of California. It dovetails nicely with Mike Davis' City of Quartz - quotes it in several places, in fact - which is basically a true crime history of California.

Palo Alto argues that the modern American world exists because of conservative ideologues and war profiteers who resorted to crime and shadiness to rule the world. City of Quartz argues that the modern American world exists because of petty grifters who resorted to conservative ideology as protective coloration. You get enough people to fondle the elephant and eventually you'll know it's an elephant. Harris' Palo Alto is big on how horrible everyone in California has been because they're a bunch of racist capitalists; Davis' City of Quartz is big on how horrible everyone in California has been because the whole place runs on graft and if you want to get ahead, the Tragedy of the Commons is that way. Palo Alto is chockablock with opinion and footnotes to the opinions of others; City of Quartz is chockablock with references.

Palo Alto's boogeyman is Herbert Hoover, who despite losing election went back to California and became a power-broker for another 40 years. City of Quartz's boogeyman is William Mulholland, who despite a complete lack of formal training, despite a body count hundreds deep, despite causing a guerilla conflict that lasted for years and despite a decades-long documented history of nefariousness and graft remains one of the most venerated people in California history.

What's interesting is that City of Quartz was written in 1990. California was an aggressively Republican stronghold, had voted conservatively in every election it had ever participated in and Darryl Gates was mostly famous for creating SWAT in response to the SLA shootout. Palo Alto came out in March of this year and Harris' bridge from the staunchly conservative Republican politics of the 20th century to the staunchly liberal politics of the 21st is (waves hands) "apple."

Even though he name-checks Prop 187.

It's funny - conservatives ran California from stem to stern. Then the LA riots happened, then all the gringos voted for "stop and frisk latinos" by a 58-41 margin and within 10 years California was an aggressively liberal bastion, Republicans never to matter for the next 20 years at least. THAT, to me, is the interesting parallel. Republicans made the 2004 election all about banning the gays and within 10 years we had legal gay marriage in all 50 states.

The Republican Party is currently at "Ackshully, slavery was good for slaves" and I think the whiplash is going to be amazing.

I'm having an epically shitty week so bad that I won't ever even be able to tell anybody about it and it's put me in one of the darkest moods I've ever been in and I am utterly and entirely out of patience so if you think I'm a cranky shithead most of the time?

STRAP THE FUCK IN

“I said, ‘Oh, my God, they’re going to allow anyone to get unemployment-insurance benefits,” he recalls. “The systems are vulnerable. All you needed was a name, a date of birth, an address, and a social security number.”

Oh my god! Poor people and Democrats might be exposed to money!

the nastiest fuckin' meanest fuckin' most Republican fuckin' talking point any shithead can find puts the total fraud from PPP at ten fucking percent. Ten. Ten. Ten fucking percent. Of which thirty percent of that was "misallocated." In other words, it went to Americans? It went into the economy? But it didn't go in the way it was supposed to. And "the way it was supposed to" was really something - "hey did you make money last year? Hey, are you not making money this year? Have money."

See those? Those are pallets of cash. American greenbacks, hundos by the stack, sitting out in the middle of the Iraqi desert, waiting to disappear into the once-and-future ISIS like piss in a pool. Best guess? 363 tons of it, $40 billion in all. I had a Lyft driver once. Iraq war veteran, one leg shy. It was the LAX-to-Cypress Park run so we had a good 90 minutes to get together. It took about 20 of those for him to mention that "guarding pallets of cash" was far and away the most fucked up thing he'd ever done. It still marked him. Because it was him, and some of his buddies, standing around in the middle of the night in the middle of the desert, knowing they could walk away with life-changing amounts of money but not doing so, only to have a bunch of future ISIS troops show up the next day and haul it all away.

the whataboutism is strong with this one

Sure. But the fact of the matter is? PPP was a democratic program in which the Trump administration was absolutely positively over a barrel and NINETY FUCKING PERCENT OF IT DID WHAT IT WAS SUPPOSED TO.

I scan maybe 200 economic charts every morning. And you know what? About 50 of them have a notch in the middle. It's a notch where pick-your-metric plummets below the axis never to be seen again, then shoots back up to about where it was three months later. That notch? That notch on 50 economic charts per day? That's COVID. And it shot back up again because this country shut down its economy, hunkered down and started it right the fuck back up again and if that only cost us a trillion dollars in misallocated cash? Fuckin' GDP of the United States is 23 trillion dollars a year, a spilled trillion for saving the fucking economy isn't even a good tip.

Ben Bernanke got the name "Helicopter Ben" for this quote:

Let us suppose now that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1,000 in bills from the sky, which is, of course, hastily collected by members of the community. Let us suppose further that everyone is convinced that this is a unique event which will never be repeated.

Except it isn't even fuckin' Bernanke's Quote, it's Saint Friedman's. "Throw money at the proles" is the quintessential Chicago School idea and if ZOMFG ten fucking percent of it ends up "misallocated" count yourself lucky. Some dipshit rapper shooting a video called "EDD" is the system at work and his ass getting arrested is nature healing.

Fucktons of money went to rich people and that is never bitched about. These articles are always about black people who didn't deserve it and the white Republicans who are all about law and order but refuse to expand the IRS who are the guys who are actually responsible for catching this shit.

Fuck Rolling Stone in general and fuck Sean Woods in particular.

I actually spent about a half hour writing a (sort of bitter and angry) response to this... but I just deleted it because the world doesn't need more negativity.

hold my beer

I know a kid. Dennis. Dennis was in my CNC class; he wasn't old enough to drink and he supplemented his family's income by working at a kennel. Dennis was the first person I saw display true, vehement rage at Millennials - he hated our instructor but he hated him as an entire class of people. Dennis was the first person I heard say "no one gives a shit if you're a ravenclaw or a hufflepuff, ass." I of course know a bunch of older GenX and their hatred of Millennials is something, but they got nuthin' on Dennis.

You know what I hate? Strauss-Howe Generational Theory. I hate it for the same reason I hate homeopathy: It has a gloss of sensibility but it's nonsense deep down inside, I know it's nonsense, and yet Bach flower essences calm me down. I see the voodoo for what it is and yet I am a zombie.

Strauss-Howe Generational Theory is where we get "millennials" from. They coined a name for GenX, too ("thirteeners") but since it was stupid, dismissive and demonstrated the archetypal 'boomer hatred for GenX, GenX adopted Douglas Coupland. "Millennials" stuck because the generation itself was still eating play-doh while their parents were busy hating on the slackers that were about to invent the Internet.

So okay. Thumbnail sketch of Strauss-Howe Generational Theory is that sociologically? What matters is who you grow up with, and who your parents are. Your life experience is dictated by what you were allowed to do as kids and who you were allowed to do it with. Chinese Zodiac ain't much different, it's just more granular. Latin Zodiac is a totally different thing. The Romans? The Romans believed in Strauss-Howe Generational Theory. That's who Strauss and Howe cribbed it from. It's a philosophy of empire, through and through, a patrician, moneyed and elitist explanation of the Decline and Fall. Romans called 'em saeculums because the Romans never thought of anything original, they were a borrowing culture, and they borrowed saeculums from the Etruscans. Etruscans thought a saeculum was a human lifetime, thought their culture had ten of 'em, and lasted roughly 850 years. Strauss and Howe took it one better and went "you're a kid, you're a parent, you're a grandparent, you're dead" for a human lifetime and decided that any given lifetime, excuse me saeculum was divisible into four generations.

Strauss and Howe made a big point about how their theory demonstrates all of American history but they also count American history back to 1600 and they go "yeah, Civil War, big head-scratcher that one" and predicting the past is hella easier than predicting the future but goddammit, there's truthiness here.

________________________________________

"GREATEST GENERATION" Saved the goddamn world from fascism and it was a close thing. Sacrificed a bunch and shall never be criticized as a result. Threw vastly more socialism at post-war Europe than they were willing to enjoy at home because Red Menace but also because too much capitalism among the ruins and you end up with warlords.

SILENT GENERATION: Too young to fight WWII, too old to do anything but get in the way and raise Generation X. Spent their adulthood being accused of communism whenever their skirts were too short or their term papers weren't decorated with American flags by "the Greatest Generation" which, as previously discussed, is immune to criticism of any kind.

BABY BOOMER GENERATION: Kids of the Greatest Generation who can always hold "I fought Nazis" over the heads of their spoiled children, who came of age during the Golden Age of Capitalism and wanted for nothing. Teenagers did not exist prior to the 'boomers. The 'boomers were the first generation to consistently go to high school let alone college. They grew up in an era of military, economic and cultural superiority that has never been seen on this earth before and will never be seen again. They worked for nothing, they wanted for nothing, their contribution to society was largely not making as much of a fuss as their parents did when they were forced to share their classrooms with minorities.

GENERATION X: Too young to fight Vietnam, too old to do anything but get in the way and raise Generation Z. Spent their adulthood being accused of communism whenever their paychecks were too small or their music wasn't decorated with American flags by the 'boomers who, as previously discussed, never.worked.for.anything.in.their.lives.

MILLENNIAL GENERATION: Came of age after The End of History, after peak oil, after September 11, into an economy that had no room for them, with the least-understanding parents and grandparents in the history of mankind. Weren't so much promised a golden future as expected to create it for the 'boomers. The Long Boom was over for Generation X but the 'boomers had no reason to notice that because it was fucking over someone else's kids, not theirs and fuckin' hell they'd bought a house and a car on one blue-collar income what the fuck is wrong with you, Junior?

GENERATION Z: Grew up with the most cynical parents in the modern history of America, picking over the cultural ruins of boomer and millennial detritus, cultural hegemony in the rear window and global wars of scarcity erupting in places the news tells them not to care about. Legitimate fears about the planet being unlivable in their twilight years as a direct consequence of oldsters who are telling them what to do. If that's not enough, Strauss and Howe don't call them "Generation Z" they call them the "Homeland Generation" and fully expect them to fix everything, because as the last generation in the saeculum, that's their fucking job.

___________________________________________

So there's your framework. Millennials, as a group, can't catch a fucking break because their parents ate all the cake and then told them they didn't get a slice because they're too slow. The kids around them, meanwhile, only know the cake through rumors and have no problem telling them to shut the fuck up if they want real problems they should take their fucking noses out of their Friends reruns and smell the melting permafrost. The guy who wrote A Generation of Sociopaths got a book deal because he first wrote an essay called "They promised us flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" because the beating heart of millennial culture is disappointment and betrayal and no one fucking cares.

There's a real undercurrent of millennial writing that fundamentally boils down to "spoiled child after her parents went bankrupt." It engenders virulent selfishness; Ayn Rand grew up bourgeois in Moscow and then the Whites stole her birthright, et voila, "objectivism." Every supervillain origin story is some form of "promise betrayed" with various aspects of culpability depending on what sort of villainy you need; the culture millennials grew up in was one in which their parents clearly didn't trust them to walk to school, let alone save the world. GenX? Lawn darts and three-wheelers. Millennials? Super Soaker bans. And then to make matters worse, GenX flipped the whole goddamn script by inventing the Internet and then the Millennials created social media so their parents could compare notes about how much they suck across thousands of miles of distance.

________________________________________

Not all millennials are bitter, disappointed underachievers scratching out a living by ranting about their childhood on Substack but it's definitely a genre. It's the disasterporn of a subsector of society that would rather figure out what went wrong than how to make it right. Plenty of people move on and make lives; their identity isn't bound up in how great malls used to be. What's interesting to me is Freddy DeBoer's adulation of Generation X, the message of which is "your whole childhood was bullshit for us, and it was because your parents were busy spoiling you." Coupland is a 'boomer and he clearly and obviously saw everything going wrong. If you read Generation X it's about a bunch of people who can't form personal friendships even in a place where personal friendships are the only thing to do because they've been ignored their entire lives and don't know how to do it. If you read DeBoer's rant, it's about how great things were back when he could talk to people. His principle complaint is that things were great back when culture was pushed at him relentlessly and now that he lives in a "pull" world he has no fucking idea what to do with himself.

It's the fundamental "millennial" problem: some people don't know how to make lemonade. There's a fundamental lack of adaptation at the heart of every one of these laments and it's always some form of "but you promised" without any aspect of "so instead I." Make no mistake: millennials have a lot to bitch about. But there's a real self-celebratory vein of millennial culture, as exemplified by Freddy DeBoer, that insists on knowing why nobody is listening.

Get an employer account on Indeed, browse resumes that match what you're looking for, and invite them to apply. Do not bother posting the position publicly. You will gain exactly nothing by letting looky-loos waste your time.

Do not ask "some profs" because academia, universally, has a batshit insane understanding of the labor market. They will go "looks like people were paying $18 an hour for this position before the pandemic, are now paying $25 an hour, but I keep hearing people aren't happy so it should be $35, and my students are better than anyone else's so they're worth $45, so I'll tell them not to accept less than $50 an hour because they'll likely settle for $48 that way and think of me fondly." Any resume or recommendation you get from academia, therefore, will be mortally offended that you are offering them half what they're worth by proffering the going rate. "Academia" decided that my wife should give up $250/hr clinical appointments in order to teach $150k/yr grad students a 3-hour drive away for $14 an hour because since she hadn't published in two years she obviously wasn't worth that much. They were vociferously, vocally offended when she turned them down.

Online hiring has become like online dating - of the 10% who feign interest, half of a percent are actually interested and they're really only doing it to reset their internal value meter. Over our last hiring cycle we looked at 250 resumes, invited 15 interviews, had 8 people show up, offered the job to 4 people, were accepted by 3, and ghosted by all three within days. Our total cost was over $6k. The only way you can accomplish anything is by doing your own headhunting (since all the hiring sites are full of companies scraping the listings, scraping LInkedIn, collating the data, sending out invites and charging a percentage).

We have taken to throwing elbows at the local school and reminding the administration that their students probably want to be able to earn back some of the $300k in debt they're accruing by actually working for a living, and the reason they've gone from 200 applications to 13 applications to 30 applications in the space of three years is because we decided the industry couldn't function without new midwives and painstakingly explained to them that the fact that there weren't any was entirely their fault. We also now proctor exams so that we can see first-hand who is available because the students held out as exemplars of achievement by the school tend to be vainglorious attention whores who hashtag them a lot on social media.

I cannot emphasize enough what an adversarial dumpster fire hiring has become, and whatever impression you have gotten of my contempt of the academic establishment is orders of magnitude less than I actually feel. I have deep and painful personal experience with three different local colleges in five utterly disconnected industries, all of which have departments either mid- or post-collapse because of the utter disregard of the necessity of industry applicability to their curriculum. I have stood before a provost and an industry advisory board, given them the rise and run of their entangled fuckitude, been scornfully disregarded and seen the provost fired and the program dissolved. Academia has many of the same problems as the Republican Party - they're entirely banking on the whims of a bunch of disinterested boomers and letting a generation bypass them entirely.

A good friend has been sweating bullets for six months over the prospect of getting his daughter into the dental hygiene school at a wrong-side-of-the-mountains community college. She has a 4.0 from one of the best school districts in the state and is a nationally-ranked gymnast. The dental hygienist program now turns away 90% of applicants because it is one of the very few academic programs in the state with a reasonable pipeline to employment. All else is vainglorious bullshit.

Meanwhile unemployment is at an all-time low. Employers have half-empty office buildings and their hiring pool is made up entirely of people who need to be convinced to apply for a job and then constantly kept happy lest they do it again. It's ultimately going to be great for the country but right now, employers are at "the beatings will continue until morale improves", the employees are at "take this job and shove it" and academia is at "why doesn't anyone want to spend $300k getting a job that pays $45k a year it must be because we aren't inspiring them enough."

You'd think that actual policy proposals would be restrained, achievable, and legal.

Lol no I wouldn't. The 'wingers are trying to ban libraries so that they can't host groomer books or some shit; if you know they're going to shoot you down no matter what you propose, propose free marijuana for transgender ANTIFA climate activists.

The Left has made a stunning amount of legislation and Democratic voter participation is largely driven by people under 25 at this point. People under 25? They aren't of the opinion that "restrained" is the proper approach when it comes to global warming. I happen to think they're right.

Tesla is 100% EV. Toyota fired their chairman for dragging his feet on electric vehicles. There are like five or six different competing electric trucks out there. Speaking as a mechanical engineer? EVs are EASY. You reduce your moving parts by about 95% and your reciprocating mass by 100%. Guaranteed: the Big 3 all went whingeing to the White House demanding a policy decision they could whine about so that their shareholders don't punish them for spending money on R&D.

Counterpoint:

GM is only going to get shittier.

I mean, if she legit loves her work and the people she works with, that's one thing. But if her misogynistic boss is cleaning house of all ovaries and GM is offering a payout? Now is the time to call up anybody she knows in design literally anywhere else and say "yeah my misogynistic boss is cleaning house of all ovaries I'm wondering if you might know somewhere interested in hiring females with 20 years of design experience in the automotive industry."

We've been dealing with hiring nonsense lately. Our receptionist basically overbalanced her ADHD meds and became a zombie. We put together a list of 30 (thirty) "hey here's this thing you're doing that isn't great that you didn't used to do could you maybe try not to do that" bullet points and she responded by going "...oh yeah I meant to tell you I'm changing careers next week." One of our midwives waited until one of our other midwives was in Brazil to say "oh by the way I'm not coming back from maternity leave." Another one of our midwives told us "hey uhh so yeah I know we discussed that I was trying to get pregnant again and last time it took me six months welll this time it took less than a week." One of our naturopathic doctors told us that her husband just took his dream job 150 miles away so uhh.

And don't get me wrong. Everyone should follow their bliss. They owe us exactly what we pay them for, no more. We have taken as our guiding star that every employee we take on leaves happier than they started and that they really take something fundamental and personal with them and so far we're batting a thousand (minus that idiot we had to fire). But none of them are mission-critical. All of them are great to have around, and we look forward to seeing them in the future. We'd sincerely hope that anyone unhappy where they are would tell us and allow us to remedy it, and also entirely understand that if they get better opportunities even if they're happy they're gonna bail. And they should. And we're happy for them.

That's a big difference from working with misogynists who don't value you.

You know what sucks? Hiring through Indeed or Monster or craigslist or Facebook or WTFever. It REALLY sucks. And it's expensive, and full of tire-kickers, and dipshits who only need three contacts for their unemployment and aren't at all serious. You know what works hella better? Calling up contacts you know and like and saying "hey you know anybody unhappy or moving."

We had four or five candidates for two open positions before we knew those positions were open. And the only way that shit happens is if people know you're a candidate.

Congratulations to your wife for thriving through 20 of the stupidest years in General Motors history. Do either of you really think it'll be any fun through the next 20?

Conversation I fucking hate that I have whenever COVID comes up

"Ohhh! I'm so sorry that you're dealing with long COVID! When did you catch it?"

"Tail end of February 2020."

"Wow! That's, like, before COVID existed."

"First verified case of COVID in the USA was two exits north in January. Second verified case of COVID in the USA was two miles east in January."

"So did you ever, like, test for it?"

"I spent two hours on the phone trying to get my insurance company to pay for the test, which was fifteen thousand dollars at the time. We had the tubes and could have done it immediately but my insurance company told me they wouldn't approve it without my PCP signing off. Spent another two hours trying to get ahold of my PCP who said they weren't testing anyone who wasn't in respiratory collapse in the back of an ambulance."

"Oh wow. But, like, later?"

"Later the Department of Health stopped all testing in the Seattle area under the rubric that since COVID was endemic to the area there was no point in testing."

"But surely you took an antibody test..."

"After six weeks I finally bullied my PCP into approving one, which came back negative. A week later it was one of the hundreds of antibody tests pulled by the FDA for having no efficacy."

"So, like, you might not ever have had COVID."

"Well according to my cardiologist it did about as much damage to me as a heart attack. And my pulse-ox was 95 or below for about eighteen months."

"you know, people miss heart attacks all the time!"

"Yep, you're right. I was running four miles a day and now I'm walking six because it's all in my head."

"No need to be so touchy! I mean, when I had COVID I got a positive test immediately..."

"You're right. I've never actually tested positive for COVID. Must be lupus or some shit."

"Well did you wear a mask?"

"Back in February of 2020? No. No I did not. Neither did you."

"You don't know that - "

"ಠ_ಠ"

I think that

(1) we're shooting anything that looks like a Chinese balloon

(2) We're accusing Russia of crimes against humanity while also threatening to leak our intelligence that China is thinking of providing them lethal aid

(3) we're quadrupling our troops-on-ground in Taiwan (from a "tiny handful" to a "small handful" but still)

(4) we're letting it be known that the lab leak hypothesis is gaining ground

(5) we're stationing nuclear bombers in northern Australia

is the United States informing China that there's a whole lot of shit that can be unwound, a step at a time, clear back to Tienamen Square.

That "U2 taking a selfie with a Chinese surveillance balloon" thing is the sort of provocation that the talking heads will miss but the Chinese won't. Because while in the US the U-2 is mostly known as "that thing that Gary Powers got shot down in" it's basically the goad we prodded China the hardest with.

Sherry Turkle had a few useful insights back in 2011 that people keep forgetting:

1) Humans want the tiniest, tiniest bit of emotion from their gadgets. If they get it, they fill in the rest. Empirically tested, neither kids nor adults can tell the difference between Kismet reacting to their face and Kismet reacting to a random number generator.

2) 80% of communication is non-verbal and 15% of what's left is tone-of-voice. Any online discussion is therefore 95% in-our-own-heads from a context standpoint so no wonder when we can't tell a human from a robot. This is why ELIZA was the fucking future in 1966 and a dystopia by 1971.

3) Humans absolutely lose their shit when the mask slips. Without knowing it. Without knowing why. Turkle consulted heavily on My Real Baby because Hasbro discovered that about one in ten people would take ahold of that cute little bundle of joy and try to bash its brains out against the nearest hard surface. My Real Baby had shock sensors on it to go fucking limp if it experienced too much trauma; prior to that, Hasbro had several destroyed in market research because if the thing kept twitching after you tried to murder it your inner ape went full kill-it-with-fire. Surprise surprise, the chat data includes a heapin' helpin' o'kill-it-with-fire.

This is all so fundamentally fucking stupid. It's a Markov bot. It knows, based on what it has trained on, what is stochastically expected. We will never achieve sentience this way, just a more perfect mirror. Is it entertaining seeing behind the illusion? Absolutely. Is it emblematic that Google would go live with a chatbot that doesn't know when it's wrong and Microsoft would go live with a chatbot that secretly wants to murder you?

Hey Satya - tell me about Clippy! (6:50)

Hey Star Trek - tell me about Clippy!

Wanna see how to break the spell? Feed it into a '90s vintage voice processor.

But that's no fun because you don't get all the navel-gazing of a twittersphere full of narcissists holding a mirror up to their face and talking about seeing God.

I'm old? So i remember this bullshit with Teddy Fucking Ruxpin. People were dragging out ELIZA back then. People think Magic 8 Balls have spirits in them because when all you have is text you don't even need to resort to cold reading. We WANT that connection. That's where pareidolia comes from. Bing arguing with some schlep about what year it is isn't an existential crisis it's a shitty fucking algorithm being sold to us as a revolution.

My cousin, who grew up in civilization, didn't really take any of my "New Mexico stories" seriously until he went down to the Balloon Fiesta and, coincidentally, spent a week hanging out with one of the girls in my clique. I think hearing the same stories from a different perspective took him from "kleinbl00 is a serial liar just like grandpa" to "holy shit." She's happily married, works at Sandia National Labs, and Teh Brokenz are still plainly evident.

New Mexico Stories

So y'all had camps, prolly. We had "Hummingbird Music Camp." It was a shithole up in the "mountains" that looked a lot like the prison camp in "Bridge on the River Kwai" if Walter White and Jesse Pinkman were imprisoned there rather than Obi Wan Kenobi. I went there for a week in 4th grade, and then like 3 days in 7th, 8th and 9th grade. The boys' dorm was an uninsulated steel box that got insufferably hot in the summer, impossibly cold in the winter and at night, the perspiration of a hundred grade-school kids would condense on the steel rafters and rain down on you. The camp "counselors" (8th grade sociopaths) would arrange the bunks to maximize the drippage and then make fun of you for "wetting your bed." They would also make sure everyone took a mandatory nap by heating up bent coat hanger wires until they glowed cherry red and threatening to poke out any eye they saw. The place was great. If you were in band? You had to spend a few days there every fucking year. They were all about Jesus, would kick out any girl who wore short shorts (but only if they saw any of the family eyeballing them) and gave you half a glass of milk with every meal. I caught food poisoning from some wretched shit they made, had projectile vomiting and diarrhea and they still made me hike 4 miles past Sulfur Springs at night so I could have "eggs mixed together, thrown in an ammo can and tossed onto a raging campfire so they can be simultaneously raw, charred and smoked" for breakfast.

Add an oboe for pure joy.

My sister informed me this morning that "uncle Elliott" was the "wedding dress rapist."

New Mexico, he said, was where Higgins had been living for the last several years. Evidence showed Higgins was originally from Ohio and had even been arrested there in the 1970s for multiple sex crimes involving minors, including indecent exposure, assault, prowling and gross sexual imposition.

Higgins also followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming an expert French horn player, Kennedy said. Records show Higgins helped establish Hummingbird Music Camp in the late 1950s, played in or directed several orchestras and symphonies, and helped start what is now known as the International Horn Competition in the mid-1970s.

Investigators believe the latter proved most beneficial for his criminal activities, as the competitions were held at various colleges and universities across the U.S., including at the University of Alabama. Kennedy said investigators confirmed Higgins had been in Tuscaloosa for the competition when the 1991 and 2001 assaults occurred.

Yeah. So your kid gets arrested in Ohio several times for trying to diddle children so what do you do? Flee to New Mexico and OPEN A FUCKING KID'S CAMP.

It's still open.

Creepy mutherfucker. His wife looked just like the women he raped.

They all fucking knew.

New Mexico Stories

First World Problems

There comes a time when it makes more sense to buy rather than rent. Often, that calculation is financial. Sometimes, it's situational.

____________________________________________

fun business fact: most commercial leases are what's called "triple net" or "NNN" which means "net insurance, net maintenance, net taxes" which is another way of saying "the landlord is going to stick you for abso-fucking-lutely everything." NNN is rarely published, the rate you see is just the lease, and it's usually in dollars per square foot per year. So in order to figure out your rental payment you're already in Excel and you can't even fill in the values until you get the NNN number.

And how do you get the NNN number? See here's the great thing. Unlike residential stuff, which is on readily-browsable databases and is fundamentally open, commercial listings are often held by brokers who don't list shit publicly. Yeah some of it is on Loopnet but even Loopnet shows only a selection. Some of it is on Craigslist but you can basically dismiss that shit out of hand because it's all Fisher Price My Very First Office bullshit. So you're already engaging with one, two or three parties just to get the number.

You might think that NNN number is highly variable, but again, we do everything "per year" which means whatever this year's number is reflects the accumulation of last year's charges divided by square footage. The clever among us might now notice that there's a built-in incentive to... you know... not do maintenance if you expect to need to sign new tenants next year (which are typically on a 5-year lease with an inflation adjustment and two five-year extensions). And if you think you might want to sell the building in the next couple years, it behooves you to not sign those leases because it will increase the delta between your rent roll and your proforma - the "how much money would you be making a year if you leased this whole turkey at current market rates."

How do you buy such a thing? Well, typically you get a commercial mortgage, which is like 30% down and typically has interest-only payments for five years and then has a balloon payment of the whole fucking nut after five years and oh by the way the interest is calculated on ten, fifteen, twenty year horizons but this stuff tends to fly because you aren't buying commercial real estate unless you're rich.

You can, of course, buy real estate through the Small Business Association. Their terms are substantially more normal. 10, 20, 25 year terms, 10% down, rate anchored at 2.75% over prime. You have to occupy 51% of the building within a year of purchase, though. We're currently 21%. Of course, nobody checks. My real estate guy has a client who used an SBA loan to buy a building downtown that he immediately leased out to a couple grow ops.

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So why would you put up with this shit if you weren't screamingly wealthy? Well, maybe your landlord has decided that since you're the only one using the sign, you should pay for 75% of it and if he feels like using more than 25%, he'll just take it. Maybe your triple-net is 50% over the average and your landlord knows it and rather than taking one for the team because of his 10 years of deferred maintenance, he just uses the internet to turn everyone's thermostats down so the heating bill is lower. Maybe he's decided that snow removal might technically be part of the triple net, but since you're the only one who's in the office when it snows it should all come out of your end. Maybe his inability to get anything better than the fuck-you price from anyone he deals with has led to an exchange where he texts you "if you think you can do a better job running the building why don't you buy it" at which point you say "because every time I offer you say there's nowhere to put the money" and he says "anything is available for a price" so you say "so give me your rent roll your proforma and your capex and we'll talk."

maybe your landlord sucks so hard at landlording that he's on the verge of going bankrupt

maybe your competitors are closing all around you because this pandemic has been absolutely brutal to the healthcare industry

maybe your colleagues are pleading with you to buy out other practices to keep them from going dark

Maybe a bunch of shit but the bottom line is you're looking at multi-million-dollar decisions in order to reduce your annoyance, and that shit's fucking whack yo. Musk? Buys Twitter to win internet arguments. Me? Looking hard at buying the building so that the landlord can't just wander in and stare at everyone's tits.

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I only bring this up because our business is not making us rich, but it is feeding eight families and paying a lot in taxes and keeping babies healthy and all that saccharine shit and here's normie me, with a spreadsheet of profitability and listen close chilluns

EVERY TIME JEROME POWELL RAISES RATES A QUARTER POINT, MY POTENTIAL MORTGAGE ON THAT BUILDING GOES UP $400 A MONTH

Which, despite the fact that I've been paying entirely too much attention to finance bullshit for entirely too long, was the first thing that really solidified "interest rates" for me. Because since October, my potential mortgage payment on that bulding has gone up two thousand dollars a month.

Multiply times the economy.

Ohhhhhhh shit son

1) Sam Bankman-Fried's parents are tax professors at Stanford and Democratic insiders

2) Sam Bankman-Fried's girlfriend/the CEO of Alameda is the daughter of a statistics professor at MIT whose lab has been financed by Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein

3) What money FTX has spent? They have spent on buying Democrats. SBF was Biden's 2nd-largest donor

4) All of their money was created out of thin air - they would make a token, sell 1% of it for $1m, keep 99% of it, and then say they had $100m in assets to get a loan with

5) The only people who could invest were chummy rich people who were basically greater-fool-theorying each other ("I can tell this is a scam, but I am smarter than the average bear, so I just need to sell it before the scam is revealed")

6) The actual failure is Gob Bluth stupidity, over and over and over and over and over again

7) It's a bunch of kids in the Bahamas mainlining Adderal and fucking each other (while also fucking over the banking system)

8) It's the guy who pretended to practice "effective altruism" while also grabbing the money brazenly

9) They were pushing real hard for regulation that would lock everybody else out while allowing them to pursue their shady shit under defacto monopoly status

10) Michael Lewis was embedded in this bullshit for the past six months fanboi-ing the shit out of SBF so of course, not even he saw the surprise ending

11) Jonah Hill looks a fuckton like Sam Bankman-Fried

12) errrrbody hates crypto, and this is crypto that bought naming rights to a goddamn stadium

...that's just off the top of my head. If you would like some hot takes, here's the financial view There was an awesome thread (since deleted) that legit mentioned reptilians.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a particularly wicked form of dementia that is also (thankfully) exceedingly rare

350 cases a year in the US

I seem to remember reading somewhere that 13 people have died of it in the last 5 years, or something.

Heritable CJD? 90 cases since 1995, distributed across 5 exceedingly unfortunate families. That's according to one paper buried deep in Up-To-Date.

They don't know why it happens.

They absolutely do. A protein flips from left-handed to right-handed, and right-handed proteins dominate. It's like Olestra - it's fat, it tastes like fat, but it gives you the liquishits because you can't digest it. Or, more accurately, like Ice 9 from Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle - water is more stable in a different crystalline structure, which means it's a solid at room temperature, and the world ends. For "world" substitute "brain". It's an exponential disease because it's volumetric chemistry, not epidemiology.

They don't know the mechanisms of its operation.

Yeah it caps off the stuff normal proteins should interact with and turns living matter to inert matter. Like the Midas touch only with meat.

They don't know the mechanisms of its operation.

Yeah no it's like supersaturated fluid. Things are all good until you drop the pan and suddenly you're fudge.

Someone just starts showing signs of early stage dementia, it progresses at lightning speed (faster than any other dementia diagnosis), and they are gone in 3-5 months.

Or, "driving" to "can't sleep" to "crazy" to "in need of institutionalization" in two weeks, and "in need of institutionalization" to "no heroic measures" in another ten.

They stopped researching it, despite the fact that 1 in 2000 blood samples in the UK have bad prions in them, 'cuz two out of two researchers in France who accidentally pricked themselves with contaminated needles ended up dead.

I considered him my "extra Dad".

When I called to say goodbye I told him on speakerphone that he was one of the very few relatives I give a shit about. I have no idea who else was in the room, nor do I care.

The advice I give people the most often is "it is much easier to find a job when you have a job."

Give 'em their money's worth and figure out what the next job is gonna be. It remains a worker's market out there, which is probably one of the main reasons stupid articles like this get written - the "take this job and shove it" mentality of the worker marketplace is crystal clear. I don't think I'm unique among employers in recognizing that the mentality is entirely justified and well-earned but there's definitely a contingent that feels anyone getting a paycheck should be grateful to be working at all.

We pay a stipend towards personal advancement (which started when we decided three or four employees needed laptops, so it was either "we will buy you a laptop or we will give you the money towards something that will help your career"). One of our employees spent it on Spanish lessons. Another spent it on training to be a home health aide. I bring this up because your focus shouldn't be on "Quats' Job" it should be on "Quats Inc." and improving the value and utility of you, the individual-for-hire, pays everyone dividends.

And hey, thinking about it? Brown-nosing your direct report by going "hey will you guys pay for me to take this training on MailChimp" 'hey can I do this CRM webminar during business hours" "hey will you guys pay for me to get my (insert useless HR certification here)" indicates that you are striving to be more useful to the company while also padding the shit out of your resume.

Rule of thumb? It costs six months' of any given employee's salary to replace that employee (in lost productivity, retraining, onboarding, etc). It is so.much.easier to retain employees than it is to rehire them so if you set the goal of being worth vastly more than they're paying you, you basically force them to pay you better.

If they're smart. If not, at least you learned early and when the next guy asks "why are you leaving your current job" you can say "they don't support my initiative and drive for self-improvement" which makes them look like monsters.

Logo by veen.

That's the servo drive. I'm pretty much three chunks of stainless away from motive power. At that point it's all done but the wiring and tuning.

The wiring of course is something else. I realized I didn't have any DB9 backshells, and that there are no good DB9 backshells anywhere on any of the services, so i spent an hour and a half whipping out DB9 backshells that are better than anything on the internet. Then I did DB15 and DB25 'cuz I need those, too.

On the plus side? They're only a mm and a half wider than a standard molded DB9, and they're strong. On the minus side? I didn't really contemplate the other side of the connector field when I laid out the ECM so uhhhh yeah gotta redesign that.

And on the minus side, doing simple things like "I need two DB9s from two different devices to terminate to DB25 and GX12-4" takes two days and looks like this on the outside

But on the inside it looks like this

And needs to be wired three times because the pins say one thing one way and one way the other way and are in 0.12 point font and the females go backwards and the males go forwards and the GX12s go counterclockwise and the pin reference for the manifold starts at zero and pins start at one and 0-1 means pin 1 but 0-2 means pin 2 and.

But fuck you it works.

Ninety minutes from idea to connector. I'd call my dad up but he'd say something charming like "I wanted to murder you all most of the time" and then whine about the fact that a drug addict nark village idiot yokel doesn't show up for thanksgiving dinner even though he's got a free house to live in and another to steel copper wires from.

Shit with the in-laws has devolved to the point where we did group counseling Monday. They were 40 minutes late. We actually passed them in the car, as they were busily getting lost and being old. The funny thing is this pretty much started with "I know you're not mad at me, are you okay?" which was the most offensive thing I could have said, apparently, and has now devolved to spitting anger where I am the proximate cause of everything wrong in her life. I made the mistake of saying "contemplating suicide" before they arrived which, combined with a thick family history of suicide, means you need to spend ten minutes doing the tedious ideation dance. Then they showed up and the counselor did a yeoman's job of beating the shit out of me in front of my mother-in-law because we knew ahead of time we were up for it just so my wife has better tools to deal with her parents while we all knew we needed to hook the mother-in-law or she'd never come back again and, by anyone's estimation, this is a situation entirely of her making.

Didn't feel good tho

I just spent six thousand dollars getting a spindle rebuilt such that its runout is guaranteed to be less than a tenth of a micron. I don't have anything that will measure a tenth of a micron. I can measure a micron. I'm the only person I know who can. It takes 20 minutes to explain why that matters and I only know a couple people who care to listen.

I like to think we can have a reasonable discussion about this. For starters, why did the crazy boomers go crazy? The exit polls for the 2004 election were radically in Kerry's favor. Voting machine integrity underwent a sea change after 2004 because of it. Yet Kerry - and the Democrats - raised barely a peep. The 2000 Gore V. Florida was an extraordinarily narrow supreme court decision that handed the election to Bush out of expediency, not morality, yet Gore - and the Democrats - raised barely a peep. Can you think of any differences in leadership between 2000, 2004 and 2020?

This isn't down to you, of course. The office of the Attorney General is investigating, as is the January 6th Committee. Unless you are literally Roger Stone I do not think you can honestly profess to more information about the situation than either of those bodies.

Humans often "shut down at the same time" when performing similar processes using similar equipment. If the polls all opened at the same time, closed at the same time, and used the same processes to tabulate, they would come to results at about the same time. But again, this is something that has been investigated at great length and absolutely zero evidence of malfeasance has been produced. You say you "can go on for weeks" but you list only two easily-dismissed logical fallacies. Can you document a single piece of concrete evidence of voter fraud of a magnitude necessary to sway a single state election? William Barr couldn't.

I've been here three times, man. Only once did people haul guns to the capital. Yes - some crazy boomers went crazy. But they were driven crazy. And no presidential candidate that I know of has ever done that except Trump.

I welcome this discussion. But it needs to be a discussion, not an invective-hurling contest. What can you say that would be convincing to a person who doesn't already agree with you? You're singing the song of your people but if you want to sit down and have a beer in a foreign land, you need to be able to listen, too.

I apologize for my compatriots (who are going to resent the shit out of me apologizing for them). They're signalling fealty as well. Reasonable people can disagree, but we gotta start by being reasonable.

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

I'm fucking good at this shit. Nobody cares. I became an engineer because my father is an engineer and when I call he hangs up the phone. He was calling me a criminal for owning cryptocurrency while driving a snitch with five felony convictions to the asshole's methadone appointments, even though he was literally stealing the copper out of the shop wiring.

Solidworks does this shit where it does something dumb, and you google it, and it takes you to Reddit, which is full of assholes going "you obviously don't know what you're doing, Solidworks is pure and beautiful." Some dipshit posted his fucking bicycle, which he modeled in Solidworks, which was like his grad project or some shit, 128 parts.

896 parts and it's just the fucking stand and electricals

Know who taught me Solidworks? A month with a correspondence course. Know who taught me electrical engineering? No one. Know what kept this shit from working? Amazon selling resistors that are airgaps.

All my life I've wanted one fucking atta-boy and here I am, pushing 50, recognizing that I was never going to get one. This is also like the eighth time in my life where I've been out past the point where you can even find someone to ask and I'm starting to get sick of it.

Go ahead. Ask when it's going to be done. 'cuz you know what? There's eight spreadsheets worth of electrical connections but I know where each and every one of them goes. I figured that shit out last week.

you might be an engineer if your wiremold comes with parabolic arches

Here's my theory:

1) Republican/conservative policy makes aid, basic life stuff harder to get through legislation. Talkin' healthcare, tuition grants, all of it. Thriving becomes more difficult, requires a lot more improvisation and the ability to adapt.

2) Socially/financially successful parents of both camps, when faced with the clusterfuck created for their children, "help" them because holy shit things have gotten complicated to navigate.

3) "helped" children inherit a world where their parents do too much for them, in which the solution to any problem is "ask your parents".

It's no one's fault. Theoretically you should be able to look up whatever you need on Youtube but the more you do that, the more you discover that Youtube is a place that buries the first 30 seconds in flashy graphics to make you think you're not going to waste your time so that they get credit for the pageview and beyond that, nothing fucking matters. The #1 video on Youtube when you look up how to use a Grobet casting machine is one that may kill you with an explosion of hot metal, will clog your pipes with cement and shows you how to get a ruined casting anyway but the algorithm doesn't care. We won't even talk about cooking, baking, tying your fucking shoes, you name it.

But what you get is young people utterly incapable of improvising or learning and the parents trying to shelter them. We've been trying to hire for an entry-level reception position for like six weeks now. We ask for a cover letter. We've gotten two. But then Indeed gives you your own magic phone number that rings through to your cell (which you never answer because your friends know not to call you), tries to leave a voicemail in an inbox that is full (because you never answer it so it's full of spam and you don't know how to clear it anyway), sends you emails that you don't know how to respond to because you can't get gmail working on your iphone, and gives you notifications that you turn off because everything gives you notifications so you're just constantly awash in shit. Meanwhile you've learned from social media that the way you respond to something you don't like is to ignore it and because kids are used to ignoring each other you get upset when you un-ignore an adult after six weeks and somehow they don't want to hire you anymore! WTF!

Most promising candidate we've interviewed lately? Yeah, abundantly clear we were talking to her mom. Right up to the job interview. Cover letter was great, email responses were great, actual human interacting with actual humans was a deer in the goddamn headlight who let the silence over "what's something you've done in your past that required multitasking" stretch for 45 seconds (we timed it).

But I mean, the world is burning and adults aren't doing shit. You spend your life in halls telling you how to maybe survive an active shooter and adults aren't doing shit. You couldn't afford a car if you wanted one and none of your friends would be allowed to drive with you anyway. The news is telling you COVID is killing everyone and they get you vaccines dead last but that's okay because your parents' Facebook feeds have told them it's all useless anyway, and for the past two years of your life you've sat in your room watching everyone else sit in their room while you all pretend to learn about Vasco de Gama or some shit.

One of our interview questions has long been "we understand this is an entry level position and you've got a brighter future ahead of you than this - where do you see yourself after this job and what could we do to help you get there?" Early on, that got us bright young things who could improvise and solve problems. Now? Now those bright young things are not working. They don't have to. They're side-hustling out of their parents' houses and reaping undeclared income. The ones applying for work are the ones who look at you stunned and go "uhhh, no man, this is it. This is my future. Please pay me."

When we first hunkered down in 2020 I knew we were witnessing the death of the middle class. I mourned it. I actually cried. Because the future belongs to the ones who can figure out their own solutions to any problem that is thrown at them because holy shit y'all it's now easier to win Fortnite than it is to fucking vote in some places.

Three of the people we hired after "what could we do to help you get there" own their own businesses now. They call to consult about hard stuff. We miss them but they're where they need to be, not answering our phones and dealing with our shitty patients. The people we're interviewing now can't even grasp a future beyond "I show up and you pay me." Can you imagine? Can you imagine going through life where "adulting" is a stretch goal? Where there is no future in which the apron strings are ever cut, because you will sink into the sea without their tether? How fucking depressed would you be?

And I mean, even the ones who have it good don't have it good. My daughter's got a friend. She's nine. She just had her first friend over (my daughter) last week. She is incapable of peeling a banana, let alone cooking. She eats chicken nuggets and spends a lot of time on the toilet because all she eats is chicken nuggets. But her family owns a couple dozen IHOPs, she got a race horse for her birthday and there is definitely a future in which she can eat chicken nuggets the rest of her life and never have to peel a banana.

how fucking bleak it is tho

See, and from my perspective I knew immediately that Trump had the potential to eclipse the ever-loving shit out of GWB. My blind spot was forgetting that not everyone else was acquainted with Trump going back to Spy Magazine.

The thing about GWB is he was a front for a bunch of soulless back-room neocons. The thing about Trump is he was a front for a bunch of soulless back-room foreign oligarchs, and even they couldn't keep him under control.