Random Rants #88: [incoherent screaming]

[aimeeandbeatles]

The Mayans must've been off by a few years.

 

[Colon]

Professors who use their classes and even their exams to push an agenda can rot in hell.

 

[Traitorfish]

Who needs 80 billion dollars? You're not going to eat 80 billion boxes of Kraft Dinner when it's on sale.

Careful, somebody might take that as a challenge.

 

[Takhisis]

Capitalism has created an entire strata of low-level managers whose only apparent purpose is to produce paperwork which makes mid-level managers feel better than high-level managers don't allow them to have any actual power. A small army of supervisors and petty managers whose primary occupation is producing endless reports to make mid-level managers feel like the haughty lords of a vast clerical fiefdom, to distract them the reality that they are largely interchangeable functionaries, and who in doing so can only hinder shop floor-level employers in doing whatever it is the business is supposed to be doing, as actual supervision is replaced with an erratic combination of neglect and micromanagement as dictated by the specific and arbitrary demands generated by whatever paperwork the mid-level managers are demanding that week.

i should probably read david graeber's book about "bulls- jobs", huh.

Just read Dilbert instead. The Dilbert principle and the Peter principle are both real things.

Why don't you stop buying from Amazon if their riches bother you so much?

I already do that. But that's just me.

Careful, somebody might take that as a challenge.

I remember when I said that nobody could jack off to a certain Internet meme. The mods prevented people from reporting on the results.

 

[JohannaK]

The Dilbert author is such a huge arsehole nutcase tho. I would rather not endorse him by reading his stuff.

 

[Takhisis]

Well, yes, I still don't understand how he manages to keep the doublethink up. Corporate culture is bad for the US as a whole and for its individuals, the government is corrupt and leadership is incompetent. And then he goes and just praises the one man who embodies all of those at the same time.

 

[Arakhor]

I stopped reading Dilbert over four years ago, when he insisted on shoving his blogs on the same page as his cartoons.

 

[Kyriakos]

I stopped reading Dilbert over four years ago, when he insisted on shoving his blogs on the same page as his cartoons.

Too late, Trumpbert fan ^_^

 

[Hygro]

Scott Adams has a knack for waiting for the inflection or tipping point of things happening, giving it a narrative, and then declaring himself first in predicting or even the causal agent in creating the movement that already brewed into the tipping point. He was useful for understanding other points of view but no longer.

 

[JohannaK]

Haha. Ha.

 

[Takhisis]

I stopped reading Dilbert over four years ago, when he insisted on shoving his blogs on the same page as his cartoons.

Actually those barely display, if at all. Perhaps he's displaying the knack Hygro speaks of and already caught on to the great impopularity of being a Trump shill (as even Kellyanne Conway seems to have) or maybe, given that I live in a country where, by law, the government can and does hijack radio stations, TV channels and even YouTube ads with mandatory panegyrics, I've simply learned to tune them out.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I only see Dilbert because they put it on the comics page in the Chronically Horrible Chronicle-Herald (a neighbour gives it to us after she's finished reading it)

 

[Cutlass]

Capitalism has created an entire strata of low-level managers whose only apparent purpose is to produce paperwork which makes mid-level managers feel better than high-level managers don't allow them to have any actual power. A small army of supervisors and petty managers whose primary occupation is producing endless reports to make mid-level managers feel like the haughty lords of a vast clerical fiefdom, to distract them the reality that they are largely interchangeable functionaries, and who in doing so can only hinder shop floor-level employers in doing whatever it is the business is supposed to be doing, as actual supervision is replaced with an erratic combination of neglect and micromanagement as dictated by the specific and arbitrary demands generated by whatever paperwork the mid-level managers are demanding that week.

i should probably read david graeber's book about "bulls- jobs", huh.

Have you been spying on my employer?

 

[EgonSpengler]

I was reading that a wedding reception of 65 people in Maine on August 7 infected 32 people, who in turn infected 21 more people. One of the secondary infections has died. So I have to wonder whether the a-holes who got married are thinking maybe they could have waited a year..? Douchebags.

 

[amadeus]

My like was for your disdain.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I've recently built my 3rd deck for this guy I know. (The first 2 were on the house where he lives, this one on his old house that he now rents out.) This deck itself was pretty easy (I built those from scratch, while in this case there was an existing deck with decent beans and joists that just needed a little reinforcing and new boards on top), but he made me go a bit overboard in building a concrete path leading up to it.

He insisted the whole path must be 4 1/2 ft wide and that rather than having a step down I should make one section of the path a ramp that inclines 7 inches over 5 ft. It would have taken several tons of Quickcrete if it wasn't for some bricks and concrete blocks lying around that I could use for filler. That reduced the amount I needed to mix to 1.75 tons.

I've handled several concrete pads in the past, but this was the first time I had to manage an incline. I was almost finished and think I was doing a pretty good job screeding when it started to rain. That washed away some of the finer particles and made the surface less smooth. I got it all covered with a tarp before the rain got too heavy but am concerned it might not look great when it is done.

I'd purchased 7 more 80 lb bags of concrete than I ended up needing and had one extra 2x6x12 left over from the deck, so I returned those to Home Depot on the way home.

The 12 ft board was a bit too long to fit in my dad's old van (which I borrowed as my Hyundai Elantra isn't much use carrying building materials). When I first bought it I let the boards stick out the back, but today I had too many tools back there I didn't want to let fall out so instead I tried to position the board diagonally so I could close the rear door. It seemed like it would fit fine but then when the door closed it bumped the board hard enough that its other end cracked the front windshield. This windshield already had a crack and the new ones on the passenger side don't impair vision too badly by themselves, but for some reason they seem to stop the windshield wipers from working. I drove slower than usual on the way home to be able to see in the rain without wipers; if the rain was as bad as it was last week I don't think I could have gotten home at all.

This deck is low enough that the code says a railing is optional. The owner originally said not to add a railing if it is not required, but now he messaged me to say he wants one anyway. I should have left the extra 2x6 there to use it for a rail cap (and left my dad's windshield alone).

 

[Farm Boy]

It's always something if it isn't somethings. ><

 

[choxorn]

The Mayans must've been off by a few years.

I like the theory that they got the last two digits backwards, and the world actually ends in 2021.

(pay no attention to the fact that since the Mayans used a base-20 number system and didn't use the birthyear of a religious figure they never heard of born across the ocean as their year 1, that wouldn't be a mistake they could logically make)

 

[W|M]

said birthyear is also probably off by a few years from the actual date of birth

 

[Kyriakos]

I like the theory that they got the last two digits backwards, and the world actually ends in 2021.

(pay no attention to the fact that since the Mayans used a base-20 number system and didn't use the birthyear of a religious figure they never heard of born across the ocean as their year 1, that wouldn't be a mistake they could logically make)