I ordered a new Tesla Model 3 today. #

Enes Kanter, an NBA player for the Boston Celtics, wrote a tweet saying the leader of China is a "brutal dictator." And of course China is shitting its pants. This is a big problem. They don't understand that there's a line they're not allowed to cross. In the US, Kanter has a right to his opinion. And the leader of China is a brutal dictator. And even if there's some question about it, Kanter is allowed to say what he thinks. This is a similar problem to the one they're having at Netflix with Dave Chappelle's show which I have not watched. I find him incredibly offensive. I'd love to have a private conversation with him where I ask what he's trying to accomplish. I find his stories humiliating. Is there some lesson I'm supposed to learn? If so, could we skip to that part. Anyway, I won't watch him. Employees at Netflix were offended too, and they want Netflix to remove him. That's just as wrong as what China is doing to pressure the NBA about Kanter. One more. The NYT fucked up when they fired Donald McNeil. I think even the assholes who forced him out would agree, as their coverage of Covid is now bullshit, where before McNeil was canned, it was stellar. They had no place trying to control what appears in the NYT. They just work there. It's a platform for speech, I think even the most jaded and cynical reporter at the NYT would agree with that. And just because you get a paycheck from the NYT, that doesn't empower you to control other people's speech, same as China and Netflix. I wrote yesterday that when Zuck rolls out his new thing next week, we'll find out if the journalists properly understand their role. There will be no fake news yet on their new platform for them to complain about. But I guarantee you it will restrict speech in an effort to appease the journalists. Will they see this, and call bullshit? Or will their vanity and narcissism prevail. Obviously they don't care about our speech, but will they mind being so visible about not honoring it?#

I'm watching Succession from the beginning, just to see how all the michegas got started. Seeing the first appearances of all the characters. The special relationship with Roman and Gerri is flirtatious from the first meeting. Cousin Greg plays a starring role in the first few episodes. And my friend Nick Denton is in the show, via proxy, only this version of Denton gets revenge over the rich capitalists who were tormenting him (no spoilers beyond that). Season 3 of Succession started last Sunday, it's just getting better all the time. One of the best TV series ever. #

BTW, I took the picture of Denton on his Wikipedia page, but don't seem to be credited. Is that fair? The picture was taken at a restaurant in Berkeley. #

I spent most of today grabbing bits of docs from the change notes outline for Drummer, while it was in development, and merging it with the already-existing docs. I can see we're going to need a new structure, because people aren't finding a lot of it, and there's more coming. Most of the newly public stuff is on the FAQs page. 💥#

I started a thread for people using Drummer with micro.blog. #

A longish podcast about the origins of blogging in the mid-90s and a lot more, and why it's time to return to the roots. We couldn't trust journalism then, and nothing has changed, and today the stakes are much higher. And there are reasons they don't tell the truth in journalism. It's the same reason no one got fired for buying IBM. #

Trump is the broken clock that's right twice a day. The people who are gushing about Powell are wrong. He owns the Iraq war. It was on his say-so that we accepted what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice were saying. He was their credibility. #

12-minute podcast about the new connection between micro.blog and Drummer. #

Here's the initial post I mentioned in the podcast. #

I hear Dems might lose in Virginia because of voter apathy. Right now the big issues are abortion, COVID, climate and fascism. That’s a pretty good set of issues. Run some freaking ads on social media. Never stop campaigning, every day of every year. #

I was pretty sure the Dodgers would crush the Braves, but wow, the Braves are up 2-0. Gotta love it. I'm sorry if you're a Dodgers fan, but I was born in Brooklyn and people such as myself don't forget. I also remember when Chase Utley broke the leg of the Mets shortstop during the 2015 playoffs. I also remember when I sat in scalped seats during the World Series in 1988, in the Dodgers wives' section and they tried to get us thrown out for rooting for the A's who won, btw. I really feel justified in hating the Dodgers, but honestly even if I wasn't, I would still hate them. 💥#

Meanwhile the NBA season starts tomorrow with a game between last year's champion, the Milwaukee Bucks, and a much-hyped superteam, the Brooklyn Nets. I will be rooting for the Bucks. Superteams suck. #

I think you have to be very young and very healthy to be medication-averse. There are some people who make it to old age without needing medical care. My mother was one of those people, she didn't get sick until she was in her 80s. Me, on the other hand, I would have died before I was 10 if it wasn't for health care and antibiotics. I had a ruptured appendix, mis-diagnosed by a doctor as a stomach ache. Okay so medicine fucks up, a lot. I have limited vision because two eye doctors gave me bad advice and did surgery, the first fucked my left eye and the second made it worse. My hearing is blown in my left ear, because a doctor used a device to clear out earwax that damaged my eardrum. So now loud noise, including loud music, makes my head vibrate in an unpleasant way. Too bad, I used to love loud music. But I am alive. My life having been saved twice by medicine now. So when medicine says "take this vaccine it'll make you safer against a horrible disease" -- I take it. Gladly. Why? Because I get how medicine works to an extent and am appreciative for the life I would not have had were it not for medicine. #

Drummer is really going. I'm trying to scope out in my mind now where I want it to go. With all the programmers around now, and maybe more on the way, I'm thinking bigger in terms of open source projects that could spin out of Drummer. #

In the back of my mind is the question of could we get a Linux version of Frontier going. That would send this project into the stratosphere, imho. Even after a year's work, Drummer is still a shadow of Frontier, which I use as my development platform for all of this. That's how I'm so productive. Invest as much time in tools as you do in product, and some years, invest all your time in tools. BTW, when I say a Linux version -- I mean an exact clone. The benchmark is whether it runs my software, not that it's a cool project. With these things it's the base of apps that matters. I think the language designers at big companies have lost the tune. The apps are what matters. That's why I program in JavaScript -- it's where all the code is. And that's why projects like Deno (A different arrangement of N O D and E) are such a bad idea. And deprecating the request verb? Only the most commonly called function the whole fricking language. Deprecated!! Someone has lost their sense of what matters. It's as if one day they decided the new Tappan Zee Bridge is too cool to drive cars over, so we'll require people to convert their cars so that the wheels are inside and the seats are outside. Always going backward is a good way to never get anywhere. BTW the Tappan Zee Bridge Is a beautiful bridge. It carries exactly the same traffic the old one did. #

The old Tappan Zee Bridge and the new one. #

I'm doing most of my writing these days in Drummer Land, but it's nice to remember that things I want to write about that don't belong there, still have a home, here.#

Car drivers suck. I usually ride my bike on the right edge of the road, making it easy for cars to pass. But if I have to make a left, I move left, and if a car approaches behind me, they have to momentarily slow. They always honk. I never carry a gun, but sometimes I wish I did (not really).#

I hope Manchin is getting paid more than $500K per year to sell out our last chance at having a planet that supports human life.#

I have a thing. If they're forecasting rain, showers or even a thunderstorm, and it's not raining when I want to go out for a ride, I go out anyway. Worst that can happen is I get soaked, I reason. And I usually make it home in time. And often as soon as I walk in the door it starts to pour. That's exactly what happened today. I'm feeling very oxygenated and strong, writing this post in my bike clothes, and outside it's pouring cats and dogs. Amazing.#

We know what we have to do -- we should be campaigning like everything is at stake (it is) instead we're hearing weak statements like this. It's not his fault, btw -- the national Democrats are looking in the wrong direction. I don't know how they can do it, but they are. Where is the Lincoln Project, why aren't they turning out ads like this, every day, about abortion rights? This is the big problem that the Democrats keep making. To them campaigns are about elections, but they're really about everything, 365 days a year. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. #

I've been doing a lot of support this last week. Noted that a lot of times the problem is web caching. Learn how to get your browser to do a hard reload. Always try that first. Once you have that mastered, it's amazing how much time you'll save.#

Today's Drummer change notes. #

The Giants lost. I'm so sorry. I knew however that it would end in an awful way when the batter, with two out in the bottom of the 9th with a runner on first, the Dodgers leading by one in what was the last game of the season for one of these teams, was Wilmer Flores. Mets fans remember him and love him like a son, because the Mets broke his heart and he didn't hide his feelings. So they didn't trade him in 2015 when the Mets went on to win the National League pennant, Flores was the team mascot, but they eventually did let him go, and he was on the forever to be remembered as the ill-fated Giants of 2021. When he stepped into the batter's box late last night I knew it would not end well. It didn't. In a very unsatisfactory way. Which I think was inevitable, probably the instant the Giants signed him. He is a man of great consequence.#

A friend asked if it was true that Spotify now owns podcasting. They read something in Wired that said they did. They're idiots. Or trying to get clicks. Or maybe they're idiots and they're trying to get clicks. Anyway -- no, Spotify does not own podcasting. As long as people say "subscribe where ever you get your podcasts" at the end of their podcast you have nothing to worry about. I'm not even going to link to the Wired article. #

See today's updates on the Drummer blog. I think we have the initial fires taken care of. Knock wood, praise Murphy, I am not a lawyer. Time to take a step back, catch my breath and figure out what the next steps are. In the meantime I'll be rooting for the Giants tonight.#

I've had this song in my head all day. So that makes it the song of the day I guess. #

I was talking with my friend Dave Jacobs last night and we got around to what should be done with Facebook. The only thing to do when a tech company gets too big, is to force them to unbundle. Bundling is how their size becomes a problem for us. So, for example, Google owning the dominant search engine and the dominant browser means they're inevitably going to turn the web into a perfect way to continue to own search. That's all that's going to matter to them. But the web has more to do. Google doesn't care. Facebook has also been successful at strangling the open web, forcing all writing on the net to flow through them. Or at least keeping it from flowing outside of them. If Facebook's fat ass wasn't squatting over the web, there would be a lot more movement. That might not solve the problem of Nazis ruining the world, but at least it gives the rest of us a chance to organize and solve the other vexing problems we have to deal with. RIght now all we're tasked with doing is making Zuck even richer, and even Zuck must be bored with that by now. The task for FB is to make it easy for the rest of us to run our own FB's and stay in touch with the people who use his FB. That's what happens when you get as big as they are. And it's far from an unsolvable problem. In fact they already have all the software written. #

To people who wanted to use a custom domain for their Drummer blogs, we now have an answer. There's a new head-level attribute for your blog.opml file that tells the CMS where the links should point. It works on my test blog for the clueless newbie. #

It's hard to imagine approval rating means anything in 2021. Even if you don't approve of Biden, are you really going to vote for Trump? It seems that even the Dems could market that you're better off not electing Hitler.#

One of the saddest things I've ever heard is Jeremy Lin saying "I think the NBA has given up on me." I would say to him, they had reasons to give up on you when you were 18 and every year since then. That's the way the world works. Assholes climb the ladder, and then think they can stop listening.#

I’ve called myself a developer, media hacker, showrunner, programmer, never a coder (ugh), maker of software snacks and shitty software (with bugs). Now I’m thinking of calling myself a software factor.#

This quote, which is part of what I wrote for The Future of Text, kind of says it all, everything I've discovered and built on in my career. I guess it's the answer to the question: "What's possible with computers that most people don't know about." They posted this in a tweet at the same time I was posting one about how we fixed the big problem with JavaScript in Drummer. I love JavaScript because it's the closest thing we have to a universal language. We have Marc Andreessen to thank for that (no sarcasm!). But there's no reason JS has to be hobbled by callback hell, promises, async/await, or whatever new hack they think up next. It's not hard to factor all that out. Every other language does it. There is absolutely no reason JavaScript has to leave all that mess visible to the programmer who wants it hidden. We proved that in Drummer. Now our implementation may not be fully baked, and at least one JS guru thinks it may be too slow, all that can be fixed. I want to write straight-line code and let the runtime handle the synchronization. That's worth trading off some speed for, but I don't see why it should require that. And it's the way comptuers are supposed to work, imho. If I didn't say anything most devs probably wouldn't even notice it's there, they still might not, that's how natural it feels. 🚀#

Observed in a middle-of-the-night tweet: Drummer is working. It’s possible finally we’re moving beyond blogging as a big production. Writing publicly can be fluid, fast. And not locked in a silo.#

A frequently asked question -- where is Drummer and how much does it cost? Hopefully the link answers the first question. The About page answers the second. "You can use Drummer at no cost." Further: "Much of the software is open source." Why is it so inexpensive and will it always be that way? I don't have big plans to take over the universe. I just want to make sure that outlining, web scripting and easy, fluid blogging are not lost arts. I have been very lucky in my career, so at this point, money, at least the kind of money it takes to operate Drummer, is not an issue. So let's have fun and see where it takes us! 💥#

There's a Drummer development blog with an RSS feed of course. #

The blog is an HTML rendering of the Change Notes outline. That link opens in Drummer, even if you're not logged in, and updates when there are new features or fixes. I would be honored if you leave that outline open in Drummer while you do your work, that way I can instantly inform you of new stuff. The file's icon will turn to green when there's news. It's the best channel I've had as a developer to users of my product. We've been using it in the Drummer test community. It really works. Instantly updating outlines are called instant outlines, btw. #

Today is the 27th anniversary of this blog. To celebrate, I'm opening up Drummer to the world. I hope you love it as much as I do. ❤️ #

And now, we can start talking about Drummer in concrete terms. Finally. The first thing you should try in Drummer is to write a few blog posts. Follow the first part of the Blogging howto, do the Hello World post. Then write some more, about whatever you like. Learn how to write publicly in Drummer first, in other words. It's the best demo we have right now, today, in Oct 2021, of the power of outlines for public writing. #

Another note and then I'll wait till tomorrow. In this case the Docs are a big part of the product. Back in February, I decided this time, rather than leave the docs as an afterthought, or hire someone else to write them, I would do it myself. For a couple of reasons. This could be the last big product ship I do in my career. Docs were always treated as an afterthought. I want to try, just once, making it not an afterthought. To let the docs have enough time to become something I'm proud of, and something I can invest more time in, like the software, after we ship. Instead of staying away from them, I wanted to reach in, and do it up. As a result I've done enough writing for a book this year, you'll see it not only in the docs linked into the sidebar of the docs pages, but also in the DocServer pages for each of the built-in scripting verbs. Lots and lots more to say. #

If you have a question about Drummer, this is where it goes. #

I'm shopping for a refrigerator. I've spent some time with various web interfaces, on Home Depot, Consumer Reports, Loew's, Best Buy, Amazon. They're all pretty bad, and could make a simple improvement that would completely eclipse the others. Here's the idea. I have a fixed space to put a fridge, and it's unusually narrow. I wish the designer of the house had left more space but it is what it is. Now, they make fridges in this shape, but they don't always have them in stock, esp now, when the supply chain is so disrupted. Here's the feature, it's a very Doc Searls-like thing, btw. I want to say hey Home Depot, this is the space I have. Let me know when you have a fridge I can buy that can be delivered within a couple of weeks. Instead they send me links to their website for refrigerators (at least they remembered that I'm shopping for one, so has Amazon) but they make me start over from scratch every time. That really sucks. Esp if they, at the moment, have a fridge that fits my very easy requirements. It would also be good for energy savings, because my current fridge is not running efficiently at all. #

Google is apparently preparing to re-enter the market for RSS readers. Before they do, shouldn’t they explain why they dumped RSS, hurting the cause enormously, and why anyone should trust them now. If you're on Twitter please RT so users understand, they are not our friends. #

Maybe other devs can make software without users, but not me. I need the feedback. I imagine it's like being a musician playing on a stage with no audience. Two users, in particular, have made the greatest contribution, Anton Zuiker and Ken Smith. Neither are devs. Anton works at Duke University as a research communication specialist. Ken is an English professor at Indiana University. Both are bloggers, both are intelligent, persevere, and put up with my demands (ahem). I need good bug reports, and they are learning, and the bugs are being fixed, and some have been quite vexing, as I've rewritten major parts of Drummer. I know it's been frustrating at times for them. I hope this is just the start of a wonderful new community. I know a bunch of other people are using Drummer, but Ken and Anton have been most actively helping the developer and that's very much appreciated. #

Anton wrote an ode to Drummer yesterday. #

Ken wanted to see how long it would take to write and publish a Drummer blog post. I'd love to see the same benchmark done with other blogging software. #

BTW, Anton got on my case about a bug in the Links tab on Scripting News not updating often enough. He noticed this because the same thing was happening on his Drummer blog. This got me off my ass to fix the problem. So if you're a fan of the Links tab here, rejoice -- it works about a million percent better thanks to Anton. This is the power of users who actually care, and pitch in to help. #

All the breakage I'm experiencing with HTTPS sites on my Macbook gave me an idea -- how about a proxy server for HTTPS sites, making them accessible over HTTP. Seems quite doable.#

Since Sunday is the 27th anniversary of blogging at scripting.com (or anywhere, for that matter), let's make that the day that the doors officially open for Drummer. There will still be things to do at that point, and that's ok. As they say software is a process. #

It's a fitting moment to flip the switch, because Drummer will open the doors for a new fluid style of blogging, based on outlining. To create a post, you click the big plus icon and start typing. When you're ready to publish, choose a menu command. No more slogging your way through Wordpress menus or a static site generator. It all happens in a second or two. And making a change to your blog is as easy as making the change in your outline, and publishing -- again -- just one command and a couple of seconds. Welcome to the world where tools for thought meets publishing. Blogging at the speed of thought. Where nothing gets in your way.#

If we default, the damage to the US economy will be permanent. It won't just be a recession, because we eventually get out of recessions. Poverty will explode. This time the US really will become a third world country. And it won't just cause chaos in the US, it'll be world wide. The media should start explaining what a reserve currency is, how the US dollar is basically the only one, and what advantages it gives us (they're huge). Increasing the debt limit costs us nothing, not even money because we can print the currency we repay our debt with. All the Repub hype about economics is, like everything else they say, a lie. The US isn't a family on a budget, it's the foundation on which the world economy runs. Look at it this way, if your family could repay its debt by writing numbers on a piece of paper, would you worry about how much you owe? That a simple version of the reality for the US and our dollar. #

Facebook is so powerful because Obama shut down his campaign after winning in 2008. The tech industry organized the people around its values, which they were very open about. The Dems could've done it. Any news org could have. I begged them to do it, publicly and privately. Everyone who's complaining now, news people and politicians, punted, had no idea what FB did was possible, didn't listen when they were told. If they wanted their values represented, they should have done it themselves. That's how this works.#

How about if we put together say $5 million offer to give to Sinema and Manchin if they vote for the big reconciliation package? If the bigco’s can bribe them, why not the people? It’ll end their careers of course, but at least they’ll have some money to soften the blow. #

Poll: Which should I get, Tesla or Peloton, neither or both?#

I started watching Maid on Netflix but it was too depressing, and that’s saying something after watching Squid Game straight through.#

Apple's Celebrating Steve Jobs video. Ten years since Steve Jobs died. Watching this video takes me back many years, to when we were young and full of hope and right in the middle of the whole thing. I had the same realization he had, that you can make the world conform to your ideas rather than the other way around. It may feel like things stay constant, but they're always changing. And the people who made the rules were no smarter or better than I am. I still hope to be able to pull a few more rabbits out of my hat. #

So if Facebook is evil, why isn’t Apple evil too, because there couldn’t have been a Facebook without the iPhone. The answer is neither is evil. They're both big companies, no better or worse than companies in other industries. #

I had this thought when I was driving into San Francisco in 1979 -- I bet I know a bunch of people here, but I have no way to find them. At some point between then and now, that vision was achieved. Add that to the list of things Facebook is other than Mark Z. I think it's time for people with a sense of the foundations Facebook is built on speak up and say what it represents. The press, given the benefit of the doubt, has no clue. #

The tech industry was and is so much about self-promotion, selfishness, that there's no way for people who know the history, how we got here, to explain in that context, what Facebook is, beyond all the things the press says about them, and the distilled evil they represent. They are a product of tech, and there was some good in the foundations we built for them to use. And that good is in their product, whether or not they know it, or anyone believes it. It's still there. And if you use it, you must know that. We have the ability to share deep ideas here, not just screaming "look at me" -- maybe this is the time for tech to grow up, before the generation that built the foundation for FB is gone.#

All of today's MLB games begin at approximately 3PM Eastern. Today is the last day of the regular season and there are all kinds of ties, some of which will be broken in today's games, and some will likely wait for a special game, that's how close the races are. A day of huge drama in baseball. #

What it feels like when you're sure you've found the bug that's been kicking your ass, and it turns out you actually did. #

Every time I read about how Biden's popularity is dropping, I wonder if there's any reality to this. If it were really a troubling sign that means in the next election, Americans will do what Germans did in 1932, we'll vote into power a fascist party, and open the US to concentration camps and mass exterminations of our own citizens. You may think this is wild, but before Covid the idea of 700K Americans dying of a disease that was largely preventable, because of disinformation from the government itself, that would have seemed like a paranoid delusion. I recorded a podcast in March 2020 to preserve that perspective. If the US actually does vote Repubs into power, we deserve what we get. #

The Links page on Scripting News should be more reliable and faster after the change I made in Radio3 today. #

Pet peeve: People talking about me in the past tense. Do me a favor, wait until it's true. #

I added Squid Game to the Bingeworthy database. My rating -- Good, after watching the first five episodes. I want to see how it turns out, it could become Loved, depending on what they do with the story, which so far is gripping.#

I'm watching Ted Lasso just to see how bad a TV show can be. Best line so far: "A sad white person is still a white person." Try changing that to black and see if it gets through the censors. Also a reporter that gives up his sources shouldn't be a reporter.#

Here's the big problem with Ted Lasso season 2. You have to like at least one character in a sitcom like Ted Lasso. That was the charm of season one, the star, the person the show is named after, was very likeable, and so were almost all of the others. Nice people, you cheer for them. This season you have to brace yourself because at any moment the formerly likeable Ted Lasso is going to do something supremely assholelike. I'm not joking. Come on. Anyway it's just like Apple to switch the user interface radically without any warning, just ask Gruber about where they moved the freaking tabs in the new version of Safari. It's conceivable that a character could reveal a very well hidden dark side and pull it off, but it's not very common and they totally don't pull it off. #

Metacritic was having problems with its SSL certificate, it's so bad that Google won't even let me read the site, even in "advanced" mode. "Your connection might not be private" they warn. Skirting the question: "private from whom?" Google can read every word no matter how much encryption there might be. The press loves to rail on Facebook, but I gotta say Google is dug in deeper than FB. And for some reason they escape the scrutiny of journalists.#

Welcome to October. The monthly ritual is done, the OPML for September is uploaded to the GitHub repo, where interested tools for thought geeks can use it to experiment with interop. There's over four years worth of archives there to play with. Also Drummer testers can see techniques that work in Old School blogs that they may not have seen. #

Facebook tells me today is Jake Savin's birthday. He's a young man, I don't know exactly how young. Jake worked at UserLand on Manila. Oct 1 was also my dear departed uncle's birthday, it would have been his 76th. I miss him every day. He would have loved the web, especially Wikipedia. Ken was always looking stuff up in the Information Please Almanac. Ken's mind would no doubt be blown that cannabis is legal in much of the US, at least the parts of the US you'd want to visit. He grew the best sinsimilla back in the 70s and 80s. I was trying to explain to a friend what that was, to no avail because all weed is seedless these days. Ken had an efficient way of killing off the male plants. He'd cover and uncover his seedlings with a blanket to simulate spring. The tiny baby plants would flower, and thus reveal their gender. Only the female plants produce the resin that humans like so much. 😀#

I don't want to jinx anything but Drummer is getting pretty solid. Nothing much will change when the product is available publicly, the process will continue, more fixes and features, more interop. I have a lot of little projects I want to do, all designed to build an open ecosystem of thought tools and their adjuncts. The first verison of Drummer will be a blogging tool and a scripting system. But there will be more of all of it. #

I watched the beginning of Jon Stewart's show on Apple TV. He says he doesn't look well, but he looks fine. I'm not sure this show is going to work. The old JS was confident, sassy even. Certainly never self-conscious. In charge. Comfortable.#

I was mentioned once on The Daily Show when Jon Stewart was hosting it. As a result I was invited to do a BloggerCon at Stanford, the third one. It was a good event. #

As someone who ran a social net long before Facebook booted up, I suspect what we're seeing on FB has less to do with the company and more to do with the scaling up of humanity on social nets. Journalism has made this about one person, Zuck, probably because that's how the journalism works. Kind of like Don Geiss on 30 Rock? #

TFT Hacker is looking for an open source JavaScript outliner, other than Concord. #

Today is the first day of real autumn weather in the Catskills. I just got back from my daily bike ride. I was fairly cold as I started, by the end I was all toasty, zesty and feisty. Feeling my Wheaties. #

Journalism is highly conflicted re Facebook, and they never look at their own culpability in weakening democracy. If it weren't so damned profitable for journalism, I doubt if we'd have had Trump. but you never read that in the NYT or WSJ, or even MSNBC.#

Other people get mystical about outliners, I prefer to stay pragmatic, to emphasize that the inspiration comes not from the tool, rather from the human being using the tool. #

I always feel great after a bike ride.#

I was thinking of adding a landline feature to my cable service. $12.99 a month sounds okay. But then I saw the fine print. Oy. I remember how hard it was to get rid of a feature last time around. I swear if only they'd stop scamming. I'm paying $8.99 a month to rent an Apple TV, even though I already had an Apple TV. Them's the rules they said. Can't get TV without paying the set top box tax. Oy oy. An Apple TV costs $169 on Amazon.#

What made me think of getting a landline? All of a sudden the phone app on my Pixel 4a refuses to connect over wifi, a requirement since there's no cell service here. Not having a reliable way to make a phone call, that's not okay. And the way I used to make calls on my computer with Google Hangouts, that doesn't work anymore either. They said use Google Chat now. OK, but where in Google Chat, on my desktop (which they have) can I make a phone call? Every one of these companies is missing part of the plan for how to build reliable service around the still relatively new (I guess) open network. They all still want to completely control you and soak you for services you don't want, and change things around so you never get to feel confident in using their software. How that helps them, I have no idea.#

It drives me crazy that the press makes everything about Dems and Repubs. Yes the Dems will be disappointed if the country disintegrates into civil war and becomes a zombie zone full of covid, but don't you get that other people will be unhappy too?#

We’re really governed by journalism. They are not transparent, not accountable to anyone, dishonest, corrupt, no moral compass. Controlled by oligarchs. Not subject to recall. We are powerless against them. We have few if any rights.#

Obviously the Repubs want to force Dems to nuke the filibuster to prevent default.#

Poll: Netflix or HBO Max?#

Netflix CEO takes a shot at HBO Max, which makes me think, I can't remember the last time I watched something on Netflix, and I watch HBO Max content all the time. I think they have a deeper and more intelligent base of stories than Netflix, which seems to be skewing toward mindless garbage, although HBO is trying to catch up in that area. #

Repubs are great at organizing. Dems just want money.#

Maybe it's time for someone to take over the Dems and get people organized. The rule-of-law people in the US still vastly outnumber the bombthrowers, at least that's what I hear from journalism.#

Background: "I expected that when the transition started, the Obama campaign website would turn into the White House website, and would continue to organize us."#

The basic problem (imho) is that we all have been raised to believe that getting ahead is the thing to do with our lives. It's deeply ingrained over many generations. We're still doing that, even though the three big crises we're going to be dealing with for the rest of our lives. demand a different impulse -- working together.#