Top Gun is Fantasy

The Five Dumbest Management Concepts of All Time

Five. Many traditional business leaders have a militaristic view of the way the business world works. A glance at the titles of popular business books-Marketing Warfare, Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, Guerrilla PR-offer ample testimony for this widely held viewpoint. We’re told that we must imitate generals and warlords if we want to be successful managers.

Taking all this to heart, many executives talk as if they were planning the next world war: “This product will do major damage in the marketplace! We’ve armed our sales force. We’ve targeted the right set of customers! The new ad campaign will explode into the territories! This is going to be a major victory! Our troops are ready!”

Military-minded managers also find it all too easy to become control freaks. Because they see themselves as generals and officers, they tell people what to do. They think that good employees should shut up and follow orders. This behavior destroys initiative as people wait around for top management to make decisions.

People actually do this? Perhaps I've been lucky and never had the misfortune to work for guys like this. Maybe I just haven't been paying attention.

Most actual officers I served under did not act like that. Oh, we were not drinking buddies, and once the Man said 'jump' we asked 'how high'. Before that, if the situation allowed [1], opinions were solicited, people were listened to.

Civilians: man y'all got whacked notions of what the military is actually about.

[1] If the lieutenant orders 'Corporal, take out that enemy machine gun', well there isn't a lot of room for debate: the gun has got to go. The majority of of day-to-day work in the military is .. just work. Trucks are driven, airplanes are fixed and flown, boxes are stacked, computers are programed. It's blue and white collar work, but everyone is younger than average, in decent shape and wearing bad haircuts. Also, they cuss a lot.

..
..

Gay is not the problem

A recent former Marine on the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell.

True liberty is people freely conducting themselves as long as they are not inflicting direct harm.  And in perspective, if someone in my squad wanted to spend the day talking about how they gargled dicks all weekend, that would have less effect on team erosion than half the shit I saw (like peeing on someone’s girlfriend or smashing the religious guy’s Christ relics he so tenderly put on his well-made rack).  If a problem does however arise as the result of a team member getting in a relationship with another team member, or having an uncontrollable pining for another uniformed team mate, deal with that.  It’s a separate issue from there.   Gay is not the problem.  The problem is the problem.

This is no laughing matter citizen

Mark Bennett has turned up a memo from John Pistole to Robert Mueller . . .

I mean, everything we do makes Americans safer by making it less likely that their airplane seatmates will be wearing bombs in their undies, and they keep complaining: “John, you’ve never caught a terrorist.” “John, the scanners don’t work.” “John, we don’t want screeners groping us or our children.” Waaaa, mine hurts too. Listen up, people: if you want flying across the country to be safer than driving to the convenience store, you’re going to have to give up some of your freedom and dignity. And the fact that we’ve never caught a terrorist just means that YOU NEED TO GIVE UP MORE OF YOUR FREEDOM SO THAT WE CAN CATCH SOME.

Mr. Bennett should watch his'self: Der TeeAssAy ze haf' no senze oft humor, nicht wahr?




Pic From Oleg.

TSA - Keeping us unsecure since 2001

I know a guy who thought about passenger checkpoints at the airport for a few seconds, figured out a way to sneak a pistol on board an airplane. It involved a small pistol, a pipe stem, a pocket protector, mis-direction at the right time.

He could have saved the skull-sweat.  All you need to do is to shove a pistol in a carry on, assume an innocent expression, and you're in, slick as snot.

Farid Seif, a Houston businessman, usually carries the weapon around for protection. He didn't realize he had kept the glock in his carry-on computer bag until he was mid-flight. Once he landed, he immediately reported the incident.

TSA. We haven't caught a terrorist yet.  But we will.  Real Soon Now.



The bawdy captions write themselves.

Pic from Daphne.

Battle of Lissa, 1866: d'oh

Ever had one of those days?

As the Erzherzog Ferdinand Max limped away, damaged after conducting three ramming attacks, the Ancona closed on her attempting to ram. In the excitement the Italian gunners got a full broadside off at point blank range, but while they had remembered the gunpowder, they had forgotten to load the shot.

Dress Code

Been to a few funerals. Noticed at the one small-town affair that there was a divide between the old (talking guys who are retired or nearly so) and young guys and gals in their twenties.

The older guys and gals dressed and acted in a way that said 'I don't have much money, but I can dress well and act like a grown-up.' The youth dressed and acted in a way that said 'I am wearing my best t-shirt - what more do you want from me?'

So. At my funeral there will be a Dress Code. Hopefully the people who come will not need to be hit with sticks to act like grown-ups. I will have ninjas on retainer. Show up in a t-shirt and you'll find yourself a sex-slave in Marrakesh before you can say 'Bob's Your Uncle'.

The Dress Code

Men. Suit and tie. Shirt and tie will be allowed on a case-by-case basis. Shave and haircut - mandatory. Shined shoes a must.

Ladies: Skirts with dressy tops, or a dress. Hemlines that flatter one's legs. Tasteful displays of cleavage are required.

Sturgis OS

I want to like Linux.  I really do.  And I do!  It's no longer the young punk, but it's where a lot of cool and groovy stuff is happening.

But spend a decade immersed in Solaris, with brief excursions to BSD-land, and you get used to having things run a certain way.  Spend a few hours with a knotty RPM problem and a fellow can be forgiven for thinking he's dropped into the Sturgis Rally.

Tabs. Way too many open tabs.

Focus on what you’re good at, and nothing else! - Neil Patel


TJIC on getting things done.


JEP on TSA

The TSA is only doing its job, and it's becoming clearer that that job is to make Americans understand that they are subjects, not citizens. Humiliating the Minister Plenipotentiary and Ambassador Extraordinary of the world's largest democracy fits into that: everyone is a subject to Security Theater. I know that these "officers" only mean well, and are dedicated to keeping America safe. They haven't yet caught a bomber, but they will, real soon now.

You can go strangle yourself with that yellow ribbon, or, here is what I want you to do instead of shaking my hand.

The military is ultimately a reflection of our culture or what we would like to believe about our culture. We would like to believe that our military is an all-volunteer force filled with young and old people who represent the diversity (class, sex, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, non-religion, talent, skills or politics) of our country. We would like to believe compulsory national service has failed to win wars in the past, that a draft is the penultimate form of a dictatorship and that today's military is better than any in our history. But is it really voluntary? Is compulsory national service as threatening as some libertarians would view it? Is the all-volunteer military the "best" our country has ever produced?

Nassim Taleb looks at what will break, and what won't

The great top-down nation-state will be only cosmetically alive, weakened by deficits, politicians’ misalignment of interests and the magnification of errors by centralised systems. The pre-modernist robust model of city-states and statelings will prevail, with obsessive fiscal prudence. Currencies might still exist, but, after the disastrous experience of America’s Federal Reserve, they will peg to some currency without a government, such as gold.

Gov't crackdown spurs initiatives to route around DNS.  Beats my idea of a ginourmous /etc/hosts.


Getting Close To The Machine - Ellen Ullman

The problem with programming is not that the computer is illogical - the computer is terribly logical, relentlessly literal. It demands that the programmer explain the world on its terms; that is, as an algorithm that must be written down in order, in a specific syntax, in a strange language that is only partially readable by regular human beings. To program is to translate between the chaos of human life and the rational, line-by-line world of computer language.

Songs that make me smile

1.  LA Woman, by the Doors.  Always makes me think of one of the finest SF novels I've read, Kingsbury's 'The Moon Goddess and the Son'.  The rest of 'The Doors' catalog I could give a fig about.

I'm playing it now, and from the way Herself is bouncing around to the beat, she may agree with me.


2. Rudolph The Redneck Reindeer, via John Boy and Billy.  Because this part [1] always make me laugh:

Santy Claus saw Rudolph's bed all covered with liquor bottles, tobacco juice all over him and cigarette butts all over the floor there and he got real mad and he said to Rudolph, "You better get on the dad-gum wagon and pull my sled tonight boy."  And Rudolph didn't like this kind of loud talk so early in the morning, so he reached over there and spit tobacco juice in in the left eye of Santy Claus then took a liquor bottle and busted it over his head and said, "Get the hell outta here you dad-gum fat hippy!"

Well, see, Santy Claus didn't like that kind of talk, Rudolph coming at him with a bottle and all.  See, Santy Claus had been taking kung-fu lessons from this Chi-nese elf all summer long while he didn't have nothin' to do ...

Mayhem ensues.

[1] Read it with a southern twang for best effect.

Kinsey Sicks: Touch-a Touch Me, TSA Security

Via.

Clearing Tabs

John Steakley - RIP.


George Bush interviewed on Facebook:

"If you see me in an airport, I hope you wave with all five fingers. But if you don't, you won't be the first. I'm a comfortable man."

The Danger of a Global Double Dip Recession Is Real

The modern world has for centuries been dominated economically, intellectually, and physically by the civilization that arose in Western Europe in the wake of the Renaissance and Reformation and spread across the Atlantic.

Will that one day be seen as a passing phenomenon doomed to ascend ever upward and then slowly fizzle out like a firework?

Hackertopia: Creating a City as a Startup

Of all the better mouse traps that need to be invented, perhaps the most important is a better city. Americans choose between soulless suburban strip malls, and expensive and congested city centers. Over the past 30 years real estate and property taxes have consumed an increasing portion of our incomes. Houses in hacker friendly cities with good school districts are frightfully expensive. The Boston metro region has median home prices of 400K, and typical San Jose home prices surpass 700K. Yet the price of building a home can be as low as 70K. This disparity hints at an opportunity.

Americans, and Hackers in particular, are on a treadmill. Productivity increases year by year, thanks to the magic of Silicon Valley. But the cost of living increases faster thanks to an out of control regulatory state. Zoning laws, the deterioration of public schools, the growth of guilds and cartels in the health care industry, rising taxes, etc have all made it harder to make ends meet.

Hackertopia is the better mousetrap. The city will provide a remarkably quality of life for an unbelievably cheap price.

Crispy Critter

Good: Thanksgiving Holiday with my wife's family. Good people, good times.

Good: Firing up the oven to make dinner for the kids the evening after a long, long, drive home.

Bad: Discovering that a mouse crawled inside the oven to die.

Good: I've used the phrase 'crispy critter' before but I have never-ever been able to use it in a literal sense. 

And now I have.

If Conan were around today . . .

Mongol: Conan! What is best in life?

Conan: Theraflu.

Mongol: ...

Conan: It is great stuff, my friend.

It is!  A bottle of that stuff, a laptop with wireless, hulu and you are set for a sick day in bed.

This is not Mick Jagger

And it is a pity

Keith likes to talk a lot about his getting clean from heroin. It is not correspondingly apprehended that he replaced the heroin comprehensively with liquor. Given a choice I select the slurring alcoholic over the comatose junkie as a lifelong professional partner, and I say this with some knowledge of the two alternatives. But neither is strictly desirable.

Later, one grows older and becomes more informed about such things, and I saw I was supposed to have held an elaborate ceremony called an "intervention." Society could have effectively halted the upheavals of the 1960s simply by requiring all of us to "intervene" with one another. In any event, considering half our circle was on heroin and the rest were coke fiends, I think it wouldn't have efficacious in our circumstances.

Breaking up a dreary drive

I am nine, staying with my grandparents. Grandpa driving to town, I'm along for funs and grins. Grandpa asks if I want to see a short cut and so we drive off the highway and around and up and up a butte and onto the top. Park. Stroll to the edge. Grandpa points to the horizon.

'There's your shortcut - straight down.'

He laughs and we drive down the road and into town.

I come from a long line of men who only think we're funny, it's true.


The week of Thanksgiving myself and three boys are going to park our butts in a car and drive, man, for about sixteen hours to grandma's house.

A side trip on the way to my mother-in-law's is planned, no time for other dilly-dally on the outbound leg.

Our over the river and through the woods coming home will take us roughly D.C. - Hagerstown - Morgantown - Wheeling - Columbus - Indianapolis - Chicago - Home.

Is there anything to see on that route?

• Not far off the road.
• Can be seen in less than an hour.
• Free.
• Bonus if I can break open a lame pun or joke.

Anyone can drive for sixteen hours and see nothing but dreary rest stops, fast food joints and asphalt. How often can you give a kid a memory like the one grandpa gave to me?

41 years old? What the ...

Terminal Lance: All That Salt.

Check this out: a herd of 18 and 19 year old brand new Marines are being introduced to their platoon sergeant at Infantry Training School (ITS).  Like Max's fictional Gunner Quigley the man looked old.  Wrinkled, leathery skin, grizzled hair, shot through with grey.  Dude looked weathered, man.

I am Staff Sergeant Mason.  I am twenty-eight years old. I have spent the last ten years in the Fleet.  You all will look like me in a decade.

Mason was a darn good boss.  Knew his stuff, knew how to lead [1].  Didn't believe in head games: Charlie (Kickback Charlie, thank-you-very-much) Company got base liberty when we were in garrison.  By contrast, Weapons company upstairs got to spend their nights cleaning their area over .. and over .. and over again.

Still ... dude looked old the first time we met him, ya know?

[1] Also, Staff Sergeant Mason was responsible for my first nickname that didn't include the words 'shit head'.  Humping out to the range early one morning I found myself near the head of the column, stepping out lively [2].  He said, 'Hey, you, Dunbar, look at you steppin' out like a big ol' damn bird.  We gonna call you Big Bird.'

[2] Marines on the march scoot along at a clip most of us would describe as 'running'.  You want to idle along, see the sights, join the Boy Scouts.

Poo. Take a dump. Etc.

When the school year ends, Evan is going to return to Shanghai.

One of the first things, I imagine, his parents will do is sit him down and ask him 'What did you learn in America?'

And he will reply 'I learned American slang for 'poop'.

Don't imagine his parents will be exactly pleased, but that genie is plumb out of the bottle, now.

When the main gun pops, a tank stops being so humorous

A long time ago, my recruiter smiled at my ASVAB score and said 'Well, now.  Looks like you can pick your MOS: what do you want to spend the next four years doing?'

I briefly entertained armor. The idea of zooming around the battlefield in a 52-ton death-dealing machine was really appealing.  In hindsight, and having some experience with flat tires in January in Wisconsin, going infantry was a good idea.

Working on a tank is not like working on a '53 Chevy.  The parts weigh tons.  If the cupola needs work, a crane lifts it off.  If the crew watns to see the engine, a crane lifts the armor covers.  When the tracks break or wear out, which they constantly do, it is back-breaking work to replace them.  Tracks are deceptively fragile.

Maintenance is hard, knuckle-busting business:  In addition to bum ears, tankers tend to have scarred hands and joints that don't work just right.  Day in and day out the crews sweat over their machines.  If they aren't just repairing them, they are cleaning them with high pressure hose at the Birdbath, a concrete washing area.  It's not fun, not even interesting.  It's just work.  In some respects, being a tanker is like having one long flat tire in January.

The Litlest Statist

My son is 10, decked out with a crown, cape, breastplate, five o'clock shadow.

Monkey: Trick or Treat!

Older Dude on Porch: Oh, are you a knight?

Monkey: No. I'm the king, collecting taxes.


He wins scary costume of the night in my book.

Clearing Tabs

Haw!

Unhappy with President Obama’s failure to get any real laughs on The Daily Show, Democrats are asking Vice-President Biden to appear on Jeopardy.

Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5. PDF at the link

So where does America stand relative to its position of five years ago when the Gathering Storm book was prepared? The unanimous view of the authors is that our nation's outlook has worsened. The present volume, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited, explores the tipping point America now faces. Addressing America's competitiveness challenge will require many years if not decades; however, the requisite federal funding of much of that effort is about to terminate.

Malthus and capital

Why did agricultural civilization remain mired in the Malthusian trap for over 5,000 years? And how was it possible to eventually escape from it?

Barack Obama: the language a fella uses says a whole lot about his internal head space.

“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, 'We're going to punish our enemies and we're going to reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,' if they don't see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it's going to be harder."

Awesomely funny clip: Everything is amazing yet nobodys happy.


The greatest science-fiction story every written


John Carmack

... trends do matter. Small, nearly painless losses accumulate over the years, and the world can slowly change into something you don’t want while you weren’t paying attention. It doesn’t take a cataclysmic crash, just a slow accretion of over regulation, taxation, and dependency that chokes the vibrant processes that produce wealth and growth. Without growth, you get a zero sum game of fighting over the pie that breeds all sorts of problems in government and society.

My core thesis is that the federal government delivers very poor value for the resources it consumes, and that society as a whole would be better off with a government that was less ambitious. This is not to say that it doesn’t provide many valuable and even critical services, but that the cost of having the government provide them is much higher than you would tolerate from a company or individual you chose to do business with. For almost every task, it is a poor tool.