Tag: Stupid people

MS Paint Is Dead — Errr, Wait A Minute

Business

So Microsoft announced that MS Paint was going to go the way of Outlook Express — i.e. die because they just aren’t interested in maintaining the old horse anymore, and it’s to the glue factory it will go.

Then, 24 hours later, after a storm of protest from longtime Paint users, Microsoft backtracked and said that Paint wasn’t going to disappear completely; it would just not be included in future releases of their operating software — it would have to be downloaded as a separate operation.

What bullshit is this? I’ve written before that Microsoft’s corporate strategy team, if they have one, should get a kick in the teeth for fucking over longtime customers just at the behest of Engineering who, despite Dilbert’s efforts, should never, ever be allowed to set policy. And product longevity is precisely what should be decided by Marketing, not by Engineering or Production, because the people most affected will be customers — and despite Dilbert, again, Engineering doesn’t understand customers.

I’ll spell it out for Microsoft (and I won’t need SpellCheck either): you guys are a bunch of fucking idiots.

There are millions of software users who don’t need sophisticated software to address their everyday needs. This is true whether it’s word processing (people who are only interested in writing letters, papers or novels), doing basic budget preparation (households and small businesses) correspondence (people writing simple letters or memos to a few people), and basic photo / picture editing (family photos, articles, blogs) . In other words, LetterPerfect 1.0, Lotus 1-2-3 v.3, Outlook Express… and Paint. In Microsoft parlance, it’s not the bloated juggernaut known as MS Office, it’s the MS Works crowd. And just to repeat the original thought: there are millions and millions of such people and I, one of the earliest Microsoft PC customers, am one of them.

I fucking hate Outlook, Office and (just to be fair) Adobe Photoshop. They’re all too much for my needs, and I’m sick of having to learn to go through a multi-step process just to be able to do something that used to be a one-click operation.

My only comfort is that I’m no longer young, and my time to have to deal with all this nonsense is shrinking. But it gives me no comfort whatsoever to think that Microsoft believes that this is the reason not to worry about me — that I and my kind are a shrinking market, which gives them the right to fuck us, and ignore us.

Goopery

Bad News

I swear on my life that I had not read this before I made Gwyneth Paltrow the worst-possible dinner guest of all time. (And you must read it too, all of it. Yes, it’s long. Don’t care.) Here’s the opening salvo:

In retrospect, I find it rather odd that I never paid much attention to Goop. Goop (or is it goop?), as you might recall, is Gwyneth Paltrow’s beauty/health/wellness website (and, of course, online store) that’s been in the news a fair amount over the last several months. The reason is that Paltrow combines celebrity, beauty, and “wellness” with pure quackery, and every so often Goop publishes something advocating pseudoscience so outrageous that it attracts the attention of not just skeptics, but of the mainstream press and even late night comedians like Stephen Colbert. What I didn’t realize is just how broad the quackery is, and, more importantly, how it is facilitated by actual physicians working with Goop. Before I get to that, though, let’s take a brief trip down memory lane, where I’ll explain how I became aware of just how much a wretched hive of scum and quackery Goop has become.

Me myself, I don’t care about Goop, its expensive snake-oil products or the fact that it hides good old-fashioned snake-oil sales techniques behind Gwyneth Paltrow’s skinny frame. I don’t even care if The Perpetually Gullible (i.e. people who espouse the value of homeopathy) end up sticking expensive jade eggs up their vaginas and die from the agonizing infection this lunacy can cause. (Yes, such a product is available at Goop and yes, it’s solemnly pitched as an answer to various ailments such as Trump Derangement Syndrome. That last part is an absolute fabrication on my part, but it’s no less plausible than all the other earnest-but-bullshit nostrums put out by Goop.)

I bet there’s an absolute direct and full correlation (like, 1.0000) between people who believe Paltrow’s  bullshit and Hillary Clinton / Bernie Saunders supporters. Not all the above are Goop acolytes, of course — but all Goop acolytes are, without a shadow of a doubt, liberals of that ilk. If you can still believe that socialism is a cure for all society’s ills after all the proof extant that it isn’t, you’ll believe anything, So feel free to clean out your colon with a Goop-endorsed boutique ostrich feather if you believe it will make you feel better about your bowel movements.

And if Goop ends up being the latest Jonestown Kool-Aid to liberals, who am I to deny their right to be a bunch of stupid, vapid morons, even if it kills them?

Charles Darwin, call your office.

Overpaid And Over Here

Behind Enemy Lines

So the BBC published the salaries of their top “talent” a little while ago. Surprise, surprise, men earn more than women for doing the same job. (As Mr. FM puts it, “Most of them are paid to read a teleprompter and are no more journalists than my dogs.”)

There’s a lot to be said about all this, but I’m only going to make a few comments.

BBC is funded largely by annual license fees paid by 95% of the British population — roughly $180 per annum per household — and the fees are collected with incredible ferocity. It’s not unfair to say that they’re collected at gunpoint, because failure to pay can result in massive fines and even imprisonment. Needless to say, therefore, people really bitch about wastage and, inevitably, bloated salaries unless they’re being paid to people of serious worth such as veteran nature documentary maker David Attenborough. Here’s a lesser-known example.

BBC Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans, unsurprisingly, makes more than any of the others. While we Murkins might know Evans as the dorky ginger who tried (and failed) to fill the scuffed suede shoes of Top Gear‘s Jeremy Clarkson, Evans is a brilliant DJ, has had the morning radio gig for many years and has astonishing listenership numbers. (Radio is still very popular Over Here, mostly because the TV, all of it, is such shit.) If we translated Evans’s popularity into a Stateside comparison, he’d make more than Howard Stern did at WNBC in New York or Rush Limbaugh still does. While there’s the usual Wealth Envy moaning from the Labour Commies, not too many people are getting upset about Evans because frankly, he’s worth the money. Of course, there are some male presenters who, equally frankly, are not only overpaid but lucky to be employed at all because by any measure, they’re as shit at their job as the crap they have to present. But that’s not the biggest issue.

Oh no; it’s all about Teh Ladies (of course).

Now I’m not going to get into who are the better presenters (although I can’t see why, say, morning TV show male presenters shouldn’t be paid the same as their female co-presenters — they aren’t; men are paid much more). I haven’t watched enough BBC-TV shows to get an idea, because a.) I have a life and b.) all the morning shows are so banal that they make Good Morning America look like the aforementioned Howard Stern’s TV show, and I’d rather walk the Free Markets’ dogs than watch any of them. I will say that having watched a few, the wimmins are actually more entertaining than the men — unless they’re doing a girls-only show like Loose Women, which makes the American show The View (which is unspeakably bad) look like quality programming by comparison.

My final thought is that managerially speaking, the BBC are a bunch of morons. What they should have done was publish alongside the salaries both the length of tenure on the job — experience counts — and most importantly, the viewership / listenership numbers — it’s all about the eyeballs and earholes, folks. Chris Evans’s 9 million listeners dwarf BBC Breakfast‘s 1.5 million viewers, so that would explain the salary disparity there. (As an aside, I should point out that rival ITV’s Good Morning Britain, hosted jointly by the sexy Susanna Reid and the revolting Piers Morgan only gets 800,000 viewers.) Here’s Susanna:

And lastly, the whole BBC salary thing is a study of orange-and-apple comparisons — morning TV shows to, say, football shows — but I have to say, though, that I’m getting a huge amount of pleasure watching the oh-so sanctimoniously-PC BBC wriggle as they try to explain the “gender gap” in their executive wage scales. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of social justice warriors. The BBC also complains that they have to pay these salaries because they’re in competition for talent with the commercial media — except that the competition pays far less, on average, than does the BBC for like jobs.

Addendum: stats on Brit media are incredibly confusing: “peak” vs. “average daily” v.s “weekly” etc. I do understand them, having worked in advertising agencies for years, but I couldn’t be bothered with forensic accuracy. My numbers may be a little off, e.g. dated, but the relative scale of them isn’t, and I’m not a journalist so I have no inclination to spend hours of research on them when I could be cleaning my new Mauser. Priorities: I have them.

Sound And Fury, Signifying Nothing

Politics

That’s been my general media attitude to the breathless headlines about Trump, Russia and all that jive. I have been getting wearied of it all, because it seems endless. But The Coldly-Furious One nails it, right here:

And that’s what it all comes down to now, I think. The Left’s target isn’t Trump now; maybe it never was. The target is Trump’s supporters. They hope to demoralize us, to make us disengage, to inspire us to resignation and defeatism and acceptance of the eternal status quo. They want us to believe that the Swamp can never be drained, to believe that Trump is a fraud who never had any intention of draining it in the first place. They want us to throw up our hands and walk away.

Remember: the lie told often enough becomes truth. What the Left is doing is not uttering the same lie, but different shades of the same lie — Trump did something with Russia that enabled him to steal the election, and if it wasn’t this, then it was that, or that, or that. And all along, all those thises and thats were baseless, groundless and in many cases, pure fabrications and/or wishful thinking.

Using yet another old cliche: throw enough mud, and some of it will stick — to the point where even cynics like myself start thinking yet a third cliche: with all this smoke, there must be fire. But there’s no fire. There’s just noise and incoherent rage, and no substance to any of it. Which is the paraphrase of this post’s title.

Ignore this nonsense, therefore. In fact, ignore what Trump’s doing, too. Let’s focus instead on the Republican Congress, and ask them why the fuck they haven’t been able to come close to fulfilling a single one of their party leader’s campaign promises? Tax reform? Not a word. Repealing ObamaCare? Nothing.

The only thing the Republican Party has been able to do since Trump was elected has been whatever Trump has done by himself.

And guess what? Next year is primary season. Maybe it’s time for We The Voters to start draining the Republican swamp, and installing people who really do want to make America great, again.

Males Under Every Bush

Seen On Campus

No, that’s not a sexy double entendre. Apparently, some academic feministicals [redundancy alert] have decided that there are too many male-sourced citations in scholarly literature, or something like that:

In a recent academic journal article, two feminist professors claim that citing sources in scholarly articles contributes to “white heteromasculinity.” Rutgers University professor Carrie Mott and University of Waterloo professor Daniel Cockayne advance the claim in an article published last month in the Feminist Journal of Geography, but also suggest that citation can serve as “a feminist and anti-racist technology of resistance” if references are chosen with the explicit intent of promoting “those authors and voices we want to carry forward.”

Note that the second of these two feministicals is (I think) a man, ergo completely pussy-whipped into compliance with Teh Narrative. Of course, they don’t let actual, you know, facts get in their way:

The authors say that “white men tend to be cited in much higher numbers than people from other backgrounds,” but dismiss the idea that this is due to the relative preponderance of white male geographers.

And yes, the picture of Professor Mott (from Rutgers’s website, no less) should come as no surprise to anyone:

My sincerest apologies to anyone who is now unable to eat their breakfast. The other idiot’s picture will also be unsurprising:

Good grief, they’re making professors out of 12-year-olds. It’s becoming easier and easier to see why The Onion is no longer either relevant or funny, because bullshit like this and people of this ilk render satire totally irrelevant.

By the way, their final comment is really funny:

They caution, however, that this approach entails a certain risk of “basing assumptions of gender or cisnormativity on particularly gendered names.”

Speaking of cultural nominal cisnormativity (I think I got that right), I’d like to point out that the word “mott” is South African slang for a vagina.

And as an African-American with a gender-opaque first name, I can only hope that somebody leaps to cite my writings as a source, preferably when writing to professors Vag and Cockless.

 

Bye Bye Volvo

Bad News, Guy Stuff

According to a report I read in yesterday’s Dead Tree newspaper (online link), Volvo has decided to stop making gasoline-powered cars altogether; all future Volvo models will be exclusively electrically-powered.

Let’s be honest about this. Volvo has always been a niche brand in the U.S. — even the venerable 240D wagon was pretty much beloved only by academics and a few soccer moms of the period — so it appears that the Swedes (or Chinese, if you prefer their actual ownership) have decided to make the brand even more niche-ier: trading the twenty or so people who wanted to buy Volvos for the nine people who want to buy electric cars (or the two people who want to buy specifically a Volvo electric car).

That’s for the U.S. market, of course. Maybe this will work for Volvo in Europe, where they only have to travel a few miles between destinations and the electric cars there need weekly recharges (instead of hourly, in America). Who knows? stranger things have been known to happen Over Here, but I have to tell you, I just don’t see it.

I was going to end this post with “Sic transit Volvo“, except that “volvo” in Latin means “I roll” so the phrase would make no sense. But you know what I mean.