Turns out your mom works in mysterious ways too

Wow, really?

• Don’t buy supplies. Workers often think they need things to do their jobs but they’re always wrong
• Make the lights flicker. By flickering the lights continually, you save 50% on electric bills without major loss of visibility
• Deny PTO requests. It doesn’t cost anything to have employees work through their vacation. You’re already paying for that time, might as well get some productivity out of it.
• Salary = 24/7 employee. By paying your R&D staff per year, you can extract a year’s worth of productivity every year. The sleepless delerium is good for creativity
• Skip the R. Research doesn’t make you any money. It’s the Development of new products that makes new money. Order your employees to Skip the R, which consumes a significant portion of R&D budgets
• Creative bonuses. A pizza party is bonus enough. Everybody loves pizza, and when they see you come in with that piping hot goodness it hacks their brains into liking you even more
• Lead the charge. Polls show that C- and mid-level management can find creative ways to help the process along, and often while skipping large portions of unnecessary work, by spending time showing R&D staff how it’s done
• Coordinate often. Further polls show that the number one reason things take too long is that nobody is asking for progress reports. Progress reports are best delivered in person, in the presence of the entire team. Zoom and other tools can support up to 3500 meeting participants, but even better is to clear out any lab space for a regular all-hands meeting. SCRUM stands for Standing Creatively, Reassessing the Utility of Meetingless time

You have to get a little creative to slash those R&D budgets, but in the long run it can pay off in terms of bonuses and promotions. Getting noticed by even higher management is important. You got this!

Well, they did technically just say “millennials”.

They omitted the modifier “a tiny fraction of”, but that’s assumed

The problem with previous epochs’ methods of tyranny was that they relied on overpowering the body. They relied on the hardness of metal and the power of weapons to enslave and imprison people.

The human spirit transcended that tyranny to create freedom, by organizing our physical power into structures that overcame the literal chains and walls of our imprisonment.

The mind seemed to be ephemeral, insubstantial compared to the steel and concrete that controlled us. But the mind allowed us to conceptualize of an existence without these things, to see freedom as a possibility and to seek it, and not to stop seeking and reorganizing our efforts until counters to these mechanisms were found and implemented.

The new tyranny, on the other hand, presents obstacles to the mind in the way that the previous tyranny presented obstacles to the body. The new tyranny is based on incomprehensibility, on preventing the mind from finding purchase.

If the victim cannot even form a comprehension of what is going on, then they cannot resist. Instead of chains and weapons, the new tyranny uses lies and complexity to imprison us. Just like bronze introduced a material that human hands couldn’t break, AI introduces a technology that the human mind cannot comprehend and navigate.

Breaking the mind of the prisoner is an old technique. It predates AI. We see it in brainwashing, in lying, in lobotomy, and in the administration of drugs.

But just as barbed wire enabled prisons to scale to house entire populations, AI enables mental imprisonment to scale to encircle billions of souls in an incomprehensible whirlwind of bullshit.

heliocentrism is not about the sun rotating around the earth. The heliocentric model puts the sun at the center, and everything rotating around it.

Why don’t the companies want to piss off the dealers? Is some Toyota dealership really gonna stop selling Toyotas because a Toyota comes out with a self-diagnosis feature?

I’m guessing government regulation.

This feature is a no-brainer. Whenever there’s a feature the market would love (and hence pay for) the reason it isn’t there is the government doesn’t allow it.

This headline doesn’t use the imperative voice. It uses the present tense.

You might have low blood sugar. That title reads perfectly fine to me.

It’s not hard, it just takes an extra step.

Is there some version of “hard” that’s not related to extra steps?

Because self control is an empty concept.

Does a thermostat control itself? No, it controls the furnace and air conditioner.

Single-celled organisms pity us for the alienation of our being.

BITCOIN DROPS TO ZERO VALUE

“It’s all so obvious in retrospect” says investor.

I heard there are about 70 Black Lotuses missing. Some people think that’s what the drones over New Jersey are looking for.

Gold was sold that way. As a currency that’s more independent of government control.

People seem to think “bad faith” refers to any kind of rhetorical method other than explicit declaration these days, and that sucks.

Reading your descriptions of what you’re looking for has been a little frustrating. It’s felt as if I’ve needed to read between the lines a little to determine your goals.

It’s not totally opaque, and you’ve done a good job of clarifying. It helps that this is a two-way forum where we can ask you questions. But if I just had to go off of the original post, I would have just had to guess what your goals were.

By extrapolation, if you’ve been publishing in some places already and haven’t been getting much traction, it may be that the clarity of your published works — and therefore the engagement they generate by resonating with the mind of the reader — may be a little lacking.

If I were to provide advice it would be: more detail, even if you think it’s obvious or goes without saying. Less implication and more explicit declaration.

Which brings me to another question I didn’t think of before: Are you wanting to publish stories, news articles, essays, what kind of thing?

Unfortunately most local managers don’t actually have the ability to negotiate. Their job is to administer the machine, and avoid getting sued.

It sucks because it often means they can’t make decisions even if they would make the store more money.

I worked at a big box store for a while and my department was turning away customers simply because we couldn’t serve them. Hiring more help would have brought in revenue far beyond their wages, but my stores hands were tied by centralized corporate policy that dictated how many people they could hire.

I had like $500k in the sales pipeline. I had an excellent conversion rate on the customers I actually had time to work with. But I was forced to spend my time stocking shelves and cleaning while my customers called in frustrated why I wasn’t helping them.

People say it’s all about profit but that’s not actually true. It’s about maximizing the ability of the central corporate office to model and predict the money flows. I wish it were all about profit.

I’ve worked for startups and other small locally-owned businesses and it’s so great to see the flexibility they have. Working for a huge corporation sucked because it was like twelve layers of command structure to get to someone who could make a decision.

If I buy one of those roasted whole chickens from the store I strip a bunch of meat off then I boil the skeleton in a crock pot. Makes great bone broth.