Quotulatiousness

May 21, 2025

AI hallucinations capture the Chicago Sun-Times summer reading list

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

Good luck finding some of the highly recommended books on the Chicago Sun-Times list of summer reading … they don’t actually exist (yet):

Critics aren’t perfect.

Sometimes they get facts wrong. Sometimes their judgment is faulty. Sometimes they dangle their modifiers or split their infinitives with everybody watching.

I’ve been there. And it’s awkward.

But I’ve never seen anything as embarrassing as the “Summer Reading List for 2025” in the Chicago Sun-Times.

It gave glowing reviews to books that don’t exist. And I bet you can guess why.

Yes, the newspaper relied on AI to write the article.

The article starts with a recommendation for Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende. This is Allende’s “first climate fiction novel” where “magical realism meets environmental activism”.

It’s a shame that Allende never wrote this book. Nor did anyone else — the book simply doesn’t exist.

(I’ll predict, however, that an AI-generated book with this title will show up on Amazon within a few days. When you live in a world of AI hallucinations, this is how the business model plays out.)

The next book on the Sun-Times list is The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir. This novel is also non-existent. But the storyline — about rogue AI that gains consciousness — makes me think that the bots are now mocking us.

It doesn’t get better. The first 10 books on the summer reading list are entirely hallucinated.

As the story of the fake reviews spread on social media, the Sun-Times got into damage control mode. It issued a public statement denying responsibility.

But that just makes matters worse.

Why are they publishing garbage without vetting it? And the denial is also implausible.

Somebody at the newspaper must have given the okay to this. The printing presses don’t run themselves (although maybe that will be the next stage of the AI business model).

How is this happening?

We are now several years into the AI revolution. I’m constantly hearing about new, improved bots that are smarter than super-geniuses, and can replace lowly humans.

But the bizarre lapses are getting worse — and more dangerous.

AI is routinely making stupid, nonsensical mistakes that even the most incompetent employee would never make. I’ve met some incompetent journalists over the years, but none would make a boneheaded move of this magnitude.

And this is after a trillion dollars has been sunk into AI by the most powerful corporations in the world. This is after they have soaked up much of the energy grid. This is after all the training and vetting and upgrading.

We’re not talking about beta testing or first generation AI. Silicon Valley is actually bragging about this tech — but it’s stupider than the worst journalist in the country.

May 17, 2025

German democracy … saved by bureaucratic incompetence?

Filed under: Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Checking in to the situation in Germany, it seems that the big secret report compiled by the German spy agency on the extremely extreme extreme right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party is a bit less than what was expected. Okay, a lot less:

In my last post, I wrote that “The campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is not going well“. Today – a mere seventy-two hours later – you could say that the campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is all but dead. This is because the people most committed to banning the AfD also happen to be some of the stupidest, most incompetent legal and political operators the world has ever seen. Their incompetence is so enormous that I am for once willing to entertain conspiracy theories as to why they might have undermined their own project. It is that bad.

Two weeks ago, you may remember, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser forced the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to rush their long-planned upgrade of the AfD and declare the party to be a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation. Word spread of a mysterious 1,100-page assessment, full of damning proofs that allegedly supported this upgrade. This document had to be kept secret, Faeser explained in an interview, “… to protect sources and withhold indications of how our findings were obtained”. So espionage, much secret, wow.

The thing was, the anti-AfD dossier could not have been that secret, because somebody (almost certainly, somebody in the Interior Ministry) immediately leaked it to Der Spiegel, whose journalists published various excerpts in an effort to make the case for how evil and fascist and Nazi and Hitler the AfD are. In this way the press could climax repeatedly in a wave of democratic orgasms over the renewed possibility of an AfD ban, even in the absence of the supersecret report.

The media circus dissipated quickly, however. The publicity campaign, the roll-out – a lot of things went wrong, some of them inexplicably wrong. Still, I thought there was a 40% chance that the Bundestag would try to open ban proceedings sometime this year. That, as I said, was on Monday. What happened on Tuesday, is that Cicero, NiUS and Junge Freiheit all received the secret 1,100-page assessment (actually, it contains 1,108 pages) and published it in its entirety. Since Tuesday evening, a great many people have been reading this document, and they have been realising various things.

The first thing they’ve realised, is that it contains hardly anything derived from supersecret spy sources at all. It is little more than a collection of public statements by AfD politicians. Faeser’s sources-and-methods justification for keeping the report hidden was a total lie.

The second thing they’ve realised, is that it is an abomination. The vast majority of material that the BfV have collected is not even suspect. It is a lot of off-colour jokes, memes, but also just banal nothing statements – thousands and thousands and thousands of them, arranged under various hysterical subject headings. Nothing in here is remotely strong enough to support the case for banning the AfD and a lot of it is also very bizarre in terms of argument. Not only have the prospects of an AfD ban all but evaporated, but I think it’s even likely the party will succeed in their present lawsuit and that the administrative court in Cologne will throw out the “right-wing extremist” label.

May 3, 2025

QotD: When the Cursus Honorum failed, so did the Roman Republic

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Public men in the Roman Republic had always been ambitious — it went with the territory; they built large parts of their culture around it — but by Caesar’s day the vetting process had been completely inverted.

The Old Republic was full of men like Caesar, because people are what they are; there are always potential Caesars running around. But the names of the Old Republic’s Caesars don’t appear in the history books, because back then they still maintained the distinction between process and outcome. If there’s a conflict between them, process must yield, and so even though a potential Caesar did a competent job as quaestor and was ready to stand for curule aedile, he’d be taken aside by an old man (“senate” comes from senex, “old man”) for a stern talking-to … or more than a stern talking-to, if it came to that.

By Julius Caesar‘s day, though, process had completely eclipsed outcome. Again, the “real” Caesar is much debated by historians, but what’s not in dispute is his naked ambition. Everybody knew what Caesar was about, right from the get-go. But since there was no way to stop his climb up the cursus honorum spelled out in the Policies and Procedures Manual, nobody did.

Indeed, by Caesar’s time, the rot was so deep that most (I’d argue all, but I’m not a Classicist) of the offices on the CH were eyewash, just lines on a CV. The curule aediles weren’t managing the grain supply; they had battalions of freedmen running that. They were still putting on games, of course, but they weren’t personally putting them on; again, battalions of clever freedmen did that. The only thing the aedile did for “his” games was pay for them … on credit, and only in order to take the next step up the ladder.

And the rot was, of course, recursive. Caesar at least had clarity: He wanted to be quaestor so he could be aedile; to be aedile so he could be praetor; to be praetor so he could be governor; to be governor so he could be general; to be general so he could be … well, whatever, that’s part of the great debate surrounding Caesar, but it doesn’t matter for our purposes. For us, what matters is that everyone else was doing the same thing, and because all the real work was being done by those battalions of clever freedmen, the quality of Republican leadership dropped off dramatically. How can a praetor-in-name-only accurately judge the competence of an aedile-in-name-only? Yeah, he technically held the office for a year, but he left it as ignorant of its duties as when he entered.

Severian, “Cursus Honorum”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-27.

[NR: Links to the Roman Glossary added.]

April 26, 2025

The Fairey Battle – Light Bomber, Heavy Losses

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Rex’s Hangar
Published 17 Nov 2021

Originally conceived in the early 1930s, by the time the first prototype of the Fairey Battle flew in 1936 it was already becoming obsolete. However, the RAF desperately needed combat aircraft, and so the Battle was put into production. It would go on to fight in the Battle of France, where it would take exceptionally heavy losses due to its slow speed and poor defensive armament. After being retired from front-line duty, the Fairey Battle would go on to becoming a successful training aircraft for the RAF and Commonwealth forces, serving the needs of combat flight schools in Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

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Producing these videos is a hobby of mine. I have a passion for history, and personally own a large collection of books, journals and other texts, and endeavor to do as much research as possible. However if there are any mistakes, please don’t hesitate to reach out and correct anything 🙂

March 14, 2025

“CDU Chancellor hopeful Friedrich Merz is screwing up”

Filed under: Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t follow German politics closely, so I depend on regular updates from euygppius, like this post from the other day which I’m sure wasn’t popular among CDU voters or personal fans of Friedrich Merz, the likely next German Chancellor:

For some time now, I’ve wanted to catalogue in one place all the ways that CDU Chancellor hopeful Friedrich Merz is screwing up. His strategic failures are really a thing to behold; I’ve never seen anybody screw up this frequently and this dramatically before. Yet I have delayed writing this post, above all because I wanted Merz to reach the end of his present streak and stop screwing up for a while. I wanted to have a complete unit – a full collection of screwups – to present to my readers for analysis. I now accept that this is never going to happen, and that the coming months and years are going to provide nothing but an unending parade of screwups, one after the other, each more inexplicable and baffling than the last. We must begin the tiresome work of trying to understand Merz’s screwing up now, because there will only ever be more of this.

As with all deeply rooted phenomena, it is hard to tell where the present parade of screwing up began. There was the lacklustre CDU election campaign and Merz’s ill-advised flirtations with the Greens that began last autumn, which cost the Union parties precious points in the polls. None of that looked auspicious, but the screwing up did not begin in earnest until January, in the wake of Aschaffenburg – when Merz decided to violate the firewall against Alternative für Deutschland. For the first time in history, the CDU, the CSU and the FDP voted with AfD in the Bundestag, first in a successful attempt to pass a meaningless if sternly worded anti-migration resolution, and then in a failed attempt to pass an actual piece of legislation that would take real steps to stem the influx of asylees from the developing world.

This manoeuvre had the real glimmerings of strategy, and so we would do well to ascribe it to Merz’s underlings rather than to Merz himself. It was only superficially an attempt to stop the tide of voter defections to the AfD. Above all, it was an effort to gain leverage over the Greens and the Social Democrats in any future coalition negotiations. Merz and his CDU, sobered by polls showing a left so weakened that they feared having to govern in a nightmare Kenya coalition with the SPD and the Greens both, wanted to send a clear message: “We’re not afraid to achieve parliamentary majorities with the AfD if you won’t go along with our programme”. Had Merz stuck to this line, he’d be in a far better place than he is today. Alas, the man chose to screw up instead. Spooked by yet another wave of leftist protests “against the right” – a “right” which now included not only the AfD but also the CDU and the CSU – Merz lost himself in a string of disavowals. A minority government with AfD support would be unthinkable, he and his lieutenants said. The Union parties would never work with the AfD, he and his lieutenants said.

In this way, Merz’s firewall gambit succeeded only in outraging and energising his future coalition partners, while achieving nothing for himself or his own party. A lot of CDU voters would like to see some measure of cooperation between the Union parties and the AfD, and for his constant never-again-with-the-AfD rhetoric Merz paid a price. The CDU underperformed the polls, crossing the finish line with a catastrophic 28.5% of the vote on 23 February. The Greens whom Merz had spent months courting – at the cost of alienating his own base! – emerged from the vote too weak to give his party a majority, and so the man was left to deal with the Social Democrats, newly radicalised not only by their own dim showing but also by Merz’s firewall trickery.

Thus it came to be that Merz ceded the high ground in negotiations to the SPD, the biggest losers in the 2025 German elections. That is itself remarkable, the kind of thing you could not be certain of achieving even if you tried. And yet it is only the beginning!

March 7, 2025

Bricking the internet

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Phil A. McBride explains how the “net giants” have steadily nibbled away at the built-in resilience of the original internet design so that we’re all far more vulnerable to network outages than ever before:

The Internet was originally conceived in the 1960s to be a resilient, disparate and distributed network that didn’t have any single point of failure. This is still true today. While there are large data centres around the world that aggregate traffic, we don’t depend on them. If one were to go offline, things would slow down, but the data would still flow.

The advent of the cloud, though, has completely changed how we use the Internet, especially in the worlds of business, education and government. And the cloud, alas, is not nearly as resilient.

Fifteen years ago, your average small or medium business would have their own servers. Those servers would be used to send/receive email, store files, and run various business or collaborative applications. Some of these servers may have been hosted offsite at a data centre to provide better security or speed of access, but the physical infrastructure belonged to someone — it was something you could touch and, more importantly, account for. Many companies kept their servers on site.

If a company’s server or network went down, it affected that company. They couldn’t send or receive email, they couldn’t open files, collaborate with staff or clients. They were offline.

But only they were offline.

Fast forward to today. Microsoft 365 dominates the corporate productivity services market with an estimated 45-50 per cent market share worldwide, with Google Workspace coming second, with around 30-35 per cent. This means that approximately 80 per cent of businesses are dependent on one of two vendors for their ability to transact business and communicate at even the most basic level.

Government and government-provided services, like education, health care and defence, are just as reliant on these services as the business world.

In today’s world, when Microsoft’s or Google’s services suffer a hiccup, it doesn’t affect one business. Or ten, or a hundred. Tens of thousands of business, and government offices and civil society institutions, all go offline. Simultaneously. Mom-and-pop stores, multi-billion-dollar corporations, elementary schools, hospitals, entire governments, all go out, all at once.

And we haven’t even talked about how Amazon, Microsoft and Google control almost two-thirds of the world’s web/application hosting market share. If one or all of those services go down, most of the websites you go to on a regular basis would suddenly become unreachable.

Kinda-sorta related to the above is Ted Gioia‘s “State of the Culture” post:

So remember the first rule: The culture always changes first. And then everything else adapts to it.

That’s why teens plugged into the most lowbrow culture often grasp the new reality long before elites figure it out. This was true 50 years ago, and it’s still true today.

So that’s our second rule: If you want to understand the emerging culture, look at the lives of teens and twenty-somethings — and especially their digital lives. (In some cases those are their only lives.)

The web has changed a lot in recent years, hasn’t it? Not long ago, the Internet was loose and relaxed. It was free and easy. It was fun. There wasn’t even an app store.

We made our own rules.

The web had removed all obstacles and boundaries. I could reach out to people all over the world.

The Internet, in those primitive days, put me back in touch with classmates from my youth. It reconnected me with friends I’d made during my many trips overseas. It strengthened my ties with relatives near and far. I even made new friends online.

It felt liberating. It felt empowering.

But it also helped my professional life. I had regular exchanges with writers and musicians in various cities and countries—without leaving the comfort of my home.

I made new connections. I opened new doors.

And this didn’t just happen to me. It happened to everybody.

“The world is flat,” declared journalist Thomas Friedman. All the barriers were gone — we were all operating on the same level. It felt like some imaginary Berlin Wall had fallen.

That culture of flatness changed everything. Ideas spread faster. Commerce moved more easily. Every day I encountered something new from some place far away.

But then it changed.

Twenty years ago, the culture was flat. Today it’s flattened.

I still participate in many web platforms — I need to do it for my vocation. (But do I really? I’ve started to wonder.) But now they feel constraining.

Even worse, they now all feel the same.

Instead of connecting with people all over the world, I now get “streaming content” 24/7.

Facebook no longer wants me stay in touch with friends overseas, or former classmates, or distant relatives. Instead it serves up memes and stupid short videos.

And they are the exact same memes and videos playing non-stop on TikTok — and Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, YouTube shorts, etc.

Every big web platforms feels the exact same.

That whole rich tapestry of my friends and family and colleagues has been replaced by the most shallow and flattened digital fluff. And this feeling of flattening is intensified by the lack of context or community.

The only ruling principle is the total absence of purpose or seriousness.

The platforms aggravate this problem further by making it difficult to leave. Links are censored. Intelligence is punished by the dictatorship of the algorithms. Every exit is blocked, and all paths lead to the endless scroll.

All this should be illegal. But somehow it isn’t.

December 5, 2024

We must always trust the experts, say the experts and their journalistic fart-catchers

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Glenn Reynolds (aka the “Instapundit”) welcomes Nate Silver to the expert-doubting party:

Well. I was writing about this stuff long before Nate got hip. Back in 2017, just as Donald Trump began his first term, I wrote “The Suicide of Expertise”, by way of responding to Tom Nichols’ book, The Death of Expertise. Nichols’ thesis was that the experts were expert, but that ignorant, superstitious Americans rejected their advice out of insecurity and an unwillingness to be proven wrong. My response was that the experts’ actual track record wasn’t looking so good:

    Well, it’s certainly true that the “experts” don’t have the kind of authority that they possessed in the decade or two following World War II. Back then, the experts had given us vaccines, antibiotics, jet airplanes, nuclear power and space flight. The idea that they might really know best seemed pretty plausible.

    But it also seems pretty plausible that Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, “What have experts done for us lately?” Not only have the experts failed to deliver on the moon bases and flying cars they promised back in the day, but their track record in general is looking a lot spottier than it was in, say, 1965.

    It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confident assertions by highly credentialed authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasure.

    And these are not isolated failures. The history of government nutritional advice from the 1960s to the present is an appalling one: The advice of “experts” was frequently wrong, and sometimes bought-and-paid-for by special interests, but always delivered with an air of unchallengeable certainty …

    On Syria, experts in Barack Obama’s administration produced a policy that led to countless deaths, millions of refugees flooding Europe, a new haven for Islamic terrorists, and the upending of established power relations in the mideast. In Libya, the experts urged a war, waged without the approval of Congress, to topple strongman Moammar Gadhafi, only to see — again — countless deaths, huge numbers of refugees and another haven for Islamist terror.

    It was experts who brought us the housing bubble and the subprime crisis. It was experts who botched the Obamacare rollout. And, of course, the experts didn’t see Brexit coming, and seem to have responded mostly with injured pride and assaults on the intelligence of the electorate, rather than with constructive solutions.

And this was long before the experts’ ne plus ultra of failure, the bungled, dishonest, and downright self-serving response to the Covid pandemic. The pandemic stemmed from experts’ arrogance, in the form of illegal “gain of function” research funded by the U.S. and laundered through Chinese labs, was met with ass-covering “wet market” lies to try to conceal that origin, and then with public health measures, such as lockdowns and social distancing and masking rules, that were backed by no actual science at all, and that were cheerfully flouted by those propounding them whenever it suited their purposes. The final nail in the experts’ authority-coffin, though, was when, after all the lockdown hysteria, they approved massive public marches by Black Lives Matter because, we were told, racism was a public health problem.

Well, so are STDs, but they weren’t encouraging anyone to march against gonorrhea.

Rather they were (ab)using their position to promote the leftist cause du jour. Everyone saw through it, and their stock collapsed.

So. Welcome to the party, pal. Nate’s noticing just how far things have gone downhill.

October 30, 2024

Zuckerberg’s bad bet on Virtual Reality

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia notes the anniversary of Mark Zuckerberg’s worst financial decision — the plunge into virtual reality:

A big birthday happens tomorrow. But don’t expect a celebration.

There will be no party, no disco. There will be no cake, no clown, no bouncy house for the kids. No Marilyn Monroe cooing the birthday song.

Just dead silence. But make no mistake — this is a very expensive birthday.

Exactly three years ago, Mark Zuckerberg placed a huge bet on virtual reality. On October 28, 2021, he even changed the name of his company — from Facebook to Meta.

A new company was born. But that’s now a huge embarrassment.

The name Meta is a lasting reminder of the most foolish decision Zuck ever made — even worse than Facemash or those ugly T-shirts.

Of course, that’s not how he saw things three years ago.

“Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life,” the company announced. “In the metaverse,” Zuckerberg bragged, “you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine.”

There was a catch — the tech billionaire needed to convince millions of people to wear virtual reality headsets.

But they looked ridiculous — you literally had to wear blinders if you wanted to enter Mr. Zucker’s neighborhood.

The very next day, I declared that “Meta is for losers”.

“This will never be cool.”

Zuckerberg was “making the wrong bet”, I warned — and gave my reasons:

    The interface looks goofy and cartoonish. Instead of entering the gritty, exciting world of Blade Runner, you’re trapped inside a bad episode of Family Guy …

    And users will look creepy too. You need to lock yourself into a headset to get the full benefit of the metaverse — and there’s no way that Zuckerberg can make that look cool. The people who spend hour after hour in his metaverse will be the subject of jokes and mockery …

    They will be nerds and incels and the most disgruntled members of society, each desperate for escape.

Mark Zuckerberg eventually figured this out. But the company lost more than $20 billion over the next two years in a desperate attempt to convince normal people to abandon reality and enter his fake world.

Even as consumers resisted, Meta refused to admit it had made such a colossal mistake. Just last year, Zuckerberg still denied that he was abandoning virtual reality.

“A narrative has developed that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse,” he told shareholders. “So I just want to say upfront that that’s not accurate.”

Then he did exactly that — retreating from the metaverse he had spent so much money building.

Fortune warned three months ago that Mr. Z’s metaverse “may finally be running out of cash”. Then in August, Meta cancelled the development of a next generation VR headset.

October 22, 2024

VIA Rail’s $1B investment somehow ends up making the trains … slower

Filed under: Cancon, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Chris Selley explains why VIA Rail’s newest locomotives — part of a $1B motive power upgrade program — are making the trains run more slowly in the heaviest-traffic portion of the passenger rail network:

VIA SCV-42 2202 Charger pushing Train 33 through Michael St. in Ottawa over level crossing, 7 March 2023.
Photo by Tiernan Johnson via Wikimedia Commons.

The news this past week for Canada’s long-suffering rail passengers would be funny if it weren’t so utterly pathetic: Government-owned Via Rail’s brand new, nearly $1-billion, much-ballyhooed new Siemens Venture train sets will take longer to navigate the Windsor-Quebec City corridor than their predecessors.

“Via Rail Canada would like to advise its passengers that we are currently experiencing delays on certain trains due to unexpected speed restrictions imposed by CN, the railway infrastructure owner,” a recent email to customers read. “Delays of 30 to 60 minutes are possible on trains travelling on the … corridor.”

The issue concerns signalling at level crossings. CN requires train sets to have a minimum of 32 axles in order to guarantee warning bells and barriers are properly activated as they approach. The Siemens train sets have 24 axles, meaning they have to slow on approach to at least some level crossings — of which there are many hundreds on the corridor — to ensure the signals have indeed activated. These trains were exhaustively tested beforehand on CN rails, which are what Via mainly uses.

The mind boggles as to how this issue could have been missed, and it’s not clear whose fault it is. CN warned Via of the 24-axle issue way back in 2021, according to CN spokesperson Ashley Michnowski, and confirmed the issue once it became official that the Siemens trains wouldn’t meet the 32-axle requirement. Via counters that this all came “without prior notice.”

Either way there’s no excuse. This has been a known issue with these same basic train sets on other North American passenger railways. And maybe the worst part: There’s a workaround technology called a “shunt enhancer” — an alternative way to trip the level-crossing signals remotely — that Siemens actually manufactures. Amtrak announced months ago it was installing them on the same Siemens locomotives Via now uses. Years too late, apparently, Via now says it’s looking at the technology.

Via customers are remarkably forgiving and earnest people, in my experience, but I imagine learning of possible “delays of 30 to 60 minutes” must have set eyes rolling. In my wretched experience in being sentenced to travel Via rail, a 30-minute delay between Ottawa and Toronto counts as a red-letter day. In the week before the new restrictions went into effect on Oct. 11 — just in time for Thanksgiving! — ruinous Via delays included a train that was one hour and 39 minutes late arriving in Toronto from London, which is a two-hour bus ride away. On one Saturday, trains arriving in Toronto from Ottawa and Montreal were on average 71 minutes late.

October 17, 2024

Failing upward into the federal civil service

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Woke Watch Canada charts the rise and rise of Kimberly Murray from failure to higher-paid failure to the federal civil service on a six-figure annual salary:

Kimberley Murray – Image from APTN News

Kimberly Murray has just wasted $10 million dollars of Canadian taxpayers’ hard-earned money with the blessing of two successive Ministers of Justice, David Lametti and Arif Virani.

By June 2022 — after five years as Executive Director at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a one-year stint as Executive Lead at the Survivors’ Secretariat looking for allegedly missing children — Kimberly Renée Murray had failed to produce the name of a single verifiably-missing residential school child.

Despite this abysmal record of six years looking for the name of a verifiably missing child without being able to find one, Kimberly Murray was appointed by Order in Council as a federal civil servant under the Public Service Employment Act as special adviser to the Minister of Justice at a salary in the range of $228,900 – $268,200 to continue her fruitless search:

    Appointment of KIMBERLY RENÉE MURRAY of Toronto, Ontario, to be special adviser to the Minister of Justice, to be known as Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools, to hold office during pleasure for a term of two years, effective June 13, 2022.

    Her Excellency the Governor General in Council, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, under paragraph 127.1(1)(c) of the Public Service Employment Act, appoints Kimberly Renée Murray of Toronto, Ontario, to be special adviser to the Minister of Justice, to be known as Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools, to hold office during pleasure for a term of two years, and fixes her remuneration and certain conditions of employment as set out in the annexed schedule, which salary is within the range ($228,900 – $268,200), effective June 13, 2022.

During the two years of her mandate, while going through her $10 million dollar budget (and according to one of her interviews, knowingly exceeding Treasury Board guidelines), Kimberly Murray failed in her primary mission — i.e., to produce the name of at least one verifiably-missing child.

Despite this spectacular failure, and her admission to the Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples on 21 March 2023 that there are no missing children, the current Minister of Justice, Arif Virani, re-appointed Kimberly Murray for a further six months by Order in Council on 28 May 2024, this time at a salary in the range of $254,000 – $297,800.

September 20, 2024

The Me163 Komet – Rockets Are Dangerous

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Technology, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HardThrasher
Published Jun 3, 2024

The story of the Me163 is a complex and multifaceted one, and I have attempted here to draw together a number of different sources into a narrative covering the political, structural, scientific and operational history. Necessarily I will have missed things and probably got things wrong. Where I know a mistake has been made, you’ll find it in the pinned comment marked “snagging” – one obvious example is Winkle Brown flew a “sharp” start after the war ended on an Me163 in Germany, and a towed flight in the UK, which I missed.

The below then is an extremely limited subset of the resources I’ve pulled on:

Me163 Rocket Interceptor – Stephen Ransom and Hans-Herman Cammann – not for the faint of heart, a book with brilliant nuggets, a drunken editor and a lot of very pretty pictures. This was my primary source.
Rocket Fighter – Marno Ziggler – Now out of print, this is a Hitler Jugend‘s Own Adventure story most of which has some truth in it but a lot of which is Marno wishing to be in his early 20s and flying for the Führer again. You can find it online fairly easily.
The kids probably haven’t got a clue what a video tape is, never mind Betamax https://legacybox.com/blogs/analog/vh… – Betamax vs VHS
Baxter, AD: Walter Rocket Motors for Aircraft, RAE Technote Aero 1668, September 1945 – a Technical note that’s incredibly hard to get hold of, but which I managed to find, quite by chance, in some papers I got years ago. Probably available from the UK National Archives still.
http://www.walterwerke.co.uk/walter/i… – a fantastic archive of all things Walter but it isn’t an https site as a warning.
https://hushkit.net/2019/03/29/the-li… – The coal powered bomber rammer P.13
https://donhollway.com/me-163/ – Bat out of Hell – great website for images of the Me163 as imagined in the Artists’ fever dreams
WW2 Gun Camera: 8th Air Force VS Mess… – Gun Cam Footage of the Me163 and Me262s being shot at and down by various USAAF pilots.
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection… – Air and Space Museum have their usual, brilliant photos and terrible descriptions.

August 27, 2024

Food at your regional end-of-summer fair/exhibition/extravaganza

Filed under: Food, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

For us in the Greater Toronto Area, it’s the Canadian National Exhibition but for a lot of Americans it’s their State Fair. James Lileks considers the sad fact that the interesting and exotic food choices at these shindigs is … overrated:

“Fruity Cereal Tenders”, one of the weird food offerings at the 2024 Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto.
Photo from blogTO, “Here’s all the outrageous food and drinks at the 2024 CNE”

I do not understand is why people go to the Fair and queue up at the hamburger stand. I often think this as I am in the queue at the hamburger stand.

After all, there’s so much more to eat. Corn dogs, for example. A low-flavor tube of minced abattoir sweepings, dipped in batter, plunged in oil, and served on a stick with a sharp point on the end. When you get to the last few bites, you either have to shimmy the butt of the corn dog up the skewer, or sword-swallow the thing so the sharp point spears your soft palate. Condiments? Why, yes — a smear of ketchup, or a smear of mustard, or, if you’re one of those people who believe in grabbing life by the lapels and shouting give me all you got, you have both.

Never in my life have I ever thought “I could go for a Corn Dog right about now,” but put me at the Fair and I have to eat one within five minutes of entering the grounds. It’s like the pistol shot that starts a race, and, like a bullet, goes through you just as fast.

It’s the same with mini-donuts. When I was doing the trivia contest at the newspaper stage, one of the questions was “how many mini-donuts can you eat before you are overcome with self-loathing?” The answer varies, I suppose, according to how much pre-existing self-loathing you bring to the job. Maybe you’re already hating yourself for eating a Sweet Martha’s bucket of cookies, a popular item at the fair. It has a handle so you can amble around as you eat. One of these years I expect it will come with a yoke and a spring-loaded tab that pops them in your you at present intervals, for hands-free consumption. My friends, a bucket of cookies is to personal girth management as a cup of quarters at a casino is to financial planning.

This year’s hot new item is “deep fried ranch dressing”, which seems impossible, like “sugar-dusted humidity on a stick”. How do they do that? Just pour the ranch in the roiling oil and and scoop out a globule?

“Well, first you shape the dressing into patties, then — ”

Wait, no, you cannot shape dressing. It defies your attempts to give it form, unless you’ve added a thickening element. (Of course, everything they serve at the Fair is a thickening element, in a sense.) It’s supposed to be delicious, but I wouldn’t eat one without first unbuttoning my shirt and smearing conducting gel on my chest, just to save time. Maybe even draw a dotted line on my sternum.

Updated to add the correct URL. Management would like to apologize for this error. The people responsible for it have been sacked.

August 9, 2024

A crisis of competence

Filed under: Business, Government, Military, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds on one of the biggest yet least recognized issues of most modern nations — our overall declining institutional competence:

Almost everywhere you look, we are in a crisis of institutional competence.

The Secret Service, whose failures in securing Trump’s Butler, PA speech are legendary and frankly hard to believe at this point, is one example. (Nor is the Butler event the Secret Service’s first embarrassment.)

The Navy, whose ships keep colliding and catching fire.

Major software vendor Crowdstrike, whose botched update shut down major computer systems around the world.

The United States government, which built entire floating harbors to support the D-Day invasion in Europe, but couldn’t build a workable floating pier in Gaza.

Boeing's CST-100 Starliner crew ship approaches the International Space Station on the company's Orbital Flight Test-2 mission

And of course, Boeing, whose Starliner spacecraft is stuck, apparently indefinitely, at the International Space Station. (Its crew’s six-day mission, now extended perhaps into 2025, is giving off real Gilligan’s Island energy.) At present, Starliner is clogging up a necessary docking point at the ISS, and they can’t even send Starliner back to Earth on its own because it lacks the necessary software to operate unmanned – even though an earlier build of Starliner did just that.

Then there are all the problems with Boeing’s airliners, literally too numerous to list here.

Roads and bridges take forever to be built or repaired, new airports are nearly unknown, and the Covid response was extraordinary for its combination of arrogant self-assurance and evident ineptitude.

These are not the only examples, of course, and readers can no doubt provide more (feel free to do so in the comments) but the question is, Why? Why are our institutions suffering from such widespread incompetence? Americans used to be known for “know how,” for a “can-do spirit”, for “Yankee ingenuity” and the like. Now? Not so much.

Americans in the old days were hardly perfect, of course. Once the Transcontinental Railroad was finished and the golden spike driven in Promontory, Utah, large parts of it had to be reconstructed for poor grading, defective track, etc. Transport planes full of American paratroopers were shot down during the invasion of Sicily by American ships, whose gunners somehow confused them for German bombers. But those were failures along the way to big successes, which is not so much the case today.

But if our ancestors mostly did better, it’s probably because they operated closer to the bone. One characteristic of most of our recent failures is that nobody gets fired. (Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle did resign, eventually, but nobody fired her, and I think heads should have rolled on down the line).

August 6, 2024

The CrowdStrike outage and regulatory capture

Filed under: Business, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Peter Jacobsen discusses the July technical and financial fiasco as a faulty software patch from CrowdStrike took down huge segments of the online economy and how regulatory capture may explain why the outage was so widespread:

“CrowdStrike outage at Woolworths in Palmerston North” by Kiwi128 is marked with CC0 1.0 .

On July 19th, something peculiar struck workers and consumers around the world. A global computer outage brought many industries to a sudden halt. Employees at airports, financial institutions, and other businesses showed up to work only to find that they had no access to company systems. The fallout of the outage was huge. Experts estimate that it totaled businesses $5 billion in direct costs.

The company responsible, CrowdStrike, was also severely impacted. Shareholders lost about $25 billion in value, and some are suing the company. The outage has led to expectations of, and calls for, stricter regulations in the industry.

But how did the blunder of one company lead to such a massive outage? It turns out that the supposed solution of “regulation” may have been one of the primary culprits.

Regulatory Compliance

CrowdStrike, ironically, is a cybersecurity firm. In theory, they protect business networks and provide “cloud security” for online cloud computing systems.

Cloud security, in and of itself, is likely a service that businesses would demand on the market, but the benefit of increased security isn’t the only reason that businesses go to CrowdStrike. On their own website, the company boasts about one of its most important features: regulatory compliance.

[…]

When experts who have relationships with companies are called in to help write regulations, they may do so in a way favorable to industry insiders rather than outsiders. Thus, regulation is “captured” by the subjects of regulation.

We can’t say with certainty that this particular outage is the result of an intentional regulatory capture by CrowdStrike, but it seems clear that CrowdStrike’s dominance is, at least in part, a result of the regulatory environment, and, like most large tech companies, they’re not afraid to spend money lobbying.

In any case, without cumbersome regulations, it’s unlikely that cybersecurity would take on such a centralized form. Despite this, as is often the case, issues caused by regulation often lead to more calls for regulation. As economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out:

    Popular opinion ascribes all these evils to the capitalistic system. As a remedy for the undesirable effects of interventionism they ask for still more interventionism. They blame capitalism for the effects of the actions of governments which pursue an anti-capitalistic policy.

So despite the reflexive call for regulation that happens after any disaster, perhaps the best way to avoid problems like this would be to argue that in terms of regulation, less is more.

Me262 – Why It Was Rubbish

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HardThrasher
Published Feb 16, 2024

A brief and sober discussion of the multi-faceted nature of aircraft development in the 3rd Reich, and an assessment of the aircraft itself in context of the political and organisational challenges and changes from 1939-1945. Or to put it another way, why it was rubbish from start to finish.

Timestamps
00:00 – 00:22 – Trailer
00:22 – 01:49 – Introduction
01:49 – 05:14 – Willy Messerschmitt’s World Falls Apart
05:18 – 08:03 – Udet’s Flying Circus
08:07 – 11:26 – Me262’s Development
11:26 – 11:32 – Popcorn
11:33 – 13:37 – The Me163 Affair
13:42 – 19:30 – Milch Tries to Break His Willy
19:33 – 30:18 – Hitler’s Big Brain Moment
30:21 – 42:03 – Speeds and Feed of the Me262
42:05 – 46:53 – Operational History
46:54 – 48:50 – Survivor’s Club
(more…)

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