Tag: people

Where’s F Fatigue ..?

Considering the fatigue seen everywhere re fake news, about all that is out there is called into question.
Which led me to search for a meme that just swirled into my mind: ‘Facebook Fatigue’. Boy did I think that could be quite some recent development, with the brag about ‘users’ (meant to mean ‘addicts’; the brag being towards ad salesmen as street corner suppliers, and investors as proceeds rippers ..?) being at something over 1.8B or so.
Boy was I wrong. Already in 2008 … And 2012, and 2015, and since …

When you try the same thing over and over again, and expect different results, you will!

Update later: This here; QED.

Now, where did ‘Newconomy’ go ..?

So there is hope. And there is:

[Paint your castle – is such a hass’le; Dublin C]

Panoptic business

Recently, I heard the gross error of thinking again “When people use their business IT for private purposes, they have no right to privacy” – rightly countered from the room that standing European law most clearly has the opposite: Employer has zero rights to see anything unless there’s prior evidence of some malfeasance or malfunctioning (e.g., performance problems – of the employee, not of the infra…). So, blanket or categorical surveillance (or blocking, which presupposes monitoring how the heck else would you detect the to-be-blocked URLs..!?): No sir.

What about the recent spat where a bank blocked Netflix because employees’ use of it at home, using company laptops that Citrixed back to the bank and from there onward, overloaded networks of sad (typo not said, intended to characterise the) bank? Well, a. how dumb can you be to Netflix over Citrix etc, or is one so incredibly cheap (hey, works at bank; apart from the exceptions you know, go figure) that bandwidth cost is an issue? Then maybe you’re too scroogy to be allowed to wok at a bank in the first place; monumental failure of ethics wise, b. in this case, clearly there are performance issues – when it’s noticable on the company network level, certainly it goes for a number of individuals, even if only by disturbing the performance (bandwidth availability) of others. c. there’s no absolutes in what employers cannot do.

But clearly, in just about every case considered today where categorical blocking by blacklisting would be attempted because managers sideways involved in HR stuff would understand what the URL is about, i.e., not-business-related entertainment however SFW or N-, skipping the blacklisting of the really to be blacklisted sites (torrents, malware shops and other rogue tooling),
we have again the panopticon argument of “observation changes behaviour” – and in these times of clueless managers (the less they know that of themselves, the worse cases they are!), you need in particular those ‘users’/employees that go beyond monkey typing away to be creative in their work and find new revenu / cost reduction directions. Which means that when you observe, or only log to be able to observe, you squelch productivity and profitability… Way to go!

Oh, and:

[Not the one mentioned above; HypoVereins München on a heat-hazy day]

Simply laborious

After some post recently, I was triggered to summarise – and expand …
Since there is a bit of history missing. Being the Theory of Firm. Which is, among other stuff but au fond, about the creation of the manager. As the go-between of ’employees’, as the go-between between the workforce and Capital. As the foreman, the one in charge of coordination – when the people come together because they can achieve more in cooperation than the sum of their individual efforts, through specialisation of labour, those specialised contributions need coming together in one way or another, and the provider of capital (the thing that other raw materials are paid with hence the about-only thing to receive deferred payment; don’t get me started on the so absolute quod-non of the ‘inherent right’ to rent above trivial liquidity and risk compensation…) will want to talk to just one. Originally, sometimes capital provider and leader/cooperation-initiator/manager were one, until external capital was required from parties that extorted control. Big sic there.
Well, now don’t go blaming me that it is on the capital provider side that criminally biased rules and regulations have crept in. Flash capital, extortionist locust ‘capital management’ groups, et al., have forced their mob ways into ‘normal’ conduct — almost; the Rheinland model [first, learn to pronounce that correctly, then, get to understand it fully, then, return and prostate and happily receive your life sentences for your transgressions] still holds sway, and sometimes veers back a bit. A bit.

So yes, to the latter, that is criminal, and the cause of cushions called management layers, ever more wrongly devised and developed. And yes, we would need some totalitarian revision of organisational structures to cure it all. Including, starting with, the redefinition [i.e., throwing away all that function there smoothly now, as they denounce their incapacity to really do what’s really required] of middle management and refilling the positions. Also capping CEO pay to, say, something like 10 times the average pay of the bottom 10% of the workforce. All contribute, and a CEO may need a little compensation for when [not if; should be law..!] something goes wrong, his (sic) head rolls. But not too much. When the CEO is sacrificed, something went so wrong that many will get hit; the CEO being in the best position to survive it, qua social and economic strata he should be in. Workers, much less so; much less opportunity to have built buffers, capice?

But maybe not absolute only Owners and Professionals. That will simply not work. Both sides would, even in an ideal world of perfect information everywhere, be buried under control information to the mountainous levels that they wouldn’t have time left [if you’d need more than 25 hours a day to do your work, just work that little longer!] to do their primary jobs…
But a revisit of Galbraith’ four information processing capacity increasing routes, as here, is desperately necessary… Surely, herein lies the way forward to much better organisational design, integrating the latest of possibilities qua information processing and internal and external networking, making possible the creation of true networked organisations and individuals…?

Oh, and:
[Completely undoctored, also unsmoked, pic from Toronto]

2FA is illegal!

Just when you thought the solutions to your eternal (not) pwd problems were getting mature enough to deploy – nudged to annoyance by all the vendor FUD – and you forgot the solution is totally easy and already in your infra everywhere, you will find … 2FA is declared illegal …

Oh …, it turns out to concern the party drug kind only, not 2FA but 4-FA. Like, here. Phew!
But stil, kids, don’t rely on 2FA either; help users reduce complexity not hinder ’em!

Oh, and:

[When all sober and straight would have been Boring; Lille]

Visual on socmed shallowness

When considering the senses, is it not that Visual (having come to ther play rather late in evolution or has it but that’s beside the point, is it?) has been tuned to ultrahigh-speed 2D/3D input processing ..? Like, light waves particles who are you fooling? happen to be the fastest thing around, qua practical human-scale environmental signals – so far, yeah, yeah… – and have been specialised to be used for detection of danger all around, even qua motion at really high pace (despite the 24-fps frame blinking).
Thus the question arises: What sense would you select, when focusing on shallow processing of the high-speed response type? Visual, indeed. Biologically making it less useful for deep thought and connection, etc.

Now that the world has turned so Visual (socmed with its intelligence-squashing filters, etc.; AR/VR going in the same direction of course), how could we expect anything else that the Shallows ..? Will we not destroy by negative, non-re inforcement, human intelligence and have only consumers left at the will of ANI/ASI ..?

Not that I have the antidote… Or it would be to Read, and Study (with sparse use of visual, like not needing sound bite sentences but some more structured texts), and do deep, very deep thinking without external inference.
But still… Plus:

[An ecosystem that lives off nanosecond trading – no need for human involvement so they’re cut out brutally; NY]

Per vertical lines of defense

What if … Lines of Defense aren’t three (or four or five) ‘horizontally’, but vertical, like actual protection against things getting out of bounds ..?
Wouldn’t that return the whole concept of 3LD, TLD, Three LoD or what’s your favourite abbreviation, to the already tried and tested process control models of yesteryear and when not if Yes, wouldn’t you be found out to be a sort of bumbling eager beaver when you think you’re still doing great and are Really Important and a GRC star and don’t see your kindergarten Importance is called out to hang high ..?

Because then, you’ll need no more big Risk departments with all the procedural justice, compliance on paper (and actual (operating) effectiveness nowhere!), etc., just some nimble support structure. Then, a major part of the conzulting industry would collapse and core management capabilities would have to be returned to formal and practical education and experience-training.

Oh well, one can dream, can’t one?
And:

[A lot of science and engineering there, inside and out, and how beautiful it is (for it); Valencia]

Making yourself less and less special

Over the last couple of decades, we have seen a rather disturbing development. Negative multipliers.
Where the ‘trickle down’ economies have been proven to be the lies that they were assessed to be but no-one listened because the truth already then was buried in the impostor-syndrome shouting of the powerful (not: autorities; they hadn’t any, not: leaders; they didn’t) that were on their way to prove Piketti correct (despite the nitpicky critiques, he was and is; facts overwhelm secondary/tertiary methodology issues). But this is a digression.

Where, moreover, and foremost, sites, platforms, apps, that tried to ‘cut out the middle men’ by brokering themselves … did all a disfavour.
It started with banks et al., once the epitome of the service industries. A large part of the manual processing was transferred to masses of clients. E.g., transactions entry. Left to masses, millions, of unspecialised users thus costing those users millions of man (sic) hours, still today — ad having saved banks much, much less labour costs as management of the processes, coaching the users and systems etc., grew a little and the cheapest categories of labour only saw some cuts.
So, all are worse off, some more than average, and little was saved or made any more efficient or so. All this was sold as Progress and improvement.

This falsehood has been copied into the app world. Where e.g., real estate agents/brokers, are being cut out by self-service apps. Which means less agents/brokers, that were specialised in what they did hence could do it efficiently and earn themselves part of the savings that accrued to the sellers, buyers, since they outsourced their sides in the process not for nothing. The clients, they could earn a living and make enough to provide the brokers with an income. From which the baker could be paid; the baker could pay the butcher, the butcher could pay the supermarket clerk (indirectly), etc.etc.etc. — your classical definition of multiplier effects.
Now that everywhere, not only are people bound to do all sorts of business to which they weren’t accustomed let alone trained, thus losing valuable opportunity to remain specialised i.e., make the most money of their expertise hence had the most available (hum, more or less I know) to multiply (in an economic sense, you pervert mind),
but also numerous links in the multiplier chains are cut out, turning the positive multiplier chains into negative job loss – spend cut chains. It even brings secondary/tertiary markets to life, even when it’s about almost-no-human business…

But will the 0.1% care ..? Not likely.
So we’re doomed. Or ..?

And:

[No time, money to go flaner anymore; M’drid]

D-raacdronische maatregelen

Okay, for those of you unable to understand the disastrous (understatement) word-play in the title because it’s in Dutch… It’s about a court case (verdict here) where neighbours were in this vendetta already and now one flew a camera drone over the other’s property succinctly the other shot down the drone.
Qua culpability for the damage to the drone, the Judge ruled that a. the drone pilot was trespassing so put the drone illegally where it was shot down, b. the gunman [an experienced shot, apparently] was not to damage other peoples’ property, both are guitly and should share the damage (and share the legal expense).

Side note: the verdict also states through witnesses, that the damage incurred was to one rotor only (after which the drone made a controlled landing; not such a good shot after all) and it had been flown into a tree before the incident (not such a good pilot in the first place), so the damage amount as reported by an independent expert were doubtful, even more so since the independent expert nowhere indicated in the report how the assessed drone was identified or identifyable, as the drone in question or otherwise.
Stupid amateurs.

Moreover, the Judge stated that a breach of privacy weighed no more of less that a breach of property rights. Now there‘s the Error [should be all-caps] in the assessment of current-day societal ethics which in this case, where the Judge appears to demonstrate a sensibility of the case i.e., the vendetta between the neighbours having dropped to a state where mediation is an option no more, would have called for understanding of the derogation of property rights by the privacy concerns as is prevalent (yes; fact) in society in which the verdict should fit. Apparently, neighbour considered the privacy breach already of more value that the risk to his property otherwise would have abstained from the risk of property damage. And the property rights should be compared with the privacy rights one has when e.g., throwing away printed materials; when discarded in the dumpster, one has surrendered one’s right to privacy-through-property re the dumped information. When voluntarily move into or over another one’s property, certainly without consent and against that other one’s want, does one not surrender one’s [protection of!] property rights to the other one? Of course one can ask one’s property back but what if the other one refuses or uses it as security re exchange for something else?

Legal scholars don’t seem to Always have a “hackers’ mentality” when it comes to finding all the side roads … Most unfortunately!
And:

[From the department of infinitely high control; Ronchamps]

Profiling the politics of the GDPR

When looking up the definition of ‘politics’, no-one can escape the notion that it regards something-choice or in any form the application of power to make decisions applying to all members of a group.
When looking up what leeways for profiling there is in the GDPR, even when so completely fellow-traveller-like as e.g., here [apart from the many, many more errors of logical reasoning, of thought, and of morality and ethics in that piece], the special category of data immediately springs to mind … that is about political opinion – representing the individuals’ autonomy in matters of choice. As any behaviour in public of said individuals is a matter of display of preference qua conduct in social affairs. As hence anything that has to do with profiling [even if only for the mundane making decisions of what ads to show to certain groups or not; abstracting even from the right (…) to have a human in the loop, seriously], has to do with political preferences.

Where is the field of study, by the way [not so much; rather a both parallel and intertwined track], of metadata and inference being special2 categories of data, not requiring consent but should’ve been outlawed per se ..?

Plus:

[Artful bars, but suppressing; Brittas Museum London]

When ABC– will use AI, success

So it turns out that the company formerly known as Google, may very well enter the job market. Qua brokerage.
In which it may succeed (it already caused to-be competitors’ stocks to nosedive, a little at least), when deploying smart AI solutions.

Let’s hope, then, that Alphabet Jobs [as it might be called in a stab’let at $AAPL ..?] will use the AI to bypass the most ridiculous aspects, that are many, of the current process. E.g., obliterating the tick box atrocity – as certainly, its own search capability will burn the fuses when trying to find anyone on this planet that fits the requirements for just any job description as billed by ‘recruiters’. Dropping the similar requirements also of ‘having ten years of experience with this totally unknown system that only three current sysadmins can handle and had been implemented only two years ago’, or the infamous but near-certain to surface ‘millennial with thirty years of industry experience, will work for barely entry-level / intern salary’. Don’t say these requirements aren’t realistic like being real over and over again. They are! They’re there, everywhere!

And what does it tell you that ‘we’ may need AI to overcome this stupidity ..?
That Disruption with a capital is desperately called for.

We can hope, can’t we?

And:

[Tomb of the Unknown Candidate. No don’t wry-smile, pay some respect…!; Paris]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord