Are We Having Fun Yet?

Interview with Gene Haas

graham September 2, 2017 0 Comments

I just watched an interview with Gene Haas during the rain delay of Qualifying at the Italian Grand Prix.
Haas came across as a deeply frustrated man. Having set up his own Formula 1 team from scratch, headquartered in the USA, he is now in his second season of F1. Superficially the team has done well, scoring points regularly. Haas did most things right, hiring experienced F1 leaders such as Gunther Steiner, and making deals with Ferrari (to supply engines, drivetrain and other parts) and Dallara to supply the chassis, in order to assure quality.
However, Haas is clearly concerned by the combination of the budgets in F1, and the reality that only three teams currently have any chance of winning races.
Whether the interview reflected his real position on the continued participation of the Haas team in F1 is difficult to tell. In this sport, public posturing and negotiation has been the norm for decades, as most of the key participants followed the divide-and-rule lead of Bernie Ecclestone. Liberty F1 are clearly not of the same mind. Chase Carey has consistently stated in interviews that he believes that businesses should negotiate privately and only announce deals after they are completed. So he may not be too happy about this public positioning by Haas. However, a lot of the Haas team infrastructure is shared with his NASCAR operation, so if he does decide to withdraw from F1, Haas can probably put that infrastructure to use, and find jobs for some of his personnel.
At any point in time, there are usually F1 teams available for sale. This has been the case for some time, ever since the slow distortion of revenue and payment structures created the current scenario, were the top three teams get given large guaranteed sums of money just for showing up. The last F1 attempt to bring new teams into the sport, which initially attracted Manor, Caterham, HRT and the failed-to-make-it USF1, did not end well, with all of the teams now defunct. Haas is the first new team in a long time to actually do well in its first two seasons. However, it is clear from Gene Haas’ comments that he is far from convinced that F1 is where he wants to be long-term.

Current Affairs, Current Affairs - US

Conflict of Interest

graham September 2, 2017 0 Comments

Conflicts of interest are inevitably going to arise in corporate and political governance.
However, the behavior pathology of driven people is to ignore potential or actual conflicts of interest. Hubris plays a part in this pathology. Successful, entrepreneurial people have a mindset that the normal rules should not apply to them. I have seen this close up in business.
A lot of politicians in the USA are former businessmen, and they carry that pathology with them into government. They regard conflicts of interest as something to be managed for the benefit of all parties, including lobbyists and influencers. The law is generally fairly clear on this topic. Conflicts of interest are to be avoided. This applies not only to clear conflicts of interest, but also to perceived conflicts of interest.
It is probably correct to state that the current administration in the USA has contempt for many basic political norms, including conflicts of interest.
However, the revelation that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who was appointed several months ago by the POTUS to head up his Electoral Commission, is also a paid contributor to Breitbart, takes the phrase “conflict of interest” to a whole new level. It confirms in my mind that Breitbart is not in any sense of the word, an independent media outlet. It is operating a significant part of the time as a propaganda channel for the Trump administration.

Current Affairs, Current Affairs - US

Political idea post of the week

graham August 31, 2017 0 Comments

The Manifesto against the enemies of Modernity.

Current Affairs

Innovation inhibitors in corporations – modern reality

graham August 29, 2017 0 Comments

I see “innovation campaigns” and change management initiatives all of the time in corporations. Most of them never achieve any positive results. In the worst case, failed change management initiatives increase cynicism and depress morale further.
Innovation and change, like morale, are things that all leaders in all corporations will agree they always need more of. However, innovation and change are very slippery items. Like the wind, you know they are there, but they can head in all directions, and are difficult to steer, and even more difficult to capture and grow.
Having watched the trends in IT solution delivery and service provisioning in corporations in the USA and Europe for over 30 years, I have come to some conclusions about why so many corporations are currently struggling with innovation and change initiatives.
Leaving aside the approaches to fostering innovation, which are often bizarre and superficial, there are several underlying current pervasive dynamics that have the power to totally derail all attempts at fostering innovation and implementing organizational and/or cultural change.

1. Psychological Safety
One of the best ways in which a corporation can ensure that innovation is suppressed is to make it clear that the reward for taking risks or attempting new approaches is to be penalized by Exile or by being made redundant. The organization shows little or no tolerance for failure.
This article explains the concept of psychological safety extremely well.
It is up to leaders to create a climate where taking risks is not immediately shut down, and failures of innovation are not immediately punished. Whenever I hear leaders commenting to the effect that “our culture is risk-averse”, I immediately begin to worry that they are stewards of a climate where nobody with any sense of self-preservation is likely to propose any sort of innovation or change.

2. The offshore delivery work fiction
Most IT delivery organizations have been relentlessly reducing staffing levels for decades, often sending work offshore, where it is often performed poorly, at which point the remaining onshore team members have to “paper over the cracks” in order to elevate quality levels to an acceptable level for the client or end-users. (By the way, this “acceptable” level is often way below the previous quality level that was provided to the client). The result is a corporate fiction that the work is being performed offshore. In reality it is being bodged offshore, and fixed up onshore by a small number of over-worked resources. Those resources are usually too busy to even think about visiting the restroom, never mind engaging in innovation.

3. Reduction in SME coverage and predominance of tacit knowledge
Over the last 15 years I have seen groups progressively slimmed down to the point where only one person is a SME for key areas of the solution. If that person is (say) killed in a road accident this upcoming weekend, the organization will be in a dangerous place starting on Monday.
However, a one-person SME, in the current climate, will not willingly train another person to be a SME, since that introduces a risk (as the SME sees it) that the organization can WFR them in favor of the newly-trained SME.
If the request is to train an offshore person to become a SME, well, if you are the corporate leadership expecting willing participation from the onshore resources, you are below naive.
Ditto documentation of processes. When a person perceives that their employer is looking for an excuse to WFR them, they are going to make damn sure that their business and technical knowledge remains implicit and tacit, not explicit and documented. The default in that sort of climate is that Knowledge is Indispensability. It is probably not true, but that is how employees will see it, and, like just about any employee, they will behave in a “circle the wagons” way to protect their position.

A culture of innovation, like credibility, requires constant renewal and attention to detail. Just as credibility can be severely or degraded by one perceived failure to deliver on promises or committments, innovation interest and engagement can be severely impacted and driven down to zero by one incident where innovators were seen to be punished for failures.

Corporate Leadership, Uncategorized, Work

Houston Floodsplainer

graham August 28, 2017 0 Comments

1. Matt Corbett‏ @CorbettMatt 13h13 hours ago
A Houston floodsplainer: (caveat, I’m not a pro, just someone interested in how my city works. If a real pro finds an error, please LMK)

There will inevitably be extreme hott-akes regarding flood planning and Monday-morning QB-ing of officials. This is for context
(some good links): https://www.harriscountyfws.org/ https://spacecityweather.com/ https://www.texastribune.org/boomtown-floodtown/ … http://traffic.houstontranstar.org/cctv/transtar/
Houston is on a flat, mostly featureless plain, which is naturally drained by a number of Bayous (“The Bayou City” refers to HTX, not NOLA) which all run (and drain) from west to east, converging on either the ship channel or San Jacinto Bay
Note the scale: HTX is also geographically enormous It also has varying development density. Here’s a sat pic which will roughly show that:

(Note: I’ve highlighted 2 areas- Addicks & Barker reservoirs and the medical center, because I’ll mention them later)
HTX has sandy soil and a high water table, and so has some, but limited, ability to rely on absorption
(related: No houses have basements and it would be nearly impossible to construct a subway)
Most of HTX is ~35-45′ above sea level. Flooding risk is almost entirely from rain, not storm surges
Being Gulf Coast, HTX gets ~50″ of rain a year. Gulf T-Storms can get intense. 4-6″-in-8-hours storms happen about once a year
flooding is essentially a rate problem- can you drain the water as fast as it comes?
when the answer is ‘no’, water backs up along the drainage routes

As a result, any person’s flooding risk is mainly about proximity and elevation vs the nearest bayou
The primary backup for the bayous for handling too much water are the roads
In the 90s. Houston was getting large enough that relying on groundwater was starting to cause subsidence problems
The powers that be decided (wisely, mostly) to slowly convert all the roads into a giant rain collection network
so every time an asphalt road needed to be repaved, it got replaced with curb & gutter concrete w/ big storm sewer underneath
this has been highly obnoxious to anyone living nearby when such a project was underway but ultimately quite effective
usually means that in flooding situations, roads briefly become rivers and then drain, saving houses from flood damage
but it’s also a work in progress that has proceeded at the rate roads needed replacing, and varies greatly by location
the next backup for water are sections of freeways. Here, e.g. is a section of I-69/US-59 (as indicated on map)

Ggiven the flood risk indication of the neighborhood immediately south, that sunken section serves a flood-relief purpose.

Thus, flood control in HTX is and has been in a continual state of upgrade for 20 years
However HTX has also been growing rapidly in that time, adding about 100-125k people/year for 15 years, with the result that at any given time the flood control has been adequate, but for the city T-5 years ago, not now, with the currently least-adequate parts usually around the geographic periphery and immediately downstream
The key incidents forming city officials’ decision making have been the experiences of Allison (2001), Rita (2005), Ike (2008), and the flooding events of the past 2 years (Memorial Day 2015 and Tax Day 2016)
Conceptually, Harvey is closest to Allison, which was a TS that parked itself over HTX for 3 days and dumped 20″ rain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Storm_Allison … . The key point:

Rita (2005) was a huge storm, occurring ~1 month after Katrina. For a few days it was forecast to hit Houston directly, but it ultimately drifted eastwards and hit Port Arthur
The debate of whether Houston should have issued a mandatory evacuation is more complicated than many probably realize
Hurricane Ike (2008) is least directly relevant- in Houston it caused immense damage but comparatively little flooding and death
..except in the medical center, which lost power, and sustained lots of flood damage http://doctorflood.rice.edu/SSPEED_2008/downloads/Day2/7B_Ellison.pdf …
The med center is an utterly critical component of Houston, and understandably a high priority for flood control
It employs ~150k people, conducts enormous amounts of cutting-edge research, and most importantly, at any given time has a large number of very sick, very immobile patients
it has therefore received (again, understandably) disproportionate flood-control attention in the past decade… but often at the expense of other areas in the city
The other section I highlighted was the Addicks & Barker reservoirs.
They are flood control reserviors that date from the 30s. They remain highly useful and functional
but given Houston’s growth are now inadequate to the nearby area, which is where the worst flooding in Allison occurred
They are the focus of the Texas Tribune article linked above, and I’d guess that’s where the worst flooding will happen this time
Note the last sentence in this page:

With all that background, now for the city’s Harvey choices:
As of mid-last week, it was forecast that Harvey would produce “up to Allison” levels of rainfall. That was when any evac order would have had to be made
It’s not possible to evac all of Houston inside of 48 hours. Too many people, not enough roads or time, and Houston would inherently be a lower priority than people closer to the coast
City & state leaders knew the rainfall would be very, very bad. But the experiences of Allison & Rita would lead to the belief that evacuation, especially on short notice, would lead to more death than hunkering down.
Also, given that roads & freeways flood BY DESIGN, “stuck on the road” is the absolute worst, most dangerous place to be.
thus an evac that stranded people mid-storm would be worst-case scenario.
Embedded in that is a gamble that emergency services will be able to rescue people at the rate they become endangered
That’s a hard choice to make. and it will be examined for a long, long time given 20/20 hindsight
But decisions have to be judged by the best information available at the time. And at the time, it was justifiable.
Perhaps on closer examination it will have been the wrong choice, but it is an entirely defensible one.
Many have noticed something of a gap a gap between Mayor Turner and Gov Abbott on this choice
and hinted some sort of R/D partisan issue. More relevant is likely the Gov’s handicap
(famously, within TX) Gov Abbott is in a wheelchair, and is thus highly sensitive to the risks for people with limited mobility, who of course are/would be in the most danger if hunkering down proves the wrong choice. And so the Gov likely has a different sense of risk than does the Mayor. Doesn’t make it right or wrong. just a different value judgement. Judgement calls are as much about being able to live with a choice being wrong as they are about picking the outcome one thinks will be best. It’s easy to see both sides of this one

Current Affairs, Current Affairs - US

Allan Holdsworth 1947-2017 – an appreciation

graham August 27, 2017 0 Comments

Allan Holdsworth passed away suddenly on April 16th 2017 from heart failure at the age of 70 at his home in Southern California.
He died in relative obscurity, and, by all accounts, in poverty.
The fact that Allan Holdsworth, at the end of his life, was an obscure small cult tells us a lot about the current state of the music business and also the popularity of instrumental music containing improvisational forms. Bluntly, the music form known as jazz is in a bad way in the USA. The problem is not confined to Allan Holdsworth. I have read interviews with other jazz players in the past few years where they explained that they were unable to play live in the USA because they could not get paid any reasonable amount of money for their craft. Europe and Japan are just about the only regions of the world where jazz artists can actually make a living playing live.
The statement that Allan Holdsworth was a guitarist’s guitarist is undoubtedly true, but it is an over-simplification and sells Holdsworth short in many respects. However, it is true that just about every person who has tried to play electric guitar has heard of Allan Holdsworth. In the same way that Jaco Pastorius greatly expanded the vocabulary of the bass guitar in the late 1970s, Allan Holdsworth did the same for the electric guitar in the 1980s. By the end of that decade, he had almost single-handedly expanded the entire notion of what a six string fretted electric instrument cold sound like, both as an accompanying instrument and as a solo instrument.
Holdsworth’s accompaniment and chordal work on guitar was the antithesis of the old phrase “rhythm guitar”. Holdsworth did not sweep the strings, he plucked them, and his chord voicings were often colored, inverted and contained controlled dissonance and open ringing notes. He used large spreads across the fretboard. I have his music instruction book “Searching for the Uncommon Chord”, and I can verify that some of the voicings and fingerings are beyond my ability to play.
Essentially, Holdsworth played accompanying guitar like a keyboards player. Processed through intricate and complex equipment, this resulted in a unique soundscape that has been imitated to a greater or lesser degree by dozens of guitar players.
It was no real surprise that when the SynthAxe appeared in the 1980s, Holdsworth was immediately drawn to it, and he became the musician most indelibly associated with the instrument. The conception of feeding the string information from guitar into keyboard controllers perfectly meshed with his approach to playing guitar. Unfortunately the SynthAxe, like many great innovations, lacked a large enough market to support proper development, and reliability and cost issues blighted greater acceptance. Holdsworth’s own SynthAxes were eventually retired from road use, to be used occasionally in the studio.
Like many skilled practitioners on musical instruments, Allan Holdsworth did not start out playing guitar. He was initially a horn player, and this was immediately obvious when you listened to his solos, which contained pauses and gaps reminiscent of what you hear in blowing instrument solos, where the instrumentalist has to stop playing to take a breath. The attack, the tone, the note selection and his use of a diverse range of scales made him recognizable in no more than two or three notes. Like all great individualists on any instrument, Holdsworth’s solos were instantly recognizable as Holdsworth.
Holdsworth, in his solo playing, also seemed to be totally non-anchored to the blues form and scale patterns that most guitarists start out playing, and often become trapped within. His choice of notes and scales seemed to be derived partly from bebop, but mostly from Somewhere Else.
Holdsworth, as befits a determined individualist, also wrote quirky, often non-standard compositions. He seemed ill at ease with or uninterested in conventional song forms. In the 1980s he experimented briefly with vocal-led music, but soon abandoned having a singer in his band, and for the last 25 years of his life, he toured and recorded with a base trio format, adding a keyboards player occasionally. However, he always used the best musicians available, and there was no shortage of musicians who wanted to play with him. Like Frank Zappa, alumni of Holdsworth bands are to be found embedded in positions of veneration in the music industry all over the place. Holdsowrth’s best composi
tions are, like his solo playing, instantly recognizable, if only because almost nobody else could write tunes like that. Unfortunately, the characteristics of his playing and compositional ability that made Allan Holdsworth unique also made him uniquely difficult to sell as a musical artist. That difficulty was exascerbated by his demanding and uncompromising personality. Unlike many other gifted instrumentalists, Holdsworth never became a fluent sight-reader, so the parallel career of a session player to pay the bills was not really an option for him. (He would have hated that line of work anyway). He also seemed to have a low boredom threshold, and tended to walk away quickly from any musical project that could not hold his attention. Stints with UK and Bill Bruford in the late 1970s ended quickly, as did an attempt to form a more conventionally-structured rock band (recording sessions for “Road Games” followed by the band I.O.U.).
Holdsworth’s many musical admirers included Steve Vai, Frank Zappa (who would probably have hired Holdsworth to play for him if he had been a sight-reader) and Eddie Van Halen, who assiduously lobbied for Warner Brothers to sign Holdsworth as a solo artist in the early 1980s. Hoever, after recording most of an album, Holdsworth and Warners fell out, and only a single truncated LP, “Road Games”, was released.
After that flirtation with the conventional end of the record industry, Holdsworth’s fate was to shuffle from independent record company to record company, releasing an LP here, a CD there. He moved to Southern California in the 1980s, worked and toured infrequently, and, like most jazz artists, suffered from the general downturn in the music industry, which has seen royalties, once a source of steady income for recording artists, shrink to almost nothing in the last 15 years. In occasional interviews, he came across as frustrated, but unrepentant. At the end of his life, he was scratching a living, and after his death, friends had to set up a GoFundMe for his anticipated funeral expenses. The fact that the appeal was shut down after 72 hours, having raised over $114,000 dollars against a $20,000 target, confirms that Allan Holdsworth still had a lot of friends and admirers.
A more conventional Allan Holdsworth would probably have worn tight trousers in a stadium rock band, played bombastic solos, been a hero to air guitar players…and would have been boring beyond belief. Instead we ended up with 40 years of a unique approach to guitar playing that re-wrote a lot of the vocabulary and expanded, sonically, harmonically and melodically, the entire landscape of what we know as Playing Guitar.
Rest In Peace Allan. We hardly knew ye.

Music

The “government is so inefficient” shibboleth

graham August 26, 2017 0 Comments

Amongst self-identfied conservative and fans of what they term “small government”, it is almost an article of faith that the private sector is more efficient than the government.
(ASIDE – there is a good reason why I used air quotes in the above sentence, since I long ago noticed that many self-confessed fans of “small government” are only fans of that idea when they come across the government spending money on Stuff They Do Not Approve Of, otherwise they are perfectly OK with governments spending money. Lots of money).
One of the classic ways in which people instinctively opposed to government try to bolster their arguments is by pointing to the ineffiencies and waste that occur in IT projects within government. If they are better-informed, they usually throw in one or two notorious examples of pas failures that made it into the public domain.
There is only one problem with the argument.
The private sector is just as inefficient at IT solution delivery. In fact, based on my being involved with both the government and public corporations over the last 38 years, I can state anecdotally that waste, inefficiency, duplication, bungling, cost overruns and out of control projects are just as common in corporate IT. Some of the worst and most expensive failures that sort of made it into the public domain (such as the Confirm travel industry program), consumed hundreds of millions of dollars for next to no result or value.
There is, however, one big difference. Failures in corporations are more often and easily swept under the carpet or into a box marked “amnesia”. I have seen multiple instances of failed delivery programs being carefully spun as successes, “re-scoped”, or subjected to any one of a number of soothing outbreaks of corporate Doublespeak, in order to pretend that the whole damn thing never really happened.
In the case of government, especially at the state and federal level here in the USA, that tends to be less easy to manage, since elected representatives like nothing more than to rake government officials and leaders over the coals in public about a waste of taxpayer’s money. It is a form of ritualistic blood sport, allowing said elected representatives to preen, strut and intimidate in front of the media, as they engage in virtue signaling to their electorates that they are Relentless Stewards of The Public Purse.
Whether those public ritualistic floggings actually yield any positive results is doubtful. Excoriating in public is never a positive motivational strategy; it is about one half step removed from the old saying “the beatings will continue until morale improves”.
The underlying point here, however, is that when people complain about “waste” in government IT, they are conveniently overlooking that the levels of waste are just as bad in the private sector. The truth is that the issues with large-scale IT delivery are many and difficult to solve, no matter where the projects are being executed. Software development and delivery as an activity stream just does not scale well.

IT and Tech, Work

the pee tape and other needless distractions

graham August 24, 2017 0 Comments

Every few weeks, regular as clockwork, speculation fires up again on the Internets that the reason that Donald Trump is apparently behaving and talking obsequiously about Vladinir Putin and Russia is because he is being blackmailed.
Specifically, there is supposed to be a “pee tape” or some other audio and/or video record of Donald Trump engaging in sexual activities, that is in the possession of the Russian government. The hypothesis is that Donald Trump is being obsequious to Russia because he fears that if he is not nice, the tape will be leaked into the public domain.
Let me spell it out.
This is an irrelevant sideshow.
None. Of. This. Matters.
For multiple reasons. It’s a long list.
1. Everything we can see and hear about Donald Trump suggests that he is immune to being shamed in any public forum. He routinely lies, bullshits, utters malformed and inflammatory statements, and behaves oddly in public with other world leaders. The behavior is characteristic of a person with acute Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Narcissists simply do not care how they are perceived by most people, they only care that enough people close to them tell them how wonderful they are. That is why narcissists are almost always surrounded by an inner circle of sycophants who will praise and venerate them, usually without prompting. (For a narcissist, validation from his sycophants is enough, and if those sycophants do not provide enough validation, why, he will damn well fire their asses and get somebody in who will tell him how wonderful he is).
2. Donald Trump might be behaving obsequiously to Vladimir Putin because he thinks he is a great guy who is doing a bang-up job of running Russia. Almost all demagogues and dictators in recorded history have been narcissists, and narcissists love to strut with other narcissists. Think of it as a public dick-swinging contest. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin may simply be birds of a feather. There is also the matter of the Trump family business ties with Russia to consider. If, as rumors suggest, Trump was once bailed out of debt by Russian businessmen, he may have powerful reasons for being nice to Russia that have nothing whatsoever to do with pee tapes, threesome tapes, whatever.

3. What people do in consensual private activities is none of our damn business.
If a politician wants to have fun by being nailed to a wall and whipped by professional working women dressed as police officers, I don’t care. It’s the politician’s own private business. What people get up to in private is nothing to do with the rest of us, as long as it does not break other laws, both parties are able to give informed consent and they affirmatively consented. This should not be difficult.

4. A leader’s consensual, equitable private activities tell us nothing about his or her public behavior.
Nelson Rockefeller, who was the VP from 1974 to 1977, died suddenly in a hotel in New York in 1979, seemingly in the middle of a discussion with a woman who was not his wife. The family hastily shut down all inquiry, had his body cremated, and life went on. However, there was no suggestion that Rockefeller was a duplicitous asshole in politics. He was a well-respected Republican politician and leader. This, remember, was just over 15 years after the office of President was occupied for several years by an Ivy League graduate and war hero who could only just about keep his pants up in the presence of a pretty girl (at least, until he could discuss matters of state with them later in private). Politics always attracts the power-hungry, and power-hungry people will use that power in all sorts of ways. Sexual shenanigans is one manifestation, but probably the least damaging to the political process and the country, as long as it is not a pattern of abusive behavior.

5. Persecution of politicians for sexual shenanigans is hypocritical and encourages secrecy, duplicity and other bad behaviors in the political process
In private life, people have affairs, split up, divorce and get re-married all the time. Yet we persist in claiming to hold political leaders to standards that many of us have not been able to live up to. This is hypocrisy writ large. I have three divorces. I am no position to demand marital consistency from a political candidate.
I would be more impressed if electors would un-elect politicians who really were guilty of malfeasance.

So…my conclusion about the pee tape? Even if it exists, I don’t care. I am far more interested in Donald Trump’s actions in his capacity as POTUS than anything he may have done consensually behind closed doors in the past. The POTUS engaging in a threesome is not something that impacts me. Starting an unnecessary global conflict will impact all of us. Let’s not get distracted by fluff.

Current Affairs, Current Affairs - US

Thinking of friending me on social media? Here’s what you need to understand first

graham August 23, 2017 0 Comments

From time to time, people who i have never actually met or conversed with on any subject will send me friend or follow requests on social media platforms.
While on one level this is flattering, on another level I worry slightly.You see, you’re not going to be friending a happy-go-lucky, sunshine, buttercups and rainbows guy who is unfailingly nice to all and sundry regardless of what day of the week it is, or what has been happening in the great wide world.
I am a thoughtful, slightly intense person who is highly engaged with the world around me. I have an inquiring and challenging mind. People who know me discovered this a long time ago.
I can also appear to be a pain in the ass from time to time. I have moods. I don’t suddenly become an unhinged psycho, but I can get slightly waspish from time to time, usually as a result of being confronted by one or more people who are talking or acting nonsensically. Usually, if I sense that I am tired, or not in a good place, I take a timeout.
Here’s what that means for your interactions with me.

1. I challenge anything that looks like an assertion with no evidence
2. I have a very sensitive bullshit detector
3. I have limited tolerance for sarcasm, and no tolerance whatsoever for any communication that looks like an attempt at bullying or threatening.
4. I do not engage in tone trolling, I don’t have much respect for it as a basis for argument or discussion.
5. If you want me to respect your arguments, have good ones
6. Don’t argue in memes or slogans. Use your own voice, not somebody else’s.
7. Don’t use juvenile ad hominems or insults if you want me to take you at all seriously. If you keep doing it, I will call you on it. As my Dad used to say, good manners cost nothing, and it’s actually not difficult to be pleasant.
8. Humor and cat pictures are good things. We can never have enough of either.
9. You cannot a la carte me. I cannot and will not engage in self-censorship to fit other people’s ideas or preconceptions about what I should be talking or writing about online. You don’t get the cat pictures without the pithy commentary.
10. I do fact-check both myself and others, and i do admit to error. Not very often, but it happens.

Current Affairs

Divorce and lowering the bar for standards of behavior

graham August 20, 2017 0 Comments

I have come to believe over time that if you want to fully test the decency of humans, you should watch how they handle divorce.
The world of divorce is an example of the idea that if you think that you have heard the ultimate story of bad behavior, just wait until the next divorce case that involves a lot of money.
This tale of the divorce of Blatherwick vs. Blatherwick truly has it all. If you wrote this all down as a story, it would probably be rejected for a TV drama series for being too outlandish.

Current Affairs