ndawg

To Trump, America is a prize that he won. If he loses reelection, he’ll do what all narcissists do when they suspect you might take away something they like. He’ll ruin the fucking thing so that no one can have it.

Right. Americans love to buy into this myth that business is some kind of crucible that feckless ineptitude can’t survive in. In reality, businesses are generally a petri dish of incompetence competing against equally dysfunctional competitors.

You’re not seeing it. Shit has been bad, but will be in a free fall if Trump wins. Let your imagination loose for a minute and really think about how bad things could get.

I mean, it’s not exactly rocket science at this point. You’re arguing that if we merely vote Trump out of office, we won’t go nearly far enough to fix the underlying problems with this country (we all agree with that, despite you being convinced we aren’t seeing it). You seem to be missing an even more important point, though, which is that if we fail to vote out Trump, we are turbo fucked. You seem too invested in proving that you think more deeply about stuff than others, and aren’t seeing how precarious our present situation really is. Hint: it’s very precarious.

No, you see, his trick only works if you make him address one thing at a time. See, he can rationalize and deflect things piecemeal that way. You’ll never get him to actually take in information comprehensively, weigh it all in the balance, and render commentary that’s fully informed by every idea that’s been presented. He’s not wired like that. None of these people are. Their brains are the house that cognitive dissonance built, and goldfish have longer attention spans. They only read just far enough to identify what shitty high school debate club tactic they can employ next. They will never examine their own ideas critically, just as they will never consider other competing ideas hypothetically. They need to be in therapy. Instead, they’re ushering in Fascism 2.0.

Burned at the stake? Hyperbole much? The worst thing that can happen here is you can be shown how and why your position is baseless and foolish. What a snowflake.

“Defund the police” didn’t strike me as meaning to literally abolish them when I first heard it. I just figured it was similar to how the Republicans defunded the education system. Gut it down to the barebones. Trim the fat. You know, they’ll probably figure out how to run themselves even better than before, and all that jazz.

I mean, I hate to say it, because I like to think the best of everybody (excluding the truly lost souls on the far right), but I think that's what his stance boils down to. To whatever extent there's lean production still being done in the medical industry, I'd bet money it's only increasing the industry's ability to adapt to the crisis. Mass production -- where the Rust Belt still seems stuck in -- is absolutely shitty at adaptation by comparison. I'm pretty far left, and even I don't see how anyone could not have an appreciation for the industrial advances of the last 80 years -- and a lot of stems precisely from how the US tooled up for WW2, which is fascinating because we're facing a somewhat similar crisis now. To suggest we erase all that advancement because some hospitals appear to be doing stupid shit seems short sighted. It's obvious to anyone paying attention that we win this shit by getting people to take responsibility and fucking cooperate. What everyone who has practiced and studied management knows is just how hard that is to pull off in an organization of any real size. It bothers me greatly that in our political climate, the GOP brand themselves as the "capitalists," but they fucking suck at actual management. Anyways, I'm way off tangent here. Social distancing and the overall stress is taking a toll, and I'm finding it hard to withstand the impulse to start barking about everything that's wrong with the world. I wish there were good managers in government right now.

Well, implicit in the phrase "I can't point to a single one" is a recognition that I simply may be ignorant. But hosts of American companies have tried to "do Lean," and they figure out some basics like batch sizes, queuing theory, etc., but never get far enough for it to really take, because they cannot reshape their culture and the mindset of their workforce (from top to bottom). I just meant that it's odd to me to see Lean show up in a political discussion. For me, Lean is a subject I've been studying as a complete amateur for a few years, and I've never observed it come up in any political discussion. At any rate, I am aware of a fairly substantial undertaking starting in the 90s to bring Lean management to our private health industry, but I've been reading some of Jim Womack's literature on their efforts to improve many industries, including health care... and he seems to paint a rather grim portrayal of actual real world success here in the States (and elsewhere). One of my favorite quotes of his goes something like this: "everyone knows the words to the new song, but few can carry the tune." I've got a strong appreciation for the subject, I suppose my impulse was sparked from a feeling of, "hey, don't throw a baby out with the bathwater." Lean principles would help this country quite a bit. But the circumstances that allowed it to emerge at Toyota in the 50s would be considered toxic (and downright "socialistic") here.

Do you mean "JIT?" And who exactly is touting the value of Lean/JIT in the political arena? I know that many American businesses have attempted a transformation to Lean, but I can't point to a single one that actually succeeded over the long haul. Even companies that made serious inroads all regressed back to typical western management practices.

Can you not see the difference?

Jimmyjazz made a prediction, not a claim.

Indeed. The thing a contrarian never wants to admit to is that they got suckered, because their entire identity is built on the notion that it's everyone else who is the sucker.

Yes, that's precisely it. You operate in a world where every time a number is put to anything, data is required, regardless of context. That's the thing you're not seeing: context. There are contexts where a numerical guess absolutely appropriate. We're seeing vastly different responses around the world to the pandemic, and vastly different outcomes. It's not hard to see that Trump wasted a lot of time that any president listening to their experts would have spent preparing the country. It's also not hard to consider the last few decades of Hillary Clinton's public life and gauge that she would have done the other thing. I guess I'm getting riled up because I work in tech, and I keep running into people with this same lack of ability to contextualize discussion. You can say you prefer mustard to mayonnaise and they'll ask you to cite your sources, like it's a formal debate. So, sorry if I'm venting my frustration on you. But I think you're missing something that's literally right in front of you.

There's no sensitivity here. Look, I enjoy reading your posts, sincerely. You're a capable contrarian, and contrarians always have the same blind spot. Every once in a while, the truth is going to be hiding in plain sight, right in front of you, and you're not going to see it, because you're biased against any answers that can be satisfied by plain observation. I think Nick Saban would have won 10 games at Texas last year. I ain't got no numbers to prove it, and that's no big deal.

This is where you're showing your ass. JimmyJames engaged in conjecture in the context of grading Trump's leadership. I believe Nick Saban would have won more games in the last five years than Strong / Herman. That's also conjecture. Also fair, if I'm grading our hoad coaches. You're stuck inside your framing of the discussion that demands an epistemological standard that is utterly irrational given the context. As if there could be no basis for his conjecture except empirical data gathered from an alternate universe where Trump lost in 2016. The basis for JJ's very valid conjecture is that he hasn't been in a fucking coma for the last three and a half years. I'm beginning to wonder about you.

Can you give us some evidence that you've thought this through rationally?

I mean, it's not even a comparison, because Charlie Strong rose through the coaching ranks and built a resume strong enough for consideration. The closest analogy would be if an actor who played a high school coach in a bad TV show suddenly became the head coach for the Green Bay Packers.

How do you feel about them Obama Death Panels now?

Maybe they don't like arguing with you, either.

All this nonsensical dissembling on whether Trump did indeed say the virus was a hoax or not is more evidence that Trump supporters don't actually have ideas. They thrive off of adopting the contrarian position, and then rationalizing it with pretzel logic. It's evident every single time they sit in front of their keyboards. They don't even pretend to be conservatives anymore, because they can't! Just to incorporate a baseline conservative position into their dumb rhetoric requires more elaborate spin than they're capable of mustering.

I've done my best to refrain from pouncing on y'all here, but I should note that, at least in our interaction a few pages ago, you didn't exactly support Trump. You suggested that we'd be worse off with Biden. To me, it seems like Trump is completely bullshitting his way through this crisis. He reminds me of every time I ever gave a presentation in front of the whole class that I had weeks to prepare for but waited till the last minute. What is it that you see?

He never will, either. Not unless someone prepares a giant copy pasta wall of text that appears to make that case.

"Hey, look, if I squint really hard and partially cover my eyes just right, then all I can see are facts that support my existing point of view! I've done it! I'm correct!"

Do you know those two sentences can be applied to your constitutional perspective, as well? Hell, anyone's constitutional perspective? And the fucking document includes a 3/5ths compromise, for chrissake.