• If there is a big meeting held to announce that the company is definitely not being acquired, it will be acquired soon.
• Likewise, if there is any communication announcing that the rumors of layoffs are incorrect, there will definitely be layoffs within a few months.
• If HR emphasizes repeatedly that you aren’t to discuss your salary with anyone, you are probably receiving much worse compensation than your peers.
• Bringing in contractors is a way for management to avoid blame when a project fails, and yet also a way to receive praise and promotion when a project goes well. It is a win/win for management and usually a negative to full-time employees.
• If you receive a mass email from HR yet it doesn’t have everyone in the company on it, and it’s about a meeting with a vague title, time to start worrying.
• If there is someone new in your department, and yet he or she hasn’t really been introduced around and not officially announced, also time to worry; either they are there to replace you or to figure out who to fire.
• Be genuinely friendly to and with the executive assistants and support staff. Not only are they often far more interesting than the executives, when you need something, they always, always know who to check with, how to get it, and are privy to the most juicy and also the most accurate rumors. You will always be a step ahead if you do this.
• If a company does not allow working from home, they do not value productivity, but rather the appearance of productivity.
• Businesses only have to be as or more efficient than their competitors, not efficient in any absolute sense. In my experience this means that most businesses are woefully inefficient.
• Status matters at work. Being a pushover means getting crappy projects likely to fail and to make you look bad. This is a kiss of death. I’ve found that navigating this works best by being very friendly and open in person, but in mass meetings being unrelenting and accurately critical. Your status goes up because you say things others are afraid to say, but people still see you as likable. Note: this probably only works for men.

People cannot imagine a world where LGBT people are fully assimilated into and accepted by religious movements, and where unmarried and “promiscuous” women are still demonized and face moral and legal sanctions but alas that world is at least somewhat likely.

Like many things, those two cluster of ideas being convergent are only truly connected by historical association. Historical associations can be broken, and often are. Divergences and convergences of other ideas are more likely than not.

Not to be bleak, but rather taking realism to its tenebrous conclusion, misogyny and demonization of women seems a historical constant, while other beliefs not as much.

Thus the obvious suppositions and postulations leading to the somewhat large probability space above.

I don’t like it, but rather than evicting it from my mind I prefer to realize turns that can be taken given the data that is available.

Ed feels the same way I do about the Israel-Palestine slaughter.

Reporting on the conflict also tends to the ridiculous extremes: the virtuous Israelis defending themselves against subhuman terrorist child-killers, or the poor, defenseless, blameless Palestinians minding their own business until Israel decides to start killing people en masse. On balance, in recent years my sympathies are probably more on the Palestinian side but I want to be emphatic that I see no Good Guys and Bad Guys in the conflict.

Agreed. The reality is that if the Palestinians were dominant, they would be slaughtering just as many Israelis as the Israelis are now murdering on the Palestinian side. Very likely more.

Neither side is right or unsullied. We love underdogs, and the Israelis are pure evil for murdering innocents, but it is hard for me to have much sympathy in general for religious nuts and right-wing fascists killing each other.

The individuals who want to just live their lives, who are caught in the middle, that is another story.

How good is my mind?

The technology industry is the only one I am aware of where white men experience extremely significant discrimination after the age of 40-45 (and in some places much younger).

Yeah, to some extent age-related discrimination occurs in every field. But nothing, nothing like in the tech industry. In some geographic areas and fields in the tech industry, if you are beyond 30, you are over the hill. If you are older than 35, you are a doddering, senescent incompetent, and if you dare pass 40, you are dead.

Your actual skills, abilities and experience don’t matter at all; nor the fact that you are much better, faster and more knowledgeable than your younger peers. It’s a religious belief that management likes and condones because younger people are easier to exploit and demand less money.

1) Unlike in the movies, for the most part members of the military do not salute indoors or on battlefields or in combat zones.

2) About people racking shotguns or racking the slides on guns in movies: if you have to rack a weapon, the chamber was empty before! So that means in all these dramatic scenes where someone is in grave danger and holding a weapon, if they have to rack before the pull the trigger, the weapon prior to that was not functional.

3) The word “cool” – meaning detached smoothness – first started being used in that sense in the 16th century.

4) All tea varieties – black, green, white &c. – are produced from the same species, Camellia sinensis. They are just processed differently.

5) Airplane’s black boxes are orange.

6) Most bacterial infections of the skin that people identify as “spider bites” were not caused by spiders, as spiders do not commonly bite humans.

7) Many etymologies of words, even those found in dictionaries, are little better than codified urban legends.

8) Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, savoy, kohlrabi and Chinese kale are all cultivars of the same plant, Brassica oleracea.

9) Humanity very likely experienced a population bottleneck in the Late Paleolithic during which the population may have been as low as 2,000 individuals.

10) If the solar system could be filled with air (same as earth’s atmospheric composition) out to Neptune at the density of atmosphere on earth at sea level, and if it could somehow be made not collapse, it would still be a black hole with only that density.

Approximately 42% of English words are loaned (aka “appropriated”) from other languages.

Since so many of the words we use every day are in fact appropriated from other languages and thus other cultures, under the logic of resistance to cultural appropriation, most Tumblr SJWs and their ilk who demand the immediate desistance from cultural appropriation should cease speaking English immediately as they will not likely have the linguistic skills to determine which words are appropriated and which are not.

Or they could learn one of the many varieties of “pure” English – or one that befits their particular culture’s specific English argot – and omit all the rest.

Somehow I doubt a lot of SJWs are going to be learning Anglish or its variants any time soon.

(Yes, I am being a bit mordant and even though I agree with many of the goals of this sort of social justice, I think a lot/the majority of these people are relatively uneducated, intellectually stunted and use this sort of thing to gain attention and demonstrate their worth and status than for any other actually-helpful goal.)

Reading back through the history of how Firefox’s Australis came to be, I realize all over again just how delusional the Firefox developers were and are, and how much demyelinization must have had to occur for their IQs to fall to such stunning lows.

This historical exploration is part research for another, longer post that will be more like the old newspaper articles I used to write rather than a blog post.

The conventional wisdom is that the personal computer is moribund.

That “wisdom” is utterly wrong as PC sales are stabilizing and will likely even rise when Microsoft releases Windows 9 in 2015.

Any “dying” product category out there wishes it could sustain unit sales of ~300 million per year.

The much-predicted death of the PC has been an ongoing bogeyman for nearly two decades now, well before tablets became a thing. People have such short memories. (And tablets were a thing before they were a thing. That tablet is running Windows XP!)

Tablets have been the excuse – I don’t think they are the actual reason (more on that in a different post) – for the interface apocalypses of late such as Gnome 3, Unity, and Australis that are extremely user-hostile and are really more about UI/IX designers continuing to receive a paycheck than anything else.

What the world will look like in a decade is that a smaller number of home users will have PCs, businesses will continue using PCs at the same or greater rate, and people will still be predicting the death of the PC.

There’s just no replacement – nor will there be soon – for a big-ass monitor, a mouse or other pointing device with pixel-level control, and no worries about having enough memory or power.

I first started seeing prediction of the imminent death of the PC in 1994. I am sure I will still be seeing these prognostications and pronouncements in 2024, and they’ll still be wrong.

“All kinds of illegal” is a great phrase.

This article reminded me of it.

It also reminded of one time when the police came to search my uncle’s house. This was the same uncle who liked to keep ammunition in the drinking cups in the kitchen cabinets.

So I asked him, “Uncle Wayne, why’re the police searching your house?”

His reply: “Well, could be any number of reasons.”

Ah, North Florida. There is nowhere else like it. For which we should all be thankful.

In an era when it’s likely that most Americans commit three felonies a day, and where there is ubiquitous and inescapable surveillance, there can be no justice and no safety.

The tragedy of Aaron Swartz’s state-assisted suicide is the best illustration of how doing anything interesting or unusual accomplishes nothing these days but making you into a target. Or rather, doing anything to help society paints a bull’s eye on you because it might hurt a corporation’s profit or embarrass a rich person – both great crimes now.

In an age of dramatic economic and political inequality, Swartz’s death is proof that it does not matter how talented you are or how hard you work—American meritocracy is a sham. If Swartz, a rich tech genius with an unparalleled network of powerful friends and a remarkable track record of success, couldn’t live an ethical, dignified life, then who can? Our contemporary culture is crippled by increasingly Soviet-style barriers against all who challenge the status quo. It has criminal statutes so broad that basically everyone is a lawbreaker, and selective prosecution has become a mechanism for ordering our politics. It demands deep moral compromise just to live with minimal interference from authority. It requires that, to be a ‘success’ like Karp, you must have not only the talent to build appealing social systems, but also the lack of a moral compass involved in using those social systems to manipulate others. The ethic of this approach is designed by those who fear only those risks associated with human freedom.

Those who dislike this culture, who think that success is the opposite of killing or spying or greed or ass-kissing, saw virtue in Swartz. Swartz had character, and he was killed for it.

I was talking about similar topics with my partner recently and while these ideas aren’t exactly novel, as we discussed it to us it was striking to us how there are a few ideas you can’t question these days:

1) That profit is an unalloyed good, and making a profit/money excuses anything a corporation does.

2) That technological change is also and often by extension of the above always positive, no matter what it destroys.

3) That questioning the mantra of “disruption/change” brands one a Luddite, a communist or worse – a terrorist.

Techno-utopian Randian libertarianism merging (contradictorily) with the pervasive surveillance state sounds like a stygian nightmare, but the thing about nightmares is you can wake up. And I don’t think that is going to be possible.

It’s probably a mistake, but I’ve re-enabled comments on this blog. So fire away if you dare or if, you know, you just feel like it.

I don’t remember the first Tori Amos song I ever heard, though it was probably “Silent All These Years” if I had to guess.

Most likely on 120 Minutes, sometime in 1992.

I’m not sure then exactly what prompted me to buy the album Little Earthquakes that same year, but I did. And that was such a damn good decision.

Discovering Tori was like an explosion in my brain. I remember thinking, This is someone like me; she is weird and utterly wild and unapologetic for any of it. I must’ve listened to Little Earthquakes a thousand times in the first six months I had it. Maybe more.

I listened to it so much on repeat that when I hear one song singly now I still expect to this day, over twenty years later, to hear the next song that followed it on the CD.

I had no idea – nor would I have cared if I had – that Tori was only “supposed” to appeal to women. Her songwriting was amazing: raw and unrestrained, yet somehow brutal and controlled at the same time. She wielded her piano like a weapon, like a polygraph, like a feather-coated cudgel of absolute truth. I didn’t want to be like her. I wanted to be her.

It is no exaggeration as I’ve pointed out before to say that artists like Tori Amos and others saved my life in high school. I really believe that, because it is true.

I also recall hovering near the TV, my VCR at the ready, in case a Tori Amos video I didn’t have played. Before YouTube, before the internet was a thing, that was the only way to do it. I eventually got all of her videos on tape, but it took countless months in front of a TV watching Color Me Badd and worse. Much worse.

But it was worth it.

One last Tori memory. In 1994, she played a concert in Orlando, Florida. The tickets for me were expensive — around $40 each if I remember correctly – and I also bought one for a friend who could not afford to go because getting more people to be able to see Tori seemed like the best charity I could imagine.

In person, with only 100 feet of air between us, she seemed both more human and more fey than she did at the remove of TV and radio. I was captivated by her music, her presence, her artistry. I watched her sweat on her baby grand and belt out truth and pain and tell stories about her life that were both quotidian and twisted into shapes most of us can’t see with our only 3-D vision.

Anyone who says that art doesn’t matter, that the humanities are worthless, that music is just a diversion or a hobby: man, fuck you. Just fuck you. Some of used it to get through. To us it was a rope thrown down into the dark pit of our lives that we used to climb up and out and then say: I beat you. I made it.

That was what Tori was to me. She threw down the rope. I climbed out. We did it together, even though she didn’t even know it.

I’ll always be grateful for her — for her music and her truth. For me and for so many others it was that crucial lifeline thrown into the murk.

(Inspired by this found on my friend’s blur blog.)

Big Telco uses shills to smear book about Net Neutrality and telcom’s corruption.

Of course they do. I’ve seen people posting on Ars Technica, HardOCP and other sites that I am 100% sure are in the employ of the telcos.

Nearly every large company – especially if they are a tech company – has a large army of online shills who frequent such sites. It’s the way business is done these days.

For instance if you read the comments of many tech sites over the past two years, you’d think that Windows 8 was the best OS ever EVER EVER. But of course it sold abysmally and will soon be abandoned by Microsoft.

The disconnect is due to that many of the most frequent and most vocal posters were of course paid by Microsoft to astroturf support for the OS.

That the telcos are doing such things reference net neutrality is just expected behavior, though it should be utterly illegal in a sane world.

We don’t live in that world, though.

I’ve seen so much bullshit speculation online about why Verizon and Comcast are unable to provide unimpeded access to Netflix content that it has been just fucking ridiculous reading all the uninformed gibberish and utter malarkey spewed out by people who have no clue or worse have some political agenda.

So it’s nice to see an actual Level 3 technical expert explain that it’s exactly as easy as I already said it was (since, duh, I’ve done work in commercial datacenters for years and kinda know) to provide the bandwidth.

Verizon has confirmed that everything between that router in their network and their subscribers is uncongested – in fact has plenty of capacity sitting there waiting to be used. Above, I confirmed exactly the same thing for the Level 3 network. So in fact, we could fix this congestion in about five minutes simply by connecting up more 10Gbps ports on those routers. Simple. Something we’ve been asking Verizon to do for many, many months, and something other providers regularly do in similar circumstances. But Verizon has refused. So Verizon, not Level 3 or Netflix, causes the congestion. Why is that? Maybe they can’t afford a new port card because they’ve run out – even though these cards are very cheap, just a few thousand dollars for each 10 Gbps card which could support 5,000 streams or more. If that’s the case, we’ll buy one for them. Maybe they can’t afford the small piece of cable between our two ports. If that’s the case, we’ll provide it. Heck, we’ll even install it.

There is no bandwidth shortage. Repeat after me, kids: THERE IS NO BANDWIDTH SHORTAGE. It does not exist. Never has.

That is a lie promulgated by ISPs hoping to squeeze money out of content providers and any others they can.

As I said in previous posts including this one, it’s a simple matter of connecting two routers together. Just as the Level 3 expert says. Just as any infrastructure type knows.

Anyone who says anything else is a liar. It really is that simple, and something done routinely by non-extortionate entities.