Well, this will be a somewhat rambling post.

“I am an indoor cat.”. Quote from Edward Snowden when he was asked about where he would prefer to live. And he said that since he spends most of his time indoors and looking at screens, it doesn’t really matter that much. I guess I’m an indoor cat as well. As long as I have my comfortable surroundings, a nice office, and a fast Internet connection, I am quite content.

Another quote “Most of us are as smart as we have to be to get by.”… I can’t remember where I saw this, but I loved it. I am afraid I have been guilty of this quite a bit of my life. Given the opportunity to be able to get by, or excel, probably more often than not, I have taken the “get by” path. As old as I am, I guess I need to work on that.

I found a new podcast, “Pivot”, from Vox media. It has Kara Swisher and Prof. Scott Galloway. It is a running commentary on digital society, finance, and technology. Overall, I like it. It doesn’t stress me out too much, and it has the benefit of at least keeping me up-to-date with what is going on with the four horsemen of the apocalypse, namely, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google. The hosts seem just a tad hypersensitive to me, but they are nonetheless intelligent and insightful, at least for me. I didn’t bother catching up on all their backlog of podcasts, but some of this stuff from the last four or five that details the meltdown of WeWork and Mark Zuckerberg’s latest idiocies were at least worth knowing about. Apparently, the founder of WeWork (a global company in the Co-working space), a reprehensible gentleman by the name of Adam Neuman, having totally F’d up his company, ended up being paid 1.5 billion, yes billion with a B, dollars to get out. Paid I believe by SoftBank, the major venture capital fund for his company. Meanwhile thousands of his employees are being fired, and thousands more who were looking forward to being quite wealthy from the IPO are now stuck in a position where they are wondering whether they even have health insurance. And he walks away with $1.5 Billion.

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t know what to tell you. He’s young, totally self-absorbed, has no sense of self-awareness, and seems to be a combination of greedy, naïve, and/or just evil. And regardless, he is utterly convinced of the rightness that is Mark Zuckerberg.

Even a cursory examination of what Facebook is doing should lead any moderately sensible person to simply delete their Facebook account and never look back … with the exception of telling everybody they know to get out as well.

I’m sorry, “being connected” with one’s family and friends is simply not a good enough of a reason to pander yourselves to this behemoth of a company as their product. There are other ways to stay connected to a small circle of real people. I listened to about 15 minutes of his various testimonies before Congress. He is beyond belief. He has no ethics, all he is trying to do is keep his company on a roll so they can make ever more billions of dollars. And since, due to this idiotic dual class share structure, he controls somewhere between 60 and 70% of the voting stock of Facebook so …

In addition, even though Twitter has refused to run political ads, Facebook is showing no signs of following suit. Wouldn’t want to lose money would they?

And by the way, why hasn’t somebody deleted Trump’s Twitter account!?

Another Scott Galloway quote that I picked up from the Pivot podcast, talking about Silicon Valley and venture capital mentalities, “they mistake blessings for talent”. Well, all I can say is that that mentality does not only apply to Silicon Valley and venture capitalists.

THE FOCUS FUNNEL

Eliminate

Automate

Delegate

Procrastinate

and if the daily tasks you have cannot be taken care of by one of those above tactics, then prioritize it and get it done. Something I saw that I really liked. 😊

I guess one of the disappointments I have with people as a whole is that they like reductive explanations. They like binary choices, black or white, good or bad. Complex is uncomfortable. But unfortunately, the world is complex. Something Donald Trump doesn’t understand. And wouldn’t understand it even if somebody engraved it on his forehead with a jackhammer. And not just him. Billions of people I fear. And I’m no different. Except I realize it and try to fight that tendency as best I can. How? By trying to stay informed, aware, and admit to myself on a regular basis that I don’t know everything.

What was the Tweet of his (Trump) that I wrote about in a blog from last the beginning of 2018? “Trade wars are good, and easy to win”. How is that going for you, numb nuts?

Economic uncertainty has gripped the world, causing an overall slowdown in global growth. Not just Trump and his moronic trade war but from other stupidity by his ilk in Britain with Brexit.

Soybean farmers in the United States alone have been paid about $30 billion in subsidies by the US government to make up for the loss of the China market, and there is no guarantee that the trade war stop tomorrow that they would get that market back. Based on what I have read, few, if any of the demographic segments that the trade war were supposed to help, have actually been helped. Every time I think about that idiot Trump, I get a mental image of a bull in a China shop. Pun intended.

By the way, to be clear, I agree completely that China has a plethora of destructive and unfair trade practices. They are probably one of the scariest, if not the scariest force in the world today. They flat out steal intellectual property, their restrictions on foreign companies doing business in China are rapacious and aimed being able to ease their industrial espionage, and, they are doing everything they can to build a superpower that, forget the United States, is truly bent on global domination.

However, a recipe of tariffs that do nothing but negatively impact American consumers, and that is liberally spiced with egregiously stupid and juvenile tweets from a totally self-absorbed egomaniac, is not the way to go about fixing this. Even basic intelligence should show that it is has been a global negative with no upside anywhere. If, and hopefully when, this idiocy ceases, there is no guarantee that world trade will recover in any reasonable amount of time. The damage is done.

Apologize somewhat for a blog rant this week. But, I feel like I had to say something. I’m really worried about this stuff. I know, I know. This falls under the category of don’t worry about which that which you do not control. But at the same time, I feel the need to at least have explained how I feel about stuff. I will try to be more positive next week.

As an addendum, not wanting to be totally negative this week, I ran across these websites doing some other research. I found them quite intriguing. Not that I want to go out and build a tractor or build a house, but still nonetheless I found the sites quite interesting.

The open source site is a catalog of lands for the basic machinery necessary to farm or build a village. Backhoes, tractors, 3D printers, etc. All that can be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of the finished product on today’s market. Complete with plans, all you have to do is download.

In the open buildings to site is a similar site except with downloadable plans for housing. All for free. Gives me some hope. If I had the money, this is something I would like to fund if I could find a suitable location that needed this kind of equipment.

 https://www.opensourceecology.org

https://www.openbuildinginstitute.org