Cobb

Destiny Two: First Speculation, Halo ODST Revisited

So here's what I know about Destiny 2. The City is destroyed. The Tower is destroyed. Guardians are outcast to the wilderness and flying around the system to find enough weapons and stuff to save Earth. But the really interesting idea I heard was that there will be something like co-op missions where you find a member of the Vanguard and fight along side them. That gets a wow. Now I'm also speculating that there will be rescue missions. It doesn't take much poking around this reveal trailer to see that there is a guardian shepherding civilians along to safety. That's fabulous. And I'll also throw it out there that there may be some flying involved and attacking Cabal ships from your own ship. That would be super magnificent. But what Destiny needs more than anything is a competent way to tell stories. The only thing they've done very well in that entire area of creativity centers around the wit and attitude of Cayde-6 and the interchanges between him and the other Vanguard members in the Taken King. 

So if there is a surefire way to continue this style along with the idea of rescuing civilians in general and Vanguard members in particular (as well as the rest of the denizens of the Tower) then Bungie already has a model: Halo ODST.

The first thing you notice about ODST is that it's quiet. It's night. You're lost. You're sneaking around trying to find your way around New Mombasa and there are patrols of Covies around every corner. But you've got silenced weapons, enhanced vision and your Halo skills. Fair fight. The music is thematically very different. It's occasionally noir, jazzy, solemn. It feels like the music of the dark and lonely night. For moments, ODST approaches Splinter Cell. In fact, that's the first way to think about it as an FPS, because you are not the Master Chief, the monk's chant is not in the background, you are on Earth and there are no Elites to be found alive. What the heck is going on here? You are on the front lines.The hardest thing, and the greatest thing you have to get used to in ODST is that you start to realize how deadly the Covenant are. Sure, when Brutes were introduced in 3, it took a minute to figure them out, but after a while you mowed them down. You were the Chief. Now you're not and it takes two, maybe three melees to take out a grunt. And if you think you can just melee a brute because his helmet is off, think again. Your combat style has to change. Heroics will get you killed. You are not a Spartan. This is not Sparta!

Wow that was eight years ago.  But now I invite you to think about the arc of the story of ODST. You start off with basically the weakest of weapons, almost like Splinter Cell: Double Agent, where you begin in jail with none of your fancy weapons. You're lost in a city and you have to combine up with the members of your team. You don't get to use rocket launchers until you find the teammate who used rockets. You look for clues as to where this missing teammate might be and search your way through foreign territory.

Now imagine that in Destiny. Just as you started the original campaign with one weapon, you'll have to gain rank before you can even get your super. And then it was a while before you could be strong enough to compete in the Crucible. So all that is possible again. Your guardian is completely rebooted, stripped of all goodies. The Tower is gone. You have no ship. It would be a while before you can get off the planet and up to the Reef. Man that sounds interesting. 

The Unsustainability of Dainty Sensibilities & Strong Arms

"We're just bugs on God's windshield." -- Richard Kadrey

I have this notion that I call the Logarithmic Shadow. It's one of those aspects of human nature I should probably consult Adam Smith on. In my version, this shadow is what keeps the common man alive. Why? Because we have a low profile, and since we do, the Powers that Be aren't particularly out to get us. It's why billionaires don't buy on eBay. It's why Michael Jordan doesn't play basketball against high schoolers. It's why you'll never get to speak to, or be margin called by a group vice president at Citibank. We're not worth the effort. We provide no challenge. 

Lots of people think I'm something of a spokesmouth for the American Right. I'm not, but I also am not into the hopey changey. But what my evolving sense of things is telling me is that the overwhelming majority of people, including intelligent people, are not really qualified to say what's best for the commons. I suspect that the law, bearing a high resemblance to the world of code, is far too contradictory and convoluted to be understood by any but the finest minds. Rather like the best algorithms for TLS, people only believe they understand how it works, but not having authored at that level, have no idea how it might be subverted. 

So I'm puzzling in public with my buddy, whose codename is Ladera. He understands appellate law. And within 30 minutes of spirited grumbling I hear something quite nuanced that makes a significant dent in my argument, and I realize that I am completely out of metaphors. Like many other of my arguments, I am getting very close to actually needing an understanding of the law and its evolution. My gripe is and has been that Americans have voted themselves into comforts and luxurious standards of living that are as unsustainable as an underwater blowtorch. My overextended metaphor is that we have voted in such a way that all cars must be expensive because they must all have airbags. And I'm trying to get Americans, who consider themselves to be anything but rich despite the fact that most of them will own several automobiles in their lives, to see how risk averse that pile of laws has made us. We have grown out of the virtue of physical courage because our entire paved, plastic, medicated and insulated environment shields us from the rigors of... childbirth, street fights... you know all of that stuff that we find so fascinating in the 'culture' of the Third World. American women and men do not have large families. That is the vector of the West. We don't face the life and death decisions of having six children who might have to face life and death decision. We have engineered an economy and lifestyle that we know is unsustainable, and yet...

It seems to me that the whole birdsnest is held together with bubblegum and spit, but also the titanium chickenwire of let's say 2,000 attorneys, judges, legislators and law professors who genuinely want us to be pampered pets.They will fight to make the law that says it is insufficiently civil for people to die of cancer before their 80th birthday. They will therefore unleash the beasts of healthcare and healthcare insurance to make it so we have every legal avenue to live forever. In other words, they take the daintiest of sensibilities and work a bulwark of rights from that. It's rather like Little Red Riding Hood's mother has actually contracted 50 woodsmen to follow her journey to grandmother's house. 

The implication is, that there is no actual logarithmic shadow. Sure our instincts remain. We naturally protect children and innocents. But we're actually not playing fair with the bad guys. We are reserving the nuclear option. 

This puts us in bed, all of us common Joes, with the most dangerous abstracted corporate powers that ever were. So when United Airlines tells us to fly their friendly skies, we had better believe their marketing. When we look at the smile of that Gerber baby, we had better trust the Nestle Corporation because all of those 2,000 legal eagles and their regulatory capture of the baby food industry are our only salvation. You know because none of us know how to actually grow food we trust to feed infants, and American breasts are not for suckling. 

We have a culture that absolutely demands that of us. We have internalized it. The likes of Trump scare us to death because he doesn't talk like the Nestle corporation. He tells us that the skies may not be friendly. This is not about Trump of course, it's about physical courage and danger. You know I'm talking to you because of your squeamish reaction to the video here. 

I have a difficulty in maintaining optimism for the First World. I'm not certain that I approve of the Shadow. Are all men actually created equal? There are a lot of scary implications. I need to see decentralized power, and I'm not certain we can get there. Worrisome. Very Worrisome. 

The Palm Springs Phenomenon

The malls are the soon to be ghost towns
So long, farewell, good-bye. --Modest Mouse

There are two ideas that come to mind when I think of Palm Springs. It's nice to be my age, because I have two ideas and three stories. One of the stories involves dirtbikes and golf bunkers, but that's another story. This is about one of the two ideas, that I am naming the Palm Springs Phenomenon. It is prompted by a headline I read off Facebook. The whole story is here. 

The song 'Teeth Like God's Shoeshine' asks the question "Do you have a lot of what you need to survive?" We do, for the time being. We also have a lot of stuff we don't need. It's rather odd to think that there are people on the planet who will never have a garage, much less enough junk to have a garage sale. But when you're rich in America, you have an estate sale when you get low on cash and you don't want to sell the vacation house. Or maybe the vacation house itself is part of the estate sale. When I had money to burn and a house less than chock full of requisites, the Spousal Unit and I would go hunting for garage sales and estate sales. I'm not ashamed to say that it took over 30 years of working in my career before I had enough credit to afford the furniture that all the marketing in the world made me lust after. Now I have the big leather sofa and love seat. Thanks Synchrony Bank! 

But isn't this a nice virtuous circle? As soon as I could afford that cowboy comfort, I put the old sofa out on the curb and it was gone in a couple days. And so it makes me think of Palm Springs with its strip of art shops. Now I've met and talked to a few antiquarians and art & crafts dealers and I know that they do what I did, which is troll estate sales for great buys. So it suddenly occurred to me that the Palm Springs strip was very much like other such quaint little expensive business districts. They are right on a main drag which is the first major boulevard that runs parallel to some hills. Hills are where the rich people live, and it's convenient for the ladies of leisure to drive down the hill to the shopping place, indulge their peculiar senses of taste and buy expensive crap to tote back up the hill and show off in their living rooms, parlors and salons. That is until such time as they, die, go broke, or run out of space and donate such queer objets d'art to some charity. Or have an estate sale. Then it's right back into the hands of the not so rich lady who runs the antique shop.

Now surely there are some other virtuous loops of free markets I have left unmentioned. We don't want to give them short shrift, but this particular idea gains significantly in resonance to the affairs of the common man when whole retail chains find themselves on the auction block. On my last trip to Chicago, I learned that Mr. Aaron Montgomery Ward was quite a heroic figure. At least the plaque in that park I read gave me the decided impression. I would like to have as nice an epitaph as he. But what if the luxury of shopping disappears altogether for the common man? What if some large portion of us who think we are economically significant are just working bullshit jobs on Palm Canyon Drive? What if some large fraction of America are just wannabe antiquarians thinking we add value? Well, that would be frightening. 

I suppose we all get displaced sooner or later. Enjoy the bright lights while they're still shining. 

 

DevOps The Hard Way

I'm going to be doing more management and 'glue' business the next year or so. Part of this business is selling and personifying the value of DevOps. Like Cloud, this is something that is insufficiently understood at a deep(er) and nuanced level. So, as is customary, I'm going to tell a story. 

The story, like most of mine, comes from an experience that burned. Something that left scars and had me wondering how people cold get into this mess. And so like the man says, share your scars. The situation was that I was on the very cutting edge of what I could do with Essbase + Essbase Studio. The requirement for drill through was fairly obvious. We all knew the limits of how much data we can squirrel into a multidimensional cube. So I used Essbase Studio to map back to the Oracle DB and bring back some records. Now it turns out that my customers wanted something on the order of 10,000 records in this detail. Well that doesn't seem like much. You could grab 10,000 records across a dozen columns, cut and paste them from one Excel spreadsheet to another right? That should only take a few seconds. Not the drill-through. That data had to come over the network. Well you could copy a spreadsheet with a dozen MB of data from a network drive to your desktop, right? That should only take a minute. Not the drill-through. We had to fulfill a query request from a database. 

My queries were taking 7 minutes and 30 seconds and then dying. 

I had to find out why. Thus began my painful birth of being DevOps. The first thing I had to learn was the difference between a view and a materialized view. Well that wasn't so difficult to learn. But I had always assumed that my DBA was materializing data for me. Well he didn't have enough disk space to do that for ad-hoc queries. So that meant I had to learn the procedure for requesting new disk space from the DBAs. How much did I need? I don't know. A terabyte? Impossible! Impossible? I can go to Best Buy and get a terabyte. Yeah but one live terabyte means four other terabytes according to our backup and DR, and we're at the limit of the current server which means we'd have to get a SAN device and... well how about an NFS drive? Nope. Can't have an NFS drive that would slow down everything I need local storage. Well, we'll get back to you. But how can you be sure that the database is the bottleneck? I don't know.

I had to find out where. What is timing out? Was it the Excel add-in? No. Was it the java middleware? Maybe. Who knows how to read the profile of the java middleware? Well there's no documentation for that, you'll have to call the engineers at Oracle. OK. Open up a service request and get an appointment. Who has access to the middle tier? Get access to the middle tier so you can log on. Oh by the way, the one support engineer is in Mumbai. That means you stay late, past 7pm Pacific time to get your answers, when he's available. OK change the profile, add in this line for the timeout. That didn't work? Oh you have to get the latest patch. Will it work with the version of Essbase Studio we're running here? Oh snap, we're going to have to burn a new version for you, but you're going to have to upgrade your java app server. OK now the explicit timeout is 15 minutes.

Still times out.

I had to find out how. What is the mechanism that creates the time out. Get this new tool called Fiddler, it will help you debug the HTML stream. Debugging HTML streams? Well, maybe it's the size of the download that's stopping things. OK did that. It's not the size. Well the corporate standard timeout is 10 minutes.. What corporate standard? The corporate standard on the firewalls between the users and the data center. Well can we get an exception? Maybe.

So it basically took six weeks for me to deal with the various network engineers, database admins, support staff and their management to prod them all to buy what I was trying to sell, which was the viability of this entire project. My only leverage was that I was consistently riding herd on the problem and I was a very expensive third party contractor. So the project was late and the entire overhead of the difficulty in justifying business as usual in the various departments was the only thing that motivated people to go to extraordinary lengths to solve the problem. Everybody wanted the problem to be somebody else's problem. And until we found out exactly what the problem was, everyone was pointing fingers until the last possible minute. It turned out to be a default in one of the load balancers that everyone assumed was set to 10 minutes, but communicated 7.5 as an override to the other. Those machines required firmware upgrades as well. 

I have been accustomed, throughout my entire career in BI to be responsible for the entire data supply chain. That I could do. But middle-tier service configurations, firewall settings and DR disk availability was all above my pay grade. I was not paid to know and I was too expensive to be paid to learn. In that way, I'm accustomed to being like the wiley developer whose time is too valuable to waste learning these operational details. At the same time, I was equally demanding of all those dependencies. Give me more memory on the app server! Open up the damned ports I want! Get more disk, you lummox! Of course let me not forget the memory constraints on the end user machines. 

All of this was a terrestrial implementation and it had other setbacks too, but it was a fascinating six month engagement. I of course learned a lot about these other systems with respect to how they affected my entire piece of the data warehousing applications. I sensed that I had the capacity to understand, but I'd never remember unless I had some responsibility and permission to make changes. That would be impossible without the cloud. But even when I had the cloud, it was more than just having control of the associated systems but really understanding how they worked. That's a story for another day. What was clear was that it was very difficult to manage all of the departmental areas, and get the priority within those departments (at their various locations) to solve a showstopper problem in this one application. It was 2011 and we were testing the very limits of the IT capabilities of a global corporation. DevOps might be a cool thing to talk about with web startups, IE a DevOps engineer would be cool for your website, but I saw the fundamental management problem that had everything to do with the way multimillion dollar Enterprise applications were built and maintained, and essentially why they were one-shot deals. 

 

The American Bog Standard Welfare State

I perceive that the US has a welfare state mentality without actually having a welfare state. So whenever parts of the non-existing welfare state is threatened, the usual suspects rebel as if they have actually lost something.   So I predict that the top income tax, within 20 years, will top out around 40-45% and we will become an appropriately two-tiered society. Free market mechanisms will collapse for the working class. There will emerge a minimally effective bog standard welfare state, and it will suck balls. Like whatever byzantine health insurance schemes survive Obama-Trumpcare, public education in Texas and civil infrastructure in Michigan.

When I say two-tiered society, I actually mean three, but we already understand that the wealthy exist in a world unto themselves, and nobody ever expects that to change absent violent revolution. So this is actually about what compromises can beset the affluent such that they are blunted into submissive acceptance of those curtailments of liberty necessary for the maintenance of an actual welfare state.  

This requires three tricks to be pulled off.  

The first trick is for all of the affluent to get enough money to say to hell with those lower than them, kind of the way NPR listeners never drink Budweiser, so long as there is enough craft beer around. Once this is established through a understood set of cultural signifiers, they can stare each other down from a distance. The difficulty with this trick is that affluent Americans also feel entitled to possess that which they can conceive. The affluent believe in upward mobility because of the readily observable examples of the rich in our heretofore open society. The solution is to eliminate all prosumer quality goods and services which might convince the affluent that they are as welcome as the rich and wealthy. IE no (affordable) Corvette will exist to actually compete with (unaffordable) Porsches. No affordable iPhones will exist to compete with unaffordable 4K movie cameras. And of course, Shock Top will have to taste good and Bud like piss.  

The second trick is for the usual rebellious suspects to realize that their fetish clients (minorities) and their fetish sponsors (celebrities) both don't give two effective turds about their political solidarity. This will take some work because as alienated as Trump haters feel, the current president actually sympathizes with the common working class patriotic American. Therefore he might consequently stumble into an improvement in government that appeals to a broad majority. You cannot have a welfare-state that does this; the gap between the universally publicly funded and the private must appear as clear as the difference between inner-city public school and Hogwarts. This therefore must mean the establishment of a soul-crushing meritocracy where the affluent actually cannot predictably succeed. They will therefore resent and scorn those with affirmative action tickets to ride, as well as those who don't need it. Imagine Meryl Streep not bothering to make public speeches, but instead immediately donating her Oscar to the homeless shelter. Middle class solidarity goes to shit. This needs to happen in order for the affluent to take their own class interests more seriously, even Leftist affluents.   

The third trick is for capitalists to create a sufficiently diverse marketsphere that is inclusive of every interest group that can support a cognizable political force. That is to say that if your constituency consists of the obscure demographic of Irish Catholic men of middle age, that you produce enough movies like Boondock Saints so that they feel like they are part of the American heroic mosaic, no matter how much the rest of America hates their guts. Since there will never again be an authentic working class Irish Catholic President, this and a host of other cultural smoke must be blown up their collective asses in order to sedate their violent human tendencies. In this way, people who realize they are being ignored politically will feel adequately attended to by those large and powerful entities who don't actually respond to their democratic needs, just to their material and psychic desires. This can be done through the miracle of marketing which in the US is already sufficiently advanced and verges on completion.

With the establishment of these three tricks, the permanent welfare state in America will be established in fact. Americans will tend to their class sensibilities and remain satisfied within their own ranks. It would help if we decommission the military and religion because these are two institutions that inspire people to become selfless and purpose-driven. This is incompatible with the aims of the welfare state, which requires no sacrifice other than the actual practice of the defense of liberty and justice for all. The political-correct language of multiculturalism and historical revisionism has been very effective in establishing an expectation of class-appropriate 'liberty' and 'justice' for each group. This simply needs to be actualized through the application of insurmountable economic class stratification.

This lies within the realm of possibility. We're on the right track.

T50 for March 2017

For the record...

 

 

 

Bruce Schneier	John Mueller	Neal Stephenson
Clay Shirky	Kay Hymowitz	Niall Ferguson
Clint Bruce	Larry J. Kolb	Philip E. Tetlock
Craig Venter	Larry P. Arnn	Richard Fernandez
Dan Ariely	Lawrence Lessig	Steven Berlin Johnson
Danny Hillis	Luigi Zingales	Steven P. Koonin
David Killcullen	Mark Blyth	Steven Pinker
David P. Goldman	Mary Meeker	Stewart Brand
Eric S. Raymond	Michael J. Totten	Tyler Cowen
Iain M. Banks	Michael Pollan	Victor Davis Hanson
John C. Wright	Nassim Nicholas Taleb	Werner Vogels