industrialangel

[industrialangel]

[industrialangel]

hi everyone i made some cow tools blinkies

Please reblog if you use or save any!

[industrialangel]

Necrostar and the doom moon!

Alien world where the planet is orbiting a black hole instead of an active sun. Where does all the solar energy come from? Well, it has a moon about the size of our moon that is just so unbelievably radioactive,

[industrialangel]

[industrialangel]

I hate it here

how does hard drive never fucking miss

[industrialangel]

So do we twiddle our thumbs or is it the other option?

Manufacturers are not in China because labor is cheap. They're in China because labor is cheap relative to productivity, and what drives that productivity is heavy manufacturing subsidies, which include tremendous overspending on transportation and logistics infrastructure.

Throw in a systematically undervalued currency, a repressed and administered financial system that prioritizes cheap lending to manufacturers, low social safety-net commitments and weak labor unions, and it is no surprise why global manufacturers like China.

As long as this continues to be the case, China-based manufacturers will be more internationally "competitive" than those abroad, and so will tend to outperform in global markets. That's why, for all the talk, I don't think we will see a great manufacturing exodus from China.

The problem of course is that subsidies must be paid for, and both the direct subsidies and the even greater indirect ones (via infrastructure overspending, weak currency, cheap financing. etc.) have come at the expense of Chinese workers and households.

This is why the household income share of Chinese GDP is among the lowest ever recorded, and why China's domestic demand is so weak. China's manufacturing and export success is just the flip side of its structurally weak domestic demand.

[industrialangel]

So you get shit where you can be Too Into It but end up being right, or at least uncovering shit someone thinks is useful, but the entire time you're surrounded by your fellow batshit utopians who think nothing ever changes, yet, and your only counter is the people who are afraid things will change, and what you actually need is boring centrists who can actually stomach incremental improvements so you gotta not scare those guys off.

[industrialangel]

So we should cut off the thumbs of Indian weavers so we can increase export demand?…

Manufacturers are not in China because labor is cheap. They're in China because labor is cheap relative to productivity, and what drives that productivity is heavy manufacturing subsidies, which include tremendous overspending on transportation and logistics infrastructure.

Throw in a systematically undervalued currency, a repressed and administered financial system that prioritizes cheap lending to manufacturers, low social safety-net commitments and weak labor unions, and it is no surprise why global manufacturers like China.

As long as this continues to be the case, China-based manufacturers will be more internationally "competitive" than those abroad, and so will tend to outperform in global markets. That's why, for all the talk, I don't think we will see a great manufacturing exodus from China.

The problem of course is that subsidies must be paid for, and both the direct subsidies and the even greater indirect ones (via infrastructure overspending, weak currency, cheap financing. etc.) have come at the expense of Chinese workers and households.

This is why the household income share of Chinese GDP is among the lowest ever recorded, and why China's domestic demand is so weak. China's manufacturing and export success is just the flip side of its structurally weak domestic demand.

[industrialangel]

Having ADHD is so fun because sometimes youre looking for something that you use regularly and definitely put away in a smart and reasonable place and you have absolutely 0 hope of remembering where and finding it. And then other times ur like "hmm I need a some kind of small pointed object. I feel like i remember seeing a paperclip under the left couch cushion a month ago, i wonder if its still there" and it is

[industrialangel]

The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss. 

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town. 

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse? 

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed. 

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now. 

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it. 

---

My job has glue traps. 

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life. 

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just 

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you. 

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out. 

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me. 

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps. 

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me. 

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was: 

Do NOT mess with animals in the building. 

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences. 

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop. 

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve. 

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went 

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover. 

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell. 

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair. 

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.  

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right? 

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes. 

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil? 

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question. 

Who grabbed the snake? I asked. 

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right. 

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No. 

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago. 

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again. 

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think. 

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be. 

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.

[industrialangel]

[industrialangel]

[industrialangel]

[industrialangel]

"Our new campaign, 'How Vance is Not Like a Follower of the Dao,' has gained us a modest advantage among Chinese Americans and a 20-point shift among Post-Rationalists. However, as you can see from this chart, we are losing Hispanic voters. To quote a member of our focus group, they're asking, 'What the Hell are you talking about?'"

"Have the Vance campaign responded yet?"

"Their AI has already started calling it 'stuffy Eastern mysticism.' I expect more will follow."

[industrialangel]

TIP ON HOW TO GET OVER YOUR FEAR OF THE DARK:

presidentjesus:

As soon as you turn the lights off start masturbating. No monster wants to see that shit. While doing it, stare at the corner and whisper, tenderly, “this is for you”.

And then the shadows growl at you and say, “Mine. You’re all mine.”

[industrialangel]

One view of the internet that I find important is that it’s an amoral ecosystem of ideas, many of which are poisonous to you and can have effects ranging from ‘making you waste your day angry at someone’ to ‘causing you join to a cultish crusade for or against some political ideology that renders you incompatible with large swathes of mainstream society’. If you are a very online person, you cannot just take content as you go, otherwise the hungriest and most efficient predators will snap you up and consume huge amounts of your mental resources. If you are Very Online, the internet will radicalize you by default.

The fact of radicalization is neutral. Certainly there’s nothing guaranteed to be good about the things you already believe and the ways you act; there are extreme-relative-to-society viewpoints and movements floating around that will, in my view, make you a better person. But the majority will not, just because there are more bad things than good things, more incorrect things than correct ones. There’s nothing that says morally righteous movements (or the ones that will make you more thoughtful and happy) are more memetically powerful and good at capturing the imagination and belief system than the immoral (or bad-for-you-personally).

If you read an unusual claim online, there are two equally important questions to ask about it – the first, of course, is “is this correct?”, and the second is “if I take this seriously, and become the kind of person who believes it, how will it change my life? Do I accept that?”