Published on 27 Aug 2015
Peter Hart described the state of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 as “lunatic persistence in the face of the obvious” – and the Battle of Hill 60 proved just that. Outgunned and with a lack of artillery support, the battle was one of the bloodiest days on the peninsular near Constantinople. The Ottoman capital was still out of reach for the Entente to capture. Meanwhile, the war spread to the Indian border region and on the Western and Eastern Front the carnage continued in the air and on ground.
August 28, 2015
The Battle of Hill 60 – Lunatic Persistence in Gallipoli I THE GREAT WAR – Week 57
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Slick political consultants horrified to discover what people are really thinking
In a post earlier this week, Ace expressed his disdain for the members of the very-well-paid consultant class who are given a lot of money to advise politicians about what the “little people” are thinking:
No matter how low my estimations of our political class, they keep failing to meet my expectations.
I complained on Friday that the vaunted consultant class does not know the most elemental things about the “constituency” they’re paid to advise clients about. I put “constituency” in quotes because it’s quite plain they do not consider the actual grassroots voter as their constituency. In fact, they do not consider them at all.
I have previously said — and I’ve said this a dozen times before, especially in the 2007 amnesty fight — that the Establishment in DC, paid millions and feted as gurus of the political pulse of the nation — knows far, far less than the base than the average low-level blogger who bothers to read his comments and talk with them.
By the way, of course: That’s expressly the reason Andrew Breitbart read the comments, especially here. Well, one reason was that he simply enjoyed them. But the other reason, he told me, was to figure out where people, as a mass, were on issues, where their passion was, where they were going.
You would think that these well-paid consultants, claiming the ability to channel the sentiments of the party, would do this very most basic sort of research into the national mood.
It’s all open source, assholes. You don’t have to pay a dime to do what Breitbart used to, which is to use some program to suck up all comments into a file so he could read them when he didn’t have the internet (on a plane, etc.)
But no — High Guru Frank Luntz is shocked to the point of his legs shaking as the world reels beneath his feet to discover the grassroots really, really despises the Establishment, and no longer trusts them, and in fact considers them political enemies in the same way they consider the Democrats to be political enemies.
This is news to them.
Good work, assholes.
You’re the Smart Ones, right? The “political elite” who employ all sorts of sophisticated and cunning techniques to divine the national mood, huh?
Did you ever think to ask them, Geniuses?
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Google and the (bullshit) European “right to be forgotten”
Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick points and laughs at a self-described consumerist organization’s attempt to force Google to apply EU law to the rest of the world, by way of an FTC complaint:
If you want an understanding of my general philosophy on business and economics, it’s that companies should focus on serving their customers better. That’s it. It’s a very customer-centric view of capitalism. I think companies that screw over their customers and users will have it come back to bite them, and thus it’s a better strategy for everyone if companies focus on providing good products and services to consumers, without screwing them over. And, I’m super supportive of organizations that focus on holding companies’ feet to the fire when they fail to live up to that promise. Consumerist (owned by Consumer Reports) is really fantastic at this kind of thing, for example. Consumer Watchdog, on the other hand, despite its name, appears to have very little to do with actually protecting consumers’ interests. Instead, it seems like some crazy people who absolutely hate Google, and pretend that they’re “protecting” consumers from Google by attacking the company at every opportunity. If Consumer Watchdog actually had relevant points, that might be useful, but nearly every attack on Google is so ridiculous that all it does is make Consumer Watchdog look like a complete joke and undermine whatever credibility the organization might have.
In the past, we’ve covered an anti-Google video that company put out that contained so many factual errors that it was a complete joke (and was later revealed as nothing more than a stunt to sell some books). Then there was the attempt to argue that Gmail was an illegal wiretap. It’s hard to take the organization seriously when it does that kind of thing.
Its latest, however, takes the crazy to new levels. John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s resident “old man yells at cloud” impersonator, recently filed a complaint with the FTC against Google. In it, he not only argues that Google should offer the “Right to be Forgotten” in the US, but says that the failure to do that is an “unfair and deceptive practice.” Really.
As you know by now, since an EU court ruling last year, Google has been forced to enable a right to be forgotten in the EU, in which it will “delink” certain results from the searches on certain names, if the people argue that the links are no longer “relevant.” Some in the EU have been pressing Google to make that “right to be forgotten” global — which Google refuses to do, noting that it would violate the First Amendment in the US and would allow the most restrictive, anti-free speech regime in the world to censor the global internet.
But, apparently John Simpson likes censorship and supporting free speech-destroying regimes. Because he argues Google must allow such censorship in the US. How could Google’s refusal to implement “right to be forgotten” possibly be “deceptive”? Well, in Simpson’s world, it’s because Google presents itself as “being deeply committed to privacy” but then doesn’t abide by a global right to be forgotten. Really.
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The insecurity of the “internet of things” is baked-in right from the start
At The Register, Richard Chirgwin explains why every new “internet of things” release is pretty much certain to be lacking in the security department:
Let me introduce someone I’ll call the Junior VP of Embedded Systems Security, who wears the permanent pucker of chronic disappointment.
The reason he looks so disappointed is that he’s in charge of embedded Internet of Things security for a prominent Smart Home startup.
Everybody said “get into security, you’ll be employable forever on a good income”, so he did.
Because it’s a startup he has to live in the Valley. After his $10k per month take-home, the rent leaves him just enough to live on Soylent plus whatever’s on offer in the company canteen where every week is either vegan week or paleo week.
Nobody told him that as Junior VP for Embedded Systems Security (JVPESS), his job is to give advice that’s routinely ignored or overruled.
Meet the designer
“All we want to do is integrate the experience of the bedside A.M. clock-radio into a fully-social cloud platform to leverage its audience reach and maximise the effectiveness of converting advertising into a positive buying experience”, the Chief Design Officer said (the CDO dresses like Jony Ive, because they retired the Steve Jobs uniform like a football club retiring the Number 10 jumper when Pele quit).
For his implementation, the JVPESS chose a chip so stupid the Republicans want to field it as Trump’s running-mate, wrote a communications spec that did exactly and only what was in the requirements, and briefed the embedded software engineer.
The embedded software engineer only makes stuff actually work, so he earns about one-sixth that of the User Experience Ninja that reports to Jony Ive’s Style Slave and has to live in Detroit. But he’s boring and conscientious and delivers the code.
Eventually, the JVPESS hands over a design to Jony Ive’s Outfit knowing it’ll end in tears.
Two weeks later, Jony Ive’s Style Slave returns to request approval for “just a couple of last minute revisions. We have to press ‘go’ on the project by close-of-business today so if you could just look this over”.
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QotD: The unusually lucky 20th century, meteorologically speaking
… I read a lot of history and thus know a fair bit about how weather impact has been perceived by humans over time. It is a fact that the 20th century was an abnormally lucky hundred years, meteorologically speaking. The facts I managed to jam into tweets included (a) the superstorm that flooded 300 square miles of the Central Valley in California in the 1860s, (b) rainfall levels we’d consider drought conditions were normal in the U.S. Midwest before about 1905, and (c) storms of a violence we’d find hard to believe were commonly reported in the 1800s. I had specifically in mind something I learned from the book Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, which relays eyewitness accounts of thunderstorms so intense that travelers had to steeple their hands over their noses in order to breathe air instead of water; but a sense that storms of really theatrical violence were once common comes through in many other histories.
We had a quiet century geophysically as well — no earthquakes even nearly as bad as the New Madrid event of 1812, which broke windows as far north as Montreal. And no solar storms to compare with the Carrington Event of 1859, which seriously damaged the then-nascent telegraph infrastructure and if it recurred today would knock out power and telecomms so badly that we’d be years recovering and casualties would number in the hundreds of thousands, possibly the millions.
(I’m concentrating on 19th-century reports because those tended to be well-documented, but earlier records tell us it was the 20th century calm that was unusual, not the 19th-century violence.)
The awkward truth is that there are very large forces in play in the biosphere, and when they wander out of the ranges we’re adapted to, we suffer and die a lot and there really isn’t a great deal we can do about it; we don’t operate at the required energy scales. For that matter, I can think of several astronomical catastrophes that could be lurking just outside our light-cone only to wipe out all multicellular life on Earth next week. Reality is like that.
Eric S. Raymond, “Heavy weather and bad juju”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-03.
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