#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
The dogs always sit next to Spacebunny. Always. Of course, so do the horses, goats, birds, and random forest animals. It’s basically like that scene from Cinderella, only every day and all the time. At this point, I’ve concluded that she’s some sort of Nordic dryad.
At least, not if you value your legacy. Because, sooner or later, the acquiring company will destroy what you and your family have built.
After more than 157 years, Leinenkugel’s beer will no longer be brewed in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.
The beer that has become synonymous with the western Wisconsin town will soon be produced at parent company Molson Coors’ sprawling plant in Milwaukee.
Molson Coors said the decision to move production of Leinenkugel’s products came after improvements to its canning line in Milwaukee. Another smaller brewery under the Molson Coors umbrella, 10th Street Brewery in Milwaukee, will also be rolled into the company’s main operation.
According to the Molson-Coors Company website, the Leinenkugel’s brewery, with 120 employees at the location in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, will soon be closing.
When efficiency is the order of the day, there is never any respect for history. The money is nice, but there is no legacy in having your name on a can of Old Shoe.
The pursuit of excellence, in even the most humble of responsibilities, is never a waste. Indeed, it can be recognized and celebrated, even in the most humble of responsibilities:
It’s been quite the week for Trevor Skogerboe. Skogerboe, an assistant equipment director at Cal, went viral over the weekend for tackling a fan who was trying to steal a helmet as the Golden Bears faithful stormed the field following a 24–21 victory over rival Stanford at California Memorial Stadium.
That tackle—which has gained the praise of many across the college football world, including Cal head football coach Justin Wilcox—earned Skogerboe a spot among the sport’s greatest talents in February.
Jim Nagy, the executive director of the Reese’s Senior Bowl, announced Wednesday that Skogerboe accepted his official invite to the annual showcase set for Feb. 1 at South Alabama. No, Skogerboe won’t be suiting up at linebacker at the 2025 Senior Bowl. But he will be a part of the equipment staff responsible for working the postseason college football All-Star game.
Don’t ever be content with just doing the minimum required. Pursue excellence, even if you’re the only one who will know the difference. Persistence plus excellence will not guarantee success – nothing short of taking the ticket will do that – but it lays the foundation that makes success possible.
Not even Iron Mike Tyson. He had two rounds to put Jake Paul away, and when he didn’t, the outcome became inevitable. Still, it’s good to see the younger generation showing due respect to their elders, even when they’ve passed them by. Jake Paul may have won a unanimous decision, but he also knows greatness when he sees it.
It took a fair amount of courage for Mike Tyson to get back in the ring, even against a show pony fighter like Jake Paul. Paul, like it or not, is a legitimate boxer now. He’s put in the time, he’s put in the training, and if he’s not about to take on a top-ranked fighter, well, he’s first and foremost an entertainer. But that doesn’t make him any less legitimate or dangerous. He’s got knockout power. And in the ring, anyone can hurt you; there are no guarantees and people get injured even in sparring. I’ve seen ankles broken, noses broken, and was even knocked out myself once in training.
I’m only two years younger than Iron Mike, so I know exactly how much he has slowed down over time. On the soccer field, I’ve been dealing with my inability to reach balls I would have easily gotten to first for the last 23 years; I remember the very practice at which my top gear, upon which I’d always relied, simply vanished. It just wasn’t there anymore. It doesn’t matter how well I keep myself in shape or how smart I play, I’m just a role player now. I don’t worry about scoring goals or providing assists anymore, I just try to keep my wing in order and protect my defender; it’s up to the younger players to win the game now and all I can really expect to do is prevent us from losing it via my side.
It’s certainly painful to watch our youthful sports heroes “embarrass” themselves by showing their age and how their greatness has departed them. But they’ve earned their right to go out there and compete with their successors, and to confirm what they already suspect about their decline. And as Jake Paul demonstrated with his obvious respect for the former world champion, what a thrill it is for the younger men to test themselves, even against the faded shadows of their great elders.
I like Thomas Sowell and his work. It was a minor influence on my intellectual development in my youth. But he has always been limited in his willingness to depart from conservative orthodoxy, as evidenced by his unwillingness to accept the relevant aspects of human genetics as they relate to societal development, or the lack thereof.
Sowell is the leading conservative proponent of the cultural explanation. In regard to race differences in the US, his idea is that black Americans adopted a dysfunctional culture from white rednecks in the South. A different culture would have, and in the future could, set blacks (as well as southern whites) on a different path. While he mostly avoids ad hominem attacks against hereditarians, he portrays most of them as bumbling half-wits with a history of making baseless and contradictory claims.
I was recently interviewed for “The Genius of Thomas Sowell” podcast to talk about hereditarianism vs. culturalism, and the host, Alan Wolan, persuaded me that it would be worth spelling out my objections to Sowell in more detail. Here I respond, in turn, to Sowell’s arguments for the cultural theory of race differences and his critique of hereditarianism. I contend that hereditarianism remains by far the most plausible explanation for persistent gaps among groups living under comparable conditions, including American blacks and whites.
Some hereditarians believe that, even if Sowellism is false, it would be politically expedient to promote it as a means of countering leftist narratives about race and racism. I will explain why this is a mistake. Even if (counterfactually) we could convince large numbers of people to accept Sowell’s scientifically incorrect theory of race differences, this would not stop wokism.
While he is a generally admirable man, one unfortunate characteristic of Sowell is his refusal to follow the observable, and even undeniable, truth, at the cost of his personal preferences. Given his identity complications, it is not even remotely surprising that he would prove willing to sacrifice his intellectual integrity on the altars of both race and personal relations.
Sowell is without doubt an effective starting point for conservatives, but at some point, anyone who is geniunely devoted to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True will find they have to move beyond him if their intellectual journey is going to proceed.
Whether it is the so-called Prevent Defense in the NFL or the various tactics used to waste time in international football, these are counterproductive tactics that serve absolutely no purpose except to allow the other team back in the game.
Have some confidence in yourself! If you’ve dominated the game for 80 minutes, or three-and-a-half quarters, keep doing what you’re doing! Don’t let up the gas and let the other team back into the game!
This season, our team had a problem with this. We’d go up one or two goals and the midfield would go passive while the defense would go to sleep. We lost three games we absolutely should have one before the guys seemed to get the message and keep pressing; we won the next game 10-0. The final game of the season, we were up 3-0 when the defense relaxed again; at one point one attacker went right through three defenders without any of them making a serious effort at stopping him. Fortunately, after going into halftime 4-4, we went back on the attack and ended up winning 8-5.
The key is that the team leaders need to stress the need to keep attacking, and the scorers need to keep taking their shots rather than getting cute and clever with their chances as they often do when the game – or the practice – start to feel easy. The best teams always blow out the bad teams instead of relaxing and playing down to their level. In those two high-scoring wins, our star striker took control and scored 9 goals in the two games.
The problem is that the human psyche doesn’t permit simultaneous passivity and aggression. If you start trying to waste time, you’ve stopped trying to actively win the game. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t practice wise clock management, and sometimes injuries force you to take off a key player and implement more defensive tactics. But the best defense is always a good offense; a team that is constantly rocked back on its heels isn’t one that is likely to get back into the game.
Every sprinter is taught the importance of finishing strong. Run THROUGH the tape. Save the celebrations for after the race. Always focus on finishing strong, never be content to just hang on.
But, but, Benny’s been told since he was a boy that he is “smart as a whip!” In addition to being a midwit’s idea of a smart person, Shapiro has always been a sell-out, and he’s not even within a standard deviation of me. There is a reason he contents himself with beating up on low-IQ college students, but has always run like a rabbit from a debate with me, or Milo, or any of his many intellectual superiors in the media space.
It is amusing to see him using rhetoric of my coinage, though. As one wit on SG suggested, no doubt we’ll soon be hearing him tell us what a “Sigma” he is. I despise the Littlest Chickenhawk, but I don’t hate him. To the contrary, I pity him, because I know for a fact that he never wanted to be what he eventually became. He’s rather like Gaiman and Scalzi, a mediocrity who was ultimately willing to take the ticket in order to achieve his ambitions, only unlike them, he knew ahead of time what it was going to cost him in terms of freedom and self-respect.
Kate Moss once famously said that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. In like manner, there is no success or fame that feels as satisfying as freedom and self-respect.
One of the woman creators I follow won two Eisners (the comic book equivlanet of an Oscar) and can’t get her work published; she has to work as a cleaner, scrubbing floors.
If you ever wonder why I’m so contemptuous of awards and the people who assiduously pursue them, this is one reason why. Awards are politics. That’s all they ever are, from elementary school to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The fact that Michael Jordan won fewer MVP awards (5) than NBA titles (6) is all the evidence you need to understand that; on merit, he should have won at least 8, according to the Sports Guy.
There are hundreds of reasons to complain about the internet these days. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Just know that the internet never, in a million bazillion katrillion years, would have allowed Michael Jordan to lose the ’93 and ’97 MVPs. He should have won seven, not five… You know what? Jordan should have won eight MVPs. My bad, MJ. I counted wrong.
Also, ahem, Wes Unseld.
People try to cite the fact that no one buys award-winning diversity books and comics as evidence of oppression and marginalization, but that’s backwards. The awards not only mean nothing with regards to quality, they actually send a negative signal now to everyone who isn’t interested in reading either a) a lecture or b) the sort of story that is of absolutely no interest to them.
The reason so many award-winning writers, such as Neil Gaiman and Neil Scalzi, have imposter syndrome is because they are imposters. A mediocrity who has collected a few manifestations of mainstream approval is still a mediocrity.
I thought the most informative aspect of this IBM employee’s critical rant about the former tech giant is the way it reveals how the corpocracy ends up devouring itself once it makes the shift from production to services. We’re presently seeing this transformation take place in the game space, as the corpocratic-“game developers” seek to capture customers and feed upon them over time rather than simply make good games and sell them to gamers.
And the larger corporations, of course, can’t survive by feeding on individual consumers, so they have to predate upon smaller corporations, locking them into “service contracts” and keeping them dependent upon their increasingly inferior technologies. The inevitable results are exactly the opposite of the theoretical benefits of so-called “capitalism”.
I have been at IBM for a couple of years now and I honestly question why any of us are still here, pretending that this company is going to turn it around. Our best days are long gone and what we are witnessing is the slow, painful death of IBM yet we are still on this sinking ship.
IBM Cloud is an absolute joke. It accounts for an extremely tiny fraction of the market and only because most companies that use it are trapped with IBM’s legacy systems. They’re not using it because it’s good but because they have no choice. We bought Red Hat for $34 billion because we dropped the ball so hard on cloud. Why build innovative cloud solutions when we can just acquire something decent and slap our logo on it? Our hybrid cloud strategy is merging old systems with slightly newer systems. Most of our cloud revenue comes from services, consulting, and managing cloud infrastructure AKA getting paid to help other companies figure out our legacy technology.
This is mostly why Global Services is our biggest revenue stream. We basically sell the solution to problems that IBM products make. Our strategy is to sell complexity and eventually that company spirals into integration nightmares so they crawl back to IBM consultants to fix it.
IBM makes billions from just keeping system Z mainframes on life support because they are the backbone to so many major institutions. We can charge a ridiculous amount for software fees for enterprise software and they have no choice but to pay up in order to stay alive. The complexity and cost to move off these systems that have been built for decades is too high and we exploit that tremendously with insane maintenance fees.
This is exactly how our software licensing works too. We just lock companies into proprietary software hell for decades because our core software products like DB2 and Websphere have become deeply embedded in the infrastructure of large organizations. Companies are trapped when we charge high maintenance and support fees and they have to shell out for upgrades they barely need. ELAs are traps designed to squeeze as much money as we can possibly can.
We fail to integrate our acquisitions within our corporate strategy. We just have a mix of cloud platform extensions, AI solutions, and industry specific solutions. We are not innovating ourselves. This is more to help our consulting sales than it is to make a competitive product strategy.
watsonx is a desperate scramble to pretend that we are in the AI market. Everyone knows that we’re not coming up with anything innovative. We are just riding off the coattails of Meta and other open source models just like what we did with Red Hat. No one new will ever adopt watsonx. This is again targeted for our legacy customers who are trapped. It is all just mostly repackaged algorithms and models that everyone is already doing.
Our workforce rebalancing efforts aka our cost cutting strategy by offshoring and replacing highly-paid employees with lower-wage employees has ultimately damaged our long-term profitability. Employees feel less motivated and valued when we see our peers get laid off for cheap labor in India. Employee motivation, experience, and collaboration are crucial for overall productivity and long-term success, but we do it value any of that. It’s all for the short-term profit gains, which again will be overtaken by the long-term negative impact of declining productivity.
Our future is collapsing rapidly. We are holding onto legacy contracts and mainframe lifelines but once those clients migrate off, IBM is left with nothing but scraps. Microsoft, Google, AWS will destroy us as cloud AI leaders and eventually, they will also perfect mainframe-to-migration tools and our mainframe clients with jump ship. I envision we will be sold off as pieces or die all together.
So again, I ask: Why are you still here? IBM is draining your energy and trapping you in an endless cycle of bureaucracy, outdated tech, and corporate nonsense. Do you truly believe that watsonx or IBM Cloud will save us? There is no growth or innovation and you will either be patching up legacy systems, trying to sell dead AI products, or stuck in consulting purgatory. We are not turning it around. Get out while you can and develop skills in modern technology and work somewhere where the future is bright.
TLDR; IBM monetizes on confusion, legacy systems, and corporate inertia. We sell tech to trap companies in it, then charge them forever to keep it working. The only reason companies are with IBM is because the cost of leaving is higher than the cost of staying and we make billions just off that equation. There is no bright future.
