Category: Musings

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I must be getting old, or people are just more insane.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I don’t want to live someplace where pot is legal.

I really don’t like the smell. Here in the neighborhood there’s a number of folks who smoke it all the dang time and even with their houses closed up for the winter, I can still smell the stuff.

That’s bad enough but it’s rather like someone smoking cigarettes or drinking in their own home, it’s their deal and who am I to judge.

Recently, I’ve noticed that I can’t go anywhere anymore without smelling pot. Sitting in traffic at a stop light, in parking lots, and near office buildings.

I can’t help but notice that some of these places I couldn’t light up a Marlboro, but someone smoking pot is oakey dokey.

Unlike cigarettes pot is an intoxicant. Pot is more like alcohol, but people are smoking pot while driving just like we old farts used to smoke cigarettes. This concerns me, and I think might be one of the reasons that driving in California has gotten so damn bad. More people than ever before are essentially drunk driving.

Sitting in traffic with my windows down, I’m getting hotboxed too. Why should I have to keep my windows up and the A/C running because you guys want to smoke pot in traffic? Furthermore why can’t I go back to smoking Marlboros?

Oh Right… Smoking cigarettes is bad for you, but smoking pot is healthy. So the effects of second hand pot smoke aren’t bad? How about second hand intoxication? What about the children riding with mommy and daddy smoking pot in the car?

Today people gasp in shock and horror when they realize people in my generation were trapped in cars with our parents smoking cigarettes. But there’s no similar outrage with pot? Talk about a double standard!

Is it any surprise that jobs aren’t getting done well?  How many fast food orders have you had screwed up? How many places have you been shopping only to find there is no organization to the merchandise?

I’ve been noticing it. I’d been pondering it until I was sitting at a traffic light with three cars around me reeking of pot.

Then watching these folks drive and thinking they were drunk, everything clicked in my head.

They were in fact intoxicated. They shouldn’t have been driving. This was midday on a weekday, I couldn’t help but wonder where these people worked.

Then I thought about the quality of the work they’d be doing.

These are the same people who are appalled that in addition to my having an ashtray on my desk at work, I’d sometimes have a beer at lunch then go back to work. At the time, I was a bench technician and my workstation had a soldering iron. The rosin in the solder was probably worse for me than my Marlboro smoldering in the ashtray.

Please notice, I said “A Beer” not a six pack.

The funny thing is that a joint might fuck you up. A single beer probably won’t impair you at all. These days, your company will say you’re not allowed to have a beer at lunch under threat of immediate termination. But they’ll say nothing about that “Medicinal” joint at lunch.

I’ve got another datapoint to work with when it comes to moving. The list is growing…

Four Seasons but with only decorative snow. I’m over 2 – 10 feet of snow falling in one storm. I like the fall change of leaves and gentle snowfall with accumulation that doesn’t last too long.
No State tax.
No Legalized Pot
Low Auto Registration, $500 a year to register a car? Really?
Generally homogeneous demographics, I’m over “Diversity”. California making me feel like I should speak Spanish instead of English has burned through my diversity quota.
Low Property Taxes.
Good Law Enforcement.
Strong constitutional beliefs. In other words no monkey shines with The Constitution when some activist group gets all mouthy about how they think we should live. I am totally over  being told that I have to live my life to spare someone else’s feelings.
I might be content with someplace that looks a lot like Mayberry. That might be a little too boring, but I’d be willing to give it a try for a while.

As an aside,

Trying to find out about Marlboros is stupidly difficult. Finding pictures of the logo and various boxes is more or less easy but there are a bunch of new packages so since I was a Marlboro smoker I was curious. MY GOD!!! I never did get to just identifying what these new packages were. They want your to register, and then answer a bunch of legal shit, then agree to be on their mailing list, then verify your age, then make sure that you’re in a country where they can send you information.

FUCK!!!!

On the other hand, I can tell you anything at all about pot.

The one thing I was able to determine is that California charges an excise tax of $2.87 on every pack of smokes and that the feds charge $1.01. so $3.88 of every pack of smokes is excise taxes which doesn’t include the sales tax in whatever county you’re in. It looks like California s charging 22% on pot.

Obviously since pot is still illegal on a federal level there isn’t any federal tax on pot. California is making a killing!

Not being able to just look something up annoys the shit out of me. This registration and age and double secret handshake crap is simply designed to make people not want to ask questions.

Asking about cigarettes doesn’t mean you’re going to start smoking. It means that you had a question. It’s not technically censorship but it’s damn close. Apparently Phillip Morris makes e-cigs but they’re only in Europe and therefore the web sites redirect you to a page saying “NO NO NO YOU NAUGHTY PERSON” you’re not allowed to see this. Which is censorship…

VPNs with servers in Europe make that a nothing barrier. Nothing aside from annoyance and reminding us that surprise! We’re not actually free.

I don’t recall voting for any censorship on the internet at all, so why is it there?

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Ya know, sometimes it’s tough to see beyond the evil and stupidity.

I’m having that kind of day. 

So I’m turning off the news. Well, more properly I’m ignoring it. 

From the mayor of Boston being a racist against white people (while being married to one, there’s a marriage on the rocks), to Eric Swalwell potentially being an accomplice in Hunter Biden’s defiance of Congress. To Joe Biden’s upcoming impeachment, It’s all a steaming pile of runny shit.

You know, Eric Swalwell, if he had an ounce of smarts would be keeping a low profile after skating on ethics violations because he was fucking an employee(?) who was also a Chinese spy. Oh and let’s not forget that he was doing that while he was married, so he also committed adultery. There are other conservative Congressmen who’ve been tossed out of office for the same or less. (Paging Madison Cawthorn!)

But never mind that obvious double standard. The show must go on.

Oh there was a blurb about the dumbass who took it up the ass in a senate chamber, claiming that the release of the video and his subsequent firing was due to homophobia. Gag! 

No, Princess Prolapsed, You weren’t fired for being gay. You were fired for completely inappropriate behavior in a place of business. Having sex in a public place such as a hearing room is simply wrong. It’s a little thing called etiquette. Your momma and daddy should have laid a belt to your ass more as a child and raised you better.

Yeah, I’m sure they’re super proud and just love being humiliated in the grocery store. Dumb ass, your name is pretty damn unique. Your dad is gonna love people seeing his credit card and saying, “Oh your son took it up the ass in the senate! You don’t have any other kids do you?” Your poor dad probably can’t have a beer with his buddies without your ass literally being a topic of discussion.

I guess they don’t teach things like etiquette in college anymore, either.

You being fired had nothing to do with you being gay, nor should it have.

Hell dumbfuck, I’ve seen a straight couple who were fucking in a locked office, fired on the spot and marched out of the building by the president of the corporation. Yes, the door to the office was locked, but the damn window was wide open and visible from the sidewalk. The president of the company was coming back from lunch and saw it all. That was the first issue. The second issue was that the male was director of HR, and the third issue was the female was the HR director’s employee.

Ding! Ding! “Strike Three… You’re Out!”

ANY of the issues noted, were grounds for immediate termination in the case I witnessed.  I am absolutely certain that your employment agreement had some verbiage about inappropriate conduct.

Anyway. I’m putting it all on ignore for a day or two, maybe longer. I’m not really mad about any of it, I’m just really annoyed, and saddened.

I’m annoyed that apparently our country has fallen so far. I’m saddened that there doesn’t appear to be any other country to emigrate to which is any better. It appears virtually every country on the planet has lost their damn minds and is rife with corrupt politicians, and plain stupid, or evil humans.

The trouble is, if you look at this kind of crap for too long, it sours you on humanity and life. 

I’ve been wondering if that’s the reason the “News” is always so incredibly bad and depressing. You know, some people might just figure it’s better to kill themselves than continue to take the onslaught of whatever the fuck this is.

If I was a super conspiracy theorist, I’d say the goal is depopulation. These days as a man, you might be pumping your seed into someone you think is a woman, only to find out she’s not. Or you find out she started to transition to being a man, then changed her mind, but the damage was done, she’s sterile. Either is a problem if you want to be a father. 

Or the girl looks like either of these charmers…  Uh NOPE! I actually like my penis, even though sometimes I beat it like it owes me money. I wouldn’t put the poor fella in either of these things.

I swear, my general rule of peoples appearance still holds. In nature, venomous creatures often have something strikingly out of the norm. Bright colors for example, odd textures to their skin, warning sounds, etc. When people adopt these traits, often they are toxic. They may be dangerous in other ways, but generally speaking you don’t want, or need to waste your time with them. No good will come of it. On some level, instinctively they’ve adopted warning plumage because they know they’re defective. 

As a guy, I’m not interested in someone, (male or female) that looks like a tattoo shop wall. Well executed, artistic tattoos are neat. Something that looks like the tattooist had a hangover and threw up on you, is not. I find overly tattooed people distracting enough that I’m not interested in sex with them, I feel like I have to glean the meaning of all the ink.

I have encountered people whose tattoos chronicle the story of their life and are well thought out and coherent. Those folks are rare but when you meet them you know. Their stories are often beautiful and tragic. The person is more often than not an amazing soul.

Put a lot of disjointed tattoos on a woman with the personality of a pit viper, and well… if I’m supposed to put a baby in that… humanity is doomed.

I wonder, how many men are jacking it into the toilet rather than having sex with women because they’re afraid of bringing some abomination into the world? If you knew your next load was going to result in one of the moronic people we’ve seen in the streets over the past 4 years wouldn’t you want to flush that bad seed, or at least see it running down her leg?

I mean dudes, think about it. Do you want to contaminate your genetic line with whatever comes from blending half your DNA with half the DNA from a fucked up chick with unresolved daddy issues, defective brain, and who spews venomous hatred all day long? If you wouldn’t trust her with a puppy, you shouldn’t trust her with your child. Guys… be freakin selective or do her anal.

BTW Guys, good women know this and act on it instinctively, they literally don’t think about it.  If you’re a fucked up douche bag, who’s the male equivalent of the two winners pictured. That’s probably why you don’t ever get to date good women. Get your shit together, clean yourself up, and become a man worthy of dating good women. 

Yeah, I really need to turn away from it all.

It’s gotten bad when I’m not just praying for an asteroid impact. I’m trying to figure out if I can make a magnet big enough to cause an asteroid impact.

Perhaps when the AI’s actually become SkyNet they’ll just nuke the planet and note somewhere in a database that humanity was a bad idea. 

John Varley ended Millennium with a computer contemplating if silicon rather than carbon was a better medium to build life. The computer in question wasn’t sure that humanity was worthwhile, but chose to save it just in case. The computer was going to contemplate the question over a very long period of time. While it had facilitated humanity’s escape to the future, the computer had to go the long way around.

Imagine Humanity’s surprise if they came out of the time warp, and the BC, (Big Computer) had decided they were too flawed, and too much trouble, to live.

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Hmm, is this real or not…

I can’t imagine what kind of device Manuel might be.

I would have ignored this entirely except that it showed up in an email from LinkedIn. It was just too emblematic of the job search market to pass up.

I thought LinkedIn was supposed to be vetting their job listings. It looks like USTech is a real company, but I can’t locate this position on their web site.

So either it’s another SPAM job listing (All too common on LinkedIn) or it’s an old position that’s been filled so LinkedIn is just presenting it to waste the job seeker’s time.

I think it’s time to ask this simple question.

Is it time to abandon LinkedIn?

What does it really provide as far as service? The site has degraded to nothing more than a FaceBook clone.

Honestly, I can’t read more than a few of the posts before getting really bored. 

The years I was completely off of LinkedIn I got a lot less SPAM. Less than a week after rejoining LinkedIn, my SPAM levels tripled.

I only rejoined LinkedIn because a completely useless HR consultant told an entire class of people it was absolutely necessary to have social media and LinkedIn. This consultant supposedly walked everyone through the self marketing process. Social media presence, LinkedIn profiles, resumes, etc. Except they didn’t.

I can say, for me sitting in those classes was absolutely useless. I can’t say for certain that anyone benefitted, and the consulting firm doesn’t appear to be in business today. 

Our jobs, indeed most of our department was being offshored and the company had to wave its hands for the government, to make it look like they were doing something to assist those of us being laid off.

The majority of us who’d been through the layoff process before, knew within 5 minutes that these HR Consulting folks were bogus. These folks had the fundamentals of the layoff process incorrect and didn’t know that when a company lays off quantities of people above a certain threshold there’s government involvement and reporting.

They were getting paid likely an obscene amount of money but their curriculum was obviously a hack job and not one of them had ever taught a class or gotten up to speak  in front of a group of people. Yes, it was that obvious. Especially since I had stood up teaching classes to technical folks earlier in my career.

I’ve wondered what it would take for me to be one of the presenters for a corporation that does the “Employment Transitions and Assistance Classes” By the way, I claim that name, and the abbreviation ETAC as my own.

I’m sure I could put together a class that dealt with Social media (What to delete!) LinkedIn and resume writing. I’m also sure that I could put together something useful to the employees facing the end of their jobs. God knows I’ve been through the layoff process enough to have gained some useful experience.