The Daily Penguin

[Penguin]

Random topic GO

Spoiler

Post anything and I'll do my best to write a long, stream-of-consciousness ramble about it without pausing to look up any sources, stay consistent, or even rooted in reality. This has managed to prove entertaining IRL so I was wondering if it might work written down.

[Maxey]

The declining quality of mainstream music over the years.

[Penguin]

The problem with the declining quality of mainstream music is that the music from outside the mainstream is even worse. This is the product of a bunch of lazy asswipes who just show up and start droning into an auto-tune thing without even having the common decency to write a fucking song. They just can't help themselves; they want the fame and riches of pop music without learning to play an instrument or even how to sing. Katy Perry performing live could be weaponized, she's so bad, and yet she still somehow has some a multimillion dollar career.

I blame the fucking club scene. People will dance to anything if they're drunk off their asses, and if they're enjoying themselves, they associate the enjoyment with the shitty music, so the next thing I know, I'm coming in to work and my 40-year-old boss keeps muttering "Ev'ryday I'm shufflin'," or something like that. The thing is, there's no way to fight it either: People who SHOULD have better taste buy the music because it's funny, or to do it "ironically." But at the end of the day, you're still paying people for this shit, and even if you're being ironic when you're doing something, you're still fucking doing it.

Then we've got all the baggage that comes with it, all the car radios sounding like somebody thinking it's somehow funny to play the top-listed shit because it's so bad, but wait, we're playing it anyway! Even Rebecca Black got damn air time with Friday, and I don't think there's any way to stop this short of dropping manatees on clubs from high orbit. Disco is dead, people, and it should've stayed dead. You don't need to keep playing this same old shit every goddamn day and holy fuck all I want is to find the nearest record label, ram their offices down with a tank, and then play a recording of the crash, edited with a synthesizer, over the airwaves -that is, every commercial radio frequency- to punish everyone else for subjecting me to this shit. I'd claim it was all Skrillex's doing, and I'm pretty sure it'd stick and nobody would question it.

[EuroBoss]

Decline of customer care politeness and dealing with a real human being.

[Beer|\/|onger]

The status of college education, and how it does or does not prepare graduates for successful careers.

[Penguin]

Decline of customer care politeness and dealing with a real human being.

Telephone customer care is one of the worst desk jobs you can have, because you're the fall guy for a company who is well aware of the problem most of the customers are going to call in about, but will never do anything about because they'll happily fuck their customers over to save a buck or two at the end of the quarter. You have to sit there and listen to people talk about how they got fucked on their latest bill and you have to explain the fine-print bullshit that provides a flimsy reason to charge someone overage fees on their cellphone because their Unlimited plan is for long-distance minutes only, so when their son came home and they kept talking to him on their phones, they went over their local limit.

When you are trapped in a shitty job like that, you can only fake that smile for so long before you're going to dread every single new call. But you have to take new calls as fast as you can, because most call centers impose a limit on how long you can spend talking to a customer before they start to penalize you. This is why you tend to get bounced from person to person or end a call with a flimsy solution that doesn't do anything.

Customer service is a joke, a lie perpetuated by corporations to stop you from suing them or calling the Better Business Bureau. That's not how it is with all companies, but I guarantee you that's how it is for any company that outsources their customer service to a call center franchise like TeleTech. This is a terrible situation for everyone but the corporate tools who sign off on it. It doesn't serve the customer, it burns out their employees stuck taking the blame, and a public largely ignorant of this system think that if they just yell at the customer service drone enough, things will get fixed faster. It's complete bullshit, and frankly, I don't see a solution to this short of never doing business with

Cell phone companies
ISPs
Utilities
Debit/credit cards
Insurance agencies
The government

Vote with your money, people! Don't use the Internet, don't have cellphones, live off of a fire stove and don't pay taxes.

Yeah, that'll work. So when they replace their drones with computers, oh well. A computer can't be driven to depression and suicide by constant contact with angry customers. And the customers suck too. Because it's one thing to have a legitimate beef and get pissed off about it. If you fucked up and forgot to pay for your credit card bill on time, it's not the customer service rep's fault for not personally reminding you. Fuck you.

So everyone bitching about calling a robot? You mostly brought it on yourselves. But the companies are still assholes for doing it. But it's not going to change in our lifetimes short of a goddamn zombie apocalypse, and even then, I doubt anyone would really notice the difference. Welcome to the 21st century: You are not a free man. You are a number.

[Penguin]

The status of college education, and how it does or does not prepare graduates for successful careers.

College education is another lie fed to the public. Not only is it completely flooded with degrees of dubious value in a booming economy, it's been proven that the costs to the student have increased at a rate far exceeding the rate of inflation over the past two or three decades. Colleges are just doing whatever they can to pad their resumes for more government funding. The end result is a massive section of the public that will be in debt for the majority of their lives, if not the rest of it. Most will never make that money back with the value of their degree. Even "useful" degrees, your BS's of math and engineering, your MBAs, their value has gone down as companies scrap their policies guaranteeing pay for employees with certain degrees.

You can say "Well you should be an engineer," but if everyone did that, the market would be flooded with engineers, and the degree would only be marginally more useful than an MFA in puppetry. Possibly even less. The simple fact of the matter is that everyone goes to college these days. It's been that way for awhile. What do most people talk about when it comes to going to college these days? Partying their asses off. Kids graduating high school aren't going to college because they want an education, they're going because they want responsibility-free partying and sex outside of the eyes of their parents, but still under their funding. This has been true for decades now, and it has only gotten worse.

This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, but understand that your education is devalued by these people. Because once they graduate (hell, it might take them 8 years to get a bachelor's now, whatever) they've got the same degree you do, and nobody gives a shit about GPA.

So you're going into deep debt over a worthless education with a college that's fleecing you of your student loan money at every turn and at the end of it you're going to be working the same shit jobs like customer service that other people who just went straight into the workforce out of high school got, and the thing is, they have more work experience than you do now.

Honestly, people just need to stop going to college. It'll be a better deal for most of them in the long run, the college scam will have fewer people to fleece, and in the end, the value of a college education will actually go up and be worth the effort again.

But naaaah, gotta go hit up them frat parties, bro.

[007Bistromath]

The failure of American politics to provide more than one option.

[Beer|\/|onger]

Are women truly capable of effective leadership and management in today's workforce?

(I'm sorry to the female forum lurkers, but personally I have never had a sane female boss.)

[EuroBoss]

Explain the failings of the luftwaffe in world war two in terms of command/structure/planning/strategy/performance.Also how you would correct those given the same resources what you do different?