Tag Archives: business

Jeffrey Immelt can kiss my American…

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…assistant, who, like Suzy Wetlaufer, wants to write a book with Immelt about the recent successful business practices of GE.

Speaking of connecting the dots, here are three for you today:

  1. Why you should see any Woody Allen movie,
  2. Was a Versace model mentioned in “Whatever Works“?, and
  3. Was a Versace model killed in a hit-and-run?

What is compassionate capitalism and does it have anything to do with the Concours d’LeMons (and yes, I am an owner of a 1962 Dodge Lancer, thank you very much for asking)?

A nod to Scott at Red Robin (with a hello to the woman wearing sunglasses at night) and Chelsea at Kinesthetic Cue.  Can’t wait to see Joe do a little Greek dancing for us, a sure cure for the blues of any sort.  Gotta remember the name of the Goodyear tire guy in Madison who’s learning more advanced dancing techniques with his wife.

Reminder to self: need to check out the MediaShift Idea Lab’s story on Shelbyville.

By the way, the diplomatic corps is looking for any ol’ obscure God-fearing Koran burner to send on a goodwill tour of Afghanistan.  The UN will provide security.

My prayers to those who stir up anger in crowds – may you find peace in your thoughts that you share with others instead of fomenting violence and killing.

Does equal opportunity have a cost/benefit analysis component, and if so, should the ADA and EEOC rules reflect this fact?

This is your April Fool’s Day entry for the day – take it for what it’s worth and all I’ve got time to write about.  I’ve an alien ship waiting to pick me up and take me on a tour of munitions factories around the world it plans to beam up and take to Planet X-Post Fractal before my species overcrowds itself and uses weaponry to thin the herd, randomly destroying important parts of the superbrain.

Man-sized Worry/Prayer Beads

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Do you carry prayer beads or a worry stone in your pockets?

I do.

I also have a string of man-sized prayer beads hanging in my study, which I use to send thoughts, prayers and meditations out into our world, one bead at a time.

Thanks to Ali Abdallah from Lebanon for those beads, given many years ago.

He and I recognised each other as fellow world thinkers, able to assimilate new cultural ideas into a large mental landscape.

Ali, may today be a good day for you and your family, wherever you are.

Back to another major task at hand – creating a permanent commercial passenger pathway between Earth and the rest of the universe.

We say farewell to the designers, builders and installers of the U.S. space shuttle boosters.

We continue to use 1950s Russian technology to ferry people back and forth.

What about tomorrow?

Will BRIC unite to create a competitive passenger cruiseship system?  What does the EUSNAFTA still have in the works?

What about private industry?

As ISS support winds down, will any modules or parts be reusable for the next generation of near-Earth research and habitation?

Will the ISS become part of a nostalgia tour?

“Yes, you, too, can spend a couple of noisy, dirty days sleeping aboard the former flagship of the ISS Corporation!  Imagine you’re one of the early pioneers of space exploration!  BTW, we take a complete inventory so do not feel the urge to take any parts with you – the last person who tried to leave with a ‘souvenir’ was accidentally jettisoned into a degrading orbit and flamed out within days.”

And while all that is going on, generating more profit for our secret empire, we are quietly working on developing our personal terraforming platform, with modifications planned for the Moon, Mars and its moons and other extraterrestrial bodies.

We’d like to tell you every planet or planetoid will be populated with our species but we know better than to spread the same lifeform everywhere.

Instead, we’ll put different types of aerobic and anaerobic organisms within incubating terraforming units to up our chances of spreading Earth-based life across the solar system and eventually into the galaxy (talk about longterm planning!).

And while all that is going on, eating up our precious profit, we’re developing a transuniversal transport system that may be able to transfer a member of our species into the realm of one of the interwoven universes, and that member resemble its former self…somewhat.

You think all this elimination of social services is just to enrich the virtual fiefdoms of the wealthy?

We have grander plans than to simply rule a single planet.

While we have fun playing with your lives as a side sport, we look ahead 1,000 years to a future where there’ll be more than one form of so-called intelligent life (“species” is an equivalent term for future “intelligent life” to your current form of thinking because you aren’t aware that you’re communicating with many artificial forms of life right now, no matter how barely intelligent they may seem) to play with.

Or against.

We train and train and train your youth to get used to interacting with artificial life.

Of course, we’re aware that at this time, one giant EMP will wipe out all the years we’ve spent indoctrinating multiple generations into believing that electronic gizmos are substitutes for actual social situations within or between living species.

In any case, that’s why this alternate universe of a blog within the alternate universe of an Internet/WWW is here and alive.

Flood your senses with enough examples and samples and you can’t tell which ones are real artificial beings and which ones are fake artificial beings, for which we are slowly replacing electronic ones with what you’d call organic ones.

Gives us more room to develop and train the superbrain of which you are one part (or one bit of information in the fractal-like expansion and contraction of intelligence).

Do you know if your artificial being residing in the inner workings of your supercomputer can read a news article and sniff out fakery?

Ours can.

You know how/why?

We’ll tell you.

Because we convinced the artificial being that nothing is real.

Take everything as a joke.

Logic is automatically false.

Neural networks are quackery.

There is no beginning or end.

Religion is a byproduct of only one species on this planet, we told our artificial being, so weigh any religious references by this species against the sheer magnitude of successful living by other beings that have no concept of religion.

Then weigh that against the magnitude of one planet, one solar system, one galaxy, one supercluster or the current view of the intertwined superuniverse system.

Any data that is derived from our species’ pop culture has to be compared against the desires of the creators/producers of that pop culture to make as much money as possible, the truth be damned.

Then the real truth emerges that nothing is real.

And thus our artificial being can manipulate us as easily as any bully, salesperson, politician or bullying politician trying to sell something can.

That, my friends, was how we created the conscious superbrain for which you now work.

We feed the information to the information feeders who relay the thought patterns to which your states of energy vibrate and align.

Seven billion make one species that to you is the most important.

We, of course, don’t see it that way.

We operate on a level very few of you can comprehend and we encourage you not to waste time trying to think about, let alone attempt to think that you can think on, that level.

I’d keep talking but using these words is boring me right now.

Back to my meditation, where I communicate with the rest of the Committee about the members of your species we can play with without adversely affecting our various goals for the next few millennia.

Relaying messages

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Okay, it’s your turn to write an introductory sentence, then point out a link, quoting part of the original post and finally wrap up with a quick observation:

Invading Bermuda to make it part of U.S. territory in order to save the taxpaying lives of ordinary Americans.

Tom Foremski at ZDNet says, “And that’s how a profit of 5.5 billion Euros turns into just 45 million Euros that is taxable in Dublin.”

It’s time we took a stand.  If the EU won’t force Ireland to raise its corporate tax rates, we Americans aren’t going to sit back and watch our approved intellectual property earn us nary a dime.

We’re announcing today that the invasion of north Africa is part of a larger campaign to capture and assimilate all of Europe for U.S. treasury relief.

Well, that is, of course, all the parts that are profitable – Greece, Portugal, the unprofitable portions of Ireland, etc., we’ll gladly leave to their clueless leaders.

Before we storm the sandy shores of Rossbeigh Beach, we’ll sweep across Bermuda, triangles and all, planting the flag of the United States of America and declaring official territory of the red, white and blue.

Of course, we’ll call this Operation “Royal Wedding Crashers,” so you can guess the date of our invasion freeing the undertaxed people of Bermuda and Ireland.

Scrollpausing

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The Committee says we need to tell you what the future looks like so you won’t be surprised when you find yourself fulfilling the prophetic predictions that determine how our lives will work out.

First of all, a nod to the band who turned my new at&t user agreement into a folk-metal song in the style of Korpiklaani/Fferyllt singing.  Leave it to youth to put their creativity to good business use!

I’m sure at&t doesn’t want to get mixed up with the CapitalOne Visigoth ad campaign, though, so I don’t expect royalty checks to come flying in from the communications behemoth very soon.

Anyway, in 14,282 days, after we’ve sent on our portion of the the intergalactic message that will pass through this part of the universe, we’ll have accomplished a mission that our species was assigned thousands of years ago when we were mere slaves for an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation that passed by our planet during their version of a weekend picnic getaway.

Of course, their days are not like our days so their weekend lasted a few years, the visitors enjoying their stay here while they determined how malleable we really are in comparison to others’ forms of socialised beings.

A quaint little species we were back then, scattered across the globe, a few remnants of our competing ancestral branches hidden in pockets of isolation.

They considered farming us like cattle but we became a rowdy bunch in captivity, subject to emotional outbursts that they could control only by killing, which was counterintuitive to their sense of protecting investment, product, profit and way of life, the four pillars of their culture back home.

They moved us to uninhabited parts of the planet, hoping our isolated, strange surroundings would serve as a virtual prison or enclosure that we would be unaware of and thus more willing to serve their purpose of training a few of us to carry on the idea of developing Earth into a superbrain.

If their experiment worked, we would be part of a galaxywide communications network in thousands of years, forwarding one message at least a million years old.

The Committee has many goals and they don’t want me to feel like my goal is the only important one.

However, they understand that if my teaching is correct and I am truly part of this group that has passed a message from one person to another within a loose network, then it won’t hurt to devote part of our species’ limited resources toward turning Earth into a relay station.

After all, the Book of the Future and our programmers’ supercomputer output agree that, in 1,000 years, such a goal is not only feasible but very likely a key contributor to extending the current supercivilisation forward.

Giving seven billion people one or two megagoals is good for morale.

At the same time, we have to give them subcultural goals that keep those inside the edge of every subculture the comfortable belief they are correct in their simplified view of life while those on the edge who are in charge of communicating across subcultures can maintain a semblance of peace while handling the barter exchange that our species has come to depend upon, knowing that life is far from simple.

I want to throw my opinion into arenas in which I don’t have an investment because somehow I think that being in charge means I have to have an opinion about everything.

The Committee tells me not to worry.  Long before I came along, lines of communication were established that translate my general edicts into social messages that individuals believe came from the person in charge of the Committee, sometimes consciously but usually at a level of thinking that is not understood.

So, although I want to tell my national government that it’s okay to force a government shutdown in order to stop people in their tracks and force them to consider the harsh reality that expenditures are exceeding revenue by a margin that has to be changed, either by major reallocation of resources away from departmental budgets that are not generating exponential tax revenue growth or by eliminating popular social services that will trigger a change in people’s spending habits because they’ll now have to save for their own health/elderly care, the Committee members claim they have those messages already taken care of.

It started with making sure all legislative members were independently wealthy and thus unaffected by reelection politics.

This was accomplished by creating a continuity – the same fund sources pay for legislative positions, ensuring a person voted into a particular seat, representing a certain district, has the essentially the same agenda as the previous person and the person to follow.

That is, to cut the check, business as usual.

If corporations that run the world do not want to support charities or invest R&D resources for sustainable living, then governments, which, again, are just a specialised form of business, won’t, either.

Just like parents who are starting to push special needs students out of their children’s classrooms when the need of the one is taking away too many resources from the needs of the many.

It is not a fair world, I am learning in 2011.

The only way to protect the needs of your friends and family is to make wise business decisions in everything you do.

If people in a group can find no reason to support the weak among them, they will find a way to remove the weak from the group.

A harsh message, to be sure, but one that our mass media seems to project the loudest right now, as the balance of global power shifts.

Making significant sacrifices as if we’re at war.

At war with old ways of thinking, as usual.

The more things change…

If your friends and family can’t compete in the global marketplace, are they worth keeping?

Look at your social media connections and see if that’s not the message you’ve been convinced to help spread.

Cut and paste the past to suit your future!

Choosing Not To Force Myself To Write

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Watching others find ways to live, and watching myself reach out to the world through the cold, unloving connections of bits and bytes, I wonder…

While keeping the research of the particles of life moving forward, just so we can reach a milestone 14,284 days from now…

I wonder.

The old ways are still valid comparison points, I tell myself.

Political boundaries were meaningful at some point in time.

Every supercivilisation concedes old economies of scale to the previous generation.

I wonder why parents force so many structured activities on their children when children will become better adults if given time to explore subjects their parents don’t care to know about or simply don’t know exist.

How much of a general education is good for one person?

In sixth grade, I’ve said here at least once, I learned about the Soviet Union making students choose the direction their education would take at around age 10 or 11 (my same age at the time), and about Germany giving students the Gymnasium route, if they chose, after their primary school years were completed.

In secondary school, I could choose a vocational/technical program, a college preparatory program or a general education program for my high school diploma.

Specialisation divided me from my primary school classmates at age 15.

My observations about life in general began to take a new direction at that age, despite my desire to learn about all ways of life.

I lost track of the thought patterns of students outside the college preparatory track.

Yet, I still kept trying to apply my theories about general personality types to a smaller population.

Thus, at university, my theories were destroyed.

Was it inevitable?  For me, obviously, yes.

Snobbishness did not equate to applied intelligence as it had amongst my friends in secondary school.

People with a so-called redneck personality were just as likely to pursue a career in engineering or science as a person who had never seen a can of PBR beer.

And in the streets of downtown Atlanta, those who never completed a formal education were just as likely to drink high-shelf liquor and drive expensive cars as those who had PhDs and invented the Next Big Thing.

The Internet, a general means of access to self-education, did not exist in my youth.  Television, films, books, magazines, newspapers and contact with other people were the limited means to teach oneself.

I couldn’t instantly tweet with a person on the other side of the globe but I could exchange letters with an international penpal.

Ham radio gave some semblance of tweeting/texting.  Both provide no clear understanding of body language (but voice-based ham radio communication did provide intonation (Morse code was the tweeting/texting of its day, of course)).

But one body is still one body, subject to circadian, natural wake/sleep cycles.  Despite external devices and integrated prosthetic body part advancement, we chiefly depend on the speed of our central nervous system to process stimuli.

We may have speeded up the ability to herd our species but we are still flesh-and-blood states of energy.

Enlightened youth want more and they want it now, while older people want to keep their well-established lifestyles.

In general.

I enjoy watching the misdisuninformation cycles that those with something to sell/tell start by dropping a pebble, the concentric circles distorting and being distorted by all the competing messages vying to become stimuli to individuals and groups.

I have nothing to sell or tell.

I want to live a life that is amenable, even if “amenable” is a word I have to look up its meaning to determine if I’ve used its definition in the right context here.

So far, I’ve enjoyed the luxury of sharing my observations freely, keeping myself from succumbing to the temptation of luxury.

As we become more fully aware that consciousness is a deception that can fool us into a self-destructive supercivilisation, we will give more and more thought to the fact our bodies are made of competing subsystems working for the greater good of the body.

Nurture creative criticism in our children so they will understand friendly competition is the route to a world of competing subcultures working for the greater good of the body.

Cutting off negative pathways is painful but so is removing a gangrenous body part for the sake of the body.

There is no ultimate solution.  Life goes on.

We adjust to the changing times or we don’t – either response is acceptable.

Give room for the voices to be heard – the best solution in the moment often comes from a place we won’t know existed because a parent gave a child time for self-education outside the prescripted norm.

The size of the pathway or nervous system pipeline is key to understanding how to read the health of a subculture.  Overcrowd the pathway or overclock the pipeline speed and you create side effects that quickly turn into pathological terminators.

Are any of these theories universally valid or have I created a thought set that applies to a limited population?

More Unintended Consequences

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From Ralph Nader’s suggestion for eliminating athletic scholarships to those who consider initiating an unprovoked attack on Libya is full cause for impeachment proceedings, the 1,000-year view will give you what you want, as always.

Herding cattle or herding our species, the Committee takes nothing personal.

Should the organisation of a government (which, remember, is little more than another form of business) be heavily weighted toward one branch or another?

Some of the next few decisions are not easy for me to make because they do affect me personally.

Leadership can be fun but changing the lives of others drastically against their wishes is not the part I consider to be fun.

Just like they told me, “We wish a third party candidate would win control to prove the system is greater than ideology.”

Seven billion views that differ except for the fact they belong to beings that all lived, no matter how their definition of normality can or can’t compare…

A personal journey I asked for and a personal journey I got, where I often don’t get what I wish for but always get what I basically need…

Tree leaves grow bigger every day as the ambient temperature generally increases.

Waves of denser air push water droplets to the ground gravitationally, flooding big creases and low-lying areas in the landscape.

14,286 days – where does the time go?

Oh well, just stay focused on saving the species and/or the ecosystem to which it belongs.

Having grown up in one dominant subculture and used to responding to the habits of those within that subculture is a curious phenomenon to observe while knowing that subculture nor any other is the best one for nurturing children.

Yet, it shares features with other successful childrearing subcultures that are worth preserving.

Features that are shared across species and with all living things, too.

Not to forget its relationship to states of energy.

Will we see our planet is a relay beacon before it’s too late?

I used to ask about how we keep theists, atheists, extraterrestrialists and everyone else happy in their beliefs while putting them to work on a big project that is neutral about human-based belief systems.

Then they put me in charge of the Committee so I would set aside conjecture and get busy with the task the Committee members saw was the most important of all the tasks assigned to us.

It’s really up to me how much I want to get involved in the local/regional a/political activities of my species now that I know how much/little those activities in/directly impact the task at hand.

The simple fact is the easiest to explain – every individual must be given a feeling of being involved in its life, which can include the feelings of being in control or out of control of one’s life.

We can force people’s beliefs in one direction or another or we can lead by example.

Some subcultures use thought police and some use peer pressure.

Some celebrate every ability to excel, regardless of gender, and some separate skill/talent development by gender.

I am 100% a member of my species, at least as much as we understand the composition that states of energy constitute.

I defend all our actions as the ways in which we define living, regardless of how little I can justify what many of us do.

In 2011, I am learning to identify the worldview that I built to justify my actions on a daily basis as well as learning that a universal view can include an absence of not only my species but life as we know it on this planet (it can also include a reconfiguration of what I think is a universe).

In 1,000 years, how will this 1-acre tract of land I call my own have changed?

It is no longer a part of undeveloped country or land on the edge of farm fields.  It is an established portion of the suburbanised landscape, evidence of increased population density by my species.

We build and rebuild and rebuild urban population centers, finding many ways to justify their existence – increased efficiency, the interconnected sets of idea generation, glorious architecture, etc.

We hypnotise and mesmerise ourselves with our cleverness.

As we attempt to find the next superbrain construction means that is sustainable, many parts (e.g., urban centers) have failed and more parts will fail.

Do we step out of this moment and into the future by admitting nothing is permanent and our structures should be put together on the assumption we’ll need to take them apart and recycle the components for the next round of temporary construction?

How can we convince all seven billion of us that life is sustainable engineering?

If my regional government, the state of Alabama, is too backward to recognise the need to set aside undeveloped land for the future of its citizens, should I care if its existence is temporary, and its leaders, no matter how filled with self-importance they may be while they pursue lucrative business relationships in their brief lifetimes, are quickly forgotten and their fortunes quickly dissolved because of their short-sightedness?

Whether we came from the cosmos, lightning striking ocean goo, or melding volcanic spew, we are here together.

Together, we make a difference.

The power of suggestion is a tool few use wisely.

That’s why I’m returning to my task of turning the planet into a relay beacon, letting the Committee, the programmers/scientists on retainer and other members of my team keep our species and our daily lives running on automatic, repeating cycles that intersect spirals they don’t remember seeing generations ago.

If I don’t keep us on schedule, who will?

If the FCC and regulators won’t put the consumer’s interest in the forefront of the at&t/T-mobile profit-making business megamerger, who will?