Good Points

https://medium.com/make-work-better/w-edwards-demings-red-beads-experiment-dea18bfc2aba

Callousness

I've been thinking about the murder of that healthcare CEO... a lot of people have, and while I don't think I'm adding anything new it still feels like it needs to be said.

Some people seem appalled by the jokes and memes and general celebration of what is basically a murder.

While I'm sure his friends and family are devastated, and the callousness of the general public is hurtful, there's obviously more to it than that.

It is, in many ways, people just demonstrating the callousness they have felt - over and over again - from a system that makes it clear that they don't give a shit how the average person suffers.

I have wondered, sometimes, about what goes through the minds of the 1%. How they can make decisions that you would think any human being would find appalling. Are they even human? Do they not have a heart?

Sure, self-interest is something everyone feels... and it's understandable people are reluctant to ignore a 'threat' to their self interest. 

But how, for example, did the people behind the decisions in tobacco companies who fought tooth and nail to deny their products caused cancer live with themselves? 

We are talking about people's lives here... and yet making money was more important.

The same for the oil companies. I don't know if they truly believe their cherry picked evidence that oil usage doesn't affect the climate, or if they just think that with their money they'll be fine... and don't care about anyone else. 

Is it callousness and cruelty? Self delusion? Do they think they're good people? Or are they so cynical that they don't care?

Over and over again, we have multiple examples. Disney fighting to deny compensation to a man who lost his wife.

Even older stories - of the Radium Girls. 

Of companies that - again - fought tooth and nail against safety requirements. Someone might lose a hand or a leg due to unsafe practices, but they'd rather say 'tough luck' and fight against them than show even a modicum of care for the employees who make their products.

Most of the time, it's some faceless and unknown 'they'. The old white man in a board room, wearing a suit, talking up about how great he is and complaining about whatever threatens his ability to buy a seventh yacht.

This CEO apparently was related to Anthem's decision to limit paying for anesthesia.

anesthesia.

Everyone knows someone who had a surgery go longer than expected. Surgeons don't always know what they will find when they open someone up, and complications are not unusual.

The idea that someone could go under for surgery and come out of it with an insane amount of debt just because the procedure took longer than expected?

Horrifying

Or worse, that they would try to reduce the anesthesia sooner than they should and someone would suffer, in pain, because of it.

Was there nobody in the room who saw the problem here?

Did... noone have the ability to put themselves in the shoes of someone going under the knife?

Do they not think they'll ever need surgery themselves? Or not worry about any  unexpected expenses if they do?

Again - are they even human?

So somebody actually put a face to one of those unnamed decision makers, and took a shot at him.

Killed him, even.

And since I don't know this guy, since all I know is that he is part of that horrible system, it is really hard not to think 'good riddance'.

Fuck those guys.

There are, of course, a lot of problems here. The issues are larger than just one CEO - they're systemic.

And while some people are fed up to the point that they just want to see it all burn to the ground (there was an interesting article about Trump, saying his supporters are basically the ones that just want to tear it all down), I've for the most part felt that that's a mistake.

For a couple of reasons... first, that tearing down the system tends to hurt the average person more than those insulated boardroom assholes. 'Too big to fail' angers people because that's part of how these guys continue to do what they do. 

Second - the source of the problem doesn't go away no matter how satisfying it might be chop of the nobles heads with a guillotine. Generally we're just replacing one group of callous and heartless rich people with another, and it's just a matter of time before the same issues occur. (Like we're seeing today.)

I understand the frustration that led people to support Trump, and my real issue with him is that he's not going to actually address any of that. 

He's even more callous and heartless than most. We already saw it, with how he handled covid. He didn't care at all about how many people were actually dying, and only cared for how the numbers looked

“I like the numbers being where they are.”

He said in March of 2020. Because the optics were more important than coming up with the best way of handling a cruise ship with infected passengers.

I've said before, I think the Bible basically is telling us to 'be a good shepherd' and keep the health of our citizens at the forefront of our decision making, because doing so will steer you right.

When someone had blatantly shown they don't have that guiding light, it's pretty much guaranteed that their decisions will go wrong.

The Democrats were not all that great of a choice, sure. But I thought, if they won, that it might be possible to fix some of this shit from within the system.

Now it's hard to believe any of that is possible, and I'm dreading the upcoming train wreck as he continues to make callous and cruel decisions that will hurt the very people who voted for him.

But enough about that. Let's go back to this CEO... and the reaction of the general public.

For the stranger I don't know, but who I'm sure was a human just like myself, and for his friends and family who cared, I am sorry.

But for yet another wealthy man who is part of such a callous and cruel system - good riddance. 

It doesn't feel like any of them care unless they suffer the consequences of their decisions, and I can't say I'd be upset if it happened to more of you.

 

Now THAT is a Good Book Quote

"Idealists are frustrating. Infuriating as they are inflexible. They hold impossibly naïve positions, and equivocate, and split hairs, and get lost in pointless hypotheticals—often as the world burns down around them. And much as they’d like to believe otherwise, they’re anything but perfect. If anything, they’re more susceptible to despair and discouragement than the rest of us. It’s that detachment from reality that makes people like me necessary in a crisis. The pragmatists, the mathematical monsters, the coldhearted bastards who believe good ends justify almost any means. The necessary evils. But if you take that as a license to smother the people who resist, who dare to hope, who wholeheartedly uphold the conviction that we don’t have to become monsters to destroy monsters, and genuinely, perhaps even stupidly, believe that things can be better? When the crisis is over and the smoke fades, evil is all you’re left with."

  -- Matt, Double Blind Book 2

Nice Unscientific Breakdown of Employee Types

https://www.tumblr.com/balioc/768319203871719424?source=share

I guess I'm a blend of Craftsman and Normie? Maybe a slight tinge of Fanatic... 

On Cocoons and the Building Thereof

A couple of posts ago I referred to the book Hope for the Flowers, and mentioned that instinctive sense that this is something that will help me become who I want to be. 

It got me thinking about where I am now, and why my current position doesn't fit that description.

The journey of self discovery  is never ending, and I've learned a few things about myself since I changed careers (again) and got a Master's in Computer Science.

1) I like solving puzzles. This is good and bad, in that I've been able to really dig into the weeds on parts of our application and now know those parts better than team members who have been there a lot longer. It's part of why they like me so much. But it's bad... because for the most part the offshore team has the manpower and resources to do intensive work on things (like writing scripts to automate some of our tasks, or building dashboards to capture key information, or figuring out how and why the app works the way it does and trying to illustrate it with a diagram) whereas our onshore team - my team - is small and all too often dealing with whatever the issue of the day is. 

I have a list of self-identified projects I'd like to work on for things that would make our jobs easier, but all too often I am getting pulled into this meeting or that, or getting asked to put together the information needed for an ask on one of our tickets, or some other thing, and I rarely get uninterrupted time to focus on any of those things.

I think - I know I can handle other tasks. I've been in leadership positions before. I can do the endless meetings and powerpoint presentations and plan and manage people and discuss KPI's and whatever... but I think I actually like just quietly working on some puzzle or another. 

As I learn more about infosec and cyber security, I realize that there are parts of it that aren't actually that appealing to me. I get the whole CIA concept, and the need to quantify business risks and make the business case for some course of action or mitigation, and although I'm confident I am capable of doing so, I don't think I actually want to deal with any of that.

Instead, I think I would really enjoy doing something like reverse engineering malware or something. Perhaps learning more about how to look through Splunk logs to identify malicious activity and track down the cause. Unfortunately, tbh I am mentally exhausted at the end of the work day and don't really have the energy to teach myself what I would need to know for yet another career change, and I think it's unlikely someone will hire me with the understanding that I would have to learn quite a lot about the field before I could be productive. (I think I would kick ass at it once I get past the learning period, but whatever.)

But puzzle solving in and of itself isn't enough. If that was all I needed, my current job would work well enough. This leads me to the next point:

2) I want to have a positive impact. 

It's not that I'm not having a positive impact in my current position. I actually kind of like pointing something out or asking a question, and knowing that I have potentially saved hours of misguided efforts. Like 'hey, this source connector needs to have an IP and port address to work, and it goes through a jump server to get to it's destination. Have we submitted the request to set up that passage through the jump server? If so what's the port number we're using?'

(Note: I am trying not to go into too much technical detail, not just to save the sanity of non-techie people, but also because mentioning specific software can give away too much information to potential hackers.)

And that's all well and good, and rewarding, but ultimately the job itself is... okay I guess. It's mostly putting money in the corporate pockets, honestly. Our app does sometimes impact the end user (i.e. a normal person who is a customer of our client), and I do want to make sure they don't have any issues. Like a website taking too long to load, or having inaccurate information regarding their usage. 

It just doesn't seem as important as pushing back the encroachment of hackers who potentially make using the internet so risky that nobody would trust it. Or identifying nation/state actors trying to do some shadowy activity. We seem to have a budding cyber war already occurring outside the awareness of the average person, and I want to have some say in how that goes.

Which is somewhat related to another point...

3) I appear to have a good amount of potential for a variety of different things. 

That seems very vague and perhaps a bit self-congratulatory, so let me explain a bit more.

Throughout my life, the one adjective people regularly use to describe me is 'intelligent'.

This seems like rather boring and non-descriptive when I think about it. Like... okay, I guess I'm smart, but so what? I pick things up quickly, I learn fast, I can solve more complicated puzzles.

Great. Makes my life easier. It's part of why I do well in classroom environments, and generally make whoever hires me happy. 

It's also a trait I never really chose. Like having brown hair or hazel eyes. 

"You have brown hair."

"You are intelligent."

Why do people act like the second statement is so much better than the first? 

Granted, intelligence is part of why I'm good at puzzle solving. But then why is puzzle solving any more valued or important than someone being good at drawing? Or good at handling emergencies in an ER?

If I were to get down to it, intelligence is more an indicator at how fast you can learn something, and how deep you can go when you master a field. And it can be applied to almost any field of interest, but you still have to put in the work to learn and master that field.

In other words - intelligence might make you reach a certain point of mastery in computer science faster than someone else, or do the same for civil engineering, or physics, or any number of fields... but you still have to put in the work, and you don't really have the time to master everything. 

So it's more like it gives you more options, and you can perhaps go a bit further than others in whatever area you focus on. (It can also lead to jealousy and pushback. I know in my first platoon, as a young butterbar lieutenant, one of my NCO's said a fellow officer was less than supportive because he felt like I could 'just pick up a manual and memorize it'. Which seems a bit exaggerated from my perspective. I generally think holistically and have to figure out where to place that information in the greater whole before I can really remember it, and I'm terrible at remembering exact quotes and phrases. But sure. Close enough.)

But to get back to the main point - intelligence can help you succeed at almost anything.

Which is why even though I have been doing well at my current job, it feels like only a fraction of what I'm capable of. (There was a reason 'be all that you can be' appealed to me back in the day. I was sad to discover that that's a lot harder to achieve than it seems.)

Those instincts saying that this is something that will help? It's generally because there's a position that seems challenging.

The right type of challenging, too. Something right at the edge between 'not really challenging, and therefore won't help you grow' and 'so overwhelmingly challenging that it's too much, and you will fail.'

Something that pushes you past your comfort level, but isn't setting you up for failure by being impossible to achieve.

There might be more to it than this, but my dog is asking to go out and I don't have anything more to add for now.

Addendum

The last post reminded me of something I've heard about before, but tends to slip my mind. 

Mainly that international organized crime is a growing threat, though it's hard to get specific details. Russia is sometimes called a mafia state, for example, and that is saying something specific about how Putin governs. 

It reminds me of something I thought, back when I was on an organized crime kick and reading up on it. 

See, the members tended to have a worldview where they looked down on the typical law abiding citizen. They will spend a lot of time and energy coming up with crooked ways to make money. 

But aside from their possible influence in adding expiration dates to milk, they're pretty much parasites. 

Think about it. 

If all the people they prey upon disappeared, who would be growing food or building cars?

All the things they enjoy depend on the people they look down upon. 

Take it the other way, and think about what would happen if all the people who think like them disappeared. 

There might be some unpredictable second or third order effects (i.e. resisting a despotic government generally means using black market ties, which means crime. I got on that organized crime kick because it seemed to fit with counterterrorism after all) but for the most part humanity would be fine. 

Perhaps even more than fine, especially if they're going around collecting kompromat so they can manipulate powerful people. 

Death Threats

On the one hand, I understand how scary this is to individuals. 

On the other hand, the consequences of intimidation to this degree are pretty horrible, and I don't know that there's any way it'll get better besides refusing to let them intimidate you. 

I guess I'll just say they all have to make the choice they can live with, but I think I'd rather they just outright resigned. If that has happened enough masse, maybe we wouldn't be stuck in our current situation.