"Failure" of capitalism

It seems to be popular these days to mention the "failure of capitalism", when referring to the global financial crisis of 2008. Well, I'd rather live in a capitalist system than any other system I've heard of so far. Here's what I think of the "failure" (downward spikes) of capitalism:

Budget Insurance Brokers

"Imagine paying R341 less for insurance every month. With Budget Insurance Brokers, you could! Reply YES to quote. STOP to opt out. Std SMS rates apply.FSP# 15260"

Sender: +27877555211

Hey you retards, I never opted in, so I won't spend even R1 on sending you the "STOP" you tell me to send to opt "out". (More like confirming that the number on their database is live.) How about this, Budget Insurance Brokers: you give me R1000 and I'll delete this post. Email STOP to opt out. Emails charged at R1000 per deletion request.

If this is "sexism" then we have come a long way

Carla Schroder accuses Mark Shuttleworth of making exclusionary and sexist comments at some LinuxCon a few years back.

I spent 5 seconds looking for a "comment on this article" link or button, didn't find it, so decided to write my response here. Disclaimer: I'm feeling too lazy to do a properly researched post, so I didn't look at the video, nor did I search the Internet for any more info about this conference.

90% of Carla's quotes relate to the use of the word "guys" where, I guess, she would have preferred a more PC gender-neutral pronoun. To me, "guys" is plenty gender-neutral enough. The fact that Mark adds an "or girl" in one instance means only that in that moment, the idea that his speech circuits rendered as "guy" was a more gender-specific one, to represent male developers, specifically. I can't read Mark's mind, but I find it astonishing to read exclusionism into his regular use of "guys". I bet 99.9999% of his audience was male. There's no fly in this soup.

As for "grandma" and "mom": it's a common Internet idiom. It is so hackneyed that in this context, "grandma" doesn't even mean grandma anymore. Perhaps there is sexism behind, or even in, the origin of the idiom. Why have and are women so consistently been rendered technologically incompetent - that is the sexism here, not the act of remarking on the existence of the pattern. The fact that your mom is 400 times less likely to be able to repair a computer than your dad is a result of sexism, but reflections of that fact in the popular lexicon are merely a sort of Huffman encoding of reality in our language. (I clearly don't believe that gendered words promote sexism as directly as Carla seems to believe.)

If you're a guy, and you're involved with software development in some way, have you ever tried "explaining to a girl what you actually do"? If you're anything like me, you meet girls socially rather than professionally (because, this much is true, there are a million men in programming for every woman), so the ones you meet are unlikely to know much about software development (strangely, so often they seem to be in advertising, or marketing, or publishing, and we don't hear about "sexism" in the sex ratios among school teachers), and you'll have a gnostic understanding of what Mark meant here.

If we are to take this (over)use of "guys" as a sign of what "sexism" means in the modern world, then I think we have come a long, long way. It must mean we have fried the bigger fish of lingering glass ceilings, of female genital mutilation in some countries, and of the near certainty of mothers winning custody disputes over their children against the fathers. Yes, that too is sexism.

Finally: Carla, humans are sexual beings. We make jokes based on sexual innuendo, we make jokes based on the mating dance, and the pursuit of sex colours much of what we do, however indirectly. Deal with it. Now move on, please. I do not wish to live in your sterile, PC world.

Another "racist email" farce?

Is this another one of those cynical distractions from some real issue? I refer to the "racist email" sent by some Otto Botha in the Aveng Group.

My bet is that this was just a stupid lapse of judgement, for which Mr Botha will pay dearly. I don't necessarily believe that this email betrays any particularly virulent strain of racism. Instead I believe that it's just another case of some random Afrikaner half hankering for some past that never really was, who is socially surrounded by people just like him, so he doesn't get the corrective feedback that would have prevented this turn of events. Just look at that list of executive managers: 14 of those 15 are lily-white - which one of them is likely to reply to some random politically-incorrect joke he trots out on Monday morning, pointing out that it's really uncool? Where on the list of priorities do you think "Be my colleagues' PC nanny" appears?

Should his head roll? I'm not sure about that. I am sure that there should be some form of punishment; after all, he is a leader in a company - a symbol, if you like, of what that company values, and symbols have meaning. But should he be forced out? That's less clear to me. I think Dr Hadebe is right to confront Mr Botha, and Aveng, but I think he overanalyzes the content of the email. IMHO it's just a stupid email sent in a stupid moment by a man who should know better.

I would like to see a more nuanced discourse on racism in the South African political economy. I'd like to see a distinction between this sort of overt offensiveness (that I hesitate to call "racism" - when my white friends tell these sort of "jokes" they seem to me more like toilet humour than a genuine expression of their beliefs), and the covert racism that you can really only notice if you're at the receiving end, or if you reduce it all to numbers, or pay closer attention to your surroundings than what narrow self-interest demands. Like when all the white staff at one of our offices has keys to the office, but "there are no spare keys left" when a non-white colleague joins. Or when my first instinct is to believe a white guy who asks me for gas money, but to expect the lone black executive among the 15 to be an "affirmative action appointment". Having a mini media storm every few years about some stupid emailed joke distracts us from the real issue.

There must be justice!

It seems I am not the only one who is getting a lot more attention from DirectAxis than I would like. There must be consequences. Not all of these ideas will stop the fake cheques, but just thinking about them should give some satisfaction.

• Google-bomb them. If anyone searches for DirectAxis, the search results should point everywhere other than their cutesy website.
• Find out the CEO's cellphone number (for extra credit, his wife's also), and use that when signing in at building security desks. (I suspect that's one way the "databases" get your info.) Use it also when anyone "needs" your phone number. This is probably not legal, so don't do it.
• Weld their gates shut. Don't do this either!
• If they include business reply envelopes (I haven't even opened their crap, I should really check this out), cram it full of "valuable marketing material" and "business correspondence" you've received from other "respected vendors" (read: other junk mail), and pop it in the mail.
• Call them, and take as much of the call centre staff's time as you possibly can. If economic sadism is your thing, you'll enjoy it, meaning it would be a good use of your time, and the call will cost them (staff costs, opportunity costs, not so much call costs - you bear those) more than it costs you. Use it as practice for sarging women (as most of the pit crew seem to be). My record is 25 minutes on an incoming junk call.

I really should add a link to my FV / PV calculators to make this post more relevant to DirectAxis's business.

2050

In 2050 I'll be an old man. These are my expectations:

• The Chinese will have sent humans to the moon.
• A manned mission to Mars will be Real Soon Now.
• We'll have strong evidence for life on some number of extrasolar planets, but I doubt we could conclusively tell if that life was "intelligent" or not.
• We'll have some blotchy extrasolar planet surface images, once we build a Luciola-class hypertelescope.
• The kernel (name unknown) will be many gigabytes of C source, taking a whole minute to compile.
• C will still be a "dying language". Java who? Oh that's those old guys who work for insurance companies?
• Rich people will be able to live essentially forever, through pharmaceutical / surgical interventions.
• Most cancers will be manageable. You'll expect to die from something other than cancer even when diagnosed with it. Getting a cancer diagnosis will be a bit like getting an HIV diagnosis today if you're in the first world: totally bummed, but you know life will go on for a while, as long as you keep taking your pills.
• We'll have finally outgrown the x86 instruction set, except in some niche legacy-dependent contexts. A bit like the PDP-11's status now. I doubt that that means we'll be using amd64 instead, because I think we'll increasingly outgrow the need for instruction-level backwards compatibility. Most of your desktop apps will be implemented in an interpreted language, or perhaps in a JVM-style monitor.
• There will be one or two asteroids we know we'll have to deflect at some point in the next 1000 years.
• All of our deserts, and then some, will be covered in solar panels. Whether PV or solar thermal plant, I don't know - probably some equilibrium based on weather conditions.
• Commercial fusion power will become available Real Soon Now.
• We will, or will have, spent another order of magnitude of money on a moar biggerer particle accelerator.
• Space cadets will still be dreaming about space elevators, while decrying the inefficiencies of chemical rockets, which somehow still just get the job done, and mostly reliably so.
• Africa will be suffering a dozen or two civil wars, and most of its countries will be bad places to live: you'll be poor, exposed to crime, and basically every one of David Bullard's stereotypes will be proving themselves true.
• We'll still be driving cars, albeit fewer of us, and we'll still be moaning about the price of fuel, yet we'll still drive 500m to the shop.

The best things in life are free

On Tuesday I hiked up Lion's Head after work with hiking friend Bronwen. I think we left just a little bit too late to catch the sunset from the top. But in a month or two, leaving at 17:30 should leave a reasonably fit person enough time to get to the top in time.

It was full moon, so although we missed watching the sun fizzle into the ocean, we did catch the moonrise on the opposite end of the Earth.

Shadow of Lion's Head

Last rays of sunset illuminate Table Mountain and the Twelve Apostles

The moon rises from behind the clouds and mountains

Dusk cityscape

Camps Bay at dusk

Clifton at dusk

Cape Town night view

Sea Point by night

Profile of Devil's Peak set against city lights

Southern cross near the top of the image