Hollywood values at CBS

Ronan Farrow is exposing CBS Chairman and CEO (((Leslie Moonves))) as another (((Weinstein))):

The CBS CEO, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, is accused of unwanted kissing and touching in a New Yorker article set to be published Friday. The New Yorker is poised to publish an article by Ronan Farrow that includes allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of embattled CBS chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

A spokesperson for The New Yorker says, “We don’t comment on pieces we haven’t published.” Sources with knowledge of the article say it delves into the broader culture at CBS and will publish later today on the magazine’s website.

CBS said in a statement that it is investigating the claims made against Moonves. “All allegations of personal misconduct are to be taken seriously,” the network stated. “The Independent Directors of CBS have committed to investigating claims that violate the Company’s clear policies in that regard. Upon the conclusion of that investigation, which involves recently reported allegations that go back several decades, the Board will promptly review the findings and take appropriate action.”

The allegations are said in part to involve instances of unwanted kissing and touching that occurred more than 20 years ago, as well as numerous claims that occurred more recently.

He’s not the first. He won’t be the last. These losers literally cannot control themselves around attractive women. It’s long past time to flush them all out of the entertainment system and the corpocracy.

Outsourcing unemployment

I’ll bet they’re celebrating landing this contract:

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) (BSE: 532540, NSE: TCS), a leading global IT services, consulting and business solutions organization, and the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services (DWS) are celebrating the launch of a new Unemployment Insurance system this week – WYUI – for the State of Wyoming. The WYUI solution is a fully modernized Unemployment Insurance system that will improve the way claimants interact with the state with a more user-friendly interface and expanded self-service capabilities.

TCS’ WYUI solution is a robust, scalable and repeatable platform with the ability to integrate and control multiple functional requirements, including online claims processing, payments, adjudication, and appeals. The WYUI implementation is also one of the first in the United States to be developed, tested and implemented in Microsoft Azure in such a short time frame, and within budget. Hosting the new system on Azure makes it more scalable than the previous system, and as the data housed in the system continues to grow, the system itself can be expanded.

TCS has already enabled several U.S. states to modernize their systems to support Unemployment Insurance programs, including Mississippi and Maine, as part of the ReEmployUSA Consortium. By partnering with Wyoming’s DWS, TCS has replaced a 34-year-old benefits and appeal legacy system with a modernized system, within a span of less than 20 months.

About Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS)
Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that has been partnering with many of the world’s largest businesses in their transformation journeys for the last fifty years. TCS offers a consulting-led, cognitive powered, integrated portfolio of IT, Business & Technology Services, and engineering. This is delivered through its unique Location Independent Agile delivery model, recognized as a benchmark of excellence in software development. A part of the Tata group, India’s largest multinational business group, TCS has more than 400,000 of the world’s best-trained consultants in 46 countries.

What a truly virtuous cycle! Put American workers out of work, then get paid to process the transfer payments between the state government and the unemployed workers. Imagine how much money can be transferred to Indiasaved by replacing the entire Social Security Administration with Tata Consultancy Services!

No place for Sarah Silverman

CNN takes note of the Silverman controversy:

A tweet Sarah Silverman sent nine years ago, which she says was a joke, has some labeling her a pedophile.

In July 2009, the comedic actress tweeted, “Hey, is it considered molestation if the child makes the first move? I’m gonna need a quick answer on this.”

On Wednesday, the conservative publication Townhall posted a story about that tweet with the headline, “Disney Voice Actress and Comedian Sarah Silverman Also Joked About Molesting Children.” The article noted that a Twitter user asked Silverman about the 2009 tweet last year, “Was that supposed to be funny? Cause it wasn’t.”

Silverman responded to the controversy on Thursday.

Sarah Silverman@SarahKSilverman
 Some very odd people R saying I’m a pedo, re: a joke from a time not that long ago when hard absurd jokes by comedians were acknowledged for what they were — jokes — not a disengenuous national threat to people fake-clutching their pearls (whilst ranting the country’s too PC)

If it’s not okay to joke about Jews or Nazis or Africans, then it’s absolutely not okay to joke about molesting children. If jokes about Jews mean you’re an anti-Semite, and jokes about Africans mean you’re a racist, then jokes about molesting children obviously mean you’re a pedophile and you should be hunted down, disemployed, banned from social media and payment processing, and rejected by all right-thinking citizens.

Those are the rules. The logic is straightforward and impeccable. So deal with it.

They’re twice as wide

It’s amusing to observe the ongoing failure of the equality principle in every aspect and on every side.

So, the van pulled into an Autohof in Germany and we parked a little distance from the cafe/coffee shop/restaurant/news-stand/playground. We needed to stretch our legs, since we’d been on the road for several hours and would be driving for a few more. As we strolled to the Hof, the driver pointed to the parking slots right in front of the doors and shook his head. There were the usual handicapped places, and then two, pink, “Women Only” slots.

Not pregnant women, not elderly women, not women with small children, just women.

Oh come on! You have to be kidding me. What became of Grrrrrrrrl Power!? What became of “I am woman, hear me roar”? Women are so delicate that we need parking slots even closer than the designated handicapped places?

What became of them? They were nonsense from the start. The sooner everyone finally gets around to admitting that there is no such thing as sexual equality, there never was, and there never will be, the sooner society can be restructured on rational and sustainable grounds.

Introducing the Devstream

A number of people have been asking me to do the occasional Darkstream dedicated to games and game development, so I gave it a shot last night and it appears to have been reasonably well received. Because I anticipate considerably more discussion on this front in the coming months, and because a lot of the people interested in it will have no interest in the other subjects regularly addressed here, I’m not going to post Devstreams here, but on the DevGame blog instead.

The interesting thing to me about Fortnite, and the reason why I consider Fortnite to be essentially the game designers more or less giving up, is because what we have been doing as FPS designers from the very beginning is attempting to provide meaning and structure and story and experience to the action, and unfortunately we’ve been fighting the tendency of a certain group of players – who I am not at all convinced are the majority of players, but there are a lot of them – and they have a tendency to simply run around like chickens with their heads cut off. If you’ve played any online game starting back in the days of Doom and Heretic – yeah when we were playing with 4-player and 8-player networks – what you would see is some people would play strategically, some people would camp, other people would would team up and move cooperatively, but you always had the people who just run around like crazy, blasting away like crazy, and basically behaving in a way that you can’t even possibly consider anything that is remotely approaching anything credible or realistic.

And so, with Fortnite, and I have played it, and it’s a very good example of what it is the Battle Royale genre and so forth, but ultimately there is no purpose, there is no story, the action is the experience. Now that’s ok, that’s fine if that’s if that’s what you want, but you see, for years designers have been trying to hide that, they’ve been trying to keep that under control, and what Fortnite represents – and it’s obviously not the first Battle Royale game, it’s not the only one, but it is the most successful, the most symbolic of the concept – it’s basically the designers throwing up their hands and saying, “you know what, you guys just want to run around like chickens with your heads cut off slaughtering each other, here you go!” And to their credit, they give you the means to do that, so that’s what’s different between that and Call of Duty and Battlefield and all these other FPS games. Almost all the other games were trying to limit that, they’re trying to limit it through the level designs they’re trying to limit it through the ammo drops, and all that sort of thing.

I can’t say more about this at the moment, but there is a very real possibility that we will soon be moving Alt-Hero into the game space as well as the movie space in the not-too-distant future. So, it’s best to be prepared for that.

Damn straight

Never much liked Stereopony, and I’d put Scandal above Doll$boxx, but they definitely got the #1 band right. They’re just spectacularly good. Even the soft poppy new song is well-written and has got the big chorus as well as a nice bass line.

On with Alex

An open thread for those who would like to live-comment my appearance on the Alex Jones show at 1 PM Central.

The stream is here.

NOW LIVE: Bestselling comic author, editor & video game designer joins todays broadcast to explain his pro-West work including an SJW-free alternative to Wikipedia and more.

Retarded rhetoric

I understand that the elite in Washington thinks Americans are stupid. But how dumb do you have to be to preen and posture about “self-determination” and “spreading democracy” for nearly 100 years, only to turn around and reject the overwhelming results of a free and fair referendum:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement Wednesday saying the US “rejects Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea and pledges to maintain this policy until Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored.”

“The United States calls on Russia to respect the principles to which it has long claimed to adhere and to end its occupation of Crimea,” the statement reads. Pompeo is also expected to state in congressional testimony Wednesday that the United States will never recognize Crimea as part of Russia, a European diplomat briefed by the State Department told CNN.

Pompeo’s declaration comes after President Donald Trump had appeared to cast doubt on his administration’s commitment to Ukraine’s claims over the peninsula. Asked by reporters on Air Force One at the end of June whether the United States would recognize Russia’s claim on Crimea, Trump ambiguously responded: “We’re going to have to see.”

Perhaps it’s just a negotiating point. Perhaps it’s just for show. Regardless, it’s stupid and totally unconvincing. Self-contradictory rhetoric is the worst and least effective kind of rhetoric.

Mailvox: moving Voxiversity

A backer wants to know how he can support Voxiversity:

Is it possible to support Voxiversity other than Freestartr?  It appears to be down. 

Freestartr is down, apparently thanks to Stripe’s shenigans, and they have not been able to get anything up and running in the time period I discussed with them. Nor have any of the backers been able to contribute anything since May. So, after consulting with several backers, I’ve arranged to get the campaign up on a new site which I will announce as soon as it is ready later this week. I hope most of the backers will be able to make the transition to the new site.

We will have two Voxiversity videos out in August. I’ve been focusing on building up the Darkstream subscriber base in the meantime. While they are two different channels, from my perspective, it’s a single video front, so supporting one is supporting the other. There is a lot of room for improvement, of course, but we are making steady progress, these occasional setbacks and delays notwithstanding. I’ve also been working on something that will have a major impact on everything from Castalia to Voxiversity, and I hope to be able to announce something about that before the end of October.

In not-entirely-unrelated news, I will be appearing on the Alex Jones show today at 1 PM Central today to discuss comics and culture war, among other things.

And for those of you who have been repeatedly asking me for essential book recommendations, I’ve put together short book lists for what I consider to be the best in literature, history, science fiction, and fantasy at the Castalia Direct Store. I’ll be adding to these in the future, this is just a bare-bones beginning.

Mailvox: the technical entry point

A reader points out how Agile development provides an entry point for converging technology companies:

It took a while to notice but there is something happening in even non-converged companies. They call it “Agile” in the instances I know of, but that has been around and revised for the last two decades.

It is being sold as what Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc. use to get great gains in productivity and measure their teams’ performance. Instead, it is where the cancer can hide.  That doesn’t mean you don’t yet have cancer, only that you won’t be able to tell as the nerves are dead.

Having been involved with it being “imposed from above” and discovering it in other companies I finally know why some of the stupid or meaningless kabuki is being used.

If something in your software development process seems either meaningless, stupid, or even counterproductive, it is because the purpose is not coding quality, probably is being celebrated elsewhere as a product of SJW convergence, but is being adopted and imposed on your team.  I doubt it is even intended to weaken or destroy competition, but that is the result.

First, there is no measure of individual productivity. All that matters is the “team velocity” which is basically socialism coding (to paraphrase GitHub). This is bad enough when you have a fixed size of similarly capable coders working on the same thing. But what if the team consists of some HTML people, some CSS people, and some JavaScript people who do nonot know much about the other domains, or worse just 3 people, one of each? Yet the measurement is overall. Worse is you typically have a few stars, and supporting actors. So what happens when your two best Java Jockeys are replaced with Danny Diversity and Betty Bugwright that are actually a negative? The powers go into a tizzy and complain about the TEAM slowing down. Everyone on the team knows why but can’t say. And what is your evaluation and/or bonus or whatever based on? Being a team player, not a team winner.

Second is “the two week sprint”. Why two weeks? Imagine a complex subproject that will take someone good three months to go from start to finish, but you know that he can do it as he has been reliable. What this new process does is require it to be broken down into a dozen individual 2 week tickets with what needs to be completed – yes, a real deliverable – a each point. You might recognize this as the hardest part of any nontrivial change or addition. But Danny Diversity can’t even begin to understand how to do anything for the complex subproject, but can copy a bubblesort routine when it is needed for sprint #9. It is worse than that because 2 weeks is the MAXIMUM granularity, but the idea is to have half-day sized projects.

Note there will be “customers” that request a feature, and “the team” is supposed to estimate it, but in the new paradigm design is either omitted, relegated outside the team, or is done in parallel (usually as resented tickets trying to do a mini-waterfall inside the “agile” – usually it is the reverse). If you are making small patches, easily reversed to something like a website (e.g. add popup for shopping cart), this can work because the granularity is small, testability is high, it is a small mod, not a major design, and can be backed out instantly. Imagine if an OTA update bricks or introduces a huge vulnerability to a smartphone.

Third, one of the foundations of Agile is constant refactoring, often built in to the process, to avoid accumulating technical debt. If refactoring is one of those things that is avoided or treated like something that we haaaave to do, you are doing the converged version of “Agile”. Why? Because Betty Bugwright and Danny Diversity will get their tasks done in the sprint, but either any review will reject them or a clean-up tech debt ticket will have to be added. Can’t let there be a visible pattern of where the accumulation of technical debt is coming from. Like San Francisco wondering why the spontaneous appearance of the feces and needles on the side walks.

Fourth, Participation (a)Trophy Test driven code. Actual regression tests are very useful, but hard to do and take time and effort to code. Expecially cross module unit and system tests. Instead, we get kabuki where Danny writes a routine to verify Add(2,2) returns 4, which is still better than letting him modify any used part of the code. But you can add thousands of lines of meaningless clutter, imply that the quality is improving because it is now “tested” while the system is collapsing, and give the deadweight something nondestructive to do for the kabuki.

True Agile is a toolbox, with screwdrivers to remove screws, hammers for nails, and wrenches or at least pliers for bolts. But when all you have is a hammer…

This is an astute observation. I may have to include it almost verbatim as an example in Corporate Cancer.