Month: April 2018

No Thank You

Business, Culture

There seems to be a consensus that if driverless cars are ever to become universal, then the controlling system will have to be one single one — you can’t have competing, perhaps even incompatible systems fighting over the traffic. In other words, we’d need something like Europe’s Eurocontrol:

Eurocontrol’s Enhanced Tactical Flow Management System compares demand for flights in a particular area with the available capacity.
The system pulls together data such as flight plans, taxiing time, and flight position from numerous sources in multiple countries and collates them.
It can then track planes in real time to manage the number of planes in the air to make sure it doesn’t get too crowded.
Precise monitoring prevents the carefully balanced system from being thrown out by planes with delayed departures or arrivals.
Planes can then be herded into departure and landing slots at airports to keep the thousands of flights in Europe flowing smoothly.
ETFMS also helps plan flight schedules up to a week in advance to help airlines and air traffic controllers plan each day down to the minute.

Uh huh. Then something like this happens:

Up to half of all flights in Europe face delays today after a Europe-wide air traffic control system failed.
Eurocontrol, which runs the system, said that a technical problem means that as many as half a million passengers could be affected, disrupting travellers who went away for the Easter weekend.
‘Today 29,500 flights were expected in the European network. Approximately half of those could have some delay as a result of the system outage,’ Eurocontrol said. The agency said the system would be back up and running tomorrow.
…
The cause had been identified, it said, without saying what it was. The agency said ‘contingency procedures’ were in place to stop the system becoming overloaded but that these would be lifted later this evening.
Eurocontrol added that flight plans from before 11.26am BST were ‘lost’ and asked airlines to refile them.
The agency said it was a ‘technical fault’ and that the system had not been hacked, saying they were now ‘in recovery mode’.

“Lost”, huh? That’s comforting.

Here’s my takeaway. I am never going to submit myself to a driverless car. And I am certainly never going to board a pilot-less aircraft (which, incredibly, has been suggested by various airlines and aircraft manufacturers).

Systems fail occasionally — all systems fail eventually — and I’m not going to be a prisoner of this kind of happenstance, ever, if I can possibly avoid it.

That “Human” Touch

Bad News, Seen On Campus

Apparently some colleges can’t even get it right when it comes to acceptance letters:

Applicants to Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health were the latest anxiety-ridden group of young people to fall victim to an admissions glitch, when, in February 2017, the school accidentally sent offers of admission to 277 students then said the notices were sent in error about an hour later. But those students are just the latest in a string of others who have suffered the same fate. Schools ranging from Carnegie Mellon to Tulane have sent admissions notices in error. In 2009, the University of California-San Diego accidentally told 28,000 students they were admitted to the school, when in fact they were rejected.

Of course, the response from these blundering fools is of the “My bad!” shrugs, along with the inexcusable excuses:

The errors are likely the result of the most mundane of office problems: IT challenges.
“For some places you’re taking relatively young professionals, you’re putting them in roles where they don’t have an enormous amount of experience with business process,” Farrell said. “The other piece is that sometimes the systems on campus, the enterprise management systems, can be very complex and not terribly user-friendly.”

I’m sorry, but we as a society are way past the “Oh, the computer got it wrong” bullshit. I’m not a litigious kind of person, but this looks like a classic case of a huge class-action “pain and suffering” payout. Without some kind of financial penalty, the universities (all of whom include courses on “Computer Science” in their curricula) have absolutely no incentive to fix this situation. So the “complex, unfriendly enterprise management systems” won’t get fixed, nor will the “inexperienced young professionals” get fired; and prospective (fee-paying) students will continue to get shafted. (My suggestion:  every time a person gets a false acceptance letter, that student should be entitled to a full-boat, all-expenses-paid four-year scholarship at the offending college. That, I think, would get someone’s attention.)

All in all, however, this sorry experience will also provide school-leavers with an excellent foretaste of corporate indifference and inefficiency, an experience that should stand them in good stead in their future careers. When their lives can be fucked up by a “mail-merge” mistake, young people will see at firsthand just how unimportant they are to Global MegaCorp Inc. If that doesn’t melt the “snowflake” mentality, nothing will.

Fat Chance

Men & Women

So… now Millennial Grrrrls would rather date older men?

I’ve noticed a new strategy among my set of female friends—lovely, intelligent, independent women—to combat the grime of the online dating world: date up.
I don’t mean status, I mean age. More and more women I know are dating men twice, yes twice, their age.
There have never been more advantages to relationships with older men, precisely because Tinder and its ilk have made dating feel impossible to those of us who don’t want to participate in the battle of who-cares-less. Reach back two decades and you are more likely to find a man who can’t fathom swiping through a series of pictures to find a mate for the night.
Older men are attentive, they aren’t threatened by your career success, they didn’t grow up watching porn on their laptops, and they certainly don’t expect sex from you before you’ve even had a chance to meet. It’s not an “old-fashioned” dating scheme, it’s just a more humane one.

Hate to burst your bubble, sweetie, but for the (older) men of my generation, just the fact that you were ever on Tinder is an automatic disqualification. And that’s just the start. I wouldn’t claim to speak on behalf of my generation of men, but here’s what I see amongst today’s young women (I can’t bring myself to call you “ladies” because you are the most unladylike creatures imaginable).

Millennial women are hopelessly vapid, shallow and amoral creatures. They have no philosophy outside the most banal, bumper-sticker tropes, and they are enslaved to a trashy popular culture that men like myself find repellent and atrocious — think of Kardashian TV, Real Housewives Of [wherever], Jersey Shore, Britain’s TOWIE and so on. Millennial women are also enslaved to technology like Facebook, Twitter and the like, are chained to their vile “smart” phones and consequently have the attention span of gnats. Worse than that, Millennial women are sexually promiscuous, with all the ghastly, pox-laden potential consequences that such a lifestyle entails.

While all this may entice some older guys into what your Millennial male counterparts scornfully call a “pump & dump” relationship — i.e. a short-term, mostly physical encounter — it does not bode well for your prospects if you’re looking for more than that. Do you think that despite our supposed “ignorance” of modern technology, we’re unaware of situations like SugarBabies.com and their ilk? (FYI: we older men refer to this as “prostitution“, no matter what you were taught in your Fem Studies classes.) It’s an instructive lesson to hear how the men who sponsor these tarts characterize their charges: disposable, cheap and ultimately, repulsive. (Ever wonder why so few sugar babies end up marrying their sugar daddies? Check the stats, if you can even understand them.) When you start setting your cap at this demographic, this is what awaits you.

So to all those “lovely, intelligent, independent women” who appear to have finally grown up and realized that they’re not quite the catch they imagined they were: you fucked up.  Now you have to deal with the consequences of the choices made back when you were in your late teens and twenties. (And by the way: most of you aren’t lovely, intelligent and independent: you’re slovenly, overweight, dull and horribly dependent on, well, just about everybody from your parents to HR departments to government.)

The biggest mistake you Millennial Grrrls ever made? Believing the feminist bullshit that your mothers’ generation foisted on you as gospel. Guess what?  You can’t have it all.  Never could, and nor can anyone, ever. Life is a series of compromises; and you lot compromised your morals, your youth, your self-respect and your womanhood, all in pursuit of the unattainable.

I’d say I’m sorry for your plight; but considering the misery that the so-called third-generation feminism has inflicted and continues to inflict on both men and women in today’s wretched society, I can’t sympathize with you in the slightest. There’s a term in the patriarchy which describes your situation perfectly:  tough shit.

Good luck, grrrls.

And welcome to the Thunder Dome.

Don’t Go There, Lefty Fuckwits

Advice, Politics, The Gun Thing

Apparently, this latest round in the saga of Leftists’ desire for general citizen disarmament has them yucking it up about gun owners’ “cold dead hands” mantra, as seen in this revolting video.

Just to make it perfectly clear:  we’re not joking.  And if your response is, “Nor are we,” then I guess I need to buy some more ammo, and your storm troopers will have to buy more body bags. Assuming you’d have enough storm troopers, by the way. (Because we all know that you’d never try to take away our guns yourselves, you braying cowards.)

This is no joking matter; this is deadly serious stuff we’re talking about. Too many Americans have died defending our Constitution for the rest of us to submit meekly to this kind of subversion. And all your bleating that “20% of Americans support our gun confiscation agenda” simply means that 80% of us don’t, which is why the Second Amendment will never be repealed.

Choke on it. And watch as our numbers grow.

Cultural Straws Part 2

Culture, Music

In yesterday’s post (Part 1) I looked at the trend in modern music covered by this article. Today I want to talk about the last couple paragraphs of said piece, which really deserve their own discussion. Why? First, the text:

“Music is at its core a social activity. People get inspired to play because they listen to their favorite artists or see them at a live venue. But that experience isn’t translated when you take music lessons. It’s usually a very solitary, one-on-one experience with one teacher and the students aren’t necessarily learning to play the songs they want to learn.”
…
“We teach students of all ages the same music theory they’d learn anywhere else, but you learn to use that theory with a band [emphasis added]. Students have group rehearsals where they can practice with a band every week. And we also have our version of a recital, which is really a rock show at a live venue. We put on more than 3,000 shows a year across the world.”

I cannot stress how good an idea this is, and here’s why.

It is a truism of education that unless there is relevance, fear or self-interest (or all three) involved, education or training will be a waste of time, i.e. no learning will be retained. (“Retained learning” being defined as being taught something, and being able to repeat the input a year later with more or less 90% facility.) This learning will be doubly successful if it is practical, meaningful and requires frequent repetition.

So here’s why the above approach is so successful.
1.) Pupils are not just learning musical theory (which I can attest is deadly boring), but are immediately required to put it into practice by playing with a group — i.e. it has relevance because the band’s performance will suffer if the pupil under-performs, and thus the band will rehearse over and over until they get it right (which provides the discipline to practice, as opposed to leaving practice to self-discipline — not an easy thing to maintain for months or years). Thus: application and repetition.
2.) Pupils get to play either exactly what they want or a close facsimile thereof by making a group compromise. Thus: relevance for the skills they’re acquiring.
3.) Finally, the audience’s applause provides the reward (i.e. self-interest) for the pupil.

I can tell you from my own experience that when our band really enjoyed a song — both the learning and the playing — we would play it for months or even years until we either forgot about it or got sick of playing it. On one occasion, after an absence of five years from the playlist, we got a request for Radar Love. As it happened, one of us had it on tape, so we listened to it during a break, then went back onstage and played it as though we’d done it the night before. Retained learning.

So I am totally unsurprised at the success of the School Of Rock, if this is how they’re teaching music. If I were a great deal younger, I’d enroll in a heartbeat.

As for the main thrust of the article — that Guitar Center is in financial kaka — I’m not worried, certainly not as far as guitars are concerned. It’s one of the few items remaining where a buyer absolutely has to touch the thing and test it before buying it, so GC should be able to weather the storm, even if in truncated fashion… I hope.