We knew why the Challenger blew up, we could have prevented it, we chose not to.
We knew why Columbia disintegrated, we could have prevented it, we chose not to.
None of this shit is hard. Engineers know how to prevent this stuff.
The hard part is choosing to care whether something is reliable or not, then doing what is necessary to make sure it is reliable.
Every engineer can tell you about some management fuckhole choosing to do the wrong thing. The hard part about our civilization is how many fuckholes there are pushing people to do the wrong things for stupid reasons.
"Space is Hard" is a lie we tell ourselves so that we can ignore the real problem. The real problem is our personalities, our laziness and our stupidity. These scare us because they are truly hard and we truly have no answers for them.
because then the entire idea of the american economy being based on a meritocratic system where good companies do well and bad companies that make no products fail, and the same goes for workers, is somehow an elaborate lie and a shell game?
lets be clear. rich people do not have to deal with this. denny hastert rapes a bunch of people and is still thought of as a good guy by the powerful and wealthy. how many more like him are protected? catholic church institutionalizes criminal sexual abuse but nobody in management goes to prison. corey feldman knows who raped him but cannot say it because that person has too much money and power in hollywood. hedge fund managers go to thailand and fuck child prostitutes but they come back here and invest in private prisons that make money putting kids in lockup for playing doctor.
some teenager sends a nude pic and get years in prison.
welcome to 'freedom'
i actually support the 'crackdown on sex crimes'... if it went after actual criminals!!!! politicians, CEOs, cops, bankers, all those people who routinely rape kids and get away with it.
but as usual, it just is a way for the rich to enslave the poor, extract money from them, abuse them, and discard them.
well fuck me sideways, i thought the purpose of technology was to enoble the human condition, lift up society, and make our civilization better for the future generations. didnt realize that corporations profit margin is the only possible good to come out of technology.
we need to realize that social media experts have basically discovered a new form of addictive drug that is based on ideas instead of on a physical substance. "if it bleeds, it leads", but industrialized and backed by big data, in the way that cocaine was an industrial-revolution optimization of relatively benign coca leaves. there are people who literally cannot take their eyes of this stuff, constantly looking for the next 'high' of outrage. righteous anger in meme form has some kind of addictive force beyond what we have seen before on a scale that can manipulate mass audiences in a way that propagandists of the old times would never have been able to dream of.
we should be worried the last three presidents were all elected by the team with the best data operation.
it has infiltrated the communication you have with your family members - never before in human history was your interaction with your own family and friends mediated through a for profit corporation whose interest it was to make you share memes.
i dont know if i am ahead of things but as someone who was on the internet since 1996... i deleted my facebook account years ago. i deleted my twitter this past year. i am close to deleting google.
i pay money to certain sites that i value, and patreon creators. my money goes to people who make stuff, and they make stuff i like without trying to manipulate me with some kind of weaponized big data political campaign. the free internet is almost become an unusable pile of shit.
i feel like there is this nugget of people leaving behind the 'standard internet' for these new little bubble enclaves where we cannot be assaulted with never ending streams of .... garbage. i dont know the name for it...
we need a name for it. its something like a drug, but crossed with a meme. it is a virus but one that you voluntarily re-infect yourself with every time you log on to some platform like facebook.
its like addiction but without the physical component.
its a dysfunctional manipulative relationship but one side
is a data center and a bunch of algorithms.
its like a toxic person but that person is a platform that
you log in to every day to try to connect with people
who are not toxic. its like you cannot get away from the toxicity anymore
its like if there was ubiquitous angry talk radio that you could never escape. its there in your pocket all the time
waiting to get you angry about something or other.
its almost like the internet is turning people into psychotics... except they really do hear little voices in their heads all day long telling them how terrible the world is. because that is what is really actually happening.
its like renting your brain out to a corporation, for free, so that you can plug into some pseudo community that exists only to generate profit.
these things all come through some kind of 'feed', which is designed to trigger the release of brain chemicals that in a feedback loop cause you to consume more of the feed.
the feed is designed by an algorithm and big data. you are like the squirrel in the psychology experiment, except of pushing the lever to get more nuts, you push the lever to get another hit of the chemicals that are released when you have a nother righteous anger story in your feed.
they used to call blackberry 'crackberry'.
maybe they are more like drug dealers. anger dealers.
or virus spreaders. they spread the viruses and re-infect people even as they try to get away.
maybe they are the reservoirs of the virus....
their only purpose is to grow.
using your brain. your mind that is.
ironically, the unwashed masses that data science has 'targeted' for 'optimization' go through the exact same process and feel the exact same emotions.
apply for 100 jobs, get zero response, and zero reason why.
be told illogical things.
be told out right lies.
welcome to capitalism. welcome to the workplace that is run entirely by data. (or by people who only care about data).
welcome to the future of humanity.
which is the taxpayers "troubled asset" which has to go into a "Relief program" which somehow translates into Socialism for the hyper-rich and indentured servitude for everyone else.
also "subprime financial products bundled together and resold as low-risk investments to massive institutions" combined with "moral hazard" of said institutions knowing they will be bailed out again by the taxpayers when the speculative bubble bursts.
also Student Debt cannot be forgiven in bankruptcy so you essentially have an entire generation of indentured servants who will never actually own property outright.
that is assuming the stock market doesn't crash. if you bought an index fund in 1928 you would still be broke AF in 1935 and wouldn't get your money back until the 50s.
buffett profited off the housing bubble and should not be
trusted. he owned huge stakes in the ratings agencies that
were giving AAA+ ratings to these awful mortgage products,
even as publically he was decrying the financial products
involved as 'mass destruction' he was making money on it.
he is doing the same with his stock market push. if
a million people listen to him and go buy stocks, what
do you think happens to his index funds? They go up of course.
absolutely hilarious and sad to watch people worship this
guy. if his secret is really to buy index funds, then
why do people listen to his speeches and newsletters?
you could just go buy index funds and be done with it.
like every other con artist, his genius is to get people
to buy in to his story.
Yes, there is absolutely no fucking way other than treating employees like they are garbage. Of all the hundreds of thousands of companies in the world, Amazon and Uber are the two most typical and everyone needs to follow them because obviously they are doing things the way it has to be done.
That's how all the great products we use were made. Like think about the Snuggly. Snuggly HQ was a brutal realization of Lord of the Flies. The bottom sales guy had his head cut off and stuck on a pike in front of the others so they'd remember their duty to the emperor.
"Every day that week, T. beat me up in the bathroom. He told me if i didnt say nice things about the company, he'd force me to get an abortion and have me deported. I told him I would post on LinkedIn about how much I loved the company. He said that he would need approval on that post per the company social media policy.
The next day he had me in a meeting with HR where I had to admit that I attacked him in the bathroom and came on to him. That I would undergo counseling for my anger problems and that I would be on probation. I signed a letter thanking T. for his understanding of my mental problems.
If I ever told anyone, he said, he would blackball me from the industry. There is a private database accessed by people who went to certain frats in the Ivy League - just like they had private databases of old final exams to study over the years, they also have private databases of troublemakers in their industries. This is what they do. This is their particular set of skills, developed over a lifetime.
Then he told me he accepted my apology, and would only take a small amount out of my bonus for the clothes I damaged while I was attacking him.
He's not a bad guy. I'm not saying he's a bad guy at all. I just wish he wouldn't get so upset when people make mistakes or do things wrong "
We knew why the Challenger blew up, we could have prevented it, we chose not to.
We knew why Columbia disintegrated, we could have prevented it, we chose not to.
None of this shit is hard. Engineers know how to prevent this stuff.
The hard part is choosing to care whether something is reliable or not, then doing what is necessary to make sure it is reliable.
Every engineer can tell you about some management fuckhole choosing to do the wrong thing. The hard part about our civilization is how many fuckholes there are pushing people to do the wrong things for stupid reasons.
"Space is Hard" is a lie we tell ourselves so that we can ignore the real problem. The real problem is our personalities, our laziness and our stupidity. These scare us because they are truly hard and we truly have no answers for them.