Telling it like it is

 The problem with the results of the most recent election are that they go against everything I stand for and everything I was ever taught. I was taught to be a fair decent upstanding human being, to be kind to others, and to look after people that need help. This election has empowered misogyny and racism and sidelined everything from women to minorities and more. The fact that there are already people celebrating and rubbing it in everyone else’s faces with big banners and slogans and advertising hoardings that read things like “your body my choice”. Republicans would have you believe that the reason they won was because Harris was divisive. Of course it’s absolutely the opposite. It’s Trump who’s divisive. It’s him who is pulling the country to pieces. And he’s empowered racists and misogynists and  sexists and all the worst people in the world by validating their thoughts, their feelings and their motives. They’ll tell you it was about the economy. But it was never about t...

I know nobody reads this any more but I need to write this down somewhere - more for catharsis then anything else. Obviously today, democracy fell to ultra right-wing fascism in America. Harris did an amazing job but she just couldn't make voters see sense. Everyone was angry about high prices and inflation. Yet prices have backed off, inflation is back down to what the 'normal' baseline is, unemployment is down, and wages are up. The economy is actually doing crazy well now - yet people just believed the constant stream of lies they were fed by Trump instead of actually looking in their own wallets So here we are facing another 4 years (to eternity?) of Trumpism. He wants to disband NOAA because he thinks climate change is a hoax. It seems that reporting on things like hurricanes is no longer important to America. Good luck, Florida and the Gulf coast - you'll now have no warnings before all your property is destroyed. And because Trump considers everything to be a pop...

4 years and not a peep. I wonder if anyone is still subscribed .... ?

Look - I understand that mormons think gays are somehow evil, subhumans. I understand that the LDS won't tolerate gays, doesn't like them and thus won't marry them. But for local government to overturn a supreme court ruling about gay marriage is taking it too far. This is religious persecution on a par with the dark ages. The church doesn't like gays, so it leans on its members in government to do everything possible to prevent them from having the basic rights afforded other couples who want to marry. In other words, the LDS church is forcing it's (wrong) opinion about the LGBT community on everyone, via state and local laws that it has had passed and enforced on its behalf. Why should non-religious people be forced to abide by the opinion of a religious cult that they have no affiliation with? Apart from anything else, the uber-conservatives in this state are always the first ones to bitch when something even slightly unconstitutional happens, yet here they are r...

I'm sitting looking at my company's internal 'learning' system this morning - hundreds of online courses that are available to all employees, some of which we're mandated to take. I'm not sure why the rest of them exist. We certainly don't have time to do any of the courses, and for the average employee, they hold no relevance to what we do, or want to do in our day-to-day jobs. I for one just want to be assigned tasks, and then be left alone. I don't need to do hazardous material training - my job doesn't involve hazardous materials. I don't need micromanagement. I don't need all the various efficiency and ethics courses that are available because I have common sense. I don't need to be instructed how to use the email system, nor how 'just in time' manufacturing is good for the company (it has no bearing on our division). Ok I understand all of this is corporate C-Y-A but so many of these things are just inconsequential to us. On...

If you're not much into gaming, you'll have likely missed this, but EA launched the latest in the SimCity franchise last week, and to say it was a disaster is understating the issue. For the uninitiated, here was Electronic Art's business plan last week: Take $60 from a couple of million gamers, deliver a game that needs to be online all the time to play (even in single-player mode), and only have 6 servers on launch day, meaning almost nobody can play the game they've paid for. Ensure no refunds are given, and ensure that people who for refunds (via bank or credit card chargebacks) get their EA accounts banned. EA already had a bad reputation in videogame circles, but last week cemented their place in gaming history as the worst gaming company in the world. What makes things worse is that when they held their public beta test, they had the same issues of people not being able to play, servers kicking people off, and huge latency making the game unplayable. That was ...