Is Paris burning?

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 232023
 

Yes.

 

 

On the one hand, Macron is operating by decree, which should never be allowed. On the other hand, what he’s doing is actually necessary… he’s raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. And even 64 seems kinda ridiculously low. France, like everywhere else in the West, has a birth rate that is less than replacement (1.83, better than pretty much everywhere else in Europe); their population numbers seem to be buttressed  by importing Algerians, Moroccans and other North Africans. The result of that is relatively few young people for lots of old people, especially going forward. Keeping the retirement – and thus pension payout – age low is going to be economically infeasible. So the French people are rightly pissed at a tyrannical government… that’s using tyranny to do what needs to happen. So… France seems kinda screwed.

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 11:56 pm

OK, so how do you game the system on this one?

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Mar 212023
 

OSU requires DEI statements from mechanical, aerospace engineer job applicants

Scholars seeking a job in Ohio State University’s College of Engineering must pledge their allegiance to diversity, equity and inclusion as part of the process.

University officials ask applicants to provide a statement that describes their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, along with “specific examples such as teaching and/or mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds, outreach activities to underrepresented groups, or conducting research that address social inequities,” according to a copy of the application rubric recently tweeted by John Sailer with the National Association of Scholars.

One suggestion I have: use the current terminology against them. What, exactly, is an “underrepresented” group? That’s nicely vague. One could simply assume that it means “minority.” Okey doke. Well, what is one of the “progressives” most favoritist descriptions these days? “The Global Majority.”

“Global majority” is a collective term for ethnic groups which constitute approximately 85 percent of the global population. It has been used as an alternative to terms which are seen as racialized like “ethnic minority” and “person of color” (POC), or more regional terms like “visible minority” in Canada and “Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic” (BAME) in the United Kingdom.

OK. Cool. Then that means “The Global Minority” is anyone not described by that 85%. You know… white people. So… say “why yes, I’m committed to mentoring minorities.” By doing so, and keeping it vague, it means you’re committed to mentoring EVERY TYPE OF HUMAN IMAGINABLE. Because by one definition or another, everyone is a minority.

Also:

High scores are given to candidates who have a “sophisticated understanding of differences stemming from ethnic, socioeconomic, racial, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and cultural backgrounds and the obstacles people from these backgrounds face in higher education.”

This can also go pretty much any way you want it to. “Yes, I fully understand the importance of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs. (Because I understand how they cause a general reduction in competence and quality.) I understand how all these different factors can play into the difficulties people face. (Because I’ve seen how Asians and The Global Minority are shut out of educational opportunities due to quotas.)” And so on.

There is a way to game any system, no matter how devious and malicious. However, better still would be to toss out this nonsense. *Especially* in stem fields of education and endeavor, where competence and merit are the only metrics by which someone should advance. otherwise buildings burn, bridges collapse, planes crash and people die. But in the mean time, people have to decide to either stand up to the bullies and risk it all, or undermine the bastards.

 Posted by at 11:03 pm

Yay! We’re doomed! (Fungal edition)

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Mar 202023
 

An emerging fungal threat spread at an alarming rate in US health care facilities, study says

Clinical cases of Candida auris, an emerging fungus considered an urgent threat, nearly doubled in 2021, according to new data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. …  rising from 53 in 2016 to 330 in 2018 and then skyrocketing from 476 in 2019 to 1,471 in 2021.

It’s resistant to drugs and disinfectants; a lot of people can be carriers and not know it. It usually causes harm to people with compromised immune systems, is difficult to eradicate either in people or facilities once it sets up shop. It was first discovered in 2009 in Japan, being found for the first time in the US in 2013. Somewhere between 30% and 60% of the people who develop Candida auris bloodstream infections die, but they also had other conditions.

 Posted by at 11:37 pm

Disappointing Airwolf

 AARRRGH, aircraft, art, Crazy, Gah., models, science fiction, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 192023
 

After watching these videos, I’m glad I passed on buying into the Mars Industries 1/18 scale “Airwolf” kit. There are a lot of problems with it. A *lot* of problems. There are design issues, uncured resin, quality control issues and, most shocking to me, problems with the vac-formed transparencies. The problem with *those* was that the forms were themselves 3D printed, which is fine… but the prints with their substantial layer lines were not sanded smooth. Thus the transparencies have layer lines. AAAARRRRGH.

 Posted by at 10:37 am

And it only took me four decades

 art, awesomeness, blather, books, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., history, Hmm..., politics, science fiction, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 162023
 

At last, my collection of “Tom Swift Jr.” novels is complete. Since I’m a miser/dirt poor, I was only willing to spend a pittance for each book, but if you wait long enough pretty much everything shows up on ebay.

Woo.

 

And because why not, here’s the next shelf over:

 

 

On a related note: turns out that last year a bit of good news slipped by me un-noticed. The CW a few years ago decided to make a TV series about Tom Swift Jr… it could have been good (I mean, it’s not beyond the bounds of the physically possible), but CW decided instead to make an abomination. The series began airing on May 31, 2022. It was promptly cancelled on June 30, 2022, due to low ratings. And of course: Tom Swift had been turned from a no-nonsense STEM-focused blond blue-eyed teenager with a girlfriend into a flamboyant gay black adult. Thus assuring that the existing fanbase would be uninterested. And who among that fraction of the population for whom “flamboyant gay black man” is a draw would be interested in a crappy sci-fantasy show?

From the Wikipedia article on the series:

Lead actor Richards said of the adaptation, “The original Tom Swift was great for his time and what he represented. At the time, that was the face of young boys, All-American kids full of possibilities. But in 2021, that can look so different. It can look like someone like me—a Black guy who is chocolate, who is queer, who is all those things that we’re told aren’t the normal or the status quo.” He added, “We’re going to dive into so many sectors of identity. We’re going to talk about Blackness—and a different kind of Blackness than we’re used to seeing, which is the Black elite, the 1 percent, the billionaires. We’re also going to talk about a queer boy’s journey into becoming a queer man. Not only self-acceptance, but acceptance as a whole, having the community and people around you.”

Gosh. I wonder why it failed to grab ratings.

 Posted by at 8:44 pm

*HOW* much???

 art, Crazy, Gah., news, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 152023
 

Nancy Meyers Netflix Movie Shut Down Over Budget Issues

Netflix was in the early stages of a rom-com. You know, the kind of movie that tends to be set in the present day, in the real world, without much need for explosions, car chases, major set pieces, whole armies of extras, Marvel-sized special effects budgets. And thus, this seems a little weird:

Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz, Michael Fassbender and Owen Wilson were circling roles in the feature, budgeted at $130 million-plus.

One. Hundred. Thirty. MILLION. Dollars.

Ummm.

 

Oh, hey, apropos of nuthin’, here’s a video made almost entirely by AI. You know, for cheap. Is it good? Meh. Did it require the involvement of busloads of Hollywood deviants, freaks and weirdos? Seems not. Is it the future? Most likely.

 Posted by at 3:20 pm

Lockheed one-man X-Wing test vehicle

 aircraft, art, Gah., history, projects  No Responses »
Mar 132023
 

Circa 1980 Lockheed jumped on board the “X-Wing” bandwagon. For those unfortunate enough not to have been graced to grow up in the 80’s, the X-Wing was a concept for a four-bladed helicopter where the rotors were rigid and could be stopped in flight, turning into two forward swept and two aft-swept wings (see Aerospace Projects Review issue V5N6 for a whole fat article on the concept). one of the Lockheed concepts that was publicized at the time was a one-man research/proof of concept vehicle, smaller than a Bell Cobra. I’ve got fair to middling diagrams and data on it, but what I don’t have is a designation. Which is terribly frustrating because I’m convinced that, many years ago, I *read* a designation for it, CL-something, decided “that’s interesting information, I shall surely remember where I read that for future reference,” and have never been able to find it again.

ARRRRgh.

Anyway, here’s some art of the thing.

 Posted by at 11:05 pm

Meanwhile, in “England…”

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Mar 122023
 

English traditions confuse me:

I guess that slots in somewhere between “Cricket” and “Blimey.”

Oh, and something to look out for in the future of a culturally enriched Britain: “Taharrush.”

Such as:

Get used to it, Brits. It’s the future you chose when you installed (or at the very least allowed) a government that took your guns and decided to replace you and your culture.

Americans: witness this. Keep it in mind when you vote.

 Posted by at 6:07 pm

Priorities!

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 122023
 

So it looks like Silicon Valley Bank employed people to do fundamentally pointless time- and resource-wasting stuff. This, sad to say, is hardly unique; lots of companies devote surprising amounts of effort end employees time to things that have nothing to do with the companies business or mission. Company baseball teams, for example, have nothing to do with, say, an auto manufacturers core function; claims about “building morale/cohesion” *might* have some validity, but if the company is in dire distress, spending resources on that is a bit unwise. However, a baseball team is unlikely to be a major source of revenue drain.

DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity) initiatives, however, CAN be a major drain on a company. Not only directly by consuming payroll in hiring these people, but in consuming productivity in redirecting employees to do stuff on company time. And probably more importantly, indirectly by tearing apart the fundamental cultures that promote productivity and setting employees at each others throats and by causing HR departments to drive away – or not hire in the first place – good employees due to them not filling Enough checkboxes, and retaining less qualified employees because they identify with the current politically favored victimhood groups.

So, any time, money, resources devoted to “woke” policies is of course a bad thing. But how bad it was for SVB is yet to be determined, but it looks like they were at least at the standard American major corporate level of wokist self-sabotagery.

While Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, top executive pushed ‘woke’ programs

Perhaps this will serve as a valuable lesson to other companies to avoid this sort of nonsense. I’m not optimistic, though… a century of blood driven by big-government collectivism, from the socialists to the Nazis to the Commies, has hardly stopped people from “but this time we’ll get it right.” Additionally: since the list of “conspiracy theories” being proven right seems to grow day by day, conspiracy theories that hold that failures like this are all part of some long plan to centralize power into fewer and fewer institutions seem undismissable.

 Posted by at 3:40 pm
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