The Proletariat Network  -

+ 1 - 2 | § ¶Improv poetry

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
When Elvis got high on the bit of an ember
That sat in his ashtray, just by his feet
While wallowing, wallowing, in his defeat. 

He asked himself 'How did I get to this place?'
'Why am I so desperate? Why did I lose face?'
He had forgotten that which he had known -
He had at long last reaped what he had sown.

'Away, away demons! Please leave me be!'
'I simply want to once again be me.'
But all hope was lost and cannot be found.
Elvis was no more, his good faith had drowned.

+ 2 - 4 | § ¶Business speak obfuscated

Business speak is an interesting and scary phenomenon - it's similar to the "like, yaknow" filler of teen girls, the "exogenous factors in the development of postmodern dyads" verbiage of academia, and the "winners don't quit" truisms of pop philosophy and inspirational posters. It's interesting because of its prominence and parallels to other utterances, and it's scary because unlike these other cases it seems to have a real impact on (or at least correlation with) career success.

This is all just based on my own anecdotal observations (you're reading a blog, after all), but it seems that those who work their way up various professional ladders really do tend to use a lot of business speak. I'm not implying causality here (in fact I'm quite sure that such vapid phrases do not really cause anything at all), but it's definitely different from the other cases I highlighted. Teenage speak is just a habit/phase and doesn't really matter positively or negatively, and really the same is true of the other cases as well. Being wordy in academia or trite on a poster is not clearly correlated with success or failure - you'll find a mix of all cases.

But business speak really is present and really is taken seriously, it seems. Sure, a lot of people make fun of it (see: Action Item, Professional Superhero), but not enough to stem it or prevent it from being so, well, "impactful." Almost without exception, people in the upper echelons of business use these words, and more frequently the higher up you go. Again I wouldn't suggest that the use of these words causes success (and would be inclined to think the reverse is true), but it is a sad and scary observation nonetheless and it causes many "lower" folks to look up and try to see meaning and wisdom where there is none.

So, I'll pile on with another attempt at humor, in the hopes that by continuing to trivialize this language we can slowly chip away at it. I guess this is a bit like the "Beg The Question" language prescriptivism, and equally hopeless, but here goes:

Following are some common business speak terms and silly/obfuscated alternatives (in the spirit of "eschew obfuscation, embrace elucidation!"):

• "Going forward" -> "Moving like a pawn" (in Chess, they only move forwards)
• "On the same page" -> "Literarily proximal" (as an added bonus, literarily sounds like it isn't a word but actually is, and sounds like "literal" which is commonly misused)
• "Add value" -> "Escalate eminence" (alliterative, somewhat unusual word choice)
• "Take offline" -> "Take the red pill" (Matrix reference)
• "Touch base" -> "Haptically plan" (haptically may or may not really be a word, but haptics is relating to touch)
• "Deliverables" -> "Remittables" (with a secondary definition of canceling)
• "High level" -> "Circumvently cirrus-like" (neither are really quite words, but it sounds fun and will make people say "huh?" - and if you know what the words are, it does make some sense)
• "Action item" -> "Vivacious component" (real words this time, but another "huh?"-raiser)

+ 14 - 13 | § ¶Meditations on spam

So I'm behind the scenes tweaking things to make the site a bit more spam-proof, and it caused me to meditate a bit about the existence of spam. Its existence implies its profitability, but its profitability is no doubt contingent on the fact that it doesn't really cost the spammers anything to do what they do (e.g. they're using viruses and such to hijack the computers of others for their own purposes).

The most remarkable aspect of spam is that the spammers are in a sense true researchers of artificial intelligence. We keep on trying to come up with more techniques to block them that mostly try to ensure the poster is truly a human, and the spammers keep on coming up with ways to feign humanity. It would be nice to somehow legitimize and leverage the "research" into cracking captchas that has been done in the name of spam.

+ 15 - 11 | § ¶Renting market

So it seems that the renting market ironically works like this:

1. Premise: Economy is crappy
2. -> real estate prices going down for foreseeable future
3. -> more people waiting to buy houses
4. -> fewer people buying houses right now
5. -> more people renting right now
6. -> renting prices are higher now.

There's some serious issues with that train of logic methinks - not its validity but rather its mere existence.

+ 21 - 11 | § ¶Proles.net is Still Alive

This website is a habit I can't keep yet can't kick.

The history of this site is marked by brief flurries of activity and long periods of nothing, like most of the web I imagine. Mostly I just like the domain - it's short and memorable, and actually has decent pagerank last I checked. I've had the domain for awhile, and it's fun (or at least nostalgic) to check out it's evolution over the years.

Of course times change and my focus has shifted a bit - no need to go into details, but if you are interested in computer programming I encourage you to check out blog.soycode.com (and of course Soy Code itself). Unlike Proles, Soy Code will have only one real topic (programming) and as such will be more focused and regularly updated.

So where does that leave this site? Well, I do still have other interests, and it is nice to have a soapbox, even if nobody is actually listening. I'll keep updating this site occasionally, not often enough to be "regular reader" fare, but please do keep it in your feedreader or whatnot if you're interested. I will most likely focus on the topics of videogames and music, with occasional nostalgic and/or meta rant. Poetry and philosophy is still cool too, but the net is full of enough noise already that I'll let you go find the real stuff in a library or something.

+ 17 - 22 | § ¶War on ants

No, not ents (don't mess with those guys) - ants. Specifically, Argentine ants. Apparently California is one giant supercolony of them, with something like 200 billion (and I only wish I was exaggerating) of them stretched over 600 miles from southern Oregon down to San Diego. It's more recently been debated that it's actually more like 4 or 5 distinct colonies, but that doesn't change the fact that they've infested the entire Bay Area. They are omnivorous and have 8 queens per 1000 ants, making them numerous and persistent. They stick around all year but are most noticable during the summer.

And stopping them? Well, don't bother trying - both chemicals and "natural" solutions are ineffective. They'll move in your apartment when it suits them (driven by either hot weather or substantial rainfall), and only move out again when they feel like it again (they eat most anything but their favorite food comes from aphids and trees). California isn't the only place infested by these things - they come from South America, but stretch from Italy to Portugal in Europe. And they aren't just bothersome pests to humans - they displace native ants which can mess with the ecosystem and starve ant predators such as lizards.

Scientists have found a way to turn them against each other, meaning their unique cooperative boon can potentially be taken away. But to actually implement such a solution on a broad enough scale to make a difference, it seems that it will be necessary for us humans to cooperate and coordinate a bit. So, I have a not-so-modest proposal - a war on ants.

Clearly, these ants are attacking our fundamental way of life. And unlike the "war on terror", this is quite literally a battle in our homes. This challenge cannot be ignored, and if the government were to step in and deploy ant bait stations (spraying doesn't really help with these) then there will be some hope in this fight. If not, then we will just have to get used to our inevitable future.

+ 26 - 17 | § ¶Testing testing 1 2 3

This is just a test - the website should look the same, but I'm changing a few of the behind-the-scenes organizations (e.g. folder/file structure, etc.) to suit my own purposes. Also, if you used to have an account to login and post stuff, you probably don't any more. Sorry about that - if you (yes you, even if you didn't have an account before) are interested in posting on this site, just speak up and we'll work something out.

+ 18 - 26 | § ¶Ad-free Sao Paulo

An interesting story:

A city stripped of advertising. No Posters. No flyers. No ads on buses. No ads on trains. No Adshels, no 48-sheets, no nothing. It sounds like an Adbusters editorial: an activist's dream. But in São Paulo, Brazil, the dream has become a reality. In September last year, the city's populist right-wing mayor, Gilberto Kassab, passed the so-called Clean City laws. Fed up with the "visual pollution" caused by the city's 8,000 billboard sites, many of them erected illegally, Kassab proposed a law banning all outdoor advertising. The skyscraper-sized hoardings that lined the city's streets would be wiped away at a stroke. And it was not just billboards that attracted his wrath: all forms of outdoor advertising were to be prohibited, including ads on taxis, on buses—even shopfronts were to be restricted, their signs limited to 1.5 metres for every 10 metres of frontage. "It is hard in a city of 11 million people to find enough equipment and personnel to determine what is and isn't legal," reasoned Kassab, "so we have decided to go all the way." The law was hailed by writer Roberto Pompeu de Toledo as "a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash… For once, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost."

Not sure what I think of this, to be honest. I tend to be libertarian-free-speech, so even censorship of corporations (which is essentially what this is) rubs me a little wrongly. Still, advertising is admittedly garish and perhaps a perversion of what expression in the first place. I don't think that justifies forbidding it, but the fact that Sao Paulo has done so is interesting nonetheless.