Tag: technology

SJWs will SJW

As I expected, it turns out that the deactivation of the God-Emperor’s Twitter account was intentional:

A Twitter customer support worker who was on his or her last day on the job deactivated President Donald Trump’s account for a few minutes Thursday evening, the social media company reported.

Shortly before 7 p.m. Thursday, social media reports surfaced that the president’s personal account, @RealDonaldTrump, was unavailable, providing the error message that the user “does not exist.” The account was restored by 7:03 p.m.

Twitter took responsibility for the outage. In a tweeted statement, the company said Trump’s account was “inadvertently deactivated due to human error” by one of its employees. The account was unreachable for 11 minutes.

Twitter later said the deactivation “was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day.”

Note that Twitter’s first response was to lie. They may also by lying about it having been the employee’s last day before he deactivated the account. This sort of behavior is increasingly common among SJWs; we had a similar problem with an SJW at Amazon when we released Corrosion: The Corroding Empire Book One.

An SJW at Amazon repeatedly pulled it out of publication status. It took three times before a manager would believe me, and a fourth time for her to catch the guilty party. I don’t know what the consequences were, but I was assured that the individual would never be able to do it again.

Which, of course, is why you must NEVER hire SJWs or permit them to continue working for you, even if you are of the Left yourself. They will not even hesitate to pursue their social justice objectives even when those objectives directly conflict with the organization’s interests. If you doubt this, or wish for a more substantive analysis, you should read SJWs Always Double Down.

Best of Brainstorm

I received this email today:

The webinar “Open Brainstorm with Steve Keen” you ran on our GoToWebinar platform made it to our Top 100 PERSONAL_DEVELOPMENT webinars in 2017. Congratulations on a webinar job well done! ?

So, that’s nice, I suppose. We’re all about the PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT here, right? In more important news, I’ve just about resolved our issues with the webinar provider and will be able to start doing Brainstorms again. The short version is that their company was bought or otherwise reorganized, somewhere along the way a billing mistake was made, and it took an impressively long time to convince someone with sufficient authority there to fix the issue. It was almost amusing when an account representative called today to ask about finally settling the unpaid invoice, I explained that I still had not received any corrected invoice nor did I even know what amount would settle it, to which the woman cheerfully responded she had it right there before promptly producing one with the original incorrect amount.

You know it’s bad when you don’t even get irritated any more, let alone angry, but simply chuckle a little as it gradually begins to dawn on the person on the other side of the line that you have, in fact, been telling them the simple truth all along.

Superconvergence

How converged does a commenting service have to be to refuse service to modestly controversial site anyway?

On Monday evening, I received an email from tos@disqus.com stating that they are suspending all Disqus services to Return Of Kings starting on October 20, 2017. Here is the full email:

Hi there,

We wanted to reach out to inform you that your site has been found to be in conflict with the terms of use of Disqus. Because of this, Disqus is unable to offer your site continued discussion services past the end of this week.

I replied asking what specific terms were violated but have not yet received a response. I’m guessing we were terminated because of their vague “hate speech” clause, which really means “speech our liberal employees disagree with.”

The amazing thing here is that without some disagreement, people have literally nothing to discuss. Disqus isn’t just elevating social justice above its primary purpose, it is actually eliminating its primary purpose for existing in the first place.

Alt★Hero FREESTARTR is back in business

Freestartr has fixed the system that I broke and you can now safely back the campaign and make additions again. If you are one of the six or seven people who backed the project in the last 12 hours since the last database backup, you will be contacted to confirm that the amount of your backing is correct. Both of the new Rewards, for the Rebel Figurine alone and for a single Poster, are now functional, although you’ll need to scroll down to the bottom of the Rewards until they get them arranged in order later today.

In other news, we have decided to remove the 150k Stretch Goal of the 15-minute video and replace it with the creation of an Alt★Hero web site, complete with forums. I spoke with the producer, and we decided that rather than do a small video now, we’d prefer to concentrate on building a strong foundation for the series, then crowdfund a more ambitious video project next year that will be written by Chuck Dixon and me. This means that we can spend more of the resources that the backers are providing us on actual comic art and books rather than on a single video that is too short to serve as much more than an expensive marketing tool.

In the meantime, by popular demand, here is another image of Rebel. She does not cuck or cower.

The death of the cloud

This sort of thing is why we don’t use the cloud. Frankly, I don’t understand why anyone does.

Yahoo said a major security breach in 2013 compromised all three billion accounts the company maintained, a three-fold increase over the estimate it disclosed previously.

The revelation, contained in an updated page about the 2013 hack, is the result of new information and the forensic analysis of an unnamed security consultant. Previously, Yahoo officials said about one billion accounts were compromised. With Yahoo maintaining roughly three billion accounts at the time, the 2013 hack would be among the biggest ever reported.

“We recently obtained additional information and, after analyzing it with the assistance of outside forensic experts, we have identified additional user accounts that were affected,” Yahoo officials wrote in the update. “Based on an analysis of the information with the assistance of outside forensic experts, Yahoo has determined that all accounts that existed at the time of the August 2013 theft were likely affected.”

The information taken in the heist may have included users’ names, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, passwords scrambled using the weak MD5 cryptographic hashing algorithm, and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. Yahoo said investigators don’t believe the stolen information included passwords in clear text, payment card data, or bank account information. Yahoo also provided updated figures in a press release and in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

As if there is any chance – any chance at all – that they didn’t know that all of the information had been taken. Who trusts anything these Big Tech companies say anymore anyhow?

Sure, I use Blogger and Gmail, but always in the full knowledge that everything on this blog and in my email could go public one day. There is no such thing as “security” in social media.

The dark side of entrepreneurial genius

Many will rightly look at this as a wonderful example of the sort of energetic immigrant entrepreneurialism that they believe to be of great benefit to America. But, as it happens, there is a very real and substantive downside to it as well:

The Uberpreneur: How An Uber Driver Makes $252,000 A Year. Uber may not just be a disruptive platform for transportation, but one for small businesses.
 
“Absolutely,” Uber spokeswoman Kristin Carvell says. “One of the greatest things about the Uber platform is that it offers economic opportunity for a variety of drivers — full-time, part-time, veterans, teachers, artists, and students — in more than 260 cities around the world.  Supporting and fueling the local economy is important to Uber and our driver partners help us to achieve this goal.”

His passengers seem to agree. Gavin’s ratings are 4.85/5.00 on Uber Black, 4.87/5.00 on UberX and 4.95/5.00 on Lyft, which he also uses. Those ratings have held up over time; Gavin drove over 3,829 passengers in the past 18 months.

These passengers include “executives who people pay thousands of dollars to meet at networking events,” Gavin says. He’s met Vogue fashion editors and Silicon Valley’s top brass, including legendary investor Shervin Pishevar.

“I’ve had a lot of amazing drivers, but Gavin is one of the best,” Shervin told me. “I was in his car with my daughter when I saw his jewelry designs. I thought they were wonderful and gave him a lot of encouragement to pursue his dreams.”

It’s these tactics that translate to sales. In the past year, Gavin designed many jewelry pieces for passengers, averaging $18,000 in transactions per month. Adding the $3,000 monthly gross earnings from Uber, he made $252,000 last year. Gavin used the income to expand his business, buying three more cars and hiring six new drivers.

It’s an absolutely brilliant idea. This guy is advertising far more effectively than any social media or Madison Avenue campaign, taking advantage of the direct one-on-one time he has with his riders to let them know about his business, which quite clearly is a genuine interest to a sufficient percentage of them. This guy is a bona fide entrepreneurial genius.

However, it’s not all rosy good cheer and future GDP growth on the horizon.

But Gavin’s growing business doesn’t tell the full story. As he’s become more successful, he hasn’t forgotten about his fellow Filipino immigrants. “I reach back to my roots,” he said. “When hiring new drivers, I find underemployed Filipinos and give them the jobs first. Most don’t know much about smartphones — and that’s okay. I teach them about Uber and Lyft. I teach them how to use the internet so it can help their lives in other ways, too. I let them use the cars to run errands and pick up their children. It’s not about squeezing every dollar from them. It’s about empowering the community that you came from.”

So much for American meritocracy. Gavin is so grateful for the opportunity that America has given him that he’s actively helping his fellow Filipinos in preference to Americans, even when they are massively less-qualified.

This is precisely why the civic nationalist notion of only bringing in the best and most productive foreigners is as harmful to the nation, and arguably more insidiously so, than importing a parasitical class of welfare recipients.

Good morning, said Gab

Gab@getongab
Good morning to everyone except Google.

If you’re not sure what this means, perhaps today’s DailyMemeWars might help you understand.

Now, obviously, I don’t agree with Gab’s position on moderation. I don’t agree with it in theory and I don’t agree with it in practice. But that doesn’t mean that I think it is either right or fair for Gab to be locked out of the App Store and the Play Store. As to whether it is legal for them to be blackballed in this way, I have no idea. I simply don’t know what most of the relevant laws are, or how they apply to the situation. Unlike most of the critics of my current petition, I try to avoid opining in ignorance.

It is a daunting task to take on a tech giant with the resources that Google has at its disposal. It’s certainly a courageous move. As to whether it is a clever move or a completely crazy one, we shall have to wait and see what comes of it. But, as we know, giants can be slain.

The failure of click-marketing

The CEO of Restoration Hardware reaches the same conclusion as the CEO of Proctor & Gamble: online advertising accomplishes nothing. More at Zerohedge.

I’ll share a little anecdote with you on this point.

We had our marketing meeting in the company several years ago and the online marketing team was pitching to double their budget, right, and at the time, say, look, nobody in the company is doubling their budget. But tell me why you believe that’s the right thing to do. And they said, well, look, our customer acquisition cost and our ad cost is the lowest in the company. And I said, well, tell me about the data, show me how. And they said, well, people who click through the words that we buy on Google, the ad cost was lowest. And I said, how do you know that they’re clicking on the word and going to the website because of the word you bought versus they saw a store or they received a source book? They said, oh, we know.

I said, well, how many words do you buy? They said 3,200. 3,200 words. I said, well, what are the top words? How are they ranked, the ranking of the words? Oh, we don’t have that, right. And I was getting the look at like, oh, Gary is kind of one these old brick-and-mortar guys. He just doesn’t get it.

And I said, well, what are the top 10 words? And they didn’t have the information. I said, why don’t we cancel the meeting and come back next week when you have the data? I’m sure that Google sales representatives who are taking you to the expensive lunches and selling you the 3,200 words have that data. So why don’t we get the data and then let, review the data?

And they came back the next week and we sat in a meeting and all of a sudden, I can tell you there’s a little change in the faces. They had to wear it kind of down. Everybody kind of came in. I said, so what did we find out?

And they said, well, we’ve found out that 98{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we’re buying 3,200 words and 98{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it’s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?

Immediately the next day, we cancelled all the words, including our own name. By the way, we are paying for the little shaded box above our words and said, oh no, we have to hang on to that because Pottery Barn might squat on top of us. I said, excuse me? I said, if someone goes to a mall or a shopping center and they’re going to Restoration Hardware and there’s a Pottery Bam there, they’re already squatting, okay? It doesn’t mean they’re going to go into their store. If somebody wanted to buy a diamond from Tiffany and just because Zale’s is sitting on top of them in a shaded box doesn’t mean they’re going to go to Zale’s and buy a diamond.

I mean, I can’t believe how many companies buy their own name and they’re paying Google millions of dollars a year for their own name, like maybe if this is webcast, right, a lot of people are going to go, holy crap. They’re going to look at their investments. They’d go, maybe we don’t need to buy our own name.

I’ve seen absolutely ZERO benefit to buying Google ads or Facebook ads myself. I’ve never bothered with Twitter ads or any other social media advertising. I’ve seen very, very moderate success buying Amazon ads. What has been far more successful is a) the Castalia House email lists, b) blogging about and excerpting books, c) the book carousels on the sidebar, and d) Tweeting about new books.

Of course, I’ve always been skeptical about digital advertising. Except for the way it can amplify word of mouth, it’s always struck me as a dubious proposition. You’ll notice that I’ve never been very prone to permitting anyone else to advertise here either, for just that reason.

Flat UI is retarding.

It is literally retarding. It slows the user down by nearly one-quarter on average. I’ve always hated it, passionately, since I noticed Apple pushing it. Now I understand why, beyond the ugly, outdated aesthetics.

The mania for “flat” user interfaces is costing publishers and ecommerce sites billions in lost revenue. A “flat” design removes the distinction between navigation controls and content. Historically, navigation controls such as buttons were shaded, or given 3D relief, to distinguish them from the application or web page’s content.

The mania is credited to Microsoft with its minimalistic Zune player, an iPod clone, which was developed into the Windows Phone Series UX, which in turn became the design for Windows from Windows 8 in 2012 onwards. But Steve Jobs is also to blame. The typography-besotted Apple founder was fascinated by WP’s “magazine-style” Metro design, and it was posthumously incorporated into iOS7 in 2013. Once blessed by Apple, flat designs spread to electronic programme guides on telly, games consoles and even car interfaces. And of course web sites.

Flat designs looked “cleaner” and more “modern” (Microsoft’s subsequent portmanteau term for its Metro design), but there was a price to pay.

The consequence is that users find navigation harder, and so spend more time on a page. Now research by the Nielsen Norman Group has measured by how much. The company wired up 71 users, and gave them nine sites to use, tracking their eye movement and recording the time spent on content.

“On average participants spent 22 per cent more time (i.e. slower task performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers,” the firm notes. Why would that be? Users were looking for clues how to navigate. “The average number of fixations was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average, people had 25 per cent more fixations on the pages with weak signifiers.”

The firm dispenses with the counter-argument that users were “more engaged” with the page.

“Since this experiment used targeted findability tasks, more time and effort spent looking around the page are not good. These findings don’t mean that users were more ‘engaged’ with the pages. Instead, they suggest that participants struggled to locate the element they wanted, or weren’t confident when they first saw it.”

However, the failure of the WarMouse to be embraced with any widespread enthusiasm taught me that for all they like the idea of fast computers, most people are not very concerned with interface speed. If people are not particularly interested in doubling their interface speed, which we demonstrated was the norm for WarMouse Meta users, it should not be surprising that they are not overly concerned about losing 22 percent of it either.

The Left begins to wake up

About the potential problems posted by the Big Social Media monopolies:

We’re basically too small for Google to care about. So I wouldn’t say we’ve had any bad experiences with Google in the sense of Google trying to injure us or use its power against us. What we’ve experienced is a little different. Google is so big and so powerful that even when it’s trying to do something good, it can be dangerous and frightening.

Here’s an example.

With the events of recent months and years, Google is apparently now trying to weed out publishers that are using its money streams and architecture to publish hate speech. Certainly you’d probably be unhappy to hear that Stormfront was funded by ads run through Google. I’m not saying that’s happening. I’m just giving you a sense of what they are apparently trying to combat. Over the last several months we’ve gotten a few notifications from Google telling us that certain pages of ours were penalized for ‘violations’ of their ban for hate speech. When we looked at the pages they were talking about they were articles about white supremacist incidents. Most were tied to Dylann Roof’s mass murder in Charleston.

Now in practice all this meant was that two or three old stories about Dylann Roof could no longer run ads purchased through Google. I’d say it’s unlikely that loss to TPM amounted to even a cent a month. Totally meaningless. But here’s the catch. The way these warnings work and the way these particular warnings were worded, you get penalized enough times and then you’re blacklisted.

Now, certainly you’re figuring we could contact someone at Google and explain that we’re not publishing hate speech and racist violence. We’re reporting on it. Not really. We tried that. We got back a message from our rep not really understanding the distinction and cheerily telling us to try to operate within the no hate speech rules. And how many warnings until we’re blacklisted? Who knows?

If we were cut off, would that be Adexchange (the ads) or DoubleClick for Publishers (the road) or both? Who knows?

If the first stopped we’d lose a big chunk of money that wouldn’t put us out of business but would likely force us to retrench. If we were kicked off the road more than half of our total revenue would disappear instantly and would stay disappeared until we found a new road – i.e., a new ad serving service or technology. At a minimum that would be a devastating blow that would require us to find a totally different ad serving system, make major technical changes to the site to accommodate the new system and likely not be able to make as much from ads ever again. That’s not including some unknown period of time – certainly weeks at least – in which we went with literally no ad revenue.

Needless to say, the impact of this would be cataclysmic and could easily drive us out of business.

Now it’s never happened. And this whole scenario stems from what is at least a well-intentioned effort not to subsidize hate speech and racist groups. Again, it hasn’t happened. So in some sense the cataclysmic scenario I’m describing is as much a product of my paranoia as something Google could or might do. But when an outside player has that much power, often acts arbitrarily (even when well-intentioned) and is almost impossible to communicate with, a significant amount of paranoia is healthy and inevitable.

I give this example only to illustrate the way that Google is so powerful and so all-encompassing that it can actually do great damage unintentionally.

It’s interesting to see that the Left is beginning to get paranoid about Big Social Media, even though they’re not being targeted by it. Yet.