Archive for August, 2010

Tribes

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

I thought of something by accident the other day:

In the thousands-of-years-ago days, people lived in tribes. There was a mutual benefit to live with your family, help raise the kids, hunt, gather, protect from animals and other tribes and so on.
But you were born into a tribe and that was it unless you got married off into another tribe in trade for some land concession or water rights or something.

But nowadays we live alone as individual families, Even the next generation up doesn’t live together with you.
So in trade, we’ve invented the office. The office is a place where you go every day to fill the need of not living with a tribe anymore.
And here’s the beauty of it: You Get To Pick Your Tribe.

If you don’t like this office tribe, you can quit and go join another one.

So by default you blow off your family. You COULD choose to live with them, but nobody actually does that, so you create a tribe of friends and you create a tribe of coworkers whom you select based on them being tolerable.

Ahhh what a great society we live in.

news not hoaxes

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

Re: the girl who quit on whiteboard pictures….
A lot of these things are hoaxes, but does it matter? It isn’t even worth checking to see if it’s a hoax, because the point is entertainment value, and you get the same entertainment whether or not it is a hoax, no?
The newspapers should do their research before they publish, but even then, does it really affect anybody, so what if newspapers run BS stories?
They do all the time anyway. You know all those headlines that make news for 2 days, they’re slow news days so they pick up on some stupid bit of research somewhere then blow it up into a big story so they have something to put on their front page, then it goes away, because it’s not really news in the first place.
It may not be a hoax, but it certainly isn’t news fit to print.

I think the newspapers and radio news stations are doing a disservice to their industry by blowing things out of proportion because in the event of a real news story, who’s going to take it seriously?

The game of corporate life.

Monday, August 9th, 2010

All of my mental facilities that I find are diminishing in some way, I attribute to age and lack of sleep.
But while it’s happening to me, it is also happening to everybody else which made me eventually realize how the big corporate game was played.
Consider, you are at your best when you’re about 20. You’re young, inspired, just entering the workforce, you’re going to change the world. You don’t have any family or any big time-consuming responsibilities. So the big corporation works you to the bone for peanuts.
As you get older you get promoted, you get more prestigious titles, more vacation time and more money. But you’re not as fast as you used to be, you can’t concentrate on one thing as long as you used to be able to, and you get tired more quickly. You spend less of your off time thinking about work because you’re distracted by family responsibilities etc.
Yet the years go on, you decay more and more yet you keep getting promotions and raises.
At some point you realize that your 20 year old self could wipe the floor with you. Certainly I remember things I did in my 20s that I can’t believe I actually did and certainly could not do now if my life depended on it. Yet here I am with a lot more title and money.

So you say, the difference is experience. I agree, I don’t make mistakes that I did 20 years ago, I know how to design things that scale, I know what pitfalls to avoid because I’ve been down the wrong road so many times before.
But I’m also a lot less creative. My experience causes me to think outside the box less. I always solve the same problem the same exact way, never thinking to try something else, because what I’ve been doing for 20 years works fine. Maybe it IS the best answer, but maybe it’s not. But I’m less creative because I know my usual answer so well, so I wouldn’t think of anything better anyway. So
that’s a wash.
So why as I get older and feebler do I make more money?

Because the whole thing is one big game. And everybody’s playing it, and everybody secretly KNOWS everybody’s playing it, and the first rule of the game is to not admit that there’s a game. Better than fight club, eh?

If you play ball, the same people who are wondering why they’re being given raises for being older and slower will be giving you a raise. It’s like the circle of life.

Every once in a while some 30 year old punk decides to break from the pack and start firing all the old codgers who’ve been with the company 20+ years because
they cost too much and don’t produce as much as the 20 year olds.

So the game players in congress pass laws about age discrimination.

It is truly a brilliant game.