- How technology created the global village … which turned out to be a pretty unpleasant place.
- Why Apple almost kicked Uber out of the app store.
- As we near the 10th anniversary of Jim Cramer’s famous (and prescient) TV meltdown, debt is … right back up there all over again. (And the Fed is not dead, and “too big to fail” is bigger than ever, and …)
- I’ve been saving this one in hopes of writing a long maunder on it. But since I don’t seem to be getting to that, here’s “The Despair of Learning that Experience No Longer Matters.” (I think there’s both a lot of truth and non-truth in this one; but it’s a good think piece on why the working class is falling into such suicidal despair.)
- Although marching for science seems like a pretty dumb idea, a few of the dogs at the march got it right.
- And while we’re on the subject of science and dogs, did you know you missed Dog Farting Awareness Day? (H/T JB)
“The Despair of Learning that Experience No Longer Matters.”
Boy, does that ring a chime. I’m one of those ‘non-college-educated white men’ New Yorker writers love to hate. I went to trade school, worked in auto repair shops, worked in dealerships, got a job at a tech school because I was good at turning wrenches, got a job at tech writing because I was good at the tech school, got a job writing training programs because I was good at the tech school and at tech writing…etc. I thought I’d die a solid middle-class citizen. But twenty years after my last dealership job, I couldn’t beg or buy work. Some of that was because I have a problem with my people skills being missing and I had burned a bridge or two along the way, but a lot of it was simply that it became accepted knowledge that nobody could possibly work on the level I’d been working for decades without an advanced college degree. My solid record meant nothing. I was an embarrassment.
All the time it was happening to me, I thought it was just me. Suppose it should be nice to learn that it’s a wide-spread phenomenon. But it’s not nice to learn that.
I will be sitting at my desk at home and suddenly be all but bodily knocked out of my chair. Certain that she has just defecated in the room, I look down to see her lying on her side and motionless. Happens every time. She has a talent, that girl.
I don’t know how I missed Dog Fart Awareness Day, but better late than never, I suppose. Thanks for the alert! I wonder how many of the dogs at that March for Pseudoscience were contributing to Global Warming with their farts?
A unified global village “looks good on paper”. Trouble is, there are those in positions of political power who achieve the power or seek more power by creating fractious groups. The same holds for some who seek wealth “when blood is running in the streets”–both financially and literally.
Never forget that half of all people are below average. And a goodly portion of the above average don’t want a village, anyway.
The signs and speeches and comments at such events lead me to suspect the people marching for science have never actually done any. “Settled science” is an oxymoron.
There are a couple of factors left out of the Experience story. For one, the glut of college degrees. Another is that a lot of my 1960s experience is no longer relevant. (I still have some of the tools used to cut mimeograph stencils.)
In my case, back when I still looked for full-time employment, they saw my college degrees and said, “You’re overqualified.”
I think Walter Williams discussed global warming very persuasively. https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2015/03/11/global-warming-n1967847