Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I went to get the most uninteresting and unimportant of health care matters addressed two months ago and subsequently spent a week waiting to be tested for a very, very bad disease.

I'm fine. But the surprises are indeed just that. The disease that had to be ruled out was insanely rare, and what I'd had that mimicked it even more rare.

What will get us is usually not a surprise. But to your broader point, I agree. Data are useful, but they'll also sap your appetite for life. I hear all these pundits pondering why people aren't filling all these empty jobs. It's not unemployment benefits. It's not even lousy pay, though that is significant. I think it's because considering your own mortality as the world has for the past nearly two years, people have said "Fuck this... I'm not going to run on the hamster wheel as The Man and the The Systems, and the reams of data they tell me support living as they want me to live - obediently, helping fatten their wallets - say I must."

Fuck the Protestant Work Ethic. It's a lie sold to service the most pernicious bastardizations of Capitalism. The only currency of consequence is time and experience. One should of course live her life cognizant of the data, but to let it control one like some form of Grand Empirical Master? Fuck that. Life's too short.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Radical Sebastian is Radical.

https://nomadflag.com/wp-content/upl...onic-image.jpg

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

FOH, Che was an idiot. He wasted his life. He hated the man in its suits and ties, but he didn't realize his rebel garb was as much a uniform. And revolution is a fucking full time job, its like billing 4000 hours a year. Fuck that man! Giving all your precious time to help the people? Sebby isn’t a flunky for anyone, man. Sebby's time is for Sebby, not some group.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

And he was a torturer (and petty thief from people who were kindly to him).

LessinPula, Croatia

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

The CIA called him "fairly intellectual for a Latino".

Likewise, I think we all think Sebby is fairly intellectual for a (something). I'm just not sure what that something is.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I sincerely have always believed the Protestant Work Ethic, and particularly the Calvinist suggestion that "work is its own reward," preposterous propaganda designed to serve holders of capital and those in political power.

It requires only the most basic rationality to see right through this narrative/control mechanism. Covid appears to have been the shock of recognition that compelled hundreds of millions around the world out of the self-delusion that frenetic busywork (one is far more productive when not wasting time putting on silly corporate casual uniforms and commuting) is virtuous.

I see these two trends irritating the fuck out of the ole men in monogrammed shirts losing their minds about not having all of their staff walking around the floors of their office buildings:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...rating/620382/

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinio...ty-ncna1166861

The second of those links addresses the most important aspect of Covid: Rethinking legacy structures and behaviors.

Why waste time commuting to jobs that don't require it? Why commute when it actually hampers productivity? Why run huge offices with massive carbon footprints just so workers can be seen within them by managers?

(Why does it matter that workers be "seen" working at all? If you give workers tasks, isn't the completion of the task all the proof that's needed?)

Business travel? Everyone likes it now and then... but why is that wasteful expenditure allowed? Other than to provide managers with excuses to see the world?

If it okay to let prisoners out of jail for compassionate release reasons (to avoid dying of Covid), then surely these people are deemed low risk to society. So then why were they jailed for so long in the first place?

If corporate America is truly obsessed with efficiency, and it should be, why do so many legacy behaviors that impede efficiency exist? Maybe because a lot of what we call "work" isn't work at all? Maybe a lot of it is politicking within the office, careerism?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I was with you up to the "business travel" snark.

There will be no questioning of my trips to Thailand, Malta, or Hong Kong on here. Each of those was mission critical. I drank every drink solely for the team.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I probably should have selected a better example of waste. Business travel is often unnecessary, but it does enrich the traveler in useful ways. A better example of massive waste we can all agree upon would be:

The Giant Steak Dinner With Clients Where Someone Who Doesn't Drink Wine But Thinks He Knows It Conspicuously Orders Lots Of Expensive Wine And All The Appetizers On The Menu

This mindless ritual combines a massive carbon footprint (cow methane) with decrease in productivity (next day's hangover) with near incurable damage to worker morale (realizing just what a goddamn bores your boss and clients really are).

I can make a steak as good as any I can buy at home. In fact, I frequently do. Without cheating by putting butter on it. And steaming vegetable sides isn't exactly high cuisine, unless one enjoys rock-hard asparagus thicker than ski poles.

"Ooooh, a football sized baked potato! With a 14 oz bowl of butter on the side! Heaven! And mac and cheese. Decadence defined!"

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

When I was a new GP at my last biglaw my Tier 1 auto supplier client was sold to a mega Tier 1. We also successfully settled a big plaintiff’s case. To celebrate I took the 2 in-house attorneys and the business guy who was head of the division, along with my partner to a very swank out there restaurant. It made sense as they each were going elsewhere and controlled millions in potential lawyer fees.

My partner had recently come back to Detroit from a few years working in wine country. During the course of a very liquid dinner I heard him chatting up the Sommelier, “$250 per bottle? That’s a great price for that wine.”

I thought he was just talking shop, but turns out that is what we were drinking. And it’s on my firm card. The bill was like $2000, $1250 for wine.

And I’m thinking do I tip 20%? There is no difference in work from bringing out a $50 bottle or a $250 bottle, right? But in the end I tipped 20%. And like I said, it did make sense to wine and dine those 3.

The next week our passive aggressive CEO sent out a firm wide email:

“Be wise with your firm expenses. Do you really think a client will send you work because you bought a $100 bottle of wine instead of. $50 bottle?”

I went to her office and explained that I had no idea what partner was ordering. She said she wasn’t writing about me. We had another partner that had a standing reservation each month at the most expensive restaurant around here. He’d take random people where he had some plausible reason why the person might be able to send work.

I was in awe of the gall.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Can't justify travel any more. For me the cases are equivalent when the meetings and deps are virtual. I am currently doing an inventory of my travel cards and figuring which one makes the cut. I can justify a card that lets me in all the United Clubs when I am traveling once a week. Once a year, not so much.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

It's all about the optics. Who gets the parade at work? The guy who spends 5 months and a million dollars in expenses on trial (while announcing it every day) to get a verdict but the company files CH11 the next day? Or the guy who quietly recovers $20 million dollars in actual money for a single person plaintiff but doesn't sing about it?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

How does a PI firm handle a lawyer running up expenses that aren't collected?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

They eat them. They can because some dipshit made the firm
$7 mil in fees for one case.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

This sort of thing does not happen in inhouse state agencies. At least where I am. Hell, people get fired for accepting baseball tickets from vendors.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

In case anyone is wondering, I am indeed more likely to send you work if you buy the $100 bottle of wine ($250 one is good too, but the jump from $50 to $100 in wine is mostly about quality and the jump from $100 to $250 is mostly about status and snobbery), but, Sebby is right, the steakhouse will do nothing for me and seems a profligate waste.

Also, none of that California shit. Ideally, a nice 1999 Ch. Musar.

It's all about knowing people's preferences for waste.

As to wasteful business expenses, the key really is that waste should be shared, because everyone enjoys partaking of something wasteful now and then. Whether it be the private box, the nice wine, the fancy dinner... make sure you cut your support staff in on some of the waste, be generous with your profligacy. Let everyone have their piece of the waste.