The New Aristocracy

The new aristocracy is the 9.9%. They have convinced themselves that they deserve to be at the top because of their superior intelligence, talent, and work ethic. And yet, somehow, those traits get passed on to their kids... but not through genetics. More through legacy college admissions and other mechanisms of privilege.

Here in Australia college really is meritocratic. You need good scores to get into good schools, and all the schools are free (you have to pay them back after you graduate, but only if you earn enough money. The point is if you are accepted to a good school you can afford to go). So what's a wealthy family to do? Private high school. Many of which charge over $12,000 a year.

Elite colleges don't have better instruction, they have better research projects. Go to an elite college and your Teaching Assistant is doing Nobel prize work as his day job. That has obvious advantages, but the point is that the advantage isn't so much from teaching skill as other factors. Factors that don't apply to high schools. The education isn't that much better at a private high school than at a public one.

What does apply, though, is sending your children to school with the children of the rich. Not just because all of the kids there are studying all of the time (so your kid does it through peer pressure) but because the connections they make will keep them in the aristocratic class more than any education they get.

“Our new multiracial, gender-neutral meritocracy has figured out a way to make itself hereditary.” - The Birth of the New American Aristocracy

And in one of the enduring absurdities that always makes me crazy:

You see, when educated people with excellent credentials band together to advance their collective interest, it’s all part of serving the public good by ensuring a high quality of service, establishing fair working conditions, and giving merit its due. That’s why we do it through “associations,” and with the assistance of fellow professionals wearing white shoes. When working-class people do it—through unions—it’s a violation of the sacred principles of the free market. It’s thuggish and anti-modern. Imagine if workers hired consultants and “compensation committees,” consisting of their peers at other companies, to recommend how much they should be paid. The result would be—well, we know what it would be, because that’s what CEOs do.

In Memoriam: Dennis Creasy

My father-in-law passed away today, after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was at home and at peace. Dennis was a good man and I was privileged to know him. He welcomed me to his home and his family. We made gunpowder together, and he shot my author photo. We played cards every Friday, and my house is full of things he fixed.

I will be lucky to live as full of a life as his.

My house is haunted?

Parnormal Investigation at a house in Ohio that has been rumored to be haunted for years, but is it?

No, you dolts. No, it is not haunted; that bad smell is probably just a sandwich I left behind while I was playing in the attic. I lived there in the 70's; I still remember mowing that vast and unending front lawn. I would cut designs into the grass and then go to the balcony window to admire them.

It's a very old house; it had a coal chute in the basement and the kitchen was tacked on years after the original construction. Inside it had cherry wood baseboards and door jambs that had, over the years, been covered in cheap paint.

My mom threw the greatest Halloween party ever there. Guests came in through the basement - there's a door cut into the hill that leads to the street - and walked through the entire dark, dingy Victorian era basement that we had decorated. I was playing a corpse in the coal chute; when a group came through I would suddenly leap up and wave a bloody knife. My sister's friend Carla screamed so loud I thought the windows would break.

We had peeled grapes and gloves with sticky fingers in the tight passageways, and everything else you could imagine. Mom was an artist, after all, and she went all out on this project. It was the best Halloween ever.

Thanks, mom. :)

In Memoriam: Nathan Ginn

My good friend Nathan Ginn passed away this week. He had struggled with heart problems for many years, which can only be described as ironic because he was one of the most open, welcoming, and charitable people I've ever known.

He was a steadfast and true friend to me for over thirty years. Let me give you example of what I mean by friendship: as an atheist, I obviously could not get married in a church. Nathan got himself ordained over the internet (in the Church of the Whole Life, I believe) so that he could perform the marriage. But that's only the half of it; when that one didn't take, Nathan did it again. How many men will you marry you twice? If that's not friendship, I don't know what is. Sara and I got married in the Rose Garden in the park, by the power vested in Nathan Ginn by the State of Arizona, and the shattered pieces of my life were made whole again. By the power vested in Nathan Ginn.

Nathan Ginn, playing his greatest role as "Priestly Officiant", in "The Wedding"

We met in karate class at the UofA and trained together for the next 20 years. We ran up and down the three flights of stairs of the UofA parking garage for what felt like 10 of them. He made movies, both as a producer and an actor. He made people happy. I still remember dinner at this mother's house as the only time I've ever actually enjoyed Chinese food.

Goodbye, Nathan. See on you on the other side of the veil.

Windows 8.1

Just when I had my XP box perfectly clean and functional, the motherboard blew.

So now I have a new laptop. I tried to convince Sara to switch to Apple months ago, but failed. As her partner it is my duty to follow her even unto darkness. Hence I have endured the maelstrom which is Windows 8.1

I don't get all the hate. I mean, sure, Win 8.1 is a gratuitously insulting piece of software that reduces people to incandescent rage whenever they try to do the simplest tasks; but that describes every version of Windows. As far as I can tell, same as it ever was.

The laptop came with 8; updating to 8.1 was free, if you don't count the nine hours of my life it consumed. The next day I was treated to the new, improved blue screen of death; after my laptop booted to the the desktop, a huge blue banner overtook the screen with the message "Please wait."

Chump that I am, I did wait for 45 minutes before going online on a different computer to see what nefarious update had effectively bricked my computer. After a few hours, I managed to boot to safe mode (so that virus protection was disabled) and then perform a restore point (the first restore attempt having failed due to the aforementioned virus protection. I would point out it was Microsoft's own virus protection, but that hardly needs to be said).

I cannot imagine what went through a professional engineer's mind when they were designing that "Please wait" screen; did the concept of a timeout (hey, we've spent half an hour at this and it's still not working, maybe we should let the user have his computer back) never occur to them? Is this a technology that Microsoft is unaware of? On the other hand, I can imagine a psychotic sadist designing it. Mind you, it's not simple greed or laziness; the lazy thing to do would to let the computer boot despite whatever perceived problem, and leave the user to the winds of fate. But no; Microsoft chose to exercise considerable effort in ensuring that your otherwise perfectly functional computer would be rendered useless, and they spent a lot of time making sure you couldn't sneak your way around it.

I have my limits, however; I shall not follow the wife into the screeching hell which is OneDrive. Manually backing my files up to the cloud every day is a right royal pain in the ass, but it doesn't leave me weeping with hatred on a weekly basis.

I do, however, envy GRRM. Not for his fame, which is a fickle favor bestowed by the gods; but for his wisdom in writing on a DOS box in the first place. If only my editor would accept Word Perfect files...

The Hobbit

Saw the Hobbit yesterday. It was beautiful to look at, the acting was great (especially Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis), and visiting Middle Earth again was wonderful. All in all, I am glad I saw it.

That said, the movie was dreadful. Peter Jackson should be flogged. He tried to make the story as epic as LotR (going so far as to steal whole scenes - the ring falling onto Bilbo's finger, the storm in the mountains, the race across the narrow bridge underground, the hero cutting off the evil leader's hand), and it simply isn't. It's about some greedy dwarves that want to steal some gold.

Jackson tried to pump up the drama, but he can't; we already know all 13 dwarves have to survive, for instance, so every battle scene not played for laughs is just silly. You can't make an adventure into an epic without changing the story, and Jackson didn't do that, he merely added to the story.

And this is where the flogging comes in. Of the scenes Jackson added, two of them are so unforgivably bad Hollywood cliches as to make me question Jackson's sanity.

The least objectionable is Thorin giving his unnecessarily contentious speech only to reverse it by announcing how wrong he was and then hugging a hobbit. Not only is this unnecessary, but no. Thorin does not hug hobbits.

The worst was the absolute bog-standard cop show stupidity, "We have your friend! We'll kill him unless you throw down your weapons and let us kill all of you! Then we'll kill him anyway." Real life cops never fall for this; movie cops falling for it is unbelievable; making medieval warriors fall for it is absurd. Seriously, Jackson must have been high when he wrote that scene, and every single person on the entire set must have been oxygen-deprived or something to not have pointed out just how freaking idiotic it was.

And the lines given to Saruman (magic mushrooms?!!) are a freaking insult to the character and the actor. Wasting Christopher Lee's voice on those idiotic words is a crime against nature. Honestly, I almost walked out of the theater at point, out of a fear that this one scene would taint the majesty that is LotR.

I will undoubtedly see the remaining films, for the reasons mentioned in the first paragraph. However, I don't know if I'll ever see another Jackson film; it is clear now that he had one and only one story to tell, and that the majesty of LotR was due entirely to his slavish adherence to a creative vision that was not his own.

Welcome to the future

The owners of the Miami Family Medical Centre on the Gold Coast fear they may have to pay $4000 to the extortionists, who hacked into a server and encrypted the medical records.
"We're trying to work out how to pay the hackers or find someone to decrypt the information," the centre's co-owner David Wood told ABC Online on Monday.
He said the information hadn't been stolen and the centre would continue to operate, but admitted it would be very difficult without patient records.
There have been 11 similar offences in Queensland this year, according to police.

This kind of thing is no longer a novelty item; soon it won't even be news.Except in the real world hackers aren't cool nerds or sexy high-functioning autistics. They're just thugs with computers instead of crowbars.

Meanwhile, everyone needs to keep backups. We keep our writing backups on Amazon's cloud; it costs a few dollars a month and you can upload from Firefox. But if you have a business, you need to have your data on physical media, somewhere in your building.

Arcology

In one of the versions of Sim City, your city got to the point where it could build arcologies: super-buildings that were a self contained environment.

And now, this:

Sky City will boast a hospital, a school, 17 helipads, and enough apartments to house 30,000.

Above the world in 90 days: China building world’s tallest skyscraper — 220 storeys — in just three months

Just think about living there - the social aspects aside, I can't believe they can run water for that many households. Can you imagine taking a shower on one of the top floors? I know we need more urban density, but I don't think this will work. In 30 years it will be a slum, just like many of the huge housing projects in Britain, and for the same reason. The Brits committed what one writer called the "arithmetic heresy:" the idea that if 8 families in a block of flats could live together in good community, then 800 could do the same in a skyscraper. The Chinese perhaps have stronger cultural and social norms; but 30,000 people is a town, not a neighborhood. The building will need its own mayor and police force.

On the other hand they won't need a gym. Just going for a walk up and down the stairs will keep everybody fit for a marathon.

The Family Estate

My family does have a spot of land named after it.

The Planck Family Estate

Fortunately, I won't be claiming my inheritance any time soon.

Slightly less honest thieves

I flew out to LA today to file for my daughter's passport. While I was checking in at the e-ticket kiosk, I was presented with a choice:

"Would you like priority boarding?"

The machine offered me a chance to board early, and listed "first access to the overhead bins" as a benefit.

For only $19.00.

Here I am, trying to check in, and if I slip and hit "Yes" instead of "No" I get charged an extra $19. I don't know about you, but when I am trying to convince a machine to let me on the plane at 6:00 AM, I tend to just hit the "Yes OK whatever just let me on the plane" button.

But it gets better. The flight contained a total of 10 passengers. Nobody needs priority boarding on a flight so empty the attendants had to ask us to move to balance the weight load.

And the cursed machine knew that. It knew exactly how many people were on that flight, and it still offered me its rip-off faux priority.

This is worse than those gas pumps that ask you if you want a car wash. At least those I can avoid; I'll just drive an extra block to a gas station that doesn't view every interaction with me as a chance to pick my pockets if I don't pay close enough attention.

But I can't do that with the airlines. I can't just change my mind at the last minute and go to the next one.

On the other hand, what I can do is leave this @#$%^&* country. Maybe Australian corporations haven't devolved to a business strategy that consists of rifling through my wallet when I'm not looking. Australia is generally 20 years behind the times, but in the case of airlines that's a good thing (remember what flying was like 20 years ago? Ya, it's like that right now on Qantas).

Sucks for the rest of you, though. Sorry.

At least they're honest thieves

I got the stupidest call this morning.

A phone research company called me up. They wanted to ask how I felt about Bank of America. Fair enough, I guess.

But then the first thing the caller says is this:

"Any ideas for customer service that come out of this conversation will belong to Bank of America, with no monetary award to you."

I kid you not.

I started laughing. I told the caller, "Hey... mad props for honesty. After having screwed the economy to death, they're out of ideas on how to steal even more money. So they call me up and ask me for ideas. For free."

She was not amused. I don't know why. At least I was laughing. I imagine most of the people she calls are simply going to be screaming invective.

Pitcure of the Day

This is exactly what I want to see if I'm ever lost at sea:





A life-raft full of lifeguard dogs being towed towards me by a lifeguard dog.