RSS
From Slate:
Silicon Valley Keeps Missing Golden Opportunities for Tech World Satire
By Lily Hay Newman
If nothing else, the HBO series Silicon Valley is aptly named. The show, which began its second season on Sunday night, is indeed a canny portrait of Silicon Valley; it depicts the antics of dweeby startup guys and haughty venture capitalists—Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg even show up to host panels—with an impressive eye for detail. But in the first few episodes of Season 2, Silicon Valley doesn’t often capitalize on the chance to offer much of a critique.
“Rarely has a show had to do so little to find so much to mock,” wrote Slate’s Willa Paskin about Season 1. And this season, that is definitely still the case. …
But it’s unclear whether there is a meta component to these underdog stories—some sort of bigger commentary on the ways in which the Pied Piper employees (mostly white males) are not actually societally disadvantaged in the broader sense. The show certainly pokes fun at them, but it mostly just glorifies them: They may be weirdos, but their lives are pretty awesome.
The Ellen Pao gender discrimination trial is one of many recent stories currently advancing discussions about the treatment of women in Silicon Valley, so obviously that scrutiny should extend to Silicon Valley as well.
This piece is part of a recurrent pattern: the humorless scolds automatically assume that the comic creative artists are on their side, then nag them for not taking seriously their absurd fiascos like the Ellen Pao-Buddy Fletcher discrimination suit, as if recasting Jezebel op-eds as dialogue would be pure comedy gold.
Over the last two decades, Mike Judge has put together about as an out-of-the-closet anti-SJW body of work ((Beavis & Butt-head, King of the Hill, Office Space, and Idiocracy) as anybody in Hollywood (or in his case, Texas — he comes to California mostly to surf) since John Milius. But nobody notices since one of the pillars of the Left’s self-regard is the assumption that everybody cool and funny is on their side. Even Judge is assumed to be, as a matter of course, another anti-Straight White Maleist who will creatively benefit from Slate’s reminder to read Ellen Pao’s complaint to find out what’s really important about Silicon Valley.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
Detroit: $50B companies with 200K employees
Silicon Valley: $400B companies with 50K employees
There aren’t just fewer jobs for women, there are fewer for everybody. There’s more wealth with less work. Yeah Judge it’s not fair! They have legal AI that can answer a million complex legal questions in seconds. Detroit has Robocop. What we need is Robojudge.
Yeah, Mike Judge did an interview with Alex Jones; he’s certainly far from a liberal.
I see the anti-SJW messages in Idiocracy and King of the Hill, and I haven’t seen Office Space. But I never thought about Beavis and Butthead, with the hippie teacher and his stupidity in reaching out to teenage idiots.
Seriously, probably the best work that Mike Judge has done.Replies: @DWB
That a jury unanimously found her to be full of shit doesn’t seem to matter to the SJW morons and Slate (and elsewhere). /sigh
Stunning really.
OT:
Re: Country Club Envy
Allen Kurzweil is on the publicity trail for this new book, in which he recounts his 40-year project to track down his Philippino Catholic nemesis, who bullied the nebbishy Kurzweil at a Swiss boarding school in 1971.
Off topic:
The Atlantic has a new article that touches on HBD:
Genes Don’t Cause Racial-Health Disparities, Society Does
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/genes-dont-cause-racial-health-disparities-society-does/389637/
Here’s a gem:
As we all know, race has absolutely nothing to do with ancestry….
Watch liberals discover that ancestry influences your genetics, and has real world effects on all sorts of traits!
Off topic but topical:
The Atlantic has a new article that touches on HBD:
Genes Don’t Cause Racial-Health Disparities, Society Does
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/genes-dont-cause-racial-health-disparities-society-does/389637/
Here’s a gem:
As we all know, race has absolutely nothing to do with ancestry….
My word, if there’s anyone who would know about being sexually harassed, it has to be Lily Hay Newman. (kind of serious, w/ all the spergy dorks that work in the slate “news” room.)…(but mostly not serious.)
http://is.gd/wOVMQZ
Extract is another Mike Judge movie that has its anti-pc moments, though the white woman line worker who cartoonishly and ostentatiously and falsely assumes and accuses the new hispanic employee of being a thief isn’t one of them. There is however a veiled joke about how one employee is too dumb to fill-out her time cards correctly. The only indication that the employee is black is that JK Simmons (the plant manager) quotes her as pronouncing “ask” as “axe” and makes a point of pointing that out. It doesn’t sound like much, but I think most of us recognize what balls that takes. Plus the sympathetic hero is a white guy–a chemist/entrepreneur–played by Jason Batemen, and one of the antagonists–a super-jewey shyster lawyer–is played by arch-zionist Gene Simmons. Oh, an Ben Affleck is actually pretty funny in it, and Mila Kunis is incredibly hot, as always.
The movie didn’t get much attention but I did enjoy it.
Related to this, and your previous post about micro aggressions, a black woman technology investor uses a black actress’s rant about cultural appropriation to implicitly ding Mark Andreessen’s rap-quoting partner Ben Horowitz: https://twitter.com/sarahkunst/status/588442658407780352
The whole cultural appropriation issue seems insoluble: you’re either ignoring black cultural contributions (bad), or referring to them too much (also bad).
When looked at that way, it's actually not such an unreasonable view. Consider how European national sports teams employ black African players. Personally, I find that vaguely unsporting. Why shouldn't African countries be the ones benefiting from African athleticism? After all, it's not like Africa can fall back on excelling in particle physics.
(Of course, most of the people who complain about "cultural appropriation" are being disingenuous, since they don't actually want true independence, cultural or otherwise, from whites.)Replies: @Dave Pinsen, @meh
Or
b) We could behave as if cultural appropriation was a real thing. Then whites would stop using whatever it is that we are supposed to have copied from blacks, twerking and, er, some other things.
And in return they would abandon white cultural products like cars, the internet, electricity and so on.
I shudder at the thought that Haven Monahan is still out there, and probably writing your computer’s next compression algorithm.
The lack of diversity in banner photo at the Ubuntu community site is a microagression: http://community.ubuntu.com/
The sad thing is I’ll bet the vast majority of those White guys make sure to chirp up about how shameful it is they’re almost all White guys. Even the Ubuntu operating system was given a Bantu name by its non-Bantu South African developer, Mark Shuttleworth. That’s how White guys roll now days: competitive xenophilia.
Erlich ratcheting up the money for VC bidding for Pied Piper (not seen, but told by him) by slamming his balls, literally, on the conference table was just crazy-funny! The first season’s file compression win for Pied Piper was based on j**king-off of all things!
I’m sure there will be a clever punch-in-the-gut piece about adventuresses and SV financiers, maybe in an utterly subversive way that also panders to the humorless politically correct. ‘SV’ is going to be attacked sooner or later, but do potential future pc critics realize just how funny the show is? Do they see how endearing these guys are? However, they’re not hot like the ‘Entourage’ guys, but they are twisted-hot….maybe this is a new vehicle to lure more awkward, brainy female computer scientists/engineers to apply for more jobs in SV? The ratio of women to men there currently, is not good for guys…why else so much verbiage about genitals? Ok, it’s a show.
I have some acquaintances in Silicon Valley, some who are IT execs and some who are VCs. Most of them are pretty aware of the HBD and will talk freely about it once the alcohol flows in private settings (where it will be all white and Asian), but ALL of them will toe the line in public with the “let’s make a billion while making the world a better place for the rainbow” Kool-Aid happy talk.
The things that irritate me about them, though, are the little things. For example, at a VC firm where I know the founder fairly well, every single “team” bio is formulaic: the usual elite university credentials, followed by the usual suspects in the field, and ends with “in his spare time, he likes to work with his hands and build wooden furniture in his garage, travel to the Galapagos to observe penguins, and help his daughters build better rockets for their science projects so that they can grow up to be feminist aeronautical engineers!”
In other words, they all want to portray themselves as not just elite, hyper-competitive, petty, and avaricious rainmakers but also fun, zany, retro, spontaneous, and worldly travelers and caring parents who wear vests and make healthy organic beer!
I have to fight the gag reflex, and sometimes have fantasies of conscripting all of them and dropping them off at Bagram.
I saw a few episodes of “Silicon Valley” on HBO and found it inferior to “Veep.” The latter cuts deeper than the former, and is a far more accurate portrayal of its world (political DC = naked ambition for power + utter, utter incompetence).
The whole cultural appropriation issue seems insoluble: you're either ignoring black cultural contributions (bad), or referring to them too much (also bad).Replies: @Demosthenes, @ABN, @Lurker, @Tracy
Yeesh. Is it ok to call out other cultures for misappropriating representative constitutional democracy, the scientific method, the industrial revolution, etc. from WASPs?
Or is it a micro-aggression simply to point that out?
“the antics of dweeby startup guys and haughty venture capitalists—Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg even show up …”
What does this even mean? I thought Mossberg was always considered cool. How can you be Jewish and dweeby?
Swisher started the WSJ's Bay Area-based "Boomtown" column just before the first dot-com bubble burst. She and Mossberg later teamed up to create a tech convention/reporting operation called All Things D under the WSJ's brand. Recently, they ditched the WSJ and relaunched their operation as Re/code.
Steve, sorry for the OT post but I find it interesting that the Aaron Hernandez case got so little attention in the national US media – including sports media. Here was a star in the prime of his career playing for the dominant team of the last decade involved in a murder trial yet the normally sensationalistic and star obsessed media usually just mentioned it in passing. Is this another case of them not noticing so-called Hispanics or is it something else? What gives?
Aaron was also a decent student and popular, and, for all intents and purposes, should have been leaving a legacy for the Brass City he came from, by reaching the venerable New England Patriots after college ball at the U of FL. He had the life, the pretty HS sweetheart girlfriend/possible wife, he had the Patriots legacy...and he threw it away for pot, drug deals with old cronies and drama from High School??!?!!!
Reminds me of an idiot in a class I had in graduate school. Each student were to do a critical review of some research. In the project she reviewed, the investigators started with a hypothesis which they disproved. She went on to gush about despite their having disproved their hypothesis, they still believed in it!!!
Stunning really.
Reality never interferes with a discussion if it’s one that certain people want to have and it also never operates as a rationale to force a discussion if it is a discussion that certain people want to avoid. The key is to be the certain people who get to decide such things.
Actually I do hope Mr. Judge burns an Ellen Pao facsimile token woman POC. Many laughs guaranteed. It’s a story so ridiculous, they may have to remove some of the actual true details (see Buddy Fletcher) to make it believable.
I see the anti-SJW messages in Idiocracy and King of the Hill, and I haven't seen Office Space. But I never thought about Beavis and Butthead, with the hippie teacher and his stupidity in reaching out to teenage idiots.Replies: @Ivy, @anon, @meh
See Office Space. Even though it is from the last millennium (1999), the archetypes are recognizable. If you enjoy Dilbert then you should like this one. There are numerous quotable lines, too.
The Atlantic has a new article that touches on HBD:
Genes Don't Cause Racial-Health Disparities, Society Does
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/genes-dont-cause-racial-health-disparities-society-does/389637/
Here's a gem:As we all know, race has absolutely nothing to do with ancestry....Replies: @Curle, @Hipster, @Glaivester
At least they recognize the circular logic, if only to explain to their co-moralists how insidious reality, er excuse me, racism can be. “But this only takes us in a circle. Even when researchers study ancestry, it is often just race in a phony moustache and glasses. ”
Monica was one of the few competent characters in the first season. I thought that was already enough of an SJW message: “Oh, look at these over-educated man-children compared to the has-it-together corporate woman.” Some kind of really heavy-handed ripped-from-the-headlines sexual harassment or promotion discrimination scandal would make it more like a Dick Wolf show than a Mike Judge show.
More likely, some female programmer will outdo The Bros, in a re-tread of the wunderkind plot line from season one.
Or even better, let Pied Piper meet its ridiculous gender quotas by letting the fellas dress as sham trans-employees. It shouldn't even be hard for them because they could just claim to be wearing the same androgynous gender neutral clothing of jeans and t-shirts like most of the genetic females do.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @WowJustWow, @Dave Pinsen
The two billionaires, the three programmers, the initial incubator funding guy who thinks he's Steve Jobs, the billionaire's lawyer, the best friend of Richard who gets hired by the other billionaire, the teenage cloud programmer, they are all guys. All the programmers, engineers, and venture capitalists seen in season one are with one exception male. A lot of the SJ warriors critical of season one thought that the Monica character was so deferential to Peter Gregory that she was Peter Gregory's secretary, Mike Judge mentions this on the commentary track of the DVD.
Although the Monica character is seen as competent, it is also pretty clear that she unlike her boss is not a technologist. Monica is shown as being a business savvy and marketing oriented which is why Peter sends her to make an in-person pitch to Richard after his initial pitch over the phone. She got more airtime in the last three episodes because the guy playing Gregory died, there was supposed to be a lot more scenes with him and the other billionaire, but that obviously was not possible. Luckily since she was already on the show they could expand her role and basically use her as a proxy for the billionaire VC.Replies: @Dave Pinsen
The things that irritate me about them, though, are the little things. For example, at a VC firm where I know the founder fairly well, every single "team" bio is formulaic: the usual elite university credentials, followed by the usual suspects in the field, and ends with "in his spare time, he likes to work with his hands and build wooden furniture in his garage, travel to the Galapagos to observe penguins, and help his daughters build better rockets for their science projects so that they can grow up to be feminist aeronautical engineers!"
In other words, they all want to portray themselves as not just elite, hyper-competitive, petty, and avaricious rainmakers but also fun, zany, retro, spontaneous, and worldly travelers and caring parents who wear vests and make healthy organic beer!
I have to fight the gag reflex, and sometimes have fantasies of conscripting all of them and dropping them off at Bagram.
I saw a few episodes of "Silicon Valley" on HBO and found it inferior to "Veep." The latter cuts deeper than the former, and is a far more accurate portrayal of its world (political DC = naked ambition for power + utter, utter incompetence).Replies: @Curle, @WowJustWow, @the raven
“I have to fight the gag reflex. . . ” Yes. Online dating profiles read the same way as do Christmas letters. Someone should collect them and mock them, mercilessly as some have done with bad photos online.
OT, but might be of interest:
So HBD is the equivalent of being a flat-earther?
This is from a blog by a law school dean, discussing when it might be appropriate to fire a professor with tenure. (http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_deans/2015/04/law-professors-and-flat-earthers.html)
and the geneticist’s “findings” both are obviously methodologically flawed and completely ignore counter-evidence
suggesting he doesn't find the hypothesis on its own equivalent to believing in a flat earth.Replies: @Curle
By the end of President Hilary Clinton’s 2nd term, or at the very latest the end of President Michelle Obama’s 1st term, someone is going to publicly say “maybe women just aren’t that interested in these sorts of tech jobs?”.
Silicon Valley: $400B companies with 50K employees
There aren't just fewer jobs for women, there are fewer for everybody. There's more wealth with less work. Yeah Judge it's not fair! They have legal AI that can answer a million complex legal questions in seconds. Detroit has Robocop. What we need is Robojudge.Replies: @Dave Pinsen, @Name
It’s worse than that. Facebook is a $230 billion company with 9,200 employees.
The probability of finding more employees who can increase the value of the company by $25M per employee here in the US is not as good as finding them outside the US, and all those other companies in Silly Valley are trying to attract the same set of employees.Replies: @notsaying
The Atlantic has a new article that touches on HBD:
Genes Don't Cause Racial-Health Disparities, Society Does
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/genes-dont-cause-racial-health-disparities-society-does/389637/
Here's a gem:As we all know, race has absolutely nothing to do with ancestry....Replies: @Curle, @Hipster, @Glaivester
This is gold!
Watch liberals discover that ancestry influences your genetics, and has real world effects on all sorts of traits!
Are you suggesting that comedy is the way to go? Under the radar that is.
“George Washington and most of Jamestown had gay sex… and John Wilkes Booth was one of Abraham Lincoln’s spurned lovers, says new book”
” Abraham Lincoln and George Washington were gay, says a new book by Larry Kramer, 79, who is a gay activist and award winning writer
In ‘The American People,’ Kramer says that Abraham Lincoln was gay and his killer John Wilkes Booth was actually Lincoln’s spurned gay lover
The book claims that the original Jamestown settlement was all male and that men would have sexual relationships when there were no women
Larry Kramer claims that many historians don’t have ‘gaydar’ and couldn’t recognize gay attributes ”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3040404/New-book-asserts-George-Washington-Abraham-Lincoln-Jamestown-gay-sex.html
The things that irritate me about them, though, are the little things. For example, at a VC firm where I know the founder fairly well, every single "team" bio is formulaic: the usual elite university credentials, followed by the usual suspects in the field, and ends with "in his spare time, he likes to work with his hands and build wooden furniture in his garage, travel to the Galapagos to observe penguins, and help his daughters build better rockets for their science projects so that they can grow up to be feminist aeronautical engineers!"
In other words, they all want to portray themselves as not just elite, hyper-competitive, petty, and avaricious rainmakers but also fun, zany, retro, spontaneous, and worldly travelers and caring parents who wear vests and make healthy organic beer!
I have to fight the gag reflex, and sometimes have fantasies of conscripting all of them and dropping them off at Bagram.
I saw a few episodes of "Silicon Valley" on HBO and found it inferior to "Veep." The latter cuts deeper than the former, and is a far more accurate portrayal of its world (political DC = naked ambition for power + utter, utter incompetence).Replies: @Curle, @WowJustWow, @the raven
What stands out to me is that Veep portrays a government where everybody’s job is 100% PR all the time.
Perhaps that is why Zuckerberg et al want more H1Bs.
The probability of finding more employees who can increase the value of the company by $25M per employee here in the US is not as good as finding them outside the US, and all those other companies in Silly Valley are trying to attract the same set of employees.
Just like most American college students getting a bachelor's or master's degree even in STEM areas are not the "best and brightest" most foreign students are not either.
How many colleges with bottom 50% -- or even bottom 75% -- STEM programs trade on overseas parents' desperation to get their kid into the US and then, they think, into an American job after graduation? Probably most of them.
The more the corporate executives and the politicians talk about "best and brightest" as if that's the only people who end up with American jobs or in American colleges, the more I know they are just lying scoundrels.
“Why Doesn’t Mike Judge’s “Silicon Valley” Take Ellen Pao Seriously Enough?”
I dunno, but Beavis seems to be taking it pretty hard.
“Silicon Valley”, meh. I wanted to like it, I really did. I’m a software developer in Silicon Valley even. Where are the gags? It’s never funny. The young dweebs don’t act and they’re emotionally empty. The older wheeler-dealer types are flat caricatures. The only women are bit roles.
I say this as a huge fan of Beavis & Butthead, and King of the Hill. (Idiocracy somewhat less; it has its moments of brilliance but it also drags on in parts.)
The things that irritate me about them, though, are the little things. For example, at a VC firm where I know the founder fairly well, every single "team" bio is formulaic: the usual elite university credentials, followed by the usual suspects in the field, and ends with "in his spare time, he likes to work with his hands and build wooden furniture in his garage, travel to the Galapagos to observe penguins, and help his daughters build better rockets for their science projects so that they can grow up to be feminist aeronautical engineers!"
In other words, they all want to portray themselves as not just elite, hyper-competitive, petty, and avaricious rainmakers but also fun, zany, retro, spontaneous, and worldly travelers and caring parents who wear vests and make healthy organic beer!
I have to fight the gag reflex, and sometimes have fantasies of conscripting all of them and dropping them off at Bagram.
I saw a few episodes of "Silicon Valley" on HBO and found it inferior to "Veep." The latter cuts deeper than the former, and is a far more accurate portrayal of its world (political DC = naked ambition for power + utter, utter incompetence).Replies: @Curle, @WowJustWow, @the raven
That’s interesting. I didn’t realize until recently how suffocatingly PC the “startup” culture is. I always thought programmers were mostly Aspie with a strong aversion to bullshit.
Recently Stack Overflow released its annual survey, and they incongruously editorialized under the “gender” section: “Software development has a gender balance problem…. there’s no doubt everyone who codes needs to be more proactive welcoming women into the field.” Now, this looks very similar to the “Workers of the World Unite!” of Havel’s greengrocer. Of course I choked on the hypocrisy of being lectured on gender parity by a company whose programmer employees are 93% male, and started a thread calling it out. There was some discussion before the thread was closed/deleted, but I didn’t get even a single supportive comment out of dozens (I did get a number of upvotes, which are anonymous).
I also discovered this blog wasenglightened by a Google-employed thought criminal. He sounds like a Soviet-era dissident — in one post he describes waking up in terror at the thought he may have inadvertently self-doxxed. The culture he describes sounds hysterical-feminine.
However annoying David Brooks can be, I'll always think fondly of his excellent observations in "Bobos in Paradise." The descriptions of the new post-80's elites in that book are pure gold.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Jim Don Bob
Good find!
Self-introduction: "For the benefit of my readers who are not familiar with Neoreaction, I present a Brief Introduction to Neoreaction, often abbreviated as NRx and also known as The Dark Enlightenment."
It's going to be quite a day when he is exposed:
The sad thing is I'll bet the vast majority of those White guys make sure to chirp up about how shameful it is they're almost all White guys. Even the Ubuntu operating system was given a Bantu name by its non-Bantu South African developer, Mark Shuttleworth. That's how White guys roll now days: competitive xenophilia.Replies: @shk12344
I think I see one black guy and 3-5 females
This is from a blog by a law school dean, discussing when it might be appropriate to fire a professor with tenure. (http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_deans/2015/04/law-professors-and-flat-earthers.html)Replies: @Anonymous, @Anonymous, @WowJustWow
Well, he qualifies with this:
and the geneticist’s “findings” both are obviously methodologically flawed and completely ignore counter-evidence
suggesting he doesn’t find the hypothesis on its own equivalent to believing in a flat earth.
What makes this statement particularly ironic is the reference to flat earth, as if the law dean was secretly hoping the reader would make the association between the dean and those who harassed Galileo on similar grounds; that his (Galileo's) conclusions were 'obviously' methodologically flawed and ignored counter-evidence.Replies: @Cagey Beast
Yes and I’ll bet everyone was trying their best to make the picture as diverse as possible.
I see the anti-SJW messages in Idiocracy and King of the Hill, and I haven't seen Office Space. But I never thought about Beavis and Butthead, with the hippie teacher and his stupidity in reaching out to teenage idiots.Replies: @Ivy, @anon, @meh
I think Office Space is the best thing he’s done.
Football is such a violent sport that the number of people killed by its pro practitioners must be fairly large. I don’t follow it much at all, but even I can name a few NFL murderers: Ray Lewis, OJ Simpson and Aaron Hernandez. The interesting question is probably why the OJ case caught on with the national media. Why most of these cases don’t is easier to understand – these are football players, it’s not really that shocking.
Hall of Famer, Heisman Trophy winner, movie star, former Monday Night Football commentator, current NFL on NBC commentator...
The Atlantic has a new article that touches on HBD:
Genes Don't Cause Racial-Health Disparities, Society Does
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/genes-dont-cause-racial-health-disparities-society-does/389637/
Here's a gem:As we all know, race has absolutely nothing to do with ancestry....Replies: @Curle, @Hipster, @Glaivester
I like the commenter who said:
This is from a blog by a law school dean, discussing when it might be appropriate to fire a professor with tenure. (http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_deans/2015/04/law-professors-and-flat-earthers.html)Replies: @Anonymous, @Anonymous, @WowJustWow
What if a professor says, ignoring all counter evidence, that, as a scientific matter, capitalist society cannot withstand the inevitable strains produced by its nature and will therefore collapse and give way to a communist society, that will render perfect equality, justice and plenty? What happens then? Control of the department if not the whole university happens then.
More likely, some female programmer will outdo The Bros, in a re-tread of the wunderkind plot line from season one.Replies: @Thin-Skinned Masta-Beta, @Unladen Swallow
Make it a heavy-handed bogus sexual-harassment case or make a mockery of sensitivity training to be inclusive to the programmer dilettante sisters.
Or even better, let Pied Piper meet its ridiculous gender quotas by letting the fellas dress as sham trans-employees. It shouldn’t even be hard for them because they could just claim to be wearing the same androgynous gender neutral clothing of jeans and t-shirts like most of the genetic females do.
and the geneticist’s “findings” both are obviously methodologically flawed and completely ignore counter-evidence
suggesting he doesn't find the hypothesis on its own equivalent to believing in a flat earth.Replies: @Curle
Right, because if a qualified expert arrives at a conclusion that cannot exist for moral reasons then it must be because their methodology was flawed or they chose to discount the significance of counter-evidence.
What makes this statement particularly ironic is the reference to flat earth, as if the law dean was secretly hoping the reader would make the association between the dean and those who harassed Galileo on similar grounds; that his (Galileo’s) conclusions were ‘obviously’ methodologically flawed and ignored counter-evidence.
Or even better, let Pied Piper meet its ridiculous gender quotas by letting the fellas dress as sham trans-employees. It shouldn't even be hard for them because they could just claim to be wearing the same androgynous gender neutral clothing of jeans and t-shirts like most of the genetic females do.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @WowJustWow, @Dave Pinsen
There is a King of Hill episode in which the propane and propane-related products small business that Hank works for is being sued for discrimination by the EEOC, so Hank quits to bring the number of employees beneath the magic number of 15 so it can avoid the Eye of Sauron.
“But nobody notices since one of the pillars of the Left’s self-regard is the assumption that everybody cool and funny is on their side.”
Exactly. But sometimes they don’t notice because it’s not only a joke on them, but the boldest indictment.
This is from a blog by a law school dean, discussing when it might be appropriate to fire a professor with tenure. (http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_deans/2015/04/law-professors-and-flat-earthers.html)Replies: @Anonymous, @Anonymous, @WowJustWow
So he’s not-so-subtly suggesting that Campos should be fired for his NYT op-ed, when every critique of it was far worse? His main point was “It is disingenuous to call a large increase in public spending a “cut,” as some university administrators do, because a huge programmatic expansion features somewhat lower per capita subsidies.” Every critique I’ve read has totally ignored that point or acknowledged it and then promptly forgotten it one sentence later.
Or even better, let Pied Piper meet its ridiculous gender quotas by letting the fellas dress as sham trans-employees. It shouldn't even be hard for them because they could just claim to be wearing the same androgynous gender neutral clothing of jeans and t-shirts like most of the genetic females do.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @WowJustWow, @Dave Pinsen
That wouldn’t even be a comedic farce. Some of the transwomen in tech have the biggest, thickest, bushiest beards this side of Osama bin Laden. There’s no expectation that they need to try to express anything even slightly effeminate in their appearance. That stuff is all socially constructed anyway, so who are you to say they don’t look feminine?
What makes this statement particularly ironic is the reference to flat earth, as if the law dean was secretly hoping the reader would make the association between the dean and those who harassed Galileo on similar grounds; that his (Galileo's) conclusions were 'obviously' methodologically flawed and ignored counter-evidence.Replies: @Cagey Beast
People in Galileo’s time knew the Earth was a sphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth
Scott Adams totally gets high tech and doesn’t hesitate to mock it because it deserves. All the geeks with totally empty lives outside of work, pointy haired managers that manage by magazine articles are a reality in the profession. It’s all real.
I remember a early Dilbert strip where he was asked to give a shot lecture about being a programmer to a bunch of school kids. Adam’s gave them the strait dope and left the kids crying and terrified of becoming programmers. 40 years of sitting in a soul sucking cube farm with no windows with a bunch of other guys who have no outside life. Sounds a bit like the big house without the buggery and beat downs.
Scott Adams totally gets high tech and doesn’t hesitate to mock it because it deserves it. All the geeks with totally empty lives outside of work, pointy haired managers that manage by magazine articles are a reality in the profession.
I remember a early Dilbert strip where he was asked to give a shot lecture about being a programmer to a bunch of school kids. Adam’s Dilbert gave them the strait dope and left the kids crying and terrified of becoming programmers. 40 years of sitting in a soul sucking cube farm with no windows with a bunch of other guys who have no outside life. Sounds a bit like the big house without the buggery and beat downs.
It’s really a dysfunctional profession and not worth really pursuing for most, unless you’re really, really good, so good that you won’t be replaced by a Bombay or Peking H-1B import brought in by all the kool billionaire nerds up at the top that are total jerks, don’t risk burnout by 35, etc. Given the way the Gates, Ellison, Zuckerbergs, and IBM’s of the tech world have done as much as possible to send American engineers and code monkeys back to the unemployment line, neither is a good long term career choice.
Or even better, let Pied Piper meet its ridiculous gender quotas by letting the fellas dress as sham trans-employees. It shouldn't even be hard for them because they could just claim to be wearing the same androgynous gender neutral clothing of jeans and t-shirts like most of the genetic females do.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @WowJustWow, @Dave Pinsen
Neal Stephenson had a bit in Cryptonomicon about how the dot-com startups had exotic female receptionists to check off diversity boxes.
The whole cultural appropriation issue seems insoluble: you're either ignoring black cultural contributions (bad), or referring to them too much (also bad).Replies: @Demosthenes, @ABN, @Lurker, @Tracy
Aside from giving professional victims yet another rhetorical arrow for their grievance quiver, I think the “cultural appropriation” thing is basically guild work. By and large, blacks don’t have a whole lot going for them economically. One thing they do have is cultural charisma, so naturally they want a monopoly on turning that cachet into money and status.
When looked at that way, it’s actually not such an unreasonable view. Consider how European national sports teams employ black African players. Personally, I find that vaguely unsporting. Why shouldn’t African countries be the ones benefiting from African athleticism? After all, it’s not like Africa can fall back on excelling in particle physics.
(Of course, most of the people who complain about “cultural appropriation” are being disingenuous, since they don’t actually want true independence, cultural or otherwise, from whites.)
Silicon Valley: $400B companies with 50K employees
There aren't just fewer jobs for women, there are fewer for everybody. There's more wealth with less work. Yeah Judge it's not fair! They have legal AI that can answer a million complex legal questions in seconds. Detroit has Robocop. What we need is Robojudge.Replies: @Dave Pinsen, @Name
It depends on how you slice the data. “High-income” people generally work more weekly hours than middle class and “low-income” people. It’s a myth that there a legions of people doing little work and making lots of money. You especially have to distinguish hourly wages from total compensation including benefits plus government transfers.
Don’t forget Mike Judge’s hilarious anti-SJW TV show, The Goode Family (ABC, 2009). From Wikipedia:
It should be noted that in the show, the adopted kid Ubuntu is a white South African, instead of a black child that the Goodes wanted.Replies: @PapayaSF
Programmers also like jobs and benefits. And you can’t take internet caricatures as accurate depictions of the real thing.
However annoying David Brooks can be, I’ll always think fondly of his excellent observations in “Bobos in Paradise.” The descriptions of the new post-80’s elites in that book are pure gold.
Yes, of oneself, that is. And that most are comically inept at it.
I have never done online dating, so I do not know (in fact, I haven’t done any dating since college). But I can just imagine it. I suppose “I am a gentleman, I am witty, and I am a good provider” just doesn’t cut it in today’s dating scene, eh?
Are you kidding me about OJ?
Hall of Famer, Heisman Trophy winner, movie star, former Monday Night Football commentator, current NFL on NBC commentator…
Add former Nebraska star Lawrence Phillips to the list. He’s suspected of killing his cell mate. What a dirt bag.
And the name of the son from Africa the good Goodes adopted? Ubuntu, the same name as the Silicon Valley-based company started by white S. African Mark Shuttelworth (See Cagey Beast’s comment #11). Everything comes full circle.
It should be noted that in the show, the adopted kid Ubuntu is a white South African, instead of a black child that the Goodes wanted.
Mila Kunis stole the purse. Isn’t she Hispanic? Ahh Nevermind.
It got a decent amount of attention. If he killed a white dude I’m thinking this case woulda been huge.
The whole cultural appropriation issue seems insoluble: you're either ignoring black cultural contributions (bad), or referring to them too much (also bad).Replies: @Demosthenes, @ABN, @Lurker, @Tracy
a) In a sane world we would acknowledge that different groups influence each other culturally.
Or
b) We could behave as if cultural appropriation was a real thing. Then whites would stop using whatever it is that we are supposed to have copied from blacks, twerking and, er, some other things.
And in return they would abandon white cultural products like cars, the internet, electricity and so on.
The whole cultural appropriation issue seems insoluble: you're either ignoring black cultural contributions (bad), or referring to them too much (also bad).Replies: @Demosthenes, @ABN, @Lurker, @Tracy
African-Americans ripped off us Italians. It is we who invented rap. See: Italians Invented Rap
What does this even mean? I thought Mossberg was always considered cool. How can you be Jewish and dweeby?Replies: @Dave Pinsen
It sounds like you don’t even know who he is. Mossberg is an old guy who for years was the WSJ’s hugely influential gadget reporter. He’d put out a shopping guide every year that lots of folks would read before buying computers, for example. His persona was neither cool nor deeby.
Swisher started the WSJ’s Bay Area-based “Boomtown” column just before the first dot-com bubble burst. She and Mossberg later teamed up to create a tech convention/reporting operation called All Things D under the WSJ’s brand. Recently, they ditched the WSJ and relaunched their operation as Re/code.
When looked at that way, it's actually not such an unreasonable view. Consider how European national sports teams employ black African players. Personally, I find that vaguely unsporting. Why shouldn't African countries be the ones benefiting from African athleticism? After all, it's not like Africa can fall back on excelling in particle physics.
(Of course, most of the people who complain about "cultural appropriation" are being disingenuous, since they don't actually want true independence, cultural or otherwise, from whites.)Replies: @Dave Pinsen, @meh
African countries do benefit from African players on their national teams. But in club play, those players go where they can make the most money. Europeans do the same. Zlatan Ibrahimović captains Sweden’s national team, but his pro team is Paris St. Germain in France.
More likely, some female programmer will outdo The Bros, in a re-tread of the wunderkind plot line from season one.Replies: @Thin-Skinned Masta-Beta, @Unladen Swallow
She was competent, but was basically a secondary character. Her boss, Peter Gregory played by Christopher Evan Welch who tragically died after the fifth episode of season one, was basically the guy that gets the startup rolling in episode one. That character who is seen by most in the Valley as a thinly disguised Peter Thiel, is the big brain of the series along with the main character Richard Hendricks who writes the algorithm that makes the company possible and his two brogrammer friends. Monica was basically the only female character of any significance on the show in season one.
The two billionaires, the three programmers, the initial incubator funding guy who thinks he’s Steve Jobs, the billionaire’s lawyer, the best friend of Richard who gets hired by the other billionaire, the teenage cloud programmer, they are all guys. All the programmers, engineers, and venture capitalists seen in season one are with one exception male. A lot of the SJ warriors critical of season one thought that the Monica character was so deferential to Peter Gregory that she was Peter Gregory’s secretary, Mike Judge mentions this on the commentary track of the DVD.
Although the Monica character is seen as competent, it is also pretty clear that she unlike her boss is not a technologist. Monica is shown as being a business savvy and marketing oriented which is why Peter sends her to make an in-person pitch to Richard after his initial pitch over the phone. She got more airtime in the last three episodes because the guy playing Gregory died, there was supposed to be a lot more scenes with him and the other billionaire, but that obviously was not possible. Luckily since she was already on the show they could expand her role and basically use her as a proxy for the billionaire VC.
The new thing is Tinder, an app where it goes entirely by pics, no profiles. I think it was inspired by the similar gay app, Grindr.
Tinder doesn’t have profiles, but someone does collect and mock their photos: http://humanitariansoftinder.com
Actually, the Hernandez case is very Voldemortean (copied from a blogger I admire) in my part of the country. Well, Aaron was All-State for football and wrestling. His mother was a widow who was, incidentally, assaulted by her second husband when Aaron was in HS which was in the police reports and court in their New England town. His mother is of Italian descent.
Aaron was also a decent student and popular, and, for all intents and purposes, should have been leaving a legacy for the Brass City he came from, by reaching the venerable New England Patriots after college ball at the U of FL. He had the life, the pretty HS sweetheart girlfriend/possible wife, he had the Patriots legacy…and he threw it away for pot, drug deals with old cronies and drama from High School??!?!!!
The probability of finding more employees who can increase the value of the company by $25M per employee here in the US is not as good as finding them outside the US, and all those other companies in Silly Valley are trying to attract the same set of employees.Replies: @notsaying
But most of the people brought in are not the best and the brightest and most of the jobs filled by the temporary foreign workers are jobs that Americans can do and will do.
Just like most American college students getting a bachelor’s or master’s degree even in STEM areas are not the “best and brightest” most foreign students are not either.
How many colleges with bottom 50% — or even bottom 75% — STEM programs trade on overseas parents’ desperation to get their kid into the US and then, they think, into an American job after graduation? Probably most of them.
The more the corporate executives and the politicians talk about “best and brightest” as if that’s the only people who end up with American jobs or in American colleges, the more I know they are just lying scoundrels.
hah haaa…you just made me laugh so much, thank you!
I say this as a huge fan of Beavis & Butthead, and King of the Hill. (Idiocracy somewhat less; it has its moments of brilliance but it also drags on in parts.)Replies: @Lagertha
Archer
> I also discovered this blog wasenlightened by a Google-employed thought criminal
Good find!
Self-introduction: “For the benefit of my readers who are not familiar with Neoreaction, I present a Brief Introduction to Neoreaction, often abbreviated as NRx and also known as The Dark Enlightenment.”
It’s going to be quite a day when he is exposed:
Good grief. What happened to watching your prey in the wild for a bit to assess its habits before stalking it for the kill? You know, check out the members of the opposite sex at school, workplace and/or church and, I don’t know, talking to them a bit and going bowling together and such?
r u kidding? OJ is in jail in for like 30 years in one of the N states: Nevada, Nebraska…
I remember a early Dilbert strip where he was asked to give a shot lecture about being a programmer to a bunch of school kids. Adam's Dilbert gave them the strait dope and left the kids crying and terrified of becoming programmers. 40 years of sitting in a soul sucking cube farm with no windows with a bunch of other guys who have no outside life. Sounds a bit like the big house without the buggery and beat downs.
It's really a dysfunctional profession and not worth really pursuing for most, unless you're really, really good, so good that you won't be replaced by a Bombay or Peking H-1B import brought in by all the kool billionaire nerds up at the top that are total jerks, don't risk burnout by 35, etc. Given the way the Gates, Ellison, Zuckerbergs, and IBM's of the tech world have done as much as possible to send American engineers and code monkeys back to the unemployment line, neither is a good long term career choice.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
As in “straitjacket”, or “dire straits”? Was that a typo, a Freudian slip, or a deliberate pun? Whichever, it fits the rest of your comment like, well, a straitjacket.
However annoying David Brooks can be, I'll always think fondly of his excellent observations in "Bobos in Paradise." The descriptions of the new post-80's elites in that book are pure gold.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Jim Don Bob
You should try Golden Gate, Vikram Seth’s novel of proto-SWPLs written in Pushkin sonnets. It’s from 1986, but just replace “no nukes” with the hot issue of the moment, and it reads like today’s blogs.
The two billionaires, the three programmers, the initial incubator funding guy who thinks he's Steve Jobs, the billionaire's lawyer, the best friend of Richard who gets hired by the other billionaire, the teenage cloud programmer, they are all guys. All the programmers, engineers, and venture capitalists seen in season one are with one exception male. A lot of the SJ warriors critical of season one thought that the Monica character was so deferential to Peter Gregory that she was Peter Gregory's secretary, Mike Judge mentions this on the commentary track of the DVD.
Although the Monica character is seen as competent, it is also pretty clear that she unlike her boss is not a technologist. Monica is shown as being a business savvy and marketing oriented which is why Peter sends her to make an in-person pitch to Richard after his initial pitch over the phone. She got more airtime in the last three episodes because the guy playing Gregory died, there was supposed to be a lot more scenes with him and the other billionaire, but that obviously was not possible. Luckily since she was already on the show they could expand her role and basically use her as a proxy for the billionaire VC.Replies: @Dave Pinsen
Peter’s replacement is a spergy female VC.
School still seems to be a promising venue, but for those who don’t go to church, the workplace can be an HR minefield.
Well that’s three you’ve come up with in 45 years; one questioned and released, one “exonerated” I think the number of fortune 500 CEO’s who have killed their wives In that time frame is higher than that.
Steve has talked about Mike Judge and Christopher Nolan on the blog before, but I’d like to point out that Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan admits (very coyly) to being a conservative in an interview ( http://www.vulture.com/2013/05/vince-gilligan-on-breaking-bad.html ). Those are some pretty serious right-leaning auteurs, all of whom have been recently enjoying some major successes, yet they’re all so guarded about their politics that it’s almost undetectable in their work or interviews, and there’s always a considerable degree of plausible deniability (Nolan flat out insists people reading political themes in his work are reading too much into it). While the South Park guys may object to being referred to as “on the right”, they are certainly at the very least anti-leftist, yet even they kind of hem and haw, and refrain from any sort of direct attack on the left. Meanwhile, left-leaning auteurs like George R. R. Martin, Joss Whedon, and David Simon regularly engage in open political advocacy.
I think there’s a sort of strange psychology that develops among highly intelligent, culturally savvy conservatives, where on probably a subconscious level they recognize they have to engage in a sort of subservient diplomacy with the left: critiques must be subtle, polite, and smothered in qualifications; political self-deprecation and other acts of atonement must be made to show “well, I’m not one of THOSE conservatives” (for every Team America, you should probably do something like The Book of Mormon); occasionally you have to kiss some rings and advocate the occasional dogma of the left; etc.
Based on my personal experience, this is a phenomenon of professional environments generally, not just Hollywood. We on the right have the psychology of a conquered people, and those of us most receptive to noticing such subtle social signals have learned to keep their heads down.
I see the anti-SJW messages in Idiocracy and King of the Hill, and I haven't seen Office Space. But I never thought about Beavis and Butthead, with the hippie teacher and his stupidity in reaching out to teenage idiots.Replies: @Ivy, @anon, @meh
This is an oversight on your part which you must rectify at once!
Seriously, probably the best work that Mike Judge has done.
Yeah, but clearly one without as much on the ball as the Peter Gregory character, Monica points this out to Richard in the first episode of season two. She is giving too high a valuation to the start up, and Monica points out Peter never did this. I guess the actress is one who played the yada yada female character on Seinfeld.
The Atlantic has a new article that touches on HBD:
Genes Don't Cause Racial-Health Disparities, Society Does
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/genes-dont-cause-racial-health-disparities-society-does/389637/
Here's a gem:As we all know, race has absolutely nothing to do with ancestry....Replies: @Honorary Thief
So does this mean if we start using the word ancestry to explain, say, why black people commit a lot of crime, we’ll be good to go?
Well, that’s another argument for going to church, eh? Pile *that* on top of saving one’s soul.
When looked at that way, it's actually not such an unreasonable view. Consider how European national sports teams employ black African players. Personally, I find that vaguely unsporting. Why shouldn't African countries be the ones benefiting from African athleticism? After all, it's not like Africa can fall back on excelling in particle physics.
(Of course, most of the people who complain about "cultural appropriation" are being disingenuous, since they don't actually want true independence, cultural or otherwise, from whites.)Replies: @Dave Pinsen, @meh
Those black players on European national teams are European nationals. They’ve been letting in millions of them for decades now, or hadn’t you noticed?
Plenty of black African players play on European club teams, but they represent their African national teams in international competition. There is no money in African club football, so they play their club football in Europe. Where the money is. But they still play for their national teams back in Africa. Dig?
I’ve only seen the first season of “Silicon Valley,” and then only on long flights, as I’ve been living in Paris, France the past couple of years. The show has just recently arrived on French shores. I have to say, having lived and worked in the real Valley for many years, I’ve found the show to be pretty spot-on in terms of the culture. People who complain that the nerd actors aren’t are not doing a good job because the characters are emotionally empty miss the point – a sizeable percentage of people in programming jobs are emotionally empty. And the VC poseurs are also pretty damned close to pitch-perfect. My first start-up was partially funded by Marc Benioff, who was on our board of directors, and I can say that, based on my interactions, I’ve personally found him to be an emotionally retarded, self-important, bullying oaf. He’s obviously honed his game in the past 20 years (NB the public face he’s put on over the Indiana/RFRA kerfuffle), but I suspect inside, he’s the same as he was in 1995 – an emotionally retarded, self-important, bullying oaf, only with more polish.
Back in the day, TJ Rogers (then CEO of Cypress Semiconductor and an out-of-the-closet libertarian) compared Jesse Jackson and the SJW to seagulls – i.e., he flies in, shits all over everything, then flies off.
Don’t know if the new generation of SV titans are capable of such candor.
http://sjrefugee.blogspot.com/2014/07/changing-culture-of-silicon-valley.html
Seriously, probably the best work that Mike Judge has done.Replies: @DWB
Agree. It’s a modern classic.
Aaron Fernandez was convicted of murder, and will be sentenced today to play for the Jets.
However annoying David Brooks can be, I'll always think fondly of his excellent observations in "Bobos in Paradise." The descriptions of the new post-80's elites in that book are pure gold.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Jim Don Bob
David Brooks though the people in “Bobos in Paradise” were funny; I think they are a pox upon the land. Buncha aging Boomers keeping it real by wearing $500 authentic peasant blouses, etc. The federal government here in N Virginia is full of them.
Lily Hay Newman is definitely projecting her own bias regarding the Ellen Pao case onto male tech professionals. These young males are definitely NOT part of the ragtag coalition sympathetic to the Ellen Paos, Zoe Quinns and Adria Richards of the world. They dread dealing with the Ellen Pao types in their professional lives. Comments on tech sites and they were running about 8:1 against Ellen Pao leading up to and after the verdict. She is considered an under-performing opportunist who just can’t hang, yet wants to be treated as an equal.
It should be noted that in the show, the adopted kid Ubuntu is a white South African, instead of a black child that the Goodes wanted.Replies: @PapayaSF
Yes, Ubuntu Goode! Gerald and Helen wanted to adopt an African orphan, and much to their chagrin, they got a white kid. Even worse, he’s regularly really good at things that embarrass them, like football.
“We on the right have the psychology of a conquered people, and those of us most receptive to noticing such subtle social signals have learned to keep their heads down.”
Well put. Forty years of television, not to mention a lot of literature and journalism, have painted a picture. The picture has little to do with reality, but the human mind can’t help live to some extent in this picture. People don’t think about things, they just see the picture.
Probably a steady stream on anti–fantasy-picture samizdat is about the best that can be done today. No need to be too despondent. The slow-drip approach, as the reality and the fantasy get farther and farther apart, will win in the end, because reality ultimately wins.