Dire Straits - Planet of New Orleans

When I was 18 years old Ted Ripoll gave me a job at Aquatic Offshore Engineering Inc. in Aberdeen, Scotland. Ted was from New Orleans and he had trained as an accountant with the FBI.


For a while he talked about sending me to work for a few months in their office in Belém, Brazil, a city on the mouth of the Amazon. I think I would have enjoyed that, but it was not to pass, ...


Instead, I spent way too much time in reception talking to Heather, and Carol. I learned a lot of stuff from Mary that I never wanted to know about how BP, Amaco, Total etc. liked their bills to be presented, and that was when I realised what a total fucking waste of time commercial accounting really was. I used to invoice tens or sometimes hundreds of thousands each month to these companies, all done by hand because their requirements for presenting bills were all so specific that I would have needed a custom-designed language to describe each of them sufficiently precisely to be able to automate the process. See my comment here: Jade Giving an Example of How A Bad Idea Can Cause a Deadly Pandemic.

This ought to be a lot more interesting than my career! 😀


See Terry Gilliam's Closet Picks.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stefan Molyneux on Resource Based Economy

Image
This is an interesting discussion. What most people don't realise is that capitalism as we practice it now wastes 99.9% of the human and material resources we currently use. Once you realise that, the problems raised by the idea of gift or resource-based economies become much more tractable. At  10 minutes 30 seconds  the discussion turns to the way we treat our family and friends differently. We don't charge our nearest and dearest. At this point Molyneux brings in Neo-Darwinian evolution to explain why there is this difference between the way we treat our kith and kin to the way we treat everybody else. I guess he will go on to argue that this is because we evolved to be like this, otherwise we would not have survived. He will presumably say that this is human nature and because it is genetically determined, nothing we can do short of a programme of eugenics and euthenasia will change that. Well, ... you know what my answer to that will be, ... something along the lines:
Read more

Sabine Hossenfelder - Lost in Math

Image
Sabine's book,  Lost in Math published in 2018. See  Rebecca Smethurst on the Crisis in Cosmology . Here's an interview on the subject of the book: At 16 minutes 27 seconds on aesthetics in a theory. I think you should worry first and foremost about whether or not it works, otherwise you are not doing empirical science. At 19 minutes 19 seconds on whether there would be better ways to advance physics other than by building the next generation of super high-energy particle collider. This is similar to military spending and it's really just an artefact of Keynesian monetary theory: that you can create 'wealth' by employing men to dig holes in the road and fill them up again. Of course you are not creating real wealth, you are destroying it and creating fake money. The upshot is that the better ways of spending much, much less money on encouraging sound scientific teaching and research are not of any interest, because they don't employ nearly so ma
Read more

Nikola Tesla and the End of The World

Image
At  1 minute 21 seconds  the building in the background, in Trafalgar Square , as she says "There is a story in our family that my great grandfather worked with Nikola Tesla, ..." is ... ... what? Hint: it is near to a statue of George Washington, a replica donated by the  Commonwealth of Virginia in 1921 .  See  War Crimes . Watch all four episodes of  Nikola Tesla and the End of The World  and then watch this: And on the meaning of the word sovereignty see: On the Mason-Dixon Line, the "boundary of slavery" in the American colonies, it might be insightful to compare the  Britannica  and  Wikipedia  entries and see where they differ. Then, especially if you're my daughter, see  On Feminist Genealogy . Then see this documentary about Mark Knopfler and what motivates his music. There's a nice bit at  17 minutes  about where songs come from, and what happens to their origin, and the role of Town Planners like my father, in this process, part
Read more