Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Comrade Smith, you’re right! No one in the right mind would ever attend this bullshit seminar. This is just some politician’s crony who’s managed to get a contract from the state of New York to funnel money to thyself. Your tax dollars at work! Incidentally, the word “entrepreneur” in Quebec French means General Contractor in the construction business and if you can pull that off, more power to you!

I was going to say, but Merrkin nailed it too, that there is plenty of benefit here...for the program administrators!

Think of the JOBS! Unionized Jobs!

About ten years too late (not that the linked is a completely original idea (Me, inc.)), or as egregious vis a vis the capped, italicized, and boldfaced snippets, but certainly just as bureaucratic:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich-AG

Oh come on Michael, buck up! Put on those Personal Responsibility ™ shoes and get some learning from one of our fine nation's Milkin Institute ™ inspired, well fed on diverted (okay, thieved) unemployment benefits, Employment Developers ™.

(After all, you could be JOBS!

That risen messiah could impart FoxConn wisdoms to you ...

all you need is A Garage!!!!!

...even a carport will do!!!!

a blocked off area of your residential street will suffice .....

when you have those:
Personal Responsibility ™ shoes.

So what if your product is totally unneccesary, toxic and destructive?

Just as long as your enslaved, non unionized workers can't afford the product they produce, who cares???

Don't be a loser!

Be a Thought Leader ™ !!!)

Speaking of that evil asshole who may rest in hell, allow me to share my last week's tale of woe with you.

My husband and I are very anti-Mac and all Apple products, which might have something to do with having worked for years at this drug company that insisted on using Mac’s for their business (your drug dollars at work!). Those comrades in the IT business probably know how difficult it is to support business applications on the piece of shit Mac’s. However, much to our dismay, we haven’t been able to impart our disdain to our daughter, who was itching to buy an iPhone after having saved her money from her two summer jobs. Of course I tried everything to convince her otherwise, including threatening to disown her (yeah, I know, I’m pretty harsh) but it didn’t work.

Alas, the kid ended up trying to buy an iPhone over the Craigslist unbeknownst to either of us and what do you know, she got scammed out of $450 of her hard earned money. So I had to spend a whole day with her going to the police and the bank to see if we could at least trace this guy to stop him from causing further damage but sadly, nothing could be done. The Montreal police was as useless as the San Francisco police and the bank gave us the usual privacy bullshit. The sad thing is that the guy is still sending her emails and mocking her gullibility.

Merkin, just regard (as they say in French) the well-earned look of total contempt on face of the man who deprived your daughter of $450 of hard-earned cash.

[T]he word "entrepreneur" in Quebec French means General Contractor in the construction business...

Did not the last POTUS deliver himself of this opinion: "The thing that's wrong with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur." I'm confused.

hard truths:

mr smith says he was fired from his job. my heart goes out to anyone who loses a job, especially now. but m smith also said he didn't care about the jib, didn't work hard,showed contempt. mr smith, if your doctor or your kid's doctor had that attitude, would you go back to him/her? your barber? the restaurant down the street? the book seller? and on and on.

mr smith and people on this blog, ok isn't good enough. average isn't goo enough, not in the global economy. if you're not great, you're out because someone out there is great, hard working, committed, engaged, willing to run though walls, do what it takes. every single person has to raise his game 10x. the chinese are, indians are, the hardest working people down the street are.

and this, everyone here on this blog and everywhere, is what YOU demand from everyone you do business with. you laugh here or fun, but you demand the best everywhere else, from everyone.

maybe start a business mr smith. you are a smart man who works hard on this blog. you are creative on this blog. raise your game, play to win, dont mock Abe detach. makes sure your kids are prepared to compete and to win.

tell them the hard truths now, because this world is getting tough. no more room for 'good enough.'

The world celebrated by Smilesberger is a horrific one of ceaseless striving and fear. The definition of "inhuman". we are devolving, because the elites demand more and more from people. I think that is why there is more and more homnelessness, not eveyrone can or is able to make himself be an "entrepeneur". A society that demands this marketing and striving and fear is not a good one, even if it is where we are going.

Although his point...contempt for your customers and clients is not a good way to run a society...is a good one.

Can I confess though...I LOVE my iPod. ALL electronics. ALL consumer goods are made in simialr or worse conditions now. I'm not excusing it, but...

I think average *needs* to be good enough, and then some. If it's not, then all us average and sub-average people -- who are, after all, a sizable majority -- need to be tearin' up the pea patch, as my grandma used to say. Where the hell do these exigeant standards come from, anyway, and whom do they serve?

Merkin in Montreal sez on 09.27.12 @17:32:
My husband and I are very anti-Mac and all Apple products, which might have something to do with having worked for years at this drug company that insisted on using Mac’s for their business (your drug dollars at work!). Those comrades in the IT business probably know how difficult it is to support business applications on the piece of shit Mac’s...

Wow, not too resentful, huh. Damn, man.

I've been unabashedly pro-Mac -- though I still roll my eyes at all the iPhone and iPad fanboys -- since early '85, when the design shop I worked at got a Mac, a scanner and a LaserWriter based on a "test drive" that one of the art directors and her husband took. It was the first computer I'd ever used -- unless you count the aging CompuGraphic 7500 system in our shop -- and it was at a time when the only alternative was MS-DOS and DOSshell, an operating system which required me to learn to type in a buttload of Magic Words, and whose paltry assortment of graphics software was an embarassment.

It took me about a week to get the hang of MacOS and another couple of weeks to get my head around the huge assortment of top-quality graphics and page-layout software available, and I put the pedal to the metal and never looked back. I've only ever used Macs ever since, except for a seven-year stint in a graphics shop where I learned a bit of Windows in order to handle the WordPerfect files generated by the writers and editors, and the occasional Corel files sent in by clients for cleanup.

When Windows 3.1 arrived at our shop, I couldn't stop laughing at its piss-poor attempt to knock off MacOS. "General Protection Fault" became one of my least favorite phrases in the English language. I quickly concluded that Windows was a plot by Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to make my job a bigger pain in the ass than it needed to be, and to make computer users in general miserable.

I think my attitude towards Macs stems in part from my age -- I was in my late 20s when I got my first Mac -- and the fact that at the time I first started doing graphic design on the Mac, I'd spent five years doing design and layout the old-fashioned way, with hot wax, cold galley type, razor blades, border tape, Rapidographs, Xerox machines and stat cameras. The epiphany I had when I suddenly realized I could take a design from concept to camera-ready in three days was only equalled by the first time I tried LSD. There's also the fact that when I bought my first Mac nearly thirty years ago, Apple was still very much "that hippie computer company".

That said, my attitude towards the trendoids who line up at 4am to buy the newest iPhone or iPad is pretty much the same as I have toward any other collection of cultist freaks. I found the iPad a distinct disappointment with its proprietary OS and walled-garden app store -- when I first heard Apple was working on a tablet, I was hoping for a letter-size tablet that could use a stylus and which ran OSX -- and as far as the iPhone goes, well, bah! Fucking hipsters.

I share your sentiment Merkin, the fucker was an incredibly unpleasant, brutal person, as seem to be all of our worshiped Oligarchic Sly Con Valley (plus that fucker public school terminator in Seattle) Thought Leaders ™

There is that hideous thing about Capitalism that worships Monsters ... (yup, that Reptilian theme does come to mind) ...which seems to be the reason they end up billionaires. I'm betting there are millions of homeless who are far more intelligent (whatever that really means) than those monsters, yet have something they don't, which is empathy and human compassion.

And that really sucks about your daughter receiving those emails. I know someone who got beat to the tune of $900 selling an instrument on Craig’s List who received the same predatory harassment after the fact.

About fifteen years ago, I went on unemployment for the first and only time in my life. If I'd gotten a note like that from the city, I'd have been laughing too hard to feel insulted.

Granted, that's insulting as hell, but... jeezus, man, it looks like something from The Onion or SNL.

This also puts me in mind of a truly insulting moment. A few years ago, when the economy was first starting to tank really hard, I caught a piece of a speech by Our Boy Emperor in which he tried to spin the skyrocketing unemployment rate by dishing out a bunch of blather about how many more people are becoming entreprenuers. I can't describe how pissed-on I felt. The country is full of unemployed, broke people about to be thrown out into the street and who are basically trying anything they can come up with to get some cash coming in -- the modern equivalent of formerly-affluent stockbrokers reduced to selling apples on Wall Street in 1929 -- and Obummer tries to spin this as an increase in entrepreneurship, f'crissake. Never before was I more seriously entertaining the possibility of risking long-term imprisonment by smacking the President Of The United States upside his goddamn' face.

Smilesburger sez on 009.27.12 @20:32:
hard truths:

mr smith says he was fired from his job. my heart goes out to anyone who loses a job, especially now. but m smith also said he didn't care about the jib, didn't work hard,showed contempt. mr smith, if your doctor or your kid's doctor had that attitude, would you go back to him/her? your barber? the restaurant down the street? the book seller? and on and on...

Is it just me, or does this guy sound like an intern from the American Enterprise Institute who's been assigned to troll Leftie blogs?

It can't possibly be someone who's actually spent any time working at a real job every day, dealing with a real boss who's a real pointy-haired jerkoff while still trying to put some real effort into a real honest day's work doing the best he can at what he knows. It's gotta be some goddamn' 19 year-old GWU poli sci major interning at AEI or some similar outfit, because that's basically the only thing they turn out at GWU -- conservative policy wonks and mediocre basketball players.

Whoever this little puke is, he needs to spend twenty or thirty years working at a real job for a real boss dealing with real working peoples' issues, and reaching the point where he feels that the only way he can strike back at the people who are making him miserable is to do the worst possible job he can with the worst possible attitude he can have without being fired.

(and smileberger, those Monsters aren't hard workers, they are power obsessed slave drivers, physically, emotionally and mentally. Monsters who love nothing better than to strip a human of their identity. They have no concern about their customers either outside of their contempt for them and finagling them under their Monopolistic boots.

I think High Arka described the type, which she terms: the superclass, pretty well here:

higharka.blogspot.com/2012/09/immortality-goes-private.html )

Is it just me, or does this guy sound like an intern from the American Enterprise Institute who's been assigned to troll Leftie blogs?

Nope Mike, it's not just you ... little [paid likely] puke fits.

(a wee update below Save the ...

http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2012/09/you_cant_fight_progress.html#comment-1395633 )

Ok comrades, now I really have to jump in on a number of issues that you guys commented on.

Comrade SK, regarding what the last POTUS said about the French, I have no idea whether or not it’s true because Quebecois et Quebecoise are not French. They might speak the same tongue, albeit with bad accent but they’re not French. They have a lot of words here that absolutely make no sense whatsoever to a French person, including all their cuss words, which happen to be ALL church references. But I dig your joke and find it funny.

Comrade Flugennock, I totally understand your preference for a Mac but as you said it yourself, it's great for graphics and art work. Back when Mac’s first came out, they were superior to any PC because of their graphics applications. But what I’m talking about is running bean counting applications on a Mac. Trust me, you don’t want to run the general ledger of a billion dollar company on a Mac!

The fool who generated our wrath is your garden variety corporate worker bee who thinks hard work and loyalty to the man would pay off. I’ve seen plenty of people like that in my time who regardless of age or political affiliation felt the same way. Like him, they use simplistic analogies of service providers such as doctors, barbers, restaurant servers or even teachers. What they fail to notice is that with the exception of a minority of people who actually produce real products, the rest of us are mere paper pushers in corporate America. There’s a huge difference between serving someone’s order in a restaurant in a timely manner (tangible goods) and shirking work when you’re pushing paper. Both of them are honorable professions but only one of them has a real deliverable with real deadlines. What I’m trying to say is that for the most part, missing a deadline in corporate America doesn’t have any real consequence or impact on the bottom line otherwise you would have seen boat load of people getting fired for that offense. Why? Because missing deadlines happens all the time, each and every day in corporate America regardless of the efficiency of workers or their lack thereof. In reality, it’s your asshole middle manager boss who gets to choose who stays and who goes regardless of your penchant for work shirking.

Note to Comrade diane: thanks for your sympathy.

(directly above that link is a correction of a calculation stupidity I made, though, thankfully, it wasn't really that far off of the mark.)

You're very welcome Merkin I can feel that pain somewhat, ... the person I know, who was harassed after being violated, is very, very dear to me.

Re general ledgers: going into more detail, I'm not so sure that those Oligarchies would care if the general ledgers of their billion dollar companies are run on a Mac, so much as demanding that their off Balance Sheet ‘assets’ and asset devouring algorithms are not run on a mac. After all, those Ellison - CIA Samurai Swordsman Pumpkin Head “Yachtsman” who is not able to navigate his own[ed] ‘boats’ - owned $$$$Oracle$$$$$ software programs, which feed into that microsquish software are truly worthless and corrupted, as are those MS, Pivot Tables!!!!!! Which no one even wants to verify, for the rabbit holes that they are.

Merkin in Montreal sez on 09.27.12 @17:32:
...Alas, the kid ended up trying to buy an iPhone over the Craigslist unbeknownst to either of us and what do you know, she got scammed out of $450 of her hard earned money. So I had to spend a whole day with her going to the police and the bank to see if we could at least trace this guy to stop him from causing further damage but sadly, nothing could be done. The Montreal police was as useless as the San Francisco police and the bank gave us the usual privacy bullshit. The sad thing is that the guy is still sending her emails and mocking her gullibility...

In all seriousness, though... jeezus, that's fuckin' sick. At least in the old days, the thief would've shown a slight modicum of class by just doing the deed and moving on instead of lingering around to inflict repeated torment.

Just wondering... is your daughter saving the emails? They're evidence, after all. You may want to find someone who knows how to read email headers, so that you can contact the creep's ISP and inform them of the harassing emails from one of their users... what with all the media hype about "cyberstalking" and all.

Great suggestion and yes, she has all the guy's emails. In fact, she printed them all when we went to the police station to file a complaint. The cops gave us a very creative bullshit line. They claimed that this wasn't a "criminal" matter because technically, she entered into a contract with this guy by accepting to pay for some merchandize. Never mind the fact that the merchandize never existed and it was all a fraud. The moral of the story is that if you're in Montreal, it's not a crime if you defraud people by claiming the goods that you don't have and collect money for the said vaporware.

Actually, my daughter is genuinely scared of this guy and at first didn't want to pursue anything with the cops because he has her address (she had to provide her address for the shipment). So I think I might actually go to another police station and see what they can do with the "stalking" charge. After all, he does have her address and if he's that sick that he continues sending emails taunting her, it could be serious.

This seems like a good explanation of determining headers here:

andromida.hubpages.com/hub/how-to-trace-the-source-of-an-email

at which point, you could enter his IP address in the look up box here:

whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup

to see what comes up. (The look up box will probably automatically show your own IP address, just enter the new one.)

The site provides quite a bit of info, including blacklists. (Note though: If you're using a Dynamic IP number (which will show up in the analysis provided) and you check your own IP data and find your IP number on a few blacklists, don't freak, read the explanations. It's likely because of the shared Dynamic IP number, which numbers are automatically blocked in certain instances.)

Good luck, I hope you can nail him.

Comrades, I'd give Mr. Smilesberger a break. He's echoing what most of us hear in Corporate Amurrica EVERY SINGLE DAY, and relentlessly. Everywhere. In meetings, from our bosses, who hear it from their bosses. At conferences. On the weekends. ALL THE TIME.

Get something drilled into you enough, with no opposing views permitted, no questions asked, and it actually starts to feel true.

That may well be the case here, though Mr Smles can of course speak for himself, I suppose.