Managerial failings: complification
“To the engineering mind, a state will probably appear decadent in just the degree that there are numbers of inhibitory or uselessly tabulative persons employed to interfere with, and inquire into the actions of others” -Ezra Pound, Machine Art
The managerial class in America is failing everywhere; it’s obvious, demoralizing and a dangerous moment in history. It is the same way mandarinates have failed through all of history. Mandinarates don’t necessarily become corrupt in the sense of taking bribes, though this is definitely a factor. More serious is the problem of mental corruption. Mandinarates fail due to complification. Failed mandinarates such as our managerial class can’t simply solve problems any more. They make simple problems into complicated ones and add new and arbitrary problems which literally can’t be solved. The tendency is near universal now, and you can see it and its effects everywhere.
The “managerial elite” of current year aren’t anything like the hard men of old who raised us up from the muck. The actual engineers and managers who pushed the needle lived in contact with the cold reality of matter and existence. They had to do difficult things like milk the cow, bring water up the hill to their homes, deal with bullies, chop wood to prevent their families from freezing, shit in a bucket and carry it to the cesspool. They were mental adults in a way that the present day managerial “elites” mostly can’t be.
Current year managerial “elites” are psychological children who primarily look to others for approval. These are coddled people whose fragile self conception is based on their “cleverness.” They depend on authority figures making their lives comfortable. Like most immature people, they’re also conformists; they wouldn’t dream of diverging from the consensus of experts. Just like kids in school who can’t bear to stand out, a stage in life which they never escape. While there were great innovators who were playful and child-like in their creativity, being praised or feeling clever for being “oh so smart” wasn’t part of their psychological makeup. This tendency is infantile and ineffective at delivering anything useful. It results in outcomes about as helpful as a toddler’s Lego creation, or mummy thinking you are a good boy for getting high marks on a test.
HG Wells saw this psychological tendency back in his day. In his Time Machine novel, he had the childish and degenerate cummies-obsessed “elite” of his day evolve into helpless conformist psychological children; the Eloi. He didn’t anticipate that the Morlocks, aka the people who keep technological society functioning would politely excuse themselves and let the Eloi attempt to run everything. Today’s engineers and managers are almost all worthless Eloi who will eventually destroy everything they’re put in charge of. Eloi engineering and management barbarism is a tremendous danger. If it isn’t stopped, we’re rapidly approaching a time where technological society decays irretrievably, if we haven’t already gone over that waterfall. Eloi are (rightly) terrified of Morlocks, but they’re only dimly aware of the fact that they depend on Morlocks for every facet of their existence.
Consider running a college. In the old days it was a couple of janitors, a couple of accountants and some professors who teach. Now, we have creatures called administrators. These festering pustules have metastasized and made running a college absurdly expensive and difficult. There are more infantile crackpot administrators than professors in most modern Universities. Mind you, this is a class of “managerial” Eloi bureaucrat that didn’t exist 80 years ago. None of these dingbats can justify their existence. Thanks to Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, these childish meshugganahs have run the educational system into a ditch. Adding them to the College headcount doesn’t add to the institution’s effectiveness; it does the opposite: it makes it more expensive, vastly more ideological and less oriented towards imparting anything resembling knowledge. Headcounts are absolutely exploding in Universities in every category but the people who actually teach things.
Yale for example: more administrators than undergraduates. This is ridiculous; Yale students would be better off if they hired each undergraduate a PhD educated personal tutor and a maid/servant, and it would be cheaper. There is a Yale administrator event horizon at which the mass of administrators at Yale within the confines of the Yale campus will form a black hole from which light cannot escape. If current trends continue, this will happen by the year 3622.
Administrator headcount at Yale doubles every 20 years and there are 5000 of these slugs now. I will approximate their mass (including laptop and papers) at 100kg each; 5×10^5kg. Yale occupies about a square kilometre. A black hole of that size is 0.3 or so solar masses, about 5×10^29kg. Log2 of 10^24 is 80. 80*20=1600 years from now. Long before that, each new administrator added will simply have their electrons and protons fuse together into a neutron blob. This will improve both the productivity of the administrator and the value of the local New Haven real estate by bathing it in lethal radiation. A mere 1200 years from now the mass of Yale administrators will exceed the mass of the rest of the planet. The present population of the earth will be matched by Yale administrators in 400 years, and the population of South Korea matched by Eloi administrators by the time Yale is twice its present age of 320 years. Lux et veritas.

Yale class of 3622 as the gravitational pull of administrators causes light to orbit New Haven
The “smart city” is a favorite concept of the TED talk/Davos class of Eloi managerial imbeciles. It is, of course, hilarious that these self proclaimed “elites” have themselves destroyed numerous Western cities already. This is the core philosophy of our parasitic Eloi “experts” -they create tremendous problems with their complexification, then present us with ever more byzantine, intrusive, complicated and oppressive “solutions” requiring their intervention. Western civilization had the most glorious cities in the world for thousands of years. No dystopian hellscape IoT surveillance baloney was required; clean water, strong families, sound money, religion and good civic culture was sufficient. Dystopian hellscape surveillance frippery won’t help the problems we have in current-year cities, which can be summarized as a refusal to enforce any laws or require standards of behavior of any kind; an entirely Eloi concept.
Eloi software goons and engineers compexify things for themselves. Generally for no observable reason. Four hour long meetings instead of one 5 minute standup. Using some retarded object oriented thing to access a database instead of pasting SQL strings together. Using computers where a two wire feedback loop would do. Adding an operating system and wifi to a refrigerator. Most of these chuckleheads have no idea why they’re making things more complicated. Often because they’re so far from the actual enterprise they think they’re being paid to make really sweet solutions that show off how smart they are rather than products which function properly.
Consider the second parity multisig wallet failure. The parity multisig was a multi-authenticated cryptocurrency wallet on Ethereum. You need 2/3, 3/5, 4/5 signatures to make it send funds somewhere. Great use of “smart contracts” (don’t get me started on this simpering descriptor; hence referred to as SCS) assuming it isn’t built into your chain from the get go, which it should have been. This adds commercial bank functionality to otherwise badly designed blockchains which didn’t think of adding this as a core feature. However, this thing was complicated and apparently poorly understood. Some Eloi genius added a “feature.” This “feature” was deploying a “library” which all parity multisigs depended on. The justification for this was to make it a few dollars cheaper to deploy your personal multisig. “Let’s be modern and use shared objects in blockchain just like the big boys in OS design.”
Well, in return for this twee complification, a complification for which there was no sane justification, the library became a central point of failure. This central point of failure had a self-destruct function that made a sort of deranged sense when the multisig was originally to be deployed as a monolithic smart contract. There’s no reason to have this method, but at least you could only kill your monolithic multisig if the owners agreed on it. When this method was pulled out into a library it had no owners; if it did have owners, it would be a security issue (the concept of “owners” was another complification which was completely unnecessary). Some curious person called the self destruct method they left hanging around in the library and destroyed the $2 billion+ in value locked up in all the parity multisigs. All to save a couple of bucks. Well played, sirs.
At the time this “use a library in a SCS” idea was very actively pursued. People even gabbling on about writing SCS operating systems. SCS operating systems that could be upgraded if people voted to do so. In fact at one point there was the very bad idea of making the upgrades to your dependencies mandatory. The reason people use shared libraries in normal computers is you’re worried about it gobbling up too much memory, and it makes it easier to upgrade buggy things without upgrading all the binary dependencies. Worrying about this on a blockchain is the worst kind of premature optimization. You’re already doing something incredibly wasteful by writing code on a blockchain: own it. Adding dependency graph management to something which is designed to be immutable is barking lunacy.

Why I invested in Immunefi instead of MakerDao
The shared object concept itself is a towering failure. This is little appreciated but undeniably true. The idea of the shared object is simple enough: if you have a computer running lots of code, some of the code used will be the same. Why not just load it to memory once and share that memory at runtime? I’m old enough to remember when this happened to Unix style operating systems back in the 90s. Before that, you’d compile binaries which contained everything you need statically linked. That actually worked rather well, and allowed you to do things like ship a binary that worked on different versions of the operating system. Mind you, back then, most computers were 32 bit and something like a quarter gig of RAM was considered an enormous extravagence. You could boot a real operating system using a 1.44mb floppy disk. People back then were interested in squeezing a little bit more RAM by using old Multics tricks from the days when “RAM” was a bunch of little magnetic cores knit by old ladies. When people invented shared objects back in the 1960s, the computer was a giant, rare thing ministered to by a priesthood: there was no such thing as multiple versions of a shared object. You used what the mainframe vendor sold you. Now, when every half-human shambling ape-man in creation has multiple computers of varying vintage, to say nothing of the infrastructure depending on old computers, shared object versioning is an enormous problem. Nobody really thought of this in the 90s when Current Year shared objects were dreamt up and deemed futuristic.
It’s now such an enormous problem there are multiple billion dollar startups for technologies for dealing with this complexity by adding further complexity. Docker, Kubernetes, various Amazon atrocities for dealing with Docker and Kubernetes and their competitors, flatpak, conda, AppImages, macports, brew, RPM, NixOS, dpkg/apt, VirtualBox, pacman, Yum, SnapCraft, various app stores and associated applications of varying degrees of completeness, or for just one toolchain (NPM, Rust Crates, go get, OPAM, CRAN, CloJars, Maven, etc etc). The package manager tools that come with the OS generally push the shared object dependency hell back on …. the OS developer. If they support your application and write helpful test scripts, it will get built and you’ll have your application. Good luck getting them to upgrade it if you need a new feature. As the number of packages grows, this breaks down, and even the OS maintainers are giving up and turning to flatpak, AppImages and Snap files. These are extremely complicated and incredibly wasteful (of memory) ways of literally packaging up a bunch of needed shared libraries with your application and presenting it to you as a crappy simulacrum of a statically compiled binary. Which is a lot more retarded than building a static binary. Mention compiling a static binary to an Eloi developer and you’ll be met with a doltish NPC stare, at which time you’ll be regaled with excuses for why Snap packages or flatpaks or whatever represent the future because reasons .
At the other end of the shared object spaghetti monkeypatch spectrum, you have shitty but simple virtual operating systems like docker. These push the complexity of shared object versioning onto the user. You now have to administer multiple shitty little operating systems, which sort of obviates the concept of having an operating system on your computer in the first place. Things like conda or brew are vendored mini OS solutions concentrating on making some tool chain run usefully without breaking the OS. They only exist because people want to use shared objects instead of just shipping a statically linked binary. Shipping a statically linked binary; so “early 90s.” What’s the matter with you? Are you a Moorlock?
All of these “solutions” are incredibly complicated and require someone do a lot of work to deal with shared object library issues. Which are only there because in 1995 memory was kind of expensive. Complification. Even if I were nominated Lord of All Computers after the inevitable Butlerian Jihad, I’d have to kill most surviving “software engineers” to fix this, as they’re almost all imbecile complexifying, “playing in the gardens they don’t maintain,” Eloi.
I’m sure some dolt will pipe up and attempt to justify the parlous state of the shared object spaghetti which makes up contemporary operating system design. Or worse, defend one of the monkeypatch things people have cobbled together to make things work. Such people can’t conceive of a world different from the one they occupy. A world where their “tech skills” are useless because humanity actually made progress. A world where we made progress by remembering something from the past. Complification is a choice, and we can choose to make things better. Eloi never do; they’re too busy playing with themselves.
Eloi complification brings ruin even in little ways. Consider the open source “code of conduct.” The idea of open source is pretty simple; share the code with the world so it doesn’t go away when a company goes out of business. Everyone can fix bugs and share code and make things better. These days you can’t just do that, you need a “code of conduct.” A complicated system involving ad-hoc courts, witch hunts and catering to the whims of emotionally turbulent “danger-hair” dunderheads rather than just ignoring jerks. Somehow people were able to develop significant software before the mid-2010s when this sort of bureaucratic nonsense became a thing. The glorious benefits of not hurting the feelings of debilitatingly fragile contributors haven’t manifested in any observable way. It’s abundantly obvious that Linux Kernel development has gotten shittier and more bug ridden since it sprouted useless witch hunters and began catering to perpetually offended people. I don’t have a time series of number of critical kernel security patches over time, but I used to have the same kernel version on my machine with uptime measured in months. Now I’m lucky to go a week without a hard reboot being required because nobody told Danger Hair Daphne that she’d be better off pursuing a job as an HR administrator than a kernel developer. Bring back Mean Linus. Morlock code is better code.
The job of management and engineers is ultimately solving the problem, and the problem almost always gets solved faster and better by making things simpler. When you’re given the opportunity to be clever ask yourself what the Morlock would do. Eating the Eloi should be included in your spectrum of possible actions.
Edison was better than Tesla in every way
It’s super popular among modern tech weebs to lionize Nikola Tesla and not think about Edison at all beyond identifying him with pointy headed bosses. This is insanity. While it’s possible that Tesla was very much ignored until my teenage years, just like the 80s era Yugoslavian propaganda services said, it is certainly not the case that Tesla is getting insufficient credit in current year. He is now extremely overrated. Tesla was indeed a great electrical engineer and inventor. However he is presently overrated; Edison is now underrated. So is Westinghouse, but we’ll keep it to Edison here, especially since Edison is propped up as some kind of villain versus somehow more heroic, rather than simply more lame Tesla.
Tesla was a lone inventor mad scientist type. He had helpers, but by and large he was a one-man band. Indeed the parts of his genius which made it into production, more or less three phase motors, he was employed by Westinghouse as a single contributor. Three phase current was a work of creative genius, but it was also an obvious innovation of the time. This will make ignorant Tesla fanboys mad, but it’s absolutely the truth. Same idea was invented independently around the same time by at least four other men, none of whom had nationalistic-communist intelligence agencies doing PR for them later. Let us name them and remember their equally great deeds: John Hopkinson an Englishman of Great Britain, Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky a Russian-Pole of the Russian empire, Galileo Ferrais a Sardinian of Italy, and Jonas Wenstrom a dwarf of Sweden. If Tesla had never lived, there were already four other guys who basically put the same mark on the world and achieved the same thing. In fact, all four mostly forgotten men are even more praiseworthy than Tesla, both as inventors and human beings.
Tesla is given all kinds of credit for shit he didn’t really do; radio, x-rays, wireless transmission of electricity. Sure he was tinkering in his lab and came across some weird things, but as an inventor he didn’t get them right, at all. He was definitely very bright; a polyglot, allegedly photographic memory and was in possession of a great deal of personal charisma and charm. He was also great with getting media attention and moved in the high society of his day. He was decent at most things he tried (games, etc), and led a volcel abstemious life.
But we must be honest about Tesla; he was a semi-broken weirdo who needed a Westinghouse to bring discipline to his researches and make money. While it is sort of admirable that he spent all his time in researches which pleased him, what he did was also extremely self indulgent, and was ultimately almost entirely masturbatory nonsense, none of which actually mattered. He really wasn’t ahead of his time; he was a crank. He didn’t believe in almost any of physics which we now know is true: electrons and relativity were nonsense to him and he spent a lot of time attempting to refute it. He also despised fat people and mannish females, believed in eugenics, zapping people’s brains with electricity to make them smarter, and had many eccentric and anti-social habits we now associate with sperg-lord character defects; and yes, they are character defects. Not being able to shag JP Morgan’s daughter because she wears pearls, or hallucinating about pigeons is indicative of a pretty severe basket of character flaws.
Edison, on the other hand, was nothing like this. Edison was a much greater inventor, a greater businessman, leader, philanthropist and human being. Things Edison invented and shipped for profitable production: telephone microphones, phonographs, motion pictures, multiplexed telegraphy, light bulbs, iron ore separators, innovations in electrical power distribution, he delivered real X-ray imaging innovations, helped invent new forms of rubber from sunflowers, invented IR detectors, the stock ticker, the nickel-iron battery, invented new processes for plastics and other chemicals, and was basically the archetypical polymath genius. He made money on all of these things, brought every one of them from idea to market, unlike Tesla who could only bring stuff to market if someone else did that work for him.
Edison also had two wives and six kids, helped with the US war effort in WW-1, was active in an important social club, was briefly a Theosophist, was a monetary reformer, also abstemious in his diet, was a man of peace who would only work on defensive weapons (Tesla by contrast was always hawking quack death rays), and there are a dozen companies he founded which still exist and create value to this day. Edison didn’t exist in his own little mad scientist world; he led men and machines to build great things, which are literally used and create value 90 years after he dropped dead. By contrast, Tesla made a bucket of loot on the one important thing he did (mind you, something done independently by 4 other men) and spent it all on his own entirely worthless personal passion projects. Mind you, Edison achieved all of these marvelous things, deeply engaged with society and the real world while stone deaf. He also never went to college.
Westinghouse did win the current wars with his Tesla invented technology, and Tesla deserves credit for having the correct solution (again, something done independently by 4 other men) but Tesla wasn’t fit to spit-shine Edison’s boots. Neither as an inventor, a creator/businessman, nor even as a human being: Edison is a greater man all the way down the line. I guess it’s OK to identify with Tesla as an underdog or something if you’re having a hard time of it, but frankly, most underdogs deserve to be underdogs. The fact that Tesla worked for Edison ought to have given you the hint: this is the natural order of things.
Everyone who works in software knows some Teslas; his self-regarding, grandiose sperg-lord nature is a familiar character. Such people may have done something that made them some loot, but then they spend it doing research into some quackery, or on polyamorous midget juggling prostitutes or whatever. None of you know an Edison, or if you do know a lesser Edison, he is probably a very great man. Edison lived in the real world rather than the self-indulgent world of cranks. Edison was a leader, a deeply moral man, and a man of affairs rather than a lone weirdo laboring on things nobody cares about. If you must emulate one of the two, don’t be a Tesla, be an Edison. It really is the virgin Tesla versus the chad Edison.
Early article, I think commissioned by Yugoslav spooks, which set me on my early Tesla fanhood, and probably everyone else’s:
https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/tesla-scientific-saint-wizard-or-carnival-sideman
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