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Re-Branding [more]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l35hvl89eQ1qz6f9yo1_500.jpg)
I see too many dudes every day who have no idea what they’re doing: guys who have no idea how to dress, how to drive, how to lift weights, how to eat/drink, how to sit, how to listen, how to speak, how to spell, how to write, how to think for themselves, or how to even live their lives.
I very, very rarely meet a fellow gentleman and then later think to myself, “He knows what he’s doing”. That sucks. Now, I don’t claim to know what I’m doing most of the time, but I’m trying. Please try with me.
This is a very fair goal for all of us.
“They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers.”
George Carlin dispenses some painful truth. A venture into the underground history of American education will corroborate these facts; it nakedly was designed to render the public docile (“for their own good”!) and ensure the stability of society. Guess what, it worked — too well, and now we’re stumbling and convulsing like a nation with its head cut off.
My only criticism is Carlin’s tendency to go soft on the politicians as underdogs / corporate pawns and not the willful participants they truly are. Other smart people like Marco (who posted the video yesterday) also skew toward this worldview. It’s clear why someone would want to believe that it’s good guys fighting valiantly against bad guys; the reality of the situation (the gargantuan, sprawling, life-eating system of theft and oppression funded by business and enforced by government) is simply too upsetting for most people to accept. “Things couldn’t be that bad”, they wish. But there aren’t any good guys running this game, whether they work in Washington or simply finance the inferno.
Today in oil spill cleanup, Louisiana coast edition.
Guys, let’s figure out what we’re doing and do it.
By Amit Gupta:
But one day, pretty soon, you’ll realize that you haven’t used your laptop in days. That you tend to grab your iPad first whenever you need to visit a website or answer email. That your laptop never leaves your desk anymore.
It starts tomorrow.
Middle Men
Found this nugget on Gruber’s blog.
Joe Wilcox on Microsoft’s Glut of Middle Managers
Insightful reporting based on interviews with current and former Microsoft employees:
“When I started at MSFT in 1996, there were six people between me and [Microsoft cofounder] Bill Gates,” Boris said. “In 2009, there were 13 people between me and [Microsoft CEO] Steve Ballmer.” Fred said, “the number of managers between me and the CEO went from six to 10,” during the last decade. Another long-time Microsoftie, whom I’ll call Barry, saw his reports go from six to 12.
Fascinating stuff, too, about the bizarre incentive structure for Microsoft employees. I think this gets to the nut of exactly what’s wrong with Microsoft. They’ve evolved a powerful, deep bureaucracy that has lost any sort of focus on creating great products. Worse, for obvious reasons Microsoft’s management is unlikely to see itself as the problem. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Lyons Has Seen the Google Buzz. Lyons is Not Amused.
Why, Google? Why take a perfectly wonderful email system and pollute it by adding a zillion new things to it? I’m not looking for more clutter in my life. I’m looking for less. At the launch event some Google exec claimed Buzz is a way to “find the signal in the social neworking noise,” but to me it just looks like Google is adding to the noise.
Why does Buzz even exist? Is it because Google wants to make my life better in some way? No. Buzz exists because Google feels threatened by Twitter and Facebook, and wants to kill them. Google has become what Microsoft used to be – the Borg, the company that gobbles up ideas from smaller rivals and cranks out lame imitations in an attempt to put the little guys out of business.
That is the biggest problem with Buzz — it was invented not for us, but for Google. So now, because Google feels threatened, we have yet another thing to learn, which won’t be easy because Google is basically a world where nerd engineers get turned loose in a Montessori preschool and they have no idea about user interface design and frankly, they don’t care.
