Lawnmower Boy

A Grumble About Technological Progress So our company recently went to "computer assisted ordering." It's not a computer writing resupply orders based on sales movement; but, rather a computer "helping" us by generating an order which the department managers then revisit and revise. If they can. For a number of reasons, I suspected that there were going to be problems of implementation. I said so: but I will be the first to admit that I am a negative and cynical person with a skeptical view of "technological progress" in this latter day, and I admitted that I could easily be wrong, and would wait to see the results. I am also, thanks to extreme labour shortage, a sometime evening manager, and sometime department manager. It's a small department, thank Heavens, the "repack." I think it's standard practice in our industry for distribution to include a warehouse where items are repacked for distribution. This will include general merchandise such as houseware, medications and cosmetics; but also, for example, baby formula and spices. Basically, the idea is that you probably don't want, say, an entire box of six 1kg bottles of garlic powder, and these are opened at the warehouse and the individual items sent to the store in totes. (Those gray, plastic bins that you see at the drug store.) The baby formula and spices and such are "repack." Though if there was ever a time when all the items from the "repack" warehouse came in totes, it is long since past. Nowadays, the order contains all sorts of odds and ends, in boxes, loose, and in totes. "Computer-assisted ordering" consists of tracking items through the tills. So what'st he problem? It is that we are expecting the cashiers to individually swipe every item to build an accurate inventory, which is a bit much to ask of a green cashier in a hurry when a new mom with a cranky baby dumps two dozen pouches of miscellaneous baby food pouches on the belt --and also tricky from the point of view of anticipating sales. Take an extreme example. Saint Patrick's Day comes but once a year, and there's a run on green food colouring dye. That is, if Saint Paddie's happens on a weekend, and not a Thursday, and especially not if this particular Saint Patrick's Day comes a week before the centennial of the Easter Rising. (That's my excuse for getting hung with some green dye this year, anyway.) It'll be a long time, if ever, that our "expert system" can predict that there will be a run on green food colouring when Saint Patrick's Day falls on a weekend, but not so much on a Thursday, for example. Actually, a long time --several centuries, in fact-- before an expert system can predict this! "Give it time," they say. Centuries are not unreasonable for a single item; in the main, we just want to predict that the on-sale tortilla chips will sell more. Which is also hard, unless you are in the habit of telling the computer when the outside vendors of tortilla chips have their sales. Hold the notion that computer-assisted ordering is hard in your mind, and move on to a new tranche of Technological Progress. A new, and more automated, warehouse. The repack order doesn't go out every day. Traditionally, there are two orders a week, rotating through the districts, so that the staff at the warehouse are kept busy through the week. For example, in my district, the orders used to come Wednesday and Sunday. Then we moved the start of the ad back from Sunday to, eventually, Friday. This made it hard to order, and we moved the Wednesday order to Thursday. Still a bit tricky, because you had to order for the week (the order was due by Thursday afternoon, when the sales stickers were hung overnight Thursday-Friday. Since the Sunday order was due Monday, you effectively lost an entire weekend's sales if you weren't able to hold the ad in your head while writing the order on Thursday morning. And that's hard!) Fortunately, big stores, like mine, get a second order, the day after the first of the week. This is thought of as a "clean-up" order, and is basically intended to avoid overburdening the stores on a single day. However, it was written Friday, after the ad was hung. Yay! So we've moved to a new warehouse. And, because reasons, we've had to adjust the order schedule. It now goes, for our district: Thursday, Friday, Saturday. (This might have to do with rural Canada slowly dying on the vine, or with our selling divisions and buying divisions, of late.) To be clear here, we now have three orders a week, and they come on consecutive days at the beginning of our sales week. Hunh? So, this Friday, I was working with the order. Included were ten cases (120 pieces) of a big box of contact lens solution. 120 x $19.99 retail. Hunh, again? I went to the invoice: it was an "automatic substitution due to pack change." That is, the product used to come in single pieces, and now comes in cases. The software translated the order in pieces to the order in cases, and somehow did it wrong, so that instead of 10 boxes of contact solution becoming one case, 10 boxes became ten cases. So that's bad. Our store (and any others that happened to need that particular product that Friday) just became the new warehouses in charge of this product. It's going to be inflating our inventory numbers forever, and no-one else will get any. ...On Saturday, we got another five. I check the order. The computer was perfectly aware that we now had two years worth of the product on hand. I checked the rest of the order. All of the items that came in on Friday had been duplicated. (We only got four cases of contact lens solution because the warehouse was out.) In other words, the Thursday-Friday-Saturday turnaround is too short for the computer system to update before generating the next order. It's not just contact lens solution, either. Some cashier seems to have swiped a single Cranberry-almond meal replacement bar a dozen times, instead of doing all the flavours, so I got an entire box of them, when only a single one had sold. Fine: I managed to sneak them into the back of the display and corrected the inventory. That's how the system is supposed to work. But it was too late to stop another case from coming in the next order! And it continues: store brand jello comes in large boxes for small sales, and goes into relatively limited space. (These things are far less well correlated than you'd think.) Now I have an entire case of store-brand raspberry jello to store for the next however long it takes to sell. All of this applies to dozens of stores, which are very quickly getting choked with slow-moving merchandise, while the number of items out of stock at the warehouse grows and grows. We're now below 75% fill rate on our orders. I hope that that is largely because of the warehouse change, but if it isn't, we're going to reach a point where we have nothing to sell because all of the stock has been distributed, and is being stored in ingenious, inacccessible ways in the wrong stores. Technology will save us!

Yes, if only the average episode of ST:NG had had the thrills and chills of the average maintenance job. "Why aren't we getting any signal? Stupid console!" *Heavy thudding noise as someone slams their fist into a stupid console.* "That's not going to help. Have you checked the dish?" "There's nothing wrong with the dish. It's just not working. While it's down, can I go watch spaceball?" "Go check the dish first." "I --okay. I'll go check the dish." "So the dish isn't getting any signal." *Conversation halts for dirty looks and sheepish eye contact avoidance* "Did you fix it?" "Well, I took it apart. . ." "Did that fix it?" ". . . . No. And I can't put it back together again. Maybe we can stop by Starbase Eleven? We could pop into the hardware store on the way!" "So you just made it worse. And you have no plans to fix it. Have you looked in the manual." "The manual? It's stupid. And it was translated badly. Now I will do a terrible imitation of a Japanese accent while muffing jokes about Japlish translations! In conclusion, dirty underwear vending machines!" "Read the manual and find out what you did wrong." *Much later.* "I read the manual. It looks like I should have dismantled the refibrillator before unfizzling it from the main integrating shaft." "Why didn't you?" "Because it was dumb and hard, and I would have missed the start of the Magnum rerun on History if I had to do it!" "Magnum P.I. reruns on the History Channel now? The future sure is a strange --Never mind. Go dismantle the refibrillator and unfizzle the integrating shaft." *Much later* "Any progress?" "Well, it sucked at first, but then I realised that if I stuck some gunk to the end of the screwdriver, I could get the darn things to stick on, and after that it was easy. Of course, then I had to clean the screws in place, but after a while it occurred to me that I needed a spray, so no-one was using the Waterpik--" "--I was use the Waterpik--" "--And that after you flush it with warm water for a few hours it'll be almost as good as new. So, anyway, I cleaned the rebrillator with the Waterpik, and reinstalled it. But notice these rings, here? They're installation guides. Turns out that the last time the rebrillator was reinstalled, it was onlly fixed to one of the rings, so every time the integrating shaft integrated, there was slippage --here. You see these wear marks? Anyway, I rebuilt the ring flanges with plastic aluminum." "And?" "The dish works. For now. Should probably get it into the shop before some space whale shoots plasma torpedoes at us again, though."

In an interview in Youngstown today, Acme Products CEO Kevin Tsujihara underlined his company's commitment to Wile E. Coyote's leadership in Project Roadrunner. Critics have suggested that in the light of Wile E. running off a cliff while under the influence of supervitamins, it might have been a good idea to rethink the whole "get the Roadrunner with pills" idea, as perhaps being too grim and unpleasant a way of exterminating the obnoxious desertland denizen. Tsujihara, however, was adamant that the pills approach had been effective to that point, by various metrics. After all, supervitamins did help Wile E. catch up with the roadrunner, although he then unfortunately ran off a cliff. As for the lean and hungry predator's decision to consume an entire bottle of earthquake pills after a tragic misunderstanding of the side-effects of the roadrunner-specific dosage (no side effects, and no effects, either), Tsujihara pointed out that the whole "character arc" was true to Frank Miller's vision. "In the comics, the Dark Knight drinks," he points out, apparently failing to understand that Dark Knight Returns wasn't canonical for a reason. Nevertheless, he went on to say, the next, Giant Catapult, phase of the project wasn't necessarily commited to the "pills" vision. "Wile E. will be painting on a broader canvas," he said. "In blood. Hopefully, other people's blood. Probably roadrunners'. Although possibly Jason Momoa's. It's hard to say." Asked whether Foghorn Leghorn's approach of not trying to fight Dawgs and chicken hawks in an endless landscape of cliffs and precariously hanging boulders might have something to do with his relative lack of falling-off-cliffs and being-smashed-into-an-accordion-by-falling-rocks related accidents, Tsujihara scoffed. "That's all right for some rooster in the South," he said. "But our vision is grander. Operatic, even!" The fact that Foghorn often manages to get the better of Dawg and L'il Chicken Hawk was dismissed. "By opening weekend metrics, we are well within range of the Barnyard Antics universe," he pointed out. On the question of wether Wile E.'s tenure at the helm of Project Roadrunner might, eventually be tied to some kind of record of succces in actually catching roadrunners, Tsujihara was firm. "He's a supergenius!"

Yeah. They should have cast Super Lady Jesus from War and Peace the Movie That's Totally Won All the Oscars-- I'm sorry. What does this criticism even mean?

I know. Wasn't it terrible when Whedon went back in time, turned himself into Brian Michael Bendis, and wrote Secret War?

Needs moar body-shaming.

Eh. The birth rates in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan and South Koreas are all well within the same range as that of the People's Republic. For all the ink spilled on the One Child Family Policy, it seems as though it was working with the cultural tides, and not against it. The lag between decline in child mortality and decllining birth rate is certainly significant --we've had this thing called the "world population explosion" as a result; but if we haven't moved into the realm of population decline, we will by the end of the next century --three human generations, at most. Also, put me down as being a bit skeptical that clothes have some kind of sex-reducing functionality. It seems a bit naive about how fashion works.

Human life expectancy at birth is historicallly low. Male life expectancy at maturity was 64 from the beginning of reliable records up to the late Nineteenth Century and past. Female life expectancy is lower, but it has been persuasively argued that grandmothers are a key evolutionary development, as otherwise, why menopause?

The moment I read this, I threw the sheepskin off my body, got up off the flagstoned floor, and wrote a letter to the Queen asking for permission to go on the Internet. By the time I was done brushing my tooth with my willow twig, a herald had walked into my hut, cuffed me about the head for my G-d-mn-d insolence, and given me my permission. And after all that, all I have to say is that it's all completely correct. I mean, I might disagree, but I don't really want to be put in the stocks again this week.

Er. You'd think that at 51 I'd have learned not to start comments with "Actually." If you couldn't tell from the above, I've had personal, family experiences with excessive exercise --the kind of excessive (for example) running that I suspect is behind some of the cultishness that surrounds long distance running. Especially the kind that just sounds like someone in a manic state. So I should probably apologise to everyone who is legitimately convinced by the persistence hunting thing, and go work out my issues in private.

"How was lunch? Lunch sucked. No, wait. I know what you're going to say. How could it have sucked? I mean, Good? She's so cheerful and fun, always so nice. And Evil? The way he drops sarcastic lilnes, his cynicism, so refreshing! Yeah. Sounds like fun. If they're at the table. But, oh, maybe they're there for precisely long enough to order and have, like, half their drinks, and then she's winking at him, and they're disappearing into the washroom. And you're left sitting there for two hours while the waitstaff is getting all impatient, and finally the come up to you and ask you if your friends are coming back, and if you mind settling the bill for three entrees, two appetisers, three drinks, and the five coffees you've had while watching ESPN 8 over the crowd at the bar. So you do. And you leave. And you check your messages, and, eventually they admit that they snuck out through the back window and had hate sex in the alley. At least Good volunteered to pay her bill, but now she's ragging on me for not tipping enough."

Actually, our ancestors had great difficulties modifying or changing hunting ranges. Once we went all in for stone tools, back in the day of Homo ergaster, ranges were defined by exploitable resources of tool stone, as well as climate and ecosystem. For a very long time, associated with the Acheulean industry, that i s, from 1.76 million years B.P. to roughly 100,000 BP, stone hand tools were made by individuals of limited manual dexterity by striking flakes from cores of suitable stone. This produced undifferentiated cutting tools with edges of perhaps 20cm. Apart from these key implements, the exhausted cores were used as very large oval handaxes and cleavers. There is debate, and much ingenious speculation, about these prevalent but seemingly little used tools or "tools." Because this technique was crude, and depended heavily on stone suitability, human activities centred on frequent returns to suitable stone outcrops; and new ranges could only be established by "colonising" new ranges by the prior discovery of suitable outcroppings. For rapid colonisation of new ranges, for example the settlement of North America, a vastly more sophisticated stonemaking technique, identified archaeologically as "Mode 4," compared with the Acheulean era's Mode 2, was required. It is notably characterised by microliths and ground edges, and allows for curation (maintaining tools to extend their range), and the use of a wider range of lilthic resources. With curation and expedient and skillful exploitation of makeshift resources, our Upper Paleolithic ancestors exploded past a whole series of geological boundaries to become a truly global species. Prior to that, we couldn't even follow the herds into the Americas! And it is all because of tools, tools, tools, tools. The making and use of artefacts, including clothing, is at the core of what we are. The archaeology of our tools (again, I'm arguably being a guy here in focussing on "tools," as there is arguably a gender divide implicit in focussing on stone tools to the exclusion of admittedly less perishable clothing) very strongly suggests that our technique has made us what we are. I cannot stress this enough: "persistence hunting" is at best a goofy digression. At the end of the day, I tend to take a very dim view of it. Yes, it works fine in a given case. Turtles are a hugely productive food source, and you can run them down easily! At the other end of the spectrum, you may very well be able to run down a male antelope in the full bloom of his rack. So, yes, sure: if a particular animal gives good results from a short chase, or disproportionate results from a long one, then chase it. Chasing is fun! Many people have, over the years, discovered the delight of the runner's high while chasing. Nothing matches that exhilerating moment on the trail when it seems like they can run forever. Well, nothing except any of the other common symptoms of mania.* Dancing naked on your roof is fun when you're in that kind of mood, too. Er, or so I'm told. Forgive me for being blunt, the discovery that running is fun is all too often a symptom that you're entering the manic phase of a bipolar episode. Or, God forbid, that you're simulating it with coke or meth. (Stimulants are fun, too: I'm writing this on a caffeine buzz. Cardiac arrest, not so much.) Understand this: crazy people will tell you, and tell you, about how much they love to run, and how everyone should run, and run, and run, and some anthropologists will believe them, and it'll be convincing and persuasive until suddenly you find yourself talking about another contemporary in their mid-forties who suddenly keeled over from a heart attack in spite of being "incredibly healthy, thin and fit, running miles every day." So, in other words, running is healthy: chasing an antelope while you're doing it can be a constructive way of turning exercise into productive activity. Enjoying it, beyond a certain point, is an indication that you might want to rethink your prescription. You only have to run with a dog for a while to realise that your body is giving you a very clear signal: Oh, hey, dude, this is far enough. Dogs are actual persistent hunters. They love to run, and suffer from being deprived of a chance to do it. Humans, again, not so much: That pain in your side and your feet? That's nature's way of telling you that you need to rethink your hunting/evasion/travelling strategy. That it's time to think about applying your existing techniques, or learning a new one. Car, Bike, bow, canoe, dog, camouflage, gun: there are a million ways of using your brain and your technique to make a living. Another thing that's in the world is the dismissal and neglect of techique. Back when Dilbert was still funny and original, I remember the Pointy-Haired Boss saying, "Everyone else's job but mine is easy." It's a pretty persistent idea: it goes into managing --if you have no idea how hard it is, you can always blame your subordinates for failing to implement your vision, and it tends to creep into history, where we decide that all past people must have been pretty dumb. "Hey, why didn't those cavemen just build themselves a fusion reactor and use it to power a meson gun? Bam! Pre-roasted antelope!" It gets a little . . . weird . . . when we start using it to take on airs vis-a-vis prehistoric predators and Alpha Centaurans. It strikes me that the safest approach there is to start out over-estimating any dire wolves and little green people, and work our way up to an earned sense of superiority. If you're going to go that route at all. Self-congratulation does not impress me as a survival technique in general, I've got to say. *Note that I'm not dissing jogging. Just gently suggesting that it works best as exercise for the young, the crazy, and the perhaps over-medicated. There's a reason us middle-aged people tend to rave on about cross-country skiking, kayaks and bikes.

So. Hot.

Fixeder!

Yeah. Here's a sweet, light-hearted guy, making an admittedly goofy contribution, and Roy just comes down on it. *Looks around to see if anyone's paying attention* Aquaman sucks.

So. Hot.

It just keeps getting worse.

As grim night sets over the ghastly battlefield of the Somme, German soldiers advanced amongst the winnowed fallen of Britan and her Empire. Dreadfully armed with buckets of warm water, indelible felt markers, and razors, they are about to commit an atrocity for the ages. . .

Public Authority: "Evacuate now! Get in your spaceships and get to warp right now! Leave everything that can't run to the launch pads! Fly, you fools!" Radio News One: "And now for a counterpoint, a representative of the Real Estate Board of Omnicron Aurigae Beta VII." Real Estate Guy: "Thanks, Chet. I just want to say that that's crazy talk. Yes, three solar masses of gravitational waves will be a tad bumpy. But consider the one million percent increase in sale prices of single family detached residences in the greater metropolitan Omnicron Aurigae Beta VII area over the last solar period. A mere cosmos-scale gravitational radiation wave event isn't going to effect the fundamentals of this upside market. Yes, prices will cool off due to the billion trillion electron volt radiation impingement, but spontaneous collision-derived ground level uncontrolled fusion events are mainly a concern for structures built before the modern building codes were brought in. " Public Authority: "Are you, are you insane? Everyone who is on this planet in an hour is going to be reduced to hot plasma! Along with their granite countertops!" Radio News One: "Please, sir, there's no call to be uncivil here. It's a discussion, not a name-calling contest." Real Estate Guy: "Oh, indeed, Chet. Remember that with real estate, the key point is that they're not making any more of it. Our projections of future population growth, based on the reasonable assumptions that we will soon learn to cure entropy and reproduce by spontaneous mitosis, shows population here on Omnicron Aurigae Beta VII rising by one billion percent in the next solar period. Well, that's if our sun isn't blown into supernova, but how likely is that? Only somewhat likely. The million percent increase in housing prices over the last period is going to seem positively infinitesmal compared with the increase in the next. Sell now! Buy nower! Wait a second. I've got to take a call. Business." Radio News One: "Wait. If prices are going to keep going up, why does everyone need to sell now? For clarification, this station turns to the Public Authority. Oh, wait, the Public Authority has just taken off in their spaceship, saying something about trying to make the escape run in less than twelve parsecs. Do you have a comment, Real Estate Guy? Real Estate Guy? Oh. There goes his ship. I . . . Oh, crap. Honey? Yeah, I know we just closed the deal on the house, but I think we maybe should think about staying with my sister over on Gamma Fomolhaut . . . Sorry, hon, you're breaking up. Too much interference. . . . "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bOy3RNyWME

In the beginning there was light: light so energetic that it made exotic particles out of itself, and in collisions beyond reckoning, its exuberance transcended the physical to the metaphysical, and life was born without the Zoas. Life before life could be, swimming in the hadrons and baryons, the gamma ray soup of the primordial. It had no name, but when it came to name itself, it would be "Thanoro Azoic." And yet in that roil of energy, hot with latency for the life and souls that would come after, there was a . .discordancy. A structure out of an older universe, sheltering cruel, proud beings, last survivors of that cosmos. And, too, there was the appetite from which these "Ravens of Dispersion" cowered. Rapturously hungry, licking energy and latency out of Creation it exuded an almost-pathetic pleasure at this new home it had found itself. Thanoro Azoic was not inclined to begrudge its appetite. At least, not at first. Surely there was enough for all! But the ancient ones came to him, and warned him, and, at last, he saw the wisdom behind their touchy pride, and saw, through their eyes, the awful gallery of lost universes that those appetites had left behind them. In that moment, Thanoro Azoic cried out to a higher power, and received an answer: a cruel answer. If the Creation Thanoro Azoic treasured was to live out its days and expire in its own time, gentle nursery of uncounted souls, fifty billion years hence, it would be by its own efforts. The Zoas must needs be neutral in this fight. It can never be said that Thanoro Azoic was created for a purpose. Purpose is a kind of metaphysics, and the only metaphysics Thanoro Azoic knows are the kind made when exotic particles collide with the force of smashing worlds. But it also cannot be said that Thanoro Azoic did not find a purpose. Thanoro Azoic will shepherd Creation from its beginning to its end. And even though the first of beings can no longer manifest anywhere cooler than the event horizon of a galactic black hole, plans long-laid still proceed, and there is teaching to be done, to those brave and wise enough to reach out.

Or that the first archmage was "alive" in the Azoic Age. Four billion years is even longer ago than 120,000. It is a bit odd that there was no archmage active in the Turakian Age. You know, unless Takofanes was the Archmage.

No offence, dude, but Victoria is the only interesting state. Check back in 2040 for Boring States of Australia (and the Northern Territory) Champions. It'll have the Tasmanian Devil writeup!

If rats actually had the sense to get out of a sinking ship before anyone else, the last Space Shuttle mission would have been overrun with. . . Oh. Never mind. I thought we were talking about the economy.