In part, you can blame the economy. In the most competitive job market in memory, the lesson is clear: You must demonstrate—on multiple platforms—that you excel above all others …
We’ve become so accustomed to boasting that we don’t even realize what we’re doing. And it’s harmful to our relationships because it turns people off …
So how should you deal with a braggart?
“Feel sorry for them, because they’re doing this impulsive, destructive thing that won’t help them in the long run,” says Simine Vazire, a research psychologist and associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Research on self-enhancement shows that people who brag make a good first impression, but that it diminishes over time.
When Ian McKenzie, 30, a schoolteacher in Lincoln, U.K., goes out to dinner with his wife and their friends, he says, everyone soon gets around to bragging—about the gadgets and cars they own, their kids, their vacations …
Today, again from the Atlantic where the editors and writers are chosen from the most senseless and fit for the job, someone named Derek Thompson, 1 percent society shoeshiner and “a visiting research fellow at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget at the New America Foundation.”
Let’s count some of the ways it is important: for merchants and for customers. For merchants, point-of-sale technology is awful, outdated, and expensive … Paying for stuff shouldn’t be such a chore…
These are innovations of convenience, mostly, but they arguably build a gateway to bigger things: for data, for advertising, and for, yes, society. The data created with millions of digitized interactions could provide deeper records of what people are buying and how much they’re paying for it — the sort of information that would be important to corporate research departments …
I think the answer is two-fold: (1) Innovations that save time, even just a little bit of time, are real innovations, because in any advanced economy time and attention are currency and creating more of them can make us all richer …
A cashless economy can make us richer: “One 2003 study estimated that moving from a wholly paper-based network to a completely electronic one could save an economy 1 percent …
A cashless society can make us richer. Innovations that save us even trivial increments of time can make us richer. The insipid passed off as critically insightful through the genius of repetition and judging progress by anything alleged to make all thicker in the digital wallet. The very intersection of magical thinking and blowjob journalism.
That’s everyone in society including the forty seven or eight million people on foodstamps, right?
A notable number of them Starbuck’s employees, too, because, like Wal-Mart and so many other US multi-nationals, the company doesn’t pay its floor and wait staff enough to make a single living, in say, Pasadena.
A problem smartphones haven’t seemed able to fix.
But if you’re the guy writing for the Atlantic, waving your nice gadget in the direction of the minimum wage servant, the quick cashless innovation that adds half a minute to your self-gratification time in the corporate coffee house makes us all more wealthy. Well, maybe not today. But soon. I’m just sure of it.
Now that Cybersecurity 2012 has failed — it deserved the fate — there’s not much point in the big gun lobbyists for it to continue the sales pitch.
Which means NSA director Keith Alexander has, for a moment, disappeared. There’s no immediate need for more scamming.
Which shows you the nature of the rigging. The financial system could be attacked. The water could be made something bad. The electricity turned off! But they failed to get what they wanted so it’ll wait until next time.
Nevertheless, PBS recently covered it, painting the failure to arrive at legislation a national tragedy, putting everyone at risk.
So how serious are the threats to America’s infrastructure? How easy would it be to take down one critical element, water supplies, electricity grid?
JOEL BRENNER, author, “America the Vulnerable”: We have seen a real spike in the attacks on the industrial control systems that run a lot of these — this infrastructure. When DHS began keeping…
MARGARET WARNER: Department of Homeland Security.
JOEL BRENNER: …Department of Homeland Security began keeping figures on this in 2009, there were four such attacks. Last year, there were 198. The numbers are pretty — they really tell the story.
MARGARET WARNER: And how many have actually — how many times have elements been penetrated?
JOEL BRENNER: I’m talking about attacks that really in many cases get in.
And, you know, there are different levels of penetration, and I’m — but I’m not talking just about pings on — knocks on the door. I’m talking about more significant, concerted attempts to get into infrastructure. And we have seen it in water supply stuff, as well as in electricity.
MARGARET WARNER: And who are the major — major perpetrators?
JOEL BRENNER: We — I can say what has been publicly disclosed is that a number of people in the intelligence business have seen the Iranian, the Chinese and the Russians inside of some of our critical systems, and we know the Iranians are trying …
Everything we do, including the air conditioning in this building and the switches on the subway systems in every major city, are reachable through the Internet. It’s very dangerous.
No, not the air-conditioning! It’s been triple digits in Pasadena the last three days!
Readers will note it takes some quality of sophisticated mendacity most of us lack to be the flunky on television telling viewers Iranians are attacking the US in cyberspace when the overriding news stories have been about our government-written viruses dispatched for work in Iran.
And, the classic example of an obviously planted question, alleged to be from a random member of the hoi polloi:
MARGARET WARNER: We did get some emails, email questions from viewers.
Kathryn Creedy of Melbourne, Florida, said, “Reports are that most companies are ignoring the significant threat of cyber-attacks or at least have it on the back burner, owing to costs.” She said, “I find this shocking, since it’s their fiduciary responsibility to protect the stakeholders of any organization, employees, customers and shareholders.”
Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, huh? Yeah, that’s something a legitimate man or woman in the street would ask. For sure.
Media rigging on the cybersecurity beat is usually obvious. But the PBS piece goes just a little bit above and beyond.
Get off the street. Get a job. You’re making a mess. You are under arrest for annoying corporate businesspeople.
That’s the common message for anyone expressing legitimate dissent. It’s how you get around free speech when the message is writ large, as it apparently was in Vegas with hijacked billboards.
Billboards there, protesting Wall St. and the collapsed economy, were adorned by mannequins made to look like someone hung himself from a stanchion, one entitled “Dying for Work.”
Clear Channel Outdoor, which owns another sign that was affected, said they pulled the display immediately and plan to work with law enforcement to punish whoever is responsible.
“We condemn the destructive behavior against one of our billboards because it is illegal and punishes our advertisers,” Clear Channel Outdoor spokesman Jim Cullinan said in a statement.
Someone punishes our advertisers, so the down on their luck but very inventive perpetrators must be punished. No visible symbolic unpleasantness allowed during rush hour.
Just a few weeks ago, I spotted a rather paranoid ad that read: “47yo patriot discovers ‘weird’ trick to slash power bill & end Obama’s power monopoly.” (I’ve heard Obama accused of many things, but being an electricity cartel kingpin is a new one.)
I wonder how this trend came to be. Was there some marketing study on the clickability of different phrases, and “weird trick” came out on top? Especially if the weird trick came from moms, dads, patriots, and other salt-of-the-earth folks? The implicit rejection of professional expertise here frankly says a lot about our culture. Don’t need no fancypants scientist telling us how to lose our flab!
If you’re one of the many people who can’t stand the 28-year-old, there could be a lot of frustration in your future.
Yes, you won’t be able to wait for the show where Ryan Lochte hosts competitive eaters challenged with palmetto bugs from Florida or a weekly contest to determine who are the best Call Me Maybe lipsynchers.
Or a show to be called “Stink!” explaining the science behind lighting farts, the bad odors emitted by dead animals in the road, and the chemistry of over the counter laxatives and enemas.
In a commentary published in the same journal issue, Dr. Mitchell H. Katz, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services said doctors should prescribe exercise to their patients to reduce their risk of dying.
On how weight-lifting may help prevent a form of diabetes.
Full disclosure: I used to be a fanatical weight-lifter. Fortunately, that’s well over.
Or take affirmations, those cheery slogans intended to lift the user’s mood by repeating them: “I am a lovable person!??? “My life is filled with joy!??? Psychologists at the University of Waterloo concluded that such statements make people with low self-esteem feel worse — not least because telling yourself you’re lovable is liable to provoke the grouchy internal counterargument that, really, you’re not ..
From this perspective, the relentless cheer of positive thinking begins to seem less like an expression of joy and more like a stressful effort to stamp out any trace of negativity. Mr. Robbins’s trademark smile starts to resemble a rictus. A positive thinker can never relax, lest an awareness of sadness or failure creep in. And telling yourself that everything must work out is poor preparation for those times when they don’t. You can try, if you insist, to follow the famous self-help advice to eliminate the word “failure??? from your vocabulary — but then you’ll just have an inadequate vocabulary when failure strikes …
The social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has persuasively argued that the all-positive approach, with its rejection of the possibility of failure, helped bring on our present financial crises.
I got over not being lovable and embraced the inner fail a long, long time ago. I have a hard time even being in the same room with armchair Dale Carnegies and Norman Vincent Peales.
DD blog wrote about Ehrenreich’s book, “Bright-Sided.” and its dissection of the Culture of Lickspittle, back in 2010 here.
[Slowness in the 2010 census] was cause for the delivery of an inspirational speech, the kind used at mass corporate rallies in the US where people pay to be told, by important figures and celebrities, that the only thing standing in the way of success is their bad attitude. If we were not to run with wolves but soar like eagles, we were told, we should separate ourselves from the drag of the complainers and critics.
About a day later, the census began firing what it thought were the complainers and critics, all the non-performers … Intelligence-insulting shit, it had nothing to do with the work of being a census enumerator, which was a solitary business.
Senate Republicans regularly promote themselves as the true custodians of national security. This claim seemed particularly hollow last week when they helped block a new measure aimed at protecting America’s vulnerable computer networks from attack by, among others, potentially hostile foreign governments …
The cost of inaction is already high. Every day, China and other foreign governments, hackers and criminals are working to break into American computer networks. They have targeted major companies and military contractors; last year there were 200 attacks on vital infrastructure — power plants, electric grids, refineries, transportation networks and water treatment systems.
Most of these facilities are owned by the private sector, whose defenses are dangerously weak. Many companies do not even insist on secure passwords for computers. Nightmare scenarios include computer attacks that shut down the stock exchange, a nuclear power plant, the nation’s rail system or all three at once.
This is not scaremongering.
Yes it is. Outside computer attacks that shut down the stock exchange. Give it a rest.
Grenade explodes at 45 seconds. Today’s viral video for the bona fide American idiot class.
Four years ago, ninnies in the US media published the ridiculous unattributed nonsense that the most famous physical fitness freak in the world consumed 12,000 calories a day.
This year, it was revived, eventually triggering the viral video above, created by someone who has made a career exploiting personal brain damage and the thrill hundreds of thousands of stupid people get from sharing the disgusting things of the world.
“[Like] … Olympics hero Michael Phelps, reportedly eats anywhere from 6,000 to 12,000 calories per day when training, roughly the calorie load of three to six large pizzas.” — the Boston Herald, 2008
Swimmer Michael Phelps’s next career may be in competitive eating. Besides grabbing five gold medals at the Beijing Olympics so far, making him the winningest Olympic athlete ever, he’s got to be setting new marks on the chow line.
A New York Post account of Phelps’s… wait for it… 12,000-calorie-a-day diet, gave us a stomachache. Could one human being really consume that much and still be in Phelps’s shape? And could this possibly be healthy for Phelps, even considering his five-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week exercise regimen?
Here’s Phelps’s typical menu. (No, he doesn’t choose among these options. He eats them all, according to the Post.)
Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelet. One bowl of grits. Three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar. Three chocolate-chip pancakes. — Wall Street Journal, 2008
Anyone who followed Michael Phelps’ astonishing performance in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games surely will remember one of the secrets of his success: Consuming as many as 12,000 calories in a day. — some twat who writes a food blog at NPR, a couple days ago
Much to the chagrin of binge dieters everywhere, it turns out that Michael Phelps’ “garbage disposal” routine of eating 12000 calories a day … — some twat at the Guardian, a few days ago
Phelps, the Olympic diet doesn’t sound like much of one at all, with the daily calorie intake creeping upwards of 12000 calories a day. — LAist
Michael Phelps told NBC he eats 12,000 calories a day — six times the recommended normal for an average adult male. –a twat at Discovery
While swimmer Michael Phelps gets paid to talk about how Subway provides some of the 12000 calories he consumes every day … — a twat at Slate
Swimmer Michael Phelps, who won won eight gold medals at the 2008 Olympics, eats 12000 calories a day when in training to meet his energy .. — Mason City Gazette, late July
Swimming superstar Michael Phelps once claimed he scoffed up to 12000 calories a day. — ABC News affiliate
Not one thought to add the disclaimer: “What a load of shit.”
“Wednesday, Phelps told Ryan Seacrest in an interview ….
“I never ate that much,” Phelps said. “It’s all a myth. I’ve never eaten that many calories.”
