Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts

Friday, July 07, 2023

Welcome To The Future

The Boomer Mantra:
  • Lunch is for wimps
  • Only the strong survive
  • Fuck it - I'll sleep when I'm dead
I am a master of the universe


Gen X Is in Charge. Don’t Make a Big Deal About It.

The original “latchkey kids” are grown up, in the boss’s seat and ready to make the rules. If that’s OK?


The average age of incoming C.E.O.s is around 54. While American government remains squarely in the hands of baby boomers — and while its leadership, at least in certain branches, becomes noticeably older — corporate boardrooms are undergoing a transition. It’s Gen X’s moment, that generation most known for being crowded out of sweeping cultural age analyses by millennials on one end and boomers on the other.

Or as Patton Oswalt, a Gen X comedian, put it: “Gen X is trending, which probably means that, uh … eh, whatever. Nevermind.”

There are plenty of fair critiques of those generational analyses. People are far more complicated than the year they were born — in Gen X’s case, some time between 1965 and 1980. But it’s still true that with new leaders often come new rules. For the country’s newest chief executives, that has meant more trust in flexible and informal ways of working.

Take Darby Equipment, a manufacturing company in Tulsa, where remote flexibility for years seemed like an alien concept. The former chief executive, Bob Darby, reigned the company, a family business, with a commitment to an in-person regimen. People were expected to show up on time, sit at their desks and stay until evening, no matter what was going on in their personal lives.

His sons, Ryan and Bobby Darby, nudged their father to consider when he might step down. But the elder Mr. Darby couldn’t imagine the company functioning without him. Employees called him the “pacesetter”: He arrived every morning before 8 a.m., which encouraged others to do the same. When Mr. Darby’s sons asked him whether he’d like to carve out more time for golfing and fishing, he scoffed at the idea.

“He was basically telling us he didn’t think we were going to be able to keep all the balls in the air,” said Ryan Darby, 47.

During the pandemic, the elder Mr. Darby decided to retire. His sons stepped into company leadership with a fresh set of notions about where and when the work could get done. They’re more comfortable with some employees working remotely.

The labor force participation of people over 55 was near its lowest rate in 15 years last fall. And the average age of incoming chief executives has been on the decline.

Research from Stanford points to generational divides on remote work. Workers over 55 (mostly boomers) prefer to work remotely around 35 percent of the time, while workers in their early twenties (Gen Z) preferred to be remote about 45 percent of the time and workers in their 30s and 40s preferred to work from home closer to half the time. In other words, Gen Xers have become the unlikely warriors for flexible work.

Of course, stage of life comes into play. A survey of 120,000 American workers, also from Stanford, found that desired remote work levels were 7 percent higher among those living with children under 18.

“Gen X are the latchkey kids — we grew up very independent,” said Robert Glazer, 47, the founder of the marketing company Acceleration Partners. “Gen X was one of the first generations to expect a little more from work, trying to set boundaries but not expecting the workplace to change around them.”

When companies were first calling people back to the office, many assumed that the youngest workers would be the most rebellious. The reality has been more complicated. In many cases, executives say, young people are eager to be back in the office and surrounded by colleagues, while middle-aged employees with child and elder care responsibilities are fighting to keep their afternoon freedoms.

David Burkus, a consultant and the author of “Under New Management,” advises dozens of companies on management issues, including return-to-office plans. He’s seen firsthand the generational divisions underlying them. This was particularly salient for a law firm he recently consulted for to send some 700 lawyers back to the office.

“Baby boomers, who were predominantly empty nesters, were pushing to get people back in the office,” he said. “Then you had Gen Xers and geriatric millennials pushing for flexibility.”

“I went into it expecting it to be clear that the younger you are, the more flexibility you want,” he added. “I didn’t find that.”

Joy Meier, who runs human resources for the 4,000 employees at E2open, a supply chain software company, has also watched those generational differences unfold as she surveyed employees about their return-to-office preferences.

Ms. Meier, 49, found that many young workers wanted to be in person, sometimes even five days a week, describing a sense of loneliness at home and an eagerness to jump start their careers; a handful even departed the company in pursuit of more in-office time. Many senior employees wanted to be in the office, too, because that was how they’d spent their whole lives. (Some also had less comfort with technology.) Then there were the Gen Xers, like Ms. Meier, who has four children at home and embraced the company’s hybrid policy, which requires most staffers to come in three days a week.

“There’s definitely more of a desire for flexibility among people who are advanced in their careers and have family commitments,” she said.

She recalled years before the pandemic watching a female colleague anxiously negotiate for the ability to leave the office at 3 p.m. to pick up her children from school. “She was so happy when her boss approved that,” Ms. Meier said. “That was a unique thing back then.”

At Darby Equipment, the company’s new pacesetter is Aaron Soto, the director of operations. Mr. Soto, 44, is also sensitive to the workplace’s shifting generational norms. He recognizes that some of the junior employees want positive reinforcement frequently, he said, so he keeps a spreadsheet tracking how many thank-you cards each employee has received from managers.

Of course, talking about generational divisions can easily backslide into finger pointing. Management experts point out that most of the variance in workplace performance isn’t about how old someone is, but how good their boss is. Broad generational brushstrokes can paper over the deeper conversations needed between workers and their bosses.

“The single best predictor for whether folks will succeed at work is the competence of their boss, regardless of generation,” said Melissa Nightingale, a co-founder of Raw Signal Group, a management training firm. “That boss is on the hook for their on-boarding, their feedback, their career growth and more. If the boss can’t do those things, they’re screwed.”

Still, when old bosses leave and new ones arrive, there are opportunities for rethinking. Workers who benefit from leaving the office early for school pickup can say so. Workers who want more feedback can ask for it. There’s a chance to look at the way things have always been done and ask: Why?

“A lot of experts make it sound like you’re putting people in boxes based on their birth year, but what we want people to understand is that generations are clues, not a box,” said Jason Dorsey, a workplace researcher. “Just because you’re born in a certain year doesn’t mean someone knows everything about you.”

Generations change as they grow up, too. For years, Gen X seemed defined by a vexed sense of aimlessness. As Winona Ryder’s character in “Reality Bites” puts it: “I was really going to be something by the age of 23.” The angst, for many, is fading. Cue a sense of workplace confidence; they became something.

Twilla Brooks, 48, recalled that when she was starting her career, as an assistant buyer for Robinsons-May, a former department store chain, she had to be in the office before her boss arrived and stay until her boss left. She raced through Los Angeles traffic before 8 a.m., petrified of letting her manager down, because in her words: “That was what you needed to do in order to make it.”

Last year, Ms. Brooks left an executive role at Walmart to start her own marketing company. Now, with no office, she decides where and when to work. “There’s a lot more flexibility in my schedule,” she said. “Because it’s my schedule.”

Tuesday, January 03, 2023

Compost Me, Baby

This does make sense to me, even though some of the details sound a little gruesome.



New York governor legalizes human composting after death

State becomes sixth to pass legislation since 2019 and gives New Yorkers access to an alternative, green method of burial

New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, on Saturday legalized natural organic reduction, popularly known as human composting or terramation, after death.

The legislative move makes the state the sixth to do so since 2019 and gives New Yorkers access to an alternative, green method of burial deemed environmentally friendly.

But the departed may not be simply tossed on the compost heap: remains must be delivered to a cemetery corporation certified as an organic reduction facility, suitably contained and ventilated, and not containing “a battery, battery pack, power cell, radioactive implant, or radioactive device”.

Washington became the first state to legalize human composting in 2019, followed by Colorado and Oregon in 2021, then Vermont and California later in 2022. New York’s legislation, A382, passed both assemblies over the summer.

In most cases, the deceased is placed into a reusable, semi-open vessel containing suitable bedding – wood chips, alfalfa or straw – ideal for microbes to go about their work. At the end of the process, a heaped cubic yard of nutrient-dense soil, equivalent to 36 bags of soil is produced that can then be used as fertilizer.

“Every single thing we can do to turn people away from concrete liners and fancy caskets and embalming, we ought to do and be supportive of,” said Michelle Menter, manager at Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve in central New York. Menter said her business would strongly consider the method.

Hochul had found herself in a political dilemma over the issue. She has said that she is a proud Irish-American and has often spoken of how her Irish, Catholic roots influenced her political outlook.

The New York State Catholic Conference had encouraged church followers to pressure Hochul to veto the bill. The organization argued that the process “does not provide the respect due to bodily remains”, according to the Catholic Courier.

“A process that is perfectly appropriate for returning vegetable trimmings to the earth is not necessarily appropriate for human bodies,” Dennis Poust, executive director of the organization, said in a statement.

On the flip side, the advocates Order of the Good Death urged the governor to commit her signature, and offered a series of decorative, colored cards reading “Compost Me” and “I Want to Be a Tree” to send on to the governor.

Others argued that people want a method of disposition in keeping with how they lived their lives. “Cremation uses fossil fuels and burial uses a lot of land and has a carbon footprint,” said Katrina Spade, the founder of Recompose, a green funeral home in Seattle that offers human composting.

“For a lot of folks being turned into soil that can be turned to grow into a garden or tree is pretty impactful,” Spade told the Associated Press. Other pioneers of natural organic reduction offer not only human composting services, green burials and water cremation (AKA aquamation).

Proponents of terramation say the process is economical as well as environmental, with the body transforming in six to eight weeks.

I haven't found anything specific as to what the family gets, if anything - a shovelful of dirt, or maybe a little flower pot so they can grow a petunia or something (?)

I don't know that I'd need anything. And if it's me, I'm not going to care - I'll be dead.

There's also a question in my mind: "What about the bones and teeth?" And the answer to that one sounds a bit grisly, ie: "Pulverization", but that's no different than what happens at a traditional crematorium. 

Terramation

Aquamation sounds like something out of a gangster movie.


...combined with some weird pagan rituals -
things to do with that dead guy

Tattoos ?

Friday, June 03, 2022

Monday, November 22, 2021

What Is A Cult Anyway?

David Pakman with Amanda Montell

A new one for me: "thought-terminating cliche"

Thursday, September 26, 2019

Today's Tweet



Gee - what might be going on that could make her think this shit's OK?
It is a wonderment.

Monday, January 29, 2018

On Trying To Listen Better


Lili Loofbourow, The Week:

"Grace," the 23-year-old woman, was not an employee of Ansari's, meaning there were no workplace dynamics. Her repeated objections and pleas that they "slow down" were all well and good, but they did not square with the fact that she eventually gave Ansari oral sex. Finally, crucially, she was free to leave.

Why didn't she just get out of there as soon as she felt uncomfortable? many people explicitly or implicitly asked.

It's a rich question, and there are plenty of possible answers. But if you're asking in good faith, if you really want to think through why someone might have acted as she did, the most important one is this:
Women are enculturated to be uncomfortable most of the time. And to ignore their discomfort.
- and -

The Aziz Ansari case hit a nerve because, as I've long feared, we're only comfortable with movements like #MeToo so long as the men in question are absolute monsters we can easily separate from the pack. Once we move past the "few bad apples" argument and start to suspect that this is more a trend than a blip, our instinct is to normalize. To insist that this is just how men are, and how sex is.
- and then -

This is what Andrew Sullivan basically proposed in his latest, startlingly unscientific column. #MeToo has gone too far, he argues, by refusing to confront the biological realities of maleness. Feminism, he says, has refused to give men their due and denied the role "nature" must play in these discussions. Ladies, he writes, if you keep denying biology, you'll watch men get defensive, react, and "fight back."

This is beyond vapid. Not only is Sullivan bafflingly confused about nature and its realities, as Colin Dickey notes in this instructive Twitter thread, he's being appallingly conventional. Sullivan claims he came to "understand the sheer and immense natural difference between being a man and being a woman" thanks to a testosterone injection he received. That is to say, he imagines maleness can be isolated to an injectable hormone and doesn't bother to imagine femaleness at all. If you want an encapsulation of the habits of mind that made #MeToo necessary, there it is. Sullivan, that would-be contrarian, is utterly representative.

Andrew Sullivan? Really?  I suspect he knows a thing or two about himself as a man, but his opinion on how men and women act and react in physically intimate encounters is not to be taken too seriously.  I could dismiss it just on the dubious merits of Man-Splaining, but throw in Gay-Splaining and you've kinda lost me altogether.

Maybe that's partly why Ms Loofbourow includes his perspective - to illustrate the problem of disconnection(?) - but I'm not sure it doesn't just cloud the really solid points she's making.

It could also be that I've chosen that particular nit to pick; and that could be not much more than my imagining the world to be a better place without Mr Sullivan in it.

Anyway, getting at the gist of it:

..."Everyone who regularly encounters the complaint of dyspareunia knows that women are inclined to continue with coitus, if necessary, with their teeth tightly clenched."

If you asked yourself why "Grace" didn't leave Ansari's apartment as soon as she felt "uncomfortable," you should be asking the same question here. If sex hurt, why didn't she stop? Why is this happening? Why are women enduring excruciating pain to make sure men have orgasms?

The answer isn't separable from our current discussion about how women have been routinely harassed, abused, and dismissed because men wanted to have erections in the workplace. It boggles the mind that Sullivan thinks we don't sufficiently consider men's biological reality when our entire society has agreed to organize itself around the pursuit of the straight male orgasm. This quest has been granted total cultural centrality — with unfortunate consequences for our understanding of bodies, and pleasure, and pain.

If you asked yourself why "Grace" didn't leave Ansari's apartment as soon as she felt "uncomfortable," you should be asking the same question here. If sex hurt, why didn't she stop? Why is this happening? Why are women enduring excruciating pain to make sure men have orgasms?

The answer isn't separable from our current discussion about how women have been routinely harassed, abused, and dismissed because men wanted to have erections in the workplace. It boggles the mind that Sullivan thinks we don't sufficiently consider men's biological reality when our entire society has agreed to organize itself around the pursuit of the straight male orgasm. This quest has been granted total cultural centrality — with unfortunate consequences for our understanding of bodies, and pleasure, and pain.

- and -

I wish we lived in a world that encouraged women to attend to their bodies' pain signals instead of powering through like endurance champs. It would be grand if women (and men) were taught to consider a woman's pain abnormal; better still if we understood a woman's discomfort to be reason enough to cut a man's pleasure short.

But those aren't actually the lessons society teaches — no, not even to "entitled" millennials. Remember: Sex is always a step behind social progress in other areas because of its intimacy. Talking details is hard, and it's good we're finally starting to. But next time we're inclined to wonder why a woman didn't immediately register and fix her own discomfort, we might wonder why we spent the preceding decades instructing her to override the signals we now blame her for not recognizing.

Note to self: Be aware. See her for who she is. Appreciate it, and tell her about it.

Monday, October 23, 2017

Perspecticide


This is from the viewpoint of a personal relationship, but it seems obvious that it pertains very much to what 45* is up to.

And of course, this is nothing new. It bears repeating though, because nobody's immune to this shit.

So here's your booster shot.

Lindsay Dodgson, Cult Education Institute

Living with a controlling or abusive partner is confusing and draining. They blame you for things that weren't your fault, or that you didn't even do, and you become isolated from your friends and family in an attempt to keep the abuser happy.

The way you see the world can also completely change, because it may be dangerous for you to know the truth.

Lisa Aronson Fontes, a psychology researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of "Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control in Your Intimate Relationship," told Business Insider the word for this is "perspecticide."

She said the word, which basically means "the incapacity to know what you know," was first used in the literature on the brainwashing of prisoners of war, and has also been applied to people in cults.

"In an abusive or controlling relationship, over time the dominating partner changes how the victim thinks," Fontes said. "The abuser defines what love is. The abuser defines what it appropriate in terms of monitoring the partner. The abuser defines what is wrong with the victim, and what she needs to do to change it."

Over time, the victim — or survivor, if that is your preferred term — loses sense of what their own ideas, goals, and thoughts were. Instead, they start taking on those of their dominating partner.

"Through perspecticide, people give up their own opinions, religious affiliations, views of friends, goals in life, etc," Fontes said. "I am not talking about the natural mutual influencing that occurs in all intimate relationships — this is much more nefarious and one-sided."

Friday, July 07, 2017

A Toon

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste or intelligence of the American consumer.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

World Music


DakhaBrahka:


Maybe I'm growing up or maybe I'm just getting weirder as I grow old, but even though there's a tinge of 1960s East Coast ersatz Bohemian (Faux-hemian?) in this, there's something I find compelling about it - and I'm not going to bail on it by calling it "oddly compelling".

There's just something kinda noble and soulful about talented people creating something interesting enough to get past the barriers of culture or politics or whatever.

Bonus - looking them up on Google and Wikipedia was worth the effort if only to have discovered there's a music genre known as Ethno-Chaos.

The world is out there - we should go take a look at it once in a while.

Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Fun With Sousaphones

It took us years to understand that the 'Band Geeks' were actually pretty amazing.



Sunday, February 17, 2013

Tell Your Daughters





I know a girl
She puts the color inside of my world
But she's just like a maze
Where all of the walls all continually change
And I've done all I can
To stand on her steps with my heart in my hands
Now I'm starting to see
Maybe it's got nothing to do with me

Fathers, be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers, be good to your daughters too

Oh, you see that skin?
It's the same she's been standing in
Since the day she saw him walking away
Now she's left
Cleaning up the mess he made

So fathers, be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers, be good to your daughters too

Boys, you can break
You'll find out how much they can take
Boys will be strong
And boys soldier on
But boys would be gone without the warmth from
A womans good, good heart

On behalf of every man
Looking out for every girl
You are the god and the weight of her world

So fathers, be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers, be good to your daughters too



Thursday, February 07, 2013

Today's HipHop

My 2nd son said, "Hey Dad - If you wanna know what the kids are listening to these days..."



First, if you're of a certain age, try not to think about Annie Hall right now.  And then you can stop wondering about shit like "history repeats itself" or " everything runs in cycles" or "the more things change, the more they stay the same" blah blah blah.  People say shit like that because for good or ill, there's some truth to it.

When Culture and Economy are all tied up together; and when both are driven by fad and fashion; and when things can change so quickly - I guess we have to expect a certain wastage left behind as we lurch along the timeline.

Is it the latest iteration of RetroChic, and do we call it Gleaning?  Or what?

Monday, December 03, 2012

Bill Burr

Two guys working in stand up right - Bill Burr and Louis CK - I think may be the voices of American men in the 21st century.

They go all the way out there to some places that're pretty weird and a little scary, and then bring it all the way back.  Phenomenal.

Thursday, August 09, 2012

There Are No Walk-On Parts

Barry Lopez interviewed by Bill Moyers
BILL MOYERS: So, is the new metaphor not nature, but the stage? That's a powerful idea that we all- have walk on parts in this drama that never ends.

BARRY LOPEZ: But who is it, Bill, that says, one person has a walk on part? You know? That's a political question. Who is it that's standing there saying, that person, this person, that person, those are walk on parts. And this person over here will be the star of the show. I don't like that. I don't like to hear it. What happens if a person speaks imperfect English in a culture like ours, is not articulate, but can dance in a way that makes you shiver? Why is that a walk on part?...
I and Thou, not I and It
BARRY LOPEZ: We have from, you know, the beginning of the Holocene, you know, the raising, the creation of cities in the Tigris/Euphrates, we have created a world in which we marginalize that which we don't think serves us as well as it could. We've turned nature into a thing. You know, Martin Buber's wonderful I/it relationship and I/thou relationship. This is an "it." The book is an "it." It is soulless. It is utilitarian. I can throw it on the ground if I want. But if it's an I/thou relationship, you never make those kinds of presumptions. So a lot of what traditional people when you watch- when you're in their environment, everything is I/thou. The relationship to the wind; the wind is alive. It has a soul. It's part of the moral universe.

And we've created something in which we have excluded from our moral universe everything but us. And in fact, a lot of people have been excluded from this central White Western European dominant culture. Everything else is an I/it relationship. With African Americans or, you know, in Aboriginal people, whatever it's going to be. But when you-- with traditional people, the relationships with everything are about the holiness of the other, the mystery of the other. That's that I/thou relationship.

And what I would like to I guess encourage people to understand is that for the sake of our own convenience, we created an "other," and that other was nature. And we said, if it doesn't serve us, kill it, move it, destroy it, crush it. Make it serve us. And if it doesn't, it's no good.
(hat tip = JR, from a very long time ago)

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Middle Class Blues

Oh, the horribleness of a life lived in the midst of middle-American privilege.

Friday, May 11, 2012

We're #1

...except when we're not - or about stuff we shouldn't be - or somethin'.

We have an amazing capacity for deluding ourselves.  And while it's not exactly unique to Americans, it seems like we have some special kind of weird need to buy into our own bullshit.  Maybe it's because our insistence on Free Speech made the slide into Propaganda unavoidable.  Maybe it's because we've allowed Free Speech to mean we can say whatever we want to say without being held to account for its consequences.

We think Foreign Aid makes up 25% of the Federal Budget, and that a more appropriate level would be about 13% - when it's actually less than 1%.

  • 48% of Americans believe Healthcare Reform has been repealed.
  • 51% don't know The US Supreme Court has 9 Justices
  • ...and 54% can't name even one of 'em.
  • 78% know Larry, Curly and Moe, while 58% can't name all 3 branches of the US Government.
  • 125 million American Christians can't name all 4 Gospels.
  • 67% of adults in the US can't find England on a map.
  • 80% of us consider ourselves Above Average Drivers.
  • 41% can't name the current Vice President of the United States.
  • 7% think funding for Public Broadcasting represents more than half of the federal budget.
  • As recently as 1999, 20% of Americans thought the Sun orbits the Earth.




Saturday, February 11, 2012

Communication

Words.....................10%
Tone and Inflection.....20%
Body Language...........70%

Monday, January 09, 2012

If I Hafta Tebow 'Round The World

(my sincerest apologies to Marvin Gaye for the title)

Cults of personality are occasionally interesting, sometimes powerful, often dangerous - and generally hard not to watch.

Especially when they're more than a little weirdly ironic.









Smoke And Mirrors

I've been noticing lately that the officiating in the NFL has been something less than stellar.  This isn't a terribly new thing.  The players get bigger and faster, and the game speeds up, and it can take a while for the Stripes to catch up - pretty simple formula.  What really bugs me tho' is that I don't see any of the blown calls on any of the highlite shows, and I never hear any of the commentators talking about it either.  It starts to look a lot like a media blackout.

I'm not saying the games are rigged, but I will say that in the absence of scrutiny, the potential for dastardly behavior will flourish in sports, business, government, religion, whatever.

Connecting those dots with any of these other dots may a bit of a stretch, but it feels like there's a real corollary at work here.

(hat tip = HuffPo)