My wife tells me anecdotally that her younger clients are slightly more likely to shop around and kill deals because they found a better rate, etc, but that they don’t have any tact or social skills. Older clients try to let you down softly or make an excuse. Millennials and…

— wanye (@wanyeburkett) August 31, 2024

That’s an interesting observation because I’ve never seen it this way. I never answer the phone if I don’t have a very specific and strong need to talk to the person calling at that moment. And I pretty much never have any need to talk to strangers. It’s the same thing with emails. I don’t even open, let alone answer, about 60% of emails I get at work because there are so many of them. The only people who always get their emails answered the second I see them are students. The idea that I’d open emails from people trying to sell me something is quite alien to me.

What I find interesting is that the quoted poster perceives a relationship between a salesperson and his unwilling mark as social and not commercial. And he indicates that younger people see it as strictly commercial. I’m neither a Millennial or a Zoomer but I believe these young people have gotten it right. Commercial and private are different things. We should not confuse them because the moment you let commercial into the private, the private is gone.

I was once friendly with a woman who was a sales rep for a supplement company. We went to dinner and she told me about how disappointed she was in a mutual acquaintance.

“I’ve been so nice to Esther!” she exclaimed. “I thought we were really becoming friends. I had her over to our place, we went out to dinner a lot. And she still didn’t buy anything from me! Not a single purchase in all this time!”

“I’m sorry, are you expecting me to buy something?” I asked bluntly because this sounded like too much of a hint.

“Oh no!” the woman said. “I really like you. I’d want to be friends regardless. Esther, though! Why did she think I was hanging out with her this whole time? Any normal person would have figured it out and bought something.”

This person still tries to suggest hanging out at regular occasions but I can never figure out to what extent it’s a sales strategy, so I don’t participate.

Let’s continue our exploration of our wonderful, Soviet-style media:

Harris has thrived in debates – will her tactics work on Trump? https://t.co/mScKlkjSHL

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) August 31, 2024

In fact, Harris thrived so much in the 2020 debate that opens this article that she lost her bid for the nomination with embarrassing results.

As those of us who somehow avoided having our brains erased overnight remember, Harris was deeply unpopular in 2020 and had to drop out of the primaries as a result. She was also deeply unpopular during her entire vice-presidency until she became nominee by bypassing the primaries.

Of course, Oceanía was always at war with Eastasia and Harris was equally always successful in debates and popular with voters according to the new software people installed in their heads last month.

Harris and the lies surrounding her are pretty trivial as an issue. This same outlet, BBC News (World) has been publishing such lies about Ukraine that I wonder whether its employees are even human. It is curious, though, that these journalists are simultaneously supportive of the silly, prattling Harris and Putin.

Tried to check the news before going to bed and discovered that people are discussing whether Trump went to a cemetery and whether Harris worked at a McDonald’s.

Starting to think that neoliberalism can’t come soon enough.

Without her, we would have elected McCain, and everything would be different. Dude really understood geopolitical dangers like nobody since.

Here’s what we need to know about Communism. It was never tried anywhere on Earth ever. A Communist society never existed. The USSR was a socialist country. Cuba is socialist with elements of capitalism. Venezuela is trying to build socialism. Soviet leadership never – and I insist, never, not once – claimed to have built Communism. We were promised that Communism would be achieved some time in the future, and the date of when that was going to happen was constantly pushed forward. Think climate apocalypse. It’s supposed to be imminent but it’s always 10 years away.

The reason that not even the USSR claimed to have built a Communist society is because Communism means no money, no army and no government. Not in the sense that “you won’t have any money” but in the sense that money as a concept would go away. Soviet ideologues knew even they couldn’t convince citizens that there was no government or money when people clearly observed them every day. I’m starting to think that the Soviets only failed at this task because they lacked the shamelessness of Politico but that’s another issue.

The way Communism is supposed to be achieved is that, as a result of living in a socialist society for a long time, human beings were supposed to evolve into “an entirely new breed of humans.” That was the terminology that was officially used in the USSR. This new breed of humans would be so evolved that they wouldn’t need the “repressive apparatus of the state” (another official term) to live in peace and mutual, willing assistance. Money won’t be needed because people will gladly and eagerly share everything. Taxes and the mechanisms of tax extraction will be unnecessary because we will all understand the need to share. It will be as natural as the need to compete and struggle for status is natural to us in our present unevolved state

There won’t be such a thing as politicians in the Communist world because people will live as one and the need to negotiate competing interests of different factions of society will fall away. Of course, such a state of existence by necessity has to be planetary because if a single group refuses and maintains an army when everybody else abolished theirs, that group will dominate everybody before you can say Karl Marx.

It is obvious to everybody who is not hopelessly naive that this state of humanity will never be achieved. It is completely contrary to the human nature. Socialist regimes did their darndest to change human nature and failed most catastrophically every single time. Hoping for Communism is like hoping that every day will be Christmas. It’s childish. The idea is attractive to people with very low intellect. But there’s enough of those to keep the Communist fantasy alive.

Calling political opponents Communists is as dumb as calling them Nazis.

Talking endlessly about Kamala’s cackle is as tedious as talking about Trump’s hair.

Saying “color revolutions” is as obnoxious as saying “white woman tears”.

“The Deep State” is as non-existent as an epidemic of lynching.

Worrying about WWIII is as neurotic as worrying about a climate apocalypse.

Expecting either Trump or Kamala to destroy democracy is silly.

Seeing people battle imaginary Communists and Nazis is embarrassing.

We get exactly the politics we deserve because we are sloppy and let ourselves be swayed by meaningless slogans.

I remember just a couple of weeks ago somebody came here to offer Politico as a reliable news source.

Politico:

One has to lack even a shred of self-respect to access this propaganda outlet for news. These people urinate in their readers’ faces and, I’m sure, mock their readership mercilessly during drinks after work. As well they should.

There are 5 Tesla Cybertrucks in our small time. Five!

Is it that popular or do we have a lot of wealthy people in town?

Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. He was only 14 years old.

As a U.S. senator, I led the effort to make lynching a federal hate crime.

As Vice President, I proudly stood beside @JoeBiden as he signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law.

As President, I will continue… pic.twitter.com/KbKdQQmZ9j

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) August 28, 2024

Thank goodness lynching is finally recognized as a crime. It was a heavy burden to live in a country where you could lynch people with complete impunity.

Hopefully, when Harris is president she’ll make lynching illegal again and again.

I looked at my kid’s third-grade math assignment and couldn’t complete it. Not because I’m particularly bad at math but – and this is the funny part – I’m apparently not good at language. The task asks children to “use the Commutative Property of Multiplication.” That’s the actual spelling, and I don’t have the foggiest what it’s supposed to mean and why the words are capped.

On the one hand, I’m glad third-graders are assumed to be able to read this kind of words. On the other, this seems like a way to scare very young children away from math because what is a fun activity at this age is made to sound prohibitively complicated and boring. “Hey, kids, let’s do this fun game about a guy who had two buckets of pears and had to share them equally among his friends” might attract 8-year-olds more than “let’s use the Commutative Property”, is what I’m saying.