Comin’ at ya . . .

MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW has an article by Aviva Hope Rutkin that you should read and ponder. “Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization”. 45% is the estimated job loss over the next 20 years.

The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services, sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage. 

What's old is new again.

20 years? Hell, I might even still be alive. As this develops, Conservatives who go berserk at the idea of Food Stamps might want to get therapy. As well, “Liberals”, to use the US term, might want the same. Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, this is scary: even the crappy jobs will be disappearing as technology develops.

Even if it's only the loss of 25%, not 45% of US jobs, there are going to be a lot of people who are under 40 when this happens who can't work if jobs don't exist, crappy or not, and if they don't starve to death, can expect to live another 30-40 years. Then there's the teenagers and twenty-somethings trying to enter the working world. And if all there is for them are crappy jobs, what will that do for future families?
Wherever he is, Karl Marx is probably laughing hysterically. How will Capitalism cope? As the robotics take over the work force, maybe we might just see a resurgence of “hand-made” items as the items of value.

While Victoria burns, Rex looks at bright shiney objects

Dear Rex Murphy,

I, like all other Canadians who revel in your eloquance and scholarly English, want to know.

What's happening in Victoria? The place is cooking! Yesterday it broke a temperature record. It's friggin' hot!!! It's like Kamloops fer chrissakes.

Jeez Rex. Remember when you told us that a snow storm in Vancouver, IN VANCOUVER mind you, in winter, made you a global warming "skeptic"? I remember.

You don't get to forget. You, you slimy prick, have a pulpit and a hefty paycheck to go with it.

So, go ahead, mush-mouth; tell me what's going on. Provide the math if you like. I'm pretty sure I can do it ... even if you can't.

Buster doesn't walk . . .

JUSTICE FOR THE PEOPLE, and Const. “Buster” Babak Andalib-Goortani has a whole new universe of problems. According Tu Thanh Ha's article, “Toronto police officer found guilty of assaulting G20 protester Adam Nobody” in the Globe, 

Constable Babak Andalib-Goortani was convicted in Ontario Court of Justice Thursday in the high-profile case of protester Adam Nobody, whose arrest was captured on video while he was kicked, punched and struck in the face with a knee.

• • •

She also said it was curious that Const. Andalib-Goortani wasn't wearing his name tag or a badge number on him the day of the protests.

The last paragraph is critical, in my opinion, which is that the failure to wear identification was a violation of the Police Services Act of Ontario. Now, “Buster” wasn't the only police officer without visible identification. Maybe, just maybe these bullies didn't all decide to do this all by themselves, they were “encouraged” (nudge, nudge) by somebody? Who was it? And who gave that person the order to beat up on hundreds of Canadian citizens?

Christopher Di Armani has an interesting site with an interesting article, “What Happened to Constable Babak Andalib-Goortani?” Apparently,  “Buster” wasn't always like this. In 2008, the constable rescued a flood victim. Two years later, and we have vicious violence, with “Buster” beating up on a retreating woman, and a battalion of out-of-control stormtroopers. How did this happen? Was it roid rage? Is there a problem with the institution's “psychology”?

Now, we come to Billy the Chief. Is Billy part of the solution, or part of the problem? 

Security considerations . . .

A copper wallet insert shields your credit cards from RFID skimming.
Image: Adam Harvey

Get a Faraday wallet. Something with a lining made of copper, or steel mesh or even aluminum foil. Or add aluminum foil to the inside of the wallet you have. With one of those, “they” can “ping” you as you walk about, and the RFID’s in your credit cards and sometimes, Driver’s Licence, are shielded, and they stay silent. 

As well, street gangs and other low-lifes are getting into using ’em to identify targets to pick off, and it is alleged that they have the ability to even get through the RFID card security, get the data, and dupe an RFID card with your data.

You see, it occurs to me that the NSA could easily have all the banks' credit card data, and that means the banks' credit card RFID's chip ID’s for each account. 

So, it could be possible for “Security” to put RFID scanners all around, like TTC station exits, parking-lot doorways. Computer scan the passers-by and RFID’s belonging to “people of interest” could trip alarms. 

Similarly with your phone and its GPS, even “off” may not be off enough, and having a Faraday container will ensure that nobody can track you through your phone's GPS or by the phone's link-up with the cellular phone system. You may not be able to use your phone, but you will be a lot more “invisible” on the street, if you’re about something that you’d like to remain private.

WIRED has two reports worth checking out: Liz Stinson has an overview of security-oriented products, with an article and a Stealth Wear picture gallery, “Wanna Buy a Parka That Makes You Invisible to Drones?”, and a How-To Wiki, “Make a Faraday Cage Wallet”.

Duct Tape RULES!

Lessons for Stevie . . .

1513. FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, Niccolo Machiavelli finished The Prince, the practical guide to political survival. Because it's practical, it's cogent today: our milieu may change, but our motivational rainbow remains the same. Boston University's BU Today blog has a fine posting by John O’Rourke, “Machiavelli’s The Prince: Still Relevant after All These Years”; check it out. The article interviews CAS associate professor of history James Johnson, who states:

Whatever its intent, one thing is clear. The book follows its declared purpose fearlessly and without hesitation: to show rulers how to survive in the world as it is and not as it should be.

Pithy and concise, that's Niccolo. Shane Parrish (do check out his own blog, Farnham Street) has an article on THE WEEK, “11 surprisingly apt lessons from Machiavelli's The Prince” that lists important must-do's for Number One. Click on the link to get the details and some observations from Michael Ignatieff, too.

1. Be present

2. Be careful who you trust

3. Learn from the best

4. Be picky about who works for you

5. Read

6. Prepare for the worst

8. Don't steal

9. Appearances matter

10. Sometimes your enemies are your friends

11. Avoid flatterers

So, how well has Stevie done? Can you say Harper Fail? Upon reflection, I believe that our country has a political disease, known as harpes . . . but folks like Owen and Mound and Dammit and the rest are working on the cure.

Winter approaches . . .

THE LEFORTOVO TUNNEL, aka “The Tunnel of Death” runs under the river, and there are leaks. During the summer, you can, as you see in the opening seconds, drive a hot Bimmer at 220 kph through it with no problems. However, winter comes, and the leaking water freezes, and as they say in the collision biz, “That's the way the Mercedes bends”.

I wanna ride at the back of the bus! Wear a helmet and buckle up, that looks like fun. So does driving those jointed beasts in that tunnel — they're long enough to keep from going sideways and the following half keeps the front half from rolling over, then straightens out the whole vehicle with a tail-slap. It's like watching a Disney or Warner Bros. car cartoon.

Suckage . . .

FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY are steadily eroding, it seems, which has prompted Alex Henderson at AlterNet to post “10 Ways America Has Come to Resemble a Banana Republic”. It's a fascist's wish-list come true.

In the post-New Deal America of the 1950s and '60s, the idea of the United States becoming a banana republic would have seemed absurd to most Americans. Problems and all, the U.S. had a lot going for it: a robust middle-class, an abundance of jobs that paid a living wage, a strong manufacturing base, a heavily unionized work force, and upward mobility for both white-collar workers with college degrees and blue-collar workers who attended trade school.

• • •

In contrast, developing countries that were considered banana republics—the Dominican Republic under the brutal Rafael Trujillo regime, Nicaragua under the Somoza dynasty—lacked upward mobility for most of the population and were plagued by blatant income equality, a corrupt alliance of government and corporate interests, rampant human rights abuses, police corruption and extensive use of torture on political dissidents.

• • •

But 50 years after King’s "I Have a Dream" speech of 1963, poverty has become much more widespread in the U.S.—and the country has seriously declined not only economically, but also in terms of civil liberties and constitutional rights.

Click on the link to ponder the list and listen to Jimmy's observations.

Warp factor . . .

SET PHASERS ON STUN: Captain Kirk watches the VMA 2013 Miley Cyrus performance. My, how time brings change. Put your coffee down, then press go. Brilliant.

Learning impairment . . .

UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN AMERICA is turning into an expensive, futile endeavour for the consumer, the student. The rise of “academic capitalism” appears to be the cause, in the opinion of Thomas Frank who has a splendid, insightful essay on a site called The BAFFLER, “Academy Fight Song”. It's a multi-faceted problem facing people who have no choice.

The coming of “academic capitalism” has been anticipated and praised for years; today it is here. Colleges and universities clamor greedily these days for pharmaceutical patents and ownership chunks of high-tech startups; they boast of being “entrepreneurial”; they have rationalized and outsourced countless aspects of their operations in the search for cash; they fight their workers nearly as ferociously as a nineteenth-century railroad baron; and the richest among them have turned their endowments into in-house hedge funds.

Now, consider the seventeen-year-old customer against whom this predatory institution squares off. He comes loping to the bargaining table armed with about the same amount of guile that, a few years earlier, he brought to Santa’s lap in the happy holiday shopping center.

Um, can you say gut-and-fillet? How about “Would you like fries with that?”

Inspirational . . .

MOTIVATIONAL POSTERS from an age that seemed to be more simple than ours. SLATE has an article by Rebecca Onion, “The Colorful Posters That Motivated Jazz-Age Workers To Strive” that is a delight. Do follow the link in the article to see a lot more of 'em.

But times change, and ninety years or so later, we arrive at de-motivational posters that appeal to those who are more objective about corporate realties. Apparently, DESPAIR, INC. was the first to create these, but the funny field has lots of other creators, as well, and a Google image-search can bring a smile to a cynic.

An opportunity presents . . .

YOU CAN BECOME PART OF THE PROBLEM, from the perspective of the NSA. MOTHERBOARD runs a site that generates keywords that they suggest the NSA will find magnetic. HELLO, NSA is a kind of oblique, my-hovercraft-is-full-of-eels buzz-word generator that you can click on for a new chunk of jabberwocky.

The government is listening to your internets. Generate a sentence with some of the keywords they're looking for. Tweet or share and you could earn a new follower in Washington.

“They don't bust balls in Juarez. They bust Mexicles.” Now, that's funny, and they say the NSA gets excited about Jarez, bust and Mexicles. Mexicles. Go figure.

Caveat: Now, if you do a lot of travelling into the US, you might reconsider. Look at it this way: if the US government puts you on a list, you might be thankful you were just denied entry, rather than get into their building for a deep cavity search and an orange perp-suit fitting — and that's just for starters.

Caveat surfer . . .

SOME SITES ARE RUN BY WEASELS. We've all encountered them, sites that are designed to force you to do something, most often at your expense. THE VERGE has a fascinating outline by Harry Brignull, “Dark Patterns: inside the interfaces designed to trick you”, which explores some of these foul constructs. And it's not just sites; Apple does the same thing with iOS 6 and they're not the only outfit, that's for sure.

When Apple released iOS 6, one of the few new features not enthusiastically promoted by the company was Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) ad tracking. It assigned each device a unique identifier used to track browsing activity, information advertisers used to target ads. Even though IDFA is anonymous, it's still unsettling to people who worry about privacy.

Fortunately, Apple included a way to disable the feature. You won't find it in the privacy settings, however. Instead, you have to go through a series of obscure options in the general settings menu. Now, "General” is a crappy name for a menu item. It’s mainly a bucket of miscellaneous stuff that they didn’t know what to do with. In the "General" menu, select "About." Down at the bottom of this menu, next to the terms of service and license items, there's a menu item listed as "Advertising." 

If you haven't been here before, the only option in the advertising menu, "Limit Ad Tracking" is probably selected "Off."

But let's take a closer look at the way this is worded. It doesn’t say “Ad Tracking – Off” it says “Limit Ad Tracking – Off”. So it’s a double negative. It’s not being limited, so when this switch is off, ad tracking is actually on.

Off means on! 

This is actually a great example of what I define as a "dark pattern."

Hot Shots . . .

— Just like Peter —

iPOLITICS has a post by Michael Harris, “MacKay’s credibility gap: pot, meet kettle” that is a delight. A cheerful read, also with a possible complication for Petey, thanks to a prof at the U of Ottawa.

I began to suspect that Peter MacKay was not Reach for the Top material in 2011.

That’s when he told former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that California and British Columbia “shared” a border. He apparently forgot that Oregon and Washington stand between beautiful BC and the Golden State.

Maher musings . . .

Reality is relative . . .

The path of progress . . .

HOW DO YOU GET TO CARNEGIE HALL? Like the old joke goes, practice! Malcolm Gladwell, who brought the term “Outlier” to the public consciousness, has a fascinating article in the New Yorker, “Complexity and the Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule” that is worthy of pondering in a world that uses Attention Deficit Disorder as an excuse for intellectual laziness. Never underestimate the power of human inertia.

Forty years ago, in a paper in American Scientist, Herbert Simon and William Chase drew one of the most famous conclusions in the study of expertise:

There are no instant experts in chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters. There appears not to be on record any case (including Bobby Fischer) where a person reached grandmaster level with less than about a decade's intense preoccupation with the game. We would estimate, very roughly, that a master has spent perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 hours staring at chess positions…

In the years that followed, an entire field within psychology grew up devoted to elaborating on Simon and Chase’s observation—and researchers, time and again, reached the same conclusion: it takes a lot of practice to be good at complex tasks.

A glowing future . . .

THE GENIE IS OUT OF THE BOTTLE with DNA, and Martin Lukacs, who posts on the TRUE NORTH blog created by The Guardian, is rightly concerned, with a post, “Kickstarter must not fund biohackers' glow-in-the-dark plants” about what is called biohacking, in this case, a Kickstarter effort to get fluorescent plants created. But the US Department of Agriculture says it's OK, so fasten your seatbelts. Martin's right, but unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle, no pun intended. Even if crowd-funding sites refuse "biohacking", the cost of engaging in it as a pastime has dropped and will continue, for precursor materials and equipment and computers. The future could be very funky . . . this is just about futzing with fluorescence.

According to a post on NATURE, “Glowing plants spark debate” the biohackers are just one of a number of visible efforts:

The Glowing Plant project is not the only foray into publicly available genetically modified organisms. Transgenic zebrafish (Danio rerio) that produce a fluorescent protein have been on the market since 2003, although their sale is not permitted in the European Union, Canada, Australia or California. And BioGlow, a commercial venture in St Louis, Missouri, informed the US agriculture department last year of plans to produce light-emitting plants, but the company has made few details public.

Google is our friend, and voila! — GloFish®. Fluorescent fun for the whole family, I suppose. Like they exhort, Experience the Glo!®.

— Starfire Red® DANIOS by GloFish® —

  — GloFish® TETRAS —

Lies with a tee-emm . . .

REALLY. From Michele Bachmann's Facebook page “Christians For Michele Bachmann”, an oeuvre apparently paid for by Christians for Michele Bachmann™. Love the tee-emm. The FB slogan is “Changing lives, one BachFann™ at a time”. More tee-emm.

If you haven't seen it . . .

GO GET A COPY of “Iron Sky”. It's about a Nazi Flying Saucer invasion from the dark side of the Moon. At least, that's what the trailers show.

Set in 2018, it is actually a sizzling satire on the GOP and US presidential politics. Ya gotta see it, I don't want to tell you any more, because the MacGuffin arrives in the first 5 minutes.

Marvelous. The flick even takes a parody on the “Hitler tantrum” scene that you have probably seen parodied on YouTube, like this one, which has some delightful copywriting:

Boldly go . . .