kaizen
what's been floating my boat lately:
  • family time


    • "How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think."
    -Hitler-
    "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
    -Albert Einstein-

    8/3/26 (21:14)

  • Went to Boston a couple weeks ago just for fun. It was supposed to be Friday - Tuesday so we'd only miss two days of work (leave in afternoon on Friday), but there was a canceled flight so we ended up missing Wednesday as well. Some day I will update the trip page to include this trip, as well as the others I have not gotten around to writing about.
  • List of airlines we won't use again: Spirit (not an issue anymore), Frontier, JetBlue.
  • I'd like to introduce a few new units of measurement for the new generations: A tiktok. This is 30 seconds. Most TV shows are about 44 tiktoks long. A Scararmucci. This is 10 days long, which is how long Anthony Scaramucci worked for the first Trump administration. This is like the metric answer to a "fortnight," which is 14 days and isn't as nice and round as a Scaramucci, which is 10 days.
  • I really hate the way people talk these days. A lot of it is tech and corporate culture. People don't just use technology anymore. They "utilize" it or, even worse, they "leverage" it. The other influence that is big is academia (especially woke social "sciences"). There are a million dumb pop psychology words and phrases these days like "holding space" for people, but the one that has been annoying me a lot lately is "lived experience." You can't doubt someone because their "lived experience" is different from whatever it is you're telling them. 1) No, that's not how things work. 2) "Experience" is the same as "lived experience." We're just making things longer to sound cool? To me it's indicative of a larger issue - people talk and meet and bullshit and hardly anything gets done.
  • Another thing I've found is that the new generation talks about "dignity," when they really just want free stuff. They will say something like "people deserve to live in dignity." And what they mean is people deserve to have free healthcare, housing, etc. It's fine if you're a communist, but don't conflate wanting others to do work for you with your own "dignity."
  • Speaking of communism...it's making a comeback and will continue to do so until capitalism can correct itself. There are plenty of ways to do this without becoming commies, but it's yet to be seen if our society will do it. The DSA is getting more and more radical. I believe we should take some wind out of their sails by 1) encouraging real competition instead of monopolies, oligarchies, regulatory capture, and crony capitalism. 2) doing some basic wealth redistribution through previously agreed upon methods - real tax enforcement, true minimum tax, inheritance tax, cutting loopholes like the carried interest loophole, etc. None of this is very complicated. Just takes the will to get it done.
  • A good video on the DSA and communism thereof.
  • Most of the time when I write about how society views things I'm referring to polite society. The intellectual elites that work at and have subscriptions to the NYT. They are generally college educated and well off. They're the intelligentsia. The academics. The big city Democrats who I interact with much more than Joe Bob from Topeka Kansas. These are the people who are setting the standards. They define what is taboo. Joe Bob might think an off color joke about gender politics is funny, but these people would find it reprehensible and in poor taste. They tend to be humorless, woke, and generally annoying.
  • Going to a pride parade is an "interesting" experience. We went to SF and the pride parade was happening, unbeknownst to us. Lots of odd costumes and the usual stuff you would expect and see on TV. Wasn't expecting to see a guy in a crotchless leather outfit with his hard dick fully exposed. He was fully shaved, fully erect (thanks to a cock ring) and just walking around like he was trying to get to work. I would guess that people would read my description and cringe a little at the graphic way I described things, but they might also feel compelled to not judge his expression of pride.
  • It's funny because I've been told before by plenty of the same people who were probably at the parade that this kind of thing is akin to sexual assault if it's a straight guy popping out of the bushes flashing a woman. But, in this context, it's just an edgy guy expressing his pride. My impression is that if I were to at all negatively comment on this guy to people in polite society, I would be seen as a prude or, worse, homophobic. To be clear, I've seen plenty worse, but it was still unexpected. At any rate, that's how my kids saw their first boner.
  • The reasoning for pushing kids into school went something like this (and I heard this explicitly several times from a few different sources): We've looked at the outcomes of different cohorts and found that people who have a high school education don't do as well as those who get a 2 year college degree...who don't do as well as those who get a 4 year degree... who don't do as well as those who get a graduate level degree. We conclude, therefore, that going to college is a great return on your investment and encourage everyone to do so.
  • This is lovely reasoning, however it completely omits an obvious issue. A lot of people who only graduate high school do so because that's the best they could do. If you went to a public school and took regular classes (as I did), then you know a lot of these people. Some just weren't very bright. Some weren't very motivated. Some were in families that didn't value education much at all. Some were bright and motivated and completely uninterested in books, history, math, etc. If you push all these people into college it's no wonder that a lot of them aren't going to do very well and are going to be in debt for not much reason.
  • Frankly, I think I could have skipped college and ended up doing better for myself in a lot of ways. I made some friends (and lost them [mostly]). I learned some interesting things (and forgot them). I spend some money (and I'll never get it back). But I was told that I didn't really have an option so I did it. I probably should have gone to trade school or joined a union. If I had a decent counselor maybe that would have been suggested, who knows. At any rate, this was a colossal waste of resources and a misallocation of human capital. There are a lot of men who wasted time trying to get through college when they should have been in a CCC type program getting some experience in real life and bettering themselves.
  • I've read two biographies of US Grant and I think highly of him. Pretty underrated president. Seemed like a high character guy. Won the Civil War. Helped get Reconstruction back on track (though it didn't last). Fought the KKK. Recently watched the documentary (Grant) on him on Netflix. Merritt watched about half of it and liked it.
  • Maybe I'm imagining things, but it seems like there used to be a time when a virtuous person was one with character and integrity. That hasn't gone away completely, but it seems like the following is more important: identity, attention, money, popularity, and signaling. Presentation over content. See above on the issue of language.
  • There's a theory that since we don't follow religion like we used to ("nones" [people who have no religious affiliation] have just about tripled since 1990), we have taken up that slack by making politics our new religion. Basically, people have a "god-shaped hole" in their heart and it will get filled with something. Maybe it's Christianity, maybe it's whoo whoo yoga shit, maybe it's politics. People need to feel like they're a part of something bigger than themselves. They need to feel part of a larger cause. A downside to that is that politics becomes outsized and all-encompasing part of peoples' lives. When everything becomes political (as it already is with many), then we're in trouble. When you can't watch Lebron without politicizing the game, things have gone too far. Of course, the media loves this shit. They create the controversy and then report on it. Works out great for them. A recent example is Sophie Cunningham in the WNBA. An ESPN story about her got into politics and asked her about trans people in women's sports and Cunningham said she didn't think males should be in women's sports. This has created a nice little news cycle for the media and has divided the league and its fans. A similar thing happened a few weeks ago when some idiot reporters wouldn't stop asking Buster Posey about the Pride patch on Giants uniforms. He refused to answer non-baseball questions and got pilloried for it. Ridiculous. It's baseball...let people just be baseball players instead of having them be billboards for your cause du jour or having to pass this week's idiological/political purity test. Another way to divide us. Thanks, media morons.
  • Speaking of media morons...I'm not sure why I still listen to the NYT Daily podcast. I guess I just want to know the news of the day and see what the taste makers are thinking. I listen to a lot of podcasts all over the place, but few of them take themselves as seriously as the NYT. Anyway, they had an episode a couple weeks ago about high prices in markets. The entire episode was about how high prices are getting in supermarkets. 100% increase in dried apricot, 50% increase in beef prices, etc. The entire podcast kept bringing up extreme numbers and building the case for Trump causing these huge increases. I assume all the numbers given were factual and correct. At the VERY final two sentences of the story they closed by stating that Walmart, Target, and Costco would be lowering many of their prices. They also stated that overall food inflation is expected to be 3.2% for the year . This is the kind of thing that drives me nuts because (I assume) all the facts and figures were accurate so they can't be impeached on that. But the tone and tenor of the entire podcast would have you believing that prices were astronomical, but in fact they have just increased 3.2%. They have anecdotes from people on the street...one guy eats only watermelon for lunch, another woman has "lost a lot of weight," another woman basically starves so she can feed her kids, etc. Story after story about how crazy high the prices are, but then they end with the reality that it's a 3.2% increase in prices. I don't want to downplay the struggle to make ends meet, but this story was just so out of touch.
  • Imagine reporting a basketball game covered like this: "Wilt Chamberlain had a rough night at Hershey arena on March 2, 1962. He missed 27 shots and 4 free throws. He shot just 57.1% from the field (only good enough for 4th best on his team). He appeared tired after playing all 48 minutes. His team was outscored by 11 points in the second half. He only mustered 2 assists. He guarded Cleveland Buckner for much of the game and Buckner had a career high 33 points in the game. Wilt also had 100 points in the game." I looked up the box score and put this together...basically, you can cover the same game however you want. My telling of the game was completely accurate, but buried the lede.



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