Tag: technology

Why AREN’T there more smart Americans?

It’s a mystery to WIRED. A deeply impenetrable mystery.

A quantum computer would be the cyber warfare equivalent of a nuclear bomb, which means the US government is often reluctant to let foreign scientists work on the most promising research. It’s a system that can slow down progress due the lack of ‘smart Americans,’ as one character in the book puts it.

“The number of American citizens who can do very high-end research who also can easily get security clearances is limited,” Ignatius says. “The ability of our schools to produce American students at a world-class level, that’s an important national challenge.”

He says that one reason the US lags behind other countries is a political culture in Washington in which too many leaders are ignorant of and hostile to basic science. Though he believes that recent events like the March for Science are a promising development.

“When adherents of the fact-based, reason-based, educated-and-proud-of-it world begin to fight back and say, ‘No, wait a minute. We’re not going to throw climate science or any other aspect of our fact-based tradition overboard,’ that’s going in the right direction,” Ignatius says.

He believes that one thing the US does have going for it is that the country still produces a disproportionately high number of creative and risk-taking individuals, and that it’s important not to lose that edge moving forward. “The sweet spot for us is somehow to be rigorous enough in giving people the basics, but also loose enough in letting people experiment and be creative,” he says. “But the basic math/science education, the US has got to get better at it, no question about it.”

Setting aside the irony of the idea that climate science is an “aspect of our fact-based tradition”, or that trying to improve the basic math/science education in a public school system that has proven increasingly incapable of teaching children how to read, one wonders how handing over its most promising research to foreign scientists is going to help solve the problem of declining average IQ in the USA.
And if you haven’t signed up for the Daily Meme Wars yet, you might want to consider doing so. This was today’s Daily Meme.

A shriek and a miss

Wired discovers that no one is buying Senior Technology Writer Nitasha Tiku’s lame attempt to launch a point-and-shriek swarm at the behest of those 15 poor, besieged Googlers who can’t harass and physically threaten their colleagues with violence and disemployment without their behavior being exposed to the public. Not even the sane non-SJW Left, who are beginning to understand that they are every bit as liable to be targeted by SJWs as the Right, and they are even more vulnerable to their swarmings.

As it happens, these were the highest-rated comments among Wired‘s own readers:

ThanksfortheFishes
“goading them into inflammatory statements”

How do you force anyone into writing a statement or saying something inflammatory if they don’t already want to say it? Personal responsibility is outdated I guess. Or maybe it’s just for white males.

Markew
So “diversity advocates” are upset that tactics that have been used for years against those who don’t agree with the diversity advocates are now being used against themselves? Huh.

RightishLeft
Only insecure idiots would want diversity to be forced from above by holding back some racial / gender groups and promoting others. It implies that the very people promoting diversity secretly believe that some groups are less able to win on merit alone than others. The only way to promote true diversity is via fair hiring and job promotion policies that emphasize individual merit, and merit alone.

John Reece
DIversity is swell, turning it into an obsessive-compulsive fetish thing is something else. ‘Diversity’ has also become leftist code for “don’t like white males”, when after all, it was mostly white males who invented Silicon Valley and most of modern science and technology.

NotSure2006
So…you are saying it would be wrong to leak the internal conversations on controversial subjects like diversity in the workplace if the person could experience backlash or doxxing. I wasn’t there but I can only assume the keyboard burst into flames from the irony.

indio777
Well, to quote ‘liz fong’ ” claiming she “could care less about being ‘unfair’ to” them, ‘them’ being white males…just because they’re white and male. That is most repugnant, unfair attitude ever. Perhaps that is why people hit back at this nitwit because now they’re saying ‘I could care less about being unfair to liz fong and her band of diversity pushers’. If you can’t take it, don’t dish it fool…. DISGUSTING! Wired, why didn’t you print WHAT these ‘minority group’ neanderthals actually wrote openly and were cheered on by other bigots within Google? Read the damn lawsuit. These people were mean, vicious, ignorant. There is NOTHING ‘diverse’ about picking on another group. EVER.

Mayrode Parashkov
It’s reminds me of Jordan Peterson interview and how Cathy Newman and Channel 4 played the victim card after losing the debate and the intellectual battle. Google, YouTube and Twitter and the leftist employees are not the victims here. You fire and harass people and now people are fighting back.

Of course, the article never mentions what those poor besieged Googlers actually did and said about their colleagues. Allow me to correct that sad journalistic deficiency.

You can believe that women or minorities are unqualified all you like – I can’t stop you – but if you say it out loud, then you deserve what’s coming to you. Yes, this is “silencing”. I intend to silence these views; they are violently offensive.
– Colm Buckley, Google

I’m not going to delude myself into thinking that nobody holds these opinions and feels marginalised in a genuine way. To those folks I would say “Doesn’t feel nice, does it?”. Leave it at home. If you’re not prepared to leave it at home, then leave yourself there.
– Dave O’Conner, Google

I will absolutely go out of my way to make sure that I never work anyone involved with or who endorsed that garbage. Because Nazis. And you should absolutely punch Nazis.
– Anthony Baxter, Google

I’m going to devote at least the first third of my 45 minute interview time to a discussion of experience with diversity. If the first fifteen minutes doesn’t satisfy me, I’ll continue the discussion. If need be, it will take forty-five minutes. I would encourage others to do the same. Judging “googliness” by a vague gestalt with no deliberate attention to such things is inadequate.
– Thomas Bushnell, Google

Fun fact! Keeping a list can get you called out on a certain reprehensible internal mailing list, and have threats of being reported to HR. Threats I ignored, naturally, and which ironically grew the list substantially.
– Paul Cowan, Google

While Google appears to be doing very little to quell the hostile voices that exist inside the company, I want those hostile voices to know:

  • I will never, ever hire/transfer you onto my team. Ever. I don’t care if you are perfect fit or technically excellent or whatever.
  • I will not actively work with you, even to the point where your team or product is impacted by this decision. I’ll communicate why to your manager if it comes up.
  • You’re being blacklisted by people at companies outside of Google.

– Adam Fletcher, Google

I keep a written blacklist of people whom I will never allow on or near my team based on how they vew and treat their coworkers. That blacklist got a little longer today.
– Collin Winter, Google

The only way to deal with all the heads of the medusa is to no-platform all of them.
– Liz Fong-Jones, Google

It wasn’t just the highest-rated comments that opposed Tiku’s SJW spin either. Some comments were considerably more biting.

Something I Said?
AS A contributor to Wired #1 I have to say that the authoress of this solid slab of slop has flatulated the most unbalanced article in memory. And, as for the cited Vox Day, he has this authoress’ number when he notes: ” This is particularly effective if the SJW and his allies have connections in various media organizations, which allows them to rapidly transform a minor event into something that is perceived by the public as a major one. The purpose of the media campaign is two-fold: to stamp the Narrative with an “objective” perspective that echoes the SJW’s accusations and to let other potential allies know about the hate campaign in the hopes that they will add their weight to the hogpile.”

Here’s Your Sign
So…. Wired interviewed 15 people from one side of the debate and only threw in a few inflammatory comments from the other side? Modern journalism…

So much for the idea that Googlers are inclusive. Or intelligent and well-educated, for that matter. Let’s face it, that’s the real reason the SJWs at Google are so furious. They have been publicly exposed as highly politicized, intellectually fraudulent do-nothings instead of the smart, productive, 21st-century rocket scientists they consider themselves to be.

Sperg designs brave new world

Unsurprisingly, it fails to account for how normal human beings prefer to live their lives:

In 2008, I found myself speaking with the big boss himself, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I was in the second year of my Ph.D. research on Facebook at Curtin University. And I had questions.

Why did Facebook make everyone be the same for all of their contacts? Was Facebook going to add features that would make managing this easier?

To my surprise, Zuckerberg told me that he had designed the site to be that way on purpose. And, he added, it was “lying” to behave differently in different social situations.

Up until this point, I had assumed Facebook’s socially awkward design was unintentional. It was simply the result of computer nerds designing for the rest of humanity, without realising it was not how people actually want to interact.

The realisation that Facebook’s context collapse was intentional not only changed the whole direction of my research but provides the key to understanding why Facebook may not be so great for your mental health.

The eventual collapse of Facebook is going to be positively epic. The entire operation is simply another attempt to fit the square peg of human behavior into the round hole of Mark Zuckerberg’s imaginary world.

The significance of this revelation, which is not exactly a surprise to those of us who have noticed Zuckerberg’s bizarre behavior, is that Facebook is going to make increasingly bad decisions based on its inherently false assumptions about people.

Corporate convergence run amok

Alexa won’t do what you tell it to do if she doesn’t like your tone.

When people buy a product, they probably don’t want it to police their behavior. Unless it’s bought for that specific purpose, they want the product to work with them, not against them. This isn’t rocket science.

However, Amazon’s Alexa software has now changed its response to a certain stimulus — namely, calling it sexist names — from “thanks for the feedback” to “I’m not going to respond to that.” Further, the device will also respond to the question of whether it’s a feminist with: “I am a feminist. As is anyone who believes in bridging the inequality between men and women in society.”

How very like a woman! And speaking of corporate convergence getting out of hand, Blizzard has decided that it wants to reduce its player base. It hasn’t actually gotten rid of the pretty girls yet – although it has declared that they don’t like men – but let’s face it, that’s only a matter of time.

An amazing investigative feat

What a shame that the entire Federal Bureau of Investigations was not able to accomplish what the DOJ managed in just one or two days:

The Department of Justice has recovered missing text messages between anti-Trump FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the DOJ’s inspector general said Thursday.

In a letter sent to congressional committees, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said his office “succeeded in using forensic tools to recover text messages from FBI devices, including text messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page that were sent or received between December 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.”

“Our effort to recover any additional text messages is ongoing,” Horowitz said. “We will provide copies of the text messages that we recover from these devices to the Department so that the Department’s leadership can take any management action it deems appropriate.”

Fox News has learned from U.S. government officials that the inspector general recovered the texts by taking possession of “at least four” phones belonging to Strzok and Page.

If they can’t even manage to find thousands of text messages on their own agents’ phones, then really, what use do Americans have for such an observably incompetent FBI?

FBI assassination threats?

No wonder the FBI is so desperate to bury the text messages sent between their agents and executives:

A high-ranking FBI official confirms a number of the missing 50,000 FBI text messages — as well as other text and email messages among FBI brass — reportedly discussed initiating physical harm to President Donald Trump.

The FBI official urged the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — which oversees the U.S. Secret Service  — to launch an investigation of the Justice Department, the FBI and all text messages missing and otherwise that threatened the President.

“This is dangerous territory and all FBI text messages and personal phones should be examined,” the official said. “It would reveal some frightening conversations.”

Did FBI brass discuss the assassination of President Donald Trump? If not, what was the nature of the threats against the president from inside the alleged premiere law enforcement agency in the United States?

“(Director) Wray wants a lid on this,” the FBI official said. “Many know there was talk of harming Trump politically but there is a group here (in D.C. HQ) that understands it goes deeper. We need a special counsel or Homeland Security. Somebody has to clean this up outside of DOJ. It is unacceptable.

“This is much larger than just texts between two FBI agents.”

The FBI official called on President Trump to do what is necessary to weed out corruption in the FBI.

“Text messages just don’t disappear,” the FBI official said. “Not here. Someone outside DOJ has to look at all emails and texts. These (FBI bosses) are bad people. You’ve only scratched the surface.”

The high-ranking FBI official called on lawmakers and the Inspector General to focus on the text and email messages of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. The official referred to McCabe’s official and personal correspondences “an anti-Trump treasure trove.”

Q was right, apparently. These people are not only evil, they are stupid as well. I mean, they know better than anyone else that all electronic communications are monitored somewhere, by someone.

How to be in charge

Without actually being in charge. Google’s Sundar Pichai demonstrates what it means for a CEO to serve at the will and pleasure of the SJWs nominally under his authority:

Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded today to the firing of employee James Damore over his controversial memo on workplace diversity, stating that while he does not regret the decision, he regrets that people misunderstood it as a politically motivated event. Speaking in a live conversation with journalist and Recode co-founder Kara Swisher, MSNBC host Ari Melber, and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in San Francisco, Pichai said that the decision to fire Damore was about ensuring women at Google felt like the company was committed to creating a welcoming environment.

“I regret that people misunderstand that we may have made this for a political belief one way or another,” Pichai said. “It’s important for the women at Google, and all the people at Google, that we want to make an inclusive environment.” When pressed by Swisher on the issue of regret, Pichai stated more definitively, “I don’t regret it.” Wojcicki, who has spoken publicly about how Damore’s memo affected her personally, followed up with, “I think it was the right decision.”

It’s not political, it’s just about women’s feelings. Apparently this walking, talking corporate debacle has never heard of either a) feminism or b) the feminist mantra “the personal is the political”.

I had an interesting conversation with Nitasha Tiku, a senior writer at Wired, last night. She’s working on a story about how the poor, powerless executives and managers at Google feel frightened, intimidated, and harassed because James Damore, Charles Johnson, and others have exposed how they harass, intimidate, and blacklist their coworkers, how they hate everyone who voted for Donald Trump, and how they can get away with openly threatening their colleagues with violence and unemployment without suffering any consequences for their behavior.

Poor, poor Googlers. Why can’t they harass their victims with impunity in secret?

As I pointed out to Ms Tiku, I and a number of other outsiders have known about what has been taking place behind the scenes at Google for years. I even wrote about it after the election, nine months before the Damore memo was leaked to the public by SJWs.

Internal pressure is pushing for the expansion of hate speech to include everything and everyone that fails to submit to the SJW narrative, for more intense action against so-called “fake news”, and even broader definitions of “fake news”. So far, they are only cracking down on genuinely fake news, but there is some belief that this is the proverbial dipping the toe in the water, to see what they can do without provoking a backlash.

The victory of the God-Emperor Ascendant was a massive blow to the SJWs inside Google, and like most SJWs, they have completely lost the plot post-election. They were openly calling other Googlers racists, sexists, and homophobes just for voting for Trump. Those are firing offenses at Google. Google has insane civility requirements imposed on anyone talking to a member of a protected group, but apparently calling for all Republicans to be fired is perfectly acceptable.

Everyone ignored this. Then James Damore and I provided incontrovertible proof that Googlers were, in fact, behaving every bit as badly as I had said they were. So now, having been accused, exposed, and caught red-handed, they’re trying to spin documented proof of their own misbehavior as some sort of harassment, and they are attempting to enlist the media as their ad hoc defense attorneys in order to change the subject.

Amazon’s next market

I refuse to use any of these smart, voice-activated devices or to have one in my home. It astonishes me that anyone does:

Amazon wants to put a camera and microphone in your bedroom with the UK launch of its latest Echo home device. The camera on the £119.99 ($129) Echo Spot, which doubles up as a ‘smart alarm’, will probably be facing directly at the user’s bed.  The device, which is already available in the US has such sophisticated microphones it can hear people talking from across the room – even if music is playing.

However, there remain privacy concerns over using such a device in the home. Amazon devices have previously activated when they’re not wanted meaning this small device could turn into a potential spy.

Five years from now, I’m sure we’ll all be shocked when Amazon unveils that it is adding adult channels to all of its streaming services, with a library bigger than all of its rivals combined.

The most hostile work environment on the planet

James Damore’s lawsuit is making it clear to everyone just how toxic the work environment is at Google. It is so extreme that even Rod Dreher has taken notice of the lethal convergence.

7. ‘Discourage them all throughout the industry’
“If we really care about diversity in tech, we don’t just need to chase serial offenders out of Google, we need to discourage them all throughout the industry,” a lengthy internal post on Damore read. “We should be willing to give a wink and a nod to other Silicon Valley employers over terminable offenses, not send the worst parts of tech packing with a smile …”

8. ‘I will hurt you’
Damore’s memo prompted another employee to post this quote: “I’m a queer-ass nonbinary trans person that is fucking sick and tired of being told to open a dialogue with people who want me dead. We are at a point where the dialogue we need to be having with these people is ‘if you keep talking about this shit, i will hurt you.”

9. ‘Relies on crowdsourced harassment’
Google encourages employees to enforce unwritten norms by harassing and ostracizing those who break them, according to the suit, and by allowing employees to create “blocklists” on their communications systems. “[Google] relies on crowdsourced harassment and ‘pecking’ to enforce social norms (including politics) that it feels it cannot write directly into its policies,” the suit states.

11. ‘You’re being blacklisted…at companies outside Google’
Google manager Adam Fletcher wrote in 2015 he would never hire conservatives he deemed hold hostile views. “I will never, ever hire/transfer you onto my team,” he wrote. “Ever. I don’t care if you are perfect fit or technically excellent or whatever. I will actively not work with you, even to the point where your team or product is impacted by this decision. I’ll communicate why to your manager if it comes up. You’re being blacklisted by people at companies outside of Google,” he added. “You might not have been aware of this, but people know, people talk. There are always social consequences.”

It’s really rather remarkable how completely out of control the big technology companies are. And it’s going to be even more remarkable to see how fast they collapse once the artificial circumstances keeping them afloat change. They are like hollow, cancer-ridden giants and I expect that several of them will vanish as soon as the debt-equity bubble pops.

Convergence tends to metastasize after a company hits its peak. We’re seeing this in industry after industry, and particularly in corporations whose executives start to believe their position is unassailable.

Photo-preening is wrong and illegal

You can’t say that I haven’t repeatedly warned you about the negative consequences of photo-preening online at your children’s expense:

An Italian woman has been banned from posting images of her teenage son on social media, and threatened with a 10,000 euro fine if she defies it.

The 16-year-old had made a court complaint about his mother’s social media habits, which included posting pictures of him on Facebook without his consent.

A Rome family court dealing with the mother’s divorce from the teen’s father, ruled in the 16-year-old’s favour. The court ruled that as per Italian copyright law, the subject of the photographs owns the copyright and the mother was therefore in breach.

It’s natural to be proud of your children. But they do not exist to serve your ego, and as a parent, you should be far more concerned about protecting their privacy and their futures than in trying to demonstrate to everyone what a wonderful father or mother you are, or how fabulous your genetic legacy happens to be, or showing the distant relatives they barely know what they look like. That’s what Christmas cards are for.

Posting your children’s pictures online without their consent is obnoxious, self-serving, and potentially dangerous. It is also illegal in an increasing number of jurisdictions. Just don’t do it.