BWare : The swimmers the dolphins push away from shore don't live to tell the tale

Applies in science too

My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call “the institutional imperative.” In business school, I was given no hint of the imperative’s existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the business world. I thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn’t so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.

For example: (1) As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

2014 06 08 Brent Comment Comments Off Permalink

There’s a new movie popping up on Netflix starring not just one, but TWO of my if-he/she-is-in-it-don’t-go-see-it actors: The Frozen Ground. Without actually looking at that IMDB page, I’m guessing it was S2V.

Yeah, Cusack has done some things I liked (Grifters), but I think the last one was Grosse Point Blank. Even though when I think about it in the cold hard light of day, he was horribly miscast. But I watch it every time I come across it. That was in the last millenium, though. Pretty much everything he’s been in since then, his presence has been (or should have been) a sign of a bad movie.

And for Cage, that’s everything since Red Rock West (1995). Yeah, LLV was a great performance, in a movie, that like Under The Volcano, I never need to see again. And probably would be happier if I hadn’t seen the first time.

And there are of course other actors in that category – Leo, Sandler, Barrymore (luckily they tend to star together and only kill one movie at a time), Broderick, Travolta, Carrey, Spacey (yes, Spacey – what was the last good movie he was in? And I liked House of Cards!). I’m skeptical of Denzel, Keanu, Cruise, Jackson, and any number of other actors who are basically not actors but just get hired to play the only character they know how to play (themselves), but that doesn’t stop them from making something fun to watch every great while.

Tagged movies

2014 06 07 Brent Rant
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Watchdogs

The NYT has a new editor, after their botched and sexist firing of the first woman editor of the NYT.

Of course, a previous editor spiked one of the first NSA stories in 2004. The new editor has a history of spiking stories about the NSA too, in 2007.

“[W]e could not figure out what was going on”, based on Klein’s highly technical documents

and by “we”, he means Dean Blaquet, the new editor of the NYT.

So if you’re spineless, and going to a spineless institution, and maybe not that bright, does the future of the NYT look better or worse? Even just from the standpoint of understanding a newspapers role in a digital world, killing the NSA story because you didn’t understand it doesn’t bode well. I’d short their stock.

It also turns out that perhaps the NSAs counterpart in the UK, GCHQ had other motives in the seemingly stupid trashing of the computers used by the Guardian to report the Snowden story.

This didn’t make sense at the time, but now given the new revelations about how the NSA is intercepting hardware to infect it before it’s shipped, the mind boggles. It now looks very much like they were there to destroy the evidence that the Guardian’s computers were compromised. Which means they likely knew about everything Greenwald and Snowden beforehand. Wheels within wheels. The mind boggles.

Tagged Dark state

2014 05 23 Brent Because linking is an intrinsic good
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Picture of the day, 13 May 2014

2014 05 13 Brent Picture of the day Comments Off Permalink

That darned Constitution, which he swore to uphold

Big Brother is already using drones to spy on everyone:

Sgt. Douglas Iketani acknowledges that his agency hid the experiment to avoid public opposition. “This system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,”he said. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so to mitigate those kinds of complaints we basically kept it pretty hush hush.”

Stupid Fourth Amendment, particularly describing the place to be searched.

Seriously, the part in question is the “unreasonable” criteria. But if you think that if you told the public (“To Protect and Serve”, it says on the side of the car that almost hit me this morning), they'd be opposed, that pretty much answers the “is it reasonable” question. It's not.

2014 04 21 Brent Rant Comments Off Permalink

This seems kind of a big deal

2014 04 09 Brent Comment Comments Off Permalink

“Inline with industry standards”

Those words are not a euphemism for “we’re going to make things better.”

2014 04 04 Brent Rant Comments Off Permalink

Not even close

I gave it six months. It didn’t even take five.

The non-professional, non-trained, non-police TSA now wants armed TSA agents at checkpoints. In addition to the Stasi papers-please and prison patdowns, now we’ll have ill-trained guards armed with automatic weapons. Welcome to your third-world country.

Like the TSA causes more crime than it prevents terrorism, I predict that the TSA will kill more people than it saves.

I take no joy in being right about this. It’s just predictable.

I’ll also predict they’ll expand out of airports soon.

2014 03 28 Brent Rant Comments Off Permalink

How

How did I not know about the Mountain Goats 20 years ago?

2014 03 28 Brent Comment Comments Off Permalink

Picture of the day, 27 March 2014

2014 03 27 Brent Picture of the day Comments Off Permalink

Pinch

If you suddenly find you’re out of margarita mix and you’ve already poured the tequila over ice in a nicely salted glass:

Works: Lemon-lime gatorade (gatorita!).

Doesn’t work: past-its’-done-by-date bloody mary mix.

ObJoeBobBriggs: I’m surprised I have to explain these things to you.

2014 03 25 Brent Comment Comments Off Permalink

Picture of the day, 20 March 2014

2014 03 20 Brent Picture of the day Comments Off Permalink

Counterintuitive statistics that will be ignored

Working fewer hours correlates with higher productivity. Who knew the Germans were such slackers compared with the Greeks?

Working fewer hours correlates with a longer lifespan.

Put that right next to the research that shows that cubicles and open plan offices decrease productivity, and that offices with doors increase same (in the round filing cabinet). Then ask yourself why your all-knowing, omniscient corporate masters continue to make decisions that are counterproductive.

2014 03 10 Brent Comment
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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Who’s overseeing who?

And now the spies are writing the legislation that affects them.

Let’s see – the spies are spying on the legislative body that oversees them, and writing the legislation for that legislative body.

If it wasn’t clear to you before, They have the goods on Congress. Now They’re not even trying to hide even a little bit that They do, and They’re not afraid to pull on the levers of power as it suits Them, to achieve Their nefarious ends. If you don’t think this is the end of the republic, you’re crazy.

de Tocqueville said “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money”, but we didn’t make it that long. We made it long enough for the spies to discover that if they know enough, they can be in charge. In secret, for years, but now openly.

2014 03 06 Brent Because linking is an intrinsic good
Quote of the day
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Dust in the wind

Searching the internet in the not-too-distant-past yielded no results, so let me throw this out there as a first:

Kansas, c. Leftoverture and Point of Know Return, were heavily influenced by Dune. Or perhaps that was just me. However, like (the apparently coincidental) Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz, I can't help but feel that the music was written with the young Kwisatch Haderach in mind.

I mean, come on, Dust in the Wind, amiright?

I wish that I had never watched that video, though. I didn't need to see that.

2014 03 05 Brent Comment Comments Off Permalink

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