What's going on with you, part II...

[Webmaster]

(05-24-2016, 04:20 PM)radind Wrote:

(05-24-2016, 04:03 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(05-24-2016, 03:58 PM)radind Wrote: Although Huntsville in known as the ‘Rocket City’( and NASA still gets most of the Press), you can see from the employment numbers that Huntsville is more of  an Army town.
( The MSFC employment peaked at ~ 7500 Civil Service in the mid 1960’s.)

 http://www.huntsvillealabamausa.com/inde...Itemid=355

Top Employers:

Company/Agency
Employees
U.S. Army/Redstone Arsenal **~20,000 Civil Service****
31,500
NASA / Marshall Space Flight Center*~2600 Civil Service*
6,500
Huntsville Hospital
6,341
Huntsville City Schools
3,000
The Boeing Company
2,600
Madison County Schools
2,389
SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation)
2,277
City of Huntsville
2,206

 http://www.businessalabama.com/Business-...c-Engines/

This probably is not the thread for these kinds of posts as this is more for light hearted, more personal discussion.

OK with me to move it.

As it stands I don't have a problem with it, radind is simply posting about his/her hometown, if it drifts into something more contentious I can split it.

[MillsT_98]

Sorry I haven't posted on here in a while...

I just came back from San Francisco, and I will be busy...I have too many final projects to work on!

[pbrower2a]

(05-24-2016, 08:57 PM)MillsT_98 Wrote: Sorry I haven't posted on here in a while...

I just came back from San Francisco, and I will be busy...I have too many final projects to work on!

San Francisco -- where one is either busy at work, busy getting fun or enlightenment, or exhausted.

Oh, do I miss it!

[pbrower2a]

(05-24-2016, 08:25 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(05-19-2016, 10:13 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Boomer economic elites are the worst exploiters in American history since the antebellum planters who had the audacity to claim that they were the best thing that ever happened to their slaves. Gilded elites? They had so little polish that they were easy to lampoon -- but at least they were the pioneers of Big Business that allowed economic modernization. Boomer elites have the polish -- and the power. Boomer elites are experts at treating other people badly while insisting that they be seen as benefactors to those that they exploit and abuse.

It's narcissism, folks. Someone who makes his living as a subordinate to the economic elites gets slave-like humility enforced upon him early. I can't imagine a waitress or checker-cashier of even the Boomer generation holding onto any conceit. What younger people hate in Boomers is what they see in Boomer elites -- men my age with wives less than half their age, two-ex-wives, and a raft of spoiled-brat kids who are never going to amount to anything. They went to college and had a fun official major with a minor in living beyond the means of most working people before they have ever held a job.

Well you and other Boomers will be the force that results in modernization of how we deal with aging. The current paradigm is a 19th Century hand-me-down. You may not benefit from this coming Revolution in the early stages of your serious aging however I predict you will benefit from it at some point.

The one thing that America cannot support is a ruling elite that believes that the rest of the world exists solely for its enrichment and pampering. "We take what we want and leave you with what we think you meed just to survive and procreate" is the ethos of the slave-master. The extreme narcissist could even take  Marx' dictum "From each according to his ability and to each according to his need" as a rationale for slavery. After all, slaves were worked as hard as possible and given what the masters saw fit for them -- an animal level of survival. Just think of how absolute plutocracy would serve them.

If Boomers seem short of the classic virtues of education, culture, and religion that Howe and Strauss ascribe to them in Generations, they are strong on the classic vices of arrogance, selfishness, and ruthlessness. What can people achieve with that? Calamity. If such succeeds in America it will make America an Evil Empire arguably rivaling the Third Reich and Stalin's Soviet Union in the perception of vileness outside America.

It could be late-wave Boomers who have the last, and benign act. We need a vision of a just world worthy of preserving. I think of a world in which people have more leisure and know how to put it to good use. It will be without scarcity designed to control and exploit, the contrived scarcity of sustenance that compels people to suffer for economic and administrative elites. It will take X pragmatism and creativity (X can be just as creative as Boomers, as I can attest), and the rational planning of Millennial adults.

[MillsT_98]

(05-24-2016, 10:32 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(05-24-2016, 08:57 PM)MillsT_98 Wrote: Sorry I haven't posted on here in a while...

I just came back from San Francisco, and I will be busy...I have too many final projects to work on!

San Francisco -- where one is either busy at work, busy getting fun or enlightenment, or exhausted.

Oh, do I miss it!

Yeah it was fun. I had a huge culture shock from what I had back home. I walked a lot, and on the way back I caught a red-eye flight so I didn't get much sleep, so I was very tired from the vacation.

[Bob Butler 54]

The basic beehive cesspool that has served my family summer home well since the 1960s failed on me with one person living here year round.  Massachusetts mandates the replacement system be up to date overkill.  They are just today filling in a very big hole in my front yard.

My rental property is right next to a huge sand pit which the town is trying to turn into some sort of oversized commercial development, the bigger, the better the return on taxes, the better from the perspective of most of the town.  They called for a bunch of volunteers, gave them the power of eminent domain, and set them loose on the poor unsuspecting neighborhood.  I'd like to see development.  The area has been used as a dump and for sewage treatment for years before the pot growers, pushers and prostitutes moved in.  Still, you would think they could come up with a plan that uses all the barren exhausted sand pit before they start taking away people's homes?  A little bit of effort to keep the heavy trucks and the school buses away from each other would be nice?  The town has a bunch of nice smiling glad handed local politicians who will tell you one thing one week and something else entirely two weeks later.  The local residents have gone into full scale not-in-my-backyard mode, and are calling in the lawyers.  My land is smack dab in the middle of things, but I can't get overly enthused about clinging to either faction.

A couple miles away from my home, just visible from the top of my hill, four 2 megawatt 492 foot tall wind turbines have been put up.  For comparison, the Statue of Liberty is 305 feet.  Yesterday I got another invitation to join a not-in-my-backyard movement.  I'm getting a reprise of the NFL's concussion problems.  Wind turbines cause vertigo, motion sickness, panic, headaches, depression, high blood pressure, dizziness, tinnitus etc, but the Wind Industry is clinging to plausible deniability.  I'm not sure whether to dive into this one.

Hopefully, I'm past peak in my allergy season.  I'm allergic to May.

Other than that, I'm doing wonderfully fine.

It seems politics at the local level can be more intense and less rational than on an internet forum.  For a while I'll be trying it out as a spectator sport.

Humans are strange.

Bob

[Danilynn]

Bob, it isn't just MA going overkill on the old sewage treatment places. That is coming from the EPA. I know it seems expensive and it is. But here's the thing, all the sewage treatment places all over the country with a few small notable exceptions in Florida, Oklahoma are woefully neglected and in dire, desperate need for municipalities to invest money into upgrades instead of Band-Aid patching the system.

Waste water treatment is so neglected in every city for upgrades, and if this isn't kept up, it does impact the drinking water systems too. I know most would like to believe they are not connected as closely as they are, but it just isn't so.

as for the rest, I wish you well.

[Odin]

(06-01-2016, 03:42 PM)taramarie Wrote: I feel like throwing up. Never again will i waste time on a man. They do nothing but cause unimaginable pain.

You're giving up on relationships because of one asshole?

[pbrower2a]

(06-01-2016, 07:21 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(06-01-2016, 07:07 PM)Odin Wrote:

(06-01-2016, 03:42 PM)taramarie Wrote: I feel like throwing up. Never again will i waste time on a man. They do nothing but cause unimaginable pain.

You're giving up on relationships because of one asshole?

What is the point? They are a waste of time.

Take it from a man -- Men, yuck! I could never be gay!

Lots of men are losers, professional students, playboys, dreamers devoid of substance, and writers of the Great American novel that might sell for a couple thousand dollars after you pay for his research (I had no idea that Vegas was important to the American Civil War... it wasn't!) that might have a little high-priced fun attached.

Maybe you can find some fellow with a real job, something nothing but money-grubbing... maybe a garage mechanic or a furniture salesman. He's got nothing to say about his work, but maybe he needs something more than making money on an awful job. So don't grill him. There are good men with no stories to their lives.

Men can be just as egregious gold-diggers as women.

[Odin]

(06-04-2016, 11:21 PM)taramarie Wrote: Happy birthday Kinser

Ditto!

[Danilynn]

Waiting on news here in my small little town to learn the fate of two men trapped under sludge in a gravel pit. We are on day 6 of the search/rescue/recovery effort. Churches have really pulled together, the recovery teams have had good food for every meal. The mens' families too. There has been a prayer vigil in town square every night since this happened. I know that doesn't mean a whole lot to a great many of you, but we are a town of less than 7,000 and still very much a Christian small town and family oriented place.

The gravel pit where this happened is only about 3 miles from my house. I still hope for a miracle for them, I don't think we'll get it, but I really hope for their children and grandchildren's sake we get it. Anyway, that's what's going on with me, helping organize food and background stuff for the recovery efforts.

[pbrower2a]

I got in touch with the lawyer... and my brother and I are going to get to keep the house while my father is incarcerated in the nursing home. He is getting better... but the way nursing homes work I doubt that I will ever get him out of there. One could write a Kafka-like or at least Kesey-like story about those.

...I have joined an entity that turns people with some writing ability into commercial writers - writing news letters, consumer guides, fundraising letters, grant solicitations, etc. Not novels, though! These people consider novels simply hobbies.

[TnT]

An observation on nursing homes:

In my experience hauling hundreds of people to and from nursing homes: the vast majority, especially in urban areas, are $#!tholes.

Commercial, large corporate organizations that exploit poorly educated, badly paid, unprofessional and non-professional employees.

I have however noticed that in small towns, relatively far from big urban centers, the folks that work in nursing homes are locals. These locals have little or no other opportunities for jobs because there simply are no jobs. These folks have not lost their compassion and some of these places are not elegant, not especially fancy, but the staff actually care. People get pretty good care in these places. Not excellent, but pretty good by comparison.

[pbrower2a]

(06-20-2016, 11:03 AM)TnT Wrote: An observation on nursing homes:

In my experience hauling hundreds of people to and from nursing homes:  the vast majority, especially in urban areas, are $#!tholes.

Commercial, large corporate organizations that exploit poorly educated, badly paid, unprofessional and non-professional employees.

I have however noticed that in small towns, relatively far from big urban centers, the folks that work in nursing homes are locals.  These locals have little or no other opportunities for jobs because there simply are no jobs.  These folks have not lost their compassion and some of these places are not elegant, not especially fancy, but the staff actually care.  People get pretty good care in these places.  Not excellent, but pretty good by comparison.

The workers are OK. For them the nursing home has some vocational stability -- no layoffs based upon slow seasons or credit crunches as in factory, farm, or construction work. The pay is better than in domestic service, fast food, or retail sales. One can get away without having to dress like a professional as might a bank clerk. In many places of employment in small towns, the old Soviet joke "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" holds except that management cracks the whip.

Staff have no need to put on the cloying, sickeningly-sweet appearance.

If one doesn't have a college degree, a nursing home may be one of the better places to work in town. Management? It's different. It has the responsibility to keep beds filled, whether for a private entity or a public entity, and grab every private asset possible of the inmates' families.

[TnT]

In any case, you certainly have my sympathy. The nursing home appears to be one of the inevitable features of our societal evolution, where nuclear families have become very small, mobility is such that families don't stay around in the same area together, and medicine has advanced to the point where we can keep the "machine" running long after it has any useful purpose.

Back when my great-grandmother was widowed, around the turn of the 19th --> 20th century, she had six grown children to depend on. She wasn't happy about it, but still, was able to move from one to the other for the remainder of her life, not burden unduly any one of her children's families, and not have to endure the cruel, useless monotony of a "home."

Contrast that with my grandmother, a Missionary. She outlived her two children and her husband. We grandchildren all moved away and she melted down and finally died alone in a "home" at 97.

[Odin]

(06-23-2016, 06:54 AM)taramarie Wrote: Wish me luck. I have contacted a local gaming studio. They are into the horror/steampunk/goth style that I am keen about. They have contacted me back asking for some work of mine. I will get all my work together tomorrow and send my digital portfolio and an animation of mine to them. If they say no I will be asking them for what they are looking for as i am aiming to work for them. If yes, I will most likely be a concept artist in gaming as that is my strength. Fingers crossed.

Good Luck! I just want to warn you that there is a wave of misogynistic BS aimed at women in video games right now so be careful.

[pbrower2a]

(06-20-2016, 01:20 PM)TnT Wrote: In any case, you certainly have my sympathy.  The nursing home appears to be one of the inevitable features of our societal evolution, where nuclear families have become very small, mobility is such that families don't stay around in the same area together, and medicine has advanced to the point where we can keep the "machine" running long after it has any useful purpose.

Back when my great-grandmother was widowed, around the turn of the 19th --> 20th century, she had six grown children to depend on.  She wasn't happy about it, but still, was able to move from one to the other for the remainder of her life, not burden unduly any one of her children's families, and not have to endure the cruel, useless monotony of a "home."

Contrast that with my grandmother, a Missionary.  She outlived her two children and her husband.  We grandchildren all moved away and she melted down and finally died alone in a "home" at 97.

it's a corrupt system with perverse economics. The more that it fails, the more it gets.

Smaller families have consequences, one of which is that there is no longer the fourth daughter generally consigned to a role as a caretaker for one elderly relative after another, never getting anywhere in life, probably having little chance for education, marriage, or even fun. If anyone would like that role in life -- tell me. I doubt that there would be any takers here. If she ever did have a job it would be as a domestic servant.

Nursing homes may work very well for people who fit a certain pattern of life. I'm guessing that the worn-out factory worker fares better than does someone who has enjoyed or exercised some authority in life. A former dentist, teacher, accountant, or business owner might have to be broken down to fit in. That was the problem for both of my parents.

I am already thinking about how I will need to adapt to old age. Having had no children, and being from a small family myself I will surely end up in such a place if I do not simply keel over of a stroke or heart attack or die in some collision involving a vehicle. Having seen Parkinsonism and senile dementia for what they are, I would rather wander into the path of an eighteen-wheeler than end up in one of those houses of horror.

[Odin]

(06-23-2016, 07:05 AM)taramarie Wrote:

(06-23-2016, 07:04 AM)Odin Wrote:

(06-23-2016, 06:54 AM)taramarie Wrote: Wish me luck. I have contacted a local gaming studio. They are into the horror/steampunk/goth style that I am keen about. They have contacted me back asking for some work of mine. I will get all my work together tomorrow and send my digital portfolio and an animation of mine to them. If they say no I will be asking them for what they are looking for as i am aiming to work for them. If yes, I will most likely be a concept artist in gaming as that is my strength. Fingers crossed.

Good Luck! I just want to warn you that there is a wave of misogynistic BS aimed at women in video games right now so be careful.

Here in NZ? The manager who contacted me was a woman.

With the internet where you are is irrelevant, nowadays. If some angry emotionally-stunted losers on the internet decide to target you as a scapegoat for their anti-feminist paranoia your life is going to be miserable.

[Drakus79]

Hi guys.  You probably remember me as Gianthogweed on the old forum.  I thought I'd take a break and focus on my life before posting here again. I've recently moved to NC due to work reasons. Anyway, I hate to say I told you so, but the brexit vote?  Yeah this is definitely going to be a de-centralizing focused 4T centered around building more private institutions and local governments.  It will be more similar to the civil war 4T and the gilded age 1T that followed I'm guessing.

[Bad Dog]

(06-25-2016, 08:29 PM)Drakus79 Wrote: Hi guys.  You probably remember me as Gianthogweed on the old forum.  I thought I'd take a break and focus on my life before posting here again. I've recently moved to NC due to work reasons. Anyway, I hate to say I told you so, but the brexit vote?  Yeah this is definitely going to be a de-centralizing focused 4T centered around building more private institutions and local governments.  It will be more similar to the civil war 4T and the gilded age 1T that followed I'm guessing.

Certainly *not* a glorious revolution....

Welcome back.