It's a law of nature...if I talk about something I'm going to do, I don't get it done? I told people to wait for this Log at midday, then fell asleep without having clicked the "publish" button...
Activism
What I find hard to believe is that without drugs an educated, connected young man would have thought of murder as a way to make the point he supposedly wanted to make. I see two possibilities: (1) Mangione was on drugs, or (2) Mangione saw what taking a bullet did for Donald Trump and wanted to do something similar, whether for Brian Thompson, for the United Health Care company, or for the insurance scam industry generally.
\Why would anyone want to make his enemy a victim whom everyone pities, instead of recognizing how wrong his ideas were?
Why would anyone want to risk allowing his enemy to be seen as brave?
If we hate the ideas people promote and enact, don't we want those people to be seen as fools and failures?
Etiquette
The skit writer has a point...
Nevertheless, even in the South, it is rude to have long conversations about personal matters in public. It is rude to chatter if anyone else is waiting. It is not only rude, but unchristian, because it always turns out to be based on the assumption that some people are "more important" than other people. I'm not saying that there aren't slow-moving stores that people visit just to have a good long chat with their friend the bored storekeeper, but when my parents were having a good visit with the storekeeper and other customers came in, they shut it off, stepped away from the counter, and either went home, or walked around while the other customers traded.
Hurricane
Let's hope the taxes on hurricane-destroyed houses reflect the current value of the property, not the value it had last year...People could, of course, organize a fund to pay the land taxes for badly damaged property.
Poem
Rants, Not Mine
Made me laugh:
Songs
Should "creative" people fear that getting a job like everybody else will destroy us like everybody else? I don't think. I think we're hard-wired to have talents, and no-talents are hard-wired not to have talents; this won't change. The jobs didn't destroy the no-talents and won't harm our talents at all. I think doing jobs just like the no-talents will inform our creative work, build empathy and compassion, etc., etc., and also pay for a lot of paint or amplifiers or Internet time.
But it needs to be understood that we are not like everybody else. No-talents can tell. They resent us. If they have any mechanism for making us feel unappreciated on the job or making us be unappreciated on the job, they'll do it. I think it's a crucial survival skill that we think of anything that's paid by the hour, day, or week as an odd job. Because, if we don't give employers reasons to fire us, it'll only be "We hired you to work on this project, but we've decided not to do this project," or "The workforce has to be reduced," or "You've earned a promotion we can't afford to offer, so if you resign we'll give you a glowing reference." (Of course, if you do resign, it will then be "You're qualified for a more prestigious and/or better paid job, so what's WRONG with you that you wanted this one? Next!")
And understand: if anybody says anything about "rapport" or "collegiality" or "how you fit in with other team members," no-talents are actively working to push you out and your best move is to stand up, say "I don't want to hang around where I'm not appreciated," and start walking, because nothing is ever going to make rapport or collegiality or fitting in with hostile team members possible. I have never seen or heard of a case where that kind of situation ever got better. Hostile team members can be told, "Well, X is doing good work, so it's up to you to fit in with X if you want to keep this job." That works. Otherwise, X's good work is making them look bad and clinging to their resentment gives them a chance to avoid looking bad, so if you had a chance to pull them out of icy water, they'd hate you more than ever. I have seen cases where the resented people left and submarined the company that listened to the resentful people. What was awesome about the Eighties, whatever your opinion of that decade's pop culture may be, was that resented people submarining resentful companies became a cliche in the Eighties.
Business owners who want not to be submarined could dismiss everything they've learned from the Harvard Business School of Perpetuating Discrimination, hire only self-accepting introverts to work on office jobs, score Green points for having everyone work from home nine days out of ten, keep the more talented people, and fire anyone who whines about someone else "not fitting in." But that could cause pain in their bloated, brittle egos, so more of them prefer to rely on public policies that discourage newer, more competitive businesses from competing with bigger, more stagnant ones...primarily by adding expenses with costly licensing fees, inspection fees, organization membership fees, insurance requirements, inflated property values and lease fees, and whatever other expense they can think of.
One way government can avoid the hazards of unchecked capitalism by downsizing to the point where it doesn't depend on income from those added expenses. Maybe we should think of the experience of starting a business with an initial investment below $100 as an essential qualification for elective office, just to keep the system clean.
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