Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

"Not the Bee"  published a piece on 8 December about Amazon's cloud computing division having an outage earlier this week, leaving thousands of people with faulty fridges, front doors and thermostats etc.  Amazon's  Internet of Things "smart homes" stuff, designed to make the little things easier and life more convenient, went down. This made some small smart things quite big, dumb and less convenient. Being locked out of your home, shivering with cold at home or having spoilt food in the fridge, can cause you problems.  And that's just the easy to identify domestic stuff. Whole energy grids, traffic light networks, defence systems or hospitals could easily be included in such a list in only a slightly different scenario. There's a signal here, amidst the noise, if you're looking for it.

We do seem to be living in "interesting times"  (or is this just an expression of my personal "contemporary historical significance bias"?). Our civilization seems to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown in the early 21st century, what with 9/11, the IPCC, GHG emissions, LGBT IQ , BLM, CRT, Brexit,  Trump, COVID19, Biden, Xi, Putin, J6, and the Insidious Acronym Plague (IAP).  Amongst other crazy ideas, personal identity has now become a big deal in our public domain. The former aspirational liberal ideal of racial, gender, ethic, disability and religious blindness as the way to live and interact in a fair and proper non-prejudiced way, has now been inverted by the prevalence of the confounding and contradictory idea that unless you demonstrably display preference and sympathy for certain specific, but seemingly ever changing, categories of people and opinions, you are evil, wrong and undeserving of an audience.  For many centuries there has been a confusing Engli

The Samizdata quote of the day on 1 December 2021 from Perry de Havillland is from a website I have not encountered before: Eugyppius . Here's the quote:      People tend to believe things that further their personal interests, and universities are no exception. Wokification succeeded largely because it gave a lot of different people a lot of different things that they wanted. It gave the increasingly powerful university administration a reason to hire more administrators to manage diversity and ensure its forward march. Self-propagation is the highest goal of administrators everywhere. Wokeness also became a useful tool in ongoing turf wars between administrators and faculty. Diversity is a simple metric via which the administration can interfere with faculty hiring and academic operations; new diversity hires know who is buttering their bread and remain loyal to the administrators whose policies brought them in. For the increasingly mediocre and incapable faculty who now teach a