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Owl? Lark? Pigeon?

Some people are morning larks. They wake up early and go to bed early.

Some people are night owls. They stay up late and wake up late.

I have found, as I grow older, that I really need more sleep than I give myself. I can’t stay up until all hours of the night anymore, but waking up is still very difficult.

Per this magnet I found: I am clearly a Perpetually Exhausted Pigeon.

Permanently Exhausted Pigeon
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Very minor and silly epiphany

I realized today that a big part of why I never got into fanfic is that so much of it is so poorly edited I can’t get through it.

I almost put down ACOTAR because of “parameter” on page 1. I’m not exaggerating. (I instead got out a pen and corrected it.)

I read Manacled because the text was, by and large, legible. I bounced hard off another fanfic my friends recommended because it was not.

And I want to be clear: being like this does not make me morally superior. It just makes me someone who needs the writing to be basically invisible in order to suspend disbelief and immerse myself in the story. Poorly edited copy takes me out of that world as I try to figure out what the author was trying to say (usually by converting the letters into sounds in my head to guess what the homograph or malapropism was supposed to be).

I wonder if this is related to how, when I hear a word, my brain converts it into the visual “word on a page” in my head?

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The oath of fealty goes both ways

I’ve had this post in my head for a long time, and I don’t have the energy today to do it justice; but I’ll start adding in some thoughts.

The thought was kindled this morning when I read this Ask Historians post about companies caring about their workers vs caring about their shareholders. There’s a very good comment about the history of General Electric, which I’ll reproduce here:

In the United States, General Electric is a good example of companies that used to ‘care about their employees.’ Of course, keep in mind that this is likely a matter of perspective, as Shareholder Supremacy has been the accepted law of the land since Dodge v. Ford Motor Company in 1919.

But to my main point, General Electric began its life as a company that built things (electronics on the like). It was a place where its workers could expect to spend their entire career in the service of GE and in return they would be given benefits and a pension upon retirement.

Without going into the rise of his career, Jack Welch became the CEO of GE in the 1980s. However, by 1981 he had effectively taken control of the company and removed most of the old guard (who had more or less believed in the old contract between employer and employee).

Welch more or less turned the company into mostly an investment firm. During his tenure from 1981 – 2001 GE’s market value grew from $14 billion to $600 billion.

However, a lot of that came at the expense of the employer employee contract. His tenure was associated with the end of pensions, reducing payroll (layoffs and reduced pay), rank and tank (firing the bottom 10% of employees), factory closures, and the expansion of stock options as well as utilizing stock options in lieu of pay for performance incentives. This mostly benefitted those at the top, including Welch himself whose pay was magnitudes above his workers.

During Welch’s tenure he was lauded as being a business genius. He was called “Neutron Jack” for his perceived success. Famously saying to judge him for how well the company was doing 20 years after he left.

Now, even by Wallstreet standards Welch’s ideas are seen as a failure. Ironically, $100,000 of shares from 2001 (shortly before Welch’s retirement) would have lost 80% of its value when adjusted for inflation by 2021. But it should be noted that GE’s stock currently sits near an all time high of $316.75 as of 12/25/25.

There is always more to say, but it’s the holidays, I’m on my phone, and I’m trying to keep it brief.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles, 2022

Winning by Jack Welch (with Suzy Welch), 2005

-Edited to fix typo regarding GE shares.

In my experience, I’ve had a number of older people express dismay that young folks have no more loyalty to their employer. (This is usually in the context of the tech industry and adjacent fields.) My rebuttal to this is usually that my generation saw our parents laid off from companies they’d poured their lives into, so it’s hard to feel loyalty to a company that doesn’t care about you.

When people talk about loyalty, it makes me think of the feudal system. Yes, knights swore loyalty to their liege lords; but the lords themselves swore fealty to protect their people, too. If you’re a lord and you don’t mobilize your army to defend against bandits, then soon you won’t have any farmers and you’ll starve in your castle.

Companies that want their workers to stick around need to make sure they are incentivized to do so.

At some point in my notes file, I wrote down this Tiktok link as a good explanation of the issue.

@heardeverything

Reply to @cdnavntech

♬ original sound – Bill Thompson

And this, on Millennials and loyalty:

I’m not sure how to do a Facebook embed, but here’s a preview of this comic strip from The Woke Salaryman on Facebook.

It’s weird how many of these social networks I no longer use.

So. Loyalty is a two-way street, is my point here.

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Today I learned: Ded Moroz

This afternoon one of my friends started talking about Ded Moroz and Ukrainian tree traditions and anyway my mind is blown.

My Jewish Family Always Had a Christmas Tree — But Not for Christmas

I had no idea about ANY of this.

We just had Santa/Saint Nicholas, and another one…Black Piet, I think? Not the weird Dutch blackface one, but just a second Santa Claus figure who followed along dressed in black robes (not red) and had the job of handing out the coal to the bad kids (presumably so that Santa wouldn’t have to get his hands dirty, literally or metaphorically).

(Side note: Stardew Valley has made me see coal as a good present.)

I’m not sure if this was just my family’s adaptation of Krampus or what. But anyway, just wanted to share!

Have an amusing meme

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Blocking is not real life

Short opinion.

I think that the reason people treat blocking (on social media) as this Horrible Unforgivable Crime is that to them, social media feels like real life; and in real life, Shunning and Ostracism are genuinely punishments for horrible crimes.

But the Internet is not real life.

My half-baked hypothesis is that people think this way because young adults right now had their formative years during COVID, when things forced us online much more than even the most dysfunctional people, and it exacerbated and accelerated a lot of already-bad social trends.