I know how it is out there. They were running companies off after one of the last big storms that tore everything up. They were crying about not having enough workers to fix all the damage while literally meeting out of state crews who came to help at the airport and telling them to go back home. We couldn't even get a permit to work on a non union telecom project out in Virginia, though they kept the $100 application fee.
Union's are an interesting issue. The problem is that they are composed of people who due to the nature of their job have 0 individual leverage, so they unionize to gain some degree of power.
I don't think unions are broken in-and-of themselves, the problem is when they collude with government to become a defect monopoly. If unions were put into a position where they had to provide value, for example the union would guarantee trained employees who actually show up consistently in return for good contract terms, that would make sense.
The problem isn't unions, it's the laws that give unions insane power above and beyond any other staffing agency.
The problem is that they are composed of people who due to the nature of their job have 0 individual leverage, so they unionize to gain some degree of power.
A small error here. Unions are composed of low influence people, but they aren't precisely the ones who do the unionizing. The instigators of unions are usually a small group of people seeking political power who go around trying to pull all the low influence people together.
My point is that unions are not a spontaneously emergent phenomenon. They are just another type of political power structure pretending to be grassroots and egalitarian. In this way, unions are particular form of communism.
Even without the anti-commie stance. The unions, like any organization, eventually becomes about it's own survival instead of its original purpose. People get cushy jobs and don't want to lose them.
I agree. The problem is not unions per say but rather the mega unions. Unions should not be bigger than the companies their members are employee's of.
The United States needs to limit the size of unions to the firm they are employed with. No United Steel Worker's Union but if the workers desire have a U.S. Steel Union and a Nucor Union. Aboloish mega unions.
In addition They need to ban political contributions from unions to politicians. Any given company has people from all political walks of life. Democrats work for Republicans and vice versa all across America. There is also a spattering of Libertarians in the mix. The problem though is that unions use members' dues to support politicians that that individual may not necessarily agree with. If I am a Republican, why is 2% of my wages going to support a Democrat? Democrat workers would be justified in having the same outrage if their hard earned dollars were used to support politicians they don't like. Solution? Ban contributions.
Now there is an argument that Unions need to be able to contribute in order to compete with the companies who give political contributions. OK lets ban corporate donations as well. Only individual flesh and blood human beings can contribute.
Yeah, scale is definitely an issue. It's like how communism can work on a limited basis in a small group where everyone knows each other, but in reality, it's used as a tool for exploitation and power consolidation.
What fucking world am I in. Are you nutjobs in the right place. Unions are a 100% communist construct. Look into their foundation. They are the most disgusting criminal enterprises on the planet top to bottom. No exceptions. Their leaders are thugs and their members are thugs.
The fact that we have so called conservatives on here who do not know the history of unions spouting off about them actually being a valid idea is fucking terrifying.
Of course. Just like colleges and the mainstream media. Leftist infiltration has perverted almost all institutional power structures in America. It's sickening.
No, your missing the point. Unions were part of the communist infiltration. Communists never infiltrated the union, the union was founded by communists in the first place.
I found that to be an incredibly foolish sentiment myself especially since only 27 states in America are right to work states. So for example in Ohio (not a right to work state) anyone that wants to work in manufacturing basically has to join a union in order to earn a living. I would agree that the union bosses by-in-large are thuggish but the everyday guy working on the line? Yeah, not so much.
Want me to start posting videos of union violence? Makes Antifa look like well Antifa, but I have experienced it first hand during "contract negotiations" and strikes. I am glad to have any Trump supporter, but anyone who is pro Union is not on the right.
Rewind the clock fifty or so years and go be a long shoreman. Your union decides that it is time to strike and you do so. You are out on the picket line. Your cupboard is getting pretty empty but you continue to ration your family while you strike.
Do you know who is not on the picket line and not rationing food? The union boss. He is dining nightly at a restaurant.
Every organization reflects the morality of its constituents. Unfortunately we live in such an immoral society that it has become very easy to coopt organizations like the union. Hard working guys don't wanna have to deal with the union after a long shift so they hired union representation. Those guys knew that they could get away with murder because the union members couldn't spend all their time policing the union power structure. Sad really, because unions could have been a good thing.
Other problem with unions....... it is almost impossible to fire those that don't do their job. Which is why government is filled with a bunch of loser-do-nothings
Agreed. I was back and forth on it for a while, but unions are like communism. They promise great things, never deliver, and greatly decrease efficiency and productivity.
Union and socialism supporters also use the same argument when faced with failed real world examples. "That wasn't real socialism / That union was just corrupt".
The problem with unions/socialism/communism is that their promise is antithetical to their inherent operation. How do you give power to the people by concentrating that power into state/union leaders?
The fuck they did, the boomers were too stupid and greedy or immoral to fight these communist unions and were happy to take in undeserved money because there were "fighting the man".
Unions were a perversion from the start and their roots were founded in the "workers party". You may have been a member and want to believe otherwise but anyone with any exposure to history knows their disgusting roots.
Also boomers created millennials, so they will never get a pass in my book.
Boomers didn't create millennials; touchy feely, I just want to be your friend without proper discipline and guidance Gen-X parents created millennial's.
Break up unions for public workers AND any public utility. It's fine for private companies when the free market decides, but absolutely corrupt and pointless when we're forced to pay.
Run to fail with little budget for maintenance is becoming a common trend in many industries. I’ve been documenting all my repair request and making sure to get a written response to cover my ass.
When something does fail the techs and the maintenance are the first management tries to blame.
Seems like they are more interested in their diversity presentations and feel good events than making sure that machinery stays running.
They can't contract in an emergency? That's what they do in Connecticut. Do you know what else they do in Connecticut? Every big storm, every politician shouts "This is unacceptable! They must improve their outage response. I'm going to get to the bottom of this!" Then, they approve a rate hike, and the response time only gets worse. It's Friday, and today was the first time I have even seen a truck with an Eversource logo. It was a pickup truck. I drive an hour each way to fill my mother's generator at least once a day, and I haven't seen a single bucket truck. My Uber driver yesterday told me that his son works for Asplundh; the company that cuts trees for Eversource. He was saying that they're not allowed to look for issues. They get an assignment, cut the trees, then park for at least an hour before they get another assignment. To summarize: Eversource is doing next to nothing...despite the constant rate hikes.
Honestly, while the message of Atlas Shrugged is unquestionably true, the narrative itself is a struggle. The book is 1000 pages and could be half that long. Strange because Rand's nonfiction is clear, crisp, and direct. (The Virtue of Selfishness is probably the most profound book I've ever read.)
There's two types of people who wind up loving her. People who already agreed with her but didn't have the words for it, and people who she freed from the chains of altruism who couldn't believe ideas like hers existed.
I was one of the latter. I read AS before I knew she was also a philosopher, and it was the truest, most inspiring, and most profound thing I had ever read.
Most of her philosophy is so glaringly self-evident, no wonder it shocks the left.
All transactions are the result of either cooperation or coercion.
The former is better.
And for that, people called her a dangerous misanthrope. Those postulates alone are enough to draw the ire of people like Barack Obama and the white-tower cementheads at the New York Times.
That's actually one of the criticisms I've seen from some of her critics, haha. But they try to play it only on certain parts, like "Duh, of course a is a, why did we need Rand to say that?"
Because anti-intellectual philosophers are saying it isn't.
She had to make a philosophical system out of just plain truth and common sense because there's so many voices trying to teach us the opposite of those things.
And she had to make it a "closed system" (it was finished with her death) because even some factions of her own followers are trying to ratify their errors into her philosophy.
Yes, it was a tragic life for her. And I do understand how this affected her writing. Such lengthy tombs were really a slog to get through. But there are moments of brilliance.
She just needed a good editor or business partner to help distill the stream of consciousness.
Ever read the REST of her life story? She cheated on her husband repeatedly, tried to ruin the lives of the men who tried to break off affairs with her, and was generally a complete psycho bitch from hell.
Go read Nathaniel Branden's book about their relationship.
Why would a productive and skilled member of society work for people who want to destroy everything?
How can those who destroy create their own skilled technicians who have only the promise of a wasteland in front of them?
This is the end result of feminized beaurocracy. 1000 middle managers trying to tell a handful of skilled and experienced men to save then from catastrophe.
The world in its entirety will grind to a halt if those men say "no".
This is the end result of feminized beaurocracy. 1000 middle managers trying to tell a handful of skilled and experienced men to save then from catastrophe.
Working for a large corporation, this hit a bit close to home. All too true
I keep hearing this from everybody I talk to. We're living through the last generation of old white guys who actually know how to get shit done propping up their diversity hire replacement/managers. In the next decade corporate America is going to come crashing down hard and fast.
Boeing was a train wreck when I was there 25 years ago. They are probably the only American corporation that really did see efficiency gains by offshoring their software work to India -- because by doing that, Boeing management couldn't constantly fuck with the specifications and drag people into useless meetings five times a week.
Part of my job was literally cleaning the microwave and the refrigerator and vacuuming the floor, because they'd imported "Japanese management" techniques which said that the employees were to maintain their own work area. Which is fine, if they really wanted to pay my contracting agency $120/hr to clean a microwave (of which I got $55) I'd take it.
I was on DCAC/MRM for a year. Toward the end of that year, my manager held a big meeting in which he congratulated us for the immense amount of hours we'd accomplished toward our "statement of work". I did the math, it averaged out to 48 productive hours per person for the entire year for the people in the room.
My current plan is to quit, start a consultancy and charge 10 times my current rate. I feel pretty good about getting it too, because I have specialized knowledge and the other people on my team are the social media girl who orders the coffee, the social media girl who makes sure the coffee isn't racist, the account girl who organizes sit-ins for vegans in the lunchroom, the old guy who spends his days cruising yoga moms on facebook and secretly roots for the heart attack to take him out of this sad sad world, and me -- the one who actually makes the widgets we sell.
My employer's critical industry is literally hiring old white guys out of retirement to try to keep the innovation coming. We have guys pushing 70 developing cutting edge stuff, because we just can't find reliable young people to do the work.
I'm fully expecting that in the next 15 or 20 years we will have to accept that nothing works and a lot of people you deal with will be incompetent and have lots of attitude that is unless we are all at home drawing UBI. In that event things will still not work.
Electricity is a racial concept. Am I supposed to believe electricity is real just because some old white dude flew a kite and got struck by lightning? Do you have any idea how dumb you sound dude?
I have been telling my wife this for years. We will get to the point where there is no one left who understands and has the ability to repair anything our previous generations have left us. Buy tools.
I'm constantly adding tools to my arsenal. My wife came home with a set of metric crows feet a few days ago. I was so proud of her. I already had a set but several have been eaten by diesel trucks and this set is much nicer.
I couldn't recall where I had seen this. Africans are just not smart people on average and will cut off their noses to spite their faces. No reason to assume that the average black person in America is any different. Why are people listening to them and celebrating their culture again?
Good for you! They will laugh at you through their fake glasses and massive student debt. While you laugh to the bank. The area I'm in is VERY self sufficient so the only way to get work here is to have tools that others don't have ie welders, sandblasters, diagnostic software. I live in a county with no building code so there are a lot of DIY'ers. I'm betting that we will see an influx of out of staters soon though. :)
After talking to my real estate agent its pretty much the same here. Sight unseen, cash and overpriced. She actually sounded a little apprehensive in saying there is not really a supply of homes anymore. I'm slighty afraid of who is moving here. If they are paying with cash they aint local or even from this state.
Yep seen a ton of Illinois plates around here lately. My wife is actually working with a transplant from Il. She heard my wife talking to some coworkers about squirrels she asked her what about squirrels my wife was like "we eat em" The lady was like "I got to get back to the city".
They aren't from there. They are a cancer that is spreading. In Seattle they can live in a little shitstain two bedroom dump that goes for $600k. They can buy a lot of house for that over there. They will absolutely ruin where you are from in as little as 10 years. I saw that here. There are some of us who would not do that but you can bet we are the minority.
My recommendation is to make them not feel welcome. Counter them in protests. Wave American flags everywhere. Let them see your guns from time to time. Drive your big smoking trucks past their houses day and night. Post religious flyers and Billboards everywhere. Make them regret ever setting foot in your homeland.
Remember that thing that was posted just after the 2016 election by some liberal soy boy about how terrified he was by a plumber who came to fix something? Terrified because THIS was what Trump supporters look like, racists who want him dead? It was hilarious.
This should be expected. Look at all the storms before this. Was it any different? Nope! Same shit all the time. Hurricane Sandy, the snow storm we had in October years ago I forgot what year. Didn’t Eversource get government money to upgrade the grid, and just took the money and didn’t DO shit?!? Pretty much just pocketed it. These power companies are shitbags.
Went to playground after storm, huge tree had fallen in and kids couldn't play. The ONE guy from the parks department is trying to cut it up with fucking hedge clippers...my friend came with chainsaw and helped him cut it up and haul it away.
My property taxes in NY are almost 10k per year, thats not including income/sales etc. And that's what we get, one guy with hedge clippers to manage a playground from the 80s.
That's our park budget. He was trying to clip enough small branches off so the big one would be light enough to drag. I felt bad for him, the other two workers did not show up so the poor guy was trying to clear the playground entrance and soccer field by himself. He stayed late and was so happy I helped and happier when he saw the chain saw.
NYC is dead and will become a massive version of Detroit. History will judge the Dems very harshly. The infrastructure of NYC is too big, complicated, and expensive to survive this loss of money.
Dutchess county here, hour or so north of NYC. We lost power for maybe a day and half total. No union just central Hudson doing there job, not sure if they are union but they get it done.
New here but let me say, Cuomo can suck a egg. Let’s shut down Indian point to appease the city people. Cool where are you going to get power for the city now? Rolling brown outs incoming! Guy is a joke, ran for the governor of NYC not NYS.
Edit: I was thinking about it for a moment, they have to deal with leaves right now, winter time they don’t, but Cuomo still sucks eggs.
My parents are in Dutchess and they were out for about 24 hours. My sister 20 minutes down the road from them was out for 48 hours and counting when I talked to them yesterday
I didn’t mean to imply that since one was up the other should have been too. I meant to point out there were a lot of outages all over the area.
My parents were lucky in that their outage was just a single tree that pulled down the lines a quarter mile or so from their house. My sister lives in a more wooded area so I imagine there were more trees down and hence more lines to fix. The worst part is her house is on a well, so no water either.
Millions times this. Biggest collection of pussy cunts on the planet. Most cities are full of "I hate my daddy and hometown" losers, but NYC is a cut above the rest.
Only they would fabricate a new "category" of storm so they can make themselves feel better about whining like the sacks of seeping smegma they are.
This is really stupid. I was there at the time. No one who was there would agree with you. It was a monster storm and everything looked like Ilhan Omar's religion of peace took over afterwards. It was surreal.
I was there and it wasn't bad. The flooding did a lot of subterranean damage, and of course the island below 32nd or so was without power for a week, but the city was fine.
I lived in Houston in New Orleans for many years. This is extremely typical for power restoration after a hurricane. People don’t realize how devastating they are. It’s moronic for the governor to go after the power companies and the people doing the actual work. He should have some social awareness and ask around, and put the people at ease and comfort them. It’s a communistic tactic to start blame shifting.
Lol. I reside in Taiwan. We get hit with 2-4 hurricanes per year. The longest my power was out was 12 hours, and that was for a cat-4 that was nearly a cat-5. For the pissy little cat-3s and below the lights don't even flicker.
"We know that severe weather is our new reality and the reckless disregard by utility companies to adequately plan for tropical storm Isaias left tens of thousands of customers in the dark, literally and figuratively,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a press release. “Their performance was unacceptable.”
Has Cuomo ever taken responsibility for anything, ever?
This is/was the whole point of the unrest and lockdown: securing the negative feedback loop for a poorer and less functional America. Our enemies have breached the gates.
I remember they had a big storm before and out of state workers got hit with big taxes for helping guess they learned their lesson on helping New Yorkers
My parents (in NJ) lost power on Tuesday in storms. For my parents it was fortunately only out about 30 min or so. However, a bunch of other people in the street - including their neighbor - are still out. Checking the power company website, it says:
"Cause:Pending Investigation
Crew Status:Awaiting Dispatch
Estimated Restoration:We expect to restore power to the majority of affected customers by Aug 11 2020, 11:30 PM"
Its been over 72 hours since the outage, and you haven't even sent a crew to check it out? And your estimating another 4+ days to get power back on? That's not even incompetence. That's malice.
You mean all the illegals and welfare rats can't fix it? What about the domestic terrorists Democrats support, not them either? Feminists, show us dumb and unnecessary men how to do it better! Hollywood pedophiles, when you're done patting yourselves on the back and raping each other and children, come on out and do some useful work for once. You won't? Woke businesses, you going to donate to this cause? No? You got money for terrorism, but no money for the power grid that you use.
Your New York Power Authority trucks are rolling around here in Puerto Rico as Cuomo tries to buy the Central Florida boricua vote for Biden. Good thing it's not working. We just privatized the grid.
This is a total clusterfuck. I just got my power back 2 hours ago. I have been driving all around my local area when the power was out, and the only work crews I saw were parked in the parking lot of the local Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds, etc. Orange & Rockland's website (subsidiary of ConEd) did not have an ETA posted until yesterday at noon, which was 11pm last night, and they still missed it. The story is the same all over my local area. Delayed and missed ETAs, poor communication, lack of work trucks anywhere.
Investigator gets prestige, nice salary, can disperse liability in event of failure. Tech gets full liability, constantly scrutinized and belittled, "you're all replaceable."
New York whiners. Oh no 36 hours without power. How about 2 weeks during the winter due to an ice storm? How about 10 days due to an actual hurricane? Pussies.
When I heard this... I wasn't shocked. They threatened this the last time. Never even gave the utilities ONE WHOLE DAY to assess the damage and create a game plan to fix it all.
That's a union only job. I'm not allowed to help, sorry.
I know how it is out there. They were running companies off after one of the last big storms that tore everything up. They were crying about not having enough workers to fix all the damage while literally meeting out of state crews who came to help at the airport and telling them to go back home. We couldn't even get a permit to work on a non union telecom project out in Virginia, though they kept the $100 application fee.
Unions are a satanic construct
Union's are an interesting issue. The problem is that they are composed of people who due to the nature of their job have 0 individual leverage, so they unionize to gain some degree of power.
I don't think unions are broken in-and-of themselves, the problem is when they collude with government to become a defect monopoly. If unions were put into a position where they had to provide value, for example the union would guarantee trained employees who actually show up consistently in return for good contract terms, that would make sense.
The problem isn't unions, it's the laws that give unions insane power above and beyond any other staffing agency.
A small error here. Unions are composed of low influence people, but they aren't precisely the ones who do the unionizing. The instigators of unions are usually a small group of people seeking political power who go around trying to pull all the low influence people together.
My point is that unions are not a spontaneously emergent phenomenon. They are just another type of political power structure pretending to be grassroots and egalitarian. In this way, unions are particular form of communism.
This is the comment right here. Exactly
Even without the anti-commie stance. The unions, like any organization, eventually becomes about it's own survival instead of its original purpose. People get cushy jobs and don't want to lose them.
I agree. The problem is not unions per say but rather the mega unions. Unions should not be bigger than the companies their members are employee's of.
The United States needs to limit the size of unions to the firm they are employed with. No United Steel Worker's Union but if the workers desire have a U.S. Steel Union and a Nucor Union. Aboloish mega unions.
In addition They need to ban political contributions from unions to politicians. Any given company has people from all political walks of life. Democrats work for Republicans and vice versa all across America. There is also a spattering of Libertarians in the mix. The problem though is that unions use members' dues to support politicians that that individual may not necessarily agree with. If I am a Republican, why is 2% of my wages going to support a Democrat? Democrat workers would be justified in having the same outrage if their hard earned dollars were used to support politicians they don't like. Solution? Ban contributions.
Now there is an argument that Unions need to be able to contribute in order to compete with the companies who give political contributions. OK lets ban corporate donations as well. Only individual flesh and blood human beings can contribute.
Yeah, scale is definitely an issue. It's like how communism can work on a limited basis in a small group where everyone knows each other, but in reality, it's used as a tool for exploitation and power consolidation.
Bingo.
You have no idea what communism is if you think unions are communist.
What fucking world am I in. Are you nutjobs in the right place. Unions are a 100% communist construct. Look into their foundation. They are the most disgusting criminal enterprises on the planet top to bottom. No exceptions. Their leaders are thugs and their members are thugs.
The fact that we have so called conservatives on here who do not know the history of unions spouting off about them actually being a valid idea is fucking terrifying.
Of course. Just like colleges and the mainstream media. Leftist infiltration has perverted almost all institutional power structures in America. It's sickening.
No, your missing the point. Unions were part of the communist infiltration. Communists never infiltrated the union, the union was founded by communists in the first place.
So I’m a thug for being in a union?
I found that to be an incredibly foolish sentiment myself especially since only 27 states in America are right to work states. So for example in Ohio (not a right to work state) anyone that wants to work in manufacturing basically has to join a union in order to earn a living. I would agree that the union bosses by-in-large are thuggish but the everyday guy working on the line? Yeah, not so much.
Want me to start posting videos of union violence? Makes Antifa look like well Antifa, but I have experienced it first hand during "contract negotiations" and strikes. I am glad to have any Trump supporter, but anyone who is pro Union is not on the right.
Thank you. Well said.
Rewind the clock fifty or so years and go be a long shoreman. Your union decides that it is time to strike and you do so. You are out on the picket line. Your cupboard is getting pretty empty but you continue to ration your family while you strike.
Do you know who is not on the picket line and not rationing food? The union boss. He is dining nightly at a restaurant.
That is the sum of a union.
My uncle was a long shoreman. He has preached this for 50 years. The union is NOT your friend. He got thrown out of the union meetings more than once.
Unions have a long history of attacking (physically) those who do not bend the knee to the union bosses
Every organization reflects the morality of its constituents. Unfortunately we live in such an immoral society that it has become very easy to coopt organizations like the union. Hard working guys don't wanna have to deal with the union after a long shift so they hired union representation. Those guys knew that they could get away with murder because the union members couldn't spend all their time policing the union power structure. Sad really, because unions could have been a good thing.
Other problem with unions....... it is almost impossible to fire those that don't do their job. Which is why government is filled with a bunch of loser-do-nothings
Agreed. I was back and forth on it for a while, but unions are like communism. They promise great things, never deliver, and greatly decrease efficiency and productivity.
Union and socialism supporters also use the same argument when faced with failed real world examples. "That wasn't real socialism / That union was just corrupt".
The problem with unions/socialism/communism is that their promise is antithetical to their inherent operation. How do you give power to the people by concentrating that power into state/union leaders?
Public sector unions surely are.
Private sector unions are a the market at work.
Unions are fine. Workers are allowed to organize in a free market. It's free association. Skilled labor is their product.
Don't blame the boomers. Previous generations laid a firm foundation for unions,and the later generations perverted them as well.
The fuck they did, the boomers were too stupid and greedy or immoral to fight these communist unions and were happy to take in undeserved money because there were "fighting the man".
Unions were a perversion from the start and their roots were founded in the "workers party". You may have been a member and want to believe otherwise but anyone with any exposure to history knows their disgusting roots.
Also boomers created millennials, so they will never get a pass in my book.
Hey dumbass, unions have been around since the late 1800's, 50+ years before boomers were born.
Find a new bogeyman. Better yet, try reading a fucking history book.
Boomers didn't create millennials; touchy feely, I just want to be your friend without proper discipline and guidance Gen-X parents created millennial's.
There are out of state crews working on Long Island
Break up unions for public workers AND any public utility. It's fine for private companies when the free market decides, but absolutely corrupt and pointless when we're forced to pay.
Run to fail with little budget for maintenance is becoming a common trend in many industries. I’ve been documenting all my repair request and making sure to get a written response to cover my ass.
When something does fail the techs and the maintenance are the first management tries to blame.
Seems like they are more interested in their diversity presentations and feel good events than making sure that machinery stays running.
They can't contract in an emergency? That's what they do in Connecticut. Do you know what else they do in Connecticut? Every big storm, every politician shouts "This is unacceptable! They must improve their outage response. I'm going to get to the bottom of this!" Then, they approve a rate hike, and the response time only gets worse. It's Friday, and today was the first time I have even seen a truck with an Eversource logo. It was a pickup truck. I drive an hour each way to fill my mother's generator at least once a day, and I haven't seen a single bucket truck. My Uber driver yesterday told me that his son works for Asplundh; the company that cuts trees for Eversource. He was saying that they're not allowed to look for issues. They get an assignment, cut the trees, then park for at least an hour before they get another assignment. To summarize: Eversource is doing next to nothing...despite the constant rate hikes.
Ayn Rand was a prophet. She had the example of the early Soviet Union to guide her though.
Which is why she’s so hated.
shes hated because her books are the most boring political fantasy ever written
I can count on one finger the number of people I've met who say "she was boring" who aren't crazy leftists.
Honestly, while the message of Atlas Shrugged is unquestionably true, the narrative itself is a struggle. The book is 1000 pages and could be half that long. Strange because Rand's nonfiction is clear, crisp, and direct. (The Virtue of Selfishness is probably the most profound book I've ever read.)
She was getting paid by the word...
i.e. she's a smart capitalist!
I can empathize with that.
There's two types of people who wind up loving her. People who already agreed with her but didn't have the words for it, and people who she freed from the chains of altruism who couldn't believe ideas like hers existed.
I was one of the latter. I read AS before I knew she was also a philosopher, and it was the truest, most inspiring, and most profound thing I had ever read.
Most of her philosophy is so glaringly self-evident, no wonder it shocks the left.
And for that, people called her a dangerous misanthrope. Those postulates alone are enough to draw the ire of people like Barack Obama and the white-tower cementheads at the New York Times.
And she wrote all this in her second language.
That's actually one of the criticisms I've seen from some of her critics, haha. But they try to play it only on certain parts, like "Duh, of course a is a, why did we need Rand to say that?"
Because anti-intellectual philosophers are saying it isn't.
She had to make a philosophical system out of just plain truth and common sense because there's so many voices trying to teach us the opposite of those things.
And she had to make it a "closed system" (it was finished with her death) because even some factions of her own followers are trying to ratify their errors into her philosophy.
You must not know many people who have read the entirety of the 55-page John Galt speech, then.
I have. It blew my mind and I had to read it a second time. :P
Tbh I gave up on the book about halfway through, does the Galt speech redeem the rest of the story? Does the speech hold up on its own?
Ever read her life story? She watched her dad get fucked over by communism. All of the villains in her stories were taken from that experience.
We did elect Hank Reardon to the presidency.
Krugman basically.
Yes, it was a tragic life for her. And I do understand how this affected her writing. Such lengthy tombs were really a slog to get through. But there are moments of brilliance.
She just needed a good editor or business partner to help distill the stream of consciousness.
Ever read the REST of her life story? She cheated on her husband repeatedly, tried to ruin the lives of the men who tried to break off affairs with her, and was generally a complete psycho bitch from hell.
Go read Nathaniel Branden's book about their relationship.
I had read that actually. Seemed to me like she spent most of her life convincing herself there is no God, and morality only matters in finance.
Why would a productive and skilled member of society work for people who want to destroy everything?
How can those who destroy create their own skilled technicians who have only the promise of a wasteland in front of them?
This is the end result of feminized beaurocracy. 1000 middle managers trying to tell a handful of skilled and experienced men to save then from catastrophe.
The world in its entirety will grind to a halt if those men say "no".
Working for a large corporation, this hit a bit close to home. All too true
I keep hearing this from everybody I talk to. We're living through the last generation of old white guys who actually know how to get shit done propping up their diversity hire replacement/managers. In the next decade corporate America is going to come crashing down hard and fast.
You already started seeing that with Boeing. Literally.
Boeing was a train wreck when I was there 25 years ago. They are probably the only American corporation that really did see efficiency gains by offshoring their software work to India -- because by doing that, Boeing management couldn't constantly fuck with the specifications and drag people into useless meetings five times a week.
Part of my job was literally cleaning the microwave and the refrigerator and vacuuming the floor, because they'd imported "Japanese management" techniques which said that the employees were to maintain their own work area. Which is fine, if they really wanted to pay my contracting agency $120/hr to clean a microwave (of which I got $55) I'd take it.
I was on DCAC/MRM for a year. Toward the end of that year, my manager held a big meeting in which he congratulated us for the immense amount of hours we'd accomplished toward our "statement of work". I did the math, it averaged out to 48 productive hours per person for the entire year for the people in the room.
My current plan is to quit, start a consultancy and charge 10 times my current rate. I feel pretty good about getting it too, because I have specialized knowledge and the other people on my team are the social media girl who orders the coffee, the social media girl who makes sure the coffee isn't racist, the account girl who organizes sit-ins for vegans in the lunchroom, the old guy who spends his days cruising yoga moms on facebook and secretly roots for the heart attack to take him out of this sad sad world, and me -- the one who actually makes the widgets we sell.
Hope you stacked some sats while you were at it!
My employer's critical industry is literally hiring old white guys out of retirement to try to keep the innovation coming. We have guys pushing 70 developing cutting edge stuff, because we just can't find reliable young people to do the work.
Yep, and when those guys are gone, what will we do?
I'm fully expecting that in the next 15 or 20 years we will have to accept that nothing works and a lot of people you deal with will be incompetent and have lots of attitude that is unless we are all at home drawing UBI. In that event things will still not work.
Absolutely true, it’s coming
Oh dont worry we will have plenty of linesmen and distribution engineers training online during lockdown!
LOL.
Go get BLM to fix it, surely a sizable number of those geniuses are engineers since they're so intellectually superior and have all the answers?
I mean, us evil white people stole their knowledge, surely BLM can fix it quicker?
dunning Krueger enters the chat
Just think: Poor Trayvon would probably be fixing the grid, if it wasn't for that rayciss White boy, George Zimmerman!
WE WUZ LINEMEN N SHIT
Electricity is a racial concept. Am I supposed to believe electricity is real just because some old white dude flew a kite and got struck by lightning? Do you have any idea how dumb you sound dude?
evil oppressor white people science
I have been telling my wife this for years. We will get to the point where there is no one left who understands and has the ability to repair anything our previous generations have left us. Buy tools.
I'm constantly adding tools to my arsenal. My wife came home with a set of metric crows feet a few days ago. I was so proud of her. I already had a set but several have been eaten by diesel trucks and this set is much nicer.
Get involved. Big brother/big sister. Some local volunteerism. Teach kids how to do stuff with their hands.
The biggest redpill is self reliance
Like in Empire of Dust when the Chinese guy drags the African because everything that was left behind when the British left is now fucked
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkEqI3_J4xg
I couldn't recall where I had seen this. Africans are just not smart people on average and will cut off their noses to spite their faces. No reason to assume that the average black person in America is any different. Why are people listening to them and celebrating their culture again?
The full version of that documentary is on Vimeo, it is worth a watch for all sorts of reasons
It's all so tiresome.
Wow lol that looks amazing....! Zero fucks given by the Chinese guy, and the black guy knows he’s right!
I learned to be a plumber and watching society I just rub my hands at that prospect.
All these high fallutin’ hoity toity CA and NY expats moving to my area gon’ pay.
Good for you! They will laugh at you through their fake glasses and massive student debt. While you laugh to the bank. The area I'm in is VERY self sufficient so the only way to get work here is to have tools that others don't have ie welders, sandblasters, diagnostic software. I live in a county with no building code so there are a lot of DIY'ers. I'm betting that we will see an influx of out of staters soon though. :)
Yeah I’m in MT they are straight up buying new houses in cash sight unseen.
I’ll get my money check and dip to another town right before they ruin it again.
I think I’m gonna take up welding I’m just getting into industrial sewing.
After talking to my real estate agent its pretty much the same here. Sight unseen, cash and overpriced. She actually sounded a little apprehensive in saying there is not really a supply of homes anymore. I'm slighty afraid of who is moving here. If they are paying with cash they aint local or even from this state.
If it’s cash it’s CA NY WA and IL MN.
Don’t fret pede there is always an angle.
I plan to just flux through markets until I find a good deal on land. I could do most of the building myself so I’m not too worried.
I just want a small cabin
Yep seen a ton of Illinois plates around here lately. My wife is actually working with a transplant from Il. She heard my wife talking to some coworkers about squirrels she asked her what about squirrels my wife was like "we eat em" The lady was like "I got to get back to the city".
They aren't from there. They are a cancer that is spreading. In Seattle they can live in a little shitstain two bedroom dump that goes for $600k. They can buy a lot of house for that over there. They will absolutely ruin where you are from in as little as 10 years. I saw that here. There are some of us who would not do that but you can bet we are the minority.
My recommendation is to make them not feel welcome. Counter them in protests. Wave American flags everywhere. Let them see your guns from time to time. Drive your big smoking trucks past their houses day and night. Post religious flyers and Billboards everywhere. Make them regret ever setting foot in your homeland.
Remember that thing that was posted just after the 2016 election by some liberal soy boy about how terrified he was by a plumber who came to fix something? Terrified because THIS was what Trump supporters look like, racists who want him dead? It was hilarious.
Well but you're just not as cool as they are with their college degrees teaching them how to identify 194 different genders.
There’s a lot of college age chicks/ hottie boom boddites working construction now too.
I recently got this same vibe with history. It just smacked me with this current generation being so brainwashed how easily things can just be lost.
Men among the ruins.
I live in Ct and the response has been terrible. My work still has no power. My buddy has no power and he was told it will be 7-10 days.
This should be expected. Look at all the storms before this. Was it any different? Nope! Same shit all the time. Hurricane Sandy, the snow storm we had in October years ago I forgot what year. Didn’t Eversource get government money to upgrade the grid, and just took the money and didn’t DO shit?!? Pretty much just pocketed it. These power companies are shitbags.
Utilities are grift machines. They grease politicians, and the politicians “oversee”them.
Went to playground after storm, huge tree had fallen in and kids couldn't play. The ONE guy from the parks department is trying to cut it up with fucking hedge clippers...my friend came with chainsaw and helped him cut it up and haul it away.
My property taxes in NY are almost 10k per year, thats not including income/sales etc. And that's what we get, one guy with hedge clippers to manage a playground from the 80s.
Yep, sounds like New York.
That's our park budget. He was trying to clip enough small branches off so the big one would be light enough to drag. I felt bad for him, the other two workers did not show up so the poor guy was trying to clear the playground entrance and soccer field by himself. He stayed late and was so happy I helped and happier when he saw the chain saw.
NYC is dead and will become a massive version of Detroit. History will judge the Dems very harshly. The infrastructure of NYC is too big, complicated, and expensive to survive this loss of money.
Wise words Pede!
Yup
Dutchess county here, hour or so north of NYC. We lost power for maybe a day and half total. No union just central Hudson doing there job, not sure if they are union but they get it done.
New here but let me say, Cuomo can suck a egg. Let’s shut down Indian point to appease the city people. Cool where are you going to get power for the city now? Rolling brown outs incoming! Guy is a joke, ran for the governor of NYC not NYS.
Edit: I was thinking about it for a moment, they have to deal with leaves right now, winter time they don’t, but Cuomo still sucks eggs.
My parents are in Dutchess and they were out for about 24 hours. My sister 20 minutes down the road from them was out for 48 hours and counting when I talked to them yesterday
Different grids, but yeah road near me is still closed with CH on it.
I didn’t mean to imply that since one was up the other should have been too. I meant to point out there were a lot of outages all over the area.
My parents were lucky in that their outage was just a single tree that pulled down the lines a quarter mile or so from their house. My sister lives in a more wooded area so I imagine there were more trees down and hence more lines to fix. The worst part is her house is on a well, so no water either.
The well sucks! Sorry to hear that. House we moved into had a standby generator, I would have never have gotten one but recommend it!
Guy is also the new head of the Nation Governor's Association.
SUPERSTORM SANDY! Wasn't even a Hurricane when it destroyed weak ass pussy ass new york ass city.
Fuck NYC. Fuck UNIONS
Millions times this. Biggest collection of pussy cunts on the planet. Most cities are full of "I hate my daddy and hometown" losers, but NYC is a cut above the rest.
Only they would fabricate a new "category" of storm so they can make themselves feel better about whining like the sacks of seeping smegma they are.
Bush's fault! George W Bush doesn't care about black people or New Yawkers!
But sir, that was 2012
SEE HOW EVIL REPUBLICANS ARE?!?!!?
This is really stupid. I was there at the time. No one who was there would agree with you. It was a monster storm and everything looked like Ilhan Omar's religion of peace took over afterwards. It was surreal.
I was there and it wasn't bad. The flooding did a lot of subterranean damage, and of course the island below 32nd or so was without power for a week, but the city was fine.
Maybe you should build your city back to a higher standard instead of wasying money on unions.
My house is built to withstand 140 mph sustained winds.... NYC crumbled with 75mph gusts.
It was not 75 miles an hour. I'm not going to waste time with you. You lie and gaslight like a liberal. Good day.
LOLOLOL.
When it made landfall in NYC the Wind speeds were 60 mph.
IT was not even a fucking Hurricane when it hit your pussy ass selfs in NYC.
Check out the definitions:
https://www.weather.gov/mob/tropical_definitions#:~:text=A%20tropical%20storm%20is%20a,(34%20to%2063%20knots).&text=A%20hurricane%20is%20a%20tropical,(64%20knots%20or%20greater).
Hurricane 74mph+
"sUpErStOrM sAnDy" was a fucking 60mph pussy ass storm.
To be clear, "Isaias" was a Hurricane (75mph) off the coast of Florida, and people were at the beach surfing.
Fuck NYC
Meet me at the Gulch
I lived in Houston in New Orleans for many years. This is extremely typical for power restoration after a hurricane. People don’t realize how devastating they are. It’s moronic for the governor to go after the power companies and the people doing the actual work. He should have some social awareness and ask around, and put the people at ease and comfort them. It’s a communistic tactic to start blame shifting.
He's done that ever since he took office. Thinks it makes him look big. Sort of like the WuFlu response, lol.
Lol. I reside in Taiwan. We get hit with 2-4 hurricanes per year. The longest my power was out was 12 hours, and that was for a cat-4 that was nearly a cat-5. For the pissy little cat-3s and below the lights don't even flicker.
"We know that severe weather is our new reality and the reckless disregard by utility companies to adequately plan for tropical storm Isaias left tens of thousands of customers in the dark, literally and figuratively,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a press release. “Their performance was unacceptable.”
Has Cuomo ever taken responsibility for anything, ever?
If a crew came in from out of state would they be quarantined either coming or going?
Why not both???
This is/was the whole point of the unrest and lockdown: securing the negative feedback loop for a poorer and less functional America. Our enemies have breached the gates.
Wait until their toilets break.
Got to love the government, nothing is ever their fault
I remember they had a big storm before and out of state workers got hit with big taxes for helping guess they learned their lesson on helping New Yorkers
Guess where transformers are made... China
Guess how long it takes to make them... a really long time https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060216451/
THIS^^^
Unions are parasites that suck the Life blood out of the host business, company.
My parents (in NJ) lost power on Tuesday in storms. For my parents it was fortunately only out about 30 min or so. However, a bunch of other people in the street - including their neighbor - are still out. Checking the power company website, it says:
"Cause:Pending Investigation
Crew Status:Awaiting Dispatch
Estimated Restoration:We expect to restore power to the majority of affected customers by Aug 11 2020, 11:30 PM"
Its been over 72 hours since the outage, and you haven't even sent a crew to check it out? And your estimating another 4+ days to get power back on? That's not even incompetence. That's malice.
In NY, O&R (ConEd)'s website said the same thing until yesterday and still missed the ETA they gave.
Ayn Rand was a prophet
Cuomo says extreme weather is our new reality. I guess if you were born yesterday. .
What did socialists and leftists use before candles? Electricity.
Recycled Venezuela joke, coming soon to a blue city near you.
Also, there is no money! The money that was allocated for utilities went into the pockets of 'friends' of Cuomos, DiBlasio, et al...
Black people built this country. Just grab a few people from BLM riot and I'm sure they'd know exactly what to do.
You mean all the illegals and welfare rats can't fix it? What about the domestic terrorists Democrats support, not them either? Feminists, show us dumb and unnecessary men how to do it better! Hollywood pedophiles, when you're done patting yourselves on the back and raping each other and children, come on out and do some useful work for once. You won't? Woke businesses, you going to donate to this cause? No? You got money for terrorism, but no money for the power grid that you use.
No one can say they weren’t warned loud and clear.
Your New York Power Authority trucks are rolling around here in Puerto Rico as Cuomo tries to buy the Central Florida boricua vote for Biden. Good thing it's not working. We just privatized the grid.
“New Yorkers deserve answers and they deserve better,” Cuomo said.
No they don’t.
They voted in decades of fucked up democrat leadership that has left the coffers empty because of socialist policies.
They got what they fucking deserved.
If you are a conservative in NY - leave.
I did.
Who is John Galt?
This is a total clusterfuck. I just got my power back 2 hours ago. I have been driving all around my local area when the power was out, and the only work crews I saw were parked in the parking lot of the local Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds, etc. Orange & Rockland's website (subsidiary of ConEd) did not have an ETA posted until yesterday at noon, which was 11pm last night, and they still missed it. The story is the same all over my local area. Delayed and missed ETAs, poor communication, lack of work trucks anywhere.
Investigator gets prestige, nice salary, can disperse liability in event of failure. Tech gets full liability, constantly scrutinized and belittled, "you're all replaceable."
New York whiners. Oh no 36 hours without power. How about 2 weeks during the winter due to an ice storm? How about 10 days due to an actual hurricane? Pussies.
Democrat run states. What else can you say?
Ah well. Who is John Galt?
Who is Joe Biden?
Cuomo sure is good at blaming other people for his problems.
Ten days of darkness, starting now, will lead to the end of NYC as a viable city. Convince me I'm wrong.
Are out of state linemen from NY's list of quarantined states twiddling their thumbs for two weeks before they finally start restoring power to NY?
When I heard this... I wasn't shocked. They threatened this the last time. Never even gave the utilities ONE WHOLE DAY to assess the damage and create a game plan to fix it all.
They're running liberal cities into the ground to force liberals out an flip states blue long term. That's my guess.
C'MON MAN, I'm on break!
If you haven't already:
READ AYN RAND!
[email protected]@k at New York now! They actually want electricity and power to work. If Biden wins, just wait. All that will change.