Paranoid MRA mistakes a masters thesis for an FBI report and concludes the FBI is investigating the Men’s Rights subreddit

Alan, Hotep is old news here. You’re in the UK? Look up Jessica X on youtube. She’s a British woman who allies with the Manosphere and cozied up to the now deceased Kevin Samuels (they call him Godfather of the Black Manosphere or Saint Kevin). We Black women here in the States do not appreciate her opining about issues that are specific to us.

@ Love Is All You Need

Look up Jessica X on youtube

Gosh. I won’t be hypocritical enough to criticise people for long videos, but wow, some of those are five hours!

I did dive into some of them though. With the caveat of very small sample size I think I see what you’re getting at. It’s not for me to comment of course on the topics at hand; they’re so out of my lane. But I can get what you say about Ms X commenting on US issues. Whether there’s a universal Black experience is for cleverer, and more appropriate, people than I to opine on. I guess stuff like racism generally will be an unfortunately shared experience. But that’s a big generality. I can see how a Black person from the UK may be no more qualified to speak on the experiences of Black people in the US than a white Brit assuming things about white Americans. Is that what you were getting at? I apologise if I misunderstood you.

I have to say though, all the North London accents in those videos is making me very nostalgic. I’ll have to make a trip back up to the Smoke.

I’ve got to wonder why the chuds David profiles so often hang out on Reddit. Sure, it has a lax moderation policy, but there’ve gotta be plenty of other forum-type sites with that trait and much better maintenance and UI design. I sometimes have occasion to browse to Reddit when researching something and following links, and I’ve noticed frequent technical problems: a big orange “oops” graphic (with a link to a status-report page that invariably shows all-green); various 500-series errors; comment threads existing, then going to a page with nothing but a big spinning red circle thingy, then existing again; and so on. If occasional visits run into these many and varied glitches this frequently, the site can’t have much more than 70 or 80% uptime, which is fucking terrible. Contrast with Facebook (well over 99% uptime) and Google (100%).

Then there’s the UI. If you come from Google, as is common, comments are mostly hidden behind a blue “view comments” link that does nothing when clicked. At the top of the page is a smaller, unobtrusive “6 comments” (number varies, depending on how many the particular thread actually has) link that … appears to reload the exact same page, except with almost all of the comments visible. Why not just make that one the landing page? <smh> And then any reply nested more than 1 deep is hidden behind a “continue this thread ->” link. This, of course, loads a page with the rest of the subthread loads one more comment (or, occasionally, zero!), with another entire page load to read each additional reply-to-a-reply-to-a-reply. Oh, by the way, did I mention their server is rather slow? Their server is rather slow. It also breaks the “back” button: backing your way up to the main thread page should go extremely quickly due to the browser cache, but at Reddit it doesn’t, as the browser seems to think every page is a fresh, previously unvisited one for some reason. And sometimes some comments are hidden behind a “4 more replies” sort of link that, unlike the “continue this thread->” links, does not work at all. There’s also a “sort by” that provides the perceived affordance of a drop-down menu but … does nothing.

A subreddit’s home page offers three sort choices, “hot”, “new”, and “top”. No explanation is given here for the distinction between “hot” and “top”, but at least the sort choice links here actually work. Each will display six items, with “new” displaying the six most recent. There is no evident way to browse beyond these maximum-of-18 forum threads, save if you find a link to an older one posted somewhere or via google. Then there’s the weird “bylines”, if they can be called that. “Posted by 3 hours ago”, etc., as if the timestamp is somehow itself the author. Maybe 1 in 10 posts or comments has something that looks like a username in the heading. And, of course, “new” is not the default sort, “hot” is. “New” would have made too much sense, I guess.

Finally, the page decorations are littered with little “F2 16”, “F2 B6”, “F2 29”, etc. boxes indicating missing unicode glyphs, even when viewed on an up to date Firefox on an up to date W10 21H2 box that should be pretty darn current when it comes to things like emoji support.

In short, Reddit is barely usable and appears to spend a substantial proportion of each day unusable, while giving a distinct air of being either only half-built or else neglected and falling apart. Given how many things are missing or act like “levers not hooked up to any machinery” and the overall maintenance woes, absent any other knowledge about it, I’d peg it as a lurching relic of a site that’s well past its peak, disinvested in by its owners, and circling the drain.

Seems a strange place to become hugely popular with a crowd that is so enamored of “free speech”, where your post will only be visible 70% of the time, with a 90% chance of not being attributed to you, and then only until it sinks below the top six in the “new”, “hot”, and “top” rankings of the subreddit where it was posted. Oh, and it might take 18 clicks in a row on slow-loading “continue this thread->” links to actually reach it even before then … in a world where more and more users would be clicking those links on metered mobile.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the logo often for some reason loads only partially and comes up as “^_^ eddit”. This hearkens back to the days when a slowly rotting business venture was marked by a rusty sign where one of the letters would no longer light up at night, or would flicker erratically. Like the year or so when one of the two malls in Podunk, Ont. was anchored by a grocery at one end and an “ellers” at the other. The “ellers” has been gone for 10 years now, killed apparently by the Wal-Mart supercenter that had opened at the other end of town, and the mall itself went rapidly downhill over the subsequent decade, with over 50% vacancies developing and then the roof leaking and half caving in until it became a disaster area with only the grocer open and the other businesses hastily relocated to nearby premises. Let’s just hope that when “eddit” meets the same fate as “ellers”, the mall of male supremacism as swiftly follows the same trajectory …

Meanwhile, I have an ongoing litany of little tech problems (some of which, perhaps, expose class issues, and particularly the awfulness of monopolies):

• During heating season, the temperature in my living room tends to oscillate quite a lot, even quite close to where the thermostat is. How can this be mitigated without a lot of manual fiddling with the knob every couple of hours?

• I continue to have issues getting my phone to download Chrome updates when there is one available. It often gets stuck “pending”, as if there’s something ahead of it in line, even when there isn’t; and everything else will then get stuck behind it, so nothing will download. Force quitting Play Store, clearing said app’s cache, and rebooting the device will typically unclog the works enough to get non-Chrome updates to download again, but Chrome will still get stuck. Usually this “resolves” when, the next day, the Chrome update no longer shows up in the list, but it seems impossible to manually apply Chrome updates at a time of one’s own choosing? This has been an ongoing/recurring bug for at least several whole years now, with no sign of Google ever lifting a finger to fix it.

• Meanwhile, can anyone explain why the Windoze 10 photo viewer will take forever to start up sometimes, and then have a process size of over 80 MB, just to display a 402×751 jpeg file that ought to be about 1.2 MB uncompressed (assuming a 4 byte per pixel in-memory representation, which seems reasonable)? The photo viewer binary is only 739 KB, so the combined size of the binary image plus the loaded data and whatever ancillary stuff it loads or generates to present its UI should not exceed about 2 MB. OK, OK, maybe it’s a packed executable, in which case a reasonable compression ratio might be 2:1, and then it should not exceed 3 MB. What the hell could it possibly be using the other 77 for?

• And why does it take 50,000 clicks instead of just one to transfer the keyboard input focus to the “Search” text input field in the upper right corner of Explorer windows on Windoze 10? This didn’t happen on W7, or WVista, or WXP, or … All of them, and every other text input field in every application on every OS, gains keyboard focus from 1 click. 1.

• Not a Windoze 10 specific complaint: why do Explorer searches get slower and slower as they progress? I’d expect search progress to be linear, but in every version of Windoze since at least XP, a big enough search slows to an eventual crawl, in a manner that looks suspiciously like an exponential decay. The worst case performance of common sort etc. algorithms tends to be quadratic. In my own programming and algorithms classes, I was told that if something is slowing down exponentially as a function of job size, then you’re doing something wrong, unless it’s one of a known class of poorly scaling tasks (factoring large numbers, discrete logarithms, and the traveling salesman problem being the usual examples given — the first two tend to be the basis for all modern encryption systems, precisely because it’s extremely slow to do a blind search for the decryption key). Also, changing the sort key (e.g. from Name to Date) tends to be much faster than performing the initial search, so poor performance of their sort algorithm as the list of found items grows larger isn’t the explanation. A search of a large set of files that produces few, or no, matches to sort is also no faster than a search of the same files that produces ten thousand hits, and both exhibit the exponential slowdown in particular. This suggests that it is the search itself, not the sorting of the results display, that is the source of the slowdown … but the search itself should be linear. (FWIW, observation of the results coming in shows that it seems to be doing a breadth-first traversal, not depth-first, for some reason, of the filesystem tree, but I still wouldn’t expect time complexity worse than n log n from that, and absolutely, definitely, positively not e^n!)

Notice a theme among those last few items? Microsoft, an actually-convicted monopolist, in association with extreme bloat and inefficiency in its various software offerings. Where by “extreme” I mean “a random fresh CS graduate not only could easily do better, but would almost certainly have to make a deliberate effort at self-sabotage to fail to do better”. Some might think it a conspiracy between Microsoft and, say, Intel to drive sales of hardware, but these days the hardware capabilities in memory capacity and single-threaded processing speed are not grossly larger than they were 10 years ago: typically 8 or 16 GB and around 3 GHz. Software bloat doesn’t drive hardware upgrades now like it could back in the 90s. I attribute the bloat instead to some combination of “design by committee” and “feature creep”. (Why on Earth is there a “PhoneExperienceHost” default-on background service on a new W10 desktop box that doesn’t have an acoustic modem, and therefore can’t interface to POTS at all?)

And then there’s the bizarre reality of the people who’s jobs it is to fix things sitting on their hands not fixing them, despite having a responsibility to do so, which they voluntarily accepted when they took the job.

Our first example comes from the same fast food joint here that’s had other bizarre problems of late, also involving some subset of the staff not performing their work responsibilities normally. A couple of weeks ago, their self-order kiosks inside the store conked out — all four of them, all at once. When, after a week had gone by without anyone having apparently done anything about the problem, I asked one of them what was up, and all they said was that they were “deactivated”. Yes, I can see that, but why isn’t anyone fixing them? They wouldn’t answer that question, just repeating that the darn things were out of order (which I already knew since their own display screens said that too).

I don’t even use the things very often, but it bothers me to see broken shit just sitting around going unrepaired week after week. (See also: Reddit’s semi-functional interface; month after month of Windoze Update patches not fixing Explorer’s exponential bogo-sort, or the photo viewer’s bloat, or assorted memory leaks…) Especially in a physical, B&M facility: if they can’t be arsed to get those kiosks up and running again, what else are they neglecting? Have they changed the batteries in their smoke detectors recently? Checked the pressure in the fire extinguisher in the kitchen? Given the building a structural inspection?
If they’re either too lazy or too cash-strapped to get one of their employees’ 14-year-old kids to come in and fix a few broken computers for lunch money or a couple of cinema tix, one doesn’t imagine they are likely to be paying a structural engineer however-many-hundred dollars an hour to verify that the roof isn’t about to fall in on some customer’s head …

(As someone who was that 14-year-old kid once, I can tell at a glance that it’s almost certainly a network cable or router problem — maybe as simple as someone tripped and
unplugged it accidentally. The kiosks are in a cluster around a pillar near the main entrance, away from the rest of the electronics. If I’d built this I’d have run a single power cable and a single CAT5 cable under the floor to the foot of the pillar, and put a 4-way Ethernet switch inside the pillar with the individual kiosk units connecting to it and to the mains power. Since the kiosks all failed at the same time, and still have power, and the only two single points of failure in that setup are the power cable and the network cable, the network cable is almost certainly the culprit. In which case the best case scenario has the fix be literally a 10-second job: find where the other end is supposed to go into the router in the office at the back, and plug it back in. Now if the cable itself has gone bad it is trickier to fix without ripping up the floorboards, but likely doable if you connect it between the failed cable and the switch in the pillar, and then use the failed cable to pull the other end of the replacement through its little tunnel to the router, then remove the middleman. Then you only have to open up the pillar, which likely has a removable panel somewhere for that purpose. Now it’s a 10 minute job instead of a 10 second job. The other likely explanation than a physical problem with the cable is a configuration error, maybe with the DHCP on that router, which doesn’t require any fiddling with cables to fix at all, just a few minutes and some know-how.)

Our second example is a mobile game with a large, deep-pocketed organization (Zynga, natch) behind it, whose online sync/backup functionality has not been functioning for
about the same time (going on 3 weeks now). It took them one week just to get around to acknowledging that it’s broken. As of now they still haven’t actually fixed it.

I can’t imagine how this didn’t get detected by automated testing the moment they committed whichever change broke things, or how they didn’t respond immediately by rolling back the change with the unwanted side effect. If it’s a hardware problem it should not have taken an organization with Zynga’s resources long to dig a spare out of their parts warehouse, puff away the dust, and swap it in, or even to buy a new one and get it delivered.

It’s like they simply can’t be arsed to get off their lazy duffs and fix whatever it was that they broke … just like with those food-ordering kiosks. Only this combination of a screwup and subsequent laziness has been costing many of the long-time players of that game, including Zynga’s prized “whales”, months and even years of game progress. I can’t imagine the mindset of a corporate executive or a tech lackey not caring under those circumstances. Why isn’t the former breathing down the latter’s neck, and the latter dropping absolutely
every other thing until the online save issue is fixed? Every day it remains broken, more whales lose their entire game, quit, and take their money elsewhere, and every day
it remains broken nobody can move to another device, since in their infinite wisdom Google have made it ever more difficult, and now apparently outright impossible, to back up your own data on your own Android device or transfer it all lock, stock, and barrel to another without “rooting” it first, so you’re at the mercy of whatever backup facilities each app developer (separately!) has instituted … if any.

Mobile in general seems to be all about stealing away end-user control. The only difference between the major brands is who gets that control. With iFoos and iOS, that would be Apple; with Androids that would be the app developers and telcos. Android was originally conceived to be as open to end users as PCs, as I recall — what happened to that?

And what is with the people who are, apparently, refusing point-blank to fix, when they break, the things that they had previously accepted the responsibility to maintain? If they can’t, or won’t, why don’t they at least do the honorable thing and quit so that someone can take their place who will actually perform the duties that were being shirked? And why isn’t the management making that decision for them, eventually? The last time I checked, even in places where employers can’t just willy-nilly fire people at will, “not doing a key aspect of your job” is justification for “for-cause” termination.

The only rational explanation is that management is complicit, which means that it’s defacto official policy (even though morally wrong) to leave some broken things broken … but they are too cowardly to state up-front that that is what they’re doing. And in doing so they’re throwing away money and customer goodwill. Nope, still doesn’t make sense.

Nor does it make sense as a labor action. So far as I’m aware neither workforce is unionized, and I don’t see picket lines or any official manifesto of “we won’t do X, Y, or Z parts of our jobs until we get better pay” or something. What kind of stupid-ass strike has the workers still do part of their jobs and be completely silent about why they’re shirking the rest?!

And it also doesn’t make sense as some sort of resource triaging. Most of these things are owned by billionaires, including the fast food chain, Microsoft, Reddit, and Zynga, and all of those billionaires are reporting massive profits this year. There’s no way in hell they have insufficient resources to fix these miscellaneous problems. And Zynga’s problem must be causing them to hemmorhage paying customers. (I know this by direct observation. I’ve seen their forum posts saying how they lost everything, after sinking hundreds or in one case astonishingly ten thousand dollars into that game, when their phone died and they couldn’t migrate their game to their new one, and go on to say how they are quitting … and many of them posted these diatribes, ironically, on Reddit.) If Zynga did have to triage its resources I’d expect them to neglect all the other things to fix their online save woes, not the other way around. Instead they seem to be doing nothing but fiddling with A/B testing different in-game currency pricing regimes while Rome burns. At this rate, by the time they’ve settled on a new pricing regime there won’t be any whales left for them to gouge with it.

So, these things make no sense as management being greedy or as any kind of business strategy; make no sense as any kind of labor action against management; make no sense as the result of a particular person simply giving up; and make no sense as resource triaging during a belt-tightening of any sort. They seem to be just plain technical problems, compounded by just plain human stupidity unadulterated by anything so sophisticated as an actual ulterior motive on anyone’s part.

It’s idiocracy, pure and simple … and giant, successful megacorps are exposed here as being internally run as idiocracies and yet they are somehow able to remain giant and successful. So much for “market discipline”! The only malice here, then, is in the politicians who intentionally and knowingly support monopoly capital over other ways of organizing production. Below that level it’s just idiots all the way down.

@Love is All We Need,

Candace Owens recently posted a video where she is crying over the lost tradition of child labor. What happened to 12 year old paper boys and 14 year olds helping out in the family business?

I take it Owens has no idea how the newspaper delivery business has changed over the last few decades. At least in my area (rural Indiana) newspapers are not delivered at 5-7am like the movies and TV shows/commercials show. They are delivered at around 1-5am, hours that are quite dangerous for anyone to be out on a bicycle, let alone a young kid. Nowadays carriers drive to the newspaper office to pick up their stack of papers and stuffing said papers into bags and tossing them out the window as they’re driving.

(As near as I can tell from the few times I’ve observed the carriers as they’re working, they seem to have some sort of hook that holds the bags open to stuff the papers in before tossing them onto the lawns. At least those who didn’t have a passenger with them to do all that already.)

And like I said earlier, it’s been like that in most of the rural areas for at least a decade or so. I suspect the people who are complaining the loudest about the absence of underage newspaper carriers are the ones who 1. have never lived in the rural/small town areas and thus don’t know why biking around there in the wee hours of the morning is a bad idea, and 2. get their papers from either a newsstand or a store newspaper rack. And should really look into the history of newspaper delivery in those areas and why they are the way they are before whining about those missing kids’ jobs. (One hint – very few, if any, newspapers in those areas are evening papers anymore. They’re all morning papers now, meaning that adults are the only ones who can get up that early and not miss school doing that job.)

@ Love is All We Need

Thank you once again. I really appreciate you sharing your time and knowledge like this; especially as it’s a triggering subject for you. So I won’t pry any further. You’ve given me enough pointers now anyway.

I ended up on a bit of a trawl through some UK related stuff. So if you are ever up for chatting about this further, and I totally understand if you aren’t, remind me to tell you about the 70s UK sit-com Mixed Blessings. You might want a stiff drink handy first though.

But already your input gave me a bit more context for articles like this. So I am very grateful for your time here.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/14/kanye-west-keeps-moving-further-and-further-to-the-right-why

@ Love Is All You Need

That was another interesting deep dive. Cheers once again.

The blog author really got me thinking about all sorts of stuff. The politics is beyond me; and not really my place to venture an opinion. But I have a bit of an interest in art and protest; so I’d love an opportunity to chat to the author of that post about their points, and a similar discussion from history.

I don’t know what Democrats can do to win more people over.

Champion the needs of the working class, while remaining anti-bigotry.

@Love is All We Need
In order for Democrats to get more votes than they have, they need to pass legislation at a Federal level which tangibly helps a large number of people, like Medicare for All, increasing wages, UBI. They need to stop doing things like voting down a minimum wage increase or canceling the expanded Child Tax Credit. They most especially need to get rid of the filibuster.

If Democrats want to win more elections (which isn’t necessarily the same thing as the above), they need to pass legislation instituting national vote by mail, getting rid of gerrymandering, restoring the vote to people with felony convictions, and automatic voter registration.

If Democrats do neither of these things, the available avenues for change are pretty much down to general strike or revolution.

@Love is All We Need
Polls indicate that a majority of Americans support Medicare for all, wage increases are very popular, everyone needs housing. UBI doesn’t poll as well, and Yang’s plan for it was pretty crap, but were it to be implemented, it would rapidly become very popular. Not unlike the CTC; lots of people loved that, including a significant number of people who would call themselves conservatives. Killing that may well have killed Democratic electoral prospects this election. It’s a lot easier to reject something when you know it’s not going to happen anyway, and given a choice between getting nothing and spite or getting nothing and mealy-mouthed platitudes, a distressing number of people will go for spite, because at least there’s some emotional gratification to be found in blaming “those people” for one’s troubles, whereas a party that claims to want to help but then just doesn’t will have difficulty getting any emotional investment from anyone, because there’s nothing there to be invested in

@RedSilk: That (the paper delivery thing) has been true in my suburban close to a big city neighborhood for… hm… at least since the mid-90s when my roommate delivered papers way before dawn to make a couple bucks when she was between jobs. And it was even before dawn in the middle of the summer. Who’s going to send a kid out on their bicycle at that hour anywhere in the US? The delivery adults use cars. And, like you, I can’t think of any papers that publish evening editions any more — even the ones still in print.

But Candace has underlings to bring her the papers. Or she reads them online. Or her underlings read them online and tells her what she wants to hear.

Tulsi is aiming to be one of “the good ones”, like Candace. The MAGAts will claim her as their “Hindu friend”. She still ain’t gonna get anywhere near the nomination, though, but I bet she’s hoping she can parlay that into speeches and talk shows with a conservative audience. Grifting off gullible white people is so much easier than getting a real job.