Quotulatiousness

December 15, 2023

Bill S-210 “isn’t just a slippery slope, it is an avalanche”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

You sometimes get the impression that the only person in Ottawa who actually pays attention to online privacy issues is Michael Geist:

“2017 Freedom of Expression Awards” by Elina Kansikas for Index on Censorship https://flic.kr/p/Uvmaie (CC BY-SA 2.0)

After years of battles over Bills C-11 and C-18, few Canadians will have the appetite for yet another troubling Internet bill. But given a bill that envisions government-backed censorship, mandates age verification to use search engines or social media sites, and creates a framework for court-ordered website blocking, there is a need to pay attention. Bill S-210, or the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, was passed by the Senate in April after Senators were reluctant to reject a bill framed as protecting children from online harm. The same scenario appears to be playing out in the House of Commons, where yesterday a majority of the House voted for the bill at second reading, sending it to the Public Safety committee for review. The bill, which is the brainchild of Senator Julie Miville-Duchêne, is not a government bill. In fact, government ministers voted against it. Instead, the bill is backed by the Conservatives, Bloc and NDP with a smattering of votes from backbench Liberal MPs. Canadians can be forgiven for being confused that after months of championing Internet freedoms, raising fears of censorship, and expressing concern about CRTC overregulation of the Internet, Conservative MPs were quick to call out those who opposed the bill (the House sponsor is Conservative MP Karen Vecchio).

I appeared before the Senate committee that studied the bill in February 2022, where I argued that “by bringing together website blocking, face recognition technologies, and stunning overbreadth that would capture numerous mainstream services, the bill isn’t just a slippery slope, it is an avalanche”. As I did then, I should preface criticism of the bill by making it clear that underage access to inappropriate content is indeed a legitimate concern. I think the best way to deal with the issue includes education, digital skills, and parental oversight of Internet use including the use of personal filters or blocking tools if desired. Moreover, if there are Canadian-based sites that are violating the law in terms of the content they host, they should absolutely face investigation and potential charges.

However, Bill S-210 goes well beyond personal choices to limit underage access to sexually explicit material on Canadian sites. Instead, it envisions government-enforced global website liability for failure to block underage access, backed by website blocking and mandated age verification systems that are likely to include face recognition technologies. The government establishes this regulatory framework and is likely to task the CRTC with providing the necessary administration. While there are surely good intentions with the bill, the risks and potential harms it poses are significant.

The basic framework of Bill S-210 is that it creates an offence for any organization making available sexually explicit material to anyone under the age of 18 for commercial purposes. The penalty for doing so is $250,000 for the first offence and up to $500,000 for any subsequent offences. Organizations (broadly defined under the Criminal Code) can rely on three potential defences:

  1. The organization instituted a “prescribed age-verification method” to limit access. It would be up to the government to determine what methods qualify with due regard for reliability and privacy. There is a major global business of vendors that sell these technologies and who are vocal proponents of this kind of legislation.
  2. The organization can make the case that there is “legitimate purpose related to science, medicine, education or the arts”.
  3. The organization took steps required to limit access after having received a notification from the enforcement agency (likely the CRTC).

The enforcement of the bill is left to the designated regulatory agency, which can issue notifications of violations to websites and services. Those notices can include the steps the agency wants followed to bring the site into compliance. This literally means the government via its regulatory agency will dictate to sites how they must interact with users to ensure no underage access. If the site fails to act as instructed within 20 days, the regulator can apply for a court order mandating that Canadian ISPs block the site from their subscribers. The regulator would be required to identify which ISPs are subject to the blocking order.

December 11, 2023

This man built his office inside a lift

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tom Scott
Published 28 Aug 2023

The Baťa Skyscraper, in Zlín, Czechia, is a landmark of architecture. And the office of Jan Antonín Baťa … is an elevator.

Thanks to the museum staff for fact-checking and translation!
(more…)

December 10, 2023

The history of the steam engine … but interactive

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes is pleased to announce the release of a new ongoing project to illustrate the steam engine in an interactive format:

I’m excited to announce something I’ve been quietly working on for a few months now behind the scenes. Some of you may be familiar with the explorable interactive articles of Bartosz Ciechanowski. They are so clearly written and so cleverly explorable, that they give an intuitive grasp of how many very complicated technologies work. My favourite is his article on mechanical watches. Be warned: if you’ve not seen these before, you’re about to lose a good few hours.

But his article on watches — which came out just as I was doing some research on the development of watches, and which proved an invaluable reference work — got me thinking about how great it would be to have something similar not just for how current technologies function, but to show how they changed over time. Wouldn’t it be great, I dreamed, to have a similarly intuitive way to explore and appreciate the process of improvement. And to correct lots of misapprehensions about the development of various technologies along the way.

As it turned out, my fellow inventions history fanatic Jason Crawford, who runs the non-profit The Roots of Progress, had been thinking along the same lines. (Drumroll starts softly.) So with the help of the Matt Brown we’ve been able to realise what is hopefully just the first small step of our vision. (Drumroll intensifies.) Based on my recent work re-writing the standard pre-history of the steam engine (drumroll crescendoes), allow me to present:

(Cue trumpets!)

The interactive, animated, **Origins of the Steam Engine**

Alongside contemporary illustrations of the many devices, you can play around with the animated models, dragging them to see them from different angles. It introduces what are so far the only interactive and animated models yet made of a great many devices — from Philo of Byzantium’s 3rd Century BC experiments, to Salomon de Caus’s 1610s solar-activated and self-replenishing fountains and musical instruments, and the 1606 steam engine of the Spanish engineer Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont:

It also contains the first depictions of the 1630s and 40s devices of Kaspar Kalthoff and William Petty. These are the experiments I discovered about a year ago, which I hope will now be given a place in the canon of the history of the steam engine. (You can read my discussion of the evidence I’d stumbled across about them here.)

December 9, 2023

The coming Micro-Macro culture war … and who’s going to win it

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia outlines the dismal state of the “macro” culture — television, movies, newspapers, book publishing and all the big corporations that control them — with the dynamism of the “micro” culture:

In the beginning, all culture was microculture.

You knew what was happening in your tribe or village. But your knowledge of the wider world was limited.

So you had your own songs and your own stories. You had your own rituals and traditions. You even had your own language.

But all these familiar things disappeared when you went off into the world. That was dangerous, however. That’s why only heroes, in traditional stories, go on journeys.

You learn on the journey. But you might not survive.

But all that changed long before I was born.

In my childhood, everything was controlled by a monoculture. There were only three national TV networks, but they were pretty much the same.

    When I went to the office, back then, we had all watched the same thing on TV the night before. We had all seen the same movie the previous weekend. We had all heard the same song on the radio while driving to work.

The TV shows were so similar that they sometimes moved from CBS to NBC, and you never noticed a change. The newscasters also looked pretty much the same and always talked the same — with that flat Midwestern accent that broadcasters always adopted in the US.

The same monoculture controlled every other creative idiom. Six major studios dominated the film business. And just as Hollywood controlled movies, New York set the rules in publishing. Everything from Broadway musicals to comic books was similarly concentrated and centralized.

The newspaper business was still local, but most cities had 2 or 3 daily newspapers — and much of the coverage they offered was interchangeable. Radio was a little more freewheeling, but eventually deregulation allowed huge corporations to acquire and standardize what happened over the airwaves. [NR: I suspect the “freewheeling” went away once the government started imposing regulations, and the corporate consolidation was enabled when they “deregulated” the radio licensing regime several decades later.]

When I went to work in an office, back then, we had all watched the same thing on TV the night before. We had all seen the same movie the previous weekend. We had all heard the same song on the radio while driving to work.

And that’s why smart people back then paid attention to the counterculture.

The counterculture might be crazy or foolish or even boring. But it was still your only chance to break out of the monolithic macroculture.

Many of the art films I saw at the indie cinema were awful. But I still kept coming back — because I needed the fresh air these oddball movies provided. For the same reason, I read the alt weekly newspapers and kept tabs on alt music.

In fact, whenever I saw the word alt, I paid attention.

That doesn’t mean that I hated the major TV networks, or the large daily newspaper, or 20th Century Fox. But I craved access to creative and investigative work that hadn’t been approved by people in suits working for large organizations.

The Internet should have changed all this. And it did — but not much. Even now the collapse in the monoculture is still in its early stages.

But that’s about to change.

If you don’t pay close attention, the media landscape seems pretty much the same now as it did in the 1990s. The movie business is still controlled in Hollywood. The publishing business is still controlled in New York. The radio stations are still controlled by a few large companies. And instead of three national TV networks plus PBS, we have four dominant streaming platforms — who control almost 70% of the market.

So we still live in a macro culture. But it feels increasingly claustrophobic. Or even worse, it feels dead.

Meanwhile, a handful of Silicon Valley platforms (Google, Facebook, etc.) have become more powerful than the New York Times or Hollywood studios or even Netflix. It’s not even close — the market capitalization of Google’s parent Alphabet is now almost ten times larger than Disney’s.

But here’s the key point — these huge tech companies rely on the microculture for their dominance.

Where is Facebook without users contributing photos, text and video? Where is Google’s YouTube without individual creators?

In terms of economic growth or audience capture, the microculture has already won the war. But it doesn’t feel that way.

Why not?

First and foremost, Silicon Valley is a reluctant home for the microculture. To some extent Alphabet and Facebook are even going to war with microculture creators — they try to make money with them even while they punish them.

  • So Mark Zuckerberg needs creators, but won’t even let them put a live link on Instagram and limits their visibility on Facebook and Threads.
  • Alphabet needs creators to keep YouTube thriving, but gives better search engine visibility to total garbage that pays for placement.
  • Twitter also claims it wants to support independent journalists — but if you’re truly independent from Elon Musk, your links are brutally punished by the algorithm.

This tension won’t go away, and next year it will get worse. The microculture will increasingly find itself at war with the same platforms they rely on today.

And legacy media and non-profits are even more hostile to emerging media. Go see who wins Pulitzer Prizes, and count how many journalists on alternative platforms get honored.

I’ll save you the trouble. They don’t.

December 3, 2023

Every Construction Machine Explained in 15 Minutes

Filed under: Technology, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published 15 Aug 2023

A very quick overview of nearly every machine you’ll see on a construction site.

It takes a lot of big tools to build the roads, dams, sewage lift stations, and every other part of the constructed environment. To me, there’s almost nothing more fun than watching something get built, and that’s made all the better when you know what all those machines do.
(more…)

December 1, 2023

“I considered shopping a proposal for an anti-helicopter parenting book called Your Kid Sucks, but for some strange reason my agent dissuaded me”

Filed under: Education, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Freddie deBoer on the modern phenomenon of “helicopter parenting”:

Collapse in childhood freedom – Graphic showing the diminishing “free ranges” of each generation of an English family.

For the New York Times, Jessica Grose details how new online grading systems allow parents to track the progress of their children not from year to year, semester to semester, report card to report card, but week to week or even day by day. The results are depressingly predictable, in today’s parenting environment. There’s stress for students and teachers alike, a collapse in interest in learning in and of itself, an adversarial relationship between parents and teachers, and the rise of “hyperchecking”, where parents complain about each and every single grade that isn’t an A. The piece is about K-12, but Grose notes that parents are increasingly seeking access to college online gradebooks, which seems crazy to me; as someone who’s taught a lot of college classes, the idea of someone constantly monitoring a student’s grade with the mindset of a litigious lawyer sounds awful. But then again, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Here’s a piece about helicopter parenting extending into the college years to the extent that the parents are arranging social calendars. Of their college-age children.

I’ve been thinking about these issues for some time — I considered shopping a proposal for an anti-helicopter parenting book called Your Kid Sucks, but for some strange reason my agent dissuaded me — and what I can’t stop wondering is why parents don’t stop doing this stuff for the good of their kids themselves. There are social and philosophical critiques to be made of helicopter parenting, some very good ones. But we never need to wonder why people choose to pursue selfish interests over social or philosophical ones. What consistently surprises me is that parents keep puttering along in the clouds above their kids, binoculars in hand, when there seem to be really compelling arguments against doing that for reasons that are completely aligned with the selfish interests of the kids. I get ignoring social responsibility for the sake of your kid; it’s hard to understand ignoring what’s best for your kid for the sake of your kid.

There’s the social case to be made against helicopter parenting, of course. If you wanted to define the essential moral project of human beings in the broadest terms possible, you could do worse than “put others before self”. Aggressive parenting allows people to juke this basic logic — parents who act as though their child’s best interest is the only important criterion are, in a literal sense, putting someone else before themselves. “Hey, I may be disadvantaging already-disadvantaged kids with my hyperactive parenting, but I’m doing it for a greater cause than myself.” And the intrinsic (genetic) dedication to the good of one’s child obliterates the broader social concerns once freed from the guilt of traditional for-myself selfishness. But hyper-parenting still reflects selfishness, putting your own kin above the interest of everyone else, especially in cases where the harm done to society is a lot bigger than the benefit to your child. Academic malfeasance like the Varsity Blues scandal has obvious negative social consequences, for example, while those specific kids faced only going to slightly less competitive or desirable schools had there been no fraud in their applications. Less directly illicit behavior, like grade grubbing — which, among other things, inevitably benefits the students with the parents who are the most aggressive and who hold the most social capital — are a greyer area, but ultimately do more to unbalance an already-unbalanced system. If these parents were confronted with the opportunity to do this for themselves, I genuinely think that most of them would decline, out of a sense of social obligation. But once it’s “for my kid”, it’s no holds barred.

I think absolutely all parenting contains a little narcissism, and that’s OK; it’s probably a part of our genetic endowment that helps compel parents to nurture their children, and anyway parenting is a tough job that we shouldn’t expect people to perform with no sense of self-satisfaction. But it is one of those quirks of our social order that the parents who are the most politically progressive, who most ardently advocate for a society that serves all of our people, are often also the most unapologetic about putting their thumb on the scale for their own children. Plus, the sort of second-order selfishness of parenting allows for the sidestepping of more philosophical objections to helicopter parenting. These objections are less about the social good of others and more about the content of our individual characters. These include personal values such as the notion that we just should, as human beings, be able to live with a degree of independence in youth; that we just should experience hardship and the consequences of our actions to better appreciate what it means to be alive; that we just should, as human beings, secure our own interests to whatever degree we’re able, without help from above, including in school; that we just should operate as though we are but one in a broad collection of human beings, all of whom matter as much as we do, for our own spiritual good. The thing about these personal values is that they’re only motivating if they are indeed personal — that is, these might sway an individual, but not even occur to their parents, and in our system parents have remarkable ability to obstruct the agency of their kids. They can do the dirty work the kids might not do for themselves.

November 30, 2023

Canadian government declares victory over Google, then lays down its arms and marches into captivity

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Trudeau government has won a glorious, historic victory over the evil capitalistic powers of Google in the war of Bill C-18. Let all patriotic Canadians raise their hands to cheer our victorious politicians before they have to admit out loud that they fucked up real good:

Heritage Minister Pascale St. Onge has surrendered to Google and Canadian media have avoided what would have been a catastrophic exclusion from the web giant’s search engine.

In the short term, this is very good news. The bureaucrats at Heritage must have performed many administrative contortions to find the words needed in the Online News Act‘s final regulations to satisfy Google, a beast which isn’t easily soothed. In doing so, they have managed to avoid what Google was threatening — to de-index news links from its search engine and other platforms in Canada. Given that Meta had already dropped the carriage of news on Facebook and Instagram in response to the same legislation, Google’s departure would have constituted a kill shot to the industry.

Instead, the news business will get $100 million in Google cash. For this, all its members will now fight like so many pigeons swarming an errant crust of bread.

The agreement will also allow the government, while surrounded by an industry whose reputation and economics have been devastated by this policy debacle, to attempt to declare victory. Signs of that are already evident.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that while 100 million bucks is nothing to sneeze at, in the grand scheme of things it is a drop in the bucket for an industry in need of at least a billion dollars if it is to recover any sense of stability. Indeed, when News Media Canada first began begging the government to go after Google and Meta for cash, some involved were selling the idea that sort of loot was possible.

This did not turn out to be so.

Instead of the $100,000 per journo cashapalooza that was once hoped for, the final tally will be more like $6,666.00 per ink-stained wretch.

That figure is based on two assumptions. The first is that the government has agreed to satisfy Google’s desire to pay a single sum to a single defined industry “collective” that would then divide the loot on a per-FTE (full-time employee) basis to everyone granted membership in the industry’s bargaining group. Google had made it clear it had no interest in conducting multiple negotiations and exposing itself to endless and costly arbitrations. So, as we have a deal and Google held all the cards, it’s fair to assume it got what it wanted — a single collective with a single agreement and a single cheque.

November 27, 2023

The slackening pace of technological innovation

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Freddie deBoer thinks we’re living off the diminishing fumes of a much more innovative and dynamic era:

I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall – three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.

At one point, I was giving my little spiel about how we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation – that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side. You’ve heard this from me before, and as before I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.

Of course definitional issues are paramount here, and we can always debate what constitutes major or revolutionary change. Certainly the improvements in medical care in the past half-century feel very important to me as someone living now, and one saved life has immensely emotional and practical importance for many people. What’s more, advances in communication sciences and computer technology genuinely have been revolutionary; going from the Apple II to the iPhone in 30 years is remarkable. The complication that Gordon and other internet-skeptical researchers like Ha-Joon Chang have introduced is to question just how meaningful those digital technologies have been for a) economic growth and b) the daily experience of human life. It can be hard for people who stare at their phones all day to consider the possibility that digital technology just isn’t that important. But ask yourself: if you were forced to live either without your iPhone or without indoor plumbing, could you really choose the latter? I think a few weeks of pooping in the backyard and having no running water to wash your hands or take a shower would probably change your tune. And as impressive as some new development in medicine has been, there’s no question that in simple terms of reducing preventable deaths, the advances seen from 1900 to 1950 dwarf those seen since. To a remarkable extent, continued improvements in worldwide mortality in the past 75 years have been a matter of spreading existing treatments and practices to the developing world, rather than the result of new science.

ANYWAY. You’re probably bored of this line from me by now. But I was talking about this to these college kids, none of whom were alive in a world without widespread internet usage. We were talking about how companies market the future, particularly to people of their age group. I was making fun of the new iPhone and Apple’s marketing fixation on the fact that it’s TITANIUM. A few of the students pushed back; their old iPhones kept developing cracks in their casings, which TITANIUM would presumably fix. And, you know, if it works, that’s progress. (Only time and wear and tear will tell; the number of top-of-the-line phones I’ve gone through with fragile power ports leaves me rather cynical about such things.) Still, I tried to get the students to put that in context with the sense of promise and excitement of the recent past. I’m of a generation that was able to access the primitive internet in childhood but otherwise experienced the transition from the pre-internet world to now. I suspect this is all rather underwhelming for us. When you got your first smartphone, and you thought about what the future would hold, were your first thoughts about more durable casing? I doubt it. I know mine weren’t.

Why is Apple going so hard on TITANIUM? Well, where else does smartphone development have to go? In the early days there was this boundless optimism about what these things might someday do. The cameras, obviously, were a big point of emphasis, and they have developed to a remarkable degree, with even midrange phones now featuring very high-resolution sensors, often with multiple lenses. The addition of the ability to take video that was anything like high-quality, which became widespread a couple years into the smartphone era, was a big advantage. (There’s also all manner of “smart” filtering and adjustments now, which are of more subjective value.) The question is, who in 2023 ever says to themselves “smartphone cameras just aren’t good enough”? I’m sure the cameras will continue to get refined, forever. And maybe that marginal value will mean something, anything at all, in five or ten or twenty years. Maybe it won’t. But no one even pretends that it’s going to be a really big deal. Screens are going to get even more high-resolution, I guess, but again – is there a single person in the world who buys the latest flagship Samsung or iPhone and says, “Christ, I need a higher resolution screen”? They’ll get a little brighter. They’ll get a little more vivid. But so what? So what. Phones have gotten smaller and they’ve gotten bigger. Some gimmicks like built-in projectors were attempted and failed. Some advances like wireless charging have become mainstays. And the value of some things, like foldable screens, remains to be seen. But even the biggest partisans for that technology won’t try to convince you that it’s life-altering.

This Cold War bomber was perfect. Why was it cancelled? | TSR2

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Imperial War Museums
Published 9 Aug 2023

In 1951, Britain introduced the English Electric Canberra. It would go onto become the RAF’s longest serving aircraft, designed to operate at high level. It was an incredibly efficient aircraft, but by the late 1950s everything changed. The Soviet Union brought into service brand new surface-to-air missiles and suddenly overnight the Canberra was vulnerable.

Now the British government needed a new aircraft, one that could beat this threat and fly under the radar. It was a huge ask for the technology of the time, but had it been successful the aircraft itself would have been a world beater. In this epsiode of Duxford in Depth, Liam Shaw takes a details look at the aircraft that never was, the BAC TSR-2.
(more…)

November 25, 2023

Crystal Palace Station is Needlessly Magnificent

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jago Hazzard
Published 9 Aug 2023

Crystal Palace and the station built for it. Well, one of them.
(more…)

November 23, 2023

Clown world is what you get when children run things in the real world

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theophilus Chilton on the overgrown children who populate what used to be the adult world in the West:

If you’ve been around dissident Right circles for any length of time, you’re probably seen the term “clown world” used to describe the modern Western world. If you’ve paid any attention at all to the state of the world around us, you know just how apt of a description that term really is. Modernity as it is expressed today transcends the types of degeneracy and corruption that have been seen in previous decadent periods and has plumbed to nadirs of human depravity that previous generations would have literally found unspeakable because they would not have had the vocabulary to even describe them. To any rational adult observer of any previous age, no matter how dissolute, today’s western social, political, and moral situation would seem completely clownish and unserious.

That this would be the case is practically inevitable given the type of people involved within the plethora of left-wing causes and intersectionality factions. As a general rule, the political and cultural Left are very childish, not just in their behaviour, but also in their worldview, demeanor, and mindset. Any normal person who has ever dealt with them on social media (or the real world, if you’ve had the misfortune) can abundantly testify to this. Now, I’m not really talking about the “boss lefties”, the people who really run the show concerning left-wing activism. Rather, I’m describing the rank-and-file lefties who fill out the echelons of “ground level” activism – ranging from the antifa street drek to the college students whining about microaggressions to the HR representatives in multinational corporations.

I sincerely believe that to understand the psychology of those on the Left, one must approach the issue from the standpoint of juvenile behaviourism. Observing how and why children – as in actual children – act as they do will shed light on why those on the Left are the way they are. I want to emphasise that what I’m saying here isn’t meant to be the usual derogation that people on opposite sides of the political divide routinely throw at each other. I am literally saying that, for whatever reason, the stunting of the emotional and rational growth of the minds of those who are drawn to the hard core of the Left results in similarities in psyche and behaviour between the two groups.

The first and most obvious similarity revolves around the acceptance of wishful thinking as a credible alternative to verifiable reality. This manifests itself in two related ways – the willingness to believe fantasies that have no credible claims to being truth, and the concurrent unwillingness to accept legitimate evidences which disagree with those fantasies.

Anyone who has kids knows that when a small child wants to believe something, they’re going to believe it, no matter what you say or show them to the contrary. Children do this because they do not have a firm grasp on the nature of reality, since they’re still essentially learning from the world around them what reality even is. They haven’t quite learned yet “how the world works”, so to speak, hence they’re still open to “other possibilities”, and assume that if they want these possibilities to be, then they can be.

Sadly, left-wing activists and SJWs operate on essentially the same set of basic premises. Despite all evidences to the contrary, they will believe that homosexuality is normal, people can actually change their sexes, adult-child sexual relationships are healthy, large-scale third world immigration is enriching, computer simulations that predict extremes of global warming are credible reflections of actual climatological science, and so forth. Instead of accepting that arguments to the contrary can even exist, much less penetrate their self-contained fact space, leftists will attempt to mold reality to their preferences by dismissing contrary arguments with one of more “signaling phrases” (i.e. racist, sexist, transphobic, etc.). In this way, they believe they have negated the very existence of those contrary arguments, thus preserving their preferred perceptions.

Another area of similarity is seen in the social dynamics of cliquishness, which both children and leftists display in social settings. We should understand that cliquishness involves much more than the mere existence of in-groups and out-groups. Everybody has groups to which they belong and do not belong, and that is a fundamental factor in human sociability. What makes cliquishness different is that it involves the purposeful engineering of social dynamics for the objective of establishing the power of and loyalty to one or a small group of actors within a set which normally would act as a broad in-group. In other words, it functions as a way of destructively dividing a body of people who you would typically find bound together by more commonalities than differences. For children, this could be classmates within a school setting. For adults, it could mean anything from an office or church environment all the way up to the national level. Ostensibly, children at a school are all there for the same purpose. In the corporation, workers are, in theory, all supporting the company’s stated goals. Within a nation, a sense of asabiyya, of social solidarity, is supposed to obtain.

The whole purpose of left-wing activism is to destroy social solidarity, and to do so in an ever-changing and unpredictable manner. Within cliques, the accepted in-group is ever-shifting and individual members can be subject to sudden changes in status among the group based on anything from personal whim to the requirements of a newly imposed ideological orthodoxy. This is seen regularly on the Left and serves to demonstrate the fragility of the Left’s intersectionality alliance.

November 21, 2023

“Self-checkouts are not quite Skynet T-800 death dealers. Sarah Connor can rest easy – for now”

Filed under: Britain, Business, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I realize the problem is me, in that I hate self-checkout kiosks with a fiery passion and have been known to abandon any plans to purchase from a store if there is no human assigned to the checkout desk. I decline (with thanks) all offers to use the self-checkout — several of which are often unused — while lined up three or four deep at the one human’s work station. It must be my Luddite side showing. But, as Christopher Gage shows here, I’m not completely alone:

Self-checkout using NCR Fastlane machines at a Sainsbury’s store in the UK.
Photo by Magnus Manske via Wikimedia Commons.

“He’s got a problem with potatoes,” said the condemned, guarding the self-checkout machines. Potatoes plague them. Carrier bags flummox them. ‘Surprising item on the scale,’ it squeaked as if I were weighing up a kilo of black-tar heroin.

The retirement refusenik tapped a code on the screen for the third occasion before returning to his post. ‘Unexpected item in the bagging area.’ Embarrassed, I marshalled my friend — the Hobbity, amenable man with the silver slugs for eyebrows — for the fourth time. He recanted a well-worn sop dispensed to young dotards like me: “Don’t take it personally,” he said. “He just doesn’t like you.”

Self-checkouts are not quite Skynet T-800 death dealers. Sarah Connor can rest easy — for now.

After a little while, the machine let me go. The ordeal, fractious and infinitely slower than employing the helpful man to man a till, was over. Then, the devil-device sucker-punched square in the testes.

“Lovely to see you bye for now,” read the screen. Sinister, like a Jehovah’s Witness grinning. No comma after the introductory clause?! The insolent swine. I fought the primal urge to drown the machine in Coca-Cola and watch it crackle. The clean-up would be Harold’s job. He had enough on his plate.

Mercifully, one supermarket has sacked these silly machines.

Booths, a posh retailer up north, has retired self-checkouts in all but two of their stores. The good burghers of Booths reckon humans talking to other humans is a groundbreaking idea that will catch on in future.

“We have based this not only on what we feel is the right thing to do but also from having received feedback from our customers,” they said.

“Delighting customers with our warm northern welcome is part of our DNA.”

Wearily, Booths did what British northerners must do lest they spontaneously combust — they peacocked their northernness. Apparently, to be born on a particular patch of this floating rock bestows northerners an umbilical, friendly mien.

Northerners cannot help themselves. POV: You encounter a northerner in a pub: “A malignant tumour, you say? You wanna get yourself a northern tumour. Northern tumours are far less aggressive than those bloody southern tumours. It’s a fact! Northern tumours still have a sense of community, you see. Not like southern tumours …”

I must forgive them. Booth’s “northern welcome” is a good thing. Entities imbued with DNA are a good thing. Even one fewer self-service checkout is a good thing.

From where Booth’s tread, others may follow. The numbers don’t tell fibs.

Self-checkouts mutate even the most cherubic of citizens into a degenerate thief. Stores with self-service checkouts suffer double the shrinkage (4%) — industry-speak for pilfering and thieving.

Researchers say the temptation can prove too much, provoking our inner tea leaf into a spot of half-inching. Self-checkouts goad miscreants into slapping a “Reduced to £1” sticker on a litre of Jameson.

Booths have bucked a trend. A fatuous, anti-human trend.

Update: Fixed broken URL.

QotD: Collabortage

Filed under: Business, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Yes, that’s a new word in the blog title: collabortage. It’s a tech-industry phenomenon that needed a name and never had one before. Collabortage is what happens when a promising product or technology is compromised, slowed down, and ultimately ruined by a strategic alliance between corporations that was formed (at least ostensibly) to develop it and bring it to market.

Collabortage always looks accidental, like a result of exhaustion or management failure. Contributing factors tend to include: poor communication between project teams on opposite sides of an intercorporate barrier, never-resolved conflicts between partners about project objectives, understaffing by both partners because each expects the other to do the heavy lifting, and (very often) loss of internal resource-contention battles to efforts fully owned by one player.

Occasionally the suspicion develops that collabortage was deliberate, the underhanded tactic of one partner (usually the larger one) intended to derail a partner whose innovations might otherwise have disrupted a business plan.

Eric S. Raymond, “Collabortage”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-16.

November 17, 2023

Prometheus

Filed under: Books, Greece, History, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Virginia Postrel tries to correct the common misinterpretation of the story of the Titan Prometheus:

“The Torture of Prometheus” by Salvator Rosa (1615-1673)
Oil painting in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Corsini via Wikimedia Commons.

Listening to Marc Andreessen discuss his Techno-Optimist Manifesto on the Foundation for American Innovation’s Dynamist podcast, I was struck by his repetition of something that is in the manifesto and is completely wrong. “The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares,” he writes.1 On the podcast, he elaborated by saying that, although fire has many benefits, the Prometheus myth focuses on its use as a weapon. He said something similar in a June post called “Why AI Will Save the World“:

    The fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us is deeply coded into our culture. The Greeks expressed this fear in the Prometheus Myth – Prometheus brought the destructive power of fire, and more generally technology (“techne”), to man, for which Prometheus was condemned to perpetual torture by the gods.

No. No. No. No.

Prometheus is punished for loving humankind. He stole fire to thwart Zeus’ plans to eliminate humanity and create a new subordinate species. He is a benefactor who sacrifices himself for our good. His punishment is an indicator not of the dangers of fire but of the tyranny of Zeus.

Prometheus is cunning and wise. His name means foresight. He knows what he is doing and what the likely consequences will be.

Eventually his tortures end when he is rescued by the hero Herakles (aka Hercules), who shoots the eagle charged with eating Prometheus’ liver every day, only for it to grow back to be eaten again.

The Greeks honored Prometheus. They celebrated technē. They appreciated the gifts of civilization.

The ancient myth of Prometheus is not a cautionary tale. It is a reminder that technē raises human beings above brutes. It is a myth founded in gratitude.

    1. Frankenstein isn’t The Terminator either. Frankenstein is a creator who won’t take responsibility for his creation, a father who rejects and abandons his child. The Creature is frightening and dangerous but he is also the book’s moral center, a tragic, sympathetic character who is feared and rejected by human beings because of his appearance. Only then does he turn deadly. Frankenstein arouses pity and terror because we empathize with its central figure and understand his rage.

    The novel’s most reasonable political reading is not as a story of the dangers of science but as a parable of slavery and rebellion. “By the eighteen-fifties, Frankenstein’s monster regularly appeared in American political cartoons as a nearly naked black man, signifying slavery itself, seeking his vengeance upon the nation that created him,” writes historian Jill LePore, who calls the “Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model … a weak reading of the novel.” I agree.

    The Romantics tended to identify with Prometheus and Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote a play called Prometheus Unbound, further undermining the reading of Frankenstein as an anti-Promethean fable.

November 15, 2023

“If you cannot make your own pig iron, you are just LARP’n as a real power”

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

CDR Salamander talks about the importance of an old industry to a modern industrial economy:

We probably need to start this out by explaining exactly what a blast furnace is and why it is important if you want to be a sovereign nation.

First of all, what it does;

    The purpose of blast furnace is to chemically reduce and physically convert iron oxide into liquid iron called “hot metal” The blast furnace is a huge, steel stack lined with refractory brick where iron ore, coke and limestone are charged into the top and preheated air is blown into the bottom. The raw materials require 6 to 8 hours to descend to the bottom of the furnace where they become the final product of liquid slag and liquid iron. These liquid products are drained from the furnace at regular intervals. The hot air that was blown into the bottom of the surface ascends to the top in 6 to 8 seconds after going through numerous chemical reactions. Once the blast furnace is started it continuously runs for four to ten years with only short stops to perform planned maintenance.

Why are blast furnaces so important? Remember the middle part of Billy Joel’s “Iron, coke, chromium steel?”

“Coke” is in essence purified coal, almost pure carbon. It is about the only thing that can at scale make “new” or raw iron, aka “pig iron”. Only coke in a blast furnace can make enough heat to turn iron ore in to iron. You can’t get that heat with an electric furnace.

Pig iron is the foundation of everything that follows that makes an industrial power. If you cannot make your own pig iron, you are just LARP’n as a real power.

It takes a semester at least to understand this, but here is all you really need to know;

    Primary differences

    While the end product from each of these is comparable, there are clearly differences between their capabilities and process. Comparing each type of furnace, the major distinctions are:

    Material source – blast furnaces can melt raw iron ore as well as recycled metal, while electric arc furnaces only melt recycled or scrap metal.

    Power supply – blast furnaces primarily use coke to supply the energy needed to heat up the metal, while EAFs use electricity to accomplish this.

    Environmental impact – because of the fuels used for each, EAFs can produce up to 85% less carbon dioxide than blast furnaces.

    Cost – EAFs cost less than blast furnaces and take up less space in a factory.

    Efficiency – EAFs also reach higher temperatures much faster and can melt and produce products more quickly, as well as having more precise control over the temperature compared to blast furnaces.

We’ll get to that environmental impact later, but the “Material source” section is your money quote.

Without a blast furnace, all you can do is recycle scrap iron.

You cannot fight wars at scale if all you have is scrap iron. You cannot be an industrial hub off of just scrap iron. If you are a nation of any size, you then become economically and security vulnerable at an existential level. I don’t care how much science fiction you get nakid and roll in; wars are won by steel, ungodly amounts of steel.

Where do you get the steel to build your warships? Your tanks? Your factories? Your buildings? Your factories?

If you can only use scrap, then you are simply a scavenger living off the hard work of previous generations. Eventually you run out. You will wind up like the cypress mills of old Florida where, once they ran out of cypress trees, they simply sold off the cypress lumber their mills were constructed of … and then went bankrupt.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress