#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
One-third of the Washington Post’s staff is being laid off. Over 300 employees were let go today.
Good to know. Only 600 to go.
Sit by the river long enough and eventually the bodies of your enemies float past you. There are few things I enjoy more than reading about the layoffs of journalists.
Don’t kid yourself. There is no such thing as online security. Everything you do online is known, so don’t even bother trying to fool yourself otherwise. Yes, I know what Signal and WhatsApp claim. It doesn’t matter, because they are highly incentivized, and quite possibly legally obligated, to lie to you about it.
US federal authorities are investigating allegations that staff at WhatsApp owner Meta Platforms Inc. had access to message content despite the company marketing the app as protected by end-to-end encryption, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.
Special agents from the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security have been examining claims from former Meta contractors who alleged that they and staff at Meta had “unfettered access” to WhatsApp messages.
One contractor told an investigator that a Facebook team employee confirmed they could “go back a ways into WhatsApp (encrypted) messages,” including in criminal cases, according to an agent’s report reviewed by Bloomberg.
WhatsApp, which was acquired by Meta in 2014, insists on its website that “no one outside of the chat, not even WhatsApp, can read, listen to, or share” what a user says.”
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone had also denied the allegations, stating that “what these individuals claim is not possible because WhatsApp, its employees, and its contractors, cannot access people’s encrypted communications.”
The only thing the US authorities care about it is that they, too, have access to the unencrypted files.
Amazon just laid off 16,000 more workers. I would be willing to bet this explains our groundless termination, as well as how quickly it was upheld upon “review”.
Amazon said Wednesday it plans to eliminate about 16,000 corporate jobs, marking its second round of mass job cuts since last October. In a blog post, the company wrote that the layoffs were part of an ongoing effort to “strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.” That coincides with a push to invest heavily in artificial intelligence.
The job reductions come just a few months after October’s layoffs, when 14,000 employees were let go across Amazon’s corporate workforce. At the time, the company indicated the cuts would continue in 2026 as it found “additional places we can remove layers.”
Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, didn’t rule out more job cuts in the future, but said the company isn’t trying to create “a new rhythm” of broad layoffs every few months.
It also might explain why the executive to whom I appealed the KDP decision was a little too busy to pay any attention to one minor KDP account right away, because apparently, he did us the favor of stepping in again and telling whomever was left at KDP to stop screwing around and reinstate us. I was a little confused this morning to see Castalia’s inbox had been bombarded with email alerts from KDP informing us repeatedly that a new book was available through Amazon and Audible, as well as this one from a different member of the Content Review Team.
I can confirm that your account is now active and you have full access to your Bookshelf. Please let us know if you still cannot access your account, so we can further investigate this issue.
None of this means that the lesson about platforms doesn’t apply. But it does give us more time to build our own correctly.
Being back on Amazon also lets us see that PROBABILITY ZERO received its first one-star review, courtesy of one of Dennis McCarthy’s readers.
Bryan H. Wildenthal
1.0 out of 5 stars This book is pseudoscientific garbage
This books is complete and utter GARBAGE and pseudoscience. The author doesn’t understand basic statistics and blatantly misuses scientific papers he relies on. Dennis McCarthy, author of widely praised articles and a book on evolution and biogeography, has demolished Vox Day’s argument in a short recent blog post. Google “Dennis McCarthy why Probability Zero is wrong evolution.”
Clearly this is some new use of the word “demolished” with which I was hitherto unfamiliar. But it’s an apt demonstration of how midwits operate. They don’t understand any of the words they use, which is why they rely upon others to do their thinking for them, then posture grandly, and confidently, with absolutely no awareness of how ridiculous they look or how insupportable their position is.
Anyhow, I’m pretty sure what happened is that some KDP employees of the “I fucking love Science” variety were informed that they were laid off and decided to strike a blow for Science while they still could. So it was SJW shenanigans after all.
By the way, after all that, 死神と悪魔 is finally available. So, if you’re one of the six people who read fluent Japanese reading this blog, you’re all set now.
We have terminated your KDP account because we found that you do not have the necessary rights to publish the book(s) listed below. If you have documentation proving you have the necessary rights to publish this book, please reply to this message and attach it to your email.
If you’re having trouble finding Probability Zero on Amazon, or any of our other books, this is why. Somehow, its system saw that Castalia had submitted 死神と悪魔, the Japanese edition of Death and the Devil, and decided that we were infringing upon the rights of Editions Alpines, which publishes the German translation called Der Tod und Der Teufel and somehow concluded that we don’t have the necessary rights to publish a different language translation of the book we originally published.
Anyhow, we hope to have this resolved today. But it’s another object lesson in the extreme fragility of trying to work in today’s centralized business environment. And it’s a reminder of the importance of building your own platforms and never being reliant upon the mainstream ones.
UPDATE: I heard back from KDP. Now they suddenly need to look into it. Which could take until next week. But I think they’ll find a reason to expedite the restoration.
Immigration and outsourcing are not the answer to greater profits over time. To the contrary, they are a certain path toward destroying the very organization for which they are supposed to be generating increased profits.
Ubisoft is on the verge of complete collapse due to terrible decisions like trying to develop the new Prince of Persia in India, as legendary WoW producer Grummz explains:
Prince of Persia, why it was REALLY cancelled. Insider tells all. “The game is so bad…” This from my Ubisoft sources:
- 90% developed by Ubisoft India.
- Project was a disaster.
- Transferred last minute to Ubisoft Montreal to “fix” it.
- Game unfixable.
- Cancelled.
Note that Ubisoft Montreal spent FOUR YEARS trying to fix it and they couldn’t. I can attest that my one experience working with Indian developers for 3M on a sales training software project was an absolute and utter catastrophe. They couldn’t implement even the simplest, most basic features with any degree of reliability, and as far as the graphics went, they appeared to be limited to the stick-figure level.
Immigrants always hire other immigrants. This is why you shouldn’t hire immigrants, and you definitely shouldn’t ever permit immigrant executives. Their first priority is always finding a way to hire more of their own, not the success of the company, much less the society they’re plundering:
FedEx received a significant federal delivery contract worth more than $2 billion in late 2022. The company’s hiring procedures started to drastically change thereafter. According to The Dallas Express, official documents show that FedEx significantly raised the number of foreign workers it hired under the H-1B visa program while concurrently decreasing the number of American positions held in different parts of the US.
In response to the report, FedEx stated that its hiring decisions are based on business requirements and the necessary skills. A spokesperson for the company told The Dallas Express that FedEx is committed to fostering employee development and constructing a workforce aligned with its operational needs.
“Across our business, we employ a wide range of roles, requiring a variety of skillsets and are committed to complying with all applicable federal immigration laws.”
Also Read: H-1B visa row drastically impacts California schools, ‘it’s a form of discrimination to…’
Indian-origin FedEx CEO Rajesh “Raj” Subramaniam is now facing flak on social media for firing American employees in order to bring in foreign workers. The move comes at a time when firms are hesitant to hire H-1B workers due to the hefty $100K charge under current Trump administration.
We’re about 20 years away from the advocacy of mass immigration, and the organizational support for it, being correctly identified and prosecuted as treason. Because that’s exactly what it is; mass cross-cultural immigration is more harmful for a nation than military invasion and occupation.
Japan and Eastern Europe were occupied for generations. They are still observably what they were. Canada, France, the UK, Australia, and the USA? Not so much, and in one-third the time.
Foreign soldiers go home voluntarily. Large-scale migrations don’t.
Just ask the American Indian…
Brien Niemeier retrospectively points out what should have been obvious, but wasn’t, to everyone all along:
For most of the twentieth century, creative ambition followed a single script. You studied the field, polished a manuscript, hunted for an agent, and prayed for a contract.
If you were in film or music, the process was different in details but identical in structure: Everything hinged on the approval of an institution. Success came from being chosen. Talent mattered, but luck mattered more. Most creators knew it but kept playing the game because the alternative seemed unthinkable.
That expectation didn’t come from nowhere. It grew out of a period when the gatekeepers could actually elevate an unknown. They possessed the distribution networks, the advertising budgets, the corporate partnerships, and the capacity to manufacture stardom.
That pattern repeated enough times to take on the aura of tradition. If you wanted a career, you knocked on the same doors everyone else knocked on. The problem is that the doors stopped opening long before artists realized the hinges had rusted shut.
By the late 1990s, the blockbuster mentality had consumed the traditional institutions. Every division—publishing, film, television, and music—became obsessed with scale. Risk tolerance flatlined. Executives seeking hits that could justify their salaries clung to anything that produced reliable profit and panicked at the unfamiliar. Innovation came to represent risk instead of opportunity.
At the same time, audiences aged. The properties that kept the lights on were the ones that debuted thirty, forty, or fifty years earlier. Instead of cultivating younger talent, the corporations recycled the same brands over and over, hoping nostalgia would substitute for relevance. You saw endless sequels, remakes, reboots, and spin-offs. The cultural oxygen was consumed by dying giants.
Creators sensed something was wrong, but most didn’t grasp how deeply the rot ran. The old structures no longer had the ability or the interest to launch new creators into the mainstream. The institutions that once acted as kingmakers had lost the will and the means to fulfill that role.
Yet legacy outlets continued promoting the old discovery narrative because it kept the talent pipeline flowing. As long as artists believed salvation waited inside the old system, they wouldn’t look for alternatives.
This conditioning left scars. Many creators still cling to the hope that one good pitch or lucky submission will unlock a career. They believe someone in a skyscraper will pluck them from obscurity and grant them access to an audience. This belief persists despite decades of evidence that the system has no interest in fulfilling creators’ expectations.
Worse, some artists internalized the idea that bypassing the old gatekeepers equates to failure. Seeing independence as a last resort, they imagine legitimacy comes only from institutional approval, even though the institutions abandoned their curatorial role.
That psychology runs deep: Creators were trained to think of themselves not as people who produce value for audiences, but as supplicants waiting for an authority figure to validate them.
The irony is that while creators waited for help, audiences changed faster than the institutions could track. Once internet access became ubiquitous, people stopped caring about traditional pipelines. Their interests moved to quality and authenticity, not pedigree.
The challenge now is that the playing fields are not even close to level. How can a podcaster compete on YouTube or Spotify when he’s banned from one, the other, or as in some cases, both? How can an author compete when the A9 algorithm, or whatever Amazon calls the way it makes winners out of losers and losers out of winners, fails to favor him?
The answer, as we were forced to figure out much, much earlier than most, is direct sales and patronage. That’s why Castalia thrives while many other publishers, including the big ones, are struggling more and more every year. It’s because we were forced to rely on you readers early on, long before
There are still challenges posed by structural elements like the payment processors, but even those challenges are starting to fade as Russia, China, and the BRICS countries improve their financial products. And what that means is that independent creators don’t have to go down with the collapsing mainstream infrastructure.
As AI improves, as the number of options improve, it’s only going to keep getting better for true independents and worse for those who still cling to the idea that the gatekeepers matter, no matter how propped up they might be.
Speaking of the collapse of the mainstream gatekeepers, shame on all of you Rabid Puppies. Shame!
I was in a small bookstore just after the Hugo blow up, and this old guy was asking the clerk for recommendations. She straight face recommended NKJemison, “She won 3 years in a row, and it’s never happened before!” Poor guy.
And that’s why it only takes 11 votes to get nominated for a Hugo these days.
Amazon bought creative control of the James Bond franchise, and for a lot less than you’d probably imagine:
Sooner or later everyone has a price, but in the case of James Bond ‘s former paymasters it’s significantly lower than the incredible sums being reported as recently as last week. After 25 films, six 007’s and countless foiled attempts at world domination, long-term producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael C Wilson sold the hugely popular spy franchise to Amazon MGM for a widely reported £1 billion, in February.
But a recent earnings report from Wilson and Broccoli’s Eon Productions suggests the true figure is notably less than initially thought.
‘On 20 February 2025, the company entered into an agreement for the sale of its interest in the Bond franchise, all associated assets as well as its subsidiary companies, B24 Limited and B25 Limited,’ reads the report, published by Variety. The total consideration for the sale amounted to $20 million (USD).’
The deal gives Jeff Bezos and Amazon MGM full creative control of the franchise going forward, while forming a joint venture with Wilson and Broccoli to manage intellectual property rights.
If Amazon can do for Bond what it did for Lord of the Rings, it should be available for a lot less in the not-too-distant future. Sure, it’s possible they learned their lesson, certainly a lot of other film studios did. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
An SG reader inadvertently discovers the raison d’etre of Stoic philosophy:
I have another 23 or so years left in my career. In reality I do not know if I can make it in my current positions. Being an accounting exec I see everything and it’s sickening. The vast majority of people serve Mammon from the top level employees down to the lowest level. The vast majority lie, cheat and steal with no remorse. They think nothing of doing things that hurt their coworkers to get an extra buck. When they aren’t doing that, they purposely allow people to make damaging mistakes so they can grandstand about it for 5 minutes and feel like they are scoring points.
I honestly don’t know how much longer I can take it. No one argues with me when I point these things out, but no one cares either, they do nothing and hope I shut up eventually, because they largely do the same things.
This is the sea of retardery that is the human condition. Balzac wrote an entire ouvre dedicated to precisely this endless series of bad decisions, shenanigans, and tomfoolery. There is little point in the reader trying to seek work elsewhere, because what is troubling him is not unique to his industry, but is absolutely normal human behavior.
This is why philosophers from the Roman Stoics to the Chinese sages have stressed the importance of not being affected by the behavior of others and refusing to let their antics disturb your equanimity.
I was just speaking with Spacebunny this morning about the distress of men and women working in the Swiss banking industry, who have belatedly realized that submitting to US pressure to give up everything that made banking in Switzerland desirable has unsurprisingly had very negative effects on their employment prospects. In just 15 years, the number of Swiss banks has fallen from 400 to 250, one of its two banking giants collapsed, and the only reason the other one still survives is because it was bailed out by the Swiss government.
All of this was predictable and predicted. Before the financial crisis of 2008, I told a VP at a Swiss bank that all of those things would absolutely and inevitably happen if they were dumb enough to submit to US pressure to change the practices that made them rich and the envy of the world. But I was not even a little bit surprised when the bankers did so, and did so in order to preserve their access to a market where they did nothing but lose tens of billions of dollars, because I would estimate that 95 percent of men and 99 percent of women are simply too retarded to be capable of understanding the inevitable consequences of their own decisions and behavior.
David Foster Wallace understood this. It’s probably one of the reasons he killed himself in his despair.
The so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.
So, too, did the Chinese of yore.
卸磨刀石殺驢
Unload the grindstone to kill the donkey.
This is the way most people and most organizations operate on a daily basis. They readily sacrifice their goals, their objectives, and their material long-term interests for what they perceive to be in their immediate interest, because they don’t realize that the latter necessitates the former.
And there is absolutely nothing that one can do about this behavioral tendency except accept it, as Confucius observed.
隨風搖曳的綠色蘆葦，比暴風雨中折斷的參天橡樹還要堅強
The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm.
And if you will excuse me quoting myself:
The gift of sight becomes a curse when one can’t intervene.
FedEx’s second-ever CEO in its history, Raj Subranamiam, has hired two new Executive Vice-Presidents, Vishal Talwar and Kawal Preet.
Better consider alternative shipping options before it’s too late.