From the time I got in until the time I punched out, I was helping clients. I had two bathroom breaks and a few times I was able to sneak into the back to get a sip of Mountain Dew, but otherwise I worked the whole six hours.
And my feet barely hurt at all.
As expected, Thanksgiving weekend is not going to be a picnic, and I'm going to be working very, very hard. This means I'll be making money, of course, which is a good thing. The fact that I was able to do what I did today means that come that weekend I should be able to survive it.
I may wish I could crawl into a hole and pull it in after me--I do expect to be coming home and going right to bed--but I'll live through it, at least.
...I was going to comment, in a general fashion, on what peoples' schedules looked like--hours and such--but then I realized "that may be private data". That being the case, I'm only going to say this: it's going to suck.
It's going to suck. Even though I'm looking forward to it because it'll be a new experience, because I'll be making good money, because I'm pretty good at customer service, because of a bunch of things, despite all that, I also know it's going to suck.
Well, they wouldn't have to pay me to do it if it were unalloyed bliss.
* * *
So Obama doesn't like to hear bad news.
If you look at the history of why, for example, Hitler's ambitions failed, you find that it's because no one could say "no" to him. There was no one in Nazi Germany who could say to Hitler, "Are you nuts? We can't declare war on Russia right now! Let's finish pounding France and the rest of western Europe before we head east. And don't even think about declaring war on America!"
Anyone who tried that would be shot, and quickly.
A less extreme example? George Lucas and the Star Wars "prequels". Lucas had total creative control over them, was the money man and the producer and the director and the writer, and all his employees were doing what he told them to do...and there was no one who could say, "George, are you nuts? What's with this Jar-Jar asshat? What the hell is this crap with the battle droids? No one cares about gungans or Naboo politics!" Anyone who tried that would be fired, and quickly.
From classical literature comes the caution: "Hubris invites Nemesis."
Obama's probably the poster boy for hubris. "I'm the smartest guy in the room!" "I'm smarter than my advisors!" He's been told he's brilliant so often he's come to believe it. I mean, WTF, this is the guy who stood in front of styrofoam Greek columns and claimed (paraphrased) "Someday people will say, 'This is the moment when the seas began to recede and the Earth began to heal!'" As if the mere act of nominating Barack Hussein Obama to candidacy in a major party was all it took to solve a major problem (however farcical it may be).
The people who work for Obama don't like to tell him bad news because of how he reacts to it. Ace comments:
This may seem like a deadly indictment but in fact it's Obama's favored spin. Remember, he doesn't have many good options here-- he's either lying, or lazy, or completely incompetent. Claiming that he doesn't like "bad news" is in fact a knock on him -- but it's preferable to the alternatives.In other news, the Obama administration has announced that it will continue its policy of flogging staffers until their performance improves.
...more or less.
That's the problem. If you decide that you can do no wrong and failures are due to the incompetence of the people who work for you, you invite exactly the sort of scenario which is now unfolding in the Obama administration, where a major policy initiative is turning out to be an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions.
The most beautiful thing about it is that there are no GOP fingerprints on this nonsense. The Democrats passed it using tricks along party lines and now it's coming up acropper and they own this bitch. I'm no fan of the GOP any longer but it still warms the cockles of my heart to see this happening.
Don't get greedy is the number one rule of any numbers game, and our government's social programs are nothing but.
Incidentally, Karl Denninger points out that the Democrats knew what they were voting for. They knew it would cause all the pain it's causing now, yet they voted for it, because they want control over your health care and all that lovely money. 1/6th of the economy!
* * *
Strange, isn't it, that foreign countries don't want to buy Internet hardware made in the USA because they're afraid of NSA backdoors?
The United States used to be the best place in the world to buy computers and aircraft, even long after the rest of the world's infrastructure had recovered from WW2. American companies invented, developed, designed, and manufactured the best computer hardware around. Our aircraft were second to none, which is why airlines all over the world use Boeing aircraft.
Of course, AirBus shouldered its way into the commercial aircraft industry--mainly because it had a guaranteed market in Europe, and no continental competition--and Boeing loses plenty of contracts to the company which makes an arguably inferior product. ("If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going." I'm just sayin'.)
We still had our dominance in electronics. Not so much in the manufacturing department, particularly of mature technologies, but in R&D no one could beat US manufacturers for cutting-edge electronics like microprocessors and signal processors. That's why most of the computers in the world have Intel microprocessors in them--not because Intel has a monopoly but because they make good chips. (Not just computers, either, I might add.)
Intel's main competition is AMD and Motorola...which are American companies. The Japanese competition that everyone was dreading in the 1980s never materialized because the Japanese simply could not develop processor technology the way the US did. The best they did was to make cheaper versions of things, but that's been the Japanese paradigm since the Meiji Restoration; what they did not do--could not do--was to develop a microprocessor which was so outstandingly better than anything offered by an American company that it simply made no sense not to use it.
But the 68000 series processors and their descendents from Motorola were viable alternatives to Intel processors for decades. In fact, from a hardware perspective, the Motorola processors do things in a much more sensible fashion than their Intel counterparts.
Of course, Intel flourished because Microsoft wrote the OS that ran on Intel processors, and the computer architecture which used Intel processors and a Microsoft OS could be built by anyone who cared to write a BIOS that was compatible with the one IBM had written, so a guy could go to a computer show with a thousand bucks and come home with all the parts he needed to build a computer...and have something that ran just as well--if not better--than a machine that came from a big-name manufacturer and had a big-name price on it.
Despite everything, the US had managed to hold on to its dominance in the tech world...but a short-sighted policy has probably done for that. That's pretty much the story of history, though.
* * *
Anyway, that's a good day's work, and I need a nap. Later.