Month: January 2024

Cyclists in Trinidad and Tobago.

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Cyclists don’t make sense to me because even with lanes, with cars driving by, there’s all this carbon monoxide coming out of exhausts and carbon monoxide latches onto hemoglobin faster than oxygen.

I should start with why I’m writing this. This morning, I stopped for coffee before some groceries and noticed a lone Trinidad and Tobago police vehicle following a cyclist on the Trinidad and Tobago version of a highway.

That seemed like a waste of taxpayer money. How many cyclists would be worth it? 3? 7? I don’t know, but 1 police vehicle driving behind one cyclist seems like a waste. On the way to the store, I saw that the group was waiting, and there were about 12 cyclists, so that doesn’t seem like a waste of taxpayer money.

But there were about 16 pickups and cars escorting them. I don’t know who they were. Friends, family, that awkward one night stand from last night who isn’t sure if they’re supposed to be there – all of them driving cars. That’s a lot of gas and diesel to be burning driving around watching spandex covered butts. It seems like joining a yoga class would be a lot less trouble for the same view, but everyone’s different.

In Trinidad and Tobago, there aren’t that many dedicated cyclist lanes. A few decades ago, they made one between San Fernando and Marabella, which no one actually used for a bicycle that I have seen. On an island, it’s hard to add cyclist lanes because there’s not as much space, so that makes sense.

Factor in that without a bicycle lane, traffic forms behind the cyclists which creates more emissions, because when traffic isn’t running smoothly, the accordion effect happens. Every acceleration burns more fuel than a nice, steady speed.

I get the idea of the open road, riding a bicycle as far as a feeling of freedom and self-determination, but when you’ve got more vehicles than cyclists involved, you have to wonder whether cycling is good for the environment. Sure, if there were one car per cyclist, you’re cutting emissions in half per vehicle and yet you’re creating emissions that don’t have to be there. There’s really no environmental argument.

The health argument is one I can roll with, though as this article points out increasing your lifespan 45% by cycling rather than taking the bus can give you the carbon monoxide levels of a smoker. Don’t judge someone who lights a cigarette if you’re cycling in traffic. There’s a fun argument sure to annoy everyone.

I like the idea of cycling, riding a bicycle here and there, but in a tropical country it can be an olfactory disaster wherever you arrive. In Trinidad and Tobago, it makes little sense to me and I know people who ride bicycles and I listen to them talk about it with the same fervor that other hobbyists have. It’s their thing, I get it, and yet…

I don’t get it. If it doesn’t affect other people, it’s no big deal, do whatever you want – but if you’re creating traffic and spending taxpayer’s money, it is affecting other people. Some countries have the bicycle paths, some don’t. Some have trails, some don’t. Cycling ain’t the same everywhere.

I don’t have an answer. I don’t want to say cyclists should stop cycling, yet I also would like to see it practical.

The Tyranny of Pieces of Paper.

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Every time I come back home, I go through my pockets and I have pieces of paper in them. Not the ones you trade for things like coffee and other vital supplies.

No, just paper. They’re folded but in no way should be considered pocket origami, an art form that Erwin might say exists but doesn’t exist at the same time because of the nature of pockets.

No, just bits of papers with numbers on them. Accountant pornography, though everything is digital. They’re receipts, and everyone seems to want to hand me one.

In Trinidad and Tobago, you get 2 receipts. You get the receipt for whatever you buy, plus the receipt for the electronic transaction being processed at the point of sale. They have little machines that connect to other machines through the internet, and when you insert or tap your debit or credit card, it generates a transactional receipt just in case you were wondering why people were giving you stuff.

In fact, if the internet access for the little machine is down, you get a receipt for the transaction not happening with the error on the piece of paper so that you know that the machine had an internet issue and could not connect. It might even tell you that you’re broke. You have it all documented on a piece of paper, handed to you with the actual receipt for whatever product or service you got.

So you have these pieces of paper, and the idea is that when you get home, you’ll neatly organize them into something an accountant can regurgitate into spreadsheets so that you can get tax breaks on the stuff you’re supposed to buy. If it’s not tax deductible, it’s just something that I theorize accountants use to stuff pillows, mattresses, and perhaps even build furniture from if they know someone in the adhesives industry.

The ones with heat paper are fun. On a hot day you can leave them on the dashboard of a car and watch it all turn black.

There are some rules I have found internationally, too.

For example, no matter where you go, if you buy a toothbrush the receipt(s) for it will be of sufficient size to gift wrap the toothbrush package.

Another example: the more things you have to do, the more likely the cashier will have to fumble around with loading a fresh paper roll into the machine so that you can get your receipt.

Also, cashiers can sometimes get really upset if you don’t take your receipt, leaving them to deal with a piece of paper that they don’t want. I think that’s fair play.

Mostly I get receipts in Trinidad because I don’t want the security guard tackling me on the way out with no evidence that I actually purchased the item. Once I walk out of the store, they’re pretty much useless as a security guard shield.

All these pieces of paper. I don’t really want them, but I am an accidental collector.

I did do some research, and was planning for this to be full of links to sites that talk about the waste of receipts, that some of the receipts aren’t of recycled paper and some can’t be recycled, but that all seems just a bit over the top given the real issue most people have is… pockets full of receipts.

Maybe women of both biological genders – did I get that right? I don’t know – have it in their purses. Maybe they hand their receipts to the guy who wants to have sex with them, who follows them dutifully around collecting the receipts in the hope of… well, in the hope of something that probably shouldn’t generate a receipt.

Summarize This.

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I was about to fire up Scrivener and get back to writing the fictional book I’m working on and I made the mistake of checking my feeds.

In comes Wired with, “Scammy AI-Generated Book Rewrites Are Flooding Amazon“. On Facebook, I had noticed an up-tick of ‘wholesale’ ebooks that people could sell on their own, but I thought nothing of it other than, “How desperate do you need to be?”.

It ends up it has been a big problem in the industry for some time, people releasing eBooks and having summaries posted on Amazon within a month, especially since large language models like ChatGPT came out. Were the copyrighted works in the learning models?

How does that happen? There are some solid examples in the article, which seem to be mainly non-fictional works.

…Mitchell guessed the knock-off ebook was AI-generated, and her hunch appears to be correct. WIRED asked deepfake-detection startup Reality Defender to analyze the ersatz version of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, and its software declared the book 99 percent likely AI-generated. “It made me mad,” says Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. “It’s just horrifying how people are getting suckered into buying these books.”…

“Scammy AI-Generated Book Rewrites Are Flooding Amazon“, Kate Knibbs, Wired.com, Jan 10th, 2024

I think that while some may be scammed, others just want to look smart and are fed the micro-learning crap that’s going around where they can, ‘listen to 20 books in 20 days’. I have no evidence that they’re doing summaries, but it seems like the only way someone could listen to 20 books in 20 days. I’d wondered about the ‘microlearning’ stuff, since I have spent a fair amount of time tuning my social media to allow me to do ‘microlearning’ when I am on social networks.

What is very unfair is that some of those books have years of research and experience in them. It’s bad enough that Amazon takes a big chunk out of the profits- I think it’s 30% of the sales – but to have your book summarized within a month of publishing is a bit too much.

Legally, apparently, summaries are legal to sell because it falls under fair use, though exceptions have happened. This is something we all definitely need to keep an eye on, because of the writers I know who bleed onto pages, nobody likes parasites.

And these people clogging Amazon with summaries are parasites.

If you’re buying a book, buy the real thing. Anyone who has actually read the book won’t be fooled by you reading or listening to a summary for long, and there are finer points in books that many summaries miss.

Writing Reality.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment
Links to Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes page.

Yesterday I was perusing around and saw that someone on Facebook was saying that they were opening up positions for writing for their magazine – Silly Linguistics Magazine. Missing from the advertisement was compensation.

I went and perused the magazine, as you should do when deciding if you would be a fit as a writer. I like etymology. I like linguistics, but I’m not a linguist. I know what I can do, I know what I can’t do, and this seemed to fall into a grey area of ‘probably shouldn’t do’. That’s the reality.

It did not ruin my life.

The comments on the post were less than kind about not showing how much people could make, what they were willing to pay, etc. It seemed silly, and I commented the same.

People were going to a default setting of, “clearly you want to us to work for free” and were out with their pitchforks and torches on a public post. Whether it was paid or not is anyone’s guess. It’s not as if writing is a lucrative investment of time; there are many other things that one can do if you want to make money and many writers do them as well.

I made the mistake of commenting. I’m not sure why I bothered, but I pointed out that being nasty wasn’t helping their reputations. Some twits then started coming after me, which I found amusing. It’s not as if writers don’t have enough trouble as it is with ChatGPT generating text better than some of them. The magazine could just have easily gone a ChatGPT route and not worried about it, editing content from ChatGPT based on a prompt and editing it. They didn’t have to open positions. A writer could get in there, get published, maybe get paid (I expect there would be pay) or not… but getting published is something one adds to one’s portfolio.

It didn’t seem like a demanding position at all with a minimum of 600 words, maximum of 3 pages every month. I just didn’t feel it was in my wheelhouse or I would have emailed about it myself. It didn’t say ‘write for us for free’. It was open in that regard, which meant if it was in your wheelhouse you might look into it.

People were getting pretty nasty about it, though, and I wondered who these people were. They weren’t improving things for anyone. They weren’t accomplishing anything. Only one person mentioned that they had emailed and not gotten a reply, but with the noise around the post I would expect that the guy who posted it would be… either busy, or waiting for people to stop being douchebags.

So I don’t know. I’ve been asked too many times to ‘work for free’ under various versions of sweat equity as a software engineer or writer, and no, I don’t do that unless I like the project and see a way it could work for me. It generally doesn’t work for me, but I don’t go beating up on people for it. The world doesn’t owe me anything.

I guess some people feel that they are owed something, and I don’t know how they got that way.

The Spin.

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The world spins regardless of our human concerns, taking us back to where we were every day even as our planet travels around the sun, through space.

Mostly we don’t think about that at all because time is increasingly inconvenient for us.

People get caught up in their own pseudo-world with no time to think beyond it.

Wake up. Drive through traffic to get to work to make someone else’s dream a reality, drive back to drop onto a chair, onto a bed, and have a flat screen tell them what else is happening in their pseudo-world. Hopefully they maintain or advance their status during the day so that the evenings might be spent with a mate.

Maybe they procreate, or at least have fun trying or not trying – it’s more complicated these days. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they go out to eat. Maybe they go out and drink fermented fruits or vegetables to forget that their pseudo-world is repetitive, anesthesia for the lost. Maybe they dance.

They sleep. They wake up. And they do it all over again, except maybe on the 6th and 7th days of a 7 day week based on a calendar that the Romans came up with – or maybe some other civilization came up with. They repeat this process for decades. A half century. More.

Dare to imagine something else.

A Tale of Two Ketchups

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Yesterday, I faced a dilemma. I have 4 burger buns left, so I went to get the ground beef so I could make burgers. In my due diligence, I found pickles at the store as well.

Pickles aren’t a big thing in Trinidad and Tobago, and as the economy begins to show it’s colors, pickles have become harder to find, it seems. Now that I had pickles, I might as well pick up ketchup, and as Gladwell wrote that Moskowitz said, “I guess ketchup is ketchup”.

Unlike most people it seems, I don’t really like ketchup, but combined with pickles, it can be tasty for me if done right. I grew up around people that loved ketchup. The plates resembled crime scenes before someone came along with tape to keep nosy people out.

As the image indicates, ketchup is not just ketchup anymore, and for the sake of this writing I will suggest I’m not 16 anymore and that I found out yesterday my blood pressure medication was twice the dosage of a deceased friend. I also weigh more than I probably should.

Thus, the dilemma. I have two choices. Do I go with the one with less salt, for the blood pressure? Should I go with the no sugar added, which is 15 calories less per serving than the ‘No Salt Added’ ketchup? And why am I stuck with this choice? Why can’t they have no sugar added AND no salt added? That would have been a no-brainer.

I stood in the aisle dumbfounded. I did not want to have to decide. Given these two other Heinz options, I could not go with the regular Heinz because that would be irresponsible to my body, or so I have been told. Repeatedly.

Gladwell’s ketchup conundrum from his book ‘What The Dog Saw‘ came to mind; I don’t subscribe to the New Yorker because it isn’t always interesting to me, but in it he dances and pirouettes through why there are so many mustards but not that many ketchups and here, in this aisle, stood an odd requiem.

Altogether, I had 5 options. I could do without the ketchup, I could get the lower salt version, I could get the lower sugar version, or I could go stark raving mad and fling ketchup all over the store.

I opted for the ‘no sugar added’ option because… it was more red, had less calories, and probably most importantly, it was on the left. It was that arbitrary of a selection.

What I really wanted, though, was a combination of ‘no sugar added’ and ‘no salt added’.

Poetically, I did not make those burgers yesterday. I will today, likely, and when I do I wonder if I’ll be happy with the ketchup or not. Ketchup, it seems, is no longer just ketchup.

There’s a lesson in that, too, Gladwell and Moskowitz be damned.

If it doesn’t work out, I’ll just not use ketchup – my default setting of mustard has worked well over the years.

Beginnings.

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We live in a world of light, mostly, as the Earth orbits the Sun and as the Earth rotates around it’s axis even as the entire solar system spirals through the Universe. When there is daylight, we see the immediate.

Once there was a time when we feared the nocturnal predators, maybe gathering around a fire somewhere thinking that would keep them at bay. As we spread across the planet, those predators became less of a problem, and it’s the rare place in the world where one has to worry about things that might eat us.

They still exist. The tigers, the wolves, the bears, and so on, but the main threat to humanity in the dark these days is humanity.

Yet some of us still look up to the sky at night, or drink our coffee before dawn in the quiet darkness that comforts the soul. There is less sound because most people are still asleep, trained by millennia of evolution to stay ‘safe’ in their caves until the sun is out, or because they were out drinking fermented fruits the night before and making their own cacophony.

In the darkness, though, with nothing to see, we can look inward and outward at the same time, less distracted by the bouncing reflections of color that make up our daylight world. The relative silence that comes with it also allows us to hear ourselves before others awake on their schedule.

At times, we can push the distractions out of our mind, plotting our way through our days. Without the cacophony of the world we can hear ourselves think, see ourselves for who we are instead of what others see.

We can hear our own thoughts without a constant ebb and flow of the cacophony.

We can confront our own darkness to see our own light.

We can feel the world around us begin to breath.

We can reflect on a world where we are our own light.

And, we get to have a nice cup of coffee undisturbed before the world begins to disturb us once more.

The Warrior-Philosopher

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I like quotations, and on Facebook I’ve attentuated my stream as best I could to provide me with thoughtful quotations and other interesting stuff despite the troublesome algorithms.

A quote caused a little discussion.

No man can hope to become a good philosopher unless he has certain feelings which are not very common. He must have an intense desire to understand the world, as far as that is possible; and for the sake of understanding, he must be willing to overcome those narrownesses of outlook that make a correct perception impossible. He must learn to think and feel, not as a member of this or that group, but as just a human being. If he could, he would divest himself of the limitations to which he is subject as a human being.

Bertrand Russell, The Art of Philosophizing and other Essays, 1968.

It ends up that some of my friends view me as a philosopher, at least in this context, which I consider praise since I do want to understand the world, and I am willing to overcome the narrowness of outlook. I don’t really belong to any group as much as I orbit some. Of course, this quotation is powerful because to an extent we all see ourselves this way. Someone brought up ‘Warrior Philosopher’, and I pondered that. What does that mean? What is a warrior philosopher? As a writer, such characters would be interesting.

I dug around a bit in my mind of people who I would consider a warrior philosopher, which of course has my own bias in it. Some examples of warrior philosophers are:

  1. Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD) – Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher. He is best known for his work “Meditations,” which offers guidance on how to maintain composure, discipline, and a sense of ethics in the face of adversity. His reign and philosophical writings embody the Stoic virtues of wisdom, courage, and justice. As someone who considers himself somewhat of a Stoic, I do resonate with this personally.
  2. Sun Tzu (544–496 BC) – A Chinese general, military strategist, and author of “The Art of War,”1 a treatise on military strategy, tactics, and philosophy. His teachings have transcended military theory, influencing business tactics, legal strategy, lifestyles, and more.
  3. Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) – A famous Japanese swordsman, philosopher, strategist, and ronin. His book “The Book of Five Rings” (Go Rin no Sho) is a text on kenjutsu and the martial arts in general, but it also provides insights into a philosophical approach to conflict and strategy. He’s actually a personal favorite figure of mine.
  4. Arjuna (Epic Age of India) – A central character in the Indian epic Mahabharata. He was a skilled archer and warrior, and his philosophical discourse with Lord Krishna, which forms the basis of the Bhagavad Gita, addresses the moral and ethical dilemmas of warfare. I grew up in my teens exposed to Hinduism, and this was probably the most central part of it.
  5. King Leonidas of Sparta (c. 540-480 BC) – Although more known for his military leadership at the Battle of Thermopylae (300, the movie), Spartan culture emphasized a combination of physical excellence and intellectual education, and Leonidas, like many of his peers, would have been trained in philosophy as well as warfare.
  6. Al-Farabi (872–950 AD) – A renowned philosopher and jurist in the Islamic Golden Age who wrote extensively on political philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics. He was also known for his knowledge of music and its theory, showcasing a diverse set of intellectual pursuits.
  7. Yagyu Munenori (1571–1646) – A Japanese swordsman and founder of the Yagyu Shinkage-ryu school of swordsmanship. He served as a sword instructor and a military and political adviser to the Tokugawa shoguns. His works blend swordsmanship with Zen and Confucian philosophy.
  8. Gichin Funakoshi (1868–1957) – The founder of Shotokan Karate-do, viewed as a modern-day philosopher-warrior. He emphasized not only the physical aspects of martial arts but also the spiritual and ethical dimensions, advocating for Karate as a means of personal development.


Thus we can see parallels. A warrior philosopher, a figure combining the disciplines of martial prowess and deep philosophical understanding, would likely adhere to a set of tenets that balance physical strength, strategic acumen, and ethical or philosophical wisdom. These tenets could include:

  1. Discipline and Self-Control: Mastery over one’s own emotions and actions, maintaining composure in the heat of battle and in everyday life. One could even say grace.
  2. Courage and Bravery: Facing challenges head-on when necessary, both on the battlefield and in the pursuit of knowledge, without succumbing to fear or hesitation.
  3. Wisdom and Knowledge: Continual pursuit of understanding, both in martial arts and in the philosophical realms, seeking truth and deeper meanings in all experiences.
  4. Ethical Conduct and Integrity: Adhering to a strong moral code, treating others with respect, and maintaining honesty in all endeavors even when, and perhaps especially when, others aren’t aware.
  5. Strategic Thinking: Employing careful planning and foresight in all pursuits, understanding the broader implications of actions.
  6. Physical and Mental Endurance: Cultivating a strong body and mind to endure hardships, be it in battle or in the rigorous exploration of philosophical ideas.
  7. Compassion and Empathy: Recognizing the value of life and understanding the perspectives of others, both in warfare and in peace.
  8. Balance and Harmony: Striving for a balance between physical actions and mental beliefs, ensuring that one’s life is a reflection of one’s philosophy.
  9. Adaptability and Open-Mindedness: Being open to new ideas and adaptable to changing circumstances, both in combat tactics and in philosophical thought.
  10. Leadership and Responsibility: Taking responsibility for one’s actions and leading others by example, inspiring both courage in battle and thoughtful reflection in quieter times.

These tenets supposedly combine the virtues of a skilled warrior with the introspective depth of a philosopher, creating a holistic approach to life that values both action and contemplation. If we replace ‘combat’ with ‘confrontation’, we can see many more people around us every day that could qualify. Beware those that want to qualify.

What is perhaps most important about all of these figures is that they were capable of communicating their message not just by example but through the written word. In this way they left an indelible mark in their own ways, yet I didn’t add that in as a requirement because I have encountered people who fit the criteria yet don’t necessarily communicate further than their examples.

While writing all of this, I did note that we could possibly have Idiot Philosophers by the latter criteria, but I suppose that’s a nice post for another time.

  1. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/132, free. ↩︎

Linguistic Oddities

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I was sitting having coffee with a few friends, and of course the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel, with lots of civilians getting caught in the crossfire, came up. I mentioned it’s a problem no one seemed to want to compromise on, citing UN Resolution 181, and mentioning truthfully that it’s such a mess that it doesn’t seem like anyone was as right as they wanted to be.

It’s a mess. I don’t know enough, I’m not invested enough, I can’t trust any news source because even the news seems polarized at this point. If you say one side is doing something wrong, people are quick to say you’re supporting the other side. I don’t support the killing or injuring of civilians, so I don’t neatly have a side to pick. It’s not as clean cut as Ukrainians defending their borders against Russia. Criticize Israel, suddenly you’re branded as anti-semitic and people with pitchforks and torches appear out of nowhere. Criticize Hamas, much the same happens. Geography matters in this regard, and since I’m not in the continental United States I do hear a lot more of the anti-American and thus anti-Israel rhetoric as well.

It’s safer to say nothing, really. To do nothing. Yet a history of that has pretty much gotten the world to where it is, and so it gets violent because we didn’t address things when we should have. That’s the story of the world.

It’s a mess, and this post isn’t about that mess but rather an interesting way a meaning has changed for at least some, arguably most, people in English. This is an academic exercise.

Someone brought up that the word ‘semitic’ actually was related to the semitic languages, and that it had become bastardized to mean ‘Jewish’. Since I’m pretty interested in words, I dug in. Here I am, over half a century spinning on the planet, learning that.

Semitic Languages.

Semitic languages are languages that derived from Afro-Asiatic languages, which to me demonstrated how ignorant I was on the topic because I’ve never traipsed through the history of language.

The major Semitic languages are:

  • Arabic,
  • Amharic (Spoken in Ethiopia)
  • Aramaic (Spoken in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Israel and Syria)
  • Hebrew,
  • Maltese and
  • Tigre (Spoken in Sudan)

There are, according to different places, dozens of Semitic languages. Aramaic, being the ‘Language of Jesus‘, surprised me with how widespread it’s usage still is. The world is very big and our thoughts on it almost always too small.

Therefore, it’s peculiar that we use it in the context of only one, Hebrew, these days, but apparently not everyone does otherwise I would not have been told about it. In learning this, I had to dig in.

The Modern Use of Semitic.

These days it seems the most popular use of the word semitic is in ‘anti-semitic’, used to say that something or someone is against Jews for some reason. I’m not, but I have met people who are so I know it’s a real thing.

The use of ‘anti-semitism’ first showed up with Willhelm Marr. Marr’s theories would be a part of the foundation of the genocide the world knew in the Nazi era based on pseudoscience. Marr later allegedly renounced anti-semitism according to Moshe Zimmerman, an Israeli historian.

Still, he introduced the pseudo-scientific racial component into that period. It’s pseudo-science because race is a social contruct and isn’t very scientific at all.

It boggles the mind that we’re still using an inaccurate phrase coined by someone who helped pave the way to the Holocaust, but there it is. We don’t like swastikas or reminders of that terrible part of human history, yet we retain one of it’s labels in it’s original form.

I’m not going to say that we should stop using it. That would be like trying to change the wind by blowing and flapping my hands in the opposite direction, but it shows how things persist even when they’re wrong.

In fact, one could argue that the modern use of the phrase ‘anti-semitic’ is ‘anti-semitic’ in both the modern context of the use of the word (loosely, ‘against Jews’) based on who coined the phrase in the first place, or even against everyone else who speaks a semitic language other than Hebrew and is being afforded no context.

Speaking for myself, from now on if people have a problem with Jews, I’ll use ‘anti-Jewish’, but I won’t wander around correcting people.

Putting that all into context, we have two linguistically Semitic people at war and only one side is considered Semitic, which seems odd too. I don’t have answers. I’m just boggled by humanity once again, using words that could be connecting people but instead using it in divisive ways.

We are such strange creatures.


When the Cheese Is Announced By Book.

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Some days ago last year, someone posted on Facebook that they were getting their team copies of “Who Moved My Cheese: An Amazing Way To Deal With Change In Your Work and You’re Life“.

What he may not have known – I’m not sure how this will turn out – is that since it’s publication in late 1998, it had become synonymous with layoffs in corporate America. This is enough so that Wikipedia has some notes on it in the reception portion of the Wikipedia entry on ‘Who Moved My Cheese’:

In the corporate environment, management has been known to distribute this book to employees during times of “structural reorganization“, or during cost-cutting measures, in an attempt to portray unfavorable or unfair changes in an optimistic or opportunistic way. This has been characterized by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America as an attempt by organizational management to make employees quickly and unconditionally assimilate management ideals, even if they may prove detrimental to them professionally. Ehrenreich called the book “the classic of downsizing propaganda” and summarizes its message as “the dangerous human tendencies to ‘overanalyze’ and complain must be overcome for a more rodentlike approach to life. When you lose a job, just shut up and scamper along to the next one.”

‘Who Moved My Cheese‘, Wikipedia, accessed on January 1st, 2023.

It’s not a reflection on the authors. It’s not a reflection of the book itself. I remember when it came out, standing in a bookstore and reading it in it’s entirety in a bookstore rather than buying it because corporate America was going through buyouts, including the company I was working for at the time, and this book was being given rave reviews by everyone in human resources. I’m a fast reader, and it doesn’t take very long to read it.

Upon reading Ehrenreich’s summary in Wikipedia, I tend to agree with her. There is this flare of ‘positivity’ and ‘change your mindset’ that people in authority tend to use whenever they change things with negative connotations for others.

Taken out of that context, it’s not a bad book and probably something everyone in high school should read. It’s written that simply.

I thought that maybe this was all dating me when I read the response to the comment I left on the original post, which pointed out that when a company hands these out, update your resume because things are about to change. It ends up I was wrong.

The book has consistently been used this way, enough so that if you search for “Who Moved My Cheese Layoffs”, you’ll presently find a review by someone named Nancy who thoroughly trashes “Who Moved My Cheese” in 2009 for that reason. The comments on it are sadly entertaining, including someone named Evan stating, “I need to write the sequel: If I’d Known, I Would Have Stolen More Office Supplies.”

Honestly, if your employer distributes this book, you don’t need to ‘sniff the changes in the wind’. They just slapped you and told you changes were coming.

In all of this, I was surprised at the vehemence the original poster had when responding to people saying the same thing I was. It was disturbing, and nowhere did he say that he wasn’t going to be laying people off.

I assumed good and told him in one post that if his intent was not to lay people off, to tell them up front because they could easily get the wrong idea. This resulted in ad hominem attacks, which were a little surprising, and then he went into full Elon Musk mode without being Elon Musk. That’s something I should write about as well at some point, I suppose, this Elon Musk fetish.

Yet it brought to mind many things I have seen management in different companies do over the years. Most of these people live in their own little bubbles, incapable of viewing the world around them, and it’s simple to think of other people as rats looking for cheese. It’s a bit dehumanizing, too, and I have to wonder whether the popularity of the book isn’t linked to the fact that corporate America was mass purchasing it or whether people just liked the book. It draws the whole thing into question, and I would not like to be the author associated with it.

Change is a reality. Most of the time, change is sold and marketed as a good thing. When a company needs to become profitable, one of the first things they do is gut the company’s employees. Sometimes they gut the right ones, sometimes they gut the wrong ones, usually they get a mix of both but to them it’s a matter of the bottom line – about how much money they save. So if you’ve played ‘the game’ well enough that you’re pulling in good money, you’re most likely the one who will get caught in the rat trap.

There is a certain hypocrisy to creating a game in a corporate environment and then getting rid of the winners. I don’t have a real perspective on it because every company will be different, but I do know that I know good people who have gotten the book, who were good at their jobs, and who did in fact move on to do much better elsewhere where management was not obsessed with simple books. In that way, it can be a blessing.

In the end, I am a little disturbed that the book is still used that way. Corporate America, with all that is happening with artificial intelligence, is likely to have ‘corporate restructuring’ (aka ‘layoffs’), and if this book lands on a desk near you, you should have already updated your resume.

In the end, if they don’t want you there, you don’t want to be there. Unfortunately, that means it’s risking your income and copies of the book are not accepted by any bill collectors I know of. Adapt and overcome, and while I do agree it’s insensitive and comes from a place that is dehumanizing by making people metaphors for rats and vice versa, getting wound up in that isn’t going to pay the bills.

Pay the bills. Find somewhere that wants you, and if you don’t find it, maybe you can build it or find people willing to build it with you.

As for the people who work for that person – well, shucks, just read his responses and make up your own damned minds.