Tales of low level management and a frustrated engineer

 It's no surprise that I came to the book "50 Things Kids Can Do To Save The World".  The world decided for me that I was going to be an environmentalist.  Some of my first and most indelible memories are images of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico.  The dead birds, fish, ect... covered in oil all from ONE  accident.   Like many young Michiganders I grew up spending many a hot summer day on the beaches of Lake Michigan.  Too see an area similar to one of my happy places turned to ruin in days... leaves a mark on your brain similar to the first time your family pet dies.  I love this and something terrible has happened to it. You have to treasure the good things in your life while you have them, and that includes the natural beauty around you.  That was something I learned early. It is also true that kids latch on to things and don't let them go.  I got in to recycling, big time.  The local community waste transfer center started...

(I have had this idea for a while and want to start writing some of this down.  Since I am unwilling to buy an MS office subscription when all I want is a one time cost for a one user license, like it used to be, I am just going to write things down on here.  I don't really use this blogger account like I thought I would anyway.) Its dehumanizing, the job of President of the United States.  No one really cares about the things that make a person a person when that person is the President.  During the campaigns my competitors distill me down to about 5 or 6 things they think will play well with their base and my election team does the same, sometimes on the same 5 or 6 things.  This has happened to me no less than five times and each time it feels hollowing to hear your self described as just 5 or 6 things. Gay Environmentalist Liberal Engineer Socialist Weak On Crime (Opponents always claimed this but the data from The city of Kalamazoo, State Of Michigan, and F...

Nikki Haley needs to be more direct against Trump.  His followers like bluster and crassness and don’t appreciate dancing around the issue.  Attacking Trump directly is the only way to knock him down. I like her talking point about chaos following Trump but let’s be direct about it.  Chaos doesn’t follow him, he makes it.  But regardless of where the chaos comes from, a good leader is someone that people can rally around and break through the chaos and make their polices work. Donald Trump is a bad leader because he hasn’t done, doesn’t have the skills to do that and actually seems to prevent others in his leadership team from being able to do that. Stop vying for a spot in his cabinet if you lose and call it like it is.  He has no leadership skills.  And Nikki Haley needs to say it.  Regardless of where chaos comes from a good leader works through it and keeps his team focused.  We know Trump can’t run a cohesive team even when it really matters,...

If we all talked openly about what we really want from our politicians I think we would find a lot in common.  I also think we would find that none of us truly likes the choices we are given. U.S. politics is overrun with business people and lawyers.  Neither one of which is particularly adept at problem solving.  Career politicians are worse, they make their living off knowing how to kiss ass and beg for money.  Also worthless at problem solving. In this modern era of challenging scientific and technical information it is kind of important to have people with training in these issues representing us, or at least willing build a basic understanding before handing down decisions.  What we have now are representatives considering privacy issues with Facebook that have no idea how the internet works.  Lawyers arguing about environmental policy that don’t know earth history well enough to understand how coal ever came to exist or why understanding that woul...

There is only 18 months to the next US presidential election so naturally the campaigning is already in full swing.  😒 The Democrats are doing something right now called an Ideas Primary, which I kind of love the idea of.  One of the things that America as a whole needs is a an open stage to throw out ideas and have a robust conversation about the direction of the country. The trouble is that a lot of the new progressives that have been elected back in the midterm election last November are being treated as fringe candidates with fringe ideas and those ideas are not getting talked about in this ideas primary.  If it wasn't for Bernie Sanders we probably wouldn't even be talking about Medicare For All, and it is troubling for me that there isn't much talk about a Green New Deal. I think what I would really like to see in an ideas primary is a town hall where organizers from the Black Lives Matter, The Parkland Students, Greta Thunberg or someone like her, someone th...

I just checked the mail and behold I just got a survey from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.  They really want my input on the survey to help guide policy in the coming election season.  The trouble is that when it comes to politics every word in a statement needs to be given scrutiny five times over to make sure you know the meaning before you agree to it.  As such this "survey" is mostly a questionnaire on "How much do you agree with the policy positions we have already decided on?" Noticeably absent from the survey is any mention of a Green New Deal, reforms to student loan programs and higher education to make it all more affordable, or even the medicare for all program that Bernie Sanders championed and some of the other prospective candidates for the 2020 Presidential election have supported.  This survey is more of a confirmation letter that the Democratic Party still isn't listening. I can appreciate that the Trump administration has ...

A recent article on Motley Fool suggested JC Penny had a sq footage target for its stores that would shrink the store size down by 30K or more sq feet, on average.  The article also noted the challenges with that,  namely that all their locations are in malls where renovations and subleasing can get tricky and require the approval of the property managers. Instead of shrinking the stores down JC Penny should do more partnering with other retailers that have struggled to maintain presence in malls and compartmentalize areas of their stores in to their own units.  I.E. 20 years ago every mall had a toy store, usually it was Kay Bee Toys in recent years it was Toys R Us Express, but now most malls have no toy stores.  JC Penny has the cash to buy the Kay Bee Toys name, build a few cubicle walls in an area of the store near the Sephora display and the Jewlery and purses and bring toys back to the mall.  Make it a separate business unit to JC Penny but still contrib...