My new manager at work appears to be one of those truly decent people. You know the ones, those who are actually, genuinely kind, which leads to them getting taken advantage of repeatedly and in a million different ways, yet they still mostly remain themselves. I gravitate toward those people, even though I by no means consider myself one of them. (I have my days of grace, though.) People like that, and I maintain an ever-growing mental list, are the only people on earth who I give a shit about.

Don’t get me wrong, I try to assume goodheartedness in every person I meet, but if you’ve proven yourself to be otherwise, you no longer exist in my mental landscape of the world. I’m just like that, always have been. I can easily dismiss people, their opinions, their very existence — and it’s one of the reasons I don’t number myself among the genuinely kind-hearted. That and the fact that I’ve really never had any desire to change this aspect of my personality, as it’s served me well many more times than it has burned me.

So now, a dilemma. I’ve never worked for a person like that before. A person I actually like, who I think actually makes the world better by being in it. Not once in all my years of sporadic employment. And it’s leading me to examine a lot of things, my work ethic and motivations for going in to work every day among them. Well, that and the fact that I’ve now been employed there long enough that my monthly passwords, just yesterday, cycled back to the originals I had when I started with the company, which is just mind-boggling to me.

Eudora was just kind enough to inform me of a new, updated version of itself. I looked in every single sub-dialog of the options screen, there is no way to turn this behavior off, and worse, I do not recall and cannot now find any previous warning that the program may occasionally do such a thing. The pedestal I had them on was getting higher every day I had to slog through with Outlook at work — I do hope they weren’t seriously injured in the fall.

To fall into an old habit, let’s sum up the last four months of entertainment industry stories: Industry can no longer make profits within current laws due to own mistakes, wants laws changed. Says silly things like ‘piracy’ over and over thinking people will begin to associate the use and sometimes misuse of media with the ongoing brutal practice of grand theft on the high seas. Succeeds. Laws changed to accommodate Industry.

As I’m sure anyone who’s likely to care already knows, the FCC’s decision on deregulation is due tomorrow, and most likely will make Rupert Murdoch, Sumner Redstone and Steve Case very happy old white men. “Now that we have all this media, we’re in a position where we don’t need to have the government dictate who can own media outlets.” Clear Channel owns six stations in the Charleston market. The last couple of holdouts that aren’t college or religious broadcasts will probably be gone within a month of this decision. Not that I listen to the radio anymore, but I do feel sorry for the folks who don’t realize that this is the reason that popular music has been by and large such crap for a while now.

And that isn’t the only way these five companies are contributing to America’s cultural stagnation and their own downfall. Our most successful export has always been our culture, but it’s not a renewable enough resource to survive this kind of strip mining.