New research reveals age of universe estimated to be 26.7 billion years old

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests that the age of universe may be nearly twice as old

Source: New research reveals age of universe estimated to be 26.7 billion years old

Here we go again: “We were wrong. We were absolutely certain we were right before. We could prove it. With numbers, and everything! But we were wrong. But, this time, we are sure we’re right. We’re positive. Have have numbers and everything!”

Just like the age of the sun.

You can say “it’s just good science” to come to new conclusions based on new findings, and you’d be right. But this isn’t good science. First of all, they were one hundred percent wrong. Like, off by the whole amount. That’s really wrong. Second of all, at some point of this level of wrongness, you lose the right to be so damnably confident in your proclamations. “Scientists” who publish things like this, and especially “journalists” who write about them, need to start admitting that these facts are current best guesses.

iOS 17 Includes ‘Grid Forecast’ Feature to Let You Know When ‘Cleaner’ Energy is Available

Source: iOS 17 Includes ‘Grid Forecast’ Feature to Let You Know When ‘Cleaner’ Energy is Available

This makes about as much sense as Microsoft automatically setting all the power options in Windows to be the most conservative and least performant, including — in an absolutely baffling move — to automatically turn off Bluetooth after a minute. Say what!? Yeah, my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard would suddenly stop working after about a minute. I searched for and found updated drivers. I upgraded Windows. I reset things. I rebooted. And rebooted.

There was a lot of hair pulled before I figured out the power saving setting was the problem, because there isn’t any scenario in the entire world where I would think this would even have been an option that someone was told to take the time to code, make a UI for, and merge into Windows. The only possible reason would be to save literally one penny of electricity, over the course of a year, at the expense of making Bluetooth… COMPLETELY USELESS. Well done, guys.

Now I see the insanity is spreading. It’s not enough that we have to go over every device with a fine-toothed comb for security, opting out of spying, and blocking ads. Now we have to go through the options to make sure that they’re not “helpfully” being invisibly and silently hobbled against their intended, normal usage by companies who want to report to their investors that they’ve saved a collective X number of kilowatt hours by their pernicious power settings.

Pluralistic: “Efficiency” left the Big Three vulnerable to smart UAW tactics (21 Sept 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

In this project, they are greatly aided by Big Car’s own relentless pursuit of profit. The automakers – like every monopolized, financialized sector – have stripped all the buffers and slack out of their operations. Inventory on hand is kept to a bare minimum. Inputs are sourced from the cheapest bidder, and they’re brought to the factory by the lowest-cost option. Resiliency – spare parts, backup machinery – is forever at war with profits, and profits have won and won and won, leaving auto production in a brittle, and easily shattered state.

Source: Pluralistic: “Efficiency” left the Big Three vulnerable to smart UAW tactics (21 Sept 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

This has been my complaint about all the mergers that happen up and down and side to side in various industries: the activity is driven by the desire and intent to extract all the profit from every level subsumed. To oversimplify, the effort is one to streamline all consumer activity, from raw material to your door. This is the result. No extra capacity. No ability to handle a shock to the system.

Car bosses have become lazily dependent on overtime. At GM’s “highly profitable” SUV factory in Arlington, TX, normal production runs a six-days, 24 hours per day. Workers typically work five eight-hour days and nine hours on Saturdays. That’s been the status quo for 11 years…

A hundred years ago, in a magical company called Arvin, they implemented the Toyota Production System, and called it the Arvin Total Quality Production System. It was the only corporate training that I’ve ever had that was actually worth anything. Part of the work was simulating a production line with poker chips and dice rolls, and it brilliantly demonstrated the improvements by going to small lot sizes and just-in-time delivery.

If we ran behind due to bad dice rolls, we would just run a little overtime, and make it up. Better to pay a little OT occasionally than spend the capital to invest in a new machine, right? Even back then, as naive as I was, what immediately struck me was how easy it was for the company to just rely on overtime to make production instead of investing in new equipment to reduce manpower needs to prevent a regularly-occurring crunch, and it was obvious that this would always be the case.

Sure enough, all these years later, every time I hear a story like this, I see the company’s refusal to invest capital to do the work, and just “throw bodies” at the problem. Having taken an accounting class, and understanding the future value of money, I understand there’s a pretty simple calculation you can make in individual cases to determine if you should buy something to help, or just plan on using human fodder for the job. Then, as soon as the profit line dips a little, you cut a bunch of people lose to appease Wall Street. It’s inhuman, and we need the pendulum to swing, quickly and far, to the other side, in favor of people again.

Men now avoid women at work – another sign we’re being punished for #MeToo | Life and style | The Guardian

A new study has found US men appear to be following Mike Pence’s lead. Maybe they’re angry that #MeToo ever happened.

Source: Men now avoid women at work – another sign we’re being punished for #MeToo | Life and style | The Guardian

What a bizarre byline, and it’s telling just how vast the disparity in viewpoints is on this.

Years ago, I worked with several women in one small IT department.

  • One I didn’t work with. We became pretty good friends.
  • One was my boss. We didn’t get along with very well, though I respected her. We were both pretty hard-headed.
  • One was my co-sysadmin. She was just great, though she was really reserved, and we didn’t talk much.
  • And one was an absolute “section 8.”

What I mean is that this girl — she was very young — was looking for trouble. We ran into each other before she was assigned to my group. Despite her utter inexperience, she was put on a politically-important team; one that I wish I had been invited to be a part of. She was completely out of her depth with some minor tasks she had been given, and came to me for help. Obviously, I was already predisposed to not be forthcoming.

So it was that she came into my office, put both hands on my desk, leaned in, stuck her (perfect) chest out at me — and she was apparently cold, if you take my meaning — batted her eyelashes, and asked me for help I didn’t think she should need, if she were actually worthy of the responsibility given to her. I didn’t take the bait. I told her what she needed to know, and sent her on her way to finish figuring it out.

I moved groups. Rumors kept following her around. Every once in awhile, some dude would be implicated in doing something inappropriate towards her, and all the rumors just tracked according to what I had seen for myself. She was strutting around, and then complaining about the attention she was begging for. She was transferred into my group, and I just plain avoided her.

One day, out of nowhere, my boss walked into my office, sat down, and said — not asked — said, “You don’t like working with women, do you?” I was pretty sure that the “section 8” had been fulminating rumors about me to my boss, leveraging my already-strained relationship to reduce my influence in the group. I took a beat, realizing all of this, and then said that the situation was not equitable — even back in 2000 — and I was being cautious because of it. To explain, I told her the following story.

I had worked in our prototype and testing facility. In fact, I used to be one of the people on night shift that ran the tests, so I was pretty familiar with the processes.

In the engineering department, there was a husband and wife who were both engineers, and ran tests in the facility. They were yuppies: young, attractive, and well-groomed. Great people. I liked them immensely, and I hated that they moved away.

One day, the wife went to one of the test stand operators, and asked for an urgent test be run right away. The operator told her there were other tests in front of hers. The rumor was that she cupped her breasts, and said something like, “Oh, come on! You’ll do it for me, because I have these.” Of course, he ran her test.

Now, I knew her, and I knew the test stand operator. It was all in innocent fun, and it was a great thing about the old Arvin that this kind of thing could be done, and it not be a big deal. But this was post-Meritor takeover, and times were changing.

After relating the story, I asked my boss: What would have happened if the test stand operator had been a woman, and the husband went to her, cupped his privates, and suggested that she do his test next because he had that? Madness, right? Pandemonium. Firing on the spot. She agreed. I pointed out that we had started living in a very duplicitous society, and I was limiting my involvement with certain people because I was afraid of being implicated for something I didn’t intend.

She reluctantly conceded my point.

The rift of this double standard has only widened and deepened in the 25 years since, and I wouldn’t blame any man for protecting themselves from a potentially vindictive woman who does not like him. Mike Pence has taken a lot of flack for requiring his wife to attend any meeting between him and another woman. He is pilloried for his old-fashioned behavior, but even his detractors would have to admit in private that it’s the only way to make sure that he doesn’t get #metoo’d too, at some point.

All Your Base Are Belong to Us

If you have a corporate- or school-issued computer, you have no control over it. Unless you wipe it and reinstall the OS, and even then, of course, they could leave things in the BIOS, and probably do. Then again, you barely “own” devices you buy, but that’s another rant. Here’s the task list for my corporate laptop.

Sigh

So let’s see…

  • Seven different reports about what I’m uploading to OneDrive.
  • Five jobs to keep Chrome and Edge up to date. Firefox and IE are also installed.
  • A job to make sure you keep Zoom around.
  • A [REDACTED] hourly job to make sure you haven’t elevated your privileges.
  • A job to make sure you haven’t (apparently) installed the npcap library. I mean, God forbid you should try to use this at a corporate site, which has probably used switching since… 1996 or so.
  • Three other [REDACTED] jobs to make sure you don’t do other things “they” don’t want you to do.
  • At least 5 jobs to make sure you don’t change… anything about the way they’ve installed Office, apparently.

Thirty one jobs. Only one of these is mine, to do the one thing I need this (secondary) computer to do.

This machine bypasses my carefully-curated and ad-blocked local DNS. I don’t know what it uses for DNS, but I see that it doesn’t operate over port 53, and I don’t care to know any more.

It also won’t print to a printer in your house. I think I tried to print to a printer at the office once, and give up after one try, because I knew it was going to be futile. Basically, no one prints anything. They must save a TON on printer costs as a company. Most printouts are a waste of resources anyway, so this might actually be genious.

The Government Controls the Horizontal and the Vertical

Feel Free to Panic Now

Welcome to today’s proof that the government “controls the horizontal and the vertical,” as the old TV show, the Outer Limits, used to say. I have all of this crap turned off. They pushed it through to everyone in the country anyway.

Take this as a reminder that every place you go, every text you send, every phone call you make, every email you send or receive, every web site you visit, every social media post, every thing you purchase by credit card… it’s all tracked and recorded. All someone in the bowels of the FBI or CIA has to do is put your name into a web app, and they can see it all, no warrant required. Edward Snowden told us about these systems a decade ago, and nothing has changed, except that he now has to spend the rest of his life in hiding.

Microincentives and Enshittification – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

That increased profitability can only come from enshittification. Every product manager on Google Search spends their workdays figuring out how to remove a Jenga block.

Source: Microincentives and Enshittification – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Internally, every powerful person at Google is committed to ensuring that their rival-peers don’t stake out fresh territory as their own. The one thing every top exec can agree on is that the one guy who’s trying to expand the company into an adjacent line of business must not succeed.

What’s worse, these princelings compete with one another. Their individual progression through the upper echelons of Google’s aristocracy depends as much on others failing as it does on their success. The org chart only has so many VP, SVP and EVP boxes on it, and each layer is much smaller than the previous one. If you’re a VP, every one of your colleagues who makes it to SVP takes a spot that you can no longer get.

Those spots are wildly lucrative. Each tier of the hierarchy is worth an order of magnitude more than the tier beneath it. The stakes are so high that they are barely comprehensible.

That means that every one of these Jenga-block-pulling execs is playing blind: they don’t — and can’t — coordinate on the ways they’re planning to lower quality in order to improve profits.

I don’t know if I’ve read a clearer description of the things I’ve seen in 30 years of (mostly) Fortune 250 corporations. Over the course of my career, about a half dozen of my successful software projects — with many happy users — have been sabotaged because they made someone else look bad, or just had the unacceptable side-effect of making me look like I knew what I was doing. Seriously. I could write a book.

Hey, I got paid, and have had a comfy ride along the way. What could I expect as a developer toiling away in the bowels of some faceless blue chip corporation? The only thing the kind of companies I have worked for could offer would be a role with more responsibility but no more pay. Uh… pass.

What really frustrates me in all of this is the tireless effort and work to make sure that software never actually improves workflows or processes for the company, so that eternal middle managers can preserve their tiny little fiefdoms. Sure, we’ll make some software to do something, but by the time the managers “manage,” the people who don’t do the job write the specs, the outsourced programmers who don’t understand anything about the process write the application, the years go by, and the poor schmucks who have to use the thing sign off on the acceptance testing, just to move on, everyone is left with a piece of crap they can’t stand to use, and they wonder why anyone bothered. They’d have been better served just continuing to use horrific, shared Excel spreadsheets.

Google spends a whole-ass Twitter, every single year, just to make sure you never accidentally try another search engine.

I never want to hear another word about what else Elon Musk could have done to supposedly improve the world with the money he spent buying Twitter.

Likewise Google/Apple’s mobile duopoly is more cozy than competitive. Google pays Apple $15–20 billion, every single year, to be the default search in Safari and iOS. If Google and Apple were competing over mobile, you’d expect that one of them would drop the sky-high 30 percent rake they charge on in-app payments, but that would mess up their mutual good thing. Instead, these “competitors” charge exactly the same price for a service with minimal operating costs.

Since the 80’s, American corporations have learned to toe the precise line that will allow them to point fingers at their “competitors” in court to wriggle out of the en vogue legal definition of monopoly, but it’s all such a naked joke. The app stores are the same way. It is a certainty that very-high level execs at Apple and Google have concluded to keep their fees the same, so that the market for app development doesn’t actually work, and is anything but “free.”

Xbox Series X all-digital refresh coming in 2024, plus new controller – Polygon

According to a huge document leak, Xbox will overhaul its hardware range in 2024 with upgraded (but disc-free) Series X, Series S, and controller

Source: Xbox Series X all-digital refresh coming in 2024, plus new controller – Polygon

This constant harping on electronics power consumption is really annoying. These things cost $20-$30 of electricity for an entire year. To put that in perspective, that’s about 2 lunches at a fast food joint, for an entire year. Saving a buck or two here makes no meaningful sense, especially if the unit ever degrades performance to achieve it. Don’t brag to me that the processor does 45 Tflops (or whatever), and then throttle it to say that the new consoles are “green.” Given that Microsoft TURNS BLUETOOTH OFF AFTER A MINUTE on Windows 11 by default, you’ll excuse me if I don’t trust them not to do that.

The bottom is line is that they’re just refreshing the SKU to generate some buzz and try to juice sales, because they’re running third in a three-man race.

Elder Scrolls Online has Me by the Short Hairs

On Sunday, I had a bad migraine, so I literally sat in my recliner and played ESO for, like, 12 hours. During this time, I…

  • Did writs on 7 toons.
  • Ran all the surveys and maps I had. (About 15.)
  • Completed all the master writs I had. (About 12.)
  • Dug up every antiquity I had a lead for. (About 30.)
  • Moved into the house you get from the Northern Elsewyr missions, and did a little decorating.
  • Bought all the storage boxes you can get, and all the crafting stations. (Using up almost all my writ vouchers.)
  • Finished learning all but the 4 most expensive recipes.
  • Bought enough motifs to complete several more lines. (I still need 13 more for Master Crafter.)
  • Created 3 more toons. (Was making an even 10, one for each race, then realized that you can actually have 20 on one account now, if you pay for the slots.)
  • Did HOURS of inventory management. (Can’t quite bring myself to de-con old meta gear I still have.)
  • Ran my Arcanist through a random dungeon and all 3 pledges.

Yeah, it was a long day, but the weird part was that I could have played more. I had a great time. I finally have a couple of toons that can do vet trial-level damage numbers, and it feels like I’m finally freed to enjoy everything the game has to offer. And, sure, it’s only the new mythics like the Oakensoul Ring and Velothi’s Amulet that have allowed me to do break into this tier, but I don’t really care. It seems pretty obvious that this is the reason those items were added into the game: to allow people like me — on the DPS bubble — to access end-game content. I don’t really want to run vet trials, as it usually takes hours of concentration and coordination, but it’s nice to know I can. One of these days, I’ll sign up and give it a try in my main guild.

I still don’t really want anything to do with PVP, though I have a bunch of siege-related items clogging up my bank. It intrigues me to find a good PVP guild, and just run with a huge pack to 1) use that stuff up, 2) earn some Alliance Points, and 3) finally get all the skill points related to PVP, and finish the Assault and Support skill lines.

Investors account for 30 per cent of home buying in Canada, data show – The Globe and Mail

Investors have become more prevalent in Canada’s housing market, accounting for 30 per cent of all residential real estate purchases in the first part of this year, according to new data.

Source: Investors account for 30 per cent of home buying in Canada, data show – The Globe and Mail

First they came for corporations, and I said nothing, because I didn’t own a corporation.

Then they came for retail chains, and I said nothing, because I didn’t own a retail chain.

Then they came for franchises, and I said nothing, because I was not a franchisee.

Then they came for housing, and now I can’t afford to buy a house.

Private equity and investment banks have been buying up literally everything over the past 40 years, driving up prices, keeping all the profits for the so-called “1%”, pushing workers into government assistance, and forcing our civilization back into a modern form of feudalism. Will there ever come a day when we can get our governments to break them up, and recreate the actual “free” markets that capitalism was supposed to based on?