Category: Business

Comings And Goings

Business, Technology

This story pissed me off, for all the usual reasons:

“For years, TWC has deceptively used its Weather Channel App to amass its users’ private, personal geolocation data — tracking minute details about its users’ locations throughout the day and night, all the while leading users to believe that their data will only be used to provide them with ‘personalized local weather data, alerts and forecasts,’” the complaint reads.
The data serves no weather-related purpose, but was only collected in order to allow TWC to turn a profit, the complaint reads. The data was sold to at least 12 third party websites over the past 19 months.
The Weather Channel app has about 45 million users, according to the complaint.
TWC intentionally obscures this information” in a 10,000-word privacy policy “because it recognizes that many users would not permit the Weather Channel App to track their geolocation if they knew the true uses of that data,” the complaint goes on to say.
The lawsuit is seeking an injunction prohibiting TWC from continuing to collect and sell the data, along with civil penalties of up to $2,500 per violation.

Just this week, I went through a store (Forever 21) instead of using a mall entrance because my car was parked closer to the former than the latter.  And on leaving the mall, I went back out the same way.

Needless to say, when I got home I had one of those “personalized”, annoying little requests:  “Tell us about your shopping experience at Forever 21” with a link attached.  Being annoyed, I went there and wrote the following:

“I walked around your store TWICE today, and not once did anyone from your staff offer to help me.  In fact, given that the people I THINK were employees were dressed like customers, it was hard to tell whether there were in fact any employees in the store at all.  Certainly, most people in the store were standing around chatting to their friends and ignoring everyone else completely, so there was no way of telling.  It will be a long time, if ever, before I visit Forever 21 again.”

And every single word of that is true.  Yeah, it’s possible the wrong people will get punished.  I don’t fucking care.  If enough people turn this data snooping around and use it against these “marketing” bastards, maybe they’ll stop using it.  If not… did I mention I don’t fucking care?

And to return to my original gripe:  I deleted the Weather Channel app off my phone, just in case and just because.

A spokesperson for The Weather Company — which operates the Weather Channel – provided CBS2 with the following statement:
“The Weather Company has always been transparent with use of location data; the disclosures are fully appropriate, and we will defend them vigorously.”

Fuck them and their transparency.  I hope the lawsuit costs them many millions, and they go out of business.  And I wish I knew which dozen organizations bought TWC’s tracking data so that I could boycott them too.  If anyone knows who they are, please share that information in Comments.

Alternative Path

Advice, Business, Guy Stuff, Men & Women

I have often ruminated that young men need to evaluate their career choices very carefully before picking the one they think will work best for them.

Increasingly, it’s become apparent that going to college is not a worthwhile option for them — unless they want to be hounded, harassed and vilified just for the “crime” of being a man, that is.  (10,000 instances of false accusations, man-hating professors and the courses they teach have been omitted on grounds of brevity.)

Now, we’ve seen in other spheres what men do when they feel that the game rules are loaded against them, or that participation leads not only to inevitable failure, but even to a compromised future.  The dating game is one such activity, where men have either deliberately turned the rules of the game against women and used them to their own benefit — or have simply eschewed all participation in the face of assured failure (going their own way — MGTOW) and simply created a parallel life outside the game.

I’m suggesting an alternative to the career game.

Don’t go to college, at least until the rotten system has collapsed under the weight of its own prejudice and misogyny misandry, and been replaced with a better deal.  Ignore the vested interests of people and institutions who preach the lie that you can only be successful with a college degree.

If you’re super-smart and driven like Michael Dell or Bill Gates, of course, you don’t need to be told this.  But only a very few men, in any  activity, are in that rare 0.00001% of super-achievers.

But for the vast remainder, there is an option:  work in industries where the vast majority of women can’t or won’t participate.  I’m talking about the heavy, dirty and sometimes thankless jobs (Mike Rowe-type Dirty Jobs) which not only don’t require a college degree, but where a college degree might even be a hindrance and not a qualifier.

Just last week I came across a guy who was an oil field worker.  He’d fled from Venezuela right after that thug Hugo Chávez came to power, and in the eighteen years since had worked his way up the ladder, in oilfields all over the world.  Now, at age 45, he’d finally reached the point where he didn’t have to work  the oil rigs, just visit them and see how things were going.  Along the way he’d acquired a wife, two preteen kids, and a $750k house in Plano where I picked him up to take him to the airport.  He’d completely lost his Hispanic accent (when he left Venezuela he couldn’t speak a word of English) and was also fluent in Arabic and (ahem) German.  When I asked him if he had a university degree he just laughed and said, “What for?”

What for, indeed.

Here’s the point.  I know it’s going to be difficult for Millennials and their successors to handle this, but working dirty jobs is hard.  It requires dedication, stubbornness and of course a willingness to get one’s hands dirty, and sadly, because of the education industry’s indoctrination of kids, this choice is often dismissed or demeaned.

It shouldn’t be.  If you weigh the eventual benefits of dirty work — where, by the way, your exposure to militant feminism is going to be minimal to nonexistent — against a useless degree coupled with crippling debt, this should not be a difficult decision.

Is this risky?  Not as much as you’d think.  Just the other day, our local community college broke ground on a campus which apparently is going to be dedicated almost exclusively to the “hard” careers — automotive service and repair, construction, welding, plumbing, electrical work, manufacturing and so on — but I’m not going to suggest you look to such an institution for your education / training;  what’s important is simply to realize that for such an event to have taken place, there must be a crippling shortage of young men willing to get into those fields, and this is the Establishment’s attempt to address it.  (It’s complete bollocks, of course — you’d do better by getting an apprenticeship at a real place of work.)

So, in the paraphrased words of Ayn Rand, go “Galt” and make your own way in the world.  You may not succeed, of course, but remember that failure is equally (or, in these times, more) likely with a freshly-printed college diploma clutched in your hand.

Become a watchmaker, if you’re mechanically inclined.  Work in construction, if you’re strong in body.  Get an apprenticeship in a trade, preferably an ugly, dirty and tough one where just by virtue of being a man you face no competition from women.  I guarantee you, there’s a tough job out there for any man if he’s prepared to go for it.  And if your first one (or several) choices don’t work out, find another one that does.

Let women take over non-jobs like human resources, clerical jobs at the DMV, cubicle management, bank tellers or benefits administration at Global MegaCorp Inc., and laugh as the life force is drained from them.

Here’s the challenge:  be a man.  Not today’s version of “male” figures who argue over craft beers and fashion accessories.  I’m talking about real  men, who do things for themselves, push aside barriers with confidence and, eventually, end up with women (like my friend Raul, above) who appreciate them for their qualities and for the security and families they can provide.

When I asked Raul if his wife worked, he looked at me in puzzlement and said, “What for?”

If this guy taught a class, he’d create a generation of achievers.  He would never do such a thing, of course, although he would (and does) train other men to succeed as he has.

Now get out there and make something of your life that does not include words like “curriculum”, “term paper” and “Diversity Studies”.  You’ll be a world better for it.

Postscript:  there was a time when enlisting in our nation’s Armed Forces would have been a viable career choice for a young man.  Not today, unless you try out for Special Forces, SEALs or similar.

Mandatory Solar Power

Business, Gummint

I have to confess that I’m in two minds about this development:

While there was little doubt it would happen, it’s now a done deal: California will require solar panels on most new homes. Officials at a December 5th Building Standards Commission meeting have voted for the new code, providing the last bit of approval necessary for the policy to take effect. New homes, condos and low-rise apartments will need eco-friendly power generation on their rooftops from January 1st, 2020 onward. The only exclusions are for homes that are either blocked by taller objects (like trees and tall buildings) or don’t have room for panels.
The building code is the first of its kind in the US, and may serve as a bellwether for the rest of the country. Critics are concerned this will further raise housing prices in a state where they’re already a sore point and might only offer limited energy savings. Proponents, however, estimate the technology could ultimately save homeowners money (as much as $60,000 over a 25-year lifespan). It could also lower the overall strain on the electrical grid, especially at peak hours.

I know, I know, it’s Loony California doing its little Totalitarian Green Thing and imposing unnecessary costs on homeowners (just the latest in a long, LONG line thereof).  But let’s take off the political filters for a moment and look at what’s involved.

Let’s say that for the average new home, this will add about $15,000 to the construction cost — which given the typical construction costs in CA, means about a 3% – 4% increase in cost per square foot.  We all know that initial building costs are generally far cheaper than retrofitting, so it makes sense to add the installation up front.  (In an ideal world, the state would offer some form of tax rebate to lessen the cost, but this is California, which last offered a consumer tax rebate in… okay, they’ve never offered a tax rebate.)  So unless I’ve made a huge mistake in my calculations (and feel free to do your own), the impact on the homeowner will be quite bearable.

Now let’s look at the benefits.

I’ll start off by calling bullshit on the quoted savings, because they didn’t include maintenance / replacement in the cost, and in any event, nobody stays in a house for 25 years anymore, so no, homeowners will not  see sixty grand cut off their electrical bills.  I’d also suggest that initially at least, the supply of solar panels would not keep up with the demand and instead of (say) $15,000 per household installation, the cost would balloon alarmingly, making nonsense of all the potential “savings” put forward.

But all that said, let’s consider this question:  is making the individual home less dependent on centrally-supplied electrical power such a Bad Thing?  It might make rolling brownouts and blackouts (pardon the inadvertent racism /sarc) a thing of the past, and lessen Californians’ exposure to damage caused by natural disaster:  earthquakes, mudslides etc. — not as the latter whack the houses, but in case the utilities’ properties and distribution networks are affected thereby.

And yes I know: what works in sunny Southern California will not work in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but the chances of Michigan passing such legislation are negligible anyway.  (It might become mandatory in New York State, but that would serve the NY voters right for electing those watermelon politicians into power anyway.)

Here’s how I see it.  The whole beauty of a federal republic, to paraphrase the Founding Fathers, is to let individual states be “laboratories” so that stuff like mandatory solar power collection and welfare reform can be tested in microcosm, and what works can then be rolled out through other states as they see fit.

And while I would support the hypothesis that while generally speaking, the proper course of action is to do the polar opposite of what California is doing, this might be one of the very few exceptions.

Discrimination!!!

Business, Politics

From an article detailing how ex-President Token and his harridan wife are making millions, we find this little nugget:

In October 2017, Michelle Obama was a keynote speaker at the Pennsylvania Conference for Women, a non-profit that promotes education and networking. The New York-based Harry Walker Agency Inc., which books both Obamas for speaking gigs, billed the Pennsylvania Conference for Women $225,000 in 2017, according to the non-profit’s most recent tax filings.

Barack Obama currently rakes in $400,000 per speech, and earned at least $1.2 million for three talks to Wall Street firms in 2017.

But, but, but… #IncomeInequality !!!

Barack Shithead Obama earns twice as much as his Pore Wife, for doing the same job!

#ShameOnBarack #PayTheBitchMore #FairnessInSpeakingFees

Whatever all that shit means.

I’ll Give You Backlash

Business, Men & Women

Insty linked to this article a while back:

Will #MeToo Spark Backlash Against Women in the Workplace?

You’d better believe it, although not just in the ways that the [female] writer of the article thinks.  Here are my thoughts on the topic, and I’ll bet anything that I’m not alone in this.

If I were a company owner or senior manager, my first obligation would be to the company:  its performance, productivity and profitability (the Three Ps).  In order to further that agenda, these are the things I’d do.

  • I would never hire a woman again, unless I absolutely had to.  In the latter situation, I’d hire an older woman with lots of experience only if there was absolutely no male candidate for the job with the same skills.  (Why older?  Because young women are fucked up, and I’m not interested in helping them.  Younger women are also more likely to affect one or more of the Three Ps because of their attitude, their propensity to cause trouble in the office, their sense of entitlement, and all the other characteristics which would affect the company’s productivity e.g. months and months of pregnancy leave.)  But honestly, I would prefer to hire male workers almost exclusively so we could concentrate on getting the job done.
  • I would not hire a Human Resources manager, or have an HR department.  HR is most often a refuge for women in any case, it has no operational function within a company, is quite simply overhead, and in many cases, malevolent overhead because it has to justify its existence, and can only do so by screwing with the lives of the employees and being an organ whereby dissatisfaction can be aired.  Every single technical function of HR can be handled by competent line managers, and what can’t be, I’d outsource.
  • There would be no administrative assistants (“secretaries”, as we used to call them, another hive for women to inhabit).  In today’s world, I would expect every employee to handle their own admin as part of the job description.  What they can’t handle (e.g. business travel planning, which can get complicated), I’d outsource that as well.
  • If I were to hire a woman, she’d have either a STEM degree from a technical college or any degree from Hillsdale.  I would make it plain, as part of the interview, that the focus of her job was to be the business, and nothing else.  And yes:  she would have to have a track record at least twice as good as any male interviewee for the position.

If all this comes across as hard-ass or “discriminatory”, I don’t care because I didn’t create today’s toxic environment, where men are vilified just for being men, where unprovable accusations are accepted as fact, and where prickly sensitivities have to be protected by company policy instead of by manners and decency.   To be frank, I hate the feminization of the business world, and in my own small way I’d be pushing back against it.

Of course, I’m never going to work in an office, or for Global MegaCorp Inc. or for anyone other than as an at-will worker.  Nor will I ever hire anyone ever again.  But let me tell you all, do not be surprised if the “backlash against women in the workplace” manifests itself in any or all of the above bullet points, even in part.

Men didn’t start this bullshit;  but we sure as hell can do our part to end it.  What you sow, you reap in the end;  and women need to understand this, if nothing else.

Recycling

Business, Good Stuff

Longtime Readers will know that I am often scornful of modern architecture on these here pages, but I have to admit that occasionally some light does shine through the gloom.  Here’s one example from, of all places, Shanghai, where somebody decided to put a played-out quarry to good use.  Before:

…and after:

…followed by a night-time shot:

We could use a few of those Over Here.  Gawd knows we have enough quarries and de-topped mountains (e.g. in Kentucky, eastern Ohio, West Virginia and Montana, to name but a few) which would support a decent-sized chain called (say) Quarry Hotels, Inc.

And if we’re not going to use the quarries for any other purpose (e.g. to bury all the dead socialists after The Glorious Day)…