Category Archives: Etiquette

UPDATE III: Experience Revered (Scientific Second Coming)

China, Etiquette, Intelligence, Outsourcing, Race, Racism, Technology

“How many grey hairs and no-hairs are in the group?” That, I am told, is a standard inquiry Taiwanese engineers make about their American counterparts in hardware engineering. Unlike their youth-worshiping American colleagues, the Chinese know that the presence of “grey hairs and no-hairs” in the collaborating high-tech group means that problems will be solved. Black hairs are unlikely to do much more than talk a good game.

The Chinese respect experience, and for good reason. It’s a fact of life that experience, so often discounted in the American workforce for fresh-faced fools, gets things done, as it has grappled with problems for longer than inexperience.

UPDATE I: Contemplationist: You might wish to refer to the post. I spoke very specifically about hardware engineers being mostly older (naturally, the field is more demanding, aka less “fun,” and thus draws fewer Millennials). However, even your exuberant, MTV-type assessment of the software field is likely also refutable, colored by a few high-profile personalities and celebrities.

UPDATE II: Contemplationist is confusing a science fair with the work place where real design is done; where the playthings that keep America’s young, twittering twits’ brainwaves from flatlining are designed. My own sources, as some of you know, work deep in the belly of the beast that makes the gadgets that Contemplationist is vaporizing about. What Contemplationist seems to be describing resembles the science fair CNN’s Soledad O’Brien once attended, where American kids, hopped-up on self-esteem, were pressing buttons, and creaming in showy enthusiasm. The “designs” they were praised to the heavens for amounted to cheap, made-in-China circuits, purchased online and stuck into cool-looking “robots.” Of course, from Soledad’s descriptions you’d think this was some kind of scientific Second Coming.

Color me skeptical.

UPDATED III (April 27): Generation Jobless.

UPDATE IV (1/1/021): Old White Guys.

This is news? The Chinese, unlike the American competition, know that the best engineers are older White Men. Nokia’s mobile division, dumped by Microsoft, was vacuumed up by … ? And who invented the cool stuff that launched America as an industrial might?

Politicians Are Not Patriots; Prostitutes, On The Other Hand…

Crime, Ethics, Etiquette, Government, Labor, Media, The State

If regular visits with prostitutes kept the political class from launching trillion-dollar war- and welfare programs, and financing Fanny, Freddy and the Fed—I would personally contribute to a prostitution fund.

These prostitutes would be patriots.

(I mean no offense to prostitutes in this post. They are self-reliant, tough people who provide a necessary, if unsavory, service. I use “prostitute” here purely as a convention.)

A million here and there for a good time; that’s nothing in the grand scheme of the crimes committed by the Empire’s foot-soldiers and stooges and the cost of these crimes.

I’m referring to the latest storm in a C-Cup over which big media is having a conniption. It is the scandal at Hotel El Caribe in Cartagena, Colombia, last Saturday, currently being finessed as an “alleged misconduct” and as a mere “incident.”

“The Secret Service sent home some of its agents for misconduct that occurred at the hotel before President Barack Obama’s arrival on Friday for the Summit of the Americas.” The scandal involves at least 10 members of the U.S. special forces, no less.

Wouldn’t you like to be “sent home” when you blow an assignment at work and leave the tab for the boss?

Note that not once did Dana Bash of CNN or Bret Baer of Fox News float the concept of firing the oink-sector scum. All share an understanding that no one who serves Uncle Sam and his agencies ever gets dismissed or disgraced. TSA pimps have license to fondle a crippled child or feel up the scarred breast tissue of a cancer survivor at the nation’s airports–and their identities and jobs remain protected.

Yeah, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.”

Another minor scandal, where dismissing the detritus involved does not seem to be an option, is the General Services Administration’s $800,000 Las Vegas orgy at our expense, with GSA official Jeffrey Neely at the helm. Wouldn’t you know it? Mr. Neely “just invoked his fifth amendment rights and refused to answer any questions in the committee’s inquiry.”

As to the safety of the parasites and whether it was compromised by the prostitutes: I hope so. I want working for government to be one of the most dangerous jobs ever (unfortunately, the honest work of fishermen earns that distinction).

UPDATED: Legal Low-lives

Crime, Ethics, Etiquette, Justice, Law

The putative attorneys for George Zimmerman (Treyvon Martin’s shooter) demonstrated their professional bona fides by holding a press conference in which these publicity whores—these legal low-lives—impugned a client they have yet to meet in person, and announced to the world they would no longer represent a man who, rumor says, has yet to hire them.

Never seek the services of Hal Uhrig and Craig Sonner; they’re unethical and should probably be disbarred.

Kudos to Natalie Jackson, an attorney for the (Treyvon) Martin family, who condemned this kind of conduct:

“These attorneys continue to make irresponsible statement to the media,’ [and] “now they have throw their own client, George Zimmerman, under the bus by alluding to his possible flight from justice.”

Increasingly—and where they see the opportunity—members of the legal system put media appearances and promotion before the case and the client.

UPDATE (April 11): Florida Special Prosecutor Angela Corey will kick off her publicity campaign with a press conference scheduled for 6:00 p.m. ET in Jacksonville, Fla.

Now it is indeed possible that charging George Zimmerman (will it be man slaughter?), as Corey intends to, in the killing of Treyvon Martin is the right thing to do. Still and all, when the Special prosecutor Corey dismissed the Grand-Jury option, yesterday, it occurred to me then that, like her colleagues discussed in the post above—who’re dancing on a defendant’s grave—we were witnessing a publicity stunt. Or a political move, since state attorneys are always looking for a leg up to the Beltway.

UPDATED: BHO’s Tactical Slip Of The Tongue

Barack Obama, Elections, Ethics, Etiquette, Foreign Policy, Russia

Mitt Romney, and everyone Republican, “seized on Obama’s comments to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, in which Obama suggested greater ‘flexibility’ on negotiations regarding missile defense after the election.”

Romney launched into a scary cold-war diatribe against Russia, to which Russian President Dmitry Medvedev retorted with reference to reason and history (no wonder the Fox News report refrained from quoting Medvedev’s one-two punch):

Medvedev advised the White House hopefuls, including Romney, to “rely on reason, use their heads,” adding, “that’s not harmful for a presidential candidate.” He further said, “It’s 2012, not the mid-1970s, and whatever party he belongs to, he must take the existing realities into account.”

[ABC]

Obama is right to suggest that the US should reconsider its policy of “getting into Russia’s space and getting into Russia’s face.”

Where Obama went wrong is in carelessly revealing the Knavish connivance he shares with just about every politicians.

Republican hysteria notwithstanding, Obama’s slip of the tongue was a tactical error, no more.

UPDATE: Nicki, many would say there’s a critical-mass of evidence that the US government and its various democratic proxies do indeed meddle on the level you suggest. See “The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt.”