He Just Wouldn’t Stop Banging On
Those of you who keep track of these things will know that today is this blog’s fifteenth birthday. I started doing… this, whatever it is, on the same day that the original iPhone was announced, back when the Blackberry Curve was a desirable thing, and 200 million people had a MySpace account. After close to sixteen million pageviews, it seems I’ve joined the ranks of the Old Guard, at least as measured in internet years. Happily, I have moisturiser.
During those fifteen years, we’ve chewed on many topics, from Laurie Penny’s lifestyle advice for terribly radical leftwing women, and the assorted lamentations of that same demographic, to the London riots of 2011, and the Guardian’s oddly selective agitation about litter inequality. We also marvelled at Melissa Fabello’s somewhat neurotic guide to interracial dating, witnessed the mental contortions of the scrupulously woke, and pondered the claim, by a Marxist academic, that conscientious parents reading to their own children are causing “unfair advantage” and are therefore an affront to “social justice.” Oh, and then there was that time when two dozen leftist artists sailed to the Arctic, at taxpayer expense, bent on saving the world with their fearless, selfless creativity.
All of which is, of course, a tissue-thin pretext to remind patrons that this rickety barge, on whose seating your arses rest, is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant a while longer, and remain ad-free, there are buttons in the sidebar with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. For those wishing to express their love regularly, there’s a monthly subscription option. And if one-click haste is called for, my PayPal.Me page can be found here. Additionally, any Amazon UK shopping done via this link, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.
For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last decade and a half, in over 3,000 posts and 130,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year summaries, which convey the fullest flavour of what it is we do. A sort of blog concentrate. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that. If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.
Oh, and for those that don’t know, I now have a Gettr account.
As always, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. Now share ye links and bicker.
haha bluegenes
Molecular biologists patch their own genes.
Instalanch!
Hide the breakables and fine liquors. Put sawdust on the floor. Order more air fresheners.
Instalanch!
[ Starts handing out ties, combs, breath mints, etc. ]
[ Starts handing out ties, combs, breath mints, etc. ]
[ Hastily replaces naked lady tie with regimental tie. No Insty reader will ask if I was in that regiment. ]
David mentioned Blackberry: about 8 yrs ago I talked to an engineer fired from them. She was in QC. She said they had no interest in fixing bugs or security flaws. I would have shorted them then if I did such things. There are indicators for organizational functioning. Ignoring goofs is one. Spending time on woke stuff and using jazz hands is another. Who do you short when every company is dropping the ball and posturing?
In for 50 pounds from Texas! Thanks for the good reads, turns of phrase, and general purdy talkin’.
In for 50 pounds from Texas!
Bless you, madam. May the smell of fried onions never outstay its welcome.
55 from Florida. Heh…Texans…
55 from Florida. Heh…Texans…
Heh. By all means continue this bidding war. And bless you, sir. May lower-level players be loudly impressed by your ability to disintegrate vast, alien battleships.
By all means continue this bidding war.
They didn’t say pounds of what…
Oh! I do ask a favor, though. Travelling to London in May and would like a recommendation on an Indian restaurant.
Travelling to London in May and would like a recommendation on an Indian restaurant.
I don’t live anywhere near London, so I couldn’t say, I’m afraid.
Right, early start tomorrow, so time for me to be horizontal. Thanks to all who’ve chipped in so far, or subscribed, or done shopping via the Amazon links, including all those much too shy to say hello. It’s much appreciated and is what keeps this place here.
a recommendation on an Indian restaurant
Haven’t lived in London for a long time, but Michelin is generally a reliable guide to price, if not quality 😉
She said they had no interest in fixing bugs or security flaws
In all fairness, that’s every software and hardware company.
The real reason to short BlackBerry was when they tried to expand out of the corporate market and take on Apple for the consumer market. Lazarides thought he was a multi-national grade CEO. He wasn’t.
Another Black separatist utopia collapses. Of course. I think I read about this in mid 2021. Clown car commies.
I went to Palpay to send some money to David, and there discovered David is actually the surviving wife of a now-deceased Nigerian prince who is hoping to strip the black coating off millions of US dollars that he had to disguise to get them smuggled out of Africa, but once out was unable to afford the cleaning chemicals. I have agreed with David at Palpay to buy and take delivery of just a couple of boxes of these US$100 notes so he can afford to clean the rest of his blackened currency and regain his immense wealth and I will be able to share in his wealth too.
In the meantime I have put some money in David’s tip jar until those boxes of money get delivered and I can get the black coating removed from those banknotes.
It’s a good thing that Palpay has also reminded me my virus protection has expired and I need to subscribe to get another renewal for the next ten years. I must have forgotten about the original subscription.
black separatist group in Colo. : sagebrush (check the photo) means you are in the desert. No rain. hahaha. At least the commune I visited in college had a rock band to support them.
I cannot speak for all hardware companies nor all software companies, but I have worked in various companies (Bell Northern Research, Northern Telecom, and Avaya as examples) where bug reports were taken very seriously. The unnamed company as far as you are concerned for which I work now also views bug reports as things to be verified and fixed. There is a QA engineer in our scrum team that works with us and tries to find any bugs before the people who pay us does so.
I consider myself to be a type of engineer (and the Canadians have the entire “iron ring” deal which is a different level) and I don’t want to create something that doesn’t do what it is supposed to do.
(US Telecom equipment was required by law to explain in an official report why any switch wasn’t operational 99.999% of a year. That’s 5 minutes 15 seconds of allowable downtime in a year.)
I’m a boomer that was born in 1959 and my dad was an aerospace engineer (Apollo, Skylab, various defense contracts). Maybe I’m more serious about this than your average Indian software developer.
Ccscientist,
I once worked for Visto corp , who sued Research In Motion (parent Corp of Blackberry) for IP infringement.
Visto won, and actually received roughly 600 million USD in settlement.
Great! Except the influx of cash destroyed Visto, because the investors (who had been waiting for 12 years) took their money out.
For me personally, the whole thing was so messy I was lucky to get out breaking even.
a recommendation on an Indian restaurant
I haven’t been in an Indian restaurant in London since 1978 so perhaps my suggestion may be a trifle out-of-date.
the claim, by a Marxist academic, that conscientious parents reading to their own children are causing “unfair advantage” and are therefore an affront to “social justice.”
Another Marxist doing the devil’s work.
Bell Northern Research, Northern Telecom, and Avaya as examples
You’re talking about large scale – and also old school – telco hardware companies. Yes, their stuff tends to have a lot more rigorous QA. But that’s also a tiny, statistically insignificant fraction of the total number of hardware and software companies out there.
You know what’s even more stringent than telcos? Medical device regulations. And having worked for a couple of medical device companies I can say that if my doctor attempts to heal me with anything more advanced than a rusty stick I’m looking for another doctor.
There is a QA engineer in our scrum team
If you’re using scrum your company isn’t serious about quality.
Another Marxist doing the devil’s work.
Well, when you strip away the begged questions and the thin, contrived rationalisations, and all of the implicit self-congratulation, what you’re left with, reliably, looks an awful lot like malice. A kind of titillation at the prospect of other people’s lives – including children’s lives – being made much worse. But such is “social justice,” and the kinds of personalities to whom it appeals.
See also this, where the eagerness to frustrate and diminish isn’t hard to find.
At least a dozen Guardian readers call Ms Murray “selfish” for paying for her child’s education while also paying via taxes for the state system she doesn’t use, because she doesn’t find it fit for use. (Paying twice, for her own child and for others, apparently makes her mean.) And being pious and tolerant lefties, there’s plenty of this: “I hope you don’t write for the Guardian for much longer.” Several indignant readers are pleased by their belief that Ms Murray’s confession of deviance will cost her her job, thus making her child’s tuition unaffordable. This is piety, you see.
And these attitudes, a mix of self-flattery and gleeful spite, are by no means uncommon among our leftist betters.
today is this blog’s fifteenth birthday
15 more please.
*hits tip jar*
discovered David is actually the surviving wife of a now-deceased Nigerian prince
15 more please.
Bless you, sir, and bless you, madam. When choosing an ensemble, may you discover that colours you wouldn’t usually think of combining actually go together really well.
Natalie above might still be looking for her Indian Restaurant. A walk up Brick Lane should do the trick. Cheek by jowl they sit and one is spoilt for choice as I recall, and on a slow day the ‘ushers’ outside will virtually manhandle/personhandle you into their premises.
The Blurting.
Brick Lane
Which is Spitalfields, E1 postcode.
And if Natalie likes church architecture, might I recommend a visit to Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields, a wondrous place.
Haven’t been there for a couple of years (obviously), but I’ve always enjoyed the Bombay Brasserie.
You have the BBC, we have NPR…
Marvel comic books does it again, Hook ’em, Horns!.
Oxford University Debates, chose your fighter:
Vegan;
Not Insane.
and pondered the claim, by a Marxist academic, that conscientious parents reading to their own children are causing “unfair advantage” and are therefore an affront to “social justice.”
Just wanted to say that was excellent. A token of appreciation is on its way.
and pondered the claim, by a Marxist academic, that conscientious parents reading to their own children are causing “unfair advantage” and are therefore an affront to “social justice.”
Many of the things they claim are unfair are open to anyone. We used the library to get an unlimited supply of age-appropriate books for our kids. No $ needed. So the real claim is that blacks are incapable of reading to their kids. Wow, who is the racist here?
Just wanted to say that was excellent.
Thank you. It does, I think, capture a kind of competitive unrealism that’s common in academia’s clown quarter.
Dr Swift, our expert in “social justice” and “egalitarian theory,” tells us that, “Parents reading their children bedtime stories… are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children.” But by reading bedtime stories, functional parents don’t “unfairly disadvantage” the children of bad parents. Bad parents do that. The parental negligence and selfishness – obvious causes of stunting and poorer life outcomes – are their doing. Dr Swift’s Marxoid formulation isn’t just wrong. It’s fundamentally perverse.
A token of appreciation is on its way.
Bless you, sir. May the seal integrity of your cafetière never be in doubt.
By the way, Dr Swift is the son of Clive Swift, best known for his portrayal of the chronically henpecked Richard Bucket in the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances. His mother is the novelist Dame Margaret Drabble. They met at Cambridge University. I’m therefore guessing that Dr Swift’s experience of the kind of state education that he wishes to inflict on others, forcibly, is somewhat limited.
Dr Swift’s experience of the kind of state education that he wishes to inflict on others, forcibly, is somewhat limited.
Yes, there’s a certain bouquet of insincerity (or perhaps complete cluelessness? malice?) in his statements.
Yes, there’s a certain bouquet of insincerity
It’s not, I think, insignificant that many proponents of authoritarian restrictions on educational choice have little, if any, first-hand experience of what it is they want to inflict on others. (See Zoe Williams, George Monbiot, Polly Toynbee, Kevin McKenna, Arabella Weir, etc.) I suppose this makes it easier to be unrealistic about what the likely result would be. And to be unrealistic about why state education is so often… what it is.
I mean, if, say, you believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that intelligence is just a matter of opportunity – something that state schools can bestow, pour into any head, and thereby distribute fairly – if that’s a driving assumption – then you’re already so far up the wrong tree that unrealism and farce are all but inevitable.
a recommendation on an Indian restaurant
I fondly remember a place called Moti. But that was over 30 years ago. In Tokyo. Hope this helps.
We used the library to get an unlimited supply of age-appropriate books for our kids. No $ needed.
And hence the reason for dumbing down our libraries over the last 30 years or so. See? It will all average out in the end.
You have the BBC, we have NPR…
I use random skin tones in texts back to my wife. For kicks. She calls me racist. For kicks… I think. I’m sure this is already documented somewhere but isn’t light skinned people getting a tan racist and/or cultural appropriation?
A fundamental premise of the Woke is that society/oppression cause crime and failure. How society causes black parents to not read to children is a mystery. But basicly, POC are helpless (no agency) in the face of oppression. Homeless? no agency. single mothers? no agency. Murderers? no agency. heroin? no agency. Remarkably, it is conversely assumed that white people are not helpless, and have agency–they can stop oppressing, change their behavior. All of this is not only contradictory and racist, but leaves many things wildly unexplained:
whites who are criminals, poor, homeless, murderers (do they assume these do not exist?)
asians with a lower crime rate than whites
women (we are told they are oppressed for 70 yrs) with a lower crime rate than anyone
I know, expecting consistency is unreasonable. heh
BRAVOOOOOOOOO…..
EXCELLENT BLOG !!
That progressive retail experience? Get over it, racists.
I fear not a piss take, but putting the moon in moonbat, Declaration of the Rights of the Moon.
Now I don’t have a PhD in Law from Griffith University*, but I am pretty sure to have an “ecology” you need something alive first, and a ball of rocks can’t be “intelligent”, even if some living things are as intelligent as rocks.
*(Slogan: “Know More. Do More.” Cato himself couldn’t have been more eloquent.)
I know it is too easy of a target, but the moon doesn’t have any “vital cycles”, there is nothing we could do to affect the moon’s relationship to the earth (ie the tides), all inert things remain forever peaceful no matter what we do…oh FFS how crazy do these people plan to get? Is it a contest?
Dr Swift is the son of Clive Swift
So, a brother of the Mockney-ish Gardeners’ World regular, Joe Swift.
I fear not a piss take, but putting the moon in moonbat, Declaration of the Rights of the Moon.
There are indeed people who think that minerals have fundamental human rights, and that it is a violation of those rights to perform mining operations. Or at least that’s what they claim to believe. I suspect many of these garbanzos do not sincerely believe that but use it as a pretense for opposing space travel and industrial civilization in general.
That.
a pretense for opposing space travel
Or they’re staking a claim to be the governance and compliance branch of any future space travel. Can’t have astronauxes improvising problematic slogans like “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”