Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 10:17 on 14 August 2016
Not much going on. Parents are visiting, as are both of my sisters, which means this weekend is the first time all five of us have been in the same place in a long time.
As is typical, my parents made a heat wave materialize when they came. They must think temperatures in the 80s and 90s are normal here, based on their experiences during visits.
Published at 08:22 on 3 August 2016
In a recent Guardian article about changing (in the direction of less of it) sexual behavior, we find the following:
“The new sexual revolution has apparently left behind a larger segment of the generation than first thought.”
“Left behind?” Really?
Wasn’t the Sexual Revolution about liberating people from socially repressive restrictions that interfered with them following their desires? Haven’t such restrictions continued to vanish in the past decade or so? Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land. LGBTQ people can now serve openly in the military. And so on.
Just because some individuals choose to abstain from sexual activity is no evidence of their being repressed. Maybe those abstainers simply don’t want to be sexually active? If the Sexual Revolution isn’t about their right to remain celibate by choice, then it’s a revolution I want absolutely no part of. You don’t sexually liberate people by replacing an obligation to not have sex with an obligation to have it.
This cuts close to home for me because I’m less sexually driven than the norm, and the (by my standards) hypersexualized youth culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s and then the (again by my standards) hypersexualized gay male subculture always left me feeling out in the cold.
It took a long time for me to disentangle my internalized homophobia from my desire to not be steamrolled into conforming to a culture of casual sex that is simply not the sort of sex I desire. It’s why I identify as queer but not as a gay man; I fit in with the gay male subculture about as little as I fit in with the straight male one. Neither are geared to who I really am.
I’ve found the Millennials’ attitudes about sexual orientation to be much more in line with what I view as true liberation, in fact. They are much more likely to see sexual orientation as a multi-dimensional thing, not a simplistic one-dimensional gay/straight/bi axis.
So color me skeptical about the premise that less sexual activity automatically implies more sexual repression. It sounds like precisely the sort of thing an aging Baby Boomer who is clueless about what liberation really means would come up with.
Published at 07:59 on 13 July 2016
Those who most need help finding employment are those new in the market for a particular line of work, either as a result of recently graduating from school or a mid-life career change. But recruiters are hired at the behest of* the employer, and candidates with no experience are common as dirt, meaning employers need no special help in finding same. The candidates employers need help finding are those with specific, specialized experience.
But recruiters lack that experience, too, which seriously limits their ability to judge and match candidates with positions. Moreover, the positions being recruited for tend to pay better than the job of recruiting for them, so this state of affairs is inevitable. Thus if you’re an experienced candidate, recruiters are still of little or no help; they’ll just pester you with false lead after false lead.
I speak from experience here, having at one time been a freshly-minted CS graduate and now being a senior-level programmer. It went from recruiters being uninterested in me to me being uninterested in the (inevitably mismatched) opportuinities recruiters pestered me about.
Given that, is it any surprise that the low road dominates in the recruiting industry? Why seek people with any knowledge at all to recruit in a field? Just hire the cheapest workers in India you can find, even if they can barely speak coherent English.† They’re fated to do a bad job anyhow, so why even try? After all, doing a good job isn’t the point. Your business model is based on both candidate and employer making an unwise decision (i.e. to use you), not on providing value to either.
This leaves out the recruiters hired by busy employers whose staffing departments are themselves understaffed, of course. But when sleaze dominates an industry, the odds aren’t good. So if I see a recruiting agency’s name on a job listing, I pass. And when one cold calls me and leaves a voice mail, I just delete the message.
* Note I did not write “paid by”. That is because they are not. To claim otherwise is to state what I call the Recruiter Lie. Does anyone think employers have an unlimited orchard of money trees to harvest for paying wages and salaries? Of course not! They budget those costs, and the cost for paying recruiters ultimately comes out of the same pot for paying wages and salaries. One will come at the expense of the other.
† Which, given they are the cheapest, will be the case; competent English speakers will seek more honorable and better-paying work.
Published at 16:23 on 9 July 2016
Recently, it happened yet again. One of my old banes, canker sores, materialized.
Those who don’t suffer them don’t understand how bad they can be. The weeks of lost sleep due to the pain is probably the worst of it. Over the years, I’ve discovered various ways of both minimizing the chances of their happening* and the pain once they do.
But that’s not a complete solution. Recently I heard about honey showing promise as a treatment, so I decided to give that a try. I was a bit skeptical: wipe the sore clean and dry, then briefly apply honey after each meal, that’s it? The exposure to honey for a under a minute several times a day can do that much?
But darned if it didn’t seem to actually work. Of course, it’s only one trial, so it could all be nothing but coincidence. Time will tell, but as of this stage it seems promising enough to be worth reporting about.
* Which means finding out which sorts of foods cause allergies to trigger the sores, then avoiding them. Plus, avoiding toothpaste that contains sodium laurel suplhate has helped.
Published at 19:38 on 27 May 2016
Well, I’ve done it. I now have a land line after a little over 10 years of being cell-phone only. Two things precipitated this decision:
We’ll see how long this option lasts. Traditional analog twisted-pair landlines are slowly dying out, and that’s what I just got. Reason is that the electric power here is unreliable, and I don’t want a cable or IP phone that depends on some piece of equipment somewhere that in turn depends on commercial power. With plain old telephone service I can use a phone powered by the battery plant in the central office.
It would be a shame if I eventually had to settle for something less reliable, but it may come to that. It wouldn’t be the first time a less reliable new technology has eclipsed a more reliable older one. (Just think of all those fidgety electronic soap dispensers, faucets, and towel dispensers in public restrooms.)
Published at 13:15 on 15 May 2016
Yes, I was there for the action. I left early because yesterday I woke with a cold and felt the need to get back home and rest. I wasn’t planning on being arrested anyhow; my role was more of a support one. Which I did.
Given how I fell asleep at 7:30 last night and didn’t get up until 6:30 this morning and have been napping all day, I would say my assessment that I needed to get home and rest was a correct one.
Published at 08:21 on 13 May 2016
Published at 17:55 on 4 April 2016
The title of this post describes my current job. It’s still going strong, as far as my boss is concerned (so far as I can tell), but it’s winding down so far as I am concerned, and I plan to announce this to my boss at tomorrow’s regularly-scheduled meeting.
When I took it, I had my qualms that it might not be the best of matches. The screening process contained a surprising amount of front end Javascript questions (such coding is not my strong suit). Plus the more I heard about it, the more I had doubts the position could furnish the sort of engrossing challenges I need. I mentioned these concerns and was assured that my impressions were incorrect.
The past six months have served to convince me that I was in fact correct. It’s getting to the point where I dread new assignments. It’s clearly time to start thinking about moving on if things can’t change dramatically (and I frankly doubt they can).
The only real question is what kind of ending can be worked out, which largely depends on their needs (if they only or mostly have a need for someone to do the sort of work I regard as unpleasant drudgery, the end will come sooner rather than later).
Published at 00:45 on 15 January 2016
The end of the smart phone era, that is. As predicted here, albeit sooner.
Published at 08:14 on 7 October 2015
Why? Several reasons.
Just because something can be done does not mean it should be done. This reason is currently lying dormant, as ours is a technology-fetishizing society and we’re still in the stage of being wowed and dazzled by how smart phones are even possible.
Just because something can be done does not mean it is therefore fashionable and popular. Another one that is currently lying dormant due to technology fetishism, and probably a much more relevant one than the above. Eventually, the fashionable will decide not to carry smart phones. People like movie stars and politicians in high office don’t need them; they have assistants to handle such duties. Jettisoning the phone will be a fashion statement that they are powerful and affluent enough to have such assistants.
This will be much like having a suntan went from being a sign of a common farmer to being a sign of someone privileged enough to have lots of leisure time outside of factories and offices. Even if those without personal assistants still have to carry a phone with them, they will opt for phones that are as small and inobtrusive as possible.
When will this happen? Who knows. It could take another ten or twenty years. I don’t think it will take significantly longer than twenty. That’s a generation, which is long enough for a new generation to see smart phones and obsession over them as yet another dorky adult thing. At that point, the way will be paved for the newest, most fashionable entertainment figures to establish not carrying much personal technology as a fashion statement.
Does my personal bias play any part in my forecasting this? Almost certainly. Yet while I personally want the smart phone era to end, that doesn’t change how the above factors all exist and lie waiting ready to manifest themselves. And personally, I’d want the new trend to happen faster than ten or twenty years, yet I’m not forecasting it will begin soon. So it can’t be written off as purely personal bias.