Category: Time

Liar’s Dividend

I was listening to an interview on the TV where the fellow described the method where one tells a lie and continuously reinforces it to further one’s cause. He was describing Trump behavior. After a thorough detailing of how it works we were reminded that this behavior has a common name; Liar’s Dividend.

What was very interesting was that the way it works was well explained. The one telling the lie can set the agenda by first offering up the lie. Thereafter anything that reinforces that lie is used to keep it out in a debate. In that process, the lie is made legitimate because it is accepted by at least a small group of supporters.

Fast forward to today….

Wharton School gradute speaks dividend!

Bernard Lambert – September 7, 2020

The Angst

I just put a young man on a plane back to his hometown. Our meeting was four days earlier where I found him sleeping in the alley behind my home. My dog had barked all night because of his presence. I asked if he was all right. I also asked him to move on. Initially he did but he returned in the evening.

The next day in the morning he walked by in front of my house and I asked him about his circumstance. He had worked until the pandemic closed his work. He had played out all his string. No money… hadn’t eaten in days. He was in trouble.

I brought him in, fed him, and got him access to get cleaned up and a place to sleep. The next day we got clothes and a phone for him. His had been destroyed. All the email and apps hooked up ok.

His desire was to return home to the midwest where he was from. He knew from checking the Internet that a plane ticket was $149. He wanted to go right away. The bargain fares were days away. We plied the net and found a Friday flight.

On Friday , the two hours after dropping him off to get checked in, I got a voice mail from the young man saying he was getting on the flight home. His mom and dad will be happy.

I asked him what he had learned in his year away from home. He realized that the network of support you have around you is vital. He never thought he would get in the position he was in.

The vigor of youth meets the wisdom of experience.

Bernard Lambert August 29 2020

About Conspiracy and Knowledge

This note is to cover the connectedness of government, business, and the populace with relevant observations on the applicability of current theories and the genesis of such theories. An attempt will be made to connect the dots.

Today much controversy is swirling around the Covid Pandemic and conspiracies. Public controversy surrounds the selection methods state health departments are using to allow or disallow businesses to operate.

The conspirators in this instance are the public drivers of the state health department, the business owners, the public, the medical industry, the insurance industry, and of course banking.

The concurrent need for all involved is for life to return to what it was last summer and fall. Prosperity is measured and perceived in that way. Any deviation from that causes uncertainty and fuels our suspicions. This alone divides us into separate conspiracy categories.

Next add the public-facing actions of each of the stakeholders. Today this causes further division in the public and feeds subdivision in the stakeholders. Add the isolation of the pandemic environments and financial want and you have nothing but time on your hands to scheme on what is conspiring against YOU. At this point, the real conspirators have won as you are totally distracted.

You are allowing this to happen and all you need to do is refocus your attention. The unknown is uncomfortable. A lot of what we are uncomfortable with today is the lack of solid indisputable facts to help us. A sense of macro proportion must be developed to gain some insight into the scope of this pandemic.

How long in time it will take cannot be known right now, progress is being made, miscues have been many. It is dangerous. It spreads before you know it. Normal social behavior is now extremely dangerous. Getting a bunch of us together is now lethal and a spoke in the spread of the pandemic.

I do not believe that any of the efforts to limit spreading is disputable by way of civil rights. It is arguable by way of financial wants and needs. The danger of grouping up inside, in any way, is absolutely guaranteed to affect more people badly. If the effect was immediate, easily observed, and tested quickly, then we would not have the superspreader generation happening at the gatherings.

The pandemic came from social gatherings. Families, restaurants, airplanes, trains, buses, airports, cars, schools, etc. could be infected and the infection carried on to others before anyone knew it. This cannot be fixed financially. Our want to gather has to be changed so we don’t superspread any more. This conduct will be necessary until years after the widespread use of medical treatments that prevent the attack on our bodies.

Bernard Lambert – August 12, 2020

At a Bad Time ….

The phrase “at a bad time” seems to be the sweeping assesment of where we are in time and place right now. Many are the troubles of the ordinary people of America. Job loss, no healthcare, no money, no shelter, brutality, all seem to press hard against the American dream.

I would suggest that we begin all assesment with:”Is this at a bad time?”

A Good Read For Techies

I got this download today about Apache Kafka from this URL: https://assets.confluent.io/m/1b509accf21490f0/original/20170707-EB-Confluent_Kafka_Definitive-Guide_Complete.pdf
It is the open source of Confluents work. The guide is free. Give it a read if you make or maintain sites on the net.

How It Happens

I just finished watching a documentary about Amelia Earhart done by PBS American Experience.  It details the meteoric rise to fame she enjoyed while learning and dedicating herself to flying and expanding women’s horizons on a grand scale.

Unfortunately the last world record flight she attempted ended in tragic loss of her life.  Conjecture about the causes of the loss points to the failures to train, to learn new radio direction finding, egoism, promotional avarice, failure to rest adequately, and a general underestimation of the limits caused by diminished mental acuity.

We find our lives rushing headlong into the future similarly hobbled by our misunderstanding of the hazards that lay before us.  A high mortality virus with the ability to spread long before it can be identified in one’s surround is making its way to every corner of the world.  Leaders are at first dismissing the threat then eventually admitting the dangers long after the pandemic is deeply seated in the population.  The cries for protection equipment, life support equipment, testing kits, and facilities to treat the afflicted are going unanswered as the hundreds of thousands of citizens are sickened and between two and four percent of them die.

The saddest part of this experience is learning that our experts at fighting this kind of fight were dismissed, unfunded, and removed years in advance of this current pandemic.  The executive and legislative leaders are now busy saying they are not responsible and are trying to redirect our attention in order to obscure their failures.

It is common in the collapse of civilizations for all of these things to take place.  If we could learn from our mistakes this would not have to happen.  Our first mistake is to allow others to have such critical control over our life.  The second is to assume anything is someone else’s responsibility.  The third is to enjoy our bread and circuses instead of organizing an effective correction of this self-inflicted demise.

Get to work!

Impeachment

Today the House has conducted the debates among politicians, largely lawyers, that argued rules, policies, constitutional law, moral law, and the basis for impeachment.

When the guy on the top of the executive branch deals for himself, however and in whatever form, he is violating the laws of the people. This is not arguable through manipulations of language. To go further and slander and debase his critics is uncivilized.

The American democracy has very few political parties. The arguments being offered right now by some of the parties speaks to the lack of moral integrity that most of those folks enjoy. It is obvious that politicians will argue. Look at how little they have done in the last several decades.

The fond hope of the powers that are in charge at this moment is that they can wear down the American voters spirit, hide the real dealings going on, and otherwise exhaust us. This tends to keep folks away from the polls.

We need everyone to make it to the polls this next November. We cannot be indifferent, lax, tired, to busy, confused, or in any way diverted from our duty as citizens.

Bernard Lambert – December 18, 2019

The 70’s Miniseries

I just finished watching the miniseries The Seventies produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman.  They also did The Sixties.   It reminded me of what I grew up in and what went on around me.  I highly recommend these.

The presentations provoked thoughts that had remained dormant for these many years and renewed how my present life was formed.  I played in a band, I protested, I played sports in school, I went to concerts, I enjoyed all the youthful experiments in drugs, marijuana, sex, music, cars, motorcycles, and cohabitation.  Our ideals were dismissed roundly in the early years.  Many things have made it into the mainstream.  The real loss has been our youthful optimisim. 

While I remain optimistic about our lives in this world, I am convinced that there are large capable forces at work erasing and diminishing the hopes of the 60’s and 70’s.

Please comment on this subject.

 

BLL 2019-09-26

Latest Twist In Recruiting Practices

Lately, since I refreshed my resume on the job boards, I have been receiving duplicate calls from recruiters who are outside of US borders and obviously are not speaking English as their first language.

I do not harbor any ill toward those hard working individuals, but I cannot understand them given my impaired hearing.  They are given the task of doing all the cold calling to potential recruits based upon scans of the job boards and matches of keywords.

It seems that many big name agencies in the US have now resorted to doing this in order to compete in the recruiting business.  It is drudgery and very unpopular among young recruiters.

The problem is a “Freakonomics” problem where the analysis of the money stream finds conflict with the purposes of recruitment.  The callers are paid by contacting the potential recruit, confirming answers to basic questions on a script, and getting the recruit to send a confirming email with the latest resume attached.

This would be innocuous if it were not for the redundant calls made to the potential recruit and if it was communicated for what client or customer.  The clients or customers want to be withheld until the cold caller secures the confirming email and resume.  That is their guarantee of payment for the work.  The problem is the candidate has no idea if they are being resubmitted many times to the same job; which eliminates them from consideration.

If that hurdle is cleared by the candidate, the recruiting agency that hired the cold caller then calls and wants to discuss the job when the candidate has not been told that someone else might call.  This is often made worse by having the cold caller’s “manager” call to verify the contact or to ask even more scripted questions.  At this point you may have had three to five phone calls and spoken to total strangers that have no idea about your true capability or experience.

Once these challenges are met the recruiter then wants a couple of things to make their job easier.  First they want the recruit to talk to the account executive that has the requisition from the client.  Again a nontechnical stranger does a filtering of your resume details and experience.  Second they ask to have your resume modified to a shorter length and to only discuss details pertinent to the job offering.  The reasoning is that the “hiring manager” doesn’t read long resumes.

At this point I often look at this circumstance as impossible as I may never get to talk to an individual who has the technical moxie to see I have more than enough capability to perform the job requirement.  To make maters worse they then often want two or three references from supervisors from previous, read most recent, jobs.

What they may fail to realize is that when one signs on to a contract there is specific language that precludes discussing any details of the contract with anyone outside of the contracting organization and the customer.

They’ll do dumb things like ask “why did you leave the last job after eighteen months?” when it is obvious that contracting jobs last short periods and complete so that you leave and go looking for more contracts.

They’ll ask what you want to do.  The employment desired section of your resume is never read.

They will always ask for you to lower your hourly rate.  They must not realize that one looks for another job or contract expecting to receive the same or greater compensation than what has gone before.  They also could just be chiselers.

Alas I have amassed a long list of blocked phone numbers, do not answer phone numbers, PITA phone numbers, spam email sources, and trash email lists in an effort to not waste too much time on these characters.

Tell me about your experiences please.  -BL

How Can I Help?

This evening an acquaintance ask me to come over and help with the installation of some artificial grass. I had on many occasions provided a fix for some predicament they got into.

It did not go well.

I arrived late after working late and spending a brief time at home getting a meal. I was confronted with a demand to lay the artificial material on the dirt after leveling everything using some sand piled in bags in the corner of the area.

The area had been worked by someone to level the hard ground. It was, for the most part, very smooth and level. I explained that putting sand down would not provide a stable underlayment.

The demand was for more flatness and no holes. That had been already realized by the previous work. I began to take the material out to size up the issues with how the seams would line up and what would be needed to join the sections to make a one-piece artificial grass area.

At that point criticism was made that they could have done that already and why had I not put any sand down. The rant went on for some time. I sat down on a chair and thought of what I would have to do.

There was not lighting in this area so I was working in the dark. I was pondering what I would have to do to further level the span and how would I firm up the ground with loose sand; and not nearly enough of it.

To help, the acquaintance turned on the cell phone flashlight to attempt to illuminate the area. It was shined directly into my face as a litany of the shortcomings about my efforts spewed forth. I had enough!

At that point I yelled to turn the F%$#)!* light off. I yelled at them about how I cannot understand what is being said without seeing their face and watching them speak; my hearing is damaged and that had been explained many times.

At this point I was told I needed to take a rest….I must be tired. They were right. I was tired of trying to explain the correct way to do this and that being ignored. I was tired of being called at the last minute because others had been run off of the project by the same condescension and abuse.

I could not see a quick fix for this. The suggestions as to how much and how long it would take were being dismissed.

The hot seaming required of the segments was unknown and the raising of the issue generated even more abuse.

I picked up my tools and announced that I was done. I came home angry. I had been called at the last minute. My understanding of what needed to be done was disregarded. My respect for the individual has ebbed.

How can I help such an individual?