Longer Step: Ideas for Justice and Sustainability

  On Trying Times: This is iteration #2 of a drystack stone wall (no mortar), around our compost pile. I hate it, and I hope you do, too. So, down it comes, and I'll try an iteration #3, which should reflect some additional learning since #2, after even more hours spent poring over obscure British websites. Mind you, it takes at least a few minutes to find one rock and test it up to seven ways before either accepting it or rejecting it, for a spot. So the failures add up to a great deal of time. Drystack walls are best built by stonemasons who have years of experience. The problem with rough rocks is that there are very few ways they can fit together into a pile which looks both finished and stable. There is no user guide telling you how to assemble the wall. You must invent a way, over and over, knowing there might be no way that works. This would be a great sermon topic: How often do we try and fail, and then learn more about how to "try better," and then try again, b...

  Thesis: Any time you see a mass layoff ( hello, McDonalds HQ !), it means upper management did a horrible job running its business. Senior officials of huge companies have access to the best planning and forecasting tools/consultants/data, and if there is need for a downsizing (which there shouldn't be for McD's, as its earnings are strong now), that can usually be accommodated via natural attrition and slowed-down hiring, with maybe a few targeted terminations for poor performance, but never a mass layoff. And it would be nice to see more companies demonstrate some loyalty to the poeple who work hard to help the company succeed. Shame. It is therefore the most-senior management who should be terminated, because it is they who have failed.

  Here's a good article addressing Russia's many surprising failures in the Ukraine assault, including poor-quality equipment (due to corruption), poor training, and poor communication/planning at all levels, including, in stupendously bad planning, lying to the common Russian soldiers that they were only going on maneuvers! Soviet soldiers are reduced to abandoning their armored vehicles and trucks, and stealing food. This, coupled with Ukraine's energetic, brave defense of its homeland and its access to good military tech from the West, explains how the Russians have so far mostly failed in their goals, despite overwhelming "on paper" advantages. And Russia has all these troubles, even not considering the economic sanctions, which should, over time, prove very troublesome to the dictator there. If you champion peace, you want to believe that economic sanctions will work, that international pressure on Russia from almost every country will hurt Russia so much ...