"Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things." - Dan Quayle

Friend Jim sent me this article from The Atlantic. I don't know anything about the author and very little about the mag, but this seemed like an insightful analysis of the current mess. If you decide to read it have your thumb and blankee at the ready; you're going to need them.

I watched The Profit on CNBC this afternoon for the first time. It was a bit like Shark Tank except that it was one guy with one firm working a turn-around plan. Pretty good. I'll watch it again.

We got freezing rain overnight and it didn't get above 32 degrees until early afternoon. I don't know if it's the dampness or if I'm going through a weenie stretch, but I'm cold almost all the time and only feel moderately warm if I've been in the car for 30 minutes with the heat blowing full blast.

I got the wall that separates the wood bay from the storage bay installed so that if Pony ever shows up with the wood he promised I'm ready. I also got one of the two lower windows installed, and that went pretty smoothly. I should get the other one in tomorrow morning and that will finally get all of Fred to a closed shell. Then I can start getting it thoroughly dried out.

Robert Sarver, owner of the Phoenix Suns, opened up to the local paper about the team's problems and blamed much of what's going wrong with the culture of millennials. He said their fascination with the internet leads to unrealistic expectations. They only stuff they post on social media is good stuff that happens to them or good things they make up. This creates people who have trouble dealing with adversity and working through it.

He may have a point, but he's probably overstating it. His team has issues that go way beyond the players' use of the internet. I do think, however, that a decade or six from now sociologists will look back on the emergence of the internet as having been as transformative as the adoption of the automobile on they way our culture works. We're too close to it now and the effects aren't completely clear, however the expectation of immediacy, the availability of information, the ease with which false information can be promulgated, and anonymous incivility have increased tremendously concurrent with the spread of internet usage.

It's a two-edged sword. If I'm looking for the best deal on windows or how to remove a C-clip style axle I'm a big fan. But when I read some of the bogus and scary stuff that shows up on Facebook I worry that we're doomed. But it doesn't make any difference what I think about the internet; like the automobile it's here to stay. It may morph in ways we can't imagine (electric cars? really??) but the genie can't be put back in the bottle. I guess if I decide I don't like it at all I can pull the plug, eh?