The good place and its message

I've been watching "The Good Place" which came out a decade ago.  I had never gotten around to it, but I finally decided to give it a go.  Its a lot of fun and deals with some intriguing topics, and includes a Florida-man for some terrific comedy relief.

Anyway, this is worthy of a mention because the underlying premise is that (spoiler if you haven't seen it) the scoring system that sends people to the good place hasn't kept up with our overly complicated world.  You may buy something from a company that doesn't treat its workers fairly, or you don't think about where your product comes from... and that winds up being negative points.

But, there's good from this learning: a theme that emerges is what we do next is more important than what we've done before. We can grow and become better people.

Its uplifting and feels good.  I know the show is from a while ago but there is a lesson in there that becomes even more relevant today.

And that reminds me that the general notion of religion is a bit of nonsense.  Look, if religious belief helps you achieve a form of enlightenment and feels good to you, then I say have at it. 

What I'm talking about is the broad part of religion and a god who wants humanity to succeed. 

How is it that someone like a T-rump (or any of the past "evil doers") can rise to power and make things miserable for the masses, while smart and decent people wind up dying young, having serious diseases, or otherwise have no ability to be that same kind of leader?

There's a flaw in the logic. 

And this is among the reasons that we can’t have nice things

On tariffs

Just a reminder from the university of Nebraska — While the U.S. Constitution grants to Congress the power to levy tariffs on goods, Congress has delegated some of that power to the Executive Branch over time. The U.S. Constitution states in Article I, Section 8 that "The Congress shall have the Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises." Congress passed general tariff legislation until the early 1930s. However, in a move to grant more flexibility to the President to revitalize global trade in the midst of the Great Depression, Congress gave the Executive Branch the power to negotiate tariff reductions within levels pre-approved by Congress through the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act of 1934. President Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first President to have the authority to levy tariffs and negotiate bilateral trade agreements without the approval of Congress. The Executive Branch has continued to exercise a level of authority over tariffs over the past few decades. In 1962 President Kennedy signed into law the Trade Expansion Act, which allows the President to adjust tariffs based on threats to national security under section 232.3 This is the authority under which President Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum, which have a vast impact on some of the United States' biggest trading partners and many U.S. industries. Since the beginning of the year, there have been bipartisan efforts in Congress to try to regain some of the power that was delegated to the Executive branch to regulate trade.— 

Our elected officials can't simply allow the sitting president take that responsibility upon himself, hurting relations and impacting everyday Americans

A good synopsis of why CEOs do what they do

This tweet from an Amazon co-founder says it all

That's on brand in this day and age.

Sergey Brin - one of Googles cofounders - waxed poetic a few days ago. 

Oh wait. It's not poetic. It's idiotic. 

 "I recommend being in the office at least every weekday," 

Which I think means people can and should work weekends?

 "60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity,  [A] number of folks work less than 60 hours and a small number put in the bare minimum to get by... This last group is not only unproductive but also can be highly demoralizing to everyone else."

So he wants to be a leader in AI and to get there, he'll abuse his employees.  Who maybe will get an attaboy for their work?  And he'll make billions. 

Those academy awards

Its billed as celebration of the movies.  But it really boils down to self-promotion and an ability to draw attention to overlooked films and for people that win to have greater asking prices.

But the whole system of selecting movies and ultimately deciding who wins is just a bunch of nonsense.  Around a decade or so ago, you had the discussion about it being about the Oscars being white, since people of various origins and colors were generally overlooked.

And then last night, you saw the pendulum swing a different way.  

There's a movie called Emilia Perez that was nominated for many awards.  Ostensibly, its a musical about a Mexican drug lord who undergoes surgery to become a woman to protect his family and leave his old life behind.  Only.... it fails on every level.  As a musical it includes songs like this one https://youtube.com/shorts/N3w2Lq-jMZQ?si=cpgGqwen-JNA0Yje which is ... wow.

It also fails in the notion of being about transgender.  Yes it does star a trans woman in the lead role.  The problem has to do with the transition happening to escape a past, and how the tropes play out surrounding the storyline.

But mostly it fails at being a Mexican story.  The person behind it is French, and it was filmed entirely in France.  He has little (or as far as I can tell, no) connection to Mexico.  He only presented things he saw in headlines. It tells a story that has no basis in reality and paints a picture of cartels that is one dimensional (and perhaps stereotypical and racist to a point).  And the actors...well, there is one Mexican person in the film. And you could argue that Selena Gomez is of Mexican heritage.  But, most people wouldn't say she's Mexican - and her Spanish is just okay and she has a very American accent.  The lead actress is Spanish (from Spain), and Zoe Saldana is Dominican.  In summary, it was a bit of a miss here too.

The academy apparently nominated it because it ticked boxes of Mexican and transgener and pithy.

And there was also the matter of Best Actor.  Ralph Fiennes turned in a fine performance.  But two members of the academy (the voters) decided not to vote for him.  The reason they gave was that he had won previously... except that he had not.  They proudly said they'd vote for Adrien Brody, who had, in fact, won a best actor award previously (and of course he won again).

The absurdity of that was out on full display. I didn't see either film (yet!), so I can't really comment on the merits of either.  This is simply about how dumb the voting is.

The blame game

Here's something I get a lot from people that I know who are in the maga community in general …. it's that they want to blame everyone else for the world's problems. It's not about anything that's happening with the guy that you love but with everyone else. 

My favorite is blaming the previous administration or blaming some billionaire who has nothing to do with anything. The two favorites go-to guys who everyone seems to point to or George Soros and Bill Gates. 

Why those two? I really don't know, but they come up all the time. Never mind that the guy who is sitting in the White House and basically running the country is a billionaire who is destroying from within. Nope gotta blame some other billionaires because they're bad people in their mind. 

Never mind that George Soros has literally nothing to do with anything related to politics. He contributes and he does have some political action committees that he's involved with and of course he wants things to go his way, but he has no real relation to anything really in government. 

Bill Gates started the Gates foundation that help communities and with food, water, and vaccines and generally ensuring that people have a better way in life … but now he's a bad guy. 

So anyway, in reading through comments on the bottom of different posts, it's sometimes amusing to see the nonsense that people post. It's like a guilty pleasure of mine that I'll read through them just to see what people think because you know you're gonna get some reasonable opinions and then you're gonna get the people who are just nuts and want to say something from an uninformed position 

My example came about when I was reading more on how small farmers are being impacted. someone wrote a diatribe - a thesis if you will -  about how Bill Gates is ultimately irresponsible for all of this because Bill Gates had bought some farms and therefore he's part of the problem, not part of the solution and it's his fault that the prices are going up and it's his fault that the farmers are going out of business 

I'm reading and I'm thinking myself wow how basically ridiculous is that?  When you look at the facts of the matter you realize there's something going on, but then you have this weird point of view that makes no sense and blames Bill Gates for a problem that was created by large corporations by billionaires in different places. 

Corporations and politicians who didn't care about everyday people, and T-rump who lied to them and told him he would and then told them no it's not my fault that this happened … it's someone else's fault!

There's just something so crazy about all of this that we can't seem to control and it really bugs me that we're at this point.