When I first worked in a managerial role in the publishing industry, things were a lot more freewheeling. Political correctness had not yet been invented, and although I was quite on the proper side of how people in the business behaved back then, it's almost certain that some of the things I did as a manager would haul me onto the carpet of today's HR directors.
It was about 1990, I think, when, Eva applied for a job I posted for a gardening editor in our small non-fiction publishing house. There were perhaps two dozen qualified applicants, and Eva was near the bottom of the list of people I interviewed for the job.
"The first thing you should know about me," Eva said matter of factly as she entered my office that day, before she had even seated herself across from my desk, "is that I am HUGELY intelligent." She paused and studied me. "Some people have trouble with that. I am far smarter than just about everyone, and they often resent me for it."
I studied her face. The confidence and arrogance was palpable and a little pathological, and it was already clear this interview would not lead anywhere. I've been known to end interviews within moments when it's clear that somebody doesn't fit, but I was a little fascinated by Eva. She was just a little older than most of the candidates for this entry-level editing job, and while younger candidates are typically a little nervous and put on their best face by dressing up a little for an interview, Eva was dressed very plainly, almost defiantly so, and exuded a confidence filled with a kind of pitying condescension.
"I know you planned to give me a test on editing," she said. "But this sample of my writing will explain who I am far better." From a leather knapsack, Eva produced a hand-bound volume, and held it up with both hands to show the title: 0 = 1. She paused, leaned forward. "I've been working on this for seven years, so you must agree to nondisclosure. This is my copyrighted work, and it will very likely change the world some day. So you can expect legal action if you communicate any of this to anyone."
This was now getting distinctly interesting.
She then explained that this treatise did, in fact, prove that the numerical value "0" was exactly the same as the numerical value "1." She had accomplished this feat of logic in a mere 380 pages. She handed the tome over. "It will take you some time to understand this, so I won''t expect to hear from you for a week or so. You can give it back to me when I start work."
On the way out the door, she paused. "Supreme intelligence in a woman can be very hard for some people to deal with," she said. "Do you think you'll be able to manage me without.....resentment?"
I nodded thoughtfully. "That's perceptive of you. I'll be perfectly honest. There was a time when extremely intelligent women were a problem for me. But I've had a lot of therapy, and these days I rarely get aroused anymore. And when it does happen, it subsides pretty quickly. It's almost never a problem. "
There was just a moment when Eva's eyes narrowed with a hint of suspicion, but it was replaced with quick nod of agreement and dismissal, and then Eva was gone.
Exactly one week later, almost to the minute, Eva called back. "I haven't heard from you. Perhaps you had difficulty understanding my treatise?"
"Not at all," I said. "But I did find that it was necessary for me to read it at home, to avoid embarrassment. "
"Of course," she said. "When would you like me to start work?"
I do not know exactly what came over me next, but I instantly had a flash on how to respond to her—a choice that in the years since has made me slightly ashamed when I recall the unwitting meanness of it. It hints at a dark talent in my soul that I'm not entirely happy is there.
"I have a bit of a problem," I said. "I have two candidates of absolutely equal abilities and qualifications, and I simply cannot decide. I also can't NOT decide. You, of all people, know exactly what I'm talking about. So I've decided to allow a degree of randomness into the equation, much as you argue in 0 = 1."
"Excellent decision," she said, pleased. "And how will we proceed?"
I leaned forward in my desk chair so as to speak very clearly. "At 5:00 on this coming Friday, I'd like you to return to our offices. My other candidate will be there, too, and I'll be lining you both up in the parking lot for a foot race, from one side of the parking lot to the other. The job goes to whoever wins."
There was long silence on the phone. "A....foot race?" Eva said uncertainly, the first time I'd heard anything but neurotic confidence out of her. "I....well, I'm not very fast...."
"Well, so be it then, I said. "But remember, you have no idea of the other candidate, either. It could be a dwarf with a bum leg, for all you know. But as argued in your book, we will let uncertainty and randomness decide this for us."
Disappointingly for me, Eva never showed up again and never called back. On the following Friday, I ended up hiring Julia, who had been on a Division 1 Nordic ski-racing team in college. It was a very good hiring decision that I never regretted, especially since Julia also had an MA in horticulture. And I'd been quite sure she would have kicked ass in a 40 yard dash.
Old Geezers Out to Lunch
The Geezers Emeritus through history: The Mathematician™, Dr. Golf™, The Professor™, and Mercurious™
Friday, October 9, 2015
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Citizens of 4f, Oct. 8, 2015
When and early meeting requires me to ride into downtown Minneapolis on an earlier-than-usual 4F bus, Maria is almost always riding. As I pass by her on the way to my seat—she invariably sits on the left side near the front—I'm always struck by both the similarities to my own daughter, as well as some perceived differences.
My daughter is in her mid 20s, roughly the same age that Maria appears to be. Like my daughter, Maria chooses to commute by bus, and I rather imagine that the reason is the same as for my daughter—she is young and and may not be able to own a car yet. And like my daughter, Maria is decidedly NOT a morning person. More often than not, she is semi-snoozing in her seat, with her head resting against the window glass and her eyes closed.
I'm also struck by differences between my daughter and Maria—some of which are obvious, some perceived. My daughter's blonde paleness makes it rather easy to guess that she's of Scandinavian descent. Maria is of Hispanic heritage; my guess is that her parents are from southern central America or northern South America. Though I don't know for sure, something about her coloring and facial features makes me think she might be from Columbia or Peru.
The other perceived differences are admittedly the product of my imagination. My daughter, second child from a solidly middle class family, commutes to work in the mornings via bus in order to afford tuition in an MA program she attends at night. Her need for low-cost commuting is, I believe, quite temporary, and it will not be long before there will be enough affluence to allow her to own her own car and to enjoy a more comfortable life. Maria invariably wears a blue uniform dress under her coat, and wears sturdy shoes with thick resilient soles. I take this to identify her as a service worker in one of the downtown establishments, possibly a housekeeper at one of the hotels. I automatically assume her options are a little more limited than they are for my daughter.
And then, despite myself, I jump to further conclusions. I imagine Maria's family to be very recent immigrants from central or South America. They could be recently naturalized citizens, or documented non-citizens, or non-documented immigrants. The economy of Minnesota, like most states, depends on all classes of this labor force. In Minneapolis, a heavy proportion of the manual service labor force is recent Hispanic immigrants, and in the rural areas, they dominate the food canneries of the big food giants Del Monte and Green Giant, or the meat packing industries.
In my liberal, pro-labor stereotyping, I am naturally sympathetic to these workers. I see almost all of them as incredibly industrious, hard-working souls, who courageously have left their homes to seek work and a better future as strangers in a strange land. Progress toward the American dream will take generational time. Only three generations ago, my daughter's great-grandfather was a Norwegian immigrant farming a dirt-poor little dairy and pig farm in far northern Minnesota, and upward mobility for the clan was a step-by-step thing. The large influx of Vietnamese immigrants that came to Minnesota in the 1970s are only now making themselves felt in government and business. It will be much the same for Maria, I imagine, though perhaps it will take even longer, given the current xenophobia of American culture. Will she be forced to follow the same labor pattern as her parents? In my mind I wonder if this will be her life—endlessly cleaning hotel rooms after pro athletes and visiting business people leave town.
But even while thinking this, I'm aware this is lazy liberal stereotyping on my part. I have utterly no way of knowing what Maria's life really is. She could be working a menial downtown job to pay for college. Or she might be changing buses in downtown to continue on to the University, where her uniform is the garb of her part-time food service job. At a gathering of family friends recently, the teenage daughter of some close friend introduced us to a girlfriend of native American heritage. Having grown up near the big tribal reservations in southern Minnesota, I had an instant image of who this girl might be...and then learned that her father was an extremely successful businessman and that she was interviewing for admittance to Princeton and Columbia on the basis of SAT scores that bordered on perfection.
I can be quite guilty of liberal stereotyping, and although my hunch about Maria probably has a better chance of accuracy than Donald Trump's assumption that her family consists of rapists and thieves, my view is still a stereotype, and as such has no guarantee of being accurate in one particular case.
Today, things looked different on the early 4F bus. Maria was wide awake, and dressed much differently, with hair slightly curled, wearing makeup, dressed in smart business-like attire. And she was not in the least bit sleepy, but instead seemed a little nervous and jumpy. Perhaps headed for a job interview this morning.
I was tempted to talk to her, but I imagine that intrusion by a stranger would rather alarm her. I do hope, though, that she soon gets to abandon the housekeeper's uniform and starts commuting in business attire every day.
My daughter is in her mid 20s, roughly the same age that Maria appears to be. Like my daughter, Maria chooses to commute by bus, and I rather imagine that the reason is the same as for my daughter—she is young and and may not be able to own a car yet. And like my daughter, Maria is decidedly NOT a morning person. More often than not, she is semi-snoozing in her seat, with her head resting against the window glass and her eyes closed.
I'm also struck by differences between my daughter and Maria—some of which are obvious, some perceived. My daughter's blonde paleness makes it rather easy to guess that she's of Scandinavian descent. Maria is of Hispanic heritage; my guess is that her parents are from southern central America or northern South America. Though I don't know for sure, something about her coloring and facial features makes me think she might be from Columbia or Peru.
The other perceived differences are admittedly the product of my imagination. My daughter, second child from a solidly middle class family, commutes to work in the mornings via bus in order to afford tuition in an MA program she attends at night. Her need for low-cost commuting is, I believe, quite temporary, and it will not be long before there will be enough affluence to allow her to own her own car and to enjoy a more comfortable life. Maria invariably wears a blue uniform dress under her coat, and wears sturdy shoes with thick resilient soles. I take this to identify her as a service worker in one of the downtown establishments, possibly a housekeeper at one of the hotels. I automatically assume her options are a little more limited than they are for my daughter.
And then, despite myself, I jump to further conclusions. I imagine Maria's family to be very recent immigrants from central or South America. They could be recently naturalized citizens, or documented non-citizens, or non-documented immigrants. The economy of Minnesota, like most states, depends on all classes of this labor force. In Minneapolis, a heavy proportion of the manual service labor force is recent Hispanic immigrants, and in the rural areas, they dominate the food canneries of the big food giants Del Monte and Green Giant, or the meat packing industries.
In my liberal, pro-labor stereotyping, I am naturally sympathetic to these workers. I see almost all of them as incredibly industrious, hard-working souls, who courageously have left their homes to seek work and a better future as strangers in a strange land. Progress toward the American dream will take generational time. Only three generations ago, my daughter's great-grandfather was a Norwegian immigrant farming a dirt-poor little dairy and pig farm in far northern Minnesota, and upward mobility for the clan was a step-by-step thing. The large influx of Vietnamese immigrants that came to Minnesota in the 1970s are only now making themselves felt in government and business. It will be much the same for Maria, I imagine, though perhaps it will take even longer, given the current xenophobia of American culture. Will she be forced to follow the same labor pattern as her parents? In my mind I wonder if this will be her life—endlessly cleaning hotel rooms after pro athletes and visiting business people leave town.
But even while thinking this, I'm aware this is lazy liberal stereotyping on my part. I have utterly no way of knowing what Maria's life really is. She could be working a menial downtown job to pay for college. Or she might be changing buses in downtown to continue on to the University, where her uniform is the garb of her part-time food service job. At a gathering of family friends recently, the teenage daughter of some close friend introduced us to a girlfriend of native American heritage. Having grown up near the big tribal reservations in southern Minnesota, I had an instant image of who this girl might be...and then learned that her father was an extremely successful businessman and that she was interviewing for admittance to Princeton and Columbia on the basis of SAT scores that bordered on perfection.
I can be quite guilty of liberal stereotyping, and although my hunch about Maria probably has a better chance of accuracy than Donald Trump's assumption that her family consists of rapists and thieves, my view is still a stereotype, and as such has no guarantee of being accurate in one particular case.
Today, things looked different on the early 4F bus. Maria was wide awake, and dressed much differently, with hair slightly curled, wearing makeup, dressed in smart business-like attire. And she was not in the least bit sleepy, but instead seemed a little nervous and jumpy. Perhaps headed for a job interview this morning.
I was tempted to talk to her, but I imagine that intrusion by a stranger would rather alarm her. I do hope, though, that she soon gets to abandon the housekeeper's uniform and starts commuting in business attire every day.
Monday, September 28, 2015
Citizens of 4F, 9/28/15
In recent days I've found myself studying my fellow passengers on the 4F commuter bus even more closely. I'm a short-timer now, and my pattern of daily commutes into downtown Minneapolis will be done in a mere 12 weeks now. My view of my fellow commuters has become fond to a degree bordering on the sentimental, now that my time is finite. Of course, that time always was finite, but over the past few years I forgot that some of the time.
Taylor is a new passenger—or at least is one that I'm not familiar with. It's possible that she normally rides a later 4F bus; her jittery, nervous demeanor suggests that perhaps she's riding an earlier bus today because of some important work deadline. Taylor is in her late 20s, perhaps early 30s, and like most of her demographic she spends most of the bus trip twitting on her smart phone. But she's not fully engaged with her electronic security blanket today, because she frequently glances up to the sky or out the window, and has a clearly worried expression on her face.
She is dressed in a long white garment, kind of a shirt-dress, worn over black leggings, and has very high platform-shoes with thick heels. She wears a short tunic-like jacket made from patches of colorful, ragged cloth of different types; it's jacket made entirely for style, not practical comfort or warmth, and I'm reminded of the costume jackets Michael Jackson once wore back in those videos. Taylor's hair is oiled; deliberately and carefully tousled to look unkempt, and the presentation as a whole was, I'm sure, very time-consuming to achieve.
Once upon a time, the look Taylor presents would have been judged haphazard and disheveled, but now, of course, this is a very stylish and sought-after look in some businesses, and I peg her as probably belonging to one of the downtown ad agencies or perhaps some kind of .com business, though these are much less common than ad agencies in our region. In these businesses, such a personal style is just as much "uniform" as pin stripes and Oxford shoes are on Wall Street. Failing to look a little eccentric would earn these young professionals criticism in these environments. Young adults in these modern businesses don't have it easy. It must be very hard for them to all look completely unique in exactly the same way.
Taylor gets off at my stop at Hennepin and 5th St. in downtown, and walks just ahead of me on the same route I take to the office. She walks frantically fast, but her tall shoes dictate very short little steps, so the result is that she barely outpaces me at all, and loses all advantage when hitting the "don't walk" sign at the intersections. Waiting for the light to change, she fidgets nervously, moving her feet the way a pro quarterback does in the pocket when fearing defensive linemen about to smash into them.
For just a moment, I'm infected by her nervousness, beginning to feel agitated myself over what the work-day will bring in the form of contentious, pressure-filled meetings and phone calls and frantic emails asking me to decide things. Then I relax, remembering that in just a few weeks now, the stress of being a VP, albeit in a relatively small company, will be over. At the end of the year, I am voluntarily stepping down into a different role that will put me back in more immediate contact with book editing itself, a role that will allow me to work from home and avoid most of the tension and stress that in recent years has lifted my blood pressure and made for many nights where 3 or 4 hours of sleep were the norm.
Taylor anticipates the "walk" light and darts across the street ahead of me, again sacrificing speed and efficiency of movement to the style of her shoe wear. She walk with humming-bird frenzy up the street ahead of me, only barely gaining on my own now-leisurely pace. She darts into my own building, and I now have a pretty good idea of where she works.
I reflect now on how work stress that I felt in months and years past, that Taylor clearly feels now, was always of self-created origin. The work world is one in which we're encouraged, even mandated, to take ourselves and our job duties with far more self-importance than they deserve. That's relatively easy to see now, in what is quickly becoming hind-sight for me. But I feel sorry for Taylor, as it's likely she faces decades of work at the same pace and level of stress she's showing now, barring some revelation on her part.
I turn the corner in the hallway of my building, and there's Taylor with the shuffling, dancing feet, impatiently waiting for the elevator to take her to the ad agency on the 6th and 7th floors of my building. I join her, punch the button for floor # 4, and upon leaving the elevator reflect on the irony that frantic living does not, in the final measure, put you any further ahead than a calm, reflective life.
Taylor is a new passenger—or at least is one that I'm not familiar with. It's possible that she normally rides a later 4F bus; her jittery, nervous demeanor suggests that perhaps she's riding an earlier bus today because of some important work deadline. Taylor is in her late 20s, perhaps early 30s, and like most of her demographic she spends most of the bus trip twitting on her smart phone. But she's not fully engaged with her electronic security blanket today, because she frequently glances up to the sky or out the window, and has a clearly worried expression on her face.
She is dressed in a long white garment, kind of a shirt-dress, worn over black leggings, and has very high platform-shoes with thick heels. She wears a short tunic-like jacket made from patches of colorful, ragged cloth of different types; it's jacket made entirely for style, not practical comfort or warmth, and I'm reminded of the costume jackets Michael Jackson once wore back in those videos. Taylor's hair is oiled; deliberately and carefully tousled to look unkempt, and the presentation as a whole was, I'm sure, very time-consuming to achieve.
Once upon a time, the look Taylor presents would have been judged haphazard and disheveled, but now, of course, this is a very stylish and sought-after look in some businesses, and I peg her as probably belonging to one of the downtown ad agencies or perhaps some kind of .com business, though these are much less common than ad agencies in our region. In these businesses, such a personal style is just as much "uniform" as pin stripes and Oxford shoes are on Wall Street. Failing to look a little eccentric would earn these young professionals criticism in these environments. Young adults in these modern businesses don't have it easy. It must be very hard for them to all look completely unique in exactly the same way.
Taylor gets off at my stop at Hennepin and 5th St. in downtown, and walks just ahead of me on the same route I take to the office. She walks frantically fast, but her tall shoes dictate very short little steps, so the result is that she barely outpaces me at all, and loses all advantage when hitting the "don't walk" sign at the intersections. Waiting for the light to change, she fidgets nervously, moving her feet the way a pro quarterback does in the pocket when fearing defensive linemen about to smash into them.
For just a moment, I'm infected by her nervousness, beginning to feel agitated myself over what the work-day will bring in the form of contentious, pressure-filled meetings and phone calls and frantic emails asking me to decide things. Then I relax, remembering that in just a few weeks now, the stress of being a VP, albeit in a relatively small company, will be over. At the end of the year, I am voluntarily stepping down into a different role that will put me back in more immediate contact with book editing itself, a role that will allow me to work from home and avoid most of the tension and stress that in recent years has lifted my blood pressure and made for many nights where 3 or 4 hours of sleep were the norm.
Taylor anticipates the "walk" light and darts across the street ahead of me, again sacrificing speed and efficiency of movement to the style of her shoe wear. She walk with humming-bird frenzy up the street ahead of me, only barely gaining on my own now-leisurely pace. She darts into my own building, and I now have a pretty good idea of where she works.
I reflect now on how work stress that I felt in months and years past, that Taylor clearly feels now, was always of self-created origin. The work world is one in which we're encouraged, even mandated, to take ourselves and our job duties with far more self-importance than they deserve. That's relatively easy to see now, in what is quickly becoming hind-sight for me. But I feel sorry for Taylor, as it's likely she faces decades of work at the same pace and level of stress she's showing now, barring some revelation on her part.
I turn the corner in the hallway of my building, and there's Taylor with the shuffling, dancing feet, impatiently waiting for the elevator to take her to the ad agency on the 6th and 7th floors of my building. I join her, punch the button for floor # 4, and upon leaving the elevator reflect on the irony that frantic living does not, in the final measure, put you any further ahead than a calm, reflective life.
Thursday, September 24, 2015
A Punk is a Punk is a Punk
Today's multiple choice news quiz question:
Who is this guy?
A: The student teacher for your granddaughter's high-school English literature class. In his comments on her written papers, he misspelled the words "foreshadow" and "ensure."
B. The guy who just registered in your neighborhood as a level-one sex offender, who now works at the Starbucks four blocks from your house. The fact that he memorized your name the very first time you ordered an iced coffee with skim, and now greets you by name every morning, is exceedingly disconcerting.
C. Martin Shkreli, hedge fund shark and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. After raising the price of the drug Daraprim (used to treat certain infections) from $13.00 to $750.00 per tablet, Shkreli backed away under criticism, then peevishly said his company would no longer be doing critical research into new medications. So there. Immediately afterwards, he grabbed his soccer ball and announced he wasn't playing with the other kids anymore.
Who is this guy?
A: The student teacher for your granddaughter's high-school English literature class. In his comments on her written papers, he misspelled the words "foreshadow" and "ensure."
B. The guy who just registered in your neighborhood as a level-one sex offender, who now works at the Starbucks four blocks from your house. The fact that he memorized your name the very first time you ordered an iced coffee with skim, and now greets you by name every morning, is exceedingly disconcerting.
C. Martin Shkreli, hedge fund shark and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. After raising the price of the drug Daraprim (used to treat certain infections) from $13.00 to $750.00 per tablet, Shkreli backed away under criticism, then peevishly said his company would no longer be doing critical research into new medications. So there. Immediately afterwards, he grabbed his soccer ball and announced he wasn't playing with the other kids anymore.
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Weekly News for Cynics
It's been rough couple of weeks for cynical greed in this country. Not that you can be shocked by this, ever—not if you're a citizen with even minimal consciousness—but the prominent stories in the last fortnight are enough to sober even the most hardened realist.
• A quiet side-bar story in the NYT observed that Nestle corporation, among others, has been flagged as a company that maintains a fishing fleet in Pacific waters in which slaves—SLAVES!—man the nets on many of the boats that produce sardines and other food fish for canning. Some of these people have apparently landed on these fishing fleets through purchase from human traffickers, and have been enslaved for years, while Nestle looked the other way. Nestle, for those of you who don't recall, cooly weathered a scandal some years back in which they sold off defective infant-feeding formula to third world countries, arguing that although the formula was a health risk to American infants, it was just fine for the third world, where the predominant standard of living was already so bad that they'd barely be affected by their awful product. The corporation continues to thrive.
• The corporate cynicism was not just American. VW corporation, it turns out, has created automobiles which lie about their emissions output. Initially when this story broke, I thought it might be one of those things where test results during product development were overlooked or slightly doctored—the kind of thing that happens so often now that you can barely blink an eye when it occurs. But it turns out to be much, much more conniving than that. VW installed software in their automobiles that correctly identifies when an emission test is underway, as is still often conducted in places like California, and for that moment alone changes the fuel burning procedure so as to give low emissions results that will become 40 times larger the moment the car drives out of the test bay and into the real world. It is almost impossible to imagine the greedy duplicity that goes into a corporate decision to do something like this—until you remember Ford Motor company's handling of the Exploding Pinto era.
• Europe is in the throes of what can be argued to be the worst human refugee disaster since WW2. By most estimates, at least 8 million, and perhaps as many as 10 million, Syrians have been displaced from their homeland and are desperately seeking a place to live. Virtually half the entire population. The vast majority are still in camps in the nations immediately adjoining Syria. There are some people in Turkish refugee camps that have already been living in squalor for 2 years or more, with no end in sight. Other nations are attempting to help in lukewarm ways, but with efforts that are in no way commensurate with the size of the horror. The UK, it's estimated, will take as many as 20,000 by end of year; France, 24,000; Sweden, 50,000; Germany, 100,000 (though to be accurate this is because they admit to needing the cheap labor). Any way you look at it, these are paltry numbers from wealthy counties, akin to emptying a bathtub with spoonfuls of water.
From the Western hemisphere, Venezuela will accept 20,000 refugees by the end of the year. Mexico has agreed to accept 10,000.
The US? Thus far, fewer than 1500 Syrian refugees have landed in our open arms, though the Obama administration, in the face of heated opposition from the fear-mongering faction, wants next year to allow as many as a whopping 10,000 victims of the Syrian civil war into what was once the land of opportunity. That means that the most affluent nation on earth, which has built its wealth upon the efforts of those taking us up on "give us your homeless" offer, will help about 1/10 of 1% of the Syrian homeless. By way of comparison, remember that more than 1 million Irish refugees landed in America around the turn of the century. Following WW2, we accepted 95,000 Germans. It's estimated that we have 1.2 million Vietnamese immigrants living here quite successfully. In Minnesota alone, we have 30,000 African refugees already.
I am just slightly ashamed. 10,000 Syrian refugees? Surely we could do better than this.
• A quiet side-bar story in the NYT observed that Nestle corporation, among others, has been flagged as a company that maintains a fishing fleet in Pacific waters in which slaves—SLAVES!—man the nets on many of the boats that produce sardines and other food fish for canning. Some of these people have apparently landed on these fishing fleets through purchase from human traffickers, and have been enslaved for years, while Nestle looked the other way. Nestle, for those of you who don't recall, cooly weathered a scandal some years back in which they sold off defective infant-feeding formula to third world countries, arguing that although the formula was a health risk to American infants, it was just fine for the third world, where the predominant standard of living was already so bad that they'd barely be affected by their awful product. The corporation continues to thrive.
• The corporate cynicism was not just American. VW corporation, it turns out, has created automobiles which lie about their emissions output. Initially when this story broke, I thought it might be one of those things where test results during product development were overlooked or slightly doctored—the kind of thing that happens so often now that you can barely blink an eye when it occurs. But it turns out to be much, much more conniving than that. VW installed software in their automobiles that correctly identifies when an emission test is underway, as is still often conducted in places like California, and for that moment alone changes the fuel burning procedure so as to give low emissions results that will become 40 times larger the moment the car drives out of the test bay and into the real world. It is almost impossible to imagine the greedy duplicity that goes into a corporate decision to do something like this—until you remember Ford Motor company's handling of the Exploding Pinto era.
• Europe is in the throes of what can be argued to be the worst human refugee disaster since WW2. By most estimates, at least 8 million, and perhaps as many as 10 million, Syrians have been displaced from their homeland and are desperately seeking a place to live. Virtually half the entire population. The vast majority are still in camps in the nations immediately adjoining Syria. There are some people in Turkish refugee camps that have already been living in squalor for 2 years or more, with no end in sight. Other nations are attempting to help in lukewarm ways, but with efforts that are in no way commensurate with the size of the horror. The UK, it's estimated, will take as many as 20,000 by end of year; France, 24,000; Sweden, 50,000; Germany, 100,000 (though to be accurate this is because they admit to needing the cheap labor). Any way you look at it, these are paltry numbers from wealthy counties, akin to emptying a bathtub with spoonfuls of water.
From the Western hemisphere, Venezuela will accept 20,000 refugees by the end of the year. Mexico has agreed to accept 10,000.
The US? Thus far, fewer than 1500 Syrian refugees have landed in our open arms, though the Obama administration, in the face of heated opposition from the fear-mongering faction, wants next year to allow as many as a whopping 10,000 victims of the Syrian civil war into what was once the land of opportunity. That means that the most affluent nation on earth, which has built its wealth upon the efforts of those taking us up on "give us your homeless" offer, will help about 1/10 of 1% of the Syrian homeless. By way of comparison, remember that more than 1 million Irish refugees landed in America around the turn of the century. Following WW2, we accepted 95,000 Germans. It's estimated that we have 1.2 million Vietnamese immigrants living here quite successfully. In Minnesota alone, we have 30,000 African refugees already.
I am just slightly ashamed. 10,000 Syrian refugees? Surely we could do better than this.
Monday, August 10, 2015
If Donald Trump is considered a serious candidate, then why not?
––Welcome back to these pages our most recent guest Geezer, "Since George Shaw". The editors are not at all sure that George is not serious about the following suggestion. Stranger things have happened. ––
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| Except for the haircut, as a presidential candidate, this is no more preposterous than four or five of the current hopefuls. |
People instinctively, and justifiably, hate politicians. Hilary and Jeb already have high, well-deserved, disapproval ratings, and by Nov 2016, every American with a TV, a radio, a newspaper or access to the internet will hate them both. A well-known and likable (sorry Donald Trump) non-politician running as a third-party candidate in all 50 states, could easily win.
And if you don't believe me, remember Jesse Ventura. Jesse did not get elected Governor of MN because people loved Jesse; we elected him because we hated Republicans and Democrats. And speaking of Jesse, he was a much under-rated Governor. Sure, he was a thin-skinned, blow-hard, but tri-partisan government actually worked better than bi-partisan government ever has. And besides cutting ribbons and touring tornado-sites, the Chief Executive's real role is to appoint a cabinet to run the government.
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| Playing a slightly different role, Hanks might well be a better choice than the hacks offered by either party. |
But if I am mistaken about Hanks' political history, then somebody like Tom Hanks. Anybody with max name-recogniton and likability and no known political connections. Peyton Manning, maybe, or Garth Brooks. I've got no problem with a woman, but I don't think Lindsey Whalen is well-known outside of MN, and I don't think Katy Perry is old enough. Other suggestions?
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
A Geezer History of the Internet
It was not until about 1989 that the Internet entered business usage for me. I remember installing the first 1200 baud modem in my computer—a IBM 286 PC with a whopping 40 megs of hard-drive space. This was the pre-Windows days where computers used a DOS-base interface. The modem would crackle, then beep, and then I could connect to university data-bases, where I could easily access technical information like span charts for wooden framing members in residential decks. It seemed quite magical at the time, and I knew then that this thing would have big potential.
But the sheer speed of that revolution surprised even the most forward-thinking people. Within a few years, Windows operating systems had become part-and-parcel of all PC's, and shortly thereafter a fairly usable graphic interface was added to basic Internet operating programs, and we were off to the races. "Internet" became "World-Wide-Web". And within barely 15 years, it became a primary method of most of the world's communication, and a main platform for commerce and entertainment.
If the speed with which the technology of information transmittal was prodigious, it was no more prodigious than the speed with with language itself changed. It was as though users, intoxicated with how fast e-mails could zip through cyberspace to one another, also felt compelled to compose those messages with increasing speed. A variety of written language shortcuts appeared. At first, it was simply the normalization of certain abbreviations of language. I remember an editor who worked for me who had gone through college with the graphic-based Internet already solidly in place, who did not realize that "thru" was a somewhat informal and, in most business usage, slightly improper shortening of "through." This kind of thing was pretty common among young adults in the early time the Internet had become widespread. For awhile, I tolerated this among young editors, believing as I did that language should be allowed to evolve. I was savvy enough to understand that linguistic drift was a normal part of language evolution—we are still in process, for example, of seeing irregular verbs like "dive" and "leap" making their historical transition from the past-tense of "dove" and "leapt" to a more regular "dived" and "leaped." I began to put my foot down, though, when another editor in a position paper started a sentence with "U can B sure that investment in marketing, 2, will translate to greater $ in gross book sales."
Soon we began to see emoticons give way to other such linguistic shortcuts. Very quickly there appeared emoticons—the usage of combined letters and punctuation to represent emotional states. :) as a smiley face; :( as a frowning face, etc.
Then came the use of emoji language—all those little variations of yellow smiley faces and other graphic symbols to represent emotional statements. One editor, after bemoaning that doing good work in publishing proved to harder than she expected, decided to pursue instead a career in selling cosmetics. In her written resignation letter, she ended with a frowning yellow face with a tear running down its cheek.
Recently, as the NY Times reported yesterday, the coming wave of shorcuts in on-line communication is GIF. Those old timers among us will remember a day when GIF (the acronym stands for Graphic Interchange Format) was the principle format for transmitting and viewing static, still photos and other images on the internet. If you found that an editor, especially a young male, had a stash of GIF files on his computer directory, you could be pretty sure he was downloading nude girlie pictures on company time.
Today, though, GIF is used for small looping video action clips, which are pasted into web postings and even emails to serve as ultra-emoji's. They are often small funny segments of movie or tv clips, and are again used to convey various emotional messages from the composer of the message.
There is a tendency among some Geezers to bemoan this rapid change in the sanctity of written language, to wail and gnash their teeth at what feels like corruption of a noble art form. These Geezers aren't all that difference from the 7th grade grammar teacher who wailed about the fact that infinitives were being routinely split before her very eyes. Such complaints are utterly useless. The language, culture, the human species itself will change as it will change. You can't fight evolution. A good deal more peace of mind will be yours if you simply practice observation and description rather than try to prescribe adherence to some kind of quality status quo, or seek to return to some kind of golden, classic era. It ain't gonna happen.
Besides, change being what it is, all things come around again. In a center for linguistic study at Oxford University in England, researchers are discovering that a certain group among the precocious young adults is beginning to uncover, and probably will eventually popularize, a concept they find revolutionary. They are learning that there is another means of communication that sacrifices speed of dialogue for a precision and level of artistic expression that is achievable no other way.
They are called words.
One young man interviewed put it thusly: "Me and my mates, we started finding that if you spell out words fully, and learn lots of new words, you can put them together in really interesting ways that are quite stylistic. There's almost no limit to what you can say if you know a lot of words, and experiment with how to put them together in sentences.
"And even more than that," he says excitedly in the filmed interview. "You can also put those sentence together in different ways to form incredible paragraphs, and even whole books.
Another young woman from Liverpool said "My last few boyfriends used to end letters with little red hearts. That was very nice, and I loved it. But my new boyfriend ended his last letter by saying he woke up thinking about me, fell asleep thinking about me, and that he was constantly seeing my face whenever he saw a pretty girl on the streets.
"It must have taken him many seconds to put that idea together and write it. Bu who knew that actual words were so great? she said with a sigh. "
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