"Guardians of the Galaxy" -or- Shut The Fuck Up

I loved "Guardians". I wish I could just drop the mic right there, but so many people are saying so many stupid things about this terrific movie that now I feel obligated to bash heads and spit venom. Herewith, a list of the top 10 complaints (rights reserved to add more) about the film and why you should shut the fuck up about them:

1. "You mean the racoon movie?"
   Yes motherfucker, the movie set in space, in a multi-species galaxy necessitating faster than light travel, implying a vast multiplicity of technology trees and their disparate outcomes including, but not limited to, genetic-cybernetic augmentation of lower life forms. This has poignant implications that they address in the fucking film directly. STFU.
2. "Why bother casting Bradley Cooper if you aren't going to use him?"
   Motherfucker, why are you making me say this? I'm not the Defend Bradley Cooper Guy! Fine, I'll say it: Bradley Cooper is more than just a pretty face. He's a pretty decent actor, and in this movie he does a damn fine bit of voice acting. He's also the funniest fucking character in a movie starring Chris Pratt, so STFU.
3. "The guy from Parks and Rec?"
   Yes. The funniest fucking lead actor in America right now. See also "The Lego Movie" and STFU.
4. "Isn't he just playing Han Solo? This whole thing sounds very Star Wars."
   OMFG STFU! There can be more than one space movie! NOTHING ABOUT THIS FILM IS LIKE STAR WARS!!! Except for the bit between Rocket and Groot, I'll give you that one. But then I'm taking it right back because fuck you, it's also narratively appropriate that Rocket is hyper intelligent enough to understand Groot's inflections and speaks to their deeper bond.
5. "And why is John C. Reilly in this?"
   Because he's fucking hilarious. Why the fuck not? I'll concede that it's odd that Vin Diesel was so excited to reprise such a limited role as the Iron Giant in tree form, but seriously STFU about the casting, it's all gravy. Karen Gillan is fully legit, Bautista held up his corner, and Michael Rooker is always a pleasure. Hell, even Zoe Saldana was strangely magnetic.
6. "Fine, then what was up with all the music?"
   It was great, it made narrative sense, it grounded the film (which again, to remind you, was set in space, in a galaxy far the fuck away, but we already covered the Star Wars thing) for the audience, it served well as a character device and plot driver. Next question, or do I need to tell you to STFU again?
7. "Yeah but they already used that one song in "Reservoir Dogs"."
   Shut the fuck up.
8. "And that other song was in "Boogie Nights"."
   You are a fucking moron. Do you understand what the use of pop songs in film is for? See answers 6 and 7. 
9. "Okay, okay, okay... you're right. But there's too much exposition."
   Now you're just saying "too much exposition" because you always say that about any kind of movie that isn't about two middle class white Americans of opposite sex on present day Earth being physically attracted to each other in a fashionable American city for 30 minutes, having a minor miscommunication, fighting and lying to each other about that miscommunication for 45 minutes, and then reconciling without ever resolving any of their core differences for 15 more. Was that too much exposition?
   Seriously go fuck yourself with this one. The team behind this movie trimmed down 4 decades of acid-fueled, cosmic, comic book crackpottery into 122 minutes of action packed, comedic, movie-going gold, and you're complaining about the 5 minutes they took to set up an easy to follow plotline about an errant warlord gone rogue?
10. "Yeah, I didn't get that part. Why does Ronan hate the Nova Core? And what's an Infinity Stone? Who's Thanos? Why is that lady pink and that one blue? What's with the big skull? Who put the----"
    ARGH GHGH GHGARF SLKG HJFS:L BHOS{DA HGRBFJS SHUT THE FUCK UP!@#!%! #%$^&$ !%$&#*&!% #*$%&^ @!* #&!@^)$_
    Seriously, can you even hear yourself? Too much exposition or NOT ENOUGH? What the fuck do you want? WHO BEAT THIS MUCH STUPID INTO YOU? SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.

Virtual and Augmented Realities

The old metaphor of the internet as a "place", or cyberspace, comes from science fiction notions of a virtual reality that is separate from the real one. When we enter cyberspace, as imagined through cumbersome means like virtual reality goggles, haptic feedback devices, or more typically and coarsely through keyboard, mice, and computer screens, we leave our current reality and enter into a place other than the one we normally inhabit. This virtual travel comes with costs akin to real world travel: load times, fidelity degradation, jet lag.

By contrast the new metaphor of the mobile internet, the social internet, the distributed internet, is not virtual reality or cyberspace, but rather augmented reality. One need not leave the real world any longer to experience the powerful forces of technology applied to daily life, one need only look down at a mobile device, look through a set of reality enhancing glasses, or connect to one's data streams though an internet ready kiosk. One doesn't go to Facebook, one checks Facebook, checks into a real place with Foursquare, orders a cab with Uber, logs the drinking of a beer with Untappd, Tweets, (Google) Hangs out, and performs all sorts of other tasks and interactions through the use of Internet enabled technologies without ever going "there".

Social technologies like phreaker "party" lines, IRC chat "rooms", and Second-Life virtual "properties" are all places that require a buy-in akin to make believe or fantasy role-playing for the experience to be of value. This transaction cost has been largely eliminated by higher and higher fidelity communication methods (audio, video, collaboration tools), and with it the need for "place-ness" as a crutch to the believeability of the social experience. With today's technology, users feel comfortable being in the place they are in while experiencing a social interaction with someone 2000 miles away. They can see them on the screen, they receive constant SMS updates from them on their phone, they watch them typing into a shared Google Doc. The social interaction is seamless without the need for the metaphor of physical proximity, without the need for place.

This trend away from virtual reality and towards augmented reality is inexorable, even for those of us who are not leading on the cutting edge of technologies that will draw it closer. Technologists that can grab hold of this metaphor now will be better prepared for it's ubiquity in the near term.

For further reading on this topic, pick up literally anything ever written by William Gibson.

The NSA, Bruce Schneier, and the Bottom Line

Because one can never say enough about Bruce Schneier.

The NSA secretly inserting back doors into standards-based encryption algorithms and enforcing compromising security practices on US businesses has undoubtedly already had, and will continue to have, a negative impact on the bottom line of those businesses. US privacy laws are behind other competitive nations and this makes it difficult for US companies to upgrade the privacy standards of their data security policies to meet the needs of global customers. Legally enforced crippling of these security policies and technologies only further widens that gap, putting US businesses further in the lurch.

The undeniable fact of the matter is that any backdoor in any cryptosystem is available to the creator of the backdoor and to anyone else who figures out the backdoor is there. So even if one believes the NSA has a duty to protect US citizens by disabling security systems around their data and spying on them, one still has to admit that this opens US citizens up to being spied upon by clever foreign intelligence agencies and increasingly clever organized criminals getting into the cyber insecurity game.

Most tech folks and many politically inclined citizens at least sort of know who Bruce Schneier is, but in case they don't he's a famous cryptographer who wrote the book on applied cryptography (conveniently titled Applied Cryptography) and became internet-famous after the terrorist attacks of 2001-09-11 for criticizing the "security theater" that constituted the bulk of the federal government's domestic response. Predictably enough he's been all over the Snowden leaks like white on rice, including assisting Glenn Greenwald the lead Guardian journalist working with Snowden in working through the best practices of handling Snowden data and explaining the technical implications of the leaks in the Guardian:

Schneier writing for the Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/profile/bruceschneier

Schneier's blog, a must read for anyone interested in technology, security, politics, or People Taking Things Seriously:

https://www.schneier.com/

Idiom Watch

• Heroic assumptions - This one I hear a lot from people who are skeptical of the ability to draw actionable conclusions from statistical analysis: your black swan theorists, your big data naysayers, your typical principled cynics with a sense of humor. They admire the heroism of the hard work and intellectual acumen demonstrated in attempts to elevate soft science to exact science, but recognize that the most significant findings require some assumptive leaps. It's a smirking form of appreciation because they still don't quite buy it, "But keep it up there, champ!"
• Tuck into - I'm going to stop apologizing for all the food idioms. This one is probably inoffensive to me (unlike other gustatory sayings) because of it's foreign roots (tuck shops, etc). You hear it in the States, but as often as not in the context of a beef stew or a shepherd's pie, and latent Anglophilia of my American nerd upbringing takes over. I say tuck away.

Recruiter's Advocate & Engineer Arbitrage

Recruiters have a reputation in the tech community for being annoying, overbearing, backstabbing, overly-forward, uninformed, loose-lipped, technically ignorant, spam-prone, conversationally dull, would-be pimps who would sell their own mothers into prostitution (or an equally debased QA position) if it meant an extra commission for a placement. The premature demise of many an engineer's LinkedIn account has oft been blamed on the overwhelming barrage of recruitment offers from these so-called parasites living off the wages of the people doing all the work. Not to mention that awkward moment at every tech MeetUp when the one sheepish engineer left in the room (the rest, being engineers, having gone to the bar) looks up to find themself surrounded exclusively by salivating recruiters ready to wolf down 20% of their next year's salary. This reputation is no doubt well deserved, but if I may play Devil's Advocate for a moment, the proliferation of recruiters in the tech community is due to an arbitrage situation we as employees and employers created.

Recruiters are a form of traditional merchant, sailing from the far east ports of expos and hackathons back to the eager bazaars of Jobvite and HR departments to hawk their wares in front of eager hiring managers. They buy low, finding underpaid, underappreciated, underrepresented talent hidden away in the windowless dungeons of the first companies to flash them a paycheck, and they sell high to new employers who have finally realized their dire need for the expertise required to try turning it on and off again, shave the yak, or [_____] all the things. The supply of people with expertise in this or any other STEM field is low, as anyone will tell you, and yet many engineers are still paid well below their potential salaries. With the market for hiring new engineers paying one price, and the market for employing existing engineers paying another, the arrival of arbitrageurs is inevitable; enter the Dread Recruiter.

Why are recruiters dreaded so? Someone out there is still hiring their next employee from a recruiter. It's like wondering aloud and with fearful disdain why the quality of beef in a McDonald's hamburger hasn't improved in the past decade of organic this and probiotic that, only to look down and find a double quarter pounder in your hand. It was there, and you were hungry! Even so, it's clear why employers dislike recruiters: recruiters capture a commission on top of a candidate's salary, and in performing this arbitrage function they are incentivized to raise the salary of the employee higher than any employer would otherwise volunteer to pay. Unless the recruiter is brokering a higher salary, the engineer has little incentive to switch jobs. Employers still need to find engineers, and they'd be happier not to pay recruiters on top of paying engineers more to switch, but at the end of the day they are still happy to get the engineer in their door at a higher price than their competitor was paying them given the limited supply. After all, employers are making even more money by selling the goods and services produced by this limited pool of engineers.

So then why do engineers dread recruiters? Engineers don't hate raises, and they are discerning enough not to take jobs they will hate if the tradeoffs aren't worthwhile, but they will mark a recruiter's LinkedIn invite as spam faster than they will a cold calling vendor offering free entry into an iPod raffle with every purchase. What engineers really don't like is wasting their time on extraneous conversations with people they don't know (or sometimes even with people they do know). They're the ones who listened when their parents told them not to talk to strangers, and maybe, as with many other things in their lives, took it a step farther than most. They've also taken Adam Smith's division of labor to heart, and become highly specialized in communication regarding their jobs. Can a recruiter help them solve the load balancer SSL problem they are working on? Can a recruiter tell them about a new development in motherboard bus speeds? What is the recruiter's opinion on the relative merits of Haskell vs Scala? These are conversations that interest engineers; this is efficient communication. Efficiency is priority number one, recruiters. Because waste is a thief.

Recruiters have at least one thing right though: engineers are underpaid. Engineers are not ones to actively seek out interviews or passively accept communication from recruiters that will help them increase their own market value. The market for engineers, to abuse an economist's term, is not clearing. This is largely due to the aforementioned lack of supply, but supply is forever linked to demand. Demand is expressed in this market by the employer's willingness to pay, and underpayment of engineers is potentially a root cause of the much lamented lack of STEM graduates and job applicants. As the Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager pointed out in N+1's Diary Of A Very Bad Year:

Finance started sucking people from all over. You'd walk around our trading floor and there were guys who were math Ph.D.s and physics PhD.s, ... The bubble in financial assets had a derivative bubble in people. There was a misallocation of financial resources and a misallocation of people resources. [The bubble bursting]'s a good thing, you know? Some of these physicists should be doing physics; some of these computer scientists should be doing computer science.

This misallocation of labor resources described by the Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager is even less efficient than engineers talking to recruiters, and at some level engineers know this as well. They know it when they see the proliferation of employees in their organization that don't appear to do anything. They know it when they see entire businesses that don't appear to produce any value. They know it when they read about an entire economy in the throes of an inflating or deflating economic bubble caused by the inefficient allocation of resources and labor at a mass scale. But what can just one engineer ever hope to do? What can they do to pull the world's economies away from the path of another bubble / burst recession? What can they do to solve the STEM education crisis? What can they do just to get recruiters to stop calling them?

They can ask for a raise.

Further Reading:

• Nathen Harvey suggests engineers Quit Their Jobs to achieve similar results (or at least go on more interviews).
• Dave Zweibeck suggests engineers become their own recruiters by taking the long view and ...drumroll... help each other find better jobs.