I wrote a script that's loading all my
linkblog links going back to 2010 into a MySQL database. I'm almost getting good at this.
đź’Ą#
I listened to yesterday's
Cuomo briefing. Highly recommend it. Here's the
RSS feed. A story he tells: On TV companies are advertising Thanksgiving the normal way with people getting together for parties and big dinners. Lots of hugs. No masks or social distancing. This sends a message that we're back to normal. I know it's illogical, but with no one contradicting the message in as powerful a way (one or two news interviews with Dr Fauci isn't that powerful) people are relieved. But the density of virus now is very high. You might've gotten away with traveling in the summer when the virus was scarce, but now, it's everywhere, and the result is likely to be dramatic, awful, and the growth of the virus will make even more people get infected in December and January.
#BTW, at the supermarket this morning I saw a guy wearing one of those
plastic face shields. That's not protection for the virus. When you breathe, it goes around the shield and enters the environment with no filter. It's as if you weren't wearing a mask, because you're not.
#We're in a period where people who understand math and science have a survival advantage over people who don't. It's not even high math, btw -- just the kind of stuff you would have learned in high school, if you were paying attention. ;-)
#A flaw in the Constitution we're learning about now, the period between an incumbent losing a bid for re-election, and the inauguration of his successor is unnecessarily long. This is a period when the president, as we're finding out now, can do real damage to the country. I expect we're going to learn a lot about what's happening now when Trump leaves, or maybe
runs. The smart thing to do would be to remove the president as soon as the election outcome is known. And pending investigation he should be put in jail, no bail. A nice one, of course, but still we need to check out what he did.
#Season 4 of
The Crown is good. About half way through, at the beginning of the Australia trip, I gave up. I felt it was unwatchable. But I gave it another try. It's quite a story. And the characters are more interesting than I gave them credit for, and the acting is good. The last scene of the last episode is the best. Ties it up in a ribbon. No spoilers.
đź’Ą#An idea for a New Year's resolution. At least once a day agree with someone. Not silently. Say "I agree with you." No qualification, not "I agree with you, but.." It's jarring at first, then liberating. And the responses will surprise you.
#
This is why I don’t trust reviews from journos who Apple chooses to review their products. They overlook the flaws that make the machine unusable. And all the gushing over what? A new CPU? Please. I can't tell what CPU any machine is running, and neither can you, unless you open the
system About box. My main concern about the new Macs with the new CPU is if VMWare runs on them, and if I can run
Frontier in there. Otherwise forget it. I'll stick with my Intel iMac Pro I bought in 2017.
#
Increased air travel for the holiday is a form of national suicide. But on CNN they give a lame version of the story. Trying to find normalcy flying to a big family dinner on Thursday is crazy.
#
A friend told me the other day that
outliners are not good for planning software development work because they are "linear." I have no idea what that means. For me, the function of an outliner is to let me record ideas and events to flow to different places over time. Flow is the big word. It's the
fluidity of the outliner that makes the difference. I think of it as
text on rails. Paper and whiteboards are not so flexible because of limited space. Outlines have unlimited space. I can always add a note and the software automatically makes room. And I can move something without erasing it (a weakness of paper). Fluidity. Are outlines linear? Not in any obvious way, to me at least. A linear tool would force everything to be on one line, at one level. The point of an outline is that you can go infinitely deep. The work has
structure. A line is unstructured.
#As far as I know, no columnist or editorial board has called for the House and Senate to remove Trump before he can do more damage. There is a provision for it in the Constitution. Here's the
checklist.
#A big unreported problem in the political universe of the US is that our journalists are: 1. Cloistered. 2. Incurious. 3. Late.
#I'm about to give up on the holiday cards. All the sites are impossible to use. I want to put a picture on the front. A two-word message in front of the picture. Open the card, it says something like Happy Holidays, with my name, and enough room for me to write something. On the back it should
not have an ad for the company. It should be just as simple as I've said here. I shouldn't have to figure anything out. Four questions, click Submit to preview. Bing.
#
A vivid
picture of how ideas flow in our political world: "He spent most of his career as a bit of an outsider to Washington’s social world, his face pressed against the glass. The cool kids, including President Barack Obama, occasionally mocked him behind his back for his cornball earnestness." They're talking about Joe Biden, who is about to become our president. So maybe the idea of people inside and outside isn't serving us so well. I can't believe how long it takes our stupid political system to neutralize a
troll. If journalism weren't so walled-off from those of us with our faces "pressed against the glass" we might have avoided a lot of the still-unknown
damage carnage of the Trump years. Two consecutive uncool presidents. Maybe it's time to air things out a bit, open the window.
#Very quietly
Medium is no longer the online place-of-record, which is good, because as a money-losing tech startup they have no obligation to maintain a record. The bad news is that the
new incumbent is yet another tech startup. If we want the net to work, we need some institutions that are not-for-profit.
archive.org is a good backstop. But the web imho deserves more.
#Must-read article on the stupid coup that's happening right now in the US. The author makes a good point. There is a coup built into the Constitution in the delay between the election and inauguration. Too much time for a president who has been voted out to do damage. Previous presidents have limited the damage because they were goodfellas, and wanted to be seen by history as such. But now we have a mad king who doesn't give a shit what you think.
#
Has anyone considered that the Trumps want to delay the transition because the Bidens will then find out that they’ve gutted our government. And that there’s actually no plan for distributing the vaccine. In other words it's a coverup. Hoping some catastrophe comes along that makes it unnecessary to do a transition. Think about how long Trump has stalled the release of his tax returns.
#Trump is like a programmer you're getting ready to fire, who gets wind of it, and starts destroying your servers and backups. I've seen this actually happen. Do you wait for all the I's to get dotted and T's to get crossed, or do you
delete his credentials immediately?
#
I saw an ad on YouTube for a product I'm interested in, but didn't catch its name before they started showing me another ad.
#
As Thanksgiving is almost here, this is what I'm most thankful for. The functional parts of the American government held back the corrupt parts. We had a perfect national election. Squeaky clean. The Trumps are proving that. The courts, even judges appointed by Trump, are sticking to and enforcing the rule of law. Is that enough to keep the system going for a while longer? We don't know for sure, but right now, it looks like it is. And think of all the things that didn't hold. And the corruption that made that possible
#A graph I'd like to see. 1. Make a list of all the most influential journalists. 2. Put their names on a map. 3. If journo A reads journo B, then draw an arc with a pointer going from A to B. That's it. I'd just like to see who influences who.
#Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed
says that because the NYT is behind a paywall and therefore only accessible to rich people, it can no longer be considered
The Paper of Record.
#An
interesting idea on Twitter,
addressed to future generations: "So misinformation was free and facts were hidden behind a pay wall? And you all wondered why democracy was brought down by masses peddling conspiracy theories?" It's a fun theory but it's not true. Buzzfeed, Axios, CNN and many others, are not behind paywalls, and are just as reputable as the ones that are.
#BTW, I almost never cite Buzzfeed, which is something I should try to correct. But it doesn't show up in my Google news searches. Or on Memeorandum. Or in other people's tweets. It isn't very visible in my world.
#As a reader I see the web as a single entity, I don't feel the boundaries that news orgs try to impose. Even when I pay to go through them. News was
unbundled a long time ago. It interferes with the flow, I want interesting ideas to circulate, to stimulate other ideas. I miss a lot of stuff that I shouldn't miss, not because I'm poor or can't pay, but because I don't want to subscribe, I don't want a relationship, I just want to read the story.
#I once had a script that gave me a breakdown of pubs I cite in my linkblog. I wonder what happened to it? Hmmm.
#
Here's the deal on when we'll get back to "normal." If you or someone you love gets the virus, probably never. Because no one knows what the lingering effects are. We know some people are devastated by the symptoms. And we don't know if people who appeared to have been symptomless really were, or people who appear to have recovered really are recovered. This is a new disease. Not much is known about it. It's weird and different. If you roll the dice, the cost of a losing bet is unknown. One Thanksgiving dinner of apparent normalcy isn't worth risking the rest of your life being crippled, disabled or in pain, or seeing someone you care about similarly affected.
#I'd like more randomness to the NBA rosters. Each year, after the draft: 1. Create a deck of cards with the images of each NBA player. 2. Throw away 2/3 of the deck at random. 3. Arrange the teams around a table. 4. Deal the cards out as if it were a card game.
#
- I've watched Maddow the last two nights. It's great that she's back. In quarantine because her partner, Susan, got Covid and Maddow was exposed. So she did an incredible job of setting up a studio at home, by herself, yet she was so apologetic for the lack of makeup and the homeyness of the surroundings. I wanted to ask her to stop. We don't tune in her show for the makeup or the studio.#
- She should take care of herself, because she's as essential to our sanity (speaking mostly for myself) as her partner is to her (as she explained on Thursday night so eloquently). She doesn't know it apparently, but a lot of us rely in her continued presence as a signal that we're still ourselves, no matter what we're asked to accept.#
- I've been hearing from readers of my nightly email that sounds a lot like what I just said about Maddow. It's kind of a heartbeat. Not so important whether we agree or not, just the continued presence of the email that arrives in the minute after midnight Eastern time, every day, as long as my heart is beating. That means something to people, and that means a lot to me. #
- My new desk#
- I've been planning on re-arranging my office for the last few weeks, bought a new office chair, cleared a larger space than I was using previously -- re-purposing the old desk I used for writing, at the one-bedroom Manhattan apartment for most of the 2010's. It has enough room for two monitors. And now I'm using it. It feels weird. Like I'm writing from a foreign country. Maybe as Maddow feels, being separated from her team, trying to believe her home office is just as powerful as the one in Manhattan. #
- My new desktop, like hers, is in the country. Funny thing is, I always assumed Maddow was coming, during the pandemic, from her home in the Berkshires. I guess she was still commuting to the city to do her show? These days you just don't know. #
- We have limits#
- Anyway, after watching last night's Maddow, the overwhelming thought is that we've way gone too far in tolerating the Republicans. It isn't enough to replace them in the White House, there has to be punishment for what they're doing. If Biden won't do it, we must do it. #
- The humiliation that this country is suffering at Republican hands is unacceptable. Where is American pride? #
- We, the people, elected a new president. It's a fact. #
- Yet a minority party, with no honor, no sense of American pride, not an molecule of humility, stands in the way of our president starting to do our work, the work we chose him to do. Nothing trivial, just saving our fucking lives. For crying out loud. #
- A dream and a plan#
- I dream that at some moment the Repubs will snap to their senses and realize the awful thing they're doing to this country that treated them so well and ask what they can do. #
- For that eventuality I have prepared a plan.#
- An instant impeachment. One article. He tried to subvert the will of the people expressed in an election. Attach a few news articles about his meeting with Michigan legislators to try to bribe them.#
- A two-hour trial in the Senate followed by a unanimous vote to remove him from office with instructions to the Secret Service to arrest him immediately.#
- Mike Pence takes the oath of office.#
- The transition to the Biden Administration begins, with full cooperation from the Pence Administration. The GSA head, Emily Murphy, writes the letter. If she won't, she's fired immediatley, and if her replacement won't write the letter, she will be fired until someone in the GSA chain of command will legally authorize the transition.#
- Mitch McConnell is censured and removed from Congress. The governor of Kentucky appoints someone to finish his term. Don't miss that the Repubs in Congress have been complicit in Trump's attempt to subvert the election. McConnell is getting off easy. He gets to go home and count his money and ponder how lucky he is he wasn't tried and punished for his crimes. #
- Trump is held, no bail, until charges can be brought by the incoming Attorney General. (I love the idea of Merrick Garland being the new AG. It has symmetry.) #
- Pence, we hope, will follow the advice of scientists to the letter during the transition, and stop the growth of the virus now. Have you seen the video of the airport in Phoenix? That must be happening all over the country. The air travel system must be shut down now, as it was in the aftermath of 9/11. It's carrying something much more lethal than terrorists. We need to care for the sick, and stop creating more sickness, and get ready for distribution of the vaccine. #
- If the Trump supporters take to the streets with guns, then they will be arrested and jailed pending trial. We simply can't tolerate people using force to make the majority do what they want. #
- We are the United States of America, no one pushes us around. #
FCTRY action figure collection.
#
Edward Norton on Twitter on what Trump is really doing. I agree, and very well put. Short version. Trump is repeatedly stinking up the room, hoping to negotiate a deal where he is able to walk away, rich and with his head held high (in his own
Trumpolini style), to live to fight another day. Norton says to call his bluff. Let him do his schtick and then say, no deal. BTW, every business and industry has one person who behaves so badly that they invariably get their way, because eventually no one wants to go as low as they are willing to go. I'm not going to name names, except Trump is the best at "stinking up the room." He keeps doing it until you give up. McConnell is pretty good too. Stinking up the room is a super advanced form of trolling.
#The truly significant developments, when viewed in hindsight, are almost never the ones that were hyped at the time of their introduction. There are exceptions, the IBM PC and Mac, both created important platforms, were quick hits. But usually the impactful products develop over time, maybe that's because to be a great product you need a quiet period to adapt to how people use your product. Right now I'm thinking about the way ISPs are gradually moving away from the server model to the app model, as pioneered by Heroku. I still plan to look at Digital Ocean's new offering. I have used
Glitch and of course
Heroku. Glitch is free, can't beat that price, but you wonder if it's just an introductory offer? Heroku's per-app price was way too high, made it diseconomic, which is unfortunate because it was so much more rational a model than managing your own servers, which is what I've been doing since switching off Heroku. All this is part of a larger thread that maybe it's time to move away from static sites because net apps are being successfully commoditized.
#
I walked into a store the other day and was greeted by a smiling young woman. I smiled back, then she said "Good morning sir." Oy. I took a deep breath and said, after a little thought, "Good morning ma'am." Her face looked like I imagined my face did. I looked at her inquisitively (it's amazing how much conversation is wordless). She said she didn't like to feel so old. I said that's how I feel. (I then quoted my father when he was my current age.) "Inside I still feel 19," I said. She smiled. I smiled. She said "Well then Good morning dude." I laughed and said "Good morning dude," and we went on with our business, having brought a little cheer to each other, I hope. She meant well. But inside the feelings are complex. I know that she and I are of different generations. When I was 40 years younger I could've flirted with her, but now I can't. But I can still dream.
❤️#BTW, in the South it's a sign of respect for any man to call any woman ma'am, even one who is a lot younger, maybe even
especially if she's younger. It's a sign of respect for the power and authority of women. I always liked that part of Southern culture. (I should be more specific,
white Southern culture.)
#
As the secretaries of state in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin do their jobs, it's remarkable that the US is still the US when it comes to elections. We wondered how deep the corruption went. We could find no limit in Repubs in DC. But the states held. We have to root the corruption out. To do that Georgia must deliver again. It's down to Stacey Abrams vs Mitch McConnell.
#I gave another $100 to
FairFight to support the Democrats in the January 5 runoff in Georgia.
#
Joe Trippi taught me something about politics. I said we, the people of the US, should buy ads in Georgia, asking the voters there to save our lives and vote for the Democratic candidates on
Jan 5. I was
very passionate about it, but was only looking at it from my perspective. Here's what Trippi said: "The South generally doesn't take well to people from 'outside' trying to influence them." That was generous, because
no one takes well to that. It may be why
Susan Collins was re-elected in Maine even though Democrats from the rest of the country poured huge money into defeating her. It's also why
James Clyburn single-handedly got the nomination for President-elect Biden -- people in South Carolina listen to and trust him. It's also why
Pete Buttigieg is a huge hit on Fox. They like a nice young
white man even if what he says would be seen as socialism if it came from an outsider (ie person of color). You can't blame people for bonding with people who look like they do. It's part of who we are, not just Americans, not just whites, but everyone. It's also true that, as
Elissa Slotkin pointed out, you can't win when you appear to be talking down to people, and an outsider automatically appears that way.
#What's the upshot of all this? Well, some part of the Trump electorate could probably be peeled off with better
marketing to white people by the Democratic Party. Have someone who speaks their language, and looks like them, explain each thing the party wants to do in Congress next year. Respect them. Talk straight, but use white person talk and do it where they live, in the middle of the country. What matters even more than what you say is how you say it and where you say it from.
#Where's a good place to get customized holiday greeting cards?
#An
article on Axios points out something obvious that I missed. Trump, by litigating his misery over the election, is ratifying Biden's win, over and over.
#
The Incredible Sulk.
#
As I was writing the
bit below about Emily Murphy,
CNN published this story about her and the transition she's holding up, and why. She says she didn't sign up for this, but that's the way it goes sometimes. She's being called on to save her country. This is about as must-read as anything I've ever seen.
#I'd like to see a graph of all the people I follow, to see how many are connected to Trump, via a "follows" arc. I'd like to be able to disconnect from all of them. I'd like to exist in a Twitterverse that is completely disconnected from Trump. Even better if it's dynamic, so I can automatically re-follow them once they disconnect from Trump.
#
Chess is on my mind. If we were playing chess with Trump, he hasn't knocked over his king yet, and he's right not to, given the rules he plays by, he still has a shot at winning. Losing as we know is a terrible
personal outcome for him, not just the ego stuff, but practically speaking, he's been caught doing crimes that you go to jail for. Ask
Michael Cohen. Most of us would accept the outcome, concede, show up for trial -- but not Trump. So even after the Electoral College votes, until he actually leaves the White House, it isn't over.
#Why is no one talking about
Emily Murphy, administrator of the
GSA. She's the single government official who could turn this situation around, yet she
refuses. Why haven't there been any interviews? She has more power in this matter than any governor, or secretary of state, or McConnell even. Later it won't be so clear, once this situation has
festered, but right now she alone has the power to turn the corner. I suggested on Twitter the other day we send her flowers with cards that say "Write the letter."
#Maybe Thanksgiving Day on Twitter should be for posting and RTing pictures of people who died from Covid in 2020.
#Idea for a science fiction story. It turns out that
Bic lighters are an alien species sent to infiltrate our civilization and return spy data to their home planet, many light years away.
#I'm about 1/2 through the current season of
The Crown. I think Claire Foy's queen with Lithgow as Churchill was the best combo. Here's a
reminder of how wonderful she is. The current season so far is good, a must-watch, but not as compelling as previous seasons.
#
Iconic Rockwell
painting, updated for 2020.
#
Podcast:
Marketing to White People. If Democrats marketed to white people, just a little, they could pick up another ten percent, because they don’t do any now. That could make a big diff. I've been wanting to talk about this for most of 2020, but wanted to wait for things to settle down a bit. It worked, we voted Trump out, but we can do much better, and be much stronger. This is a 20-minute manifesto, a plea, an idea that's worth listening to imho. PS: The rep I was thinking about was
Elissa Slotkin.
#
I wish
Amazon had come along
with their
online drug store earlier so I could have switched to
it. Previously I had used
CVS, and their online service was awful, and their in person service was spotty. I expect Amazon's drug store will work work like Amazon, i.e. as you would expect given that it's 2020 not 1990. I wish Amazon would go into competition with banks, so I could do my checking with them. I have an Apple credit card, btw -- and it works way better than the ones the banks issue. Perfectly integrated with my iPhone. And I use Google Fi, again, way better than T-Mobile et al. I don't know why the banks, drug stores, airlines, credit cards, you name it, can't just copy the online services, but clearly they can't.
#
On March 5, I wiped the home page of my blog, replaced with: "A deadly virus is taking over the world and the United States doesn't have a government." It's still true.
#
Today's podcast listen:
The Daily on the split in the Democratic Party. I think both sides are missing the obvious answer. Study the people who are voting for the Repubs. Listen. Think. The Democrats are rightly recognizing the minorities, but this may be misinterpreted by whites, esp white men. Correct that, not by trying to correct the voters, but correct the way you explain the party. The Democrats implement programs that are good for
people regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, age. The Repubs are poison for the people. How hard could it be to come up with a simple way of saying that truth? I agree that
Defund The Police was a terrible slogan, but it wasn't a Democratic slogan. Yes I know what it's supposed to mean,
but if the slogan were any good you wouldn't have to explain it. It's ripe for the Repubs. Stop leading with your chin. No one in their right mind is willing to get rid of the police. I want someone to come when I need help. Defund is the wrong word.
#I have another related question. Why didn't the Dems run ads saying that the Repubs aren't doing their jobs, starting with the president. He's a bum. He doesn't show up for work. Hasn't had a briefing in months. McConnell lets the legislation pile up on his desk. They're basically
welfare queens. I remember the Repubs campaigning about that, effectively. Why would we pay for people who do nothing for us?
#Another question. Why don't the Democrats make an issue out of everyone voting. We learned in the aftermath of the Nov 3 election that the Republican Secretaries of State are honorable people. If the Dems put that idea out there -- that the Repubs are abusing the rest of us by trying to stop us from voiting, well it's an American value that everyone gets to vote, it doesn't matter what race they are or how much money they have (an appeal to white voters, btw). Everyone has a say. That's American as apple pie. Why don't the Repubs get on board with that? A nice way to push a wedge into the Repub voting block.
If poor whites start voting against Repubs, you better believe they're going to disenfranchise your ass. #
Nate Silver put together a
quick and dirty table with the share of each state's population ever infected with Covid. 39% of people in North Dakota have been infected. In New York, 18%, California 13%.
#People are tweeting that Substack is building its own version of Google Reader. I'd be surprised. Imho more likely they're creating a place to read stories published on Substack, as they are published. I'd bet this is more like the reading function in Medium than Google Reader.
#
I pay $65 a month for
YouTube TV, which I use to watch CNN and MSNBC for a couple of hours each night. I wonder if there's a less expensive way to get these services. Seems like a lot of money, considering both channels have ads.
#Right now there are only two stories about Trump that matter imho. 1. How he is leaving and when. 2. What damage will he do before he leaves. Anything else is just him trying to cling to a dream that is over.
#If you haven't listened to the
1619 podcast, I highly recommend it. It's a whole new way to view American history, compared to what we were taught in school when I grew up. Five episodes.
#
Has any news org written a story about what would happen if January 20 comes and Trump refuses to leave the White House. Not speculation, ie not whether it will or will not happen, but attempt to gather facts about it. Request an interview with the head of the Secret Service, for example. Seems to me this at least rises to the level of the famous
"I'm in control here" press conference with
Alexander Haig in the Reagan administration. There was a West Wing
episode about this, btw, when the president is shot. Danny wants to know who was in charge then. CJ can't figure it out. Anyway what happens on January 21 when parts of the government are still responding to orders from Trump. Get ready because that's a possibility. That should be on the op-ed pages of every news org, now.
#I started a
thread on yesterday's contemplation of a preprocessor for JavaScript that would allow us to define functions that perform asynchronous operations yet be called as if it were synchronous. I think this can be accomplished with a preprocessor. I want a scripting language for my
JS outliner, that's the motivation.
#
Today's must-listen podcast:
Radio Open Source. A review of the election with eight regular guests. Take-away: Dems need candidates that working class people connect with.
#Poll: Are you going to a Thanksgiving dinner with more than your immediate family?
#
Thread: Suppose one were to contemplate a new scripting language that was minimally different from JavaScript, was implemented by a pre-processor (ie it generated JavaScript code), that could handle any JavaScript code or data structure, but -- allowed you to implement asynchronous functions that were called synchronously, both in the built-in functions and developer-defined functions, without using special syntax such as promises or await/async to invoke them. Has anyone attempted that? Delivered?
#
- We've been aware since long before the election that the Repubs could play games with the Electoral College, appointing a group of Electors in states Biden won with Republican legislatures, who do not vote according to the popular vote. This was contemplated in Florida in 2000 by its Republican legislature, but was made unnecessary by the Supreme Court decision. #
- Then I heard Trippi's theory, that McConnell et al are using Trump to support the Republican candidates in the Georgia runoff on January 5. I found it convincing, but the theory doesn't say what happens after that. What if the Electoral College (December 14, a couple of weeks before January 5) elects Biden? Hard to imagine Trump campaigning too enthusiastically for Loeffler and Perdue. #
- Then this Guardian article I read last night left me convinced that the Repubs should be considered seriously as trying to keep Trump in power through Electoral College shenanigans. #
- And finally this tweet from AP Washington bureau chief, Julie Pace, that says "GOP leaders in four critical states won by Biden say they won’t participate in a legally dubious scheme to flip electors to Trump. Their comments effectively shut down a half-baked plot some Republicans floated as a last chance to keep Trump in office." #
- It's still not clear exactly how and who will remove Trump from the White House if he doesn't go voluntarily on January 20. #
- Meanwhile it couldn't hurt to have peaceful candlelight vigils in the Republican state capitals: Madison, Lansing, Harrisburg, Atlanta, Phoenix. #
Signage outside Trump's White House.
#- The "Battle for the White House" is over folks. To the extent there is a battle, it's a battle for the Constitution, the rule of law, democracy, the United States, all of our war dead going back to the Revolution. If there's a battle that's what it's about.#
- It will soon be time to ask the Secret Service what they do if on January 20th, the previous president refuses to leave the White House. They will probably say they can't comment on that. But they have to. That's what it's come down to. Who will they take orders from? #
This week's
Joe Trippi podcast is a must-listen. He says the Senate Republicans are playing Trump. They need him to win the
Georgia runoffs on January 5. Trippi has experience managing (and winning) the
Doug Jones special election in Alabama in 2017 and thinks turnout in the Georgia runoff may be similar (ie much lower than on November 3). Democratic turnout will be managed ably by
Stacey Abrams. Trippi says the
letter Loeffler and Perdue sent to the Georgia secretary of state demanding he resign was primarily for Trump, look boss we're carrying your water, come campaign for us! Once the runoff is done, the story goes, they will dump Trump and turn to the Biden inauguration. If they lose in Georgia, they become the minority party, and McConnell et al don't want that. Pretty amazing how depraved these Republican senators are, if Trippi is right, and I suspect he is. All for two years in the majority, obstructing the recovery from the virus.
#I asked Michael Hunt about the status of the
Woodstock Library bond issue. "Down by 80 votes but over 1000 absentees to count by November 17. We won early voting by 10 points (55% to 45%) but got clobbered on Election Day. I think absentees could look like early voting. It will be a nailbiter but it ain’t over."
#
Elissa Slotkin (D-MI): "You know, the one thing I will say about Donald Trump. He doesn’t talk down to anybody. He is who he is, but he doesn’t talk down to anyone. And I think that there is a certain voter out there because of that who identifies with him and appreciates him."
#The reason to vote Democratic in Georgia in the runoff is to save your life.
#Surprising to learn the Republican Party is not corrupt to the core. Republican Secretaries of State at least
sound like high integrity professionals who are committed to a full and accurate vote. And it's wonderful to know that voting still works in the USA.
#Tommy Williams: "Even here in Montana, where the vote went red up and down the board for probably the first time ever, our Secretary of State,
Corey Stapleton, told President Trump to concede on Nov 7."
#
Before you hit Send on a reply, check what you said, and if you’re talking down to the other person, think again.
#
Trump is firing the people who protect the country. I wonder if that's because some other country is going to attack us.
#
The difference in quality between the two groups of
Georgia senate candidates, Dem and Repub are like night and day. The Dems will use the power of the US government to be sure the Georgians get through the winter of the pandemic in as good shape as possible. The Repubs will not. It's really simple. And when they save the lives of thousands of Georgians, they will also be saving the lives of many thousands of people in every other state of the union. That's power! Thanks in advance to Georgia for helping us out. We won't forget.
#Rosental: "As a journalist, I covered many coups in Latin America. If I were still there and saw a president who doesn't accept his defeat in a legitimate election, fires the head of the military who refuses to use troops against protesters, I would conclude that a coup d'Ă©tat was imminent."
#
I have plenty of ways to get exercise in the summer, but winter has been a challenge. I don't like riding a stationary bike, I tried mounting my street bike on a Zwift device, and yuk, I didn't like the simulated racing, I don't ride competitively. And the street scenes were primitive. Unlike my regular real-world rides I always was impatient for the exercise to be over. When I'm riding outdoors, I feel very differently.#- A friend suggested getting a rowing machine, and somehow that seemed better. But when I looked into the devices I started feeling it might be the same. #
- We just had five unusual warm November days, I rode all of them, outdoors, and was thinking that the difference may be the feel of the ride. Real bike rides you almost never are straight up and down. You lean one way then another, and shift your weight to different sides. Maybe that's the diff. Then I saw an ad for this Bowflex bike that leans! It looks in the video like it may be more fun to ride. #
- I posted a bit about this on Twitter. Megan McCarthy sent a pointer to a review of the category and a specific bike I asked about. I might get a Peloton, but it seems I might not have it until January. I'd like to start riding daily asap. But I'm concerned I'm going to spend a lot more money and still not have something I want to use. #
A few days ago a user asked that LO2 support "includes." I did a little investigating, and found that it already supports them. So I thought it might be a good idea to explain what they are and how they work, maybe other people will find it interesting and/or useful. #- The idea comes from the C programming language. It had the ability to include one file in another. When you included a file, it was as if its text was present in the file doing the including. The C compiler couldn't tell the difference. #
- This is what a C include statement looks like. #
- In an outliner it works similarly. A node is an include if it has a type attribute with the value include, and a url attribute that points to an OPML file with the outline to be included. #
- When you expand an include in LO2, the text from the included outline is expanded below the node. You can edit the text, but none of the edits will be saved to the included file. You should think of it as read-only, even though LO2 doesn't enforce that. #
- Here's an outline that opens in LO2 that illustrates. #
A Twitter thread from
Timothy Snyder. He says we should be out in the street protesting now. "Coups are defeated quickly or not at all. While they take place we are meant to look away, as many of us are doing. When they are complete we are powerless. In an authoritarian situation, the election is only round one. You don't win by winning round one. Peaceful demonstrations after elections are necessary for transitions away from authoritarianism, as in Poland in 1989, Serbia in 1999, or Belarus right now."
#CNN: "As Trump mounts a
fierce battle to remain in office and refuses to concede the election he lost, he has shown little interest in the work of being President."
#
Trump et al had months to prepare for this coup, most of us can't even believe it's happening.
#The Trumps aren't going to court to win, they're trying to create a hierarchy of grievances. First there was the cheating, so they took it to the courts but that was rigged too.
#I just heard a rumor that Alec Baldwin is refusing to leave SNL.
#Did you get a chance to try the
Similar Users command in
BingeWorthy? It came out in the middle of the election frenzy. When you choose the command, BingeWorthy looks through the database and finds people who like similar programs to you. You may get ideas by looking at their picks. Here's a
screen shot of what it shows me.
#More exploration into the world of Fargo blogging. Here's the
OPML source for
Kim Parker's blog. Kim Parker is a fictitious person, a support person at a tech company called
Bloatware. Her blog was the example I used in the docs for Fargo's CMS. Not sure why I used #attributes instead of using outline attributes, which are hidden and out of the way. But there you have it. A 2013 blogging system, does it differently than Old School. It's more like Frontier's CMS.
#
On Sunday I said Joe should
throw an elbow. He did, at least three.
Netanyahu,
MBS and
ErdoÄźan didn't endorse his victory without getting something in return. This is where we're glad it's Biden that's President-elect, with lots of experience. He knows where the levers of power are in the US and internationally, he has credibility that other Democrats didn't.
#Lawyers: Which states don’t require the electors chosen by the state legislature to be consistent with the vote of the people? Which of these states have Repub legislatures that voted for Biden?
#How about a social network where you choose people who lead you and people you peer with. Not for discussion, for organizing.
#I gave $100 to
FairFight to elect Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff and help Democrats take back the Senate.
#A two podcast Tuesday. Today's
Daily podcast on how polling went wrong in 2016 and 2020.
Lincoln Project on what's next, and how deeply dug in the Trumps are. We still live in their country.
#
A tyrant autocrat is elected POTUS because a lot of people voted for a third party candidate or thought the other candidate was a shoe-in so they didn't bother to vote at all. #- The people endured the four years, even though they suffered and many died, the country was looted and its government was dismantled.#
- But! Once the four years was up they voted the tyrant out, replacing him with a solid ethical president and vice president. The citizens relaxed and partied and got back to their business of staying alive during a raging pandemic.#
- But! While they weren't looking, the other party took over state legislatures. This was seen as a crafty foxy move because then they get to gerrymander House districts, which gave them an advantage that meant it was relatively easy for them to control the House. #
- But! They were even more crafty and foxy. There was a little-known feature of the Constitution that meant that controlling state legislatures meant they controlled who was president.#
- The current president, the tyrant, played golf, as he normally does. People relaxed. "See he doesn't have any nefarious plans!" said the citizens.#
- More in the next installment. #
BTW the best place to write and publish a twitter thread isn’t in Twitter or Wordpress, it’s
thread.center.
#
I've been raving about the
Tribit Stormbox Bluetooth speaker to friends. The sound is great and large, but the package is small, sturdy, nice to hold the way an iPhone is. I have it strapped to the handlebar of my bike which I've been riding the last four days because the weather is so good. One more day, tomorrow, then it's going to cool off again. Definitely not November weather in the mountains.
#It's pretty obvious the Repubs are improvising a coup of the US government. Goodbye Constitution.
#Sometimes people are wrong. The presidential election is one of those cases. Trump simply wasn’t doing the job. That’s an objective fact. When we get a president who is doing the job, and we elected one, the system will start working. And we desperately need it to work. So no, I’m not esp concerned about the feelings of Trump voters. They were wrong. We saved their lives. Maybe they’ll never appreciate it, but we did save their lives regardless.
#One of the reasons my blog doesn't work as
an RSS feed is that I'm always adding links and editing text through the day. I am done by midnight before the
nightly email goes out. But people who read via RSS only see the first version of a post. RSS as a format is fine, but the installed base of readers hasn't evolved at all since the beginning.
#
OK we just had an election in the US, and we're doing the same thing we do after every election. Trying to figure out how 70 million people could (this time) vote for Trump after seeing him in action for four years. I had a lot of trouble understanding why people gave
Bush a second term, that was a stop-everything moment for me. I did a
podcast about it
that day, to preserve the moment. But this time I think maybe we're asking the wrong question. Why are so many people depressed? I think you have to be pretty sad to vote for Trump. I think that's what it's an expression of, sadness. What could we do to make living more fun? I know it's a weird question, but maybe someone has an idea.
đź’Ą#The Russians, apparently, did not hack the election, or at least if
they tried it didn't work.
#If you're an NBA fan as I am, you know all about
Inside the NBA on TNT. Charles, Kenny, Shaq and Ernie. They're funny, smart, irreverant, and when they get serious, have a deep understanding of basketball. I want something like that for politics. The cable shows are dull and repetitive. If you're not going to say much at least tell some good stories.
#
The Democrats should do some marketing, and connecting with their users (ie voters). Based on what I'm reading about the polls, they have a crude and often incorrect view of what they think and what influences them, what they look for in a candidate. Just read about
Hispanic voters in south Florida and Texas voting for Trump, when the Dems thought they had their support.
Membership in the Democratic Party should mean something. Or maybe we need to start another party, not to run candidates necessarily, but to organize voters. Maybe the Dems would get the idea that they should "acquire" this party. That's how change often happens in tech, btw. Key point I've raised over and over -- political parties and social networks belong together. The current crop of social nets are optimized for advertisers. No surprise they've made a mess of political organizing.
#
New Yorker cover after 2018 election.
#
The election is over, our power as citizens is now back to normal, which is minuscule. We’re ever more hunkered down by the virus, or we should be. How do we as individuals make things better other than symbolically. We still depend on the same people to rep us. The last 24 hours were glorious. Now we have to deal with reality.
#I'll take
People Who Made Life Better for $100,
Alex.
#I have to admit to having new respect for
Philadelphia. I could never think of a reason for it existing, I tried, I really did. Next time we get a fascist asshole in the White House, we’ll call Philadelphia.
#
- Leo McGarry, a fictional character: "Bill Russell was getting eaten alive cuz they could never get him to throw an elbow. He didn't want to do it. So Red Auerbach told him to do it, one time, throw an elbow on a nationally televised game, you'll never have to do it again. You bet your ass they'll know the leak came from us." #
- I really enjoyed VP-elect Harris's speech last night. I was crying like a baby through the whole thing. Even though I'm not black, Indian-American or a woman, I'm a sucker for people rising through prejudice and achieving huge victories like that. I also like that she's from the Bay Area, specifically Berkeley, where I lived for a number of years, and still have friends who live there. #
- But Biden's speech was disturbing. Not because he said anyting other than what he was saying through the campaign -- he was totally consistent. But now we're on the other side of the election, and I don't think all the happy talk about working across the aisle will amount to anything, other than a sense by the Repubs and their voters, that yeah you can walk all over the Dems and there's never a price to pay. #
- Another quote: I like what JFK said in his inaugural, to the Soviets. #
- "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."#
- The equivalent from Biden to McConnell today would be...#
- "We noticed that Trump stopped getting his Cabinet officials approved by the Senate a couple of years ago, and McConnell never said a word about it. So the first round of my Cabinet appointments will be on the house, freebies, appointed without Senate approval. Then we can have a big bipartisan conference on how we want this to work in the future. And until then, the Senate is out of the advise-and-consent business. If you don't like it, ask Nancy Pelosi if she'll impeach me. Heh."#
- Hopefully the Repubs will squawk, loudly, and take the Dems to court. And Biden, like Trump, will ignore what the court says, if they dare rule on this. #
- Same with oversight from the Senate. Cross that off the list too, until we come to some larger agreement about enforcing the norms that Trump and McConnell trashed over the last four years. Maybe the price is, dear Senate, that McConnell is censured and loses his party leadership. Or maybe we insist that he be sent back to Kentucky. I'm not kidding. What you all did is not excusable. We're willing to let McConnell take the fall, and then we can move on from there. #
- But don't tell me how we're friends, we're not friends. McConnell came within a hair of turning America into a fascist dictatorship. He must've thought he'd get away with it.#
- I wrote about this in We must be worse than the Repubs on Oct 27. #
- "The Repubs walk all over the Dems. But if you love America, you have to vote Democratic, because the Repubs are crazy fascists. We have to teach the Dems how to be hardass motherfuckers, and insist that they have a head-on collision with the Repubs so they respect them, and in doing so, respect us."#
- It sure sounds like Biden is making the same insane mistake Obama did, believing that this election is somehow transformative, or that he is transformative, and all of a sudden, because the US is in dire trouble (as usual when the Dems take over), the Repubs will transform. They only respect you if you drive straight into a head-on collision with them without hitting the brakes. You are the president, Mr President-elect, you have to be the badass. I'm hoping you know that and this happy talk is just a veneer. #
11:45AM: MSNBC, CNN, Fox and AP have all called it for Biden.
#Can we move to Georgia in time to vote in the January runoffs?
#
- Written before the election was called. #
- So many things to observe in this marathon of an election night. #
- First, it's nice that it isn't a nailbiter. We know the outcome. Unlike my friend Tom Watson, who is beyond impatient for the networks to call the election, I'm glad that it's stretching out. I wish the 2008 election had been similarly extended so we could have had a chance to absorb the change gradually. Instead boom, he was elected, giving his acceptance speech, still gives me goosebumps, and we all went out to party in the streets. Now we're getting to savor the fullness of the moment. And the eventfulness of 2020 is cooperating. #
- For example, Covid is raging. Growing exponentially. We're doing nothing to resist it. The example Trump set during the campaign, all those awful rallies, more awful because they were such good entertainment, is probably responsible for a good portion of the growth. I heard on the news that there's a high correlation between regions hardest-hit by the virus and those that voted for Trump. They see it as a conundrum, but it's obvious what the connection is. People who live in Trump Country don't see the virus as a threat. That's gotta be one of the biggest indicators. People who don't feel threatened by it are probably more likely to get it.#
- Okay so here's something people don't like to say out loud. But obviously the Trump election was a reaction to the Obama election. The yin to the yang. People who don't like uppity presidents (ie blacks) probably don't care for presidents who don't know their place is in the home (ie women). They thought Trump was the perfect way to say Fuck You Try Again Assholes. Let Trump drive them crazy. Smart. It sure did that. So when enough people got tired of Trump the Dems offer up an affable white grandpa, he likes dogs! -- just the thing, but they snuck in just behind him a woman who happens to be black! We hardly noticed. #
- At one point the other day, when it seemed clear that Biden was going to top it off, we realized oh shit it's going to be Vice-President Harris. She's really going to be VP. The glass ceiling is breaking as we speak. But you know what, the people in Trump Country noticed. They might've told the pollsters they were going to vote for Uncle Joe, thinking all the time that a black women wasn't their idea of someone who should be a heartbeat away from the presidency. Esp such an old heart. #
- It's good that there's some time to contemplate this before it's official.#
- Another thing that's good is it gave Fox some time to decide how to handle this. At first they were going to refuse to call Biden President-elect Biden. That would have been a catastrophe. In the meantime, they figured it out, and Laura Ingraham, last night, looked into the camera and told Trump to go gracefully. They gave him an out. You have to figure if he doesn't take it, they're going to go ahead and call Biden president-elect. We had time to negotiate this. This is kind of a miracle but hardly anyone noticed. Fox isn't going to help start Civil War 2.0. #
- Nate Silver is openly trying to figure out what happened with the polls. He seems glad that this is being drawn out too. Consider maybe the electorate was a moving target, and the polls, with all their heuristics couldn't pick that up. Things were seesawing with Trump in October. First he's in the hospital, looking frail, sick with Covid, possibly dying. That can't have been good for his polling. Then he recovers, is full of energy, pumped up on steroids, holding his normal now murderous rallies, and the Dems were holding drive-in embarrassments. He juiced his base in late October, and it worked. It got people to think "Hey hun, the old Trump is back," the virus didn't get him, look at the fun, and they switched their vote. They could, because Trump told them not to mail in their ballots. I think, net-net, people are being too hard on the polls, and too hard on the statisticians at the networks. #
- PS: Meadows getting the virus at this moment and spreading it while covering it up is the perfect epilogue for trump as something other than a tragic punchline.#
Post-election New Yorker cover from 2016.
#
- For a project I'm doing, I wanted to see how Fargo did calendar structures. This is what I found out. It's here primarily so I can find it again later through search engines. #
- First, here's an OPML file from Fargo, that I used briefly in the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014 to edit my blog. #
- I was interested in the attributes that Fargo used. I wanted to see what type attributes it used for calendars. I was surprised to see that it didn't use any. It did use a name attribute. And now I can see what it used that for, it was for the name of the file. It allowed you to change the text of the headline without affecting the name of the file the HTML rendering was saved in. This had come up as a question in some of the work we're doing with Old School. #
- For clues about Fargo, I found the Fargo blog indispensible. Here's the OPML source for the Fargo blog. #
The only time we have to listen to other Americans is when we vote. They can keep talking, that’s their right. But I can choose not to listen. There’s a limit to respect. I don’t listen to people when all they have to say is how they hate me.
#The news should reflect what the Trumps are really doing with the lawsuits. They're going to pitch state legislatures that the election was stolen and they should appoint different electors. The lawsuits just have to get press coverage and show up in opinion polls. They wouldn't have to flip too many states with Republican legislatures. For example: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan.
#Assuming Trump refuses to leave the White House, here’s the plan. Turn the White House into our equivalent of Lenin’s tomb. Seal it off but, everyone but Trump can leave, send him food and water and people can visit to see the imprisoned former president. When he dies embalm him.
#Might be a good idea to stop referring to Republicans as Repubs, and call them what they are -- Trumps.
#CNN's
Magic Wall is crap. They should have people entering the numbers that the announcer says from a keyboard. And the performance is awful. Get a higher-rated CPU. I can't believe how shitty all of them are.
#Even if the tech is old, slow and poorly organized --
Kornacki is king. He's the Batman of the United States of Gotham City.
#The first female vice-president. History.
#In hindsight Trump might’ve been smart to hold the RBG nomnination.
#I can see I'm not getting any work done today.
#
Getting rid of the rat in the attic.
#
Devs who want to leave a legacy of code, keep a copy of everything on GitHub. Here's why. 1. They host your projects for $0, so your code can persist even if your heirs stop paying hosting bills. 2. They're owned by Microsoft which will probably be around for a while.
#Secretaries of State are the nerd heroes of our democracy.
#Debugging the polls. Why not be direct. Ask the person this question instead. Who's winning? Since the role of a poll is to feed the horse race, why beat around the bush. Ask the question you really want the answer to.
#A lot of dev work is taking things from one list and putting it on another.
#
While the campaign was still on, I didn't want to criticize the Dems for their rallies, which were basically impossible to watch. They must've been even worse to be a speaker at. You take a gifted campaigner like Obama, who could get into a lovefest with an audience, he had so many good lines like Don't Boo, Vote. The crowd would boo just to get him to say it! Or he'd say Fired up! and everyone would scream Ready to go! Even watching the rallies on TV would get the love chemicals to flow through your blood. But the drive-in rallies, while the idea seemed cute and innovative, as an idea, were, in practice, embarrassing. I kept wondering if the Dems could have done something like what the NBA and MLB did, with fake crowd noise. Everyone knew they were fake, but you didn't mind. Even though a basketball game with no crowd noise is actually kind of nice, as at a small college game, not having a crowd cheering and booing at the right times during the NBA Finals and the World Series would have been awful. #- So the Repubs cut the corner, and went ahead and had viral-spreading events in the form of end-game political rallies. And they were wonderful. Trump, like Obama, really is in his element in those rallies. Once, because of a stubborn local government, he had to give a rally to a socially distanced group of 250 people, and his heart wasn't in it, and he left early. So the Repubs cheated. I think that's where a lot of his votes came from. If the campaign had ended with Trump on the balcony, febrile, gasping for air and weak, pulling of his mask, then we would have gotten the Biden/Harris landslide that the polls predicted.#
- The really awful part is that the pundits, idiots, one and all, are ignoring the context of this election. As if it were a normal election where the candidates were playing on something of a level playing field. They weren't. The Repubs sacrificed hundreds of lives, and thousands of peoples' health and helped spread the virus that was already spreading uncontrollably. They weren't rallies for the presidency as much as they were rallies for the virus. Come get sick, and btw, also see the president dance. The people would have come out, just as much, for Obama and his mantras, or him brushing the dirt off his jacket, or just looking like the stud he is. Or Biden telling stories of his lost family, and how great America still is, and how it'll all come back as soon as he's in the Oval. But they didn't, and that was the right thing to do. And the pundits, who really do need to be fired, are ignoring the whole thing, and pretending the Dems are out of touch, when they were totally committed to the reality that there is a deadly pandemic that is happening at the same time as the election.#
- This is kind of a replay of what happened in the final days of the primary, when people were mourning the loss of E Warren, and the impeachment was booting up. The virus was already the Big Story, but everyone was putting it off until they could get around to it. Same thing now. When we come back to the pandemic we will notice that 100K new cases yesterday, an all-time record. But until we all focus on it, full time, and take our medicine, for real, we will never get out of this mode. #
- Maybe next week the news can somehwat get back to reality. And if the Biden win doesn't prove to be a mirage, we can all breathe a sigh of relief that the Orange Monster will be going back to where ever they will have him. I hear Florida voted for him, good -- he's theirs now. No backsies. ;-)#
Trump probably impressed the rest of the Republican Party by turning out so many voters, and keeping Congress competitive, even if he did have to spread a lot of virus to do it. Rallies make for better television if you don't mind killing hundreds of rally-goers, and making thousands sick.
#Funny thing, James Carville, who I love, has now been wrong about the last two elections. In 2018 he said it wouldn't result in Dem control of the House, and it did. And this time he predicted 2020 would be a landslide for the Dems, and unless some mistake has been made, not so.
#BTW, I accidentially typed the year as 2o2o, and I kind of like it. Another of my mottos. People think I'm creative but I'm just hard of hearing. Now the same goes for typos.
#
- A new BingeWorthy feature. #
- Pull down the menu and choose Similar users. A window opens with a list of users who have tastes similar to yours, ranked by how close they are. From there, you can click on the names to see their ratings.#
- You may get ideas for new binges from this, or may find people you know who have similar tastes. At least you'll have something to talk about next time you get together. :-)#
- If you have questions or comments, please post them here. The number crunching code was written by my very generous friend Andrew Shell. #
- Good morning sports fans!#
- How did you spend your night? I watched MSNBC, love Kornacki, you can have the rest of them, but I hated whenever the sound came on saying IT'S TIME TO CALL SOMETHING. It was always something like Kentucky or South Dakota, Vermont or New York. At one point I wrote on Twitter we're on the roller coaster now. That feeling of this is being done to me, I don't like it but at this point I have no choice, I'm on for the ride. I watched as Kornacki flipped over the counties in Florida, a remarkable number of which I was familiar with either from having been there or listening to any number of podcasts instructing me what to look out for. Very depressing. Oh shit. This feels like 2016, I said -- as did everyone else watching the returns. I started nodding off around 9PM and finally decided to go to bed at 10, and woke up at 1AM, and went looking to see how things had turned out and I literally screamed out loud when I saw Trump was ahead in Wisconsin. Oy oy oy. So here we are. And where is that exactly?#
- Well, Biden is very likely to win. And that is good news, even though they're already spinning on the webs that it would have been better if we won the Senate and lost the presidency, which is such utter bullshit. People are so stupid. Getting rid of Trump was job #1, and it seems we will get rid of him. No I didn't watch his campaign rally in the White House, and yes, I have heard it quoted, and yes, he is trying to be a dictator, and no doubt his voters will listen and believe him, and will drive their cars around running people off the road, and they might even kill people, but we're already dying in great numbers, so what the fuck difference would that make. Here's what getting rid of Trump means. Goodbye Bill Barr. Hello Paris Climate Treaty and let's get back together with the Iran deal. Let's start playing to win in international trade instead of just abdicating and sounding tough. And btw, let's get the babies out of those prisons, find their parents or at least get them into a home-like situation. And then think about all the things Trump won't be able to do if he's just a private citizen. Yes, he can be a first class asshole, and have rallies, but he will also be tried and probably convicted and go to jail. And for sure McConnell will block everything Biden tries to do, but think of it this way, Biden will block everything McConnell wants to do, something Trump didn't do. So fuck you and your fancy theories about wishing Trump were still president and McConnell would be Minority Leader.#
- So here's something I write every time a Republican wins, even though this time a Republican didn't win. We need to organize on a permanent persistent basis. It's not enough to ask for our money and phone banking at election time. We the non-elites have to be part of governing. You don't get to just ask for our money every four years and then say thanks now go away. We need to be part of this. Luckily we have this great technology that enables this, and we need to use it. Howard Dean was on the right track in 2004, but there was no follow-through (and of course he didn't even get nominated). Facebook and Twitter et al aren't the only models. We can create new media where people get to participate and where spamming means nothing. Today's networks are set up in a way that makes the most money for advertisers. We can set up networks that are great for governing and organizing. Until we do things will just keep getting worse. #
- I was depressed at 10PM and 1AM but by 6AM I was over it. I'm ready for the next season in the great drama of American politics. Let's have fun! #
Finally, today -- it
is a horse race! 🏇
#My parents weren't perfect, but they had democracy down. Each year my mother or father would take us voting with them. We went into the booth, watched while they flipped the switches in the old style voting booth, and then pulled the big lever that opened the curtain, logged the vote and we went on our way.
#When I was 17 I was too young to vote, but I really wanted
McGovern to win. I was campaigning for him, going door to door
where ever the campaign sent us. My father didn't have a strong opinion, so he let me have his vote. One of the nicest most memorable gifts he gave me.
#It's weird that Trump doesn't have a big ballroom reserved for tonight filled with supporters, exchanging their viruses.
#Joe Biden could stand in the middle of
Fifth Avenue and shoot Donald Trump and I would still vote for him.
#The
interview I did with Jason Calacanis is out. I haven't listened to it yet, but I will. Hope you like. :-)
#I'm loving
Better Things. It's smart, funny, classy, nutty, loving and lovable, and sexy. The characters are great because they all remind me of someone dear to me. It's not Le Grand Binge, it's more like an
amuse-bouche, something to
cleanse the palate, before going onto more serious fare. Right up there with
30 Rock, another of
my favorite shows. I'm still in Season 1 on Better Things. Savoring each episode because it makes me feel good, in times when feeling good isn't the norm.
#Assuming Biden wins tonight, I look forward to articles in
The Redneck Country Bugle about how they failed to understand the coastal communities, where there are plenty of people who are not elites, rather people who pay attention to what politicians do, instead of how funny they are.
#It's interesting as I write my blog today, knowing that when it goes out at midnight Eastern tonight, we'll know a lot more about what happened today, than I did as I was writing this michegas.
#
Today is the day America says, resoundingly, “Enough of this bullshit.”
#
Roast a turkey tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving!
#All the commercial publishing services are broken in one way or another. Twitter has a character limit. Substack makes you use their editor, Facebook has no links, styling or titles. Medium has an api but you can't update your posts. We need something that simply works for writers and readers.
#Back in 1994 I had what was then a revolutionary idea. That a software developer could write about the world just like a columnist does. Not after stopping being a software developer, but as
part of being a software developer. People really didn't understand.
#When they say Trump has a 10% chance of winning the election, that means, precisely, that if they had 10 elections just like this one, Trump would win one, and Biden would win nine.
#I use my
Public Folder app on my Mac to keep local folders in sync with locations on S3. It works flawlessly, and performs a function I used to use Dropbox for, until they dropped their public folder feature.
#Poll: What will you do on Tuesday night?
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Ben Smith thinks Twitter may buy
Substack, viewing it as Twitter Premium. Let's hope we can do better. Start by getting rid of the character limit in Twitter so we don't need to invent new channels just to distribute essays. Twitter can already do photos and video. People do all kinds of hacks to distribute writing. Let's re-legitimize it. Also can you imagine how pissed
Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and founder of
Medium, would feel if Twitter bought Substack? Leaving Medium out in the cold. It's long been assumed the reason Twitter didn't relax the character limit is because of Medium. As we say in the blogging world, oy.
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This
tweet really grabbed me. "I intubated a relatively healthy 86 year old man with covid in the ER at 4:30 this morning. He was alone, I was the last person he spoke with and he was confused. He’ll likely die in the ICU, alone. I don’t make any extra money for that."
#I did the usual beginning of the month rollover for the blog, but this time I also made the October archive into a shareable outline. You can
click this link to open the outline in
LO2. You can think of it as the source code for Scripting News, October 2020.
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On Facebook, I'm getting another look at all the things I posed in the run-up to the 2016 election. One of the threads was a
screen shot of the
538 graph showing the probability of a Clinton win over Trump over time. It took a real dive when
Comey announced he was
investigating emails found on
Anthony Weiner's laptop. Nate Silver said, in the aftermath of the election, when people complained about the polls, that Trump had a greater than 30% chance of winning. A baseball player who hits .300 is a pretty good hitter. 30% ain't zero. That said Comey
made it 30%. The odds were a lot lower before his announcement.
#Trump is a troll, and trolls thrive on novelty. They always have to be increasing the rage. From the
Trolling howto: "Immunity to outrage builds up over time. What pissed people off six months ago will barely show up as a blip today. Luckily for Trump as he rises in stature, from poll-leader, to presumptive nominee, to one of two possible Presidents, his tweets automatically get more outrageous, because now they have half the weight of the office of POTUS behind them." Four years later his stature has not increased, and the tweets are just as crude. So his trolling juice doesn't work this time. No one cares. On the
Trippi podcast his guest
Mike Murphy said once you've seen
Gallagher smash a
watermelon, you don't need to go back and see it again. That's Trump. Gallagher,
Carrot Top,
Joan Rivers,
Don Rickles,
Rodney Dangerfield. We've been there done that and all we got was Covid-19.
#I wish I had a big Pause button, let's just hold here for a while. I'm more comfortable living in limbo than knowing the outcome of Tuesday's election. I'm sure everyone feels the same. I don't have any advice. Maybe buy something sinful and consume it with wild abandon. Or maybe read up on emigration out of the US, or painless ways to end it all.
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I finally understand what
agile means in programming, and of course, I've been doing it from the beginning of my programming career. Get something working, try it out, learn from it, perhaps go in a different direction, but always checking what I'm doing by using it and listening to users.
Mitch Kapor, who I learned a lot from at Personal Software in the early 80s, worked this way. I ran
Living Videotext on these principles. Everything
UserLand did was developed this way. Now that I understand what it means, I might try to factor all the writing that's out there about it into a few words that explain the difference. I once encountered
anti-agile development in a company where the software was developed using
DoD procedures. Their philosophy was design the whole thing up front and give pieces of the project to different groups of programmers, who never saw the full spec, so no one knew what they were working on. The company went out of business very quickly. The team went on to form the core of another company, which also went out of business, each time because the product widely missed the mark.
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A recent Biden rally.
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