Why Do Deferred Life Planners Ask For Help?

Posted on November 25, 2012 by FullVacuumRob

Deferred Life Plan types are easy to spot. They tend to be insecure about their success, because they know they are messing up. This entraps them in the basest form of reassurance: short-lived stuff, which makes them financially worse off and yet more insecure. A cycle is born.

You know people who buy cars, meals, houses, clothes that they cannot afford. Some have approached me for “help”, which means “money.” The same people’s insecurities then lead them to criticise my ways.

DLP’s know the game they are playing. The news for them is that everyone can see the DLP game because they radiate it. DLP’s radiate boredom and shallowness from the shopping malls to the driving habits to the cholesterol tests.

What happens when an entire country forgets to have a goal and goes on DLP? Does it then borrow money from those whom it lectures about human rights?

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SchizopHRenia II: Category Killing Dudes

Posted on November 25, 2012 by FullVacuumRob

In the first installment, I said that you can’t spell “schizophrenia” without HR, reflecting the nuttiness of many human resources departments across the Fortune 500. Make that the Wilshire 5000. Full Vacuum believes that typical HR policies are dangerous to business and the country.

What one should really look for in a candidate is the ability to run. It’s the ability to kill – not the target, not the weapon, not anything else. It’s an attitude. It’s the operating system, not the applications. Human applications, also known as skills, will be added or deleted with training.

Resume keyword filtering filters that out and focuses on the most fungible part, the training. Many companies want to be the category killer but then kill themselves by hiring based on a record that shows experience in the space. Let’s say I’m starting a new company called Buffalo Bill Dot Com. Whom should I hire? According to present HR filtering strategies, the ideal candidate would be a bison biologist or a cartographer of the Plains states.

FullVacuum says you’ll do much better with a kick butt person who likes to see competitors fall. Resume filtering often gets rid of candidates who have turned pro, in the sense that Steven Pressfield means it. Want to be a commodity, ie, not make strides or money? Then hire commodities, and commoditize them with commoditized training.

Positively schizophrenic.

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Tim Kaine Walks Into It

Posted on November 13, 2012 by FullVacuumRob

Did anyone realize? Here’s the technique: if you can’t pack the court, you pack the agencies. This is an age old trick by totalitarian governments.

A few days ago Virginia Senator-elect Kaine was interviewed on a TV news program. He stated that Virginia turned blue because of the growth in the northern suburbs. Naturally, he was in favor of this.

Readers of 1984 will recall one of the tricks was to get your friends in the bureacracy and co-opt your non-friends by harming, then hiring them. Just a book? This why the max salary limit quietly went away for apparatchiks during the Soviet era. This is also how the apartheid government got entrenched in South Africa, and is described in The Covenant.

And the Governor-elect walked right into it. Let the pork begin.

 

Posted in Being a Leader, Government, Media | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Democrat Dow

Posted on November 13, 2012 by FullVacuumRob

There is evidence that US stock markets rise faster under Democrats than under Republicans. If Republicans say they’re business-friendly, why should this be so?

1) Dividends: no one says whether the Dow Jones Industrials rise because of tax policy. If a less efficient policy comes into place, then the smart choice is to hold on to earnings and not force shareholders to be taxed on dividends. (Let them choose, in other words, how and when they wish to be taxed.) The Dow Jones reflects retained earnings better than it does dividends.

2) Inflation: savvy investors know that stocks are the best hedge against inflation. No GDP deflators apply to the Dow Jones.

3) History: Under FDR, business improved in spite of him, not because of him. JFK didn’t have enough time to ruin things. LBJ didn’t have Japan to contend with. For Jimmy, see “inflation” above. Bill didn’t channel Reagan as much as he inherited him, and China wasn’t on line yet.

4) The Wineglass Economy: there are two kinds of companies in Socialist economies. Those are hot dog carts and Leviathans. If you don’t believe me, look at Sweden: either you have a mom-and-pop shop, or you’re Ikea, Electrolux, or Volvo. Nothing against them, but understand that red tape burdens in the US act like the squeeze of a soap bar. The Dow Jones index is going to show Leviathan growing without showing the opportunity cost of the shrinking middle.

 

The end lesson is to remember that the DJIA, or any other index you choose, is a proxy, and proxies tell part of the story.

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I Am Minus 119 Percent White!

Posted on November 7, 2012 by FullVacuumRob

Great book: Stuff White People Like.

I took the test at the end of the book and turned out to be only 19% white. Elsewhere in the book it says that if you have a degree in science, engineering, or business your white card is automatically revoked. I guess that means I’ve been set to zero twice (once for engineering, once for business) so maybe it’s minus 19. Minus 119? 219?

Allow me to present some white person abject failure: I don’t even know what a Wes Anderson movie is, hate raising awareness, had to google David Sedaris, think James Joyce is the worst and could not suffer even three chapters, and have never seen My So-Called Life. I have a life, have never watched Jon Stewart or David Colbert, and think the New York Times isn’t fit to wipe one’s arse with.

Guilty as charged, though, if you had a search warrant, you could confiscate Pulp Fiction, Kerouac, a number of teas and Infinite Jest should you be clever enough to nick my Kindle. The Full Vacuum will rest at negative 119, a safe margin.

I think the author is right about whites… not the majority, but you know of whom I speak. Same pseudo-mess hair, same pants, same car, same color, same unacted upon wish to live in Portland, where the same race of people listens to the same kind of music and has the same opinion about evil corporations (THEIR cars, forks, meds and coffeemakers are created by gypsy magic fairy dust in renewable cottages) while shooting for the same useless career making second rate sketches for some third-rate free newspaper that raises awareness.

These are the same people that don’t like Rush, say, or your odd Metallica disc or Steven Pressfield because “it’s all the same.” They vote blue because they like diversity, but live in Portland, Boston, Maine, Vermont, or a safe part of Maryland because they really don’t like it at all.

They advertise their nonconformance by being totally conformist, criticizing the tribe for being such, simultaneously frustrated they can’t join it. One cannot be conformist and authentic.

If to be white is to be desperate for authenticity, then minus 119 sounds about right.

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Do NOT reverse engineer your friends

Posted on November 7, 2012 by FullVacuumRob

Many are happy with yesterday’s results. Many are unhappy.

Hold to your beliefs but remember that your friendships transcend. If you subscribe to Lee Iacocca’s “9-C” model of leadership, you realize that very few people really score well on all 9 categories at once. Your friends and relatives may weigh things differently – this is not a reason to hate them anew. Friction is necessary in relationships, else you would only know yourself, and not very well at that.

My wife saw Facebook entries with “wouldn’t it be nice if” and a judgement toward the other side. In more than one election I’ve heard from close relations about “your president” and heard many a sigh and eyeroll. Inappropriate, and only serves to harden an opinion and invite judgement.

I’ve also heard “You are [category X], but you’re so nice! I don’t understand!” I’ve heard it in a number of forms (from the north, occupation so-and-so, whatever). This proves Rudy Giuliani’s statement that painting Republicans as mean is nothing but prejudice. It also shows that many cling to categorizing when the point of the US is the power of the individual.

To label is to spite people’s complex feelings and beliefs. Both campaigns could be construed to insult us by caring the most about swing states and by using terms like “firewall” for non-swing states. “Firewall” implies that you are being taken for granted, someone for whom the label matters more than the result.

Remember that the label is someone else’s, all categorization may stink of death, and don’t expand the worst of the other side to your friend.

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Another reason Newsweek died

Posted on November 7, 2012 by FullVacuumRob

Good riddance. Before the first debate, their cover showed a picture of the President with the title “The Democrats’ Reagan.”

Regardless of your position, rarely was news so misguided, a metaphor so poorly applied. The customer, right and left, has noticed.

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The Audacity of Kicking It

Posted on November 6, 2012 by FullVacuumRob

I read The Audacity of Hope, and though The Full Vacuum is strongly libertarian, we do not wish a leader to fail. We all fail when they do.

But if there had been some – even a small amount – of the audacity of kicking some tail around, there would have been hope. It’s the same problem as The Secret: useful as a start, but action is required.

For those of a more poetic bent, here is some good advice:

Lost the audacity of hope / no results and no chance / decided to glare and mope / when you shoulda got up and danced.

Go. Be. Do. Be truly audacious, don’t theorize about it.

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Obama posts, FullVacuum Responds.

Posted on November 6, 2012 by FullVacuumRob

Posted to the FullVacuum twitter account today from Obama for America CO:

President Obama and the First Lady have already voted. Today, it’s your turn. Find your voting location: [site deleted]

 

The reply:

You mean today it’s my turn to get the boot off my throat. No reminder necessary.

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Glad That MIT Was A Bust

Posted on June 1, 2012 by FullVacuumRob

For me, that is.

My dream for many years – for as long as I knew where things were happening – was to attend MIT. I was thrilled to have, in the mid-1980′s, an off campus interview in upstate New York.

I’d already noticed that the state was in dire straits and during our big picture conversation asked why things weren’t scaling down. That is, big brother drives people out, fewer services are required, costs ought to be decreasing.

The dude actually contradicted me and asked what I’d rather have, people on one side of the welfare line receiving checks or on the other side handing them out. Or how to decrease the cost of a plowed road, or a city bus, because the same cost is spread over fewer people. I was stunned and even at 16 knew this was completely wrong. Maybe that is why I didn’t get in, because my lack of poker-playing skills told the alum I thought he was a schmo. Dodged a bullet.

The Economist pointed this out. Between 1950 and 2006 Buffalo’s population halved, but the number of state workers remained steady. No surprise, as I noticed the trend twenty years before the article came out.

Full Vacuum is happy to be validated, but spit out the sour grapes as soon as they crossed the palate. Much better was avoiding being contaminated. The best the august MIT could do was find a guy who defended the people that were choking him. What use are differential equations without critical thinking?

Incidentally, in the ensuing years the share price of the company he worked for went up to $250. Before it crashed to $0.90, that is. MIT was not the only bust. It is pathetic that we all have to lose because of the incestuous partnership between education and public sector union leeches.

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