Men and Women

A lot of people hate me for my views on the differences between men and women. This is just a link to Fred Reed's latest column to prove that I am not the only one that thinks that the genders think differently. I'm sure that Fred is nuttier than a Sam's Club fruit cake and twice as dense, but I get this nagging suspicion that he is more right than wrong. I am forever amused by the people who will insist that I have to accept perpetual, multi-generational welfare in the black community in the name of diversity, and that I must think, feel, and act like a woman at all times because everyone knows that men have nothing to offer Western Civilization. Until, as Fred has repeatedly pointed out, the oil needs changing.

More Biking News

We tried to get out for our usual 8-mile ride after work yesterday, but we had met with an old college friend of mine for dinner, which turned into dinner and a two-and-a-half hour conversation. We only had enough daylight for about four miles. Today, I rode to my doctor appointment at 7:30am, then on to work. On Friday, I work from a different location that is further away and up a long, slow grade. Even on a bike, you can barely tell you are going up hill until the thighs start feeling like they are being stabbed by hot pokers. At least the ride back will be easier. My total mileage for the day should be somewhere around 8-10 miles, which is pretty good. If the weather cooperates, maybe we can scoot out to Sands Lake Quiet Area again.

Another New Blog

It's getting to the point that keeping up with all the blogs on my blog roll takes up most of my work day. Good thing, because what I am paid to do makes by brain cells die slow painful deaths. If I listen carefully, I can here their pitiful little screams. Anyway, my point is that I already have more material to read every day than I can reasonably absorb, so I did the logical thing: I added another one. Welcome to CEO of the World, a brother-sister duo that just crack my ass up.

Happens Every Day

If you haven't caught on yet, I'm cleaning out my "gee this would be funny to stick on the blog" folder.

Popcorn Anyone?

Heh. For the record, I plead the fifth....

Also for the record, I have no idea why Blogger insisted on making the above image full-size when I marked "Medium," thus forcing me to use the "Small" image, which perversely came out small rather than medium. If anyone can figure it out, let me know. Every other image works fine.

Belated Valentine

So I'm a little slow. Don't like it? Get yer own blog....

Love you baby.

Newlyweds

Think long and hard about it, guys. Thanks to feminism, you no longer need to marry to have all the sex you want.

TV Journalism

Ah. All becomes clear.

Windows Vista: DOA?

I have used Microsoft products since DOS 2.0. Yes, I have bitched about them. Probably more than my fair share. But I have always recognized what Microsoft did to the PC industry: they made computers affordable. Most people around today do not remember when $10,000 was considered to be a reasonable price for something vastly inferior to Intuit's Quickbooks, or the annual "maintenance agreement" on your operating system.

Gates and Company also felt that getting something out the door that was less than perfect was better than delaying releases. I remember an outfit called Brown Bag Software that sold a stand-alone outline generator. Unbelievable stuff at the time: small and fast because it was written in hand-optimized assembler. Microsoft had nothing like it until automatic outlining was added to Word (which even now does not work as well). But Brown Bag was so particular about writing perfect code that the pace of the industry just swamped them. Gates is more than willing to ship something that is barely adequate and rely on updates, patches and faster hardware to bail him out. That sounds horrible, but it worked.

That is until now. The fix-on-failure policy may have worked for DOS or even Windows up through version 3.11. but it all seems to be crashing down on Uncle Bill now. For the first time in over 20 years, I'm 100% certain my next computer will not be running a Microsoft OS nor will it be running any Microsoft products. I'm looking seriously at the new Intel-based Mac notebooks, or possibly giving Xandros another try when 4.0 is released. But whatever I do, I won't be running Windows XP. I can't be alone in thinking that by the time Microsoft gets Vista out the door in early 2007, both Mac and Linux will have left them in the dust.

However, I wouldn't write off Bill Gates or Microsoft yet: the history of the PC industry is littered with the corpses of companies that did. But I can't shake the feeling that there is a convergence going on that will, maybe not kill Microsoft outright, but more likely make them irrelevant. When all I need is a browser for my word processor, photo album, web content creation, e-mail, taxes, and personal finances, what possible difference does the OS make? At this point, about the only thing missing is a way for iTunes to store my music library online and a web-based Excel-like spreadsheet. (Both of which may have already happened and I'm just not aware of it.)

I doubt Microsoft will crash and burn overnight. Instead, I would expect a long slow decline punctuated by brief bright spots. But I would expect the over-all trend to be downward until no one cares anymore.

More Biking News

N rode to work yesterday, so we didn't do a ride together. I only rode part of the way to work this morning, because I stopped and picked up my truck on the way in. I figured it was easier to load my bike in the back of the truck and drive to work, than it was to carry my truck on my back and ride. Being a lazy bugger by nature, I naturally took the easy course. So my total distance for the day will only end up being about one mile.

Customer Disservice

I know that businesses all over northern Michigan read this blog to bask in my praise and take to heart my constructive criticisms. So as a public service, allow me to offer Traverse City and its businesses a few handy tips.

Traverse City: A beauty queen with warts on her face.

1. I don't know who is in charge of road signs, but they ought to be fired and replaced with a chimp, because there is no possible way the situation could be made any worse than it is. What is so hard about consistently signing streets at every intersection? What is so hard about not hiding street signs behind the stop signs? Or trees? Or telephone poles? What am I, a fucking psychic?

2. I don't know who is in charge of speed limits and the related signs, but they, too, should be fired and replaced with a chimp working a random number generator, because, again, it couldn't be any worse than what every driver has to deal with. The speed limits themselves are completely nonsensical and have no relation to road conditions, number of lanes, amount of traffic, frequency of driveways and side streets, or whether you are driving through a residential neighborhood or the warehouse district. Worse, the speed limit on any given road changes at random. In any case, good luck in finding a sign that informs you of any of this, because you can literally drive for miles without ever seeing one. Again, I'm not a fucking psychic. If you expect me to obey the speed limit, you have to tell me what it is. Otherwise, I'll just make shit up.

3. I assume there must be a national shortage of the paint used to mark streets because there is a remarkable lack of it on every road. At no time will you see lane dividers, center lines, stop lines, cross walks, or arrows indicating that some part of the road is left- or right-hand turn only. Only small wisps of white or yellow speak of some long lost attempt in the distant past to create order from the chaos that is Traverse City driving.

4. "So", say all 2.5 of my gentle readers, "if it's really that bad, get your fat ass out of your car and ride a bike. Traverse City has this awesome thing called the TART trail." First, try finding an accurate, up-to-date map of the trail. And by accurate, I also mean that said map contain such "non-essentials" as the names of the streets that the TART trail crosses, rather than an unlabeled red line winding through a grid of unlabeled grey lines. They exist, but only at one or two places, and only for a price. I would assume that if Traverse City and the hoards of tree-huggers that inhabit it were serious about reducing vehicle traffic, accurate, up-to-date, detailed TART trail maps would be everywhere for free. Silly me; the reality is that the TART trail is a secret jealously guarded by said tree-huggers to prevent the trail from getting used by The Unworthy, and to keep all those evil SUV owners on the road so the tree-huggers have something to bitch about.

The second problem is getting to the TART trail, and from the TART to someplace useful. See, the TART mostly runs along the railroad right-of-way, and through publicly-owned property, which means it doesn't go anywhere near most of the residential areas where people live or the businesses where they work. But it does intersect the roads that go to those places, so no big deal, right? Well, in a normal city, you would be correct. But this is Traverse City. Due to the traffic chaos described above, no one in their right mind would attempt to ride a bike in the street, even in residential neighborhoods. "But," you respond, "surely there are sidewalks." Well, sort of. But they are unpredictable. They start and end randomly, with no obvious logic, planning, or other form of higher intelligence in evidence. This includes residential areas, the mainstreets inside the city limits, the highways outside the city limits, and even right in the middle of the fucking business district. You are riding along and the sidewalk will just end for a few blocks, then resume for three or maybe four blocks, then end again. It takes days of experimentation to map out a viable bike route from point A to point B.

Traverse City businesses: the warts without the beauty queen:

1. Hungry Howies - Try hiring people to work your phones that understand standard English. How can you possibly fuck up an order for a medium with two toppings, onion-flavored crust, and three-cheese bread? And yet you did. Not just sausage instead of pepperoni, or some other small mistake. You major-league fucked up our pizza, and totally missed the cheese bread.

2. BC Pizza - It's not your customers' fault that everyone in your store is ignorant of the coupons that you print in the local paper, so I don't expect to have to shout to be heard over the store manager yelling in the background about how the "fucking coupon better not be expired" and "make sure the drive gets that fucking coupon." Then to top it off, you fuck up the order, force me to drive to your filthy fucking store to make it right, and can't even manage a fucking apology. Fuck you.

3. Eastfield Laundry - Hire people that can manage to talk on the phone while punching my customer rewards card. I shouldn't have to stand around for five minutes listening to some inane blather about someone else's laundry because your employees are incapable of doing something as simple as punching a piece of cardboard (well, actually they initial it because you are too cheap to purchase a hole punch in spite of your obscene prices) and talking on the phone at the same time. And if you are going to offer a wash-and-fold service, how about sticking a couple machines in the back for that instead of forcing your customers to compete with your employees for wash machines and dryers.

You are all welcome.

And as a matter of fact, I do feel better. Thank you for asking.

And yes, I will be out of this place soon.

Movie Day

Sunday, we decided we were taking a day off. We had a stack of movies we had rented and we never left the motel room except a quick trip to BC Pizza (more on that in another post). It was glorious.

We never saw King Kong when it was in the theaters, even though we had heard that was the best way to experience it. We decided to rent it, just so we could stop dealing with the incredulous stares every time we had to confess that, no, we hadn't seen the re-re-re-re-make of King Kong.

Well, I can say I saw it. I can also say that if I had paid $7-a-head to see it in the theater, I would have burned the place down. First, it's just too damn long. Now, understand I have nothing against long movies if the story warrants it. It takes three hours to even gloss the material in a Tolkien novel. However, it does not take three hours to tell this story. This has to be the slowest-paced action/adventure film in the history of film-making. We watched entire sections on fast forward and missed nothing because a) once on board the ship, there were exactly zero words of dialog outside of yelling, screams, and grunts, and b) the "action" was so damn slow that even at 2x, it still looked like slow motion. We were able to MST3K the final scenes while on fast forward and never had a problem keeping up.

Another thing this move lacked was plausibility. Now that may sound like a funny thing to say; after all this is a movie about a twenty-plus-foot gorilla on a lost island full of all sorts of improbable creatures. But while every movie involves a willful suspension of disbelief, every movie must establish its rules, then abide by them consistently. For example, Kong is fighting off a entire army of some sort of dinosaur, while simultaneously juggling Ann Darrow making repeating blind catches. OK, so Kong is super-perceptive and hyper-coordinated. Except that just a few minutes prior, he gets smashed in the head by a boulder that he cannot for some inexplicable reason see or hear crashing down the side of a hill. We are also supposed to believe that Darrow can be repeatedly smashed into the ground (shown lovingly in one of the dozen or so seemingly-endless slow motion sequences) and not only survive without a single bruise or scratch, but then reprise her vaudeville act, complete with pratfalls, on uneven, broken rock. And so on, and so on, through every scene in the movie.

The second movie we tried to watch was Capote, but after the Kong debacle, we couldn't take another slow movie. We ditched that in favor of another remake, Fun With Dick and Jane. I was prepared to not like this, just because it was a remake, but I also wanted to like it because I've been a sucker for Jim Carrey humor since he was on In Living Color. It turned out to be a good remake that retained enough of the original to be recognizable while making the changes necessary to fit current reality as well as fitting the style of the current actors.

The last movie of the day was Good Night and Good Luck, which I enjoyed immensely, but which bored N to tears. It's an important movie, but it is hard to make an action movie out of a story that takes place in the newsroom and in congressional hearings. If there is any hope of salvaging the scraps of our republic, then people have to recognize that the spirit of McCarthy is alive and well and living in the White House. But of course, I'm working at becoming totally mobile so I can leave the country on a moment's notice, so that pretty much tells you all you need to know about my expectations for these united states.

And that was the entire day.

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'

I know that my 2.5 readers/day don't give a shit about my bike riding, but this is just so I can sort of keep track of how much I'm riding (as opposed to how much I'd like to think I'm riding). Yesterday, I had planned to ride to work, but everything went to shit, and I ended up driving. But N and I did get an eight-mile ride in just before dark. It was a good ride except for the cold front that moved in and dropped the temperature from somewhere in the 60's to the 30's in about 5 minutes. Neither of us were dressed for cold weather so we spent the rest of the evening curled up in blankets.

I was able to get motivated to ride in this morning in large part because my truck is in the garage again, leaving me no choice. I was able to reduce the time it takes me to get from the motel room to my cubicle from 20 minutes to 15. Unless it is raining buckets, I really don't have any excuse to ever drive to work again. But I'm sure I can come up with several anyway.

If N doesn't ride to work today, we will do another eight-mile loop. If she does, we may just call it good and be lazy tonight.

Books I'm Reading

I haven't done one of these in a while, but that is mostly because I have been playing catch-up with my backlog of magazine subscriptions. I've already mentioned The Joy of Sects; this is a group of essays on the major world religions, discussing their origins, beliefs, factions, and major figures. It obviously cannot even be close to comprehensive, even at a couple thousand pages, but it is interesting. I'm taking it a chunk at a time because it is pretty tough plowing. In between, I'm currently working through The Acts of Jesus: What Did Jesus Really Do? by the Jesus Seminar. In addition to that, I'm working through The Gospel of Judas from the National Geographic Society with N. All very interesting, as well as very heritical in the opinion of most mainstream denominations. I'm having a lot of fun reading all of my former church's banned books. Knowledge is the death of fundamentalism in particular and religion in general.

The Real Brain Drain

This hits so close to home, it's almost not funny.

Some Religious Leaders Are More Fun Than Others

I'm currently reading the Joy of Sects by Peter Occhiogrosso. I ran across a bit in his discussion of Taoism about one of the Seven Sages of the Neo-Taoist movement named Liu Ling:

Liu was reportedly followed closely by a servant with a wine bottle in one hand and a spade in the other, in the event that Liu either sobered up too much or drank himself to death. Famous for walking around his house in the nude, Liu was once questioned by a Confucian visitor who was shocked that he wasn't wearing trousers. "The whole universe in my house and this room is my trousers," Liu Ling responded. "What are you doing here inside my trousers?"

Now that's a guy worth listening to.

Feeling the Burn

N and I spent four hours yesterday on our bikes. Holy shit can I feel it now. Anyway, we rode around out at the Sands Lake Quiet Area and checked out lakes 1, 2, 3, and 4. All of them are extremely low. Most of the lakes have adjacent marshes that we were able to ride our bikes through without the tires even getting wet. That is definitely not good when you consider it is only April. If the DNR has any brains (not always a given) they will slap a total fire ban on the place.

But the ride was good for the first of the year. We probably did four miles total with a lot of that being serious hill climbs (we had to abandon the bikes at one point because it was hard enough just walking up the grade; we would never have made it pushing bikes as well), followed by white-knuckle downhills with the back wheel locked trying to miss the deadfalls all over the trails. We managed to make it out alive without either of us biffing. The only close call was one downhill that ended abruptly at a lake (Lake 2, IIRC). I was dragging the back tire the entire way down, but I'm so god-damned fat I was picking up speed anyway. I got stopped about a foot short of the lake.

Today, we will be taking a short ride on a level, paved bike path just to keep things loosened up. We both want to start riding to work, so today we will map out N's path to work, and tomorrow we will try to find an easy way to my work. Feels good to be back in the saddle again!

Thoughts on Copyright

I know the internet is already chock full of articles about copyright. So here is one more. Hey, it's my blog and I'll post what I want to....

Since I installed Limewire, the question I have been asking myself is why would I ever buy another CD or DVD when I can just steal them off the internet? And with every episode of every series on the internet, who needs cable? Yea, yea; stealing is wrong and all that. So I don't get it off Limewire. Libraries are a great source of free stuff. Check out a book, read it, take it back. Not only didn't you buy it, you don't have to store it or drag it around with you when you move. Libraries also carry CD's and DVD's which you can listen to/view for free and rip yourself a copy while you have it checked out. And if you think about it, is it really stealing in the traditional sense of that word? Lets work through it step by step:

1. Go to my local public library and check out a CD or DVD. Perfectly legal and moral.
2. Listen to/watch said CD/DVD repeatedly. Perfectly legal and moral.
3. Decide I like the CD/DVD and rip it to my PC's hard drive. Perfectly legal and moral.
4. Return CD to the library for the next guy to use. Perfectly legal and moral.
5. Listen to/watch said CD/DVD repeatedly from my PC's hard drive. Perfectly legal and moral.

(The same also applies to hard-copy books, but the cost in paper and toner to Xerox an entire book exceeds the cost of just buying a copy. More on this in a moment.)

Now the MPAA and RIAA would disagree with point 3. Unfortunately for them, the Supreme Court does not; no matter how many lawsuits and FBI warnings these assholes shove at us, the bottom line is that the Supreme Court of the United States has already looked at this issue and decided I can make all the copies of copyrighted material I wish to make as long as I don't try to sell them. Period. Full stop. No exceptions for "digital media," and no limits on who I can give those copies to.

So how can, say, a musician make a living if he only sells one copy of each album to every public library system in the country and everyone just copies it from there? Allow me to answer that question with a question of my own: how did musicians make a living prior to the invention of sound recordings? By performing. Imagine that: a musician making money by playing music in front of an audience. I understand that this would be a career-ender for some "musicians" who only manage to sound good with a lot of, um, well, I'll call them post-production interventions. And yes, this would be a serious shake-up in the music industry. But why should one of the most-expendable parts of our economy not be subject to the same paradigm shifts, disruptive technological innovations, and creative destruction that everyone else faces?

But all that aside, my question is why does music, movies, and e-books cost so damn much? E-books especially: I have no idea what the publishers are thinking when they charge the same price for an e-book, which costs nothing to produce and distribute, as Borders does for the hard-cover edition. The price of an e-book should be the writer's royalty plus profit for the publisher, or less than $2 total. The entire cost of a music CD, including all production, distribution, advertising, royalties to the musicians, is, depending on who's numbers you use, $2-$3 per CD (again, downloaded music costs the publisher nothing). So why should CD's cost more than about $5? Here's a simple game you can play. Go to Meijers or Wal-Mart or Target and find the price of whatever the hot new release is, then walk the store making a list of everything else that retails for that price. Think about what goes into making and distributing those goods. Then ask yourself if any music CD could ever logically be worth $25 or more.

The argument for movies is that they cost a lot of money to make. But why? What is so much more difficult about making a movie than, say, building a new wing on the hospital I work in? I can't see any reason why the number of people, the logistics, and the coordination of numerous contractors and sub-contractors over the several years necessary to build the building going up outside my window, is any less daunting a task than making a movie. Yet the completed building will cost around twenty percent of what Peter Jackson blew making King Kong.

So instead of arguing about whether I can or can't make copies of music, movies, and e-books, maybe we should be focusing on the motivation to copy music, movies, and e-books: their insanely high cost. How many book publishers are on the news whining about how the Xerox machine is putting them out of business, or proposing a subsidy to the publishing industry funded by a tax on blank paper? There is a reason for that: the time and materials consumed in photocopying a book is higher than the retail price of the book. Books still get photocopied, but it isn't considered a threat to the foundations of the publishing business. The music and movie industries need to wake up and get the message being sent by the millions of people willing to spend time and effort to acquire their products outside of normal distribution channels: Your shit costs too much!!

I'm doing everything I can to send them that message; how about you?

No One Has Time

Another article on the negative impact of modern life. The money quote:

"We never concentrate on one task anymore," said John Challenger, CEO of a Chicago outplacement consultancy. "You take a little chip out of it, and then you're on to something else. It's harder to feel like you're accomplishing something."

That pretty much sums up my average work day. I spend 6 hours of an 8-hour day documenting what I just got interrupted from doing, and trying to pick up the threads of something else that I was interrupted in the middle of earlier in the day. When I'm not blogging, that is. Blogging takes up a lot of my work day as well, just because my "work" consists mostly of filling out forms to document all the work I never get done.

Hotter Than Hell

The next time you hear someone yapping about how global average temperatures have increased by some decimal fraction over the last several decades, think about this. It's not like we have temperature data from all over the earth from the last 100 years accurate out to three decimal places. I do think there is anecdotal evidence for some warming over the last 100 to 150 years, but that is most likely a rebound back toward "normal" after the Little Ice Age and the Year Without Summer.

Amazing

I'm not much for the arts, mostly because I really don't get most of what passes for talent these days in painting and sculpture. But this guy is truly amazing. I love that whoever wrote the captions had to work in that Ron Mueck has "no formal art training." Good thing; otherwise we would be looking at giant fiberglass representations of dog shit, or a crucifix in a glass of piss. Instead, we have someone that is damn good. Based on his work, I would also say that he takes pride in what he does, but doesn't take himself too seriously. In other words, I'd love to split a bottle of vodka with this guy.

Hitler Was An Evolutionist

Creationist, Christians, and other habitual liars like to associate Hitler with evolution, likely because the truth is too painful. Solomon was right; there is nothing new under the sun.

The History of Creationism

This is the article I thought I was linking to on Friday. If you want to know how the Creation Science/Intelligent Design political movement started and, uh, evolved, you would be hard pressed to find a better description.

Purpose of Life

I agree with Wally. The only difference is that I transport Diet Coke, not coffee. If you find happiness in the small things, the big questions really don't matter.

Takedown!!

This has to be the best takedown of a creationist that I have seen in a while. I really don't have anything to add.

[Editor's Note: If you hit this link before Monday, you may have been somewhat confused as to my description of it as an over-view of the Creation Science movement. It's called blogging with only half your brain engaged. And it now seems I have lost track of the article I thought I was linking to. Ah well, this one is a good read as well.]

Self-examination

Sorry guys, no breast self-examination pictures; just Fred Reed's latest ramblings about why people make the choices they make. After leaving the wife and deciding to pretty much chuck everything I have, I find myself questioning my choices: ones I am making now, as well as ones made in the past. I'm more and more coming to realize that I really need to be alone. I just suck at this whole relationship thing.

Back in Business

The updates to Microsoft's crappy browser were pushed out at work today, so I can turn on scripting and get back to blogging again without fear of my PC being hijacked. It was a close call: I nearly put in some productive time at work instead of my usual practice of wasting work time posting shit here.

In any case, I'm back in business for the time being. I need to figure out a way to get a computer. I really don't have any cash right now, but I am lusting after one of the new Mac notebooks. The problem is that people in the know are saying to wait until August for Apple to shake out all the bugs. I don't know if I can hold out that long.

The Law Is an Ass Part 187,456,091

KipEsquire comments on three court cases that tell me that we have gone past the point of the law being an ass to being under the rule of magistrates. If a beat cop can nullify the Fourth Amendment on the basis of the binary state of a television set, then the Fourth Amendment may as well not exist. If a judge can decide the Bible is a rational tool to be used in jury deliberations, then what about the Koran? The Gospel of Judas? The writings of Jayaprakash N Arayan? The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? If a pharmacist can be convicted of a felony for selling two packages of Sudafed, is there anything left that is legal?

I feel no allegiance to these United States. In fact, all I feel is a duty to break as many laws as possible every day and heap out-right hatred, if not physical violence, on anyone working in law enforcement or the courts. I am sure that I am not alone. Piss off enough smart people, and things will get ugly fast. I'm dedicating myself to making things as ugly as possible as fast as possible.

Understanding Men

Vox Day explains better than I could how to understand men. Women, take note: like my last post, this is reality. You can wish it were otherwise all you want, but some of us prefer reality.

Hating Women

I'm often accused of hating women. That is provably not true. There are several things that I have said about women, especially women in management roles. I will state them again as clearly as I can:

First, women, as a group, score the same median on IQ tests as men, but have a very different shape to the bell curve. A higher percentage of women are clustered around the median with fewer at the extreme ends. This is why there are fewer (notice I didn't say zero, just fewer) women Einstein's as well as fewer women sociopaths. Women are under-represented in both groups (or, if you prefer, men are over-represented in both groups), because they are under-represented in the associated IQ percentiles. I will freely admit that I have no idea why that is. People a lot smarter than me have spent their entire lives looking at that very question and come to different conclusions. I suspect, but cannot prove, that there is a reinforcing effect that involves several things such as genetics, social class, culture, opportunity, and nutrition. But regardless of the cause, things are as they are and bitching about it won't change anything.

Second, my personal experience working as everything from a dish washer in a restaurant, to a truck driver, to a systems analyst has led me to the following observation: every woman manager I have had was a disaster for the employees under them and the organization as a whole. I don't think that is the result of some sort of inferiority of the gender, but rather the selection process that is used in most organizations.

This is going to take some time to explain, so please reserve your male-bashing until you have read all the way through. Here is how every organization that I have been a part of works:

In any job or industry or trade, if you ask those who work in that trade to rank those they work with on a 1-to-10 scale, you will end up with a nice bell curve. The reason it will look like an IQ bell curve is because a person's ranking by his industry or trade peers will almost always be the same as his ranking by straight IQ in that same group. For example, if all the licensed electricians in one county were to rank each other on their work, the result would look very similar, if not identical, to their ranking by IQ. If you think about this for a moment, you will see why that is. If you watch the people in the upper quintile (20%), they seem to work effortlessly, rarely if ever looking rushed or hurried, yet accomplish as much as the other four quintiles combined.

The impact of this on those selected for management is that no organization that wishes to exist for long is going to take its most productive workers and put them in management. And no competent organization is going to promote anyone from the bottom three quintiles, unless coerced by government regulations. (Obviously, no selection process is perfect, but the organization will typically self-correct in fairly short order.) That leaves those in the 60-80th percentile range for management. For whatever reason, a male from this range can be a very effective manager, while a female cannot. Again, I don't know why that is, I just know that it is.

Now, if nature were allowed to take its course, the situation would resolve itself, and management would be largely a male profession. Instead, we are all under a constant barrage of indoctrination that what we know ain't so: these women are not bad managers; they just "bring something different to the table," or use a different "style." This is pure bullshit, but you can't say that these days. You have to just smile and nod, and pretend that reality is just a social construct.

If any of that makes me a woman-hater, then so be it. I prefer the label "reality-based."

Movin' on Up

It ain't exactly a "deluxe apartment in the sky," but it is on the east side of town. That's right; let the drifting begin. I'm out of the house, and the house is on the market. If we can find a buyer for a unfinished, owner-built, off-grid log house on a seasonal road with a spare $400K, I am on easy street. At that point, there will be nothing holding me here. In a few months, that streak that shoots by you will be my large, hairy, wobbly ass getting the fuck out of this shit hole.

I don't have a computer available, and our work machines are all crippled thanks to our reliance on Microsoft's bug-ridden, last-generation browser, so this will be the only update until Uncle Bill fixes his shit-ware.