Yesterday I was driving across town, as it happened, that meant tailing, one car behind, a fairly new fairly high end Ferrari.
You know something, almost NO fucker looked at it, not even a covert glance after it passed them, nobody’s head swivelled to the sound of the V12, nothing, not a fucking flicker of interest.
Yesterday, as I was talking to a wimminz, she was telling me that in the past year she had seen a sudden and dramatic change in the wimminz applying for work, it’s a notifiable job so you have to answer the question on sexuality, a year ago maybe 5% were putting bisexual, today that figure is over 80%, I asked her if she thought she knew why that was, she nodded, and said because these wimminz can’t get men to do anything more than pump and dump.
So, it would appear that despite all the rosy rhetoric, changes are afoot and apace and abroad in the land…
It would appear from some of the comments, that readers think I am yet another one of those guys preparing for the final apocalypse when society comes crashing down and water stops flowing and the lights go out permanently.
World War Three, the resource wars, or, mom’s apple pie Christianity v those crazy fucking raghead muslim terr’rists… I don’t think any of y’all know what a war is, because the reality is that it is just a time when all the rules are suspended so that pieces can be moved around the board at will, then when that time is over suddenly everyone goes back to playing by the rules, and while the new rules are a bit different to the old rules, give it a decade or two and they will be just the same.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Sure, lots of people lose their lives, lots more lose their shirts, but *most* people don’t… and there is so much shit flying around, most people don’t care much about anything except getting out the other side in one piece.
What *I* believe we are facing is a reset in the economy and society, and, technological change, and indeed resource wars, social and civil unrest and upheaval.
What I am talking about is a series of progressive discrete things, each permitting the following, you couldn’t have had WW2 without the Great Depression, for example…
Let me tell you about my job, my job is working on the internet, specifically on layers 2 and 3 of the OSI model.
What I see in my day job doesn’t make a lot of sense if you listen to what people are saying (AfORisms 02) but if you look at what people are doing, and look at the results…
Recently I upgraded and consolidated my home NAS, I talk about it elsewhere here, so now I have one shoe box sized box that I can pick up and walk away with, and have all my digital shit with me wherever I put it down.
When I look at the centralised and outsourced model being deployed in all these companies whose main street premises I visit, I see exactly the same shit, they are consolidating the data well away from any given high street operation, or the staff therein.
Tesco’s *could* set up in a field with reasonable road access within 24 hours of a net connection of some sort, even satellite, going in, and if this reminds you of a battalion being airlifted somewhere, you are on the right track.
You turn up with a small rack that will communicate with the bar-code scanners for the tills, good out, and logistics, goods in, and chip and pin machines to make sales, everything else is just logistics.
No real skills needed by anyone on the ground, just follow electronic orders, the most skilled people there will be the one driving the wagons and forklifts, every one else is stocking a shelf or swiping an item.
I *know* what the turnover of these supermarkets is, even relatively small operations in rural towns that used to be called “market towns” are turning over in excess of £300k per week, they have to, less than £200k and it just ain’t a viable or interesting enough operation.
You could flatten the whole place one night with a Cat D9 and they could be up and running a few days later in the empty and disused industrial unit down the road.
Or, Tesco can close the whole place down themselves within a week, the instant the numbers don’t add up, and the “loss” to them would be minimal…
(I’m picking Tesco as a random example, I could have used ANY high street brand)
To them it is like cutting off a toenail.
The store is NOT the core business, it is just a point of sale, an illusion, a fascade, smoke and mirrors, the core business is at the other end of those data links, *well* away from any shit that can go down at the branch level.
Even *this*.. a damn near million square feet regional distro centre for one of the supermarkets, doesn’t hold any of the brains, it may be the heart, but it is just dumb muscle, connected to the brains by more data links.
Cut it off from that remote brain, and it drops dead, INSTANTLY, same as the points of sale do, in our parlance that is taking the site hard down and it is an error that the field engineer in question will be in the shit for, an hour’s lost trade is £50k.
And it stays down, despite the local to the site computer power, a couple of 8U blade servers and some NAS boxes and VOIP / switches / routers etc are just paperweights when that data link drops out, they are not designed to work autonomously, not even for an hour, not even for a minute.
What seems like single point of failure insanity is just perspective, a gun looks different if you are looking down the barrel at the target, or up the barrel at the bullet…
In the wild west cowboy films, the bandidos would ride in with a couple of sticks of dynamite and blow the safe and flee with saddlebags bursting with cash.
How can you rob a bank that is just a remote point of sale and doesn’t have any actual cash? And we are closer to that kind of bank branch that you think… just ask the Cypriots, or the Greeks… wanna riot and burn the building? Go ahead, nothing of value was lost to the brain, no more than a toenail clipping.
Let’s take a look at that OSI model again.
I work at layer 2 and 3, layer 1 is the guys running physical cable / fibre, or microwave links, or sat downlinks, which I can do after a fashion.
Every layer above me can be outsourced and discarded like a toenail clipping, and set up again pretty much anywhere the brain chooses, within 24 hours of the layer 1 guys providing a physical data link.
You think this military style structure with basically dumb terminals controlled by the remote mainframe, with all its inherent weaknesses and flaws and drawbacks came about by fucking *accident*? Or because that *is* the mother-fucking design criteria.
It really doesn’t matter WHICH high street outlet I go to, it could be a tyre fitter or a retail shop or furniture place, or a bank, all the staff, without exception, are basically interchangeable dumb drones, it’s gonna take longer to teach the fuckers they are no longer one of the “team” but one of the “colleagues” or some such shit, that it will take to teach them the “new” point of sale systems.
I watch the fuckers repeating the new programming (Acme sooper summer bar bee kew sale, 20% off winter woolly socks) that just came down the data pipes from the brain, to the other worker drones in a “team meeting” and the fuckers aren’t even smart enough to realise they are just programmed drones, toenail clippings.
It doesn’t take World War Z in the streets of your home town to change fucking life as you know it.
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