Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Katrina horror

    We were given tags when we deployed. Anybody put up a fight, or we just didn't like them, we were told to shoot to kill, tag 'em, bag 'em, call in GPS coordinates. We were there as health professionals. We're supposed to kill our patients?

    Before I made sense of the situation I killed one guy. I shouldn't have. Some medics liked the license to kill or fantasy they spun about what they were doing. There were a lot of bodies in the morgue at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in Belle Chasse with our bullets in them. They put them down there so there wouldn't be a scandal about what we did.

    [...]

    The third story my cousin couldn't write down. She looted nursing home pharmacies when she ran out of retail pharmacies. She kept narcotics and delivered three times a week unexpired, above-the-flood-line meds from our essential drugs list.

    One nursing home told its story step by sickening step as she saw it, entered, and was drawn into what happened there. Sites all over Katrina's world did that to us. She was alone that day.

    Out front a fifteen-passenger van stalled in the water. A towtruck stalled in front of it. Inside was evidence the staff tried to feed and care for residents and themselves despite no microwave or stove, broken refrigerators, no air-conditioning, no clean water or bedsheets, ten centimeters of floodwater inside.

  • Hello From The End Of The Bar

    I see now why people drench themselves in unlit rooms, caroming around the dimmed synapses of midnight. I was in such a room last night, and the colors spun around me and I stepped from one foot to the other- like you wouldn't believe- a song came over the speakers but I don't know what it's called. It always plays.

  • It's Not Distracted Driving If You're Leveraging Synergies

    I'd claim that this is dumb shit no one wants, but I can see the managerial market for it: BMW is partnering with Microsoft to allow the cameras in BMWs to function as cameras in Microsoft Teams. At my workplace, we have one person who sometimes does Teams calls from his car - we don't like it, and we tell him not to, but he does it anyway. I suspect this is the target market: people who are convinced that their proof of presence in a meeting is more important than keeping their eyes on the road.

• Politics and World Events

  • Virtual Economics

    This article raises some interesting points, most notably that maybe work itself is a game, or could be considered a game by some. Protestant Gamer Ethic? Another is that wealth, or what passes for such, may embiggen in the virtual world possibly at the cost to the Real™ World such as loss of tax revenue, workers not working (or gamers not gaming the work system as desired?), and the need to maybe come up with new measurements of such things as GDP if increasing amounts of the so-called wealth is in virtual economies and not the Real™ one. Power might flow less to governments and more to those in charge of the virtual, or already has given how much presence some internet companies have in Washington and other such Real™ locations.