- People bullied me for no apparent reason.
- A rumor has been going around about me the last 36 years that is not true and people that I don't even talk to, believe it and it really makes me mad!
- so much relationship/friendship drama
- some of the teachers are more fun then helpful
- the rich kids lorded it over the poor kids...guess where I was?
- class warfare - 38 years later, class warfare
- Graduation day was easily one of the happiest days of my life...and a week before, I received death threats at my home.
- the girls were evil and self centered and mean and hateful and cruel. They guys were just nasty..
- The jocks and preps who thought I was weak AND stupid, even though I lettered in two sports with 7 total medals in 3 years at the state championships. JESUS GOD!
- the teachers at my school were nothing more than glorified prison guards and it wasn't till i left school that i began to start learning
I have never been to a single one of my high school reunions. There are two main reasons:
First of all, I can't stand the thought of the people who made my life a living you-know-what coming up to me and saying, "Oh, remember all the GOOD times we had?" like nothing happened.
Second, I've had people (my own sister, for one) tell me that I should go to see "who got fat and bald". That is not my idea of enjoyment. I don't get jollies from other people's misery (and who's to say that they ARE miserable? Maybe they're fat, bald and happy - and all the best to them).
I graduated with close to 1,000 kids - I keep in touch with less than 5.
- To be concise and clear, I have spent the last 30+ years trying to improve myself. i got the DOD to send me back to school twice - for a BSEE, then to the Naval War College, where I got my PhD in Economic History (you had to back in the '80s to get promoted). Then I persuaded an employer to pay for my M.B.A. and you know what? It doesn't matter one whit to those self-absorbed morons - they still (we're all @ 52yo) talk to me like I'm something they scraped off their shoe. I'm not one of the "special people", and never will be, and I don't know what possessed me to make contact with those assholes again
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Why I hate everyone I went to high school with..
Why I hate everyone I went to high school with..
The Warning
When it was released, David Halberstam said the The Reckoning was his most ambitious of the trilogy on American power; the earlier two were on politics and the media.
Halberstam described why he wrote the book. “One day I was on a book tour and I kept noticing that Chrysler was almost gone, Ford was in trouble, all those great American companies were (gone). ... The Japanese were taking cars, which was an American signature, and doing better at them. I didn't see it as a business story. I saw it as a social cultural story."
In economist John Kenneth Galbraith's New York Times 1986 review of the book, he said the result of Detroit’s downfall is that "life for most Americans (is) bound to become leaner. But in the middle of 1986, there seems to be little awareness of this, let alone concern about it."
Indeed, that was Halberstam's gloomy conclusion of The Reckoning. He wrote: "No country, including America, was likely ever to be as rich as America had been from 1945 to 1975, and other nations were following the Japanese into middle-class existence, which meant that life for most Americans was bound to become leaner. But in the middle of 1986, there seemed little awareness of this, let alone concern about it. Few were discussing how best to adjust the nation to an age of somewhat diminished expectations, or how to marshal its abundant resources for survival in a harsh, unforgiving new world, or how to spread the inevitable sacrifices equitably."
Amen. And the review on Associated Content of April 17 said: “Although The Reckoning is a 20-year-old book, its message has never been truer than it is now as America's once leading automobile industry is heading for deep decline. In my opinion, Halberstam's book should be retitled The Warning. By the time this book was published in 1986, the United States had already gone through two devastating energy crises orchestrated by OPEC. While Ford Motor had experienced some success with its energy-conscious Ford Taurus, the production emphasis was still on gas-guzzling trucks and luxury vehicles. While praising Nissan and other Japanese car companies' business model of affordability, fuel economy and quality control, [Halberstam] doesn't completely let them off the hook in his description of Nissan's union strife in the Fifties.
“In the meantime, in 2007, the price of gasoline is over $3 a gallon, the Iranians are once again threatening the Straits of Hormuz, Ford has laid off thousands of workers, Toyota is now the world's second largest carmaker,” the column written April 17 concluded.
Make that gasoline that could hit $4 gallon and, as of this morning, Toyota is the world’s No. 1 automaker.
What 99% of the people out there, including the politicians (who constantly yammer about "the American Dream". as if they even know or care about what that is) don't understand, is that the 30 year ascendancy of American economic hegemony was a complete anomaly - an accident, if you will, just like Spruance winning the Battle of Midway.
Think about it - from 1948 to 1978, the US workforce was flooded with new college graduates (thanks to the G.I. Bill) and worldly war veteran high school graduates, moving into a newly dynamic industrial base, that grew faster than Guth's inflationary universe... with abundant negative consequences. By the '70's (which I remember ALL to well), Kodak had "workers" napping in film rooms, G.E. had engineers and such (not executives) on the local golf course, and the American work force had become a hyper-bloated warthog from hell by 1978. Change that nibbled on the edges came in the '80's and 90's, but now the same worthless gang of idiots is running GM/Ford/Chrysler, et al, making cars nobody wants or needs, thinking that more (not better) marketing and adding gadgets will boost sales of inferior products. And now they have their collective hands out for guvmint money.
Well, I say - "Fu*k 'Em!
We (the US) are in the middle of an economic transformation the likes of which we haven't seen since the steam engine. Yes, people will be thrown out of work - for a while. Yes, companies will be in receivership, in order to re-organize - for a while. But the transformation will come, no matter what manner of backward, insane, neo-socialist, buggy-whip making stupidity the guvmint tries to inflict, And if the guvmint doesn't midwife this transformation, it will be stripped down against it's will too. We are moving, albeit slowly, into a new economic paradigm, in which KNOWLEDGE, will supersede information as the controlling factor - this means jobs will be discarded and replaced with new types of jobs, manufacturing will shift from human-based to machine-based labor, hell, even the very definiton of what a damn job IS will change. The end of the "job", if you will, is coming, and nothing can be done to stop it..
The end of the "job" as a way of organizing work, it is a social artifact that has outlived its usefulness. Its demise confronts everyone with unfamiliar risks -- and rich opportunities.
Each day's newspaper and blog carries another story of new job losses. We hear the recession has been in effect for quite a while. The coming Obama Administration is trying convince you that they can create jobs, but critics claim some of its new taxes and regulations will destroy jobs. We are told the only way to protect our jobs is to increase our productivity, but then we discover that business process re-engineering, using self-managed teams, flattening our organizations, and turning routine work over to computers always make many jobs redundant. We used to read predictions that by 2000 everyone would work 30-hour weeks, and the rest would be leisure. But as we approach 2010 it seems more likely that half of us will be working 60-hour weeks and the rest of us will be unemployed. What's wrong? It is not that the President or his critics don't care what happens to us, or that organizations that asked for our loyalty and grew because of our efforts have double-crossed us. The fault does not lie even with that dread monster overseas competition, which has been blamed for everything from unemployment to falling living standards. It's a shame these things are not the culprits, for if they were our task would be simpler.
The reality we face is much more troubling, for what is disappearing is not just a certain number of jobs -- or jobs in certain industries or jobs in some part of the country or even jobs in America as a whole. What is disappearing is the very thing itself: the job. That much sought after, much maligned social entity, a job, is vanishing like a species that has outlived its evolutionary time. A century from now Americans will look back and marvel that we couldn't see more clearly what was happening.
The job is an idea that emerged early in the 19th century to package the work that needed doing in the growing factories and bureaucracies of the industrializing nations. Before people had jobs, they worked just as hard but on shifting clusters of tasks, in a variety of locations, on a schedule set by the sun and the weather and the needs of the day. The modern job was a startling new idea -- and to many, an unpleasant and perhaps socially dangerous one. Critics claimed it was an unnatural and even inhuman way to work. They believed most people wouldn't be able to live with its demands. It is ironic that what started as a controversial concept ended up becoming the ultimate orthodoxy -- and that we're hooked on jobs. Now the world of work is changing again: The conditions that created jobs 200 years ago -- mass production and the large organization -- are disappearing. Technology enables us to automate the production line, where all those job holders used to do their repetitive tasks. Instead of long production runs where the same thing has to be done again and again, we are increasingly customizing production. Big firms, where most of the good jobs used to be, are unbundling activities and farming them out to little firms, which have created or taken over profitable niches. Public services are starting to be privatized, and government bureaucracy, the ultimate bastion of job security, is being thinned. With the disappearance of the conditions that created jobs, we are losing the need to package work in that way. No wonder jobs are disappearing.
"People get ready - There's a change a-comin'"
more on this rant to come....
Halberstam described why he wrote the book. “One day I was on a book tour and I kept noticing that Chrysler was almost gone, Ford was in trouble, all those great American companies were (gone). ... The Japanese were taking cars, which was an American signature, and doing better at them. I didn't see it as a business story. I saw it as a social cultural story."
In economist John Kenneth Galbraith's New York Times 1986 review of the book, he said the result of Detroit’s downfall is that "life for most Americans (is) bound to become leaner. But in the middle of 1986, there seems to be little awareness of this, let alone concern about it."
Indeed, that was Halberstam's gloomy conclusion of The Reckoning. He wrote: "No country, including America, was likely ever to be as rich as America had been from 1945 to 1975, and other nations were following the Japanese into middle-class existence, which meant that life for most Americans was bound to become leaner. But in the middle of 1986, there seemed little awareness of this, let alone concern about it. Few were discussing how best to adjust the nation to an age of somewhat diminished expectations, or how to marshal its abundant resources for survival in a harsh, unforgiving new world, or how to spread the inevitable sacrifices equitably."
Amen. And the review on Associated Content of April 17 said: “Although The Reckoning is a 20-year-old book, its message has never been truer than it is now as America's once leading automobile industry is heading for deep decline. In my opinion, Halberstam's book should be retitled The Warning. By the time this book was published in 1986, the United States had already gone through two devastating energy crises orchestrated by OPEC. While Ford Motor had experienced some success with its energy-conscious Ford Taurus, the production emphasis was still on gas-guzzling trucks and luxury vehicles. While praising Nissan and other Japanese car companies' business model of affordability, fuel economy and quality control, [Halberstam] doesn't completely let them off the hook in his description of Nissan's union strife in the Fifties.
“In the meantime, in 2007, the price of gasoline is over $3 a gallon, the Iranians are once again threatening the Straits of Hormuz, Ford has laid off thousands of workers, Toyota is now the world's second largest carmaker,” the column written April 17 concluded.
Make that gasoline that could hit $4 gallon and, as of this morning, Toyota is the world’s No. 1 automaker.
What 99% of the people out there, including the politicians (who constantly yammer about "the American Dream". as if they even know or care about what that is) don't understand, is that the 30 year ascendancy of American economic hegemony was a complete anomaly - an accident, if you will, just like Spruance winning the Battle of Midway.
Think about it - from 1948 to 1978, the US workforce was flooded with new college graduates (thanks to the G.I. Bill) and worldly war veteran high school graduates, moving into a newly dynamic industrial base, that grew faster than Guth's inflationary universe... with abundant negative consequences. By the '70's (which I remember ALL to well), Kodak had "workers" napping in film rooms, G.E. had engineers and such (not executives) on the local golf course, and the American work force had become a hyper-bloated warthog from hell by 1978. Change that nibbled on the edges came in the '80's and 90's, but now the same worthless gang of idiots is running GM/Ford/Chrysler, et al, making cars nobody wants or needs, thinking that more (not better) marketing and adding gadgets will boost sales of inferior products. And now they have their collective hands out for guvmint money.
Well, I say - "Fu*k 'Em!
We (the US) are in the middle of an economic transformation the likes of which we haven't seen since the steam engine. Yes, people will be thrown out of work - for a while. Yes, companies will be in receivership, in order to re-organize - for a while. But the transformation will come, no matter what manner of backward, insane, neo-socialist, buggy-whip making stupidity the guvmint tries to inflict, And if the guvmint doesn't midwife this transformation, it will be stripped down against it's will too. We are moving, albeit slowly, into a new economic paradigm, in which KNOWLEDGE, will supersede information as the controlling factor - this means jobs will be discarded and replaced with new types of jobs, manufacturing will shift from human-based to machine-based labor, hell, even the very definiton of what a damn job IS will change. The end of the "job", if you will, is coming, and nothing can be done to stop it..
The end of the "job" as a way of organizing work, it is a social artifact that has outlived its usefulness. Its demise confronts everyone with unfamiliar risks -- and rich opportunities.
Each day's newspaper and blog carries another story of new job losses. We hear the recession has been in effect for quite a while. The coming Obama Administration is trying convince you that they can create jobs, but critics claim some of its new taxes and regulations will destroy jobs. We are told the only way to protect our jobs is to increase our productivity, but then we discover that business process re-engineering, using self-managed teams, flattening our organizations, and turning routine work over to computers always make many jobs redundant. We used to read predictions that by 2000 everyone would work 30-hour weeks, and the rest would be leisure. But as we approach 2010 it seems more likely that half of us will be working 60-hour weeks and the rest of us will be unemployed. What's wrong? It is not that the President or his critics don't care what happens to us, or that organizations that asked for our loyalty and grew because of our efforts have double-crossed us. The fault does not lie even with that dread monster overseas competition, which has been blamed for everything from unemployment to falling living standards. It's a shame these things are not the culprits, for if they were our task would be simpler.
The reality we face is much more troubling, for what is disappearing is not just a certain number of jobs -- or jobs in certain industries or jobs in some part of the country or even jobs in America as a whole. What is disappearing is the very thing itself: the job. That much sought after, much maligned social entity, a job, is vanishing like a species that has outlived its evolutionary time. A century from now Americans will look back and marvel that we couldn't see more clearly what was happening.
The job is an idea that emerged early in the 19th century to package the work that needed doing in the growing factories and bureaucracies of the industrializing nations. Before people had jobs, they worked just as hard but on shifting clusters of tasks, in a variety of locations, on a schedule set by the sun and the weather and the needs of the day. The modern job was a startling new idea -- and to many, an unpleasant and perhaps socially dangerous one. Critics claimed it was an unnatural and even inhuman way to work. They believed most people wouldn't be able to live with its demands. It is ironic that what started as a controversial concept ended up becoming the ultimate orthodoxy -- and that we're hooked on jobs. Now the world of work is changing again: The conditions that created jobs 200 years ago -- mass production and the large organization -- are disappearing. Technology enables us to automate the production line, where all those job holders used to do their repetitive tasks. Instead of long production runs where the same thing has to be done again and again, we are increasingly customizing production. Big firms, where most of the good jobs used to be, are unbundling activities and farming them out to little firms, which have created or taken over profitable niches. Public services are starting to be privatized, and government bureaucracy, the ultimate bastion of job security, is being thinned. With the disappearance of the conditions that created jobs, we are losing the need to package work in that way. No wonder jobs are disappearing.
"People get ready - There's a change a-comin'"
more on this rant to come....
Thursday, November 13, 2008
GM "bailout" and the buggy whip syndrome...
Good God, what year is it? 1908?
GM is peddling fast to make a comeback from the brink of extinction. In the case of the auto manufacturer, the problem hasn’t necessarily been superior foreign competition. GM has been struggling out from under the weight of a “buggy-whip maker” syndrome, a syndrome that GM itself participated in at the turn of the century, when the auto industry began to displace entrenched, horse-drawn craft. When your product, no matter how good,is no longer found to be useful, it’s time to get off the track before the innovative express flattens you. If you’re a buggy-whip maker, you can have a legendary history (GM does) and a line of products unsurpassed by others (GM does), but excellence isn’t going to save car dealers.
You might have expected that the company that invented heavy-duty manufacturing and decentralized financial management, would have been faster to rethink,retool, and reinvent itself, but progress has been slow and more painful than expected. You can now choose from among a line of GM cars and trucks, with a few "experimental" flex fuel trinkets thrown in as an afterthought, OR choose a more robust car from Honda or Toyota (and others on the way) that offers the same (or better quality) for less cash, and straight-up H2 or electric vehicles already in the pipeline.
There already IS a bailout system in this country - it's called Chapter 11 bankruptcy. GM won't go away, and a draconian purge of the current (mis) management team wil be the kind of caustic medicine needed to kick the alternative energy revolution in the ass... and serve notice to the other automakers. Tom Friedman has got this right in his NYT op-ed: the Wall Street Journal said on Monday by Paul Ingrassia, a former Detroit bureau chief for that paper.
“In return for any direct government aid,” he wrote, “the board and the management [of G.M.] should go. Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity. And a government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical — should have broad power to revamp G.M. with a viable business plan and return it to a private operation as soon as possible. That will mean tearing up existing contracts with unions, dealers and suppliers, closing some operations and selling others and downsizing the company ... Giving G.M. a blank check — which the company and the United Auto Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant — would be an enormous mistake.”
I would add other conditions: Any car company that gets taxpayer money must demonstrate a plan for transforming every vehicle in its fleet to a hybrid-electric engine with flex-fuel capability, so its entire fleet can also run on next generation cellulosic ethanol.
Let 'em die on the vine, then rise from the ashes.
GM is peddling fast to make a comeback from the brink of extinction. In the case of the auto manufacturer, the problem hasn’t necessarily been superior foreign competition. GM has been struggling out from under the weight of a “buggy-whip maker” syndrome, a syndrome that GM itself participated in at the turn of the century, when the auto industry began to displace entrenched, horse-drawn craft. When your product, no matter how good,is no longer found to be useful, it’s time to get off the track before the innovative express flattens you. If you’re a buggy-whip maker, you can have a legendary history (GM does) and a line of products unsurpassed by others (GM does), but excellence isn’t going to save car dealers.
You might have expected that the company that invented heavy-duty manufacturing and decentralized financial management, would have been faster to rethink,retool, and reinvent itself, but progress has been slow and more painful than expected. You can now choose from among a line of GM cars and trucks, with a few "experimental" flex fuel trinkets thrown in as an afterthought, OR choose a more robust car from Honda or Toyota (and others on the way) that offers the same (or better quality) for less cash, and straight-up H2 or electric vehicles already in the pipeline.
There already IS a bailout system in this country - it's called Chapter 11 bankruptcy. GM won't go away, and a draconian purge of the current (mis) management team wil be the kind of caustic medicine needed to kick the alternative energy revolution in the ass... and serve notice to the other automakers. Tom Friedman has got this right in his NYT op-ed: the Wall Street Journal said on Monday by Paul Ingrassia, a former Detroit bureau chief for that paper.
“In return for any direct government aid,” he wrote, “the board and the management [of G.M.] should go. Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity. And a government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical — should have broad power to revamp G.M. with a viable business plan and return it to a private operation as soon as possible. That will mean tearing up existing contracts with unions, dealers and suppliers, closing some operations and selling others and downsizing the company ... Giving G.M. a blank check — which the company and the United Auto Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant — would be an enormous mistake.”
I would add other conditions: Any car company that gets taxpayer money must demonstrate a plan for transforming every vehicle in its fleet to a hybrid-electric engine with flex-fuel capability, so its entire fleet can also run on next generation cellulosic ethanol.
Let 'em die on the vine, then rise from the ashes.
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