Jamais Vu!

I found this observation interesting:

Germany had in the past few years a row of scandals with an identical theme: Corporations became bold enough to behave as if they were entitled to treat their employees like subjects. This concerned especially the spying on subjects, err, employees at work and in general.

Mostly for the depressing realisation that it's been like that for as long as I can remember in the soi disant anglo/saxon world. Nice to think the continent is catching up (or down, as the case may be)

Why I hate Microsoft, Part #7812940522(b)

So I go to log into a server that has been loaded with the latest Windows Server install*, and lo & behold, instead of the standardised login screen that has been used for the last 20ish years, I get a full-screen teal blue blob with a stylised icon picture of a proto-human**, and a slot for password underneath.

What on earth is this? They are aiming for the day that everyone has pictures of themselves available so graphic confirmation is available? and how exactly is this going to help security? or is it just to provide a sense of warm familiarity to the user to see a picture of themselves? (not unlike being pissed on by Microsoft staff, in that case).


* Which itself seems to be deviating sufficiently from the PCbound version of their slime as to almost qualify as a separate system with a new name, really. Worthless Prizes offered for suggestions of a new name! - my own thought was Microsoft Corrupter



**Presumably this is what suckers customers actually look like to Microsoft: faceless, futile, and feckless

more cut&paste memos

From sf author Matthew Hughes (memo to Phil: get a flippin' copy of Template fgs)

MATTHEW HUGHES:

Not so long ago, if you called a man a liar, it was coats off and outside, pal. Go back a few generations farther, it was sabers or pistols at dawn.

Reputation was everything. “Give a dog a bad name and hang him” meant that when good standing was lost, all was lost with it. Better to die, or at least take a beating, than be branded a weasel.

Then something changed. Now people go on “reality” TV to lie and cheat their way to fame and fortune. And their blatant weaselhood doesn’t earn them public contempt. Instead, they become celebrities.

These aren’t secret agents who lie to defend their country. They’re doing it for the money and a chance to appear on Good Morning America. And every time there’s an audition, tens of thousands more rush forward and beg for a chance to connive and backstab their way to the top.

The thing that has changed, it seems to me, is that the role that honor used to play in our society has been supplanted by greed. I see it as a side-effect of the social transformation wrought by marketing in my lifetime: today we no longer think of ourselves primarily as citizens of a society, with rights and responsibilities; instead, we have become consumers in an economy whose only purpose is getting and spending. You know: “This means war! Everybody go shopping!”

In the old days, honor was an extension of pride, especially the esteem of our fellows. People might do something unworthy, but they sure didn’t want anyone to know about it. Our grandparents’ world was built around vanity. Our times are driven by avarice. We want it all, and we want everyone to know about it. And how we got it doesn’t much matter.

Being classically educated (well, I’ve read some really old books), I am aware that greed and pride are two of the seven deadly sins. I once got to wondering if there were societies based on any of the other five. For those of you who don’t read really old books, the rest of the seven big bads are: anger, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth.

Anger was easy: Sparta, Nazi Germany, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Envy? What about all those Asian societies where it is crucial not to lose face? And mini-cultures within our own sphere where keeping up with the Joneses is a driving force?

Lifted from Obsidian Wings

This letter from Berkeley professor Michael O'Hare to his students is so good I'm just going to include it in full here:

Welcome to Berkeley, probably still the best public university in the world. Meet your classmates, the best group of partners you can find anywhere. The percentages for grades on exams, papers, etc. in my courses always add up to 110% because that’s what I’ve learned to expect from you, over twenty years in the best job in the world. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you have been the victims of a terrible swindle, denied an inheritance you deserve by contract and by your merits. And you aren’t the only ones; victims of this ripoff include the students who were on your left and on your right in high school but didn’t get into Cal, a whole generation stiffed by mine. This letter is an apology, and more usefully, perhaps a signal to start demanding what’s been taken from you so you can pass it on with interest.
Swindle – what happened? Well, before you were born, Californians now dead or in nursing homes made a remarkable deal with the future. (Not from California? Keep reading, lots of this applies to you, with variations.) They agreed to invest money they could have spent on bigger houses, vacations, clothes, and cars into the world’s greatest educational system, and into building and operating water systems, roads, parks, and other public facilities, an infrastructure that was the envy of the world. They didn’t get everything right: too much highway and not enough public transportation. But they did a pretty good job.
Young people who enjoyed these ‘loans’ grew up smarter, healthier, and richer than they otherwise would have, and understood that they were supposed to “pay it forward” to future generations, for example by keeping the educational system staffed with lots of dedicated, well-trained teachers, in good buildings and in small classes, with college counselors and up-to-date books. California schools had physical education, art for everyone, music and theater, buildings that looked as though people cared about them, modern languages and ancient languages, advanced science courses with labs where the equipment worked, and more. They were the envy of the world, and they paid off better than Microsoft stock. Same with our parks, coastal zone protection, and social services.
This deal held until about thirty years ago, when for a variety of reasons, California voters realized that while they had done very well from the existing contract, they could do even better by walking away from their obligations and spending what they had inherited on themselves. “My kids are finished with school; why should I pay taxes for someone else’s? Posterity never did anything for me!” An army of fake ‘leaders’ sprang up to pull the moral and fiscal wool over their eyes, and again and again, your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph.
Now, your infrastructure is falling to pieces under your feet, and as citizens you are responsible for crudities like closing parks, and inhumanities like closing battered women’s shelters. It’s outrageous, inexcusable, that you can’t get into the courses you need, but much worse that Oakland police have stopped taking 911 calls for burglaries and runaway children. If you read what your elected officials say about the state today, you’ll see things like “California can’t afford” this or that basic government function, and that “we need to make hard choices” to shut down one or another public service, or starve it even more (like your university). Can’t afford? The budget deficit that’s paralyzing Sacramento is about $500 per person; add another $500 to get back to a public sector we don’t have to be ashamed of, and our average income is almost forty times that. Of course we can afford a government that actually works: the fact is that your parents have simply chosen not to have it.
I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat (though your children will be even worse off if you don’t take charge of this ship and steer it). Your education was trashed as California fell to the bottom of US states in school spending, and the art classes, AP courses, physical education, working toilets, and teaching generally went by the board. Every year I come upon more and more of you who have obviously never had the chance to learn to write plain, clear, English. Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively! You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.
Many of your parents took a hike as well, somehow getting the idea that the schools had taken over their duties to keep you learning, or so beat-up working two jobs each and commuting two hours a day to put food on the table that they couldn’t be there for you. A quarter of your classmates didn’t finish high school, discouraged and defeated; but they didn’t leave the planet, even if you don’t run into them in the gated community you will be tempted to hide out in. They have to eat just like you, and they aren’t equipped to do their share of the work, so you will have to support them.
You need to have a very tough talk with your parents, who are still voting; you can’t save your children by yourselves. Equally important, you need to start talking to each other. It’s not fair, and you have every reason (except a good one) to keep what you can for yourselves with another couple of decades of mean-spirited tax-cutting and public sector decline. You’re my heroes just for surviving what we put you through and making it into my classroom, but I’m asking for more: you can be better than my generation. Take back your state for your kids and start the contract again. There are lots of places you can start, for example, building a transportation system that won’t enslave you for two decades as their chauffeur, instead of raising fares and cutting routes in a deadly helix of mediocrity. Lots. Get to work. See you in class!

Krugman on tax cuts:

This has nothing to do with sound economic policy. Instead, as I said, it’s about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience.
So far, the Obama administration is standing firm against this outrage. Let’s hope that it prevails in its fight. Otherwise, it will be hard not to lose all faith in America’s future.

Except, oops, too late on that last

Post Twentieth Century Stress Disorder

Just a quick copy & paste of something I found very well put:

Post Twentieth Century Stress Disorder

by Jacob Davies

The twentieth century kicks off with the wizard invention of the concentration camp by the British in South Africa, who are engaged in a battle over Lebensraum with a bunch of Dutch guys, neither side having the slightest interest in the brown people previously occupying the area except as a sort of irritating natural resource to be strip-mined where possible. Whatever the original intent of the British, the key features of the concentration camp rapidly assert themselves, which is to say once you have a whole lot of annoying people gathered in one place and prevented from wandering around by barbed wire and guns, you can make them significantly less annoying to you by sort of, well, accidentally forgetting to feed them.

That's just a warm up though; we quickly go to the War to End All Wars That Doesn't, in which approximately one kerbillion soldiers from every civilized nation on the planet are ordered into an unremarkable area of France about the size of Vermont to die by various exciting means including being crushed by tanks, shot, stabbed, starved, bludgeoned, blown up, diseased, machine-gunned, and having the occasional bomb dropped on their heads in an amateurish fashion (they get better at this later). This accomplishes absolutely nothing for anyone and ends only when the Americans get tired of Germans randomly blowing up their stuff.

Everybody learns a Valuable Lesson about the Importance of Peace, which they all put into action in the same way: a determined effort to ensure that this time they will be the ones with the biggest guns, goddammit. Russia has a proletariat revolution which scares the crap out of all the moneybags businessmen in the rest of the world, which just goes to show that their imaginations were a bit limited at the time, since they could have treated them like China today, i.e. a giant source of cheap labor for foreign corporations under a government that doesn't tolerate any silly talk about worker's rights because, hello, you live in a socialist paradise - haven't you read the newspaper today?

There's a brief period of glorious economic euphoria and excitement in the rest of the world, but then all the fun is sidetracked by the implosion of the entire economy everywhere and the immiseration of millions of people, which in America is the terrible worst bad thing ever and in much of Europe is destined to be "the good old days" - you know, back when you were only poor, homeless, and unemployed, and not starved, murdered, robbed or abandoned in a frozen apocalyptic wasteland - but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Germany drops the pointy hats but retains the paranoid militarism, and decides that the worst piece of logical induction ever - "bankers wrecked the economy", "many bankers are Jews", "therefore TEH JEWS wrecked the economy and we have to kill them all!" - makes perfect sense. So anyway, that's when things start to get actually bad.
Japan decides that what every modern industrial power needs is a gigantic empire, an understandable conclusion given that every other modern industrial power either has or is trying to acquire its own gigantic empire, but makes the small mistake of relying entirely on American oil for the whole thing.

It takes a surprisingly long time for all of this to blow up, but when it does, it really does. The thing is, Germany and Japan aren't really doing anything particularly novel. All the other imperial powers have spent the last couple of hundred years taking territory by force and butchering as many of the natives as necessary, and America has just steamrolled across the west regardless of the wishes of the prior inhabitants. The Axis are just late to the game and have plans so grandiosely insane and in conflict with the interests of the existing powers that they can't be left to get on with it.

And we all know this part of the story, or we think we do, but if we're from the west, especially the UK and the US, we don't really know it. We understand the Holocaust (which probably was the worst of the horrors, the most concentrated evil) because we have photographs and survivor accounts and records. But Generalplan Ost did not just call for the murder of millions of Jews, but for the starvation of nearly every person in the cities of Poland and Russia, the murder of 20 or 30 million people, and this plan is in fact put into action and in fact kills 15 or 20 million people and destroys absolutely everything it touches in Eastern Europe, it is the end of the world for entire regions and cities, but we don't see pictures so we don't really know that it happened.

So then after all that we discover a way to make a single compact air-deliverable bomb that can destroy an entire city. And we use it. And surely that is the end? It must have seemed so. Oppenheimer says it in a way grandiose enough to do justice to the reality:
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed... A few people cried... Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form, and says, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

So then we have peace, amid the ruins and the corpses and the radiation. But we also have radio and television, and it turns out that that wasn't the end of the world, and after the postwar consumer boom winds down we have corporations looking back to the good old days when the US military bought everything they could produce, and shortly after that we have the new permanent enemy in the shape of the Commies who are poised to taint our precious bodily fluids and have to be beaten back at all costs and by the way, we do mean all costs.

And television - how much by accidental evolution and how much by intent is debatable - is the means of delivery for a diet of intense fear and anxiety and uncertainty and the promise that all of it can be abolished if you just buy this product or vote for this person or agree with what the man on television says. And because we are just simple plains apes and inclined to believe whatever we are told, we do believe it. Believing what you're told was a lot safer when sociopaths were spread out among the population and easier to spot, not so much when they are concentrated in the boardrooms of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, but we are a little slow. So everyone from the twentieth century is profoundly brain-damaged by extensive exposure to advertising designed to make us afraid and insecure and jealous.

So then we build enough nukes to kill everyone in every city on the planet just in case that ever seems like a good idea, but in the west at least, the thing to keep in mind is that nothing really bad ever happens for basically the rest of the century. Sure, unemployment, minor wars, social unrest, but the absolutely apocalyptic events that swept Europe in the 30s and 40s are never repeated in the west.  (Sure, 20 million people starve to death in China, but out of sight of cameras, so it's like it never happened.) Despite nothing really bad happening, we all live in terrible overwhelming fear that it will descend on us at any moment, which is not entirely irrational given that thousands of nuclear missiles are aimed at the exact place we are sitting and armed on a hair trigger.

And so the century comes to a close and by some miracle we are mostly still alive. And I suppose now you're wondering what the point of this superficial and glib and highly inaccurate account of the twentieth century is.
The point is this: we're all profoundly damaged goods, us twentieth century relics. Even those of us, like me, who only lived through the last quarter of it. We flinch at loud noises. We cower, and prepare to fight when someone hurts us even a little bit. We look at our neighbors and wonder if they would push us into the gas chamber if it came to it. We can't have too many illusions about the kindness and goodness of the human spirit because we lived through a period of total derangement and insanity, when a war that would likely kill everyone in every city across two continents was seriously discussed and prepared for.

So I have a certain sympathy for those who are suckered by chain emails and propaganda into worrying that we're about to descend into a socialist or fascist murder-state, or about to be obliterated by nuclear explosion, because the rational unlikelihood of it isn't worth much in the face of the irrationality that propels those kinds of events, and those events are barely historical, they were still happening in our lifetimes.

I think our children are going to think we are nuts. We live in, in the west, in a world incomparably better than the one our grandparents grew up in, with far less absolute poverty, with paved streets and indoor plumbing, refrigerators, clean water and cheap food, big houses, cheap cars. And yet we spend all our time jumping at shadows. The Muslims are going to take over! The terrorists are going to kill us all! Iraq is going to fly poison-gas planes over America! It is delusional, but it is understandable. We are the survivors of horror and threatened horror, and we are having a really hard time adjusting to the idea that maybe there won't be any more horror.

This isn't especially topical. But it's where I start from when I'm trying to understand the world, and I always want to put it all in as a preamble to even the most trivial comments on current events. The world is run by people and still mostly inhabited by people who are seriously traumatized from the last century, which genuinely was a horrific time unequaled in human history. That affects everything they - we - do and say.