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.

No one knows anything (G edition)

The core problem with macroeconomics is that it is an abstraction piled upon fiction which is then used to set policies with material consequences. As I addressed in no little detail in The Return of the Great Depression, the margin of error observably involved in the reporting of economic statistics is greater than that required to know something as basic as if the economy is growing or contracting. That is why it matters very much indeed that over half of the government’s spending data is wrong:

A new bipartisan Senate report revealed more than half of the government’s public data on federal spending is wrong, as the website USAspending.gov is riddled with errors.

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by chairman Rob Portman (R., Ohio) and ranking member Tom Carper (D., Del.), released a report Tuesday finding nearly every agency is failing to accurately report its spending as required by federal law.

The subcommittee reviewed over two dozen inspector general reports and determined 55 percent of the spending data submitted to USAspending.gov was inaccurate. The errors accounted for $240 billion in spending during the second quarter of 2017, according to the report.

The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014, or DATA Act, required federal spending to be easily accessible to the public through a searchable website, which became USAspending.gov. The website was revamped earlier this year, but agencies are not meeting their requirements to submit accurate, consistent, and reliable data on its spending.

The agency in charge of USAspending.gov—the Treasury Department—is among the worst culprits, as 96 percent of its own data is inaccurate.

To put this in perspective, $240 billion amounts to 1.3 percent of the $18.6 trillion US GDP. Since it was reported that GDP grew 3.1 percent in the first quarter of 2018 compared to the previous quarter, that means that actual GDP growth was either 4.4 or 1.8 percent that quarter, depending upon which way the error lies.

And since the last two quarters growth are reported at 0.7 and 0.5 percent, these government spending errors may mean that the US economy is already in a statistically hidden recession.

Facebook in trouble

Something BIG is about to drop.
Q

Facebook plunges more than 24 percent on revenue miss and projected slowdown

The tech-heavy Nasdaq was set for a big down day Thursday after disappointing quarterly results from Facebook sent the social media giant hurtling toward its biggest share price decline ever and on track to lose more than $125 billion in market value.

The Invesco QQQ Trust, which tracks the Nasdaq 100 index and can give traders a good idea of how the Nasdaq stocks will trade, was down more than 2 percent at one point in after-hours trading Wednesday. At last count, the ETF was off by about 1.5 percent. Nasdaq futures opened lower Wednesday evening, off by about 0.8 percent. Facebook lost more than a fifth of its value after hours.

Good faith in what?

I don’t think these guys understand how many people now sincerely believe that everyone on the Left is an evil deviant who hates Jesus Christ, Christendom, children, comics, and video games.

At this point, though, good faith isn’t required for a conservative social media takedown. After seeing figures like Google engineer James Damore fired for what their supporters see as mere political differences, many on the right have subscribed to what conservative writer Kurt Schlichter has termed “the new rules.”

As long as conservatives get fired for their political opinions, in their view, they can use campaigns to get liberals fired for the same.

Of course we can. And of course we will. If you don’t like it, then you shouldn’t have permitted us to be deplatformed in the first place.

It’s not as if we’re just imagining that Hollywood is a criminal cesspool of godless degeneracy:

The other shoe has finally dropped for Clare Bronfman, the heiress behind the alleged cult leader. Bronfman, who’s an heiress to the Seagram’s liquor fortune, was long ago outed as a major bankroller of Keith Raniere, the empowerment guru turned master manipulator who’s been charged with sex trafficking conspiracy, sex trafficking, and conspiracy to commit forced labor.

On Tuesday, Clare Bronfman was taken into custody in New York City. A superseding indictment charged Bronfman alongside several other top NXIVM members: Kathy Russell, Lauren Salzman and Nancy Salzman. The six defendants stand accused of running an organized criminal enterprise. Crimes alleged within the indictment include identity theft, harboring of aliens for financial gain, extortion, forced labor, sex trafficking, money laundering, wire fraud and obstruction of justice. It describes Bronfman as “a member of the Enterprise and a high-ranking member of Nxivm” who served as an executive board member from approximately 2009 to 2018.