My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The end of culling, ArenaNet’s relaunched website, interviews with developers and the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
March 15, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
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Will the death of Google Reader also be the death of RSS?
Felix Salmon on the knock-on ramifications of Google’s announcement that it is killing Google Reader:
But whether or not Reader was ever going to be a good business for Google, it was from day one a fantastic public service for its users. Google started as a public service — a way to find what you were looking for on the internet — and didn’t stop there. Google would also do things like buy the entire Usenet archives, or scan millions of out-of-print books, or put thousands of people to work making maps, all in order to be able to get all sorts of information to anybody who wants it. [. . .]
The problem with the death of Reader is that it was the architecture underpinning lots of other services — the connective tissue of just about all RSS readers and services, from Summify to Reeder to Flipboard. You didn’t even need to use Google Reader; it was just the master central repository of your master OPML list, all the different feeds that you were subscribed to. Google spent real money to provide that public service, and it’s going to be sorely missed. As Marco Arment says, “every major iOS RSS client is still dependent on Google Reader for feed crawling and sync.”
Arment sees a silver lining in the cloud, saying that with Google gone, “we’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.” I’m less sanguine. Building an RSS sync platform is a hard and pretty thankless task, it costs real money, and it might not work at all — especially in a world where less and less content is actually available in RSS format. (You can subscribe to my Tumblr feed in RSS format, but there’s no such feed for my posts on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Path or even Google+.)
RSS has been dying for years — that’s why Google killed Reader. It was a lovely open format; it has sadly been replaced with proprietary feeds like the ones we get from Twitter and Facebook. That’s not an improvement, but it is reality. Google, with Reader, was really providing the life-support mechanism for RSS. Once Reader is gone, I fear that RSS won’t last much longer.
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Britain’s class system may have changed, but the snobbery is still all-pervasive
Tim Black reviews Consumed: How Shopping Fed the Class System, by Harry Wallop.
In short, class has stopped being the basis for a political identity; it has become a form of identity politics. As Wallop puts it: ‘Class is no longer what we do with our hands nine to five, it is what we do with our wallets at the weekend. How that money arrives in our wallets must play a part, but how we define ourselves and how others view us mostly comes down to the weekly drive to the local retail park, rather than the daily trudge to the factory.’
Consumed is a snarking and sniping attempt by Wallop, a consumer affairs writer at the Daily Telegraph, to anatomise these new consumerist class identities. At the upper end are the super-rich Portland Privateers, named after the private Portland Hospital in central London, where pregnancies come to fruition with the obligatory C-section at the cost of several grand and the toiletries are Molton Brown. Then in descending order come: the Rockabillies, defined by their love of a British holiday, ideally in the Cornish town of Rock; the Wood-Burning Stovers, who love a wood-burning stove almost as much as they love the Guardian; the Middleton Classes, who – like Carole Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge’s mother – have vaulted up the social ladder, usually taking in a grammar school en route; the Sun Skittlers, a resolutely old-school working-class identity devolving upon reading the Sun, playing skittles, and earning enough to have bought one’s own home; the Asda Mums, who spend wisely, but take safety in big, well-known brands; and the Hyphen-Leighs, whose much sneered-at social aspiration is marked out by the unusually spelled double-barrelled names and the commitment to high-status brands, from Burberry to Paul’s Boutique. Other monikers crop up throughout, but these are the main ones.
If Consumed sounds rife with all forms of snobbery, from the inverse to the outright, that’s because it is. And this ought to be expected, too. In a society in which how you consume has been allowed to determine your identity, then snobbery, which was always a vice of the consuming class par excellence, the non-productive aristocracy, is bound to flourish. It allows groups to include initiates and to exclude the vulgar. Hence, as Wallop relentlessly details, the consumption choices of other people (and it is always other people) have now become objects of mockery and often condemnation.
[. . .]
As Wallop records, eating out in the 1950s was for many limited to Lyons Corner Houses or fish-and-chip shops. And it wasn’t just the high-cost of restaurants that deterred many; the arcane rituals of the hotel dining experience were equally off-putting. This is why, argues Wallop, the British embraced the classless, ritual-free environs of the fast-food joint, first in the form of Wimpy and latterly in the shape of McDonald’s or Burger King. ‘Of course, eating out in fast-food places, or indeed any places, never became a classless activity’, writes Wallop. ‘Classless merely became a euphemism for working class. No more so than with fast food, which over time took on a demonic quality, at least in the eyes of those who refused to eat it. Junk food for the junk classes.’
Junk food for the junk classes. In that one sentence, Wallop touches upon the crucial conflation of the object of consumption with those consuming. When Wood-Burning Stovers complain about McDonald’s, they are really complaining about the type of people that eat there.
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Is Lockheed’s C-130 Hercules the all-time champion in US pork barrel politics?
Ian Geldard linked to this rather interesting history lesson on the Lockheed C-130 transport aircraft (the RCAF is also a user of this type of plane, along with a large number of other air forces):
USAF Lockheed Hercules C-130 at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo (Photo from Wikimedia)
Here’s where the story starts to get interesting. After 25 years, the Pentagon decided that it was well stocked with C-130s, so President Jimmy Carter’s administration stopped asking Congress for more of them.
Lockheed was in trouble. A few years earlier, the Air Force had started looking into replacing the Hercules with a new medium-sized transport plane that could handle really short runways, and Lockheed wasn’t selected as one of the finalists. Facing bankruptcy due to cost overruns and cancellations of programs, the company squeezed Uncle Sam for a bailout of around $1 billion in loan guarantees and other relief (which was unusual back then, as William Hartung points out his magisterial Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex).
[. . .]
So what did Lockheed do about the fate of the C-130? It bypassed the Pentagon and went straight to Congress. Using a procedure known as a congressional “add-on” — that is, an earmark — Lockheed was able to sell the military another fleet of C-130s that it didn’t want.
To be fair, the Air Force did request some C-130s. Thanks to Senator John McCain, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) did a study of how many more C-130s the Air Force requested between 1978 and 1998. The answer: Five.
How many did Congress add on? Two hundred and fifty-six.
[. . .]
The Air Force’s approach of passing unwanted Herks off to the Air Guard and Reserves worked out nicely for Lockheed. The company allied with Air Guard and reservist advocacy groups to lobby Congress further. In an era of base closures, heavily lobbied governors would use the arrival of new planes to argue for the continuing life of bases in their states. In turn, states and their congressional delegations would fight to get new planes or hang onto existing ones. It was a veritable Lockheed feedback loop. Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus quoted a Pentagon official as seeing C-130 politics as a twist on the old military-industrial complex: “a triangle of the Guard, Lockheed, and politicians.”
The result: the military was often prevented from retiring the oldest Herks, the ones that really needed to be put out to pasture. For example, as Pincus reported, the Joint Chiefs and the Air Force concluded in 1996 that they had 50 more C-130s than they needed, but Congress stymied efforts to retire any of them. One tactic used was to hold nominees hostage: a Kentucky senator repeatedly held up Air Force promotions until four Kentucky Air Guard C-130s were taken off the chopping block.
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The real cuts to the military budget
In Maclean’s, John Geddes examines the way budget cutbacks are being implemented in Canada’s military:
Perry’s fine-grained analysis starts by setting aside the major parts of defence spending that are, at least in theory, protected from cuts. Last year’s fiscal plan called for more than $1 billion a year to be cut from the defence department’s overall budget of more than $20 billion by 2014-15. That doesn’t seem so tough. But the Conservatives pledged to do that while keeping up the troop strength of the Canadian Forces, at about 68,000 regular members and 27,000 in the reserves, and also protecting most planned capital spending. According to Perry, that means about $12 billion a year was deemed uncuttable — leaving all the reductions to be found somehow in the remaining $8 billion that is spent on the civilian workforce and on military “operations, maintenance and readiness.”
How hard is it to achieve those savings? The clearest indication so far came from Lt.-Gen. Peter Devlin, the commander of the army, in surprising testimony he gave late last year before a Senate committee. Devlin said his land force’s operating budget has been shrunk by an eye-popping 22 per cent—a figure that doesn’t show up anywhere in publicly available defence documents. “As you would expect,” Devlin said with classic officer-class understatement, “that has an effect on people, infrastructure and training.” And he took pains to counter any suggestion that the army should be eliminating desk jobs to save field assets, stressing that administrative and head-office functions occupy only four per cent of his workforce.
[. . .]
Harper’s letter echoed the thrust of Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie’s 2011 “transformation” report. Leslie, who has since retired, conducted an extensive study of defence spending and concluded that the department must “ruthlessly focus” on reducing its spending on outside consultants and private contractors, with the aim of redistributing resources to military units. He delivered his report two years ago. Yet the latest figures available show that the defence department’s spending on professional services and consultants continued to climb to $3.25 billion in 2011-12 from $2.77 billion in 2009-10. And that increase came after a period when head-office growth outstripped the expansion of the fighting forces. According to Leslie’s report, headquarters personnel numbers grew 40 per cent from 2004 to 2010, while the regular forces grew by just 11 per cent.
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