Fumesucker
Fumesucker's JournalI'm taking what they're giving cause I'm working for a living
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/checking-out/Among the 100 million people in this country who hold full-time jobs, about 70 percent of them either hate going to work or have mentally checked out to the point of costing their companies money — “roaming the halls spreading discontent,” as Gallup reported. Only 30 percent of workers are “engaged and inspired” at work.
At first glance, this sad survey is further proof of two truisms. One, the timeless line from Thoreau that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The other, less known, came from Homer Simpson by way of fatherly advice, after being asked about a labor dispute by his daughter Lisa. “If you don’t like your job,” he said, “you don’t strike, you just go in there every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.”
The American way, indeed. Gallup’s current survey, covering two years, is a follow-up to an earlier poll that found much the same level of passive discontent from 2008 to 2010. Even in an improving economy, people are adrift at work, complaining about a lack of praise, with no sense of mission, and feeling little loyalty to their employer.
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All of that is certainly at play. But here’s the surprise: the main factor in workplace discontent is not wages, benefits or hours, but the boss. Yes, that cretin from Kentucky Fried Chicken, in countless forms. The survey said there was consistent anger at management types who failed to so much as ask employees about their opinion of the job. Ever.
The people I'm around in real life are convinced the government is recording everything
It's not hard to work the conversation around to Affaire Snowden, I can be garrulous if I wish and I'm interested in what people think.
Not yet have I found someone who does or will categorically deny that the government would do such a thing and then lie about doing it.
The majority of them accept it as fait accompli; "Really, you have to ask?" <shrug>.
Not that everyone gives a damn mind you, even people you would think should care quite a bit just due to the nature of their occupation, people who should be professional paranoids.
The "gives a damn" people cut across the usual political lines I've noticed though.
Is a society where it is impossible to do anything at all illegal without being caught a good thing?
Because eventually that's where society in America and on Earth may well be headed, do anything to break any law and the evidence to arrest, arraign and convict you will be on a computer somewhere and it will be meta analyzed by sophisticated algorithms so that any lawbreaking will be detected and acted upon.
In my mind the desirability of such a tightly controlled society is highly dependent on the rules that society has.
Are you convinced enough of the rationality and sheer sanity of our rules and those who make and enforce those rules that you would be comfortable living in a world similar to that of Minority Report where every crime was instantly detected?
Sometimes I think about Smirk and Sneer having that sort of power and it really chills my soul.
Ever had an OP unexpectedly "blow up in your face"?
Yeah, I've had it happen back on DU2 and got my ass handed to me and no I'm not linking to it even if I could find it.
I've had my thinking changed several times by that sort of thing, make an assumption and make an ass of myself.
Most of the time these days I manage to get my brain engaged before I hit <enter> but every now and then...
Thanks to naivete I made an error in judgement in my early twenties
That was my age when Nixon was forced from office in disgrace, naively I was convinced that no Republican would be President again for at least a generation, that it would take that long for the Republican brand to shed the stench of Nixon and rehabilitate itself to the point a Republican President was again a possibility.
We all know how that worked out, we had one Democratic President for one term and then it was Mourning In America with Ronaldus Maximus for eight horrendous years and then Poppy Bush for another four. We have not to this very day begun to climb out of the hole in our society those two unspeakable creeps put us in.
I get the impression reading for the last few days that a great many DUers who should know better think that there will never be a Republican President again and they don't have to worry about granting powers to that office that they would surely come to bitterly regret should a Republican once again hold it.
One thing I have learned in six decades of life is that you could run the Republican party through a wood chipper and it would reassemble itself like that liquid metal Terminator in T2, they are too useful to the 1% and have more money than God, Allah and Yahweh combined as well as all the moral sense of a rabid badger on meth.
Dismiss the possibility of another Republican President at your extreme peril.
Just put a new SSID on my wifi router
Booz Allen Surveillance Unit 12C4U
Some of my neighbors are unfriendly, this should nip it in the bud.
If tomorrow Obama changed his mind and decided the surveillance program was all wrong
Do you think any of those now arguing about government surveillance would change their positions, pro or con?
The argument about domestic spying isn't one the other side is having to any extent
The right and the Republicans are fine with almost any level of domestic spying with very few exceptions, leave their guns alone and talk enough about Jeebus, Free Markets and Mooslim Terrism and they'll happily goosestep into something that makes 1984 look like a Disney toon while calling anyone that doesn't cheer loud enough a traitor.
If there is any significant opposition to domestic surveillance it's going to have to come from the left and the Democrats.
What I see so far doesn't make me particularly sanguine about the prospects of even slowing the growth of surveillance.
Tears to my eyes dept:Tanker truck full of Scotch whisky tips over and catches on fire in Woodbridge
http://www.nj.com/middlesex/index.ssf/2013/06/tanker_truck_full_of_scotch_wh.html#incart_river#incart_hbx#incart_best-ofThe tanker truck full of Scotch whisky that tipped over on a Woodbridge residential street? That would fall into Chandler's not-as-good category, especially after the truck caught fire.
Captain Roy Hoppock of the Woodbridge Police Department said that a B-Line truck carrying the spirit flipped for unknown reasons on King Georges Road in the Fords section of town at 9 this morning. The driver was treated for minor injuries, Hoppock said. First responders quickly put out a fire that started after the crash.
Lori Kessell, who lives down the street, said she heard a loud boom at about 9 a.m. and smelled what she later found out what burning fiberglass. The intersection where the truck flipped is a dangerous one, the scene of many crashes, Kessell said.
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