The Rat's Rules: #3 Never Become Expert at Something You Hate

The Rat's Eye Business Rule #3: I can’t believe I’m finally just now getting around to writing up this “rule”: “Never become expert at something you hate, they’ll make you do it for the rest of your life.” This is something I’ve said for at least 40 years. It’s also something I failed to observe for the overwhelming majority of my life. And it’s not an original idea.

The make-or-break moment, for me, came when I was working for one of the least ethical companies on the planet (outside of the military or military/industrial complex) in 2001 and I was depressed to the point that I could no longer read . . . anything. I had become “expert” at organizing and manipulating data (product failure data, in this case) so that product problems could be identified and fixed. Nothing about this “expertise” appealed to me, but it was specially unappealing in a company that had absolutely no interest in improving product reliability. While I have spent a lot of my life at a keyboard, including writing database code, I don’t have the right kind of obsessions to be good at it; or, more importantly, to like doing it.

That job put me in 4 to 5 hour-long meetings a day and most of what went on in those meetings was political posturing and career positioning. I do not believe meetings of any sort are productive. . . politics in business is just bad management. But the job paid more than $100k/year and that was more money than I ever imagined I would see in any life. I hated the company, I hated the job, I hated myself for working at the company and doing the job. My grandson was the inspiration that tripped my quitting-trigger. I realized that my kids had grown up watching me be a lousy work role mode and, now, my grandson would too. With him for inspiration and several friends for support, I left the big money for the scary world of self-employment and temporary contract work. Worst case, I figured I would burn through my retirement savings in 5 years and have to look for “a real job.” Thirteen years later, I retired without having touched my savings and having added substantially to our retirement security. Best of all, I did not hate any part of the last 17 years of my working life. Sure there were bad days, but there were always great moments and good weeks and memories that I treasure to this day.

A lesson that only came to me in retrospect was that when I was doing work that i liked and, even, loved I didn’t need anyone to “make me do it.” Now, to clean up this Rat Rule, I want to be clear on the fact that nobody but me ever made me do the jobs I didn’t love. I chose to take that route for a variety of ill-conceived reasons. I always had a choice to take jobs that were less secure, didn’t pay as well, required more training and preparation, and/or would have taken more effort on my part to obtain. Always. Nobody every put a gun to my head and said, “Do this shitty job or else.” I always weighed my options and went for security, more money, and something that was familiar (something close to what I was already good at). Always, until 2001.

In 2001, several things ganged up on me to help me break that habit. One, my high paying job was so demoralizing and counter to everything I felt was precious to me that it broke me; literally. Not being able to read was simply one symptom of the major depression that job forced me into. Two, my kids were grown and on their own and no one really needed me to stuff my nose into the grindstone for their survival. We went through some rough economic times between 1968 and 2000 and I often felt that if I slipped off of that treadmill we’d be living under a bridge in a heartbeat. Three, I had the surprisingly good luck to have a friend in high places, Michael McKern the director of Musictech College, who offered me a temporary job helping to build the studios in the school’s new St. Paul location. That took a lot of the risk out of quitting my old job. It wasn’t anything near a replacement for the money I gave up, but it was enough money to keep me going for the interim and it gave me a new mission to focus on.

For me, maybe the mission was the thing that turned “work” into something less onerous. For a decade, I really felt like I was doing something that often contributed to making my student’s lives better and, as a result, the world a better place. The problem with most work is that most of us can’t connect the work to our life’s mission; whatever that may be. Having a mission is probably the most underrated quality of a modern life. Just going to work for the check is demeaning and boring and tends to make humans into machines; not very good machines, either. Machines are predictable, reliable, and unemotional. Humans are none of those things and when they are in a creative, inspiring, motivating environment humans kick machines butts every time.

Looking back at a 55 year work career, I am not one of those people for whom work is a means in itself. I need for my work, the thing that I will spend most of my life doing and most of my time attending to, to be something I believe is worthwhile and useful. Like the mistake I made so many years in pretending that I was made to do unsatisfying work because I was good at it, I have also made the mistake of believing that most people do not need a mission in life. I do believe that the overwhelming majority of people in my culture do not have a work mission and do not know that they need one. In this case, ignorance is fatal to your spirit, soul, consciousness or whatever you call that thing that decides if life is worth living or not. It is also true that the mission some people decide upon can be harmful to the world and their community: racial supremacy, wealth and power at the expense of anyone who gets in the way, experimental technology that risks the environment or life, and the rest of that list. Still, when you look at the people who have taken on harmful missions, you can’t help but be a little impressed with their effectiveness.

Missions are powerful and apathy isn’t. If you want to have a career and a life that you don’t hate, you will have to figure out what your mission is, then you will have to stay on it regardless of how easy doing something else seems. Greg McKeown, in his book Essentialism, said this more rationally than me, "If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will. "

The Rat's Rules #2: When You Know It Is Over

Way back in 2008, I wrote a Geezer with a Grudge rant titled, "A Technological Dead End?" I always intended this essay to be turned into a Rat's Rules for this blog, but because I wrote it once it never made it to the Rat's Eye View. Today, I have fixed that. This is Rat's Rule #2: as a technology approaches terminal, it gets really good.  Then it dies.

All Rights Reserved © 2008 (revised 2012) Thomas W. Day

 

The Rat's Eye Business Rule #2: I have a theory, born from personal experience and lightweight observation of history.  My theory is that as a technology approaches terminal, it gets really good.  Then it dies.  When a new technology is just finding its legs, the technology being replaced makes a wonderful collection of giant leaps; which will fail to stave off obsolescence, even for a moment.  But examining those last moments of declining technological health can be really enlightening.  

I'm not saying this as someone who has been on the leading edge of a technology shift.  In fact, as a mid-tech transient I've been trailing edge for most of my life.  In the mid-1980's, professional analog audio recording gear began to be displaced by digital recording systems.  The last generation of analog recorders were a huge improvement over anything previous technology.  But it was too late: the convenience, cost advantage, signal-to-noise improvement, and trendy-ness of digital wiped out those last moments of glory and hardly anyone even noticed that most of the problems usually associated with recording on analog tape had been minimized.  Today, professional analog recording systems are practically relics and even the simplest personal computer has more editing and playback horsepower than a multi-million-dollar studio from twenty years ago. In my lifetime, I've seen (or am seeing) electronic tubes, analog computers, magnetic data storage, photographic film, visual artist's tools, payphones, cathode ray tubes, analog television, vinyl records and turntables, carburetors, and dual-shock motorcycle suspensions quickly peak and begin the rapid transition from regular use to museums' shelves [2] . 

I was first turned on to this realization when I was a very young man.  When my kids were toddlers, one of our favorite weekend trips was to Minden, Nebraska to visit the Harold Warp Pioneer Village Museum.  The place is stuffed with all kinds of historic tools and toys, from Pony Express relics to railroad history to farm equipment to early internal combustion vehicles. The thing that tripped my trigger was getting a close look at horse-drawn carriages, especially the high-end, luxury models from the turn of the last century.  Just as the first internal combustion vehicles were making horse-drawn transportation obsolete, the last carriages were becoming efficient, comfortable, and sophisticated.  I studied suspension systems that we wouldn't see on cars until fifty years later.  Some of these vehicles had heating systems, evaporation interior cooling, clever convertible tops, interior and exterior lighting, safety equipment, and finish work that made the next half-century of car design look primitive.  Unfortunately, they also had horses providing the horsepower. 

The other sign of impending obsolescence is nostalgia.  This country is currently being decorated with monuments to the Golden Days of Oil.  To anyone with a sense of history, that ought to be a big, red, flashing sign that something is on the downhill slide.  Folks are paying idiotic prices for Gulf, Esso, Kerr-McGee, and Standard Oil memorabilia.  Oil Century Museums are popping up everywhere from California to Tex-ahoma to Florida to New Jersey.  Ohio is home to the "Society for Commercial Archaeology."  And, of course, we have wads of motorcycle museums littering the country side.  On my last long Midwestern bike trip, I counted ads for half-dozen Harley/Indian museums before they began to fade into the fast food, antique store, and hotel signs. The last couple of decades witnessed a giant blast of the past as Boomers tried to revive their youth with muscle cars and 1950s-styled big twins.  That fad won't last much longer, because Boomers are soon going to be looking for their next hipster thing in prosthetic hips (like mine) and electric wheelchairs. 

Watching what's going on in our culture makes me suspect that we're about to see our beloved internal combustion engine technology vanish.  I don't know if you've noticed, but internal combustion engines have become trailing-edge technology, almost overnight.  There are alternative transportation systems on our highways and all over the rest of the world.  At the same time the technology designed into internal combustion-powered cars and, especially, motorcycles has become absolutely incredible.  The performance, reliability, and even the sound of modern motorcycles has been tweaked to the nth degree.  The only thing that's been stubbornly ignored is energy efficiency and that's probably the only characteristic that really matters in the twenty-first century.

In (2007) end-of-year issue, the relatively conservative Motorcycle Consumer News published their "Performance Index" for the current generation of motorcycles. In a summary, they listed the following most important performance categories: ten best 1/4 mile times, ten best rear-wheel HP, ten best power-to-weight rations, ten best top speeds, ten best rear-wheel torque, and ten best 60-0 stops. All but one of those measurements are, essentially, the same sort of 1950's information; power.

Most likely, the only modern statistic included in the data provided would be "average fuel mileage." By this standard, the 2006 Kawasaki Ninja 650R was the winner at 65.3mpg (the 2007 version was 10mpg less fuel efficient), followed by the Ninja 500 (64mpg), and Honda's Rebel 250 (62.6mpg). The Victory 8-Ball at 29.8mpg was the fuel guzzling loser. My daughter's 1991 Geo got better mileage than more than half of the motorcycles MCN rated. From occasional long ride experiences with folks on liter sportbikes, my own calculations estimate that MCN was optimistic about the efficiency of most of the bikes they rated. I wouldn't be surprised at less than 20mpg performance from many of those street legal race bikes. (The new Honda NC700X has upped the game a bit, but I think it's too little, too late.)

While those performance-based qualities are being fine-tuned, the world's oil consumption has rapidly passed world oil production.  Sometime in the last five years, oil demand whipped around oil production capacity and the world's economies will either shift away from burning petroleum or suffer the consequences.  Some experts claim that 2005 was the whipping point; the last year of "cheap oil" and that we're on the downhill slide where production will get further from meeting demand every year.[1]  In 1999, the uber-conservative, alternative-technology-spurning oilman Dick Cheney was one of those "experts" warning that the age of oil is about done.  Cheney told other oil execs, back then, that the reason oil companies weren't building new refining plants was that investment would be putting good money after bad.  We have more than enough oil processing equipment, we don't have much oil left to process.  Some folks estimate that in as little as two or three years, it may cost $100 to fill a compact car's tank.  Filling a bike's tank will be pretty close to half that and it's going to be more expensive every year afterwards.

Let's get real.  A 250hp, liter bike that burns 15-20 mpg is going to be a pretty worthless piece of history when gas costs four to ten times what it costs today.  Everything we use, do, and consume, will be incredibly more expensive when oil bumps against the predicted 2025 $400 per barrel.  If we humans are lucky and put some planning and a lot of resources into the next few years, we might be converting to hydrogen cell vehicles or some other petroleum-less fuel about the time the old technology becomes impractical.  I like to imagine that motorcycles, with their inherent energy efficiency and other advantages will be part of that change.  I'm sure horse lovers hoped horses would find a place in the modern transportation scheme, back in 1906.  Who knows, maybe horses will make a comeback?

Personally, I'm feeling a little nostalgic today, while the majority of Americans appear to be clueless about the future of our energy-dependent systems.  As an example, the dim-bulbs in St. Paul are widening freeways, planning communities that are further than ever from necessary services and employment, and designing government buildings that depend on energy systems that will be disappearing about the time those facilities are put into service.  My sentiments, inspired by that irresponsible bureaucratic inattention to reality, is considerably less upbeat.  Their behavior is more evidence that we always get the government we deserve, just like every other country in the world. 

While there appears to be a fair amount of thought going into replacing the power plant under the hoods of our cars, for a while it looked like that wouldn't be happening for two-wheeled vehicles.  Zero Motorcycles and Brammo have changed all that.  Zero Motorcycle's new Z-Force^tm power pack is pushing electric motorcycle technology fast into the new Green Age. With a 100 mile range, an 88mph top speed, and 3,000 charge cycles (a 300,000 mile battery life), Zero's bikes are beginning to warrant their price premium. Hayes' diesel-powered bike is another cool thing.  A hydrogen-powered turbo sportbike would be beyond hip.

Knowing that this oil barrel is more than half-empty with a rust hole in the bottom has forced me to suspect that the world I lived in is vanishing.  I'm trying not to sound like a reformed whore, but it's hard for me to pretend to any other pose.  I am from a generation that burned gas for almost nothing but recreational uses.  I can "brag" that I sometimes rode my Kawasaki Bighorn, Rickman 125 ISDT, or even the Harley Sprint to the racetrack, took off the street hardware, raced the bike, and, after reinstalling lights and crap, rode back home.  I guess that's something.  But I also trailered, trucked, and station-wagoned bikes to races, took long mind-altering rides in the country, and practiced racing on all sorts of surfaces.  Today, those leisurely rides through the country side feel a bit like immature, excessive exercises in selfishness; and I'm missing them before I've given up doing them.  I know that every drop of oil that I waste is coming out of my children and grandchildren's heritage and I'm becoming more than a little ashamed of the oil I wasted before I knew better.  The days of getting together with a few dozen friends to explore backroads and hang out in the twisties are fading.  I think sports like motocross, road racing, and all of the fun we have had aimlessly and recreation-ally burning fuel are also coming to a sooner-than-you-think end.  Between declining resources and world-wide pollution and global heating catastrophes, it appears that we have hung on to these carbon-burning handlebars a little too long.

I'm not celebrating this.  I'm not gloating or saying "I told you so" while I write this.  I lived in a gloriously ignorant, greedy, selfish time and it was an incredibly fun period in human history.  I wish I could pass it on to my children and, especially, my grandson.  If we're truly a civilization worth saving, we'll find a way to make a world our kids can enjoy.  If we don't, we deserve any misery we receive. 

---

[1] A depressing, but complete site for all sorts of links to information about the coming energy crisis is http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/.
[2] Paul Young added this note to my list of vanishing technologies from my own lifetime: "One of the guys I work with had his 11 year old son come up to him and ask 'Have you ever heard of something called a landline?' Something else to add to your list of disappearing technology. "

The End of The Rat’s Eye View

For all I know I’m dead now.

I expected to be dead in 1978, so having survived this long (7/19/2013 as of this writing) has been unexpected, sort of amazing, a little disappointing, and definitely surprising. Way back in May of 2013, my wife, Robbye Elvy, and I decided we were going to spend at least a year on the road. That meant my Comcast account would close and I’d lose my old RatsEyeView.com (some Chicago yuppie asshole owns this one now) and http://home.comcast.net/~ratseyeview/ websites. No point in paying for the first, since it was never seen by many readers, and the second would just die because Comcast no longer provides webspace for new subscribers and, if we came back to Minnesota, I’d be “new” and website-less.

So, I decided to move all of my old Rat Rants to Google Blogger and schedule them for one release a week until I ran out of old material. New material would just get slipped into the mix when the inspiration came. And now we are at the end.

Rat Links

When I started The Rat’s Eye View in 1, I had a mission. That mission shifted on me more than a few times. Looking through the pages of that seldom read website, I found a few things I decided I want to continue in some fashion, like my Links:

Business Stuff

• Don Lancaster's Incredible Secret Money Machine Lancaster and his book, The Incredible Secret Money Machine, are benchmarks in the available information for small business owners.  Lancaster was a hero of mine at the beginning of my technical career for his Cookbook Series with Sam's Electronic Books.  The Secret Money Machine just solidified his value to me. Harvard and the other MBA-clone manufacturing sites are decades behind what Lancaster told us 30 years ago. 
• Dr. Zimmerman's Tuesday Tips Not always useful, but often, at least, interesting. 

Political Stuff

• BBC NEWS | Programmes/Newsnight For what's left of English-speaking MSM news, the BBC is it. This international news source is not available anywhere in the US, other than through the Internet. Not on a cable channel, not anywhere. That is freakin' scary, since the Brits are supposed to be one of our few actual remaining allies.
• Arabesque: 9/11 Truth It's hard to find anything remotely honest about the events leading to the Saudi attacks on New York and Washington D.C. and even harder to find real information about the cover-up that followed, but this site provides the kind of information that a real national media would be all over if the media wasn't part of the problem.
• Brill's Content (commentary and criticism on the media, this is a lot more interesting than it sounds)
• Capital Hill Blue Doug is inconsistently good, but always informative. This website has probably broken more major Washington stories than all of the other news sources in the nation.
• Common Dreams - "Breaking News and Views for the Progressive Community"; enough said.
• Jim Hightower - America's #1 Populist One of G.W.'s first political victims. Hightower is, possibly, the sole reason why Texas should be allowed to remain in the Union when the revolution comes.
• Michael Moore Yeah, that Michael Moore. Inconsistent, but often courageous. What more do you expect from your news?
• t r u t h o u t News Politics One of the only actual news sources left in these United States. t r u t h o u t is an incredible source of news, opinion, and facts that the MSM chooses to ignore because they don't promote the corporate fascist point of view. The fact that so much of what is found on this website never makes it to the news is a national embarassment.
• Think Progress Another great investigative news source.
• Yahoo/IOpEd Richard Reeves Editorials (Richard is a radical progressive who writes what he sees.)
• Yahoo/IOpEd Ted Rall Editorials (Rall is another radical progressive who's mother must be really concerned for his health in this "conservative," right-wing, neo-Nazi political environment.)
• Beyond Oil It isn't being regularly maintained, but Kenneth Deffeyes' website (intended to promote his book, Beyond Oil) is often a source of useful insight regarding current events and their relationship to energy.

Cool Stuff

• Craig's Minneapolis List Craig's List is destroying the profit margins of MSM newspapers all across the nation. Good for them.
• H. L. Mencken - Quotes and Quotations This is a fine source of what never fails to be ageless wisdom.
• Mr. Cranky, the ultimate movie reviewer (a man after my own heart)
• The Frank Church Papers The man who actually ended the Vietnam War by removing Nixon's access to money. An American hero.
• The Recycler (a Southern California classic, a place to buy anything)
• Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Everything you need to know about most things.

#84 Restructuring the Rat (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Another half year has gone by and I've written damn little in this journal.  It's not that I haven't had lots of ideas and tons of material.  It's an election year and I'm part-time employed.  Those two activities alone are enough to start me ranting endlessly.  But I managed to create a monster, a maintenance monster, with the structure of the Rat's Eye View webpage and finally it killed off my desire to write these things.  In a fit of inspiration, I completely restructured the website into my version of a blog journal.  No more "This Week's Rant" page.  Everything gets dumped into the current year's list of babble.  No more snazzy index that allows readers and website search engines to find a particular rant about a specific subject.  Every damn thing I've written is going to be dumped into annual files.  The newest stuff is on the top of the page, the old crap is at the bottom.  If I had a readership, I'd be concerned that I've managed to lose their historical interest.  I don't, so I'm just doing this make life easy for myself.  And, after all, that's what really matters, isn't it?

My hope Is that I'll write a lot more because of this easier, less accessible structure.  I've thrown readership counters on each of the annual pages, which will give me some idea if any of you are out there reading what I write . 

I write a column for local motorcycle magazine, called "Geezer with a grudge." the idea behind that column is that I write something that pisses off the magazine's readers, they write a nasty letter to the editor , if they write often enough, the editor has evidence that there are a lot of readers out there in magazine land, and he can justify his ad rates.  The page counters are doing the same job for me.  I'm not writing this drivel for my health.  At least, I'm not posting it to a webpage for that purpose .  I created these web pages in the hopes that either attract a readership.  So far, that experiment has been a dismal failure, but I've written about one million bytes of text in the effort.  As a writing experiment, I can't call it worthless.  As a self-promotion experiment, it hasn't been worth much, though. 

June 2004

#15 Athletes as Executives (1998)

All Rights Reserved © 1998 Thomas W. Day
The baseball strike of 1994 and beyond, the expressed shock at Reggie Lewis’ supposed drug use, and the regular athletes-are-bad-guys editorializing in our local newspapers has made me reconsider what athletes are to our culture.  Doing that made me realize that athletes have been raised above the standard we require for government officials, corporate executives, professionals such as lawyers and doctors, and even coaches.  I guess this is one more sign that our country’s priorities are so screwed up that even sports no longer make sense.
I guess this resorting of occupational importance occurred because salaries for athletes are so widely known and so incredibly large.  The big money part applies to  a whole category of people who’s performance is a lot more important to the country, but we don’t hear about the money they make through the daily papers and television. 
Face it, if a basketball player gets paid a few million as one member of a dozen person team, it’s pretty obvious—even to a half-bright sportswriter—that the team owner is raking in a whole lot more money for that investment.  That is, simply, how business works.  But you never see sportswriters criticize owners for being overpaid, under motivated, and under talented.  Anyone who has looked closely at the problems in American business knows that the source of our market failures is consistently a management failure.  Why would a sports team’s failures be any different? 
At the top end of American business, we’ve had a collection of executive goofballs expose their ignorance and incompetence on a constant basis, but how often does a local newspaper or television station run an expose on those bozos?  Next to never, unless they rake off a few billion in a local savings and loan and the Feds are hauling them to jail.  The press doesn’t usually catch that until the company PR spokesperson issues a “we are not idiots and/or crooks” press release.  What kind of outrage do you think the press would express if a Fortune 500 executive spent a few months drying out with Betty Ford?  It happens all the time and the press says nothing, even though these people are responsible for thousands of jobs and millions of dollars.  The standard simply isn’t the same and you have to wonder “why?”
Athletes don’t get any kind of consideration for privacy or, even, humanity.  For one, they aren’t from the ruling class.  They are working class, for the most part, who make ruling class salaries.  Apparently, that salary covers a lot more than payment for athletic performance.  Judging by the standards sportswriters seem to hold for athletes, their salaries include an obligation to assure sportswriters with employment.  Athletes may also be our middle class frustration scapegoat.  The ruling class has always done its best to find us someone to point fingers at, other than themselves, so that they can avoid making a cultural contribution equal to the wealth they extract from the culture and the middle class. 
Athletes deserve some of this attention.  They are instantly rich, nearly the moment after leaving college.  Many of these instant millionaires never prove to be worth a small portion of their guaranteed income.  Even those who make valuable contributions to their teams and sport are more profitable than most small to medium sized businesses.  The typical first round draft choice will make more money in his first year of full time employment than most of us will earn in our lifetimes.  That has to create some resentment among the working class. 
But that is no different than the children of the ruling class.  They often inherit the equivalent of the lifetime earnings of a pro athlete superstar, without ever lifting a finger.  They can control incredible assets without ever knowing the slightest thing about the businesses they manipulate.  Thousands of lives can hinge on their spoiled brat whims.  Stock markets can rise and fall from the maneuverings of their portfolio managers.  And their personal habits are completely out of the realm of public inspection.  Their business transactions are never disclosed by the media.  Somehow, they completely escape the attention given to a first round draft choice, who at the very least is among the 1,000 most talented people in the country in his sport.  Why is that?  I really want to know.
April 1998

You Are Here

#2 The Rights of Bums (1998)

All Rights Reserved © 1998 Thomas W. Day
A couple of years ago, during an attempt to purchase a home in Minnesota, I have learned a lot about the direction of the legal system.  I’ve learned, for instance, that the “rights” of the irresponsible will almost always override the rights of the responsible.  It is incredible that citizens know so little about the multitude of protections there are for those who refuse to pay their bills.  I suspect that if these laws were more common knowledge almost all of us would chose to be deadbeats. 
I suspect it’s more a matter of the general poor state of management, than a conscious direction our culture has chosen.  I doubt that we, as a nation, would knowingly chose to allow people the right to refuse payment on all manner of goods and services and still expect to receive any of those products unimpeded.  While there is a certain belief in the myth of “the free lunch” running through this country, most of us know it really doesn’t exist.  However, our laws don’t support that knowledge.
Let me give you a few examples of how idiotic our “bum protection” laws have become.  A person can expect to live for at least a year in a home for which that person makes absolutely no payment of any sort.  Mortgage companies will always allow a freeloader at least a year in which to come up with a single mortgage payment, before they consider evicting the bum.  Utility companies are equally hamstrung.  If a resident chooses to ignore notices of non-payment, utility companies are unable to either shut off the service or force payment through any means for at least a year of non-payment. 
Now you have to intelligent enough to know who makes up for those deadbeats.  The cost of freeloaders is simply added to the bottom line of the cost of doing business and is passed on to those of us who are idiotic enough to think we have to pay our bills.  The power company doesn’t lose any money.  The mortgage companies don’t go broke.  The garbage still gets picked up and the sewers still drain into our lakes and streams.  Those companies and organizations just add the cost of deadbeats to what the rest of us pay. 
The “no free lunch” concept only applies to those who don’t expect a free lunch.  If you are mentally able to cope with being a deadbeat, you can make a pretty nice living from handouts. 
And you can expect sympathy from a significant portion of the federal and state government for accepting that support.  At first glance, it might not make sense that government employees would want to work against the interest of tax and bill payers.  That’s a fairly superficial analysis, though.  Government employees have a vested interest in protecting deadbeats.  If it weren’t for slackers, we wouldn't have a lot of need for a significant portion of our current government.  If all government did was regulate trade and provide for national defense, we could eliminate considerably more than half of our current federal and state payroll.  Of course, that would put an incredible number of unemployable deadbeats out in the street which would probably start the whole cycle over again. 
January 1998

No Stupid Zone? Look in a Mirror.

These douchebags, http://ratseyeview.com/, bought the "rights" to my original "Rat's Eye View" domain and are pretending they are the "No Stupid Zone." If they are so bright, you'd think they could come up with their own website ID. Fuckin' morons.

"The Rat’s Nest is where Nesters meet to talk about Chicago sports, news, and politics as well as national events and more! Fatrats writes his colorful “Ratitorials” two to three times a week, and we’ll also bring you interesting and fun videos, pictures, jokes and other pieces of interest. If you’re looking for a (slightly?) opinionated view of the news told in a no-holds-barred way in the “No Stupid Zone”, check back daily!"

Sports? For starters, they're talking about the dumbest conversation material in modern history. As for politics, they're wingnuts, so stupid is what they specialize in.

So far, this douche has pissed all over the Rat's Eye View concept. Who knows? Maybe when pigs fuck dogs something good can come from it, but I doubt it.

#1 How I Came to Love Promiscuous Movies (1998)

  All Rights Reserved © 1998 Thomas W. Day
(Author's historical note: The original title of the newsletter was "Things I Don't Understand." This is the one and only article shipped under that title.)

A few mornings ago, on a local talk radio show, a local nutball religious wacko was babbling to a local, equally wacko, talk-jock about the Disney boycott. The fundamentalist line of propaganda was about how Disney hides its "promiscuous movies" in affiliate production companies like Miramax. And how we ought to avoid those movies, and all of Disney's movies, because they were "promiscuous."
The main gist of their babble was that all of the decent people of the world ought to avoid brain-dead, pitiful excuses-for-remakes-of-literature movies like "The Lion King," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," and "Anastasia" (better known as "Anesthetic," staring Barbie and Ken as themselves) until Disney stops making those other "promiscuous movies." I'm all for avoiding bad movies; which pretty much means I don't go to movies very often. I think we all should get a life and stay away from any movie written by an MBA or a similar brain-dead Spielberg-clone.
But all the philosophical stuff aside, I want to know about these "promiscuous movies?" Back when I was working in the "entertainment industry" I never suspected that all those film cans, stacked on top of each other in storage, could be doing anything animate. If movies are promiscuous, do they also reproduce? I wouldn't like to think these two illiterates were using the word, "promiscuous," when they didn't know what it means.
My buddy, Webster, defines "promiscuous" as:

1. composed of all sorts of persons or things
2. not restricted to one class, sort, or person : INDISCRIMINATE <education... cheapened through the promiscuous distribution of diplomas --Norman Cousins>
3. not restricted to one sexual partner
4. CASUAL, IRREGULAR <promiscuous eating habits>

I'm not sure I want to restrict movies about "all sorts of persons or things." I kind of like multiple plot movies. I really like movies with lots of scenery. I like movies that depict realism. Movies, were the actors don't appear to be "casual" or realistic, generally get classified as being amateur. The more I think of it, the more I'm convinced that any movie that doesn't have some promiscuous characteristics is going to be really boring.
I know this doofus was trying to imply that movies containing sexual activity are his focus, but, if that's really true, why did he pick a word that means something a lot different? What is he really trying to ban? I'd guess Webster's definition of "promiscuous" is exactly this fundamentalist's definition. Substitute "fun," "interesting," "realistic," and non-whitebread for "promiscuous" and you'll know just what these zoned-out, simple-parts-of-the-bible-thumping, God-speaks-to-me-and-you'd-better-listen types wants to abolish. If the thumpers and the politically correctors ever get together to pass laws for the rest of us, you're going to see a promiscuous assortment of bell tower snipers sending a promiscuous collection of bullets towards a promiscuous bunch of bystanders. And we'll all be right there to watch, because live-action promiscuous violence will be the only source of entertainment available.
January 1998
Author's Note: Yep, by the second column, I changed the name. A "friend" took great joy in telling me that the list of "things I don't understand" would take far too long to, even, imagine. After suffering a two hour company meeting this morning, The above title seemed a lot more appropriate, anyway. As always, the rats are winning but I'm not even in the race.

Recycling Rat Rants

Way back in 1998, I started writing Rat Rants. The first one was called, "How I Came to Love Promiscuous Movies." That was so long ago I can't even remember the inspiration that convinced me I could/should write about politics, business, religion, and human nature. Hell, I don't even like humans, so why I decided to write about them is beyond my current imagination.

However, in the near future I'm going to lose my Comcast website. When that happens all of the Rat's Eye imitators and outright thieves (http://ratseyeview.com/,http://www.flickr.com/groups/15452323@N00/, http://www.kogeto.com/dotspots/S44RBSGKU617#.UaiZm4ko50s, http://www.zackmoir.com/?p=155, https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tower-Tribes-a-Rats-Eye-View-the-Prologue/182731025164944, http://johnkoessler.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/a-rats-eye-view/, http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2191673/1/Rat-s-Eye-View, and the rest of the crap you will find if you Google "Rat's Eye View") will be able to claim the creation of this moronic concept. When I first named my AT&T Blog (long since dead) "The Rat's Eye View," It was a play on "bird's eye view." Today, we're all rats, except for the 1%, and we seem to be proud of the fact. When the Comcast webpage vanishes, that will be the end of me and the Rat's Eye View . . . . unless. . . .

Here's the "unless." I'm going to repost every one of my pissed-off, half-baked, rants from the past starting with #1 and going to the end, when ever that is, once a week on this blog for however long it takes. You'll know you're looking an old rant when you see the number (pound sign, #) at the title and if you see the Rat's Eye View logo at the top of the page.