America will always plant crops and need chemicals to service those crops. And it will always need payment, delivery and data services. But will it always need Facebook and Twitter? Cisco runs a large proportion of the Internet; Facebook hosts your grandma’s pictures. You do the math.
There won’t be any suicides in Silicon Valley – the most dangerous thing to happen in northern California occurred last month when an angel investor’s Birkenstocks got caught in the BART elevator – but the whole edifice on which the delicate San Francisco ecosystem is based is about to come crashing down all over again.
If so, I won’t shed a tear, after all the damage those people have done to the state of California and the country.
…while I am not upset at the results (except insofar as it proves a large number of my field is running the Marxist malware to such an extent that it will vote a slate to avoid an imaginary slate) I am upset at the display of infantility or senility or perhaps roboticity in my field yesterday (Though who would program robots that way?) No one watching that live stream — and there was a lot of it captured and it will be replayed — can imagine that those who proclaim themselves the “intellectuals” of our field have an IQ above room temperature. And certainly no one can imagine they have an emotional maturity above that of a toddler displaying to one and all the magnificence of the turd just deposited in the middle of the floor.
We saw those no-awards coming from a mile away. By voting no-award, you proved the Sad Puppies’s point. And most of you are too damn stupid to know it.
You’d rather no one win, than see someone you don’t agree with walk across that stage.
We only wanted a fair ballot; real diversity among the Hugos, books by authors who don’t all think the same way. Books that tell stories rather than try to force-feed us messages. But you couldn’t have that.
It was you, not us, who brought the Hugo Awards down last night.
And you cheered while you did it.
A lot of this is why I haven’t read much science fiction in the past couple decades.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Uh oh. Hitler found out what happened [language warning, but only in subtitles]
People have asked me if I’m disappointed in the results. Yes. But maybe not in the way you might expect. I’ll talk about the slap in the face to specific nominees in a minute, but I can’t say I’m surprised by what happened, when it was just an extreme example of what I predicted would happen three years ago when I started all this.
I said the Hugos no longer represented all of Fandom, instead they only represents tiny, insular, politically motivated cliques taking turns giving their friends awards. If you wanted to be considered, you needed to belong to, or suck up to those voting cliques. I was called a liar.
I said that most of the voters cared far more about the author’s identity and politics than they did the quality of the work, and in fact, the quality of the work would be completely ignored if the creator had the wrong politics. I was called a liar.
I said that if somebody with the wrong politics got a nomination, they would be actively campaigned against, slandered, and attacked, not for the quality of their work, but because of politics. I was called a liar.
That’s how the Sad Puppies campaign started. You can see the results. They freaked out and did what I said they would do. This year others took over, in the hopes of getting worthy, quality works nominated who would normally be ignored. It got worse. They freaked out so much that even I was surprised.
Each year it got a little bigger, and the resulting backlash got a little louder and nastier, culminating in this year’s continual international media slander campaign. Most of the media latched onto a narrative about the campaign being sexist white males trying to keep women and minorities out of publishing. That narrative is so ridiculous that a few minutes of cursory research shows that if that was our secret goal, then we must be really bad at it, considering not just who we nominated, but who our organizers and supporters are, but hey… Like I said, it is all about politics, and if it isn’t, they’re going to make it that way. You repeat a lie often enough, and people will believe it.
It isn’t about truth. It is about turf.
#ProTip to journos trying to cover the Hugo story: We know from experience that the Puppy kickers will lie to you without compunction.
While the author comes across as supporting the consensus, the paper presents some insightful perspective on the ‘consensus enforcement’ by the establishment and why a substantial portion of the public is not buying the expert consensus on climate change. It boils down to a lack of trust, and concerns about deceit, conspiracy and groupthink.
Where do these concerns come from? Climategate and explicit advocacy by scientists are two obvious sources. Disagreement portrayed in the media and distrust of the government’s politicization of the issue are others.
Yes, the lack of trust and concerns are well justified.
A nice round up of what’s happening from Sarah Cruddas. I hadn’t realized that Space Angels had a branch in Europe.
Meanwhile, XCOR has moved half its staff to Midland, and one of their engineers now estimates 6-9 months to first flight. They must still be having wing-delivery issues.
That data should have never been on that server. The fact that it was is solid, indisputable evidence of the commission of multiple crimes. The only question is who all committed them.
I’m not sure what to make of this article on their switch to small-sat launches. I don’t think they want to give the impression that they’re backing off on the tourism goal. I will say I found this comment of George’s a little ironic:
This service compares to Pegasus, Virgin Galactic’s rival in the satellite launch market. “Nasa is the only real customer for Pegasus,” claims Whitesides. “It typically buys a Pegasus once every two years at a price of around $50m for a payload in the order of magnitude of 250kg. We offer the same payload at a fifth of the cost.”
Other start-ups entering the industry make similar claims. New Zealand-based Rocket Lab’s flagship engine, Electron, is designed to send payloads of 100kg into space for just $4.9m, while Texan outfit Firefly Space Systems claims that it will offer “the lowest launch cost in its class”.
Whitesides pooh-poohs the idea that these new outfits will undercut his rates: “It’s easy to say that you’ll charge a price for a product before a product is built. We have assembled a group of people that have built rockets in the recent past and what we will offer will be unprecedented in terms of cost and access.”
Emphasis added.
And this is a weird statement:
Unlike SpaceShipTwo, which has been designed in partnership with Scaled Composites, LauncherOne belongs exclusively to Virgin Galactic and could prove an intellectual property goldmine.
I don’t think IP is an issue here. Either they’ll have a launcher that the market finds useful at the price, or they won’t.
This seems like a good reason not to enable Cortana:
Section 7b – or “Updates to the Services or Software, and Changes to These Terms” – of Microsoft’s Services EULA stipulates that it “may automatically check your version of the software and download software update or configuration changes, including those that prevent you from accessing the Services, playing counterfeit games, or using unauthorised hardware peripheral devices.”