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December
09
2022
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Your Government No Longer Values Competence
Take a look at the recent incident with our "nuclear waste person" allegedly caught stealing a piece of luggage. You have to be out of your mind to do something like that. There isn't an "innocent explanation" for it, nor one that meets the basic test of logic. It has been reported that the person in question didn't even check a bag, so there was no reason for them to be in the claim area to begin with. Supposedly said person has degrees in the nuclear field from MIT. Is the degree worth anything and was it actually earned? 30, 40, 50 years ago we wouldn't have a reason to ask that question but today we do because colleges teach classes on "gender studies" and "whiteness as a disease", along with similar rot, and admit people not based on their aptitude but also based on various "diversity" checkboxes, whether it be race or something else. This was bad back in the 1990s when I was running MCSNet and had people come apply to my firm for a job as students at UofC who couldn't manage to do four-function arithmetic on a piece of paper or write a basic business letter! The majority failed at both tasks which I required to get an interview; the requirement was put in because if you couldn't do those two things, both of which you should have to demonstrate to graduate from High School you couldn't successfully communicate to a customer that they had to pay their bill to get service restored or make change for a $20 if they came in to pay in person! We put men on the moon multiple times in rockets designed by men using nothing more than a slide rule, pencil and paper for their calculations and drawings. Said devices worked. Today the average college graduate appears to be unable to make change for a $20 without the computerized cash register telling them how much it is! Bob Iger is back as CEO of Disney, which has seen its stock price collapse. Meanwhile the price of admission to the parks has skyrocketed. What are you getting for the money and why is it that ever-increasing cost to the customer hasn't translated into ever-increasing EPS? That's obvious: The firm is bleeding money out of severed-arterial size holes. Iger claims he will "quiet down" the culture war controversies. Uh huh. Sure he will. Disney used to be the family-friendly company -- meaning parents with kids -- in all respects: Movies, theme parks, merchandise, etc. Like it or not 95% of the families are in fact one man and one woman raising some number of children even though in today's world many of those couples do not remain together through that full 18+ year journey. If you as a corporation cater to the 5% who include the small minorityof two dudes with an adopted or foster child you******off the 95% of the married, heterosexual couples with kids who have no desire to have their children consider that "normal" and trying to force that into said children's minds is going to drive the parents away. Disney never put such content into its movies and similar production until fairly recently and its not because Disney "hated" said people: Its because they knew damn well that if you start playing "drag queen story hour" with your movies heterosexual married couples with children will think you're nuts, they do not want their children exposed to that and they won't spend money on your products and services where it is present. Yes, its true that larger numbers of people consider this sort of thing "ok" today compared with 20, 30 or 50 years ago. It doesn't matter except to a minor degree; you're still going to******off the majority of the families. Never mind Disney outsourcing virtually its entire IT department to either overseas locations or firing Americans and replacing them with H1b people, both of which were hired not for competence but rather because they checked a box -- in this case, they were cheaper. If you allow a firm's employees to "express themselves" in the products and services offered you get whatever you hired and if said people were hired not with the first, second, third and all checkboxes being only competence but because you had some "DIE" goals in mind you now either must ban all such expression by the firm or you will******off the majority of your potential customers. Next up: ***** shots. The legal standard for an "immunization" is that it must be at least 50% effective at preventing contracting said disease. This is long-standing law in the United States. The jabs were claimed to be nearly 100% effective, and this was a lie. Was it an intentional lie or simply "do it fast, who cares if we're lying!" sort of lie? I don't know but what I do know is that basically every public company and government agency now hires based not on competence only but with its finger on the scale based on the number of checkboxes you can tick, none of which have anything to do with your skill in-field. Since it is now admitted that the shots are not in compliance with the legally-mandated minimum requirements and very rapidly fall below those minimums for effectiveness has our government forced their withdrawal? Nope. Leaving safety issues aside the effectiveness requirements are not suggestions, they are requirements. So where's the government action to force them off the market and stop jabbing people with them? Are there any competent individuals at the FDA or were they all hired based on the color of their hair or a "non-binary" gender claim? And by the way, would you mind explaining how being "gender-queer" factors into whether you can do the statistical math required to figure out whether a serious safety signal exists? Did we not learn that letting private actors perform these tasks and pinky-promise all was ok was stupid when Boeing did exactly that with MCAS and the result was two lawn-darts? Twitter is a prime example in the private sector of proved worthless hired staff in size. Elon Musk buys the company and almost-immediately fires more than half the workforce. If the people "working" there were actually producing something valuable the firm couldn't have possibly operated for more than a few days. Its been a month. Where's the collapse? That it didn't happen is proof that the majority of Twitter's former employees, perhaps nearly all of them, were hired either without a care in the world whether they could or did produce anything and once hired they were retained even though they in fact produced little or nothing of value, or worse, had negative value. I couldn't have fired 10 or 20% of the people who worked at MCSNet without having severe and immediate consequences, and the few times I had to fire people for cause as they were disrupting things, a couple of times on a "more than one-off" basis, it was a severely disruptive event that generated my having to work 20 hour days to get through what I voluntarily took on by doing it. You try like Hell as a CEO to never have to do that but sometimes you must -- and when you do its "all hands on deck" until you can find and acquire competent people to take those places, because you hired people who actually did the job in the first place and cutting them, while it might be necessary, is going to hurt. THIS DID NOT HURT therefore those people weren't hired for the capability to do whatever their job was, whether its coding, customer support or cleaning the toilets. This is not in "one department" or "one company" across America -- its everywhere. People pulling down salaries not based on their competence and work ethic but rather because they check some number of boxes that have nothing to do with job performance. How much of our economy is predicated on this nonsense? How many people does your local hospital actually need to perform the task of removing a bullet from you after being shot and sewing up the damage and how many people does it employ who have as their greatest "asset" whether they check one or more of those boxes? Certainly you need people in any firm that perform all manner of tasks but are you paying them in return for the actual task performed in a competent manner or are you paying them because they claim to be a woman yet they in fact have a sausage and two peanuts between their legs? At MCSNet I did not care what race, color, creed, origin, sexual preference or any other box you might check. I hired, fired and promoted based on personal competence to perform the job and nothing else. No other factor went on the scale -- ever. But if you brought any of that into the workplace and tried to express it as part of the "corporate culture" you were going to get fired -- every time, no matter what it was, and if you tried to organize that crap within the workforce everyone involved got fired. MCSNet operated for the express purpose of providing Internet Services. That's it. We didn't care if you were black, white, brown, gray or Martian. I didn't care who you slept with or what ever else you might do on your own time but that was not part of the firm's purpose and promoting any of it, no matter how mainstream or otherwise it might be, wasn't part of the company's mission statement and thus I never let it happen. Why not? Because doing so both diluted the effectiveness of the people who were working, which would drop directly to the bottom line, and in addition was guaranteed to******off some subset of the customer base at the same time it appealed to some other subset. It seemed that every few weeks some pressure group of this sort or that wanted something and every single one of them got the same answer: NO. We're in a lot of trouble in this country folks, and a huge part of why is found right here.
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Neither does Disney, nor many if not most other large corporations.
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