What The World Needs Now

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What we need now is something to drag us down from the precipice and into the gutter where we belong.  Another plague, a real economic collapse, a global war or two, and a new aggressive religion ought to do it.

Will the USA Drag Down the Western Alliance?

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The USA has proven beyond doubt that it is an unreliable ally, capable at any time of devolving into a  racist and self-destruction quasi nationalism, a nationalism as conceived by the most literal and ignorant of people. And as its economy craters due to the hard work of the bipartisan globalist morons, most Americans will find themselves on the short end of the stick. Impoverished and unemployed or working at stupid menial jobs while the elite jetsets around the world.  I doubt that Americans will enjoy living in this world they so diligently created. As their self-impoverishment becomes more apparent, I think they will be shocked. And that they will lash out, I predict, with some truly insane late-imperial militarism. 

And yes, any country that is affiliated or allied with us will no doubt be drawn into stupid military adventures, expensive as well as ill-conceived, demonstrating the most crass and shallow understanding of the situation even as it uses some clever but expensive new munition.

Historians will write for centuries about the stupiity of the USA and perhaps also of the west, of their (or at least the USA's) self destructive behavior but they wont have any answers. It is not much more complicated than it appears. People are not pretending to be shallow. They are shallow. The USA self-destructed out of greed and dumbness.

But we may not have to worry about the judgment of history as everyone may be dead due to global climate change. Go methyl hydrate! Go polar ice caps! Yay!

Trump, Civilization and the Second Coming of the Christ

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I am sure I speak for all Americans when I say how proud I am to have a vulgar sexist and bully represent us to the world.  And how beautiful that this moron would call for a vigorous defense of civilization when it is this piece of garbage and his venal friends who are themselves destroying civilization, at least here in America..

How wonderful it is to be demeaned and disgraced in front of the world. Any foolish pride we may have had reduced to the banal by this moron and his supporters, the Republicans, the soldiers who fight for God. But I wonder, what is left for #45 to achieve, having ascended to the very pinnacle of history as leader of western civilization? What is next? Perhaps he would consider becoming the Bishop of Rome, yes to ascend to the throne of St. Peter, or perhaps even reveal himself as the second coming of the Christ, the Murdered God who opens a Door back to God.

Who else could forgive us for our sins?

Internet Provides A New Way for Human Resources to Confuse Victims

When I first worked for a large corporation, I had a very benign view of Human Resources.  I assumed that HR was there to help everybody get their job done in an organized and civil manner. Yes I was so naive that I believed that HR had the employee's and potential employee's welfare in mind as well as that of the corporation. Of course as years went by I realized that this was rarely so, and that HR was there first and foremost to protect the corporation and nothing else.

Nevertheless, in spite of our experience, most American's seem to have a very naive view of various elements of the HR process.  They believe, against all experience, that many HR mediated processes are fair, that there are rules to the game and that the game is not entirely crooked.   They believe that people only get fired for just cause, that everyone gets the same shot at opportunities, and that corporations work hard to get the best person for the job, not merely the one that has surface validity or who expresses the same corrupt values as the people they will work for.

Of course the reality is different.  And not all of these differences are necessarily bad.  For example, one reason that not everyone gets the same opportunities, is that for most people I know at a fairly senior level, their jobs are created for them, in some sense tailored to the person who is being hired.   That has often been the case for me in the past, and is very much the case for many friends who are further along in their career.  Of course one side effect of this is that not everyone gets the same opportunity.

Related to that is the phenomena where jobs are not listed until there is a candidate in mind, or that a job is listed but will not be filled, or that the real qualifications are not the ones that are listed, or that the job is listed for pro forma reasons only, or that the job opening(s) is/are created as a way of gathering data about one's competition.

The single biggest lie is that people get hired without having contacts at the company that hires them.  In other words, that it can be done anonymously via the internet, a cover letter and a resume. It turns out that there are people for whom this has occurred, but it is not very common in my experience.  Usually you need someone inside pulling for you.

But even if the above is all true, it is certainly not a new phenomenon.  All of these issues have existed for years and decades and maybe even longer.

But there is one part that is new.  It used to be that there was a job board that was never quite up to date, with job openings tacked to the wall.   Or a book of job openings at the corporation that was unwieldy and difficult to use.  But now all corporations have Internet job boards online and what is great about these job boards, which the potential job seeker is required to use, is that they, in my humble experience, are rarely up to date and often are just wrong.

For the last several years, I have at irregular intervals, and purely manually, reviewed the job boards for a series of companies that are on a select list. In some cases I am interested in jobs at that company, in some cases I am just interested in the kinds of jobs that they advertise and what skills they need. There are a variety of reasons for this research, if that is what it is, and one of the reasons is to see to what extent companies perceive computer animation as a desirable skill.

But for whatever reasons I do this, I have noticed the odd situation where jobs seem to appear or disappear on a daily basis. One day here, one day not here, and seemingly at random. At first I just thought that the job opening had been pulled, or was filled, or some other normal explanation.

But recently I had a very egregious situation and proved to myself that the job listing did exist, but only if you knew the correct term to search for.  If you just did a general search for all job openings, it might or might not appear.

In other words, the Internet has helped create a whole new dysfunction for Human Resources to exhibit: the database-backed web page that is broken.

Foresight Needed to Create Viable Future Tourist Industry for Failed American Civilization

Recent improvements in building technology have made it necessary for America to start planning for its decline now, if it is not to wake up in a few hundred years unable to compete as a tourist attraction for visitors from China and other emerging powers. That is the harsh message that is coming out of the recent International Conference on Planning for Urban Decay and Tourism (ICPUDT) held this week in Detroit, MI.

Although buildings made of stone have a good chance of surviving the time scales required to create a good future tourist industry, even that is in doubt because of the use of substandard, standard concrete in modern America.   But now the Japanese have invented ways to create concrete, essentially a form of liquid stone if you will, that lasts almost half as long as the classic Roman concrete.  "We are still not as good as the ancient Romans, damn them, but this is good enough for us to build structures that will last long enough to be viable tourist attractions.  I call on the patriotism of all true American construction firms to start using this new concrete in their work so that we can leave a legacy for our impoverished descendants."

The conference attendees were inspired by this announcements and also the breakthrough ideas in monument protection technologies and designs for future ruins that have the potential of enhancing tourist appeal.  The conference attendees also voted to approve and issue a report describing the threat to future tourism dominance in a collapsing civilization and to propose possible countermeasures that have the promise of creating an important tourism industry for the failed and otherwise shamed former superpower.

To see the danger most clearly, the conference report discussed the situation in Egypt and Rome, both of which have extremely important tourism industries which live off the extensive remnants of their glorious past. In both cases, what tourists see are not actually the ancient buildings and tombs, but what is left of them after their greedy and lazy descendants demolished  those buildings in the search for cheap building materials.

Was the passage of time the cause of this decay or was the building stripped for parts?

Although there was no consensus on what techniques should be used to protect our future tourist investments, there was general agreement that we have to start now. “It takes time and its hideously expensive to build these buildings that will represent us to future tourists. We have to start now and build in the protective techniques that will keep our children's children from destroying these buildings in order to make a fast dollar, or yuan, as the case may be”.

Three experimental techniques proposed in the final report of the conference include:

-- developing new materials that bond the facade with the underlying concrete so one can not remove one without removing the other,

-- making the windows out of transparent and incorruptable metal,

-- long-lasting explosive designs that kill anyone who tries to loot the building by dropping a wall or a roof on them (this is a revision of the classic booby-traps designed by ancient Egyptian architects to stop the looting of their ancient tombs), 

-- micro-encapsulated poison gas incorporated into the building materials that shatter and instantly kill the looters.

The conference report concluded that if America was going to fail to show the slightest planning in their economy, infrastructure and foreign affairs, but always go for the most stupid policies that make the fastest buck for the rich, then it is all the more important that we take care today to create a viable tourist industry for our impoverished and degraded descendants or the people who conquer them and live here now.

Already abandoned in Detroit, does this building have what it takes to survive 500 years and become a tourist attraction?

Article on recent work on reverse engineering Roman concrete
http://www.globalconreview.com/innovation/rome-gives-her-concrete-secrets/

Wikipedia page on Roman concrete
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete