“Good morning, employees of WidgetCorp. Yes, it’s true that EvilSouless Robot Manufacturing, Inc. recently purchased your company, but no need to worry. Your company culture is one of the things we value most, and you can be assured that we will never make any changes that would affect it.”
What I came to post.
There is also this food place that sells something like “Maker’s Diet”, which is supposed to be only food God made and designed. It’s supposed to be healthier. It’s quite crazy.
Dude, what’s your malfunction?? 
Healthcare insurers are here for you, for your health, your care is a priority and we guarantee the highest quality.
By the way, your claim has been rejected since your specialist is 0.2 miles outside the authorized alternative care provider distance, and we will only pay up to a statistically calculated market average for that particular care compared to the national average. No you can’t see those figures or market statistics, we’ll tell you when the check comes due. Yes, my BA communications degree and customer service script authorize me to make critical preferred care decisions that your surgeon is woefully underqualified to make.
Fuck, I’d forgotten all about that fucking albatross getting hung around my neck. What a colossal WOMBAT that bullshit was. I finally just quit working on it and rebuffed senior management efforts to revive it. What really pissed me off were managers who hung their hats on it in order to justify their positions.
True. Astrology at least has entertainment value.
If you’re talking stupid moving average systems, etc. being sold on the internet, I agree with you. But then you have to consider you have people like the director of of the MIT Lab for Financial Engineering releasing papers(pdf) saying stuff like this:
Psychoanlysis of dreams.
Astrology.
Okay, I think I get it!
I have some respect for the weak version of post-modernism. Some ideas are, in fact, influenced by the culture of the people who hold them. Language has some role in directing the thoughts it expresses.
But the extreme varieties…the notion that there isn’t any real objective truth, or that any given culture is exactly as good as any other… Now that’s bullshit!
I’d classify that more as “insanity” than “bullshit”.
I’m hugely sympathetic with this, when it comes to really complex modern science. I will absolutely forgive anyone for not getting quantum mechanics, expansionary phase cosmology, or even special relativity. These are all blatantly counter-intuitive.
(Which, of course, is true because we’ve been fortunate to exist in a large-scale, stable, sheltered part of the cosmos, conducive to the origin of life and intelligence.)
Doubting these things when first encountering them is not bullshit; it is the essence of wisdom. Continuing to doubt once the evidence has been presented… Now that’s bullshit!
Gawd, yes! Also Sarbanes-Oxley certification.
And I was also given the Y2K certification assignment, and that was bullshit too!
While we’re talking business bull, add in Six Sigma. I was a maths major in college, and know my stats cold. This was a ghastly waste of everyone’s time! But I got to do a fun “Green Belt” project, just like high school science fair! Whee!
Aw! I like dream analysis! I’ve learned a lot about my unconscious mind from it.
(Also, I’ve written entire novels based on my dreams! If I could record 'em, they’d be big hits on YouDream!)
Lots of good BS downthread.
yeah, I was going to say “any time a politician is producing sound.”
Another vote for ISO certification.
Life.
:eek: I would pay actual money to read that in English. Even bad machine-translated English! Please oh please! Any idea where I can see even an excerpt in Dutch?
ETA: I am in heaven.
How about Lean Six Sigma? http://www.6sigma.us/
I personally have not had any training or received one of their colored belts, but I’ve been in a project group where the organizer was doing it based on this training. It was absolutely a waste of time. It took like the first three weeks of the meetings to establish meeting rules, timelines, definitions, etc before we even looked at the problem at hand.