Tag Archives: News

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Morale building activities. Our office seems determined that it’s going to lick the morale problem by doubling down on potluck lunches and after-hours team building events. I invite you to piss directly off with that nonsense. If you want me to be part of a team activity, schedule that mess while you’re paying me for it. And damned well don’t expect me to cook (or inflict my colleagues cooking on me) in order to participate. Why the hell we can’t just take an hour or two, get out of the office, and patronize a local restaurant like normal people is completely beyond me. It’s all a hard pass for me. If that reinforces my rep as a non-joiner or problematic player of team ball, so be it.

2. Late night interruptions. The number of times each week I wake up at two in the morning to take a piss, spend an hour flopping around not sleeping, and then drifting off for an hour or so of absolutely ridiculous dreams before waking up to start the day bleary eyed and disgruntled is something of a too regular occurrence. It’s not every night, which would drive me batshit crazy, but it’s easily once every week or two and that makes it more than regular enough to be obnoxious. There’s a whole level of frustration knowing you can’t hold your water or fall back asleep on command the way you used to. Most other nights I still manage to sleep like a baby, but not knowing whether the night will be restful or ridiculous is just short of infuriating.

3. Protests. I’ve always looked slightly askance at protestors as a group. Clogging up sidewalks, roadways, or parks and making a spectacle / nuisance of yourself never seemed like a good way to make any kind of point. Once I started working in DC, I developed an even lower opinion of the average “protestor.” Inconveniencing me as I’m just trying to go about my daily activities is, I promise you, no way to ever convince me of the virtue of your cause. In any case, any time I see news of protestors getting all froggy – whether it’s on city streets or on college campuses – I just get preemptively annoyed and assume they’re chanting and occupying whatever for some cause I’ll inevitably think is foolish. 

Eclipse…

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Well, if you’re reading this, someone must have survived the “great American eclipse” this afternoon… or the internet is being read by alien archeologists 1000s of years in the future after they have figured out how to recover old network drives. Either way.

Yes, it’s eclipse day in America, which means some non-zero percentage of the population is absolutely losing their shit. It’s totally understandable who the ancients were deeply suspect of sudden darkness in the middle of the day. Why, deeply into the 21st century, it’s more than an interesting aside and fascinating bit of astro-physical trivia. I mean we know what’s happening, we know when it’s happening, and we can project how often and where these events will occur indefinitely into the future. 

We the people have once again made the predictable mistake of thinking that we’re somehow unique and that this is a world-changing once off event. I suppose it makes for good ratings. It must do, given how much ink and airtime have been spent delivering minute by minute coverage to Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea.

Look, it’s great. It’s a fascinating experience. I went outside and looked around during “peak darkness.” Unlike a certain ex-president during the eclipse in 2017, I managed to avoid looking directly at the sun today, so I’ve got that going for me if nothing else. But now that the next big local eclipse is 20-something years in the future, I’m forced to wonder what perfectly normal and explicable event will be next to have itself turned into a media circus. I’ll never quite understand how we pick the things we want to blow out of proportion or carry to entirely illogical extremes.

Echo chamber…

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Turn on the news and it’s impossible to miss the steady drumbeat of stories about Trump, or Biden, or the health of The King and Princess of Wales depending on which side of the Atlantic your news provider of choice is based. Throw in a sprinkle of Russia, China, Iran, Hamas, and a few unavoidable human interest stories and the whole thing becomes an echo chamber. It doesn’t particularly matter if you’re getting your stories from cable news, the internet, or what passes for newspapers. The mashup is more or less the same, just with a slightly different agenda being pushed.

That’s fine. The news is a business just like any other. Without eyes on screens or pages, there is no news. Like it or not, whether it’s “good for us” or not, the more confrontational the headlines, the more eyes will end up on it. Outlets are doing whatever they have to do to compete. 

This weekend, though, I found myself doing what I do more and more often. I opted out. Sure, I scanned the headlines in the morning, but after that, I shifted over to music or podcasts, or parked my television on a couple of channels that were either running old movies or old TV shows and that didn’t have any interested in trying to sell me the news of the day. Honestly it made for some terrific background noise. I highly recommend it.

I’m not sure if it’s something about getting older in general or about my response to the annoyance of modernity in particular, but my god is it getting hard to give a shit about anything other than the five or six “Big Things” I’m already interested in. Beyond that, most everything is beginning to resemble a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man vying for attention.

I seem to revisit this topic a lot. Every time it feels like it’s becoming more and more imperative. I’d love to know whether that says more about me or about the world. Maybe both. 

I’m shocked that reporters try to sell panic…

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A certain segment of the media is busily peddling fear and angst about the banking sector. One headline asks, “Fed says don’t worry about banks, but why should anyone believe them?”

Well, mostly because the Fed is doing precisely what it’s supposed to do when a bank finds itself teetering on the edge of collapse. Most recently, with First Republic Bank being seized by regulators and mostly sold off to JPMorgan. Depositors – the mom and pop Mr. and Mrs. Mainstreet that reporters are so fond of citing – were protected up to their federally insured limit and FRB’s investors were left with their dicks in their hands. This morning, FRB’s branches opened as scheduled and depositors had full access to their funds. That the system is working as advertised is precisely why the vast majority of depositors shouldn’t be worried about their chosen bank.

I’m not entirely sure what else we should reasonably expect the Federal Reserve and the whole laundry list of financial regulators to do under the circumstances. Protecting depositors while allowing the market to punish corporate officers and investors feels like the right approach. That’s the “risk” part of the risk and reward dynamic of the market at work. 

By all means, improve the financial stress tests imposed on banks and change the rules to discourage managerial incompetence in the executive suite. Beyond that. I’m not sure what financial reporters are up to beyond trying to gin up panic and worry where none appears to be justified.

Grinning like the village idiot…

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OK, so here I am back after a delightful, if short, four-day weekend. I mostly tuned out any form of news, avoided Twitter, and landed on Facebook only sporadically – air dropping in to post occasional memes, but not doing much scrolling. In short, it was really kind of delightful. I’m quite sure there’s a lesson there, if I’m willing to take heed of it. Steering mostly clear of news and social media is good for your mental health. Who knew, right?

I’ve often wondered why people who are obviously stupid wander through life so often grinning like the village idiot. I can only speculate based on my limited evidence, that perhaps ignorance really is bliss and that’s not just something people say. Going about without a thought in your head or a worry in your heart is undeniably freeing. It’s not so much that I didn’t care what was happening in the world as it was that I just didn’t know. I’m feeling surprisingly ok with that.

The first thing I did when I trundled to my desk this morning was tee up Drudge. Finding it plastered with reports of China’s rising protests, Donald Trump in general, the Republican Party continuing to form a circular firing squad, Elon continuing to be Elon, and Russia, as always, doing Russian shit. If that’s what I missed out on across the four days of Thanksgiving, I have to ask if I really missed anything at all. 

I still don’t expect I’ll ever be able to tune everything out indefinitely. It’s an unhappy side effect of being, at least in some ways, curious about the world. I hope that I can at least be a bit more selective in the future – heading down rabbit holes that are of interest rather than just because they’re there. If the world is determined to burn itself to the ground, I can’t see any good reason I shouldn’t just increasingly allocate my attention to books and animals and smile while everything else does its thing.  

Towards a more curated experience…

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A weekend with virtually no news seems to be precisely what the doctor ordered. It was a helpful reminder that there’s enough going on within my span of control to absorb every bit of free time I want to have on any given day. It was kind of great to focus in on those things rather than spending a lot of time focused in on external issues.

My news and media brown out only lasted until I sat down with a computer terminal in front of me this morning. Then I was greeted by headlines warning that “Poll reveals staggering polarization ahead of midterms,” “Fundamentals flashing red; Last pillar of credit crumbles,” and, of course, any number of stories highlighting Donald Trump being his normal, beshitted self. None of those are apt to keep one’s blood pressure down, but what else would anyone really expect on a Monday morning?

I like to imagine I now have all the all the input I need to start scaling back on the amount of hard and soft news I’m consuming on a daily basis, but breaking the habits of a lifetime is probably something of a slow burn. Even if it were possible, I’m not sure I’d ever want to wander through the world completely unaware of what’s happening – if for no other reason than it would create a whole lot of white space when it comes time to sit down every day and do a bit of writing. Short of turning this space into a blog focused on petting dogs and cats, reading books, and highlighting the occasional home cooked meal, keeping a bit of a grip on current events is probably inevitable. 

In any case, I think what that leaves me with is a strong desire to begin curtailing how engaged I am with broad-sourced news coverage – maybe a little less Drudge and a bit more heavily curating Google News to spit out coverage on more tailored issues. It feels like a good idea… and I have no idea if it’s the kind of change I can make work for the long term. 

Ponder, dwell, and worry…

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This week has been a lot and I’m tired. Not so much physically as mentally. I’ve expended too much mental energy on stuff that I have no control over and in my estimation that’s almost always a mistake. Being, by nature, someone who ponders, dwells, and flat out worries, it’s an easy enough trap to fall into.

Between ongoing Russian fuckery, the UK having a crisis of confidence, the steady drumbeat of the US midterm elections approaching, and various other bits and bobs, the world is a busy place filled with any number of things that could literally or figuratively maim, mutilate, or kill a guy. Each and every one of those topics is an area worthy of the big thinkers of our time. Even they, in their collective wisdom, probably couldn’t arrive at a collective resolution. I don’t tend to believe in unsolvable problems, but I absolutely believe in problems that can’t be solved until everyone involved wants to solve them. We’re nowhere near that point on so very many issues of great import – and so, completely unbidden, my mind tends to dwell.

This weekend, I’m going to treat this problem the best way I know how – by dramatically reducing my consumption of content from the electronic and print media for a couple of days. I won’t bother to proclaim a news blackout because I’ve never been successful at making one of those stick. I can, however, make intentional choices about what sites I visit and links I follow.

Add in a healthy dab of physical exhaustion from jumping into the fall yard work and that’ll be just about what the doctor ordered to even out the keel. By Monday I should be ready to dive back in and, if nothing else, look at the same old issues with an at least partially rested frontal lobe.

Should’ve known better… 

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State and local officials in Florida are catching three kinds of hell for not issuing evacuation orders earlier last week in advance of Hurricane Ian. The buck has to stop somewhere, I suppose, but I’ve got a slightly different take on where that particular responsibility lies. As much as I want to jump aboard the smack Ron DeSantis around train, I’m just not there.

Let’s say for purposes of argument that I’m a resident of Sanibel Island. It’s late September and a large hurricane is gathering strength in in the Caribbean. About the time it has taken a bite out of Cuba and starts tracking towards the west coast of Florida, I’m paying very focused attention and going through my own checklist of what needs to happen before I get the hell out of Dodge. When I’ve completed my personal risk assessment, knowing full well that I’m on a barrier island, there’s limited accessibility under the best conditions, and that the big one could cut off communications, water, electricity, and access to pretty much all modern services. At some point in assessing that reality, I’m going to make the decision to flee or ride it out.

It’s the same thing I do on a different scale when there’s snow falling on a weekday. I know that both routes from the outside world to my little homestead here involve negotiating both up and down hills that tend to ice over and get treacherous after a few inches of snow. Even with 4-wheel drive getting in or out can get a little problematic – more often than not because of other area residents who have already tried and failed to negotiate those trouble spots. That’s why I make my own decision about whether it’s safe to go to the office, whether I need to leave early to head home, or whether it needs to be a working from home kind of day. Waiting around for the bureaucracy to make an official decision just means conditions will already be shit by the time I get on the road, so I take the decision into my own hands – because no one is more concerned about me than I am myself.

The problem we run into is a really an issue of what we mean by “mandatory” evacuation. It’s hard to imagine (or expect) that even in the face of an incredibly destructive hurricane your state or local government is going to walk into your house, physically restrain you, and haul you out of your home against your will. They’ll certainly advise. They’ll caution. They may even warn, but ultimately the go/no-go decision is on your own head. The “I didn’t know it was going to be so bad” excuse only goes so far. Even here in north eastern Maryland plenty of reports were cutting through the static about Ian and all the potential damage he carried along. Living on a barrier island in south Florida during hurricane seasons kind puts a lot of the onus on each individual to have a bit of heightened awareness.

Sure, you’ll tell me that some people had no choice. In every natural disaster there’s always some subset of the impacted population that can’t afford to evacuate, or don’t have a car, or have some other extenuating circumstance. Those don’t seem to be the ones raising three kinds of hell during television interviews or in the print media. Then again, there’s a world of difference between “can’t” evacuate and “won’t” evacuate. For the former, it’s a tragedy. For the latter, it feels a lot more like a case of should’ve known better.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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Things from the Before Time. People are returning to the office. What I’ve noticed, particularly among a certain set of semi-senior or management types, is a quiet, unspoken determination to do things the way they were done in the Before Time. There’s a willful effort at suspending disbelief and denying the reality of the Great Plague. The fact that people aren’t quietly going along with their fervent wish to roll the clock back to February 2020 almost hits them as a surprise… as if they want to wish away the fact that over the last 30 months, the people didn’t find a better way to work and arguably a more rewarding way to live. But here they are, shocked and surprised that most of their colleagues aren’t thrilled and excited to commute, spend eight hours a day siting in florescent hell, or pile into a charter bus packed elbow to asshole with 53 of their new closest friends to take a two-hour ride. The powers at echelons higher than reality can make people return to cubicle land, but their expectation that anyone will do it with a smile in their heart is going to be sorely disappointed. 

Hurricane coverage. I’ve never really understood why networks make their anchors stand in the rain looking like drowned rats for their newscast. I know television is a visual medium, but I think everyone watching has had enough experience with rain to know what it looks like when you get caught in a downpour. Sure, show the aftermath. That’s probably newsworthy at some level. During the storm itself, though, there’s honestly just not that much to see that can’t be caught through a window or from under some minimal level of shelter. Sending grown ass adults to stand outside to demonstrate that it’s raining and windy, doesn’t feel particularly useful to my understanding of the coverage.

Being a dollar short and three months late. The plumbing company I had originally planned to use to install and new and improved water filtration system (more than two months ago) called rather sheepishly on Monday morning. The voicemail went a little something like “Oh, hey Mr. Tharp… We, uh, have a plan here for your filter system… We, uh, must have put it in someone else’s file and, uh, wanted to schedule a time to come out and get started on that work.” I appreciate the level of audacity it must take to make that call, particularly after I spent a month calling weekly to see where the plan was and when they were going to get started, before giving up and handing the project to a company that came out, drafted the plan, and did the work all within a week’s time. Mistakes, I’m told, happen. This, however, is one that could have been avoided at any of five or six points along the way if they had responded to a customer’s efforts to make contact. I encourage this company to go, and I can’t emphasize this enough, fuck themselves. 

Global wealth, exceptionalism, and mediocrity… 

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According to an article in The Guardian, in 2021 the number of millionaires in the United States increased by 2.5 million, bringing the total of millionaires in the US to 24.5 million. Put another way, approximately 7% of the people living in this country have a net worth of at least one million dollars. That number is so high compared to historical levels that according to the article “the number of millionaires was becoming so large that it was becoming ‘an increasingly irrelevant measure of wealth.’” 

In my mind, having 39% of the world’s millionaires knocking around the country is a good news story. It speaks to the unprecedented level of wealth creation the American economy and global trade have fostered. We’re creating wealth in greater amounts and more quickly than ever before in history and it’s a testament to what’s still possible with brains, effort, and a bit of luck.

The Guardian, of course, takes pains to point out that the largess of the global economy hasn’t been fairly distributed. As if anything in the world has ever been distributed fairly. Natural resources aren’t sprinkled evenly across the world. Intellect isn’t awarded equally at birth. Gnashing your teeth over issues of equity is, of course, the trendy take, but it’s not how the universe works. 

Personally, I’m far happier knowing it’s possible to be exceptional, somewhere towards the right end of the bell curve, than knowing for a certainty that we can all look forward to an equal share of mediocrity.