ChickenLadyLovesLife

My mother was born in the mid-1930s and from time to time she likes to talk about "the good ol' days" of her childhood when people respected each other blah blah blah. I remind her of the horrific racism and she's like "but I didn't even know any black people!" lol.

My last job was with a very large west coast tech giant (its name is a homonym with an equally-large food services company). The mandatory information security training was a series of animated shorts featuring talking bears which you could fast-forward through and still get credit for completing. Not surprisingly, we had major data thefts every few months -- or more accurately we admitted to major data thefts that often.

Lol I found the only less competent people than the managers were the consultants they hired.

With one hilarious exception: at my first real programming gig I was left alone and I had created the sort of vastly overcomplicated, unmaintainable mess that newbie programmers always manage to create. My company brought in a highly-paid consultant who correctly identified the problem: me. Since I was a rock star, my managers laughed and sent the consultant packing and I was allowed to keep fucking things up for another year or so.

I had a boss once come to me with an article he had just read about how APIs were the next big thing in programming. He told me I should incorporate some APIs in our software and I told him I would research it. This was in 2010.

I interned at IBM in the late '80s at the TJ Watson research facility. I have no idea if that's still around or if it's still what it used to be, but at the time it was a pretty amazing place, filled with brilliant people doing stuff that may or may not have been directly related to the corporate bottom line. Benoit Mandelbrot (the chaos theory guy) had an office there. There was an unused scanning electron microscope parked in the hallway outside of our lab because there was nowhere else to put it. I learned to use CADCAM on enormous monitors; it was a blast to design something, send it electronically to the machine shop for fabrication and have it delivered on a cart the next day (sometimes the same day). I worked on a project repurposing these miniature electric punches that had been designed for ceramic green sheets (the way they built their mainframe cores back then) and then got to experiment creating a new hole-punching technique using pressurized fluids. They let you do whatever you felt like doing even if you were just an intern. There were no corporate idiots anywhere in sight there.

As far as I can tell, that part of IBM (the actual innovation) is gone.

The Nuer (a pastoralist people in the Sudan) put milk in a gourd, add in some bull urine, stop it up and leave it out in the sun for a few months. We should really be more appreciative of yogurt.

I watched a video some time ago where he was showing the evolution of SpaceX rockets. At one point he referred to "the fiddly bits" on the outsides of the rockets.

The SpaceX launch/landing videos with people cheering wildly the whole time always annoyed the shit out of me. I'm watching a documentary on Apollo 11 and you don't hear people constantly cheering in the control rooms. Like, they had actual work to do.

I have a bunch of trumper coworkers who love to talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome. For fun I've been agreeing with them but telling them Trump Derangement Syndrome means that Trump is deranged. They get quite apoplectic.

The best my local wing place can do is to deep fry the wings, refrigerate the ones that don't get sold and eaten, and deep fry them again the next day. Not literally the best way to have wings.

A little-known fact is that Hitler's purge of Ernst Roehm and other brownshirts acquired the name "Night of the Long Knives" because Hitler used the phrase (which dates to medieval times) to describe what Roehm allegedly had planned for Hitler in a speech shortly after the event. Hitler never intended his own actions to be called that.

American homes…cheap AF.

One reason for this, believe it or not, is slavery. One very under-appreciated aspect of cotton plantations is that cotton (in the days before artificial fertilizers) very quickly exhausted the soil of the American South, leaving behind land that was mostly only suitable for growing pine trees. This left pine wood as a cheap and plentiful resource for building houses. Southern US pine is now so plentiful that it's even the source of most of the chopsticks in China.