Why Not?

So evidently this is a thing.

I'll play along:

Meh.

It's Always Rainy In Oregon

Or, y'know, not.

Although we seem to have broken the planet, it looks like Oregon might be a pretty nice place to be, at least until the hordes of ravenous humanity fleeing the desolation of what was once California arrive.

Hopefully they won't show up until after the weekend. I have plans.

May Day! Mayday?

I still have a job. For now. Yay.

Unfortunate that nobody even notices May Day in the U.S. anymore, even though the change from a traditional spring holiday to a modern worker's rights holiday celebrated in pretty much the whole rest of the world is related to an American incident.

Anyway, cheers! If you don't have a job, may your search be short and your résumé be type-o free. If you have a job, may our glorious international corporate overlords not decide that it's more efficiently done in a deadly Bangladeshi sweatshop.

No one Everyone could've predicted...

...that our glorious corporate overlords (all hail!) pushing for more "skilled" immigration to solve our desperate "skills shortage" were doing so solely in order to keep wages in the STEM sectors low.

A brief excerpt:

If there was a shortage of IT jobs then you'd expect wages to rise, but in fact the team found wages in the field (on average) peaked in 2001 and have remained flat ever since, and in some cases have fallen over the last 14 years. The reason, according to the research, is that overseas workers are being recruited to keep wages low.

The researchers found that the US produces a surfeit of STEM graduates, but only half of them are hired. The rest of the jobs in the IT industry, primarily entry-level positions for the under 30s, are filled using foreign workers and may account for up to 50 per cent of new hires.

"Even our high-end estimate, of 50 percent, is a conservative estimate of the proportion of guestworkers hired," Professor Salzman told The Register. Salzman has spent the last 13 years researching this area of the market and has amassed a large body of evidence to support his claims.

I'm so surprised.

Just to be clear, I'm totally fine with immigration. Let people come here, whether they want to be ag workers, or tech workers. Just don't pretend that a certain kind of immigration is all swell and good and shiny while a darker icky smelly kind of immigration is eleventy times as bad as Hitler.

R.I.P.

Richie Havens, yet another relatively unsung great, died today. If not for the vagaries of fucked up logistics at Woodstock, he may never have even garnered the minor fame he ended up with -- he went on first because all the other filthy hippies were late.

Regardless, he was a man able to transform the blues standard "Motherless Child" into the Woodstock classic "Freedom":

RIP Richie.

UPDATE

Moar, 'cause fuck you Mr. Death:

The following contains the entirety of the first video above after the initial song. Oh well, sosumi.

Update again, 'cause fuck you that's why:

Update again: Moar? Yeah, more, you got a problem with that?

Fuck the NRA

And the creatures in congress that they own. Fuck them right in the ear, with the biggest example of one of the fucking guns they worship.

What a horrible, fucked up, shitty week.

Nothin'

I have nothing positive to say about anything. So here, have a puppy in a bowl: