Rants, FEMA, great pictures, and lots more

Mail 696 Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Best. Rant. Ever.

Jerry

Below is the best rant ever. A 13-year veteran of Amazon and Google tells his Google colleagues what they “don’t get” in a long, extremely well-written rant. The grammar is even correct:

https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX

A central section:

“So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He’s doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion — back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year — he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.

“His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

“1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

“2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

“3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

“4) It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care.

“5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

“6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

“7) Thank you; have a nice day!

“Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.

“#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell. Rick is an ex-Army Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word "hardened interface" a lot. Rick was a walking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it.

“Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon’s vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street. Amazon’s dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way. A teeny tiny sampling of these discoveries included:”

A very interesting rant indeed. I found it at The Reg, here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/13/google_does_not_get_platforms/

Ed

Where did it go?

Hello Jerry,

"For a start they want the bailout money back. It didn’t go to them. To whom did it go? There was a lot of money floating out there –"

Interesting question; I’m surprised that NONE of the ‘mainstream media’ have asked it.

Not!

Example: Solyndra (Obama’s friends and supporters) got a half billion dollars to set up a solar power plant, create a bunch of jobs, and save the planet from the dreaded ‘Climate Change’.

A year or so later, Solyndra is bankrupt, there hasn’t been a watt of solar power delivered to the grid, the former Solyndra employees are again unemployed (but their 2 year unemployment clock has been reset), and the climate is, reportedly, still changing. The half billion has evaporated and not only does the collective media not know where it went, they, along with the Obamunists that they front for, are singularly uninterested in finding out.

Solyndra is not unique. In fact, the moral equivalents of Solyndra are downright common, to the cumulative tune of a couple of trillion dollars. And, on the evidence, the term ‘audit’, at least as it applies to tracking and documenting government expenditures, is so rare that it is scarcely worth including in a dictionary. After all, if we are unconcerned with the whereabouts of penny that escapes our pocket in the parking lot, why should we be all atwitter over the fate of 2e14 of them?

Bob Ludwick=

As I have said, were I the right age I might be tempted to join a protest group. Boring from the inside, so to speak. Of course many of those sitting about are useless, but there are some misguided idealists who might yet be saved. They know something is wrong, they thought they’d get a real change, and here we are with the same old ruling class. No open society. All back patting and favor exchanges. This was what they were waiting for? Ah well, we told them so…

From the "Unbiased media" department

The Big Three networks covered the ENRON story heavily. They are ignoring the Solyndra scandal and the cool half a billion dollars tax payers are losing on it. Naw – this can’t be. The media is not biased. They tell me they aren’t.

Reality Check: ABC, CBS and NBC Bury News of Taxpayer Money Squandered on Obama-Linked Solar Energy Company http://newsbusters.org/blogs/rich-noyes/2011/10/11/reality-check-abc-cbs-and-nbc-bury-news-taxpayer-money-squandered-obama-#ixzz1aVQjfGrl

Do YOU believe the media?

{^_^}

World Depression Two and the Great Revolt

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

First note:

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/320-80/7814-focus-recession-officially-over

The "Great Recession" is officially over – for now at least. By definition, a recession is when certain economic indicators decline for a set period of time. That decline, in those (but not other) indicators is over for now; but recovery has yet to arrive.

By definition, a "depression" is the trough between a recession and a recovery. Since the recession is (officially) over, and the recovery is nowhere in sight, that means that the depression is (officially) on, as of now.

You may recall that, about eight decades ago, there was another depression, called the "Great Depression". It had been preceded by a war, at the time called the "Great War". However that conflict was followed by an even greater war, called "World War Two"; so the "Great War" was retroactively renamed "World War One".

Given this precedent, I propose that we retroactively relabel the "Great Depression" as "World Depression One"; so that we may call our present economic slump "World Depression Two".

World Depression 1 was ended by World War 2; but we cannot end World Depression 2 with a "World War 3", for that would not improve the economy or anything else. But perhaps, instead of a "World War 3", we will see a "Great Revolt". It has already started in the Arab world, and it may be spreading to Wall Street.

I mention this possibility, not as any fan of revolts – too risky – but as an even lesser fan of world wars.

Sincerely,

Nathaniel Hellerstein

Syndicalism. The Myth of the General Strike. Etc.

A Great Revolt will not be likely to solve anything: what usually happens is that there appears someone acceptable to the ruling class who is a friend of the people, and you get a temporary dictatorship to end the disorder. When the mob goes in search of bread it is joined by those who simply want to burn the bakeries. When enough people spend time demonstrating, you get a sea change. As Lara Logan discovered in Cairo. The people, in distress, seldom cast up any person or institution you would much care for. Simon Bolivar’s last observations included “He who seeks to plant democracy in my homeland plows the sea,” and his last words are said to have been “There have been three great fools in history. Jesus Christ, Don Quixote, and me.” It may well be that Julius Caesar would have reformed the dying Roman Republic; there is some evidence that once his debts were paid and his life was secure, he would in fact have restored many of the old institutions, and like his uncle Marius stood down. We’ll never know.

But a Great Revolt will not restore the Republic. And we have no George Washington that I can see.

Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one. But as soon as mankind has attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion (a period long since reached in all nations with whom we need here concern ourselves), compulsion, the direct form or in that of pains and penalties for noncompliance, is no longer admissible as a means to their own good, and justifiable only for the security of others. John Stuart Mill

The ancients understood that good government is a gift from the gods. James Burnham understood this and tried to warn us in Suicide of the West. Perhaps we will learn. Perhaps we will not.

Fed governor defends CRA as not the seed problem of the housing bubble

http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/duke20090224a.htm

I took the time to carefully read the damn thing. Institutional denial is understandable, but reading someone’s execution of that denial is a little unsettling.

Phil

Horrifying. Educational horror.

Fugate FEMA

Craig Fugate might be trying to "manage down" the expectations of FEMA, but that’s not the same thing as encouraging meaningful disaster-preparation activity by local organizations.

Like you always say, the thing about the Dark Ages was not that we forgot how to do things, but that we forgot that certain things had ever *been* *done*.

—

Mike T. Powers

And we are definitely in a dark age. We do not know that once there were no illiterates who had been through more than five grades of school. Essentially none. I once asked my mother, a rural Florida first grade teacher in the 1920’s, how many of her pupils left first grade who had not learned how to read. She said there were one or two every couple of years, “but the didn’t learn anything else, either.” Which describes the situation. The notion that a child of dull normal or above intelligence would leave first grade unable to read was simply unthinkable. Now – well, now we cheer if half the kids in first grade can actually read at “first grade level”; and of course grade level reading is silly to begin with. If you can read you can read. You may not know the meaning of many words, but you can read them. But we have forgotten that this was ever true.

The Snows of Enceladus.

<http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=20126>

Roland Dobbins

“I think that these things were captured by the kraken and taken to the midden and the cephalopod would take them apart.”

<http://www.geosociety.org/news/pr/11-65.htm>

Roland Dobbins

Cyclist vs. Hartebeest.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2oymHHyV1M>

Roland Dobbins

Dead or Alive

What then was the legality for the "Wanted, Dead Or Alive" posters for the gangsters, bank robbers, and murderers fro the 1930’s on back?

Roger Miller

Outside the movies how many official posters have you seen that actually said that? Of course it would true of an escaped prisoner known to be armed.

In general it wasn’t legal and for that matter outside Hollywood didn’t much happen that people were proclaimed outlaw to be killed on sight.

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

Of course, you are right! And the "experts say" TV and media do not affect us.

What then? Everybody bitches on how things are. and we can only blame ourselves. Is there a way of fixing all this? R’s or D’s won’t or any other flavor you want.

As was said, we are a ‘Constitutional Republic’, we are supposed to be under the rule of law, not an individual or regime.

But then, when we are no longer a moral people, under moral leadership, the law is twisted or outright broken at whim. Are we no longer a moral people?

Roger Miller

We do not even proclaim ourselves moral. We are now a diverse, non-judgmental, politically correct people are we not?

: Opera and al-Alwaki

Regarding the comment on the synchronization of TTD:

The question was whether the transportation of a synchronized TTD from Switzerland to Italy, passing through a non-uniform gravitational field, might have upset that synchronization by a nanosecond or so. What would happen if two sets of clocks, A and B, were synchronized: one at CERN and the other at Gran Sasso. Then one of each pair is transported to the other site over the same route, but in opposite directions. It is not necessary that the A and B clocks agree with each other, because only the delta between the two sites is needed. Or is the effect not symmetric?

I do note a remarkable difference between the way the hard scientists at CERN are treating their methods, their data, and their reasoning versus the way that climate scientists treat theirs.

Regarding the comparison of the assassination of al Alwaki to the sniper shooting a Confederate soldier:

It was considered poor form, unless carried out in the midst of battle. However, the proper comparison ought to be with a Union sniper taking out a politician agitating for secession of, say, Kentucky or Maryland. (There was a secession movement in New Jersey, too!) Or on the other side: a Confederate agent assassinating the editor of an abolitionist newspaper. As I understand it, the jihadis in question were agitators, not fighters. One ran a web site. The other encouraged others to acts of free enterprise terrorism. Not very nice, but they were not carrying arms, nor themselves engaged in the conspiracies they encouraged. This puts it in a gray area, I think. No tears lost for the dynamic duo, but remember that Boromir thought he could use the One Ring solely for Good.

MikeF

The biggest evacuation by boat ever

This is a video about the biggest boatlift evacuation ever, larger even than

Dunkirk. It took only 9 hours to evacuate Lower Manhattan by boat. Boats came

out of nowhere to help the people stranded by 911.

http://blogs.reuters.com/katharine-herrup/2011/09/09/boatlifters-the-unknown-story-of-911/

All those heroes just did what needed to be done. God bless each and every

one of them, twice.

{O.O}

An Important Point You Made Needs Iteration

You made a stupendous point today; I believe we need to take the philosophical approach used in Hagakure to this point. You see, points often make a point beyond the context one makes the point. Yamamoto Tsunetomo made simple, elegant use of one similar situation:

<.>

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to pet wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning,you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to all things.

</>

Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure

You wrote:

<.>

And when you inject more and more money into the higher education market, then the costs will go up. We keep running that experiment in the hopes that this time it will come out different. And here we are. It costs an increasing amount to go to college, it’s increasingly easier to get loans, and the costs keep going up.

</>

https://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=2487

Over the years, I spoke with many close to me and I often hear certain phrases e.g. "I am not sure throwing more money at the problem is the answer". Throwing more money at the problem would only increase the problem. We know you to say "stop feeding the beast" when we apply this understanding to government. More money, more problems; this understanding extends to all things. It is well that you pointed this out.

If we can find a way to allow people to apply this to general questions in public policy, we might observe some positive changes. Should we give big banks more money? No, somehow it will make them more expensive and that is bad. It could be that simple.

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

The future of the nation depends on being able to educate the top 10% of the population and to civilize the rest. We are not doing a very good job of either task.

Stakeholders chart

The stakeholders chart that one of your readers submitted is quite possibly the funniest….and probably most accurate….things I’ve seen about development in a long time.

I’ve sent this to colleagues, clients and associates….I suspect the email lines will be quite busy for a few days due to it.

http://mthruf.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/workplace-subjectivity-chart1.jpg

Thanks!

Tracy Walters CISSP

crime of the century

I wish all of our "crimes" were only as bad as this one.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/sex/senior-citizen-car-sex-098713

I think the officers could have done them a bigger favor by assisting them to a motel and leaving a note reminding them where their car was.

Sean