Can a president be indicted? Imho it might depend on how heinous and dangerous the crime. Being controlled by a foreign enemy might make a difference.#
Bug fixed in feedBase. If the user logs off, changes their Twitter username, then logs back into the app, the updates will go to the old username. This was a caching issue in the davetwitter package. Thanks to vincode-io for the excellent detective work and report. I was able to understand the problem immediately, and it was easy to fix. #
Independent of whether Congress impeaches, it would be great to have a public resource that listed all of Trump's clearly impeachable offenses, with Clinton's 1998 impeachment as the benchmark.#
Social topology, something I've been thinking about for a long time. When I was a math student, I got interested in graph theory, and wrote all kinds of Fortran apps that walked graphs, figuring out things about them. Not a great choice of language for that. Graph theory is part of at least two branches of math, combinatorics and topology. And I think there must be a mapping from topology to the structure of online communication systems. Looked at a particular way, we've been spending the whole of my career in tech, dating back to the 70s, studying, without any sense of the theory, the topology of net communication systems. Blogs are very different from mail lists, so different the could be considered opposites. List all the different rules for each of the following: Facebook groups, Facebook messages, public Twitter, Twitter DMs, Instagram, Snapchat, AppleLink, Reddit, Whatsapp, on and on. And the tools we use for managing developer groups also yield different kinds of social topology. I was just thinking about the difference between Slack and GitHub as two recent examples of development systems I've used. #
Before Walter Cronkite did an hour special saying the Vietnam War was unwinnable, press coverage was pretty much re-written press releases from the Pentagon. Cronkite's observation, that the war was unwinnable, turned press coverage in a different direction. The question of whether or not we should be in Vietnam was now something they could ask, and did. #- We're in a similar situation now. People are covering climate change and Trump as if the normal rules of journalism can deal with these two crises. Clearly they cannot. We need a different approach.#
- Postscript #1: Jon Stewart was definitely on track to be the current day Walter Cronkite before he left The Daily Show. I know he disclaimed that he was just a comedian, but he was much more than that. #
- Postscript #2: Three observations that address the shortcomings of news in covering the current situation. If Cronkite were alive and observing the rise of Trump and our failure to address climate change, I'd like to think he'd do a corner-turn today like the one he did in 1968 around these ideas.#
- Occam's Razor. If it's obvious, report it as obvious.#
- Common sense. Life teaches us how people are. Use that info.#
- This is a dire situation. (Trump, climate change.)#
- Postscript #3: The title of this piece is derived from the song Mrs Robinson by Simon and Garfunkel. #
BTW, re yesterday's braintrust query -- thanks to the readers of this blog, my mid-2011 MacBook Air is now running High Sierra. #
There was a moment that press coverage of the Vietnam War turned the corner, when Walter Cronkite stopped reporting on Defense Dept press releases and started telling the truth, that the war was unwinnable.#
I just drove back upstate from the city, listened to two hours of NPR. They had a jerk talk nonsense about the Mueller report, about how it exonerates Trump. They just let him go on and on, never interrupting to say hey you're full of shit. Then an hour later they had Jill Wine-Banks and she was making so much sense, but they had to cut her off mid-sentence to go to an interview with a musician. This radio listener was pissed. After so much repetitive drivel, finally someone who knows the subject, who's had some time to process, is laying it out, and they have to cut her off? #- Meanwhile, whatever the Mueller report says or doesn't say, we all witnessed his obstruction of justice in the interview with Lester Holt, and if you saw his press conference in Helsinki, you understand that Trump is controlled by Putin. We don't need a report to tell us any of that. If journalism is writing the first draft of history why aren't they writing that? #
- PS: I tried listening to this morning's Daily podcast about the Mueller announcement, and realized finally that their reporters are really dull. They don't find this stuff interesting, they just namedrop and repeat bullshit they heard somewhere as gospel. #
Braintrust query: I have a mid-2011 MacBook Air that I want to update to the latest OS that will run on it. I asked for help on Facebook, but none of the suggestions work. So let's start over. I'll post screen shots over on the GitHub thread. #
Joe Biden is going to run for president. Okay. I'm not in favor of it. And today there's a story that to prove he's not just some random old white guy, he's going to name his running mate long before he's even won the nomination, Stacey Abrams, a rising star of the Democratic Party. It reeks of what John McCain did in 2008 when he chose Sarah Palin. He paid dearly for that choice. Biden should stand on his own and compete on equal terms with the other candidates. If he wins, so be it. If not, same thing. Going down this path he risks being overshadowed by his very interesting running mate, the way McCain was by his choice. He may say it proves he has guts, but what will it say when she outshines him? #The problem with the media reporting on itself is that it’s the media reporting on itself.#
Yesterday's Daily podcast about Boeing's bug was interesting because bugs are starting to be mainstream life and death issues and the cost of lack of interop was frontmost in Boeing's decision to mask the difference in the two models of 737 using a compatibility bridge. Developer tool developers should be so concerned about the cost of re-training. Lots to process for techies. I listened to the podcast driving down the NYS Thruway in my Forester that nudges you to stay in your lane. I always think, what if there's a bug in this system, it might make my car do something like what the Boeing planes were doing. But I leave it on, because I like what it's doing, at least for now.#A friend who's known me for a long time said today that I am a special character. I like that. (Not sure which one though.)#
- This is a braintrust query. #
- The new country house has geothermal heating and cooling, which is something I didn't know existed until I found this house. It's supposed to be a lot less expensive. It uses electricity to move water around to transfer heat from or to a pool of underground water that's at a constant temperature of 55 degrees. In the summer, it's used to cool, in the winter to heat. Genius.#
- But just before the heat comes on it makes a very loud jarring sound, like a garage door slamming shut. It rocks the whole house. Wakes me up when I'm sleeping. There's no preparation for it, it just happens. It's basically not acceptable. I don't want to get used to it.#
- I've tried searching on the net for ideas about how noisy these things are supposed to be, and no one talks about this loud sound.#
- I have to find someone to come out and take a look, but I don't know how to search for someone who does maintenance on geothermal heating.#
- I love the idea, but this is not an acceptable situation. I may have to switch to conventional heating and cooling.#
- PS: An AirBnB I rented the week before had the same problem. It was worse because the heat was going on and off all the time. So it was garage door slamming all night nonstop. Needless to say I didn't stay there the full time I had reserved it.#
Medium keeps changing their mind about what they are. Today's change, for me, adds to the confusion. Yet, if you think of Medium as a publishing company, as they seem to want us to, at least for now, of all the online publishing companies, they alone have structured their product around the idea of a somewhat level playing field where there isn't (much of) a distinction between professional writers and the rest of us. The big publishing and tech companies would be wise to pay attention. Even if Medium doesn't succeed, they are exploring an idea that is imho the future of news publishing. #- I found a default that's set the wrong way on Facebook. #
- Here's the story. #
- I set up a private group just for close friends for me to share stuff I don't want to be shared publicly.#
- I only added people, slowly, who I want to be in the loop on what I'm doing.#
- Someone I didn't invite posted a comment.#
- How did that happen?#
- I looked at the group settings and there's a pref that says whether or not group members can add people. It was enabled. Oy.#
- Luckily only one person was added this way, and it was someone I would have added anyway. But this should default the other way Facebook.#
Note to self: A freshly set up Mac has weird mouse behavior. It scrolls when you move the mouse pointer, sometimes. This is how you disable it. In the Accessibility prefs panel, click on Mouse & Trackpad, then Mouse Options, then uncheck the Scrolling popup. #
Today's Daily podcast was about the terrorist attack in New Zealand. First they had interviews with victims, then quoted the prime minister about gun control and they ended with a broad trashing of the net, specifically YouTube and Facebook. But they omit a very salient fact about the economics of running an open content publishing platform. You can't review each video in advance, there are too many videos and employees are too expensive. There are shades of gray, but for the NYT it's black and white. Further the reporters have a huge undisclosed conflict of interest, because the net is used for more than terrorism, it's sources going direct to interested readers. There's a new news system trying to boot up. The same features of the net that make it possible to bootstrap a terrorism network, also enable new channels of news. But of course this is never part of their discussion. They make it sound easy. Tech is bad. Tech is responsible. Implied but not said: shut it down. They are as scary as the terrorists. Think about it. #It's way too early for a 2020 presidential horse race. I'd like to uncheck that box. Oh that's right, there are no topic checkboxes on Twitter. Somehow my car can steer itself, but Twitter can't tell a post is about horserace politics.#
Journalism used to vilify Craig Newmark, then he started giving millions to news think tanks, journalism schools, and startup news orgs. The new demon is Facebook. A few hundred million should make the troubles go away.#
We need to talk about how we're going to reboot local news. The journalism industry isn't doing the job. #
This is our next big wakeup call. If a couple of hundred people die in an American plane crash due to the incompetence of the FAA we can't say we weren't warned.#
I decided to try Amazon Pantry, since I'm now living in a place where FreshDirect doesn't deliver. I just got a notice that "Progresso Soup" has shipped. I ordered five different kinds of Progresso soup, wanting to try them all. I prayed that the title of the order was just one of the items they were shipping. Nope. One can of Progresso soup will arrive in its own Amazon box on Wednesday. I can see this will be a short-lived experiment. #
- I've had this problem for a few days in Signal and finally have a workaround. Warning you'll lose local copies of all the messages on your desktop only. They'll still be present on your phone.#
My new Subaru Forester has a passive self-driving feature -- it sees the lines on the road, if you steer outside the lines, it nudges you back inside the lines through a gentle force it applies to the steering wheel. If you ease up on the grip, the car steers itself, even on winding mountain roads.#
I have some ideas for new architectures the RSS feed reader market, to better empower users and to create new opportunities for reading and writing tool developers.#
- Tom Watson, who I have never met, is a fellow New Yorker whose political opinions, until recently, track my own pretty closely. #
- Tom just posted his list of tiers of presidential candidates for 2020. I find it very provocative. Here are my comments on his list.#
- Please, just go away Bernie#
- First, there's one thing we agree on. Bernie should retire. #
- We're saying goodbye to Hillary, even those of us who enthusiastically supported her in 2016. Sanders should step aside, following her example, as we want DJ Trump to retire, hopefully to solitary confinement at a max security prison. #
- Bernie is a vestige of the 2016 election, which we never will forget, but would really like to. #
- Tom's A-tier#
- I don't think much of any of Tom's A-tier candidates. Harris doesn't speak well, I don't have a clear idea of what she stands for. The most convincing appeal I've heard for her came from California governor Gavin Newsom on Maddow. Now there's a politico who should run. He spoke highly of Harris, who he (surprisingly to Maddow) has endorsed. #
- Gillibrand? Don't make me laugh. She flips positions so quickly, she's just a suit, running for something, without any reason I can discern. And she was the force that drove Al Franken from the Senate, and for that, I would love to vote for anyone other than her when she runs for re-election to the Senate. #
- Booker? A solid meh. Like Harris and Gillibrand he says nothing other than I want to be famous. #
- Warren? She'd be the best president of this bunch, but she's not the purist people think she is. I believed in her before she supported Israel in their killing of innocent Gazans. At that point I realized okay she's just a Democrat who has a specialized schtick. Not a good leader. Perfect for Massachusetts, not for America. #
- Summary: If we elect any of these candidates, somehow (I think Trump will beat any of them) we will have wasted the election. And we'll get another Trump only worse next time. And Congress? Nothing will get done there. #
- My A-tier#
- First, a note about criteria. A candidate, if you want them to win, has to be a great campaigner. Think about the poor campaigners Democrats have nominated recently and you'll see a list of losers. The winners, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, were great at owning a crowd. Think about the moments they inspired you. So Corey Booker and Kamala Harris might have great ideas, and the support of other politicians, but both are stiff and not good at thinking on their feet. And then think about the guy they're running against, he lies shamelessly and he'll say anything for a laugh. So you have to exclude otherwise good candidates who would shrivel under Trump's abuse. Think of Jeb Bush as an example. Do you really think Gillibrand would do better than Jeb?#
With that preamble, here's my A-tier: Klobuchar, Inslee, Buttigieg. They're very different candidates. I love Klobuchar because she would bring as much of the country together as is possible in 2020, and she has a strong spine, a calm demeanor and would be a good president. And she's lucky (thinking of the snowstorm in Minneapolis when she announced, who did she have to pay to make that happen). The fact that the press is gunning for her makes me like her even more. We have to think bigger picture than who best reps our personal policy preferences. Our form of government is built on compromise. You can't get everything you want, and neither can your most despised opponent. That's good. We have to think about the America the next president will govern if we manage to get Trump out of office. I think Klobuchar is our best choice for that. Not Biden. Not any of the others, except... #- Inslee, who I've only learned about recently, is actually the perfect candidate for our times. He has the guts to say what our top issue is, climate change, and is running on that as his only issue, and he pulls it off. A pragmatic and visionary politician who's great at leadership. Not often we get a chance to vote for such a candidate. His interview on Maddow was fantastic. Watch it if you can find it. (Their archives are awful.) He gets that politics is marketing, has ways of explaining all of it, in simple words that reach into your heart. And the great thing about it is, everything he advocates is right on, it's what we need to do. I would love to see a ticket with Inslee and Klobuchar, I don't really care who's #1 and #2. #
- Buttigieg is smart and inspiring, thinks on his feet, has guts and also gets that politics requires positioning, memorable slogans that reach you at an emotional level, in other words, marketing. Like Klobuchar he comes from the middle of the country which is a big plus for 2020. #
- I would pay money to see any of these three debate Trump (and btw, I think Biden would do pretty well there too). Tom's A-tier would deal with Trump's mischief about as well as HRC did, which is pretty good, but not good enough. #
- The wild card#
Stacey Abrams. Wow would she shake things up. She could either be Al Sharpton 2.0 (he was actually a good candidate, but the press didn't take him seriously), or could come out on top. I'd pay lots of money to see her debate Trump. However there is a caveat. All the race hate that Obama inspired would re-double with a President Abrams. On the other hand, I guess this is a fight we're going to have, and I'm guessing she'd be the best to lead us. If she's running to raise her profile in advance of a Senate run in Georgia, then good for her. #- It's too early to worry about disruption in the field. And for sure Abrams would shake out airheads like Beto, Booker and Gillibrand. I would also pay to see them on the same debate stage. She'd mop the floor with them. #
- All I have to say about Beto#
- Beto is the Democratic equivalent of Marco Rubio. A candidate designed by central casting, with no reason to be there. #
- No to Joe#
- Joe Biden. I met him at the DNC in 2008. He's very charismatic, one of those politicians who make you feel like you're the only person who matters. He really is a good guy. But we have to win in 2020, and putting up someone who's even older than Trump loses us an advantage we need, the idea that we're looking to the future not to the past for our best. Biden's time has passed. It seems he is going to run. I think he'll add something to the field. And he deserves a chance to convince us we're wrong when we think he needs to join HRC, Bernie, Obama and Trump in retirement. #
Fixed a bug in feedBase where if you upload an OPML file to a newly created account, it would lose track of its address. The View my OPML command in the Main menu would be disabled. It now works as it was supposed to. ✓#
I use Signal to communicate with any of my friends who will use it. I like that it's encrypted, and that it's open source. I'm not feeding Mark Zuckerberg. That's a plus. But today it's not working on my Mac desktop. When I launch the app it gets stuck in a loop saying it's optimizing the application. There is a thread on the GitHub project about this, but the fixes are expressed in terms of a beta, which I don't think I'm running. According to the About window I'm running v1.22.0.#
Ken Sedgwick from Berkeley: "Recently I became aware of keybase. It is also open source and end-to-end encrypted. It adds some really nice features authenticating your identity on twitter, github, reddit, http etc. It also has encrypted groups with file sharing etc."#
What could we do to prevent the kind of usurpation and abandonment of open formats and protocols so common among the big tech companies? I think there are some valid approaches. Including this from a thread on Twitter yesterday. "Let's talk about it. I think it involves patents and trademarks. And the equivalent of the GPL for intellectual property. Prevent open shared creations from being used in silos. You can't import what you won't export. Something like that."#
I was reminded of a story from Living Videotext in the 80s. We had a rule that every desk had to have a PC on it, which was somewhat radical for the 80s. That included our receptionist, Tammy, who was like my officemate, since my room was adjacent to the front entrance. We put a Toshiba desktop on the table next to her desk, and put a copy of ThinkTank on it, for notetaking, but she never used it. That was allowed too, the computer just had to be there. turned on and ready to go. #- One day we got a confidential demo of a new product from Data General, the first battery powered PC-compatible laptop. This was a huge deal. I brought groups of all the employees in to show it to them, including of course Tammy.#
- When she saw it she said "I would use that computer." I was puzzled. "But Tammy that computer does exactly what your Toshiba does." She replied, but it doesn't have all those wires. #
- I learned something memorable there. People find computers intimidating because of all the wires. I don't blame them, I would too. That's the great thing about iPhones I guess. No wires.#
- PS: While we were testing the DG/One we were also testing the first Macintosh. Both used 3.5 inch floppy drives. But the formats weren't compatible. I tried to communicate to both companies, without violating the others' NDA that there was an opportunity to be compatible, but neither were interested. #
Yes, it's almost certainly a coincidence that Trump threatened his opposition (which includes a lot more than Democrats) with the force of the military, police and bike gangs the same day a massacre of Muslims was carried out in New Zealand, by a white terrorist, in Trump's name. Don't brush this aside. Trump's talk is more than a dog whistle. It's certain that fascists are present in the military and police. That's who he's talking to. #
It's just sinking in that Facebook announced a radical shift in what their product does, reorganized around their chat apps. Are they shutting down the discussion group functionality? What does this mean for the ability to post messages on your timeline and to follow other users? What about private groups? Is Facebook going to shut down those functions? If so, we're facing a hole in the net far bigger than what Google created when they withdrew Reader. I'd like some idea from Facebook what this means for the public writing function of Facebook? And if that's going to be phased out, will they work with open web developers to replace the functionality off Facebook's servers. Let's try to put back some of the life FB drew from the web. #It's not surprising that a journalist, Karl Bode, wants to tax Facebook to pay him to write ads for journalism.#
I got my coffee and breakfast sandwich at a nearby Manhattan Starbucks today. On the way out I noticed a Michael Jackson song was playing on the store's sound system. Since this is NYC, people didn't seem to notice. I think we're going to continue to listen to him, and I think that's right. The music doesn't belong to him, even if it's his voice, because it was so important in its time, to all of us. We all remember where we were when Thriller and Billie Jean were top hits. I was CEO of a growing software company headquartered on Charleston Road in Mountain View. I was driving a white BMW 535i with a kickass sound system that was wonderful to listen to Jackson on. I was young, the world was mine, I was creating the best stuff in the world, and he wrote the theme music. These days I don't listen to his music very much, but I did just load up the Thriller album on my iPhone to listen to on the drive I'm taking today. I expect to enjoy the feelings it brings up. I'm enjoying writing about it now. #
Two days of the Daily podcast have got me blowing my top. They have a scenario about the Mueller report that is unhinged, no other word for it. They need to be shaken, someone throw a pie in their faces, they need to read the Constitution, and think about what kind of country they want to live in, and then re-think their approach to the ongoing crisis that is the Trump presidency. #- First, the evidence that Trump committed a crime is overwhelming. Anyone with eyes and a mind can see it. Watch this interview with Lester Holt (which of course they have all seen at the NYT, but apparently have forgotten). Having seen that, how could you imagine Mueller would come back with a conclusion that Trump did not commit obstruction? He confessed to it, publicly. We all saw it. Not a minor crime, he has been covering up a stolen election where he was the beneficiary. #
- His confession was every bit as televised as the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. No one ever doubted that he had been murdered. They didn't need a special prosecutor. And no one imagined there would be a rebellion if a district attorney claimed he had been murdered. It was public, on TV, seen live by millions, just like Trump's confession.#
- So if Mueller comes back with what appears to be an impossible conclusion, the people who believe in the US as a rule-of-law country will have a tough decision. Do we immediately take to the streets? Do we have a general strike? Do we demand impeachment? They're so focused on potential retribution by Trump and his supporters, they forgot that most of us voted against Trump before the Lester Holt interview. We care about this country. We're not going to stand by and do nothing if the coverup extends to Mueller.#
- But of course Mueller is not going to come to that conclusion. This story is bullshit. The scenario isn't worth considering. If he does it's because someone is blackmailing him. They're holding his family hostage in Rumania. #
- Nadler by the way could not be blown off course by this nonsense. Thank goodness. He understands his job and is doing it, clearly and confidently, as if he believes in our system of government. I think that's a very basic quality we should expect from NYT reporters. #
I like the way they implemented TBL's first web browser written in JS presumably and running in a modern browser like Safari or Chrome. #- To go to a specific page, choose Open from full document reference in the Document menu and enter the URL. #
- I tried loading the home page of my blog in the app. It looks pretty good, but clicking links doesn't work at least in Chrome and Safari (the two browsers I tried).#
- I also tried a very early site that hasn't been rebuilt since 1995. It's spectacularly readable. What a thrill! 💥 #
- These sites, and the others I've tried, can all be read, which is testimony to the power of an unowned standard. As I've said elsewhere, if a big tech company owned the web, they would have deprecated its earlier forms long ago. Because no one owns it, forward compatibility is automatic. Of course that is very much at risk given Google's recent moves to annex the web. #
- It would also be interesting to have early versions of Mozilla and Netscape browsers to try out in this mode too. Not to shame existing sites, because why should they be concerned about working in ancient browsers. Rather to experience early websites as they were designed to be viewed, given the limits of browsers of the times. This would help historians and researchers, now and in the future. #
- Update: Ted Howard recommends oldweb.today. #
I dare say most Knicks fans will cheer the day James Dolan sells the Knicks. So the fan who urged Dolan, quite politely, to sell the team probably speaks for pretty much everyone in the Garden on any given night. He probably paid $1000 for his ticket to watch the Knicks get clobbered by the pathetic Sacramento Kings. For his advice to Dolan he's being banned from the Garden for life for being "rude." This is fucking NYC where people greet each other, with respect, by telling them to fuck off. I'm not kidding. I think it's long past time for Knicks fans to speak up. In the remaining nine home games this season, every game should be accompanied by universal chants of SELL THE TEAM, perhaps punctuated by ASSHOLE to give the punk (Dolan) a taste of non-trust-fund NY cultchuh. Then he can ban all 20K fans (Knicks games continue to sell out, amazingly) on the way out of the Garden. Repeat at the next game. #Yesterday I bought a house to go with my new car. (Heh actually it's the other way around.) It's a beautiful house in upstate New York, in the Catskills. It's a place where old hippies go when they want to get an advance look at heaven. I was looking for six months, considered a lot of options, and went for a place that's a bit daring, not conservative, that's what I always seem to do. As you might imagine, I'll have much more to share in the coming weeks and months. 💥#
- I appreciate what Elizabeth Warren is proposing re tech companies. But we need to do more, and do it very soon. They are destroying natural resources the way oil giants did before the government stepped in. However our political leaders, like most users, don’t understand.#
- The natural resource they are destroying is the World Wide Web, an open, unowned resource that has fostered the innovative environment that gave birth to Google and Facebook.#
- Google is acting as if it were the government, without any checks and balances, no oversight, no redress of grievances. They say they’re doing it for the good of the net, but we know they’re a huge corporation, and that’s not how it works.#
- Facebook is sucking the life out of the web, along with Medium (where Warren published her manifesto!). Some simple rules, if followed, would restore balance to the web ecosystem. But there are no rules here, so they run wild, and take whatever isn’t nailed down.#
- They’ve had a fantastic run, but it’s long past time for some rules, and consequences for not respecting that we all have ownership of the resource they are foreclosing on.#
Poll: According to a survey, a majority of Americans think Trump is a criminal. If you think he is, when did you realize it?#
I've been working on a project where I use a private Facebook group to gather info from experts, and a public blog to report on what I learn. It's proven a very good way to do (dare I say it) journalism, even though of course I have no training as a journalist. :-)#- So I have to say I'm only beginning to use Facebook to its full potential. Who knows what comes next. But for all the asshole things FB the company does, FB the network has a lot of value. I don't like it any more than others do, but if it's there I'm going to use it.#
- Discussing this with a friend today I said, yeah I bet there's Exxon gasoline in the tank of my car too.#
If you were going to design the ideal news reading environment, would it be a river of news like Twitter, or would you use the mailbox reader style of the now-defunct Google Reader? Or would you do something else entirely?#
- Last time I spoke to the news industry in the US, blogging was booming, there was no Twitter, and podcasting was still very much in bootstrap mode. So I'm thinking that what I propose now, while it's basically the same idea as I was promoting then, that we, the sources, the editors, and independent developers (not the big tech companies), work together to create a great open news publishing system (the basic vision of RSS, btw) might go over better than it did then. #
Back then, in the mid 00s, I guess they thought I was dreaming, it was unrealistic, or whatever, but now all that I was pitching has happened. It really happened. We have a SGD president. And Congress more and more is made of SGDers. But it's not happening in an open way, from my point of view because the news people won't listen, so things are faltering like crazy. Facebook, formed out of the DNA of Silicon Valley, has way too much power. News is shaped to suit their business interests, and not surprisingly this has choked off the air supply for the news business. That's how dominant tech companies work. I know this because before news collided with Big Tech, I was a developer in the ecosystems of several huge tech companies. My career appeared to be over at age 37 because there was no way out of the tight boxes they had created for us, poorly designed boxes, like networking on the Mac, for example. Able to do so much but so crippled through its API that developers couldn't access its power. #- I struggled against it, and lost. But then the web came along, and boom, we were growing again. I was sure then and am equally sure now that the news industry will meet the same fate as MS-DOS devs, Mac OS devs and then Netscape et al. There is an economic math at work here, and being in denial of it doesn't change it. (These were among the very first pieces I wrote when my blog started up in October 1994.)#
- I don't expect to be liked for saying all this, but I'll try to smile "smile" and be affable, and maybe a few people will listen and see (as I believe) that sources and news people working together, without the big tech companies, is the only way out of the mess. #
- Good morning sports fans!#
- I went skiing yesterday for the first time in let's say five years. The last time was at Deer Valley in Park City, Utah. I remember being in extreme pain and skiing badly, and not being happy. But this time I was less than 30 minutes from a nice easy ski area (or so I thought) in the Catskills, on the day after five inches had fallen overnight, and I sucked up my courage and went skiing. It was painful, but I took it slow, and at times even felt in charge. It's the feeling where your boots are where you express your will to move in this direction or that. The skis in front and back of the boot almost aren't there. You move your ass one way to turn the other. When you get in that zone it's fun. I played another little mental game, sometimes when I'm bike riding I pretend I'm skiing. This time I pretended I was bike riding. A new thing. Now this morning I'm sore from head to toe, but I feel gratified. I did it. I can still ski. #
- Another thing I learned is that the vertical drop on Catskills ski areas are pretty good. The big difference is elevation. Belleayre, where I was skiing yesterday has a base elevation of 2000 feet, compared to Deer Valley at 6500 feet. That's why the snow is so much nicer at the latter. It rains a bunch in the winter in the Catskills. Enough to make the snow wet sometimes and icy others. But yesterday it was perfect. The snow was the kind of stuff Utah is famous for. #
One of these days a thinker-about-journalism is going to have an epiphany, like this. Hey the crisis in journalism isn't just about me and other journalists. The people need and want journalism too. Maybe we should include them in the discussion about what to do?#
I recommend watching this 9-minute presentation by Sarah Kendzior in 2015 about her experience as a journalist in NYC in 2000 and how things changed. At the beginning, she was paid enough to rent an apartment in Astoria for $900 a month. By 2015, the same apartment rented for $2500 and her former job at the Daily News was now an internship that paid nothing. It's the first time I've heard the story told by someone who is not going on to say how tech needs to pay for the salaries of reporters. Her story is simple, compelling, and gives the problem of what to do to the listener. From here we can begin the discussion about how we proceed. Do we bet everything on finding a business model that returns journalism to the model that worked before the web? And if we do that, is that all we do? Is there no Plan B? No way to hedge against that not working? The truth is we need journalism. My job, as I see it, is to work on Plan B. Always have seen it that way. I'm not Craig Newmark or the Knights. I have no vast pile of money to pay to journalists to keep them employed. And even if I did, I think that's the wrong answer. I believe we need journalism to work. We all do. And I think it has to work better than it has worked before the web. My answer is not popular with journalists. They have a lot of power to shape the discussion, but journalism does not exist to serve them. It's for all of us. #
Mohammed Ali: "Looking at life from a different perspective makes you realize that it’s not the deer crossing the road, rather it’s the road that is crossing the forest."#
The Boston Celtics were so good last year, even though their two biggest stars were out for the playoffs, and this year they're struggling, even though they're both playing. More proof that teams are not arithmetic. There is such a thing as chemistry.#
I was asked how I feel about my new Subaru Forester. I love it. It's a sweet car all around, but the best thing about it is it fits me. For my whole life I've been driving cars that were too small. I'd have to contort myself to get in and out. Not the Forester.#
- Maybe it's time to do some work on Podcatch.com, to make it possible for anyone to turn a list of podcast feeds into a reverse chronologic river of new shows. Help the open network push back against the VC-backed silos.#
- The diff betw podcasts and Netflix, btw is this. Movies and TV shows are almost all licensed, because they are very expensive to produce. Podcasts are not expensive, yes I know some orgs spend a lot of money but I don't think that makes them better. And the infrastructure for movies is super expensive and the infrastructure for MP3s is not. #
- There are all kinds of reasons why podcasts will never need the kind of service that Netflix provides for video. But if we don't put up any open services, the lock-in might happen anyway.#
When I was a teen, buying tickets at Carnegie Hall, a nice old man said he lost his wallet. If I loaned him $20 he’d send me $50 when he got home to Connecticut. I gave him the money and my address. The old guy is Trump and his voters gave him the money.#
Adweek is a sneaky outfit. If you go there with an ad blocker on you get this scolding. So if you turn the ad blocker off, you still can't read the article. This is supposed to make you do what? Subscribe? Not really, I wonder if they user-tested this. #
Over on Twitter, a question -- "What do you do to feel more confident?" I have an answer, but it's sort of NSFW. So I'll post it here instead of there. Certain drugs in your bloodstream give you confidence. Not sure if this is true for women, but it is true for me, and I'd guess for other men. So when I'm feeling frail, or sad, or lacking direction, I stimulate my body to produce this drug. It's never failed. 💥#
- The web is showing me lots of furniture ads these days. Here's an example of an ad for a simple convertible couch that looks really nice imho.#
- Here's the thing I don't understand. How can you buy furniture online? I can't get a feel for it. This little couch is very cheap. It must feel cheap, right? But it doesn't look cheap.#
- How can people buy something like this without sitting on it first? How does this work? Plenty of people must buy this way or there wouldn't be so many businesses selling this way, I assume...#
Michael Calore: "Thanks, but I'll continue with my ad blocker turned on. No I don't want desktop notifications. No I don't want your newsletter. No I don't want to see this video. No I don't want to chat with the bot. <--- the first 10 seconds of every visit to your website."#
Cohen was such a compelling witness and had his tragic story so down, you could take a few excerpts of his testimony and turn it into a play. The best part was when he said the Repub inquisitor had no shame and how soon enough he would be in his Cohen's place.#
Yesterday's braintrust query has not yielded an answer. I've never seen such a thing where an HTTP request works over the net but doesn't work locally. This is a problem for an app like serverMonitor. It only seems to happen on Digital Ocean servers, which is where most of my servers are these days. I worked around the problem by putting serverMonitor on its own machine, a $5 per month minimal setup. It's a waste of money, amounting to $60 a year, it shouldn't be needed. But I can't keep my servers running without the serverMonitor app, so I'm paying the price until we figure out what the problem is. #My new Subaru has the ability for me to control it remotely. I can start the engine, or make it flash its lights and honk its horn. This is worrisome of course, because if I can do it, so can a hacker. But it's also fun, since it's in a parking garage in Manhattan, I could just start the engine and freak out the people who work there. Not that I would be the first to do that. (Note: I'm not going to do it.)#
They also offer features that allow the owner to set up their own authoritarian state (aka family).#
I remember as a college student in New Orleans I felt lost. I was pretty unhappy. I had a pain in my stomach most of the time. New Orleans was not a great choice for a kid from the northeast in the early 70s. New Orleans, partly an international city and partly the Deep South, was a really strange culture for a Queens kid, a culture that I never really adjusted to.#- Even so, when I called home every week from a pay phone in the student union, I'd always put on a happy face. I'd tell stories of how great everything was, even though the grades I was getting pretty much proved it wasn't. I was unhappy. Lonely. #
- But if I ever said anything about not being happy, my parents would explode, maybe they thought I was holding them responsible or something. I never could get them to explain why they reacted so explosively, if I tried to ask that they would really explode. They'd deny any wrong-doing, thinking I was accusing them of something. They'd probably turn it back on me, talk about something I did that was wrong. I learned it was easier to just make everything sound great. And that made my stomach ache even more. #
- It wasn't just my family. I was visiting a friend in another part of the US a few years ago, on my way through his home town to visit another friend in another town down the road. I was really drifting. I didn't have a job, nothing to do every day. What friends I had were generally pretty busy, and my family, well they were still as I described above, even though by then most of them were gone. So my friend asked me to tell him how was great everything was for me. An invitation to impersonal conversation. I thought for a moment and decided to tell the truth. Everything is kind of nothing, I said. He seemed to have no idea what to do. We're about the same age, in full adulthood, we had both dealt with considerable pain and struggle in our lives. But I broke protocol and told the truth. I'm pretty aimless. Could use some structure in my life. Not sure what I'm doing. No it's not great. #
- I think we're also dealing with that approach in our political culture. Sarah Kendzior explains it this way. "People have normalcy bias. They thought: 'If Manafort is really such a criminal, clearly someone would do something.' Well guess what? No one did anything and now we have a Russian asset as POTUS backed up by a transnational crime syndicate!"#
- In other words everything must be okay because it's always okay because we wouldn't know what to do if it's not. Not a good way to run a family, or friendships, or the world. Shit is always falling apart. It'd be better if we were truthful about that, imho.#