Saturday, June 24, 2023

Todays important news according to Reuters: "A Bear sh...ts in the woods"

 From today's Reuters Weekend Briefing:

"Decaffeinated pride: More than 3,000 Starbucks workers will walk off the job following claims that the company banned Pride month decorations at some of its cafes. Pride celebrations are planned for several U.S. cities this weekend, but as the Reuters World News podcast tells us, it’s quite a bit more dangerous to be in the LGBTQ+ community in many other countries. In related news, read how Christian groups helped parents pull books from some Pennsylvania school libraries."

Considering that Starbucks employs about 400,000 people at this time, and, conservatively, 80% of the 3,000 Starbucks workers who will allegedly be walking out will act on pure peer pressure, we have Reutres - supposedly a quality GLOBAL NEWS, driven by and pandering to 0.15% (that's 3 in 2000 people) of the constituency. 

I might as well start getting my news from TicToc!

Somebody STOP the madness!

I thought I lived in a democracy. I am all in for protecting people's rights. Still, if we allow a naval-gazing, crotch-centric minuscule minority of the citizenship to set the agenda, this is no different than tolerating the pathetic legislative branch being de-facto controlled by undereducated Trumpist imbeciles.

Yep - I am sick and tired having someone else's agenda marketed to me day in and day out. 

I remember back in the day when I was much younger, more naive and narrow-minded, marching, raising money, and dancing in the streets in support of the anti-apartheid movement.

And what did we accomplish - a MORAL victory! And helped build a nation that is one of the worst governed, most violent, corrupt societies, with a standard of living for the same people we were "helping", that today is IMHO way lower than it can and should be. And the cherry on the cake - that same country that we helped "liberate" from "white oppression" has now embraced BRICS...

Vaarwel en sterkte vir jou saak van die dag, dwase!

Monday, April 10, 2023

It's not about liberal and conservative, democrat or republican. It's about Anarchy vs Rule of Law.

My initial reaction when I heard about the Tennessee House's decision to expel two Democratic lawmakers was, "Ugh, them Tennessee Trumpers are embarrassing themselves again."

I then accidentally saw a full video of the legislative session that led to this action - and, sadly, I totally agree with getting those two "young progressives" kicked out.

What the now former legislators did was no different than Turmp's crowd on Jan 6, 2020 - an invasion of a minority of self-important, entitlement-demanding loud-mouths, teetering on the edge of violence.

This is not democracy. It's anarchy. 

Whenever I see a shouting young person pumping their fist in front of a lectern, demanding justice for one thing or another, I see a mini-me Castro in the making.

Unfortunately, great dreams of equality and justice for all overnight have never led to prosperity. 

Historically they have given us Stalin, Mao, Castro, and the Kims.

Sorry to rain on the parade of enlightenment, but realpolitik gets things done, not embarrassingly undereducated poor behavior. If you are not smart enough to know the difference between street-preaching and getting legislation passed, you are just squatting in the chamber.

What would you do if I showed up to your PA meeting or church with a bullhorn and interrupted your speaker to shout about something important to me?

Yes. Me too.

I believe in genuinely equal opportunity for all, but I do not support minority entitlements.




Thursday, November 17, 2022

CRYPTO - we are all only in because we think we can get something from nothing - and a quick buck

I have no crypto holdings today - I got out when BTC hit $10,000 - a long time ago. So this is not a "sour grapes" motivated story, and I have no losses to bellyache about.

I can't help but opine on the drama around the "failure" of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried.

Why are we all pretending "Crypto investment" is anything but a pyramid scheme - creating "value" by wasting electricity to compute hashes is NOT, in any rational sense, creating anything meaningful - not even artistic or experiential.

The only reason why Crypto grew at all is that, for a while, it allowed some modicum of privacy protection and enabled TOR-fronted anonymous illegal international transactions up to the nation-state level. The demand for non-government-controlled currency and piles of dirty money (if there is such a thing) made it possible. (see, for example: sanctioned )

Then, every business opportunist who could hire a couple of programmers who knew how to access open-source blockchain code became a "crypto entrepreneur." IMHO 99% of the cryptocurrencies, tokens, and NFTs are pyramid schemes and pet rocks.

Look at the resumes of the loudest mouths in Crypto - few people are credible. One is J Allaire - at least he has shown his chops in technology, going back to the early internet days - I credit him (and his brother) as the conceptual fathers of the "application server." The concept of a guaranteed 100% liquid token, enabling fast dollar-equivalent money movement transactions, does make sense - and I know what I am getting if I were to buy in.

On the other hand, we have Mr. Fried.  Having had the privilege to work with some top physicists from around the country, I can tell you that getting through MIT with an undergraduate physics degree and NOT staying in the field is a huge "propensity towards mediocrity or lack of focus" flag. And spending a few years moving other people's money around (aka "trading"), a top business mind does not make...

In all honesty, though, it is the greed of the mythical smart money that is to blame for enabling these types of fast-talking (granted charismatic) charlatans - the same people that for years turned away startups with real medical diagnostics technology because they were "all-in" on Theranos.



Wednesday, November 2, 2022

I am sick of the Harry & Meghan Reality Show

I wish we had the practical technology to magically filter out topics across all of my information streams.

Every time I look at a news feed, I see the same drivel about Harry, the under-educated British jock, and Meghan, the LA actress who suffered oh so much as a princess and then laid it all out to Oprah.

Barf.

Make it stop!

I must say, though, that "the firm" seems pretty astute in getting rid of the unqualified and obnoxious, especially the ones that embrace a sense of entitlement to such a painful level.


Thursday, June 16, 2022

Paramedic Waste

 I was at the airport today, and an older lady was not feeling well.

The paramedics were called and EIGHT people showed up!

What an incredible waste - in almost every other country I have visited or lived in, ambulances are NOT gigantic fire trucks and are staffed by a driver and two responders at most.

It is ridiculously wasteful to plain stupid to have fire stations offer paramedic services.

Another waste of my tax dollar - but boy - who dares tell firefighters that a lot of what they do is wrong and wasteful...

Saturday, May 7, 2022

It is easy easily identify failure in product design

I think that the easiest way to guess if a company or organization will succeed or fail is by using its products. 

Today I went to the USPS website to track a package. The receipt I am holding has a tiny tracking number (I have changed some digits below, so don't they to run it - it will not come up as mine :) : 

Tracking Number: 9400111108036467868990

I am expected to type this in, exactly, to get the information I need.

No wonder the USPS is a s--t-show! How hard can it be, with the Billions of dollars in funding to make the most used feature easy to use?

The USPS has put in place a system that allows them to assign a unique number for every package, if every person on earth (assume 9 Billion or so), sends 400,000 (yes that is four hundred THOUSAND) packages EVERY DAY for the next 100 years...

Talk about government excess :)

Even if for some reason we DO need that many digits - my tracking number can be at least made easy for me to enter - a direct substitute, using both numbers and letters would look something like this:

A01-WSP-089-WTR

Yep - believe it - I did the approximate math - in base 36 (uppercase letters plus digits), all we need are 12 symbols...

So yes - it is easy to spot a poorly managed organization by the crappy usability of their products. (Note to self - ALWAYS taste what you are cooking!)






Saturday, April 30, 2022

Google’s former AI Researchers appear to live in an echo-chamber of their very own meta-universe

 I keep reading about the AI researchers that ejected themselves from Google. Notice I say “ejected themselves”, rather than “fired”.  It is because I am quite aware that the words I use can change the perception and narrative of the topic I am discussing. More importantly, it is because these were advertised to be smart, well-educated, and supposedly well-liked (implying socially well-adjusted) individuals. 

It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that they are fully aware of what happens to junior employees when they choose to violate policy. It matters not whether the policy is subjectively good or bad. Publicly whining about it and badmouthing your employer will, and frankly must, result in a prompt parting of ways.

IMHO, they ejected themselves because they chose to behave in a way that would absolutely get them fired.

I applaud the professional way in which Google management conducted itself in following its own internal rules and procedures of legal review and calling out what is good and what is bad for the company.

The Google AI researchers getting fired is a fashionable topic that has staying power – it has not become yesterday’s news for years now. That seems to be because of prodigious outputs by media contributors (call them journalists if you like) who can’t grok the tech aspects of the technology itself but desperately want to be relevant and write about AI. Like pork spending, attached to a congress appropriations bill, the topic of AI today offers a platform to attach hobby-horse musings on ethics, diversity, and censorship.

Time for a reality check, however. We do not live in a post-scarcity society that can afford to navel-gaze ad nauseum reoccurring ethics topics. We live in a capitalist society. It may be the worst economic order, but to date, we know of nothing that works better (quantitatively measuring its historical performance in raising the standard of living for the greater number of people by the largest margin).

Granted – capitalism is not good for all, but it appears to be good enough for most – and as a democracy, we have agreed to be ruled by what is good for the majority, after all.

If you ever doubt that harsh American capitalism works, let me point out that the US was the first country in the world to offer best-in-class vaccines to all of its citizens. (I am not counting Israel, a population too small to be statistically relevant in this case and a diaspora with enormous economic and political power worldwide).

So when I come across a few loud-mouth young “scientists” who have crafted, since college, their careers and publications to a specific agenda, much more so than towards "true science" (if there is such a  thing), the only reaction I have to the whining post the well-deserved corporate boot in the backside is: “Good luck and good riddance!”

Regardless of the clear incompetence and short-sightedness of the Google manager who handled the most famous of these incidents in November 2020 (and missed a fantastic opportunity to redirect the discussion to a scientifically relevant, productive, and brand-enhancing direction), the opposite party's immediate retreat to the comfortable protective shade of the old "I am mistreated because I am a minority" mantra was equally pathetic. It's darker and colder in the shade.

Tuesday, April 5, 2022

Proposed Constituional Amendment

The rules about who can become a president (apparently, I am eligible) are:

Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution imposes only three eligibility requirements on persons serving as president, based on the officeholder’s age, time of residency in the U.S., and citizenship status:

"No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."

These requirements have been modified twice. Under the 12th Amendment, the same three qualifications were applied to the vice president of the United States. The 22nd Amendment limited officeholders to two terms as president.

We desperately need another amendment to add these two additional requirements:

1. No person who cannot pass a blind mental health exam shall be eligible for president and vice-president.

2. No person over the age of 65 shall hold the office of president.

We need protection against both "very stable geniuses", as well as easily steered geriatric slow thinkers.


Friday, March 18, 2022

Marketing to Ignorance

Without a doubt, Apple Inc. is the greatest marketing company in the world.

I know of a few others that can take 20-year old technology, repackage it, declare it new and often revolutionary, and have it selling better than pet rocks.

Take the latest one of these: "Universal Control" 

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212757

Fantastic name for a feature that I have been taking advantage of for the last 20 years or so.

Stardock Multiplicity is my strong recommendation for non-Apple users that want to drive an unlimited number of separate computers from a single keyboard and mouse, without additional hardware (you do need a common subnet IP range).

https://www.stardock.com/products/multiplicity/

It seems the key to this success is to market the old as new to a target audience that is not aware of things that have been around long enough to not be fashionable and lack this year's magic quadrant buzz-words.

It's a bit like the folks that hit it out of the park with NoSQL databases, as the younger generation of developers had never heard of old tech like PICK, and ate the concept up as new and revolutionary. 

Granted, the difference between a Mongo and a Pick is a bit like a Tesla and a '67 Chevy, but they do share a few similarities - like four wheels, four seats, and a purpose to move me from A to B...

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Entitlement du jour

 Every now and then I read about some former employee of a large tech company complaining about this and that.

It usually draws a visceral desire to start shouting at the author:

"You are not special!
        You are not entitled! 
            You have to earn it! You lazy! Self-absorbed! Head-up-your-a...s! Whiner!  You are replaceable!
    Easily replaceable!
        We are ALL easily replaceable!"

(Hmm - I may have to put this to some retro-punk noise - these feel like good lyrics to scream...)

Today's rant-instigator is a gentleman who thinks of himself in superlatives, although reading between the flowery lines in his Linked-In profile, his business skills seem to be best illustrated by his ability to build a Salesforce dashboard...

Apparently, he made some GREAT revelations on TikTok recently - he told the world that big (and smart) companies offer perks to their employees so that they can get more work out of them!

The HORROR! The CONSPIRACY!

And I could have sworn I read all about how good of an investment it is to spend money on your employees outside of direct compensation in just about every HR and business publication going back to .... Y2K?

Oh, the great discoveries people make daily! Indoor plumbing! The wheel!

And naturally, the gentleman in question pointed out that:

...
even with a $150,000 salary and abundant perks, a Google employee still made "pennies on dollars" compared with the company executives.

And this is when I started laughing.

I can probably think of a dozen reasons why this gentleman earns "pennies on the dollar", compared to the CEOs of top tech companies. Here are the ones that come to mind without too much effort:

 - You have never written a personal check to cover the payroll of the employees of a company you started.

- You can't get a meeting with a Fortune 100 CEO, because you have nothing to say to them that they care about.

- You are not responsible for the relative peace of mind of thousands of employees and millions of public market investors.

- You have not survived 20 years of big company organizational dynamics, board member management, or had to orchestrate a quarterly Ks & Qs call.

- You have heard about fiduciary duty and financial risk expressed in numbers with 9 zeroes after them. Maybe. In your college 200-level class, but not since then.

So - to complete my rant - put on your big-boy pants and get on with it. 

Indeed - life is unfair. Luck does matter. And we do NOT live in a post-scarcity society.

But please! Your whining bores me!
Your sense of entitlement is embarrassing.

Sunday, March 13, 2022

The Astonishing Failure of Anarchy in K-12 Educaton Management in the US

Common Sense!

Can't teach it (much). Can't buy it. There is no substitute for it.

Is it common sense that a group of parents, with mostly no relevant (if any) higher education, are qualified or equipped to set standards and policy on what and how the children in their school district should be taught? 

Indeed not.

I have no issue with a private school doing pretty much whatever they please, as long as it can get parents to pay for the privilege.

With pubic schools, however, I think we are fools to allow TDH (Tom, Dick and Harry Dorothy, and Herm) to have a say on curriculum and policy. They are just not qualified!

I would be perfectly OK if a school board were in charge of hiring a panel of professionals who anonymously make decisions on their behalf. It would be in line with the best of American constitutional traditions and the spirit of the founding fathers, who were smart to realize that we, the unwashed masses, should not be electors. Oh, wait - maybe we screwed that one up a bit, my fellow populists...

Instead, we congratulate ourselves on the freedom and right to decide how and what our children will be taught. This regional anarchy of decision-making on school matters results in parents driving down the standards of education towards an "A for effort", "everyone's a winner", head-in-the-sand parental avoidance of responsibility that aims to ban bad news about our offspring.

What we are doing is failing our children, because the day they send their first resume to their first prospective employer, they will find that the real world expects results (or capital). 

The intern with the larger "SAT vocabulary" will be the one to get the promotion. I guarantee it. Too bad your parents nixed standardized testing - you had no reason to study "SAT words". 

Would you like to be a doctor? A lawyer? Guess what - to get there you need to be able to take tests, but again "Ooops!" - in your school district they did not quite get to the interesting parts of genetics in Biology class because the school board insisted on balancing your education with a dose of creationism.

Et cetera stupidity ad nauseum! (Yep - I took the SAT)

I have no idea if standardized testing is good or bad. And I don't really care. It is how the world works, probably because that is how our minds work - constantly categorizing and looking for ways to classify and order things: fight/flight, good/bad, love/hate, like/dislike, smart/boring, educated/not, dangerous/cuddly, capable/not, employable/not, promotable/not.

Instead of looking at standardized testing as forcing our children to conform to a one-size-fits-all mold, we should use it as a teaching tool about overcoming societal constraints outside of our control. 

I once told my children that it is important to learn how to pass a test. Actually learning the material on the test is optional, I said. Instead, they should "really" study only what truly interests them, but only AFTER the lowest common denominator of the test is out of the way. The point is to teach personal discipline and the ability to think for themselves and make their own choices.

When I went to school, the teachers had their lesson plans (for the year) ready on the first day of school and I don't remember continuous education and in-service days (what are those anyway?). We went to school 5 days a week, the school year was shorter, vacations longer, everyone in 3rd grade studied the same math book and if anyone had suggested a "restorative circle" as a way to resolve conflict, we would have come up with "ROFL" before text messaging was a thing.

Middle-aged nostalgia you say? Maybe. Or common sense? After all - what are the long summer vacations for - let's get those service days, continuous education, union negotiations, lesson planning, book selecting, out of the way then, why don't we? And let's make sure we pay all teachers a 12-month salary if they do 12 months of work, like most do. 

What really triggered this rant was in fact something only marginally related. It was this:

"ByThe Associated Press, March 12, 2022

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/mississippi-assistant-principal-fired-book-choice-83411025

JACKSON, Miss. -- An assistant principal in a Mississippi school district has been fired after he read a children's book to a class of 2nd graders that district leaders said was inappropriate.

    Toby Price was fired last week after reading “I Need a New Butt,” a children's book by Dawn McMillan, to students at an elementary school in Byrum, a suburb of the state capital of Jackson. He had served in the post for three years until his firing."

On Amazon, the book in question is described like this:

"A silly story that will cause boys and girls to giggle from beginning to end!" — Norman Public Schools

A young boy suddenly notices a big problem — his butt has a huge crack! So he sets off to find a new one. Will he choose an armor-plated butt? A rocket butt? A robot butt? Find out in this quirky tale of a tail, which features hilarious rhymes and delightful illustrations. Children and parents will love this book — no ifs, ands, or butts about it!

"I can assure you right now that your kids will love this book. They will giggle, they will laugh, and they will want this book to be read over and over again because it is just plain silly and funny … the perfect kid-combo." — Storywraps

 https://www.amazon.com/Need-New-Butt-Dawn-McMillan/dp/0486787990"

 

Really? Who empowered the so-called "district leader" to fire a teacher because in her singular judgment the material was inappropriate? Was it the local school board, or lack of basic common sense?

 I say the person who should be fired for "a lack of professionalism and impaired judgment", as she herself put it, is the aforementioned  Hinds County Schools Superintendent Delesicia Martinis.

 Oh, but wait - we have a problem.  Ms. Martinis, who appears to have taken down her Linked-In profile in the last 6 hours, is African American and the fired Mr. Price ... is not. 

 I can only imagine the self-righteous anti-racist vigor we would provoke if we were to apply common sense to this situation.

 

 

Saturday, September 12, 2015

From Kaspersky to BitDefender

I had been a client and user of various Kaspersky anti-virus and internet security suites for a number of years. 

It is pointless to debate whether Kaspersky is in bed with the FSB (aka former KGB). I had decided to pretend this particular issue is irrelevant to me, as long as the software performed well. 

When I saw this tidbit, however I started reconsidering. 

Finally, when I heard that Mr. Kaspersky stated his "simple mission" to be “We are here to save the world.”, and that 

"Russia is very rich in software engineers, thanks to Russian technical education system. And actually, Russian software engineers are the best."

I giggled like my 10 yo daughter does when she watches the cartoon network. 

When you are laughing at something you can't really take it seriously any more - clearly the time had come to switch.

Why I giggled you ask - well to quote: "The hubris that we are here to save the world is based on a grossly exaggerated view of ourselves, and it is a very dangerous piece of folly." (attribution to Jonette Christian), and to observe: "Haven't seen any (meaningful) programming languages or operating systems originally done in Russian yet, have you?" (and No, English is NOT my native language either!)

Deciding to do something and actually doing it are two very different things, however. It took yet another irritating discovery to force my hand. 

Today I found that my Kaspersky software inserts it's own javascript code in EVERY web page I open. What is more interesting is that it does it even after I removed the Kaspersky extension from Chrome! (Talk about trojans and viruses!)

What this means is not only that the antivirus sees every unencrypted file on my computer (I knew that already), but it also tracks every webpage I go to. 

I am OK with Google doing it (they told me they do). I am not OK with Kaspersky doing it "on the sly". Worse, the implementation is buggy - it keeps trying to access a bad URL and swamps the browser. 

I checked the support forums and it appears it has been over 6 months since the issue was reported - a bit embarrassing for those best i the world programmers, I'd say.

Or is this a deliberate choice? After all, the Kaspersky software updates itself at least once a day. 

My only conclusion is that they either chose to not fix the issue or they cannot fix the issue. I am not sure which one is worse or a bigger cause for concern...

Finally it was "Досвидания Товарищи" (Goodbye Comrades). 

In a grand and admittedly meaningless gesture I decided to send even more of my money to Eastern Europe and purchased Romanian made BitDefender for my home office computer.

Murphy's law struck, of course - the BitDefender registration site was down immediately after they collected my money online. 

The good news was that they have 24x7x7 worldwide support and while the wait on hold was too long, it was still only a quarter of my personal Microsoft "tech support on hold" average. The person who answered the phone knew exactly what the problem was and - surprize - his accent was no worse than mine and I could understand him just fine!

Best of all - it only took an hour for everything to come back and as I write this, I am happily installing my new software.

In conclusion - I feel compelled to offer some generic advice: 

Do not trust any cyber security software absolutely. 

You have to find a way to "police the policeman" on your computers. 

To that effect, if you have more that one computer, subscribe to more than one security software suite and don't buy the 3-year packages - change them every 12 months. There is associated cost, of course but there are also excellent free packages.

As of today it will be Norton360 at work, Panda on my laptop and BitDefender at home.