Hear hear!

I wonder what makes people be this stupidly ineffective.

I've noticed that people that go to school just to become managers tended to be this bad, as they have no fucking clue how anything functions outside of excel, powerpoint and meetings. But also corporate suck-ups promoted from the ranks without management education. Anecdotally it seems their management education then becomes a crash course of reading management self-help books, which are written primarily by the first type of shitty manager who have failed at corporate life.

None of this is helped if there are idiotic corporate policies forcing high turnover if revenues don't increase every quarter until the heat death of the universe. This system rewards and retains the worst types of people and slowly eats away at well-functioning operation with a million small cuts.

Yeah, I had one of those guys at my job. He even admitted the system was broken. But he also said he was there to pay his bills so if he had to fuck us he would. He wouldn't hesitate. Because at the end of the day you kind of just have to throw your sentimentality to the side and get things done because 'you got your own'. Not his exact words but close enough.

And he would always wonder aloud why people didn't like him. Like it hurt him that people were agitated in his presence. It's like gee, maybe it has something to do with your Carter Burke act?
"You don't see them fucking each over for a percentage!"

Voltair's Bastard's by John Ralston-Saul is a treatise on what makes people this stupid.

Voltaire's Bastards is totally worth reading, but his thesis (that Rousseau Romanticism is somehow superior to Voltairean Technocracy) is fundamentally flawed by the passage of time. We're seeing this intense nouveau-Romanticism with the Trump Administration, this concept that one man can beat back the tide of progress if only everybody steps back to let him, and it's clearly no better and observably worse than Obama's Technocratic tendencies.

People are like this because they've been trained nearly from birth to be just stupid enough to follow orders and consume. Backbone of the economy.

I'll revisit Voltaire's Bastards, perhaps I'm wrong, but my reading was that Ralston-Saul was providing a Foucauldian (genealogical) type critique of how people use reason to systematize certain functions to produce certain desirable ends and then put the cart before the horse and see the systematization as the end.

Funny thing about the learned obedient stupidity, it's really surreal to see the recent bewilderment and hostility from the old guard about millennial workers expecting higher pay, better benefits, work/life balance and to be treated as 'special snowflakes' (i.e., humans) instead of as a number on a ledger.

These people have either accepted or are trying to perpetuate an idea that the role of everyone bellow the ruling elite class must accept a life of meager servitude and BE THANKFUL FOR IT BECAUSE I HAVE A BINDER FULL OF DREGS THAT CAN REPLACE YOU IN A HEARTBEAT!!!

Yeah, my aunt who's otherwise a lovely person is downright vindictive to the 20-somethings at her work. It's weird to see.

I'm halfway through reading a book about this phenomenon: Bullshit Jobs by Device Graeber. It's a bit uneven but there's some good stuff in there.

God, how many of us are there?

Yoooooooooo!

We should all go drinking sometime.

Dude let's do it, do you hang near the Bay Area anytime? Holla at me!

Weird, he never looked that tall on TV but I guess that's what happens when you're in an ensemble cast with Bill Nye.