Woman #1: I don’t think I have ever met a man who is an extreme Leftie Democrat who isn’t a complete pussy. Why is it that virtually all males whose sentiments lay at that end of the political spectrum all seem to be girly men, gay, 98-pound weaklings, failures at business, librarians, fops, Ned Flanders, Hollywood entertainers who would not be employed otherwise, or ankle-biting sycophants? I’ve never met a man who calls himself a “feminist” or supports OxFam to be the least bit attractive. Is there a connection between low testosterone and supporting Libtard causes?
Florida International University President Mark Rosenberg hits the familiar notes of complacency and self-congratulation that administrators of contemporary US colleges specialize in, as he celebrates the installation last Saturday of his new $14.2 million pedestrian bridge, the first to be put into place using the wonderful new Accelerated Bridge Construction method.
A 950-ton section of a pedestrian bridge was swung into place over Southwest Eighth Street Saturday morning, connecting Florida International University with the city of Sweetwater.
The $14.2 million bridge at Southwest Eighth Street and Southwest 109th Avenue is being built using Accelerated Bridge Construction methods, which have been advanced at FIU. The university said the modular construction method reduces potential risks to workers, commuters and pedestrians and minimizes traffic interruptions.
The bridge is also made of self-cleaning concrete. When exposed to sunlight, titanium dioxide in the concrete traps pollutants and turns them a bright white, the university said.
Officials said the bridge should be completed early next year. FIU President Mark Rosenberg said in addition to connecting the campus with Sweetwater, the 289-feet-long bridge will become a destination for students and faculty.
“This bridge is not just someplace to someplace else,” Rosenberg said. “It will have places where people can study, where they can contemplate, where they can observe the incredible traffic and dynamism of West Dade.”
Currently, the university runs shuttles that ferry students across busy Eighth Avenue safely. A student died crossing Eighth Avenue in August after the shuttle service ended for the day.
Saturday installation marks the first time a bridge this large has been installed in this way.
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Denoument: The bridge collapsed yesterday, killing at least 6 people. 9 people were pulled out of the rubble alive. The contractor behind the bridge is a major political donor in Dade County.
Kevin Williamson looks at the Forbes 2018 list of the richest people and concludes that the best way to get very, very rich in America is by doing good things for ordinary people and the least well-off.
[W]hat kind of companies did the wealthiest Americans start? Overwhelmingly, America’s billionaire entrepreneurs grew wealthy by providing goods and services to middle-class families and people of modest means. The wealthiest European on the list is Bernard Arnault, the guy behind Louis Vuitton, while the wealthiest Americans on the list brought you Amazon, Microsoft, Dairy Queen (one of Berkshire Hathaway’s many holdings), Facebook, Dixie Cups (a product of Koch Industries), Google, and everyday low prices at Walmart.
“There is a great deal that is wrong with the American economy. There is crony capitalism, subsidies, and favoritism, and advocates of free-market policies should be open about those abuses and rigorous in opposing them. But where our progressive friends are most mistaken is in this: If you want to see what’s wrong with American society, you won’t find the answers on the list of who is rich — you’ll find it in the account of who is poor, how they got that way, and why they stay that way. It isn’t Amazon keeping them down.”
This ‘school walkout’ thing is giving me serious ‘1984’ vibes.
Schools are sanctioning it, so it isn’t actually a walkout. It’s actually students conforming to the government authority by speaking a government-approved opinion in a government-approved venue. And that opinion is that they should have their own rights taken away by the government whose opinion they are expressing.
You have students marching with the sanction of the state to demand less freedom from the state… and everyone is pretending that their doing so is somehow brave and rebellious.
In my high school, the better students, in the two Academic class sections, received instruction in Latin in 9th and 10th grade. Our Latin teacher had a curious personal custom. He sacrificed annually, in honor of Great Caesar, on the Ides of March, the male student in each class who had offended him by doing the least work and/or being the most disruptive. He sacrificed additionally one female student from each class whose selection, I fear, was based only upon his own capricious whim and covert sexual attraction.
The sacrifice consisted of the victim being bent over a desk and receiving three strokes of a paddle, delivered by a six foot+, 250 lb.+ Latin teacher laying on the strokes with a will and putting his weight behind them. (I won’t name him.) Mr. X’s paddle was a four foot long piece of 1 1/2″ thick pine, produced in our high school’s wood shop by General Curriculum students, who did not take Latin, but admired Mr. X. The paddle was roughly in the form of a Roman gladius, and its surface was scored by a series of regular lines, because it was generally believed that a blow from an uneven surface was more painful.
Mr. X had a fixed policy of assigning the duty of construing the day’s Latin assignment on the blackboard in strict and completely predictable order, going up and down the aisles of desks. Two or three of the smart kids would always actually do the Latin, (I was one of them) and it was our recognized duty to supply the translations in advance to the person who would be going to the blackboard.
Readiness to translate correctly was really vital, because Mr. X would apply his dreaded paddle to anyone who failed to write out the day’s assignment correctly on the blackboard. It was rare, but every once in a while some truly feckless idiot would neglect to seek out Kenny Hollenbach, Jack Rigrotsky, or yours truly, and would arrive at the blackboard, chalk in hand, unprepared.
Mr. X typically broke the current paddle over the defaulter’s posterior, and the mental defectives in shop class would gleefully commence the fabrication of a new, yet more elaborate, edition of the famous paddle.
Every March 15th, two 9th and 10th grade Academic Curriculum sections would look on with the same sadistic interest of Roman spectators at the gladitorial games, as Mr. X conducted his sacrifices. I can recall that he struck the pretty strawberry blonde with the well-developed embonpoint so hard that he raised dust from her skirt. We were a bit puzzled that girls actually submitted to being beaten with a paddle for no reason, but all this went on undoubtedly because the legend of Mr. X the fierce disciplinarian had enormous appeal in our local community. The whole thing was fascinating, and it all made such a good story that everyone, student and adult, in his heart of hearts, enthusiastically approved.
Mr. X would never be allowed to get away with that kind of thing today. Alas! In Hades, poor Caesar must do without his sacrifice. And it is my impression that Latin instruction has rather overwhelmingly also become a thing of the past. Kids today learn Spanish. Modern languages are easier and are thought more relevant.
My high school Latin teacher is the large chap wearing glasses. He also coached one of our sports teams.
When Sutyagin began work on his house in 1992, he only intended to build a two-storey structure — larger than those of his neighbors to reflect his position as the city’s richest man. But a trip to see the wooden houses in Japan and Norway convinced him that he had not used roof space efficiently enough and decided to keep building.
“First I added three floors but then the house looked ungainly, like a mushroom,” explained Sutyagin to the Telegraph in 2007. “So I added another and it still didn’t look right so I kept going. What you see today is a happy accident.”
Sutyagin even built a five-storey bath house in the garden, complete with rooms where he could entertain his colleagues from his construction company, and their girlfriends. But before he could complete his dream, Sutyagin was arrested on racketeering charges in 1998 and sent to prison for four years.
When he was released, he discovered that his rivals had robbed him blind, destroyed his equipment, and even threw his five cars into the river. And then his neighbors started complaining about the monstrosity of his house while city authorities pointed out to him that no wooden structure should be higher than two floors, and warned him that fire could cause the whole suburb to go up in flames. Finally in 2008, the court ordered the house to be demolished. Over the following year, the house was pulled down.
[The black academic consultant] found… a long tradition of racism in the magazine’s coverage: in its text, its choice of subjects, and in its famed photography.
Unlike magazines such as Life, “National Geographic did little to push its readers beyond the stereotypes ingrained in white American culture,” Goldberg says, noting that she is the first woman and first Jewish person to helm the magazine – “two groups that also once faced discrimination here.”
All of which strongly suggests that previous hiring policies were a lot wiser and better.
To assess the magazine’s coverage historically, [the racial grievance specialist] delved into old issues and read a couple of key critical studies. He also pored over photographers’ contact sheets, giving him a view of not just the photos that made it into print, but also the decisions that photographers and editors made.
He saw a number of problematic themes emerge.
“The photography, like the articles, didn’t simply emphasize difference, but made difference … very exotic, very strange, and put difference into a hierarchy,” Mason tells NPR. “And that hierarchy was very clear: that the West, and especially the English-speaking world, was at the top of the hierarchy. And black and brown people were somewhere underneath.”
For much of its history, the pages of National Geographic depicted the Western world as dynamic, forward-moving and very rational. Meanwhile, [the professional race warrior complained], “the black and brown world was primitive and backwards and generally unchanging.”
How did the obviously true magically recently become “problematic”?
One trope that he noticed time and again was photographs showing native people apparently fascinated by Westerners’ technology.
“It’s not simply that cameras and jeeps and airplanes are present,” he says. “It’s the people of color looking at this technology in amusement or bewilderment.” The implication was that Western readers would find humor in such fascination with their everyday goods.
Then there’s how the magazine chose its subject matter. Mason explains that National Geographic had an explicit editorial policy of “nothing unpleasant,” so readers rarely saw war, famine or civic conflict.
So the depiction of insufficiently flattering reality in the old days was just plain wrong. People of color, even if living in the Stone Age techologically, ought to have been touched up editorially into sophisticated and superior Wakandas, and the old family magazine ought to have been delivering a steady ration of Marxist agitprop supporting Third World revolutionary movements in every issue. Right!
Left-wing idiots screw up everything they get their hands on. With the old National Geographic transformed into Whining-About-Discrimination-and-Bitching-About-Western-Civilization-While-Arguing-How-Not-Only-Equal-But-Downright-Superior-People-of-Color-Everywhere-Are Geographic, my prediction is that it’s going to be a lot less pleasant to read and circulation is going to tank.
Who the hell wants to read a bunch of Virtue Signalling sermons on Intersectionality and Oppression, the Evils of White Privilege, and the Historical Crimes of Europe and America, while waiting for one’s root canal? That sort of thing simply gratuitously deepens and extends the whole root canal experience.
Google employees eat lubch in Kendall Square Cafeteria, Cambridge, Massachusetts
A long-time Google manager, at Marginal Revolution, describes life at Google, and critiques other major tech companies.
I joined Google [earlier]…as an Engineering Director. This was, as I understand it, soon after an event where Larry either suggested or tried to fire all of the managers, believing they didn’t do much that was productive. (I’d say it was apocryphal but it did get written up in a Doc that had a bunch of Google lore, so it got enough oversight that it was probably at least somewhat accurate.)
At that time people were hammering on the doors trying to get in and some reasonably large subset, carefully vetted with stringent “smart tests†were being let in. The official mantra was, “hire the smartest people and they’ll figure out the right thing to do.†People were generally allowed to sign up for any project that interested them (there was a database where engineers could literally add your name to a project that interested you) and there was quite a bit of encouragement for people to relocate to remote offices. Someone (not Eric, I think it probably was Sergey) proposed opening offices anyplace there were smart people so that we could vacuum them up. Almost anything would be considered as a new project unless it was considered to be “not ambitious enough.†The food was fabulous. Recruiters, reportedly, told people they could work on “anything they wanted to.†There were microkitchens stocked with fabulous treats every 500′ and the toilets were fancy Japanese…uh…auto cleaning and drying types.
And… infrastructure projects and unglamorous projects went wanting for people to work on them. They had a half day meeting to review file system projects because…it turns out that many, many top computer scientists evidently dream of writing their own file systems. The level of entitlement displayed around things like which treats were provided at the microkitchens was…intense. (Later, there was a tragicomic story of when they changed bus schedules so that people couldn’t exploit the kitchens by getting meals for themselves [and family…seen that with my own eyes!] “to go†and take them home with them on the Google Bus — someone actually complained in a company meeting that the new schedules…meant they couldn’t get their meals to go. And they changed the bus schedule back, even though their intent was to reduce the abuse of the free food.)
Now, most of all that came from two sources not exclusively related to the question at hand:
Google (largely Larry I think) was fearless about trying new things. There was a general notion that we were so smart we could figure out a new, better way to do anything. That was really awesome. I’d say, overall, that it mostly didn’t pan out…but it did once in a while and it may well be that just thinking that way made working there so much fun, that it did make an atmosphere where, overall, great things happened.
Google was awash in money and happy to spray it all over its employees. Also awesome, but not something you can generalize for all businesses. Amazon, of course, took a very different tack. (It’s pretty painful to hear the stories in The Everything Store or similar books about the relatively Spartan conditions Amazon maintained. I was the site lead for the Google [xxxx] office for a while and we hired a fair number of Amazon refugees. They were really happy to be in Google, generally…not necessarily to either of our benefit.)
