I’ve always tried to leave personal stuff out, I’ve alluded to it now and again, for example by mentioning that I am a small business owner, who rents an industrial unit, etc, but I’m always far lighter on details than I often want to be, and that isn’t because I want to retain some anonymity, but it is because it always worries me that such details will be found by others to be deeply boring and depressing, hey dude, every day life for me sucks too, now you want me to watch a soap? Pass the suicide gun.
But the fact does remain that for a species at large as individuals we have far more common with each other than we do to set us apart, but, swapping the sugar and salt around in a kitchen on the basis that they are small white crystals that look the same, will devastate everything you make to eat or drink.
So the “relatively minute” differences are often hugely important.
As an observer / storyteller, sometimes it is very hard to identify what is what, and not throw the baby out with the bath water, or vice versa.
Which all makes it very interesting when someone you know, who knows you, lets slip that they have an enormous amount of respect for you, due to the way you handle the challenges in your life… say what? I can and do bitch and moan with the best of them, but I am also acutely aware of how lucky and blessed I am, sure, there are things that are not absolute perfection in the garden, but by and large everything is good, soooo…. WTF are they on about?
In a sense I can see what they are on about, but far from being symbols of my greatness, I see these things as things that define what makes me, me….
So when you run and small business and rent an industrial unit, you’re making a binary selection on the population, there is everyone else who owns/runs a small business and rents an industrial unit, and there is everyone else who does not, and the experiences and knowledge gap between the two is in many ways huge.
In my particular region rents tend to run around 8 quid per square foot per year for a bog standard 1000-3000 square foot small industrial unit, so on the one hand you can do some simple math and tailor your budget, if your budget is 10k per annum then 10,000/8 = 1,250 square feet, so so go for slightly more square feet at that budget and get lower quality older units, or less square feet for a new build.
Typically to “everyone else” those are the only numbers they will ever see, yeah yeah, fred rents a unit for 10k p.a. and that’s it, to insiders, you know that the 10k rent is the least of your worries, and probably not even half your annual expenditure even if you are a one man band with zero employees.
A standard 800 mm wide steel fire / exit / personnel door runs between 1,700 and 3,000 quid, this is just one fucking door, but if you do not have the right sort of certified door, your proposed insurer will fuck you up the ass on your annual premium, it’s often cheaper to spend a wad of extra cash on a fancy alarm system and upgraded physical security, because you can actually make it back in a year or two on the insurance premiums alone.
Then of course there is all the regulatory shit, and even if you aren’t processing used plutonium, the rules pertaining to it still apply, they may not be RELEVANT, but they still exist, so the electrical conductors may be perfectly good, but the insulation uses the old white outer and red for live and black for neutral system, and the new regulations the cable is grey outer, brown for live and blue for neutral, electrically the two systems may be identical, one piece of 2.5mm copper is much like another, but, when it comes to getting a CERTIFICATE, such things matter… we have in the Uk recently changed, again, the approved way in which the earth system is supposed to be implemented, if you want to be compliant and get a certificate, open your wallet.
I mention all this because of the recent terrible news about KFC franchise shops running out of chicken, because the upstream supplier changed from one company to DHL, and the software systems didn’t talk to each other well over the change, and of course back in the local franchise stores (all of which have to obey all the regulations, not just the food hygiene ones) the workers themselves are on zero hours contracts, so nobody is getting their KFC chicken, and nobody is getting paid wages, and the management ineptitude / drive to cut margins and make profits that sits behind all this stuff makes perfectly understandable and expected fuck ups to the ex Cisco kid who amongst other high street things used to go and do all the local KFC joints (the one place where you had to scrape your shoes for 10 minutes on the tarmac to get the grease off before you could get back in your car and drive safely, there was ONE store that was an exception, the manager pressure washed the floor every week…) and who knows that the humble potato was the most expensive cost item on the menu, the KFC bucket contained 12p worth of chicken, and 50p worth of potato, at cost.
To everyone else, it is utter insanity, Kentucky Fried CHIKIN, how the fuck can KFC run out of chikin???? When there isn’t actually a shortage of chikin anywhere, it’s all a supply / logistics / software screw up….
This you are on the inside and can see / you are on the outside and cannot see split in society is one of the huge problems we face.
I myself freely admit I had zero idea how fucked up the entire police / secret family court system was prior to my own little run in with the worthless bastards, then I became an insider and my eyes were opened.
various charities and sex parties in areas where they are “working”, yeah. I’d heard that one years ago, so much so that the only “charity” I would ever give 1 penny to was the lifeboats, because back then it was run as you’d expect a charity to be run, no more, so they do not get my money either…. quite why Exmouth inshore lifeboat (a rib on a trailer that used to live on a shed on the beach) needed to move to a new build glass and chrome thing further up the beach that would be worth millions in property values alone if it was a house, and then has (yeah, the Cisco Kid used to do the lifeboats too) 100/100 mbit dedicated fibre connection which was hooked up to a couple of dell desktop office PC’s and a poxy webcam, for what purpose I do not know, there is nothing there that a 64kbit ISDN connection and a phone line could not handle with ease, because it did down at the old station for 30+ years.
“Curiosity killed the cat, and information brought it back”.
I was flicking through the daily fail website today, and I saw an article about Assad using Napalm on his poor benighted citizens, and possible subconscious perception aside, I’d only actually consciously seen the headline about “observers” “reporting” Assad’s use of napalm and I was thinking to myself “white hats” so I glace at the article and sure enough, it’s a report from the white hats.
As someone who was using “the internet” from long before there was an internet or a WWW or http or anything else, I have heard, for as long as it is physically possible, about the growth in rumour and bad data, hell I myself talk about assholes on line (TM) and how the “free” internet killed it for us early adopters, but, the fact is the digital realm is just a medium, sure, it increased individual bandwidth immeasurably and made it possible for fuckbook and twatter and instagram and cat videos, and sure it made it possible for planet x and flat earth and everyone else to have a voice, and sure it turned the dripping tap into a firehose at your face, but you know what, proportionally speaking, the crap content is not much higher.
Fake news and the russians controlling elections and all the rest of the bullshit, to those of us on the inside of the data revolution, it was always nothing less than total bullshit of such a magnitude that nobody with even clue #1 would be seen dead uttering it.
What has changed, and it’s that inside / outside perspective thing, is that even in Vonnegut’s new world where every man woman and child can find some website or blog or twitter feed to support their own personal delusional religious view f the world, OVERALL, the credibility of EVERYTHING is falling, and fast approaching zero.
In their efforts to manage the media and imagery and presentations and portrayals, TPTB are all making everything even worse, and creating the feeding grounds for memes and disenfranchisement.
It is entirely true and factual to say that President Donald Trump has a greater challenge from “media” and “data” as a whole than any president who went before him, and whoever follows him will have it worse, save a yellowstone or carrington event that takes it all down.
And as the KFC debacle shows, again it is an inside / outside view, nobody outside the experience set of the Cisco Kid can get it, everyone with similar experience sets to the Cisco Kid gets it, “data comms” has become an essential part of everything, and by essential I mean keystone in an arch essential, not MBA speak essential.
The REAL fear, badly expressed by the MSM, is the fact that nobody known how to separate the crap online from the fact that digital comms are an essential fundamental foundation of modern society and civilization.
In my industrial unit I pay 20 quid a month for 350/10 mbit broadband AND a phone line, and I pay 13.5p per kWh of electric, flat rate, the fact is I cannot get anywhere near those prices 5 miles away at my home residence from the same fucking suppliers.
It’s not AI that worries everyone, despite the claims, it is he million monkeys with typewriters, eventually by random chance one of them will write Henry V, or the truth about JFK, or something else, and there is no way of predicting whether or not that particular monkey story will take off.
Why did KFC fuck up, why do suppliers sell me services at my industrial unit at a significant discount to anything I can get from the same people domestically 5 miles away, why is security and insurance and complying with regulations likely to cost as much as ground rent per sq foot per annum, these are the INTERESTING questions, and they are interesting because the answers do directly affect your life as an individual, no matter what type of individual or personality you are.
This is the other danger with talking about me personally in detail, you’re likely to discount it, not just because who gives a shit what I ate for tea last night, but because the very fact that it is personal detail means you are likely to discount it, because you are not me….
…no, you’re not, but we are bother governed by the rules for handling radioactive waste, whether we actually handle any or not.
My friend has just been allowed back in his house, after 36 hours…. he hasn’t done anything wrong, and there is nothing wrong with his house, the guy three doors up who allegedly had a knife / gun / bomb / WMD and who did not want to come to the door and talk to the po-po about allegations made by his ex, not so much.
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