Linux nerd and consultant. Sci-fi, comedy, and podcast author. Former Katsucon president, former roller derby bouncer. http://punkwalrus.net/

  • 1 Post
  • 321 Comments
Joined 2 年前
cake
Cake day: 2023年6月22日

help-circle


  • It’s the “not handling” part that gets us as kids. We knew better. Adults didn’t. In my case, I was in high school, but it was on a “Teacher workday, student holiday” we had each semester. I watched it live on NASA TV, which we had on channel UHF 55 in the DC area. Even the voice of mission control delayed about a minute or two. I remember thinking, “THAT didn’t look good…” but then they said nothing but normal speed and temp readings, so I thought it was just the angle of the chase plane. Only when the famous “forked cloud” appeared that the announcer said, “we have an apparent major malfunction,” or something.








  • Punkie@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldStupid meetings
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    edit-2
    7 天前

    One of the things I have learned is that a lot of middle management don’t have tangible roles, so they make up for this by recognition, which is usually “presence.” So they have meetings to be seen, stay relevant, and look important. Like, how do you measure management as a product? It’s a social game, primarily. I’m not saying all or any large percentage of management is like this, but there are a LOT.

    “What do you say you DO here, exactly…?” And they start to sweat.

    Edit: Clarifying I know there ARE effective ways for an organization to do this, but that doesn’t mean they do or even know how :/


  • When I was in theater camp as a pre-teen, one of our actors was a very enthusiastic foot guy. I had heard of foot fetishes, but never understood them. But this guy was like an overexcited fan boy of feet. My curiosity triggered this guy into a huge brain dump, and one of the things he went on about about how feet were the “true expression of a person’s feelings.” Feet turned towards you? They like you. One foot pointed away? They don’t. He then showed me how girls’ feet would match their mood, so no matter what parts they were rehearsing, he could tell their underlying mood: anxiety, sadness, anger, happiness, etc… I have no idea if he was right, but that was my first exposure to another person’s fetish. I could only understand it abstractly, but I found it fascinating.



  • It’s pretty scary: I am seeing it in the IT sector as well. It’s not just knowledge; anyone can look up things, even Einstein did it. “I never memorize anything that I can look up,” he said once, about the why he never memorized cosine tables and such. But it’s basic logical flow of thought and problem solving. Like the skills behind the knowledge, that I see less and less of.





  • I have seen some rhetoric about this, like “a few bad apples,” but here’s the problem with this and a lot of enforcement jobs.

    • Polite and decent people, on average, dislike confrontation. Thus, are not particularly attracted to these types of jobs.
    • This leads to an uneven amount who are fine with confrontation or even like it. Some of these people are sociopaths and psychopaths.
    • People who are psychopaths are actually very attracted to position where they have power over people.
    • US Customs are not regulated under the same laws as police or military. They can do what they want, when they want, with little to no discretion.

    Are all US customs agents bad? No, of course not. But unchecked power is dangerous for anything. I can’t tell you what percentage is or is not, because you can’t measure a negative. But I see this in military, police, hired guards, and politics.

    Many years ago, they cavity searched an underage girl at my local airport (Dulles) as she returned with her family from a vacation in Jamaica. They separated her from her family, did not tell her family, and searched all her holes “for drugs.” They defended their actions by saying, “if we told people we didn’t cavity search babies, they’d hide drugs inside babies.” Essentially admitting, with no shame, they’d cavity search an infant. All in the name of “stopping drugs.” Oh and the girl? US citizen, but dark skinned. The mistake they made was her dad was a powerful attorney and went public.

    https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-106hhrg66023/html/CHRG-106hhrg66023.htm

    https://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/circle/raceprofiling/stories.racial.profiling.html



  • No. I have known a lot of attractive people get bullied by jealous bullies. Imagine you’re attractive, guys checking you out, and girls who work HARD to get noticed see you get noticed without much effort. You may even be, “no thank you,” like you have a choice. And they will seethe because they think it’s unfair you “have it so easy.” Logic and reason do not apply to bullies, they only know how to “preemptively retaliate” to keep the status quo in their head,