Mailvox: WTF Vox?

There is literally nothing is more important to the average Baby Boomer than the idea that his generation is the coolest, wonderfulest, and most envied by other, lesser generations. This exchange with TS not only made me laugh, it serves rather nicely to demonstrate everything GenX has observed about the Boomers:

WTF Vox? What’s with all the Boomer bashing? Have you hit a wall or something? Bashing us isn’t going to remove the logjam in your crusade or your intestines.

Can you afford to alienate any percentage of your supporters? I’ve been a SF fan since long before you were born. The Hippies’ main tactic was to bash the greatest generation America ever produced so you are in excellent company.  ::roll eyes::

Also, if you’re going to bash boomers and actually be effective, you may want a spokesman who is NOT referred to in Wiki as:  “the Godfather of hipsterdom”[5] and one of the “primary architects of hipsterdom”.[6]” Most Boomers think Hipsters are people with no little to no purpose.

My response: Obviously you haven’t been on VP very long. Do a search for “Boomer”
on VP. You’ll see that I have always had contempt for that
generation, taken as a whole. They are the locust generation.

TS replied with all the wisdom and restraint that has caused so many GenXers to develop such deep respect for the Baby Boomers:

Sayonara motherfucker.

Adieu, sweet prince. I shall comfort myself with the knowledge that we will not only bury the Baby Boomers, we will write their history. What I find so amusing about this is that insufficient respect for his generation is, in TS’s Boomer eyes, a legitimate reason to write off someone he claims to have supported.

And yes, I can afford to alienate 100 percent of such “supporters”. That’s not exactly the sort of fortitude upon which one ideally wants to rely.

But wait, there’s more!

No wait, I thought of a better comeback! Hating boomers makes you an SJW too.

 And to think they thought they were cool. (shakes head)

The new browser

Brave was announced today:

It’s amazing how fast a page loads when you strip away everything but the real content.

Up to a whopping 60% of page load time is caused by the underlying ad technology that loads into various places each time you hit a page on your favorite news site. And 20% of this is time spent on loading things that are trying to learn more about you.

Performance, privacy, and convergence-free. What’s not to like? Brave CEO Brendan Eich explains:

How to Fix the Web

The Web is always in trouble for some reason or other. I remember when Microsoft came after Netscape and threatened to lock Web standards into IE. Only the Web is so big, with such reach to billions of users, that no one owns it. This means it will always be contested ground.

But the Web today faces a primal threat.

Some say the threat to the Web is “mobile”, but the Web is co-evolving with smartphones, not going away. Webviews are commonplace in apps, and no publisher of note is about to replace its primary website with a walled-garden equivalent. Nor can most websites hope to develop their own apps and convert their browser users to app-only users.

I contend that the threat we face is ancient and, at bottom, human. Some call it advertising, others privacy. I view it as the Principal-Agent conflict of interest woven into the fabric of the Web.

You use a browser to find and contribute information, but you generally do not pay for the websites who host that information. Across billions of people, for most sites in most countries, it isn’t realistic to expect anything but a free Web. And as Ben Thompson points out, “free” means ad-supported in the main. Yes, successful sites and apps may convert you to a paying customer, but most won’t.

You might object: “Hey, I’m ready to pay for websites I support”. I’m with you, but many people are not so well-off that they can support most of the commercial sites they use. Also, the Web missed an opportunity back in the early days to define payments and all they entail as a standard.

Once you grant this premise, that the Web needs ads in the large, it follows that your browsing habits will be surveilled, to the best of the ad ecosystem players’ abilities. Also, depending on how poorly ads are designed and integrated, you may become blind or averse to them. Since the ‘90s, I’ve seen several races to the bottom along these lines.

The Principal (you) uses a browser (one of a layer of agents, both software and humans) to browse the Web and keep its lights on. Consider your primary agent, the browser. It’s a complex piece of code, but now thanks to Mozilla, WebKit, Chromium, and even in part Microsoft, this billion-dollar investment is available as a mix of free and open source software.

Yet thanks to tracking options that are inevitable with anything like the Web, your valuable and private user behavior and browsing intent signals can be extracted via your current browser. And that may not be a fair deal.

Everyone’s talking about ad blocking. Blockers can make the user experience of the Web much better. But as Marco Arment noted, they don’t feel good to many folks. They feel like free-riding, or even starting a war. You may never click on an ad, but even forming an impression from a viewable ad has some small value. With enough people blocking ads, the Web’s main funding model is in jeopardy.

At Brave, we’re building a solution designed to avert war and give users the fair deal they deserve for coming to the Web to browse and contribute. We are building a new browser and a connected private cloud service with anonymous ads. Today we’re releasing the 0.7 developer version for early adopters and testers, along with open source and our roadmap.

Read the rest of it there.

An avalanche of defaults

The mainstream economists are just beginning to catch up with The Return of the Great Depression, published in 2009.

The global financial system has become dangerously unstable and faces an avalanche of bankruptcies that will test social and political stability, a leading monetary theorist has warned.

“The situation is worse than it was in 2007. Our macroeconomic ammunition to fight downturns is essentially all used up,” said William White, the Swiss-based chairman of the OECD’s review committee and former chief economist of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

“Emerging markets were part of the solution after the Lehman crisis. Now they are part of the problem, too. Debts have continued to build up over the last eight years and they have reached such levels in every part of the world that they have become a potent cause for mischief,” he said.

“It will become obvious in the next recession that many of these debts will never be serviced or repaid, and this will be uncomfortable for a lot of people who think they own assets that are worth something,” he told The Telegraph on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

“The only question is whether we are able to look reality in the eye and face what is coming in an orderly fashion, or whether it will be disorderly. Debt jubilees have been going on for 5,000 years, as far back as the Sumerians.”

The next task awaiting the global authorities is how to manage debt
write-offs – and therefore a massive reordering of winners and losers in
society – without setting off a political storm.

What is interesting to consider is if there is a connection between the nonsensical climate change propaganda and the coming avalanche of debt-defaults. If I were a member of the global elite who a) genuinely believed that resources like fossil fuels are limited, b) was in a position to decide how society’s winners and losers would be reordered, and c) did not subscribe to Christian morality and lacked a moral conscience, I would use the financial apocalypse and subsequent reordering to make sure that I, and my allies, held all the title to the resources necessary to ensure our control of them.

This would permit the construction of a global feudalism and extend the time in which the dwindling resources could be utilized, and would permit aristocratic resource-holders to retain a small First World technological society while the resourceless commoners are reduced to Third World technostasis.

That doesn’t even rise to the level of science fiction, of course, economics being a science only in the ancient sense of a field of knowledge, but even as pure economic imagination, it’s coherent and perhaps even worrisome in light of the present circumstances.

Tor editor “not expected to recover”

From Facebook:

Late this afternoon David [Hartwell] had a massive brain bleed from which he is not expected to recover.

Hartwell was John C. Wright’s editor at Tor Books; he was also friendlier to the Puppies than any of the SF-SJWs are likely to believe. I had the privilege of speaking with him when he called me last year after the Rabid Puppies overturned the SF applecart; he was the previously unnamed individual who explained the unusual structure of Tor Books to me, using the analogy of a medieval realm with separate and independent duchies. He wanted to avoid cultural war in science fiction even though he clearly understood that it appeared to be unavoidable; it was out of respect for him that I initially tried to make a distinction between Tor Books and the Making Light SJWs before Irene Gallo and Tom Doherty rendered that moot.

Despite his leftward leanings, David Hartwell struck me as being one of the last remaining sane individuals in the editorial offices there, and he was perhaps the only one capable of reigning in the lunatic impulses of Patrick Nielsen Hayden and the Torstapo. By his own account, he even managed to talk the notorious award-whore into standing down and letting long-time bridesmaid Lou Anders of Pyr finally win PNH’s Best Tor Editor Award (also known as Best Editor (Long Form) Hugo) in 2011.

I expect he will be missed by many, and that things in the science fiction world are going to get even more, shall we say, interesting, in his absence.

UPDATE: David Hartwell has died. Requiescat in pace.

She hasn’t forgotten

Sarah Palin endorses Donald Trump for president:

Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice-presidential nominee who became a Tea Party sensation and a favorite of grass-roots conservatives, will endorse Donald J. Trump in Iowa on Tuesday, officials with his campaign confirmed. The endorsement provides Mr. Trump with a potentially significant boost just 13 days before the state’s caucuses.

“I’m proud to endorse Donald J. Trump for president,” Ms. Palin said in a statement provided by his campaign.

I can’t help but suspect the abuse Sarah Palin experienced at the hands of the Republican establishment might have had just a little something to do with her decision to throw her support to Trump. But regardless, this is a big deal, as it is an indication how women who are concerned about immigration and vibrancy are going to vote.

Yes, Green Bay should have gone for 2

ProFootballTalk considers Mike McCarthy’s decision to settle for overtime:

Three days later, the sports world continues to buzz about the epic Packers-Cardinals playoff game. And one of the many questions that continues to bubble up from time to time is this: Should the Packers have gone for two after scoring on a :00 Hail Mary pass?

In hindsight, absolutely. But if coach Mike McCarthy had opted to go for two and if his team had failed to convert, he would have become a pin cushion for criticism in the aftermath of what would have become his team’s latest failure in a playoff game. Apart from the fact that coaches who do the conventional and fail get a pass while those who do the unconventional and fail don’t, a McCarthy decision to go for two would have been directly responsible for the fifth straight failure to get to the Super Bowl despite having one of the best quarterbacks of the Super Bowl era on his team.

It’s not hindsight. It was the obvious thing to do. In 2015, the Packers went for it 6 times and scored the conversion 4 times for a 66.7 percent success rate. The league average was 47.8 percent.

But Mcarthy’s decision is even worse than the statistics indicate. The Packers were underdogs. The underdog should ALWAYS go for the winning two-point conversion. I was at a Vikings-Cowboys game in 1995 when the Aikman-Smith-Irvin Cowboys were the defending Super Bowl champions and the dominant team in the league.

The Denny Green-coached Vikings managed to tie the game with 30 seconds left. It was a chance at a huge upset; the Cowboys were clearly the better team and the only reason we were in it was due to a very rare Emmitt Smith fumble. The two-point conversion was our one shot at winning the game.

But like Mike McCarthy, Denny Green choked, and played to continue the game rather than to win. Sound familiar?

The Cowboys won the coin toss and needed
just five plays to win the game. Smith broke through a huge hole on the
left side and outran safety Charles Mincy to the end zone just 2
minutes 26 seconds into overtime. 

The players can tell when their chickenshit coach isn’t even trying to win, and they play accordingly.

A mysterious change

The most interesting thing is the way that the massive global pro-immigration media blitz of last summer, complete with PICTURES OF DEAD CHILDREN only managed to reduce the German anti-immigration position by three percentage points. Clearly the clueless moderates are more susceptible, as support for immigration briefly jumped six points. Of course, you should never put much credence in polls.

We don’t need to speculate about whether pollsters manipulated their findings, because the pollsters have admitted it themselves. Survation announced the morning after the result that they had decided not to publish their own “final” poll of the campaign because – in the words of company CEO Damian Lyons Lowe – “the results seemed so “out of line” with all the polling conducted by ourselves and our peers – what poll commentators would term an “outlier” – that I “chickened out” of publishing the figures.

The techno-gods have spoken

Do you see what happens when you unverify Milo, Twitter? Do you see what happens, Twitter?

Millions of internet users are unable to use Twitter after the site crashed at around 8.20am GMT. Users of the micro-blogging site are being confronted with the image of a broken robot and cannot view or send any tweets online or on their phones…. An outage map created by downdetector.co.uk shows the problem is affecting users in western Europe, including the UK and in Japan. 

Je suis Milo.

Memento mori

For me, the best thing about all these Baby Boomer icons beginning to die off is the way that the godless narcissists who made a quasi-religion of them are in total despair about what it says about something they have denied for decades, namely, their own mortality. I don’t think Ed Driscoll is GenX, but he sounds as if he is in this take on the Eagles’ breakup:

So let me get this straight: throughout the documentary, a running leitmotif is that the band was desperate
to add some decent rock under their soaring harmony vocals. The band
fires British superstar engineer-producer Glyn Johns (whose previous
resume included the Stones, the Who, the Beatles, and Led Zeppelin’s
first album) because he emphasized their harmonies and country sound. In
response, they bring in Joe Walsh to rock out. And finally, when their
other guitarist does something that’s actually rock and roll and utters a punk rock-style sneer to corrupt power, the entire band implodes?

Perfect.

But I’m glad for the many fans of the Eagles that they got one last chance to see the band on tour last year. I’m told it was an excellent concert; while I wasn’t a fan myself, I had a lot of respect for them as songwriters.

Still, the Baby Boomers are dying, and soon we will have a chance to remake the civilized world they spent fifty years doing their damndest to destroy. Let’s learn from their mistakes, shall we?

We have certainly learned that nothing good ever comes of believing yourself to be eternally young and cool. And wisdom and experience should always be respected, not dismissed out of hand.