Likes is a Node-based server that manages an SQL database of triplets: username, URL of the thing they liked, and a timestamp. When you like something, it adds a record to the database. When you unlike, the record is removed. There's a demo app that shows how to hook up to the server in your own web apps. I've factored the code so there's an API and UI. You probably will only use the API in your stuff. We use Twitter for identity. If you want to run your own server, which is fine with me, you will need to create an app on Twitter. Questions are welcome. #I was having an offline discussion with a famous journalist. He objected to me making general statements about journalism. But to me journalism is often, in some ways, a monolith. Yes I know some writers are better than others. And I know all tech isn't the same (his counter-example), but I also understand that as a user, I see tech companies acting in concert. I see limits they impose to give themselves power that I can't have. Same in journalism. So it's totally valid to write about journalism as an entity, because in some ways, for me, that's how I experience it. As with all writing, I only write about my experience.#
It would be great to have one writing system for the web that blow by all the limits imposed by the journalism and tech. No character limit. Full use of HTML. Titles, podcasts. RSS feeds in and out, so it's not a silo. #
I changed my Twitter because One more thing it seems to be how I preface every tweet. Might as well add it to the chrome. 💥#
BTW, I'm writing better stuff on Twitter these days than I am here on my blog. It sucks. It should be the other way around. But once I get started typing in Twitter I can't stop. I guess the page never gets full? Have to figure it out. #
I'm almost ready to ship the first release of my Likes server with an API for JavaScript running in the browser. I took time to get it right, I hope. Could be the beginning of something interesting! I'll do another review tomorrow before posting pointers.#Given that Facebook is now known to be a shitshow, hopefully they can do a better job of peering with the open web so we have a way out, and aren’t betting the whole future of online discourse on it.#
Braintrust query: Are you a member of De Correspondent in the Netherlands? What, in your own words, makes it different from other news orgs? There's been a lot of hype as they start up in the US. It would be interesting to hear about it from a member's perspective. Thanks!#
People who climb the ladder don't want to hear that the ladder went nowhere.#
TFW you're at a board meeting and all the options suck but you decide do to something that can't work because you have to do something.#
I'm tired of being the audience. I want to be part of the news system. Not a passive part. Contributing experience, point of view, ability to write, and hope for our species to survive. To pass on what I know. To help. To be useful. All the models of news as an industry are meant to get us to give them money while lying to us that we're part of their process. Our job is to give them money and then chill while they run the world. I don't like how they're running the world. Maybe news wasn't meant to be an industry. Maybe it's a calling, a passion, a civic responsibility. No one pays you to vote or sit on a jury. We have to re-think news on a grand scale. And the news people refuse to do that.#Worth isn't a function of money, or what others think of you. It's what you find when you look inside. That's what you're worth.#
Pssst if you want to piss Trump off, at his next press conference fill the room with black women reporters.#
Yesterday Quartz announced a new membership-based publishing system, and today Jay Rosen announced a membership drive on behalf of De Correspondent, a Dutch-originated news org. Of course I know Jay from the podcast we did a few years ago, and Zach Seward is one of the top guys at Quartz, who I knew from Nieman Lab and also when I was at NYU. These are both smart people who have roots in blogging. However, both efforts have a limited view of the contributions of members. I wrote about this, tangentially, yesterday, about the line that separates us from journalism. That line is where the attention must focus. These are the small steps people rooted in journalism are comfortable with. The real problem imho remains making Sources Go Direct really work. News as-it-is is promoting the failure of democracy, not standing up for it. Imho of course, ymmv, I've been wrong before, my mother loves me, I am not a lawyer, etc. 💥#It's somewhat embarrassing to have all those 0 Likes on my posts, but I'm going to leave them there. It's a worthwhile bootstrap imho. It can lead somewhere if we want it to. #
Something bothered me about CNN's protest of their reporter being excluded from the White House. It took me a while to pinpoint. I guess they would like us to have their back -- but do they have ours? They do so many things that sell us out as they chase profit. It's as if they've found a way to monetize America's failure. Maybe one of these events will wake them up and they'll realize they aren't protected anymore than we are, and they should do what they can to halt our descent, even if it makes them lose money. Until they do that, I don't see why I should care whose reporters are in the White House carrying the Republican message. #As a language hacker I wonder if we could make a meme somehow happen where people think the word flake came from Jeff Flake instead of it being a coincidence.#
In January, House Dems should pass a bill that updates the Affordable Care Act to fix all that should have been fixed in 2014, and undoes the damage Repubs did. This is the platform for 2020.#
I was just telling a friend about Al Pacino's speech in Any Given Sunday. I know a lot of people don't like sports movies but this one is the story of age, how the coach and the young quarterback (played by Jamie Foxx) learn to work together. It's got all the schmaltz of typical sports movie. But the acting is so good, and the story simple and universal and heart-grabbing. Old people remember being young. We aren't young anymore, but we have experience and knowledge to offer, and when we work together the winning is so much sweeter. I would like the newly elected Democrat reps to watch this movie and work with Nancy Pelosi. She knows how to win. We have a really big problem to solve and we have to work together to solve it. If we don't work together, we'll die as individuals. #
I think the problem with journalism in 2018 is that it relies on a centralized model, journalists who are paid salaries and everyone else who pays to read what the salaried journalists produce. It's not all the way there yet, but it's close. #- But -- who really wants to read what the paid journalists write? And why? And what about the knowledge and perspectives of the readers, why are they wasted in this model? I understand why they were wasted in the pre-Internet world, because the cost of distribution was prohibitive, but that's no longer an issue. #
- The standard answer, which I don't disagree with is how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? The repetitive rote stuff that just echoes what a few opinion leaders put out there versus original insights that could help us solve problems? But how does the system do it now? The columnists are very predictable, they're mostly rehashing the same themes over and over, applied to different events. And as Matt Taibbi says so well in this paywalled piece (somehow accidentally I was allowed to read it) most of what they talk about in the news is pure bullshit. We knew that, but it's nice to hear someone on the other side of the paywall say it.#
- Ultimately that model is going to break because of their inability to do the corner-turn that the new technology has required of them since the web opened up. The turn is this: stop paying writers, and figure out how to find the good stuff in a sea of bullshit. The same problem everyone has and no one has an answer to. The news org that has the courage to tackle that problem, and solves it, will lead the consolidation, which will imho happen very quickly.#
William Gibson: "Very little 20th Century sf anticipated anything even remotely like what we must now recognize as the greatest single unanticipated effect of human technology." #I've been making a lot of phone calls lately on my iPhone (6, iOS 12.1), and the volume on the calls is way too low. I have to force the phone to my ear and it still needs to be louder. I've turned the volume on the phone all the way up. What can I do? (Update: Heres'a a list of things I tried. I think the volume went up. I'll find out for sure on my next phone conversation.)#
I changed the way the thumb works in Like. Now, when you click the thumb, it fills in, when you click it again it toggles to being open. It used to flip to down. This was confusing. Now it doesn't flip, it's always up. I think this feels better, burns fewer braincells. #
BTW, not every post has the Like option. I have to set an flLikeable attribute on the post to true in order for the Like to be generated by the JavaScript code that runs in the page. #
Todo: List of likers should be reverse chronologic. Done.#
- I just had a brief chat with Om on Twitter. Here's what I said.#
- I liked your post about the blogger who tells her story. I saw Matt Haughey post something the other day lamenting there weren't more bloggers. I responded that there aren't that many bloggers. We're different.#
- Then I thought, if this were an industry we would have a PR firm that made sure we were included in important discussions, about law, policy, society, culture.#
- It's one of the things that's wrong. We develop great stuff, then the pros come in, take it over, miss the point, and drive it in the wrong direction. Or forget the roots, or don't protect its openness.#
- It's so weird that I can't even get into the covnersation about podcasting, something that I personally developed.#
Feeling adventurous? Click the Like icon to the right. #
Note -- you may have to Hard Reload the page to be sure the files it needs to implement like are reloaded. #
Super important point: The 2018 election isn't over. At stake, governorships of Florida and Georgia. Senator from Florida. Stacey Abrams is leading the fight. She is so strong and determined. If she wins, we will win, hugely. Give her money now. #
Had a great talk this morning with Chuck Shotton. We've been doing projects together on and off for decades. A few thoughts. I spend most of my programming time refactoring code for different purposes. I learned the benefits of modularity almost at the beginning. UCSD Pascal had the concept of units, which were more clean and simple and powerful at the same time than the equivalent in JavaScript today, almost forty years later. Also we had a Lambda-like code environment in Frontier in the mid-90s. Cleaner and quite a bit more efficient imho. I have been modularizing my Node code, but haven't come close to the level of factoring we did with Frontier. No conclusions, just interesting to observe how glitchy progress is. #Probably the most damaging form of voter suppression is the kind going on now. Getting hysterical about completing the count when you've got the result you want. We should all be funding Stacey Abrams, who made voting rights her big issue and is fighting for it, now. #
A rambling 22-minute podcast on the election. Why it's important to savor victory. There was a lot of good news in Tuesday's results. Feel the winning. The political system might be killing us, but America, underneath it all, is still America. Most important, by giving the House to a party that will do real oversight, we re-asserted the control by the people over the government. Whether you support Trump or not, this has to be seen as good. #Obama should go on a victory tour now, hold rallies to drive home what we accomplished by showing up to vote. Host SNL. Visit with Jimmy Kimmel. Do an interview with the NYT. He's the one Democrat who can't be accused of campaigning for 2020. Solidify the message, we asked people to vote, and they did, and look what we accomplished. When I ran a company, I always made my sales people visit the distributors after we shipped a hit product. It wasn't for sales, it was to soak of the feeling of winning.#
Theory why Trump fired Sessions and appointed Whitaker now. They know Mueller is about to issue his report. They wanted to move first, do something, anything, to be able to say they were on top of it. It won’t work, he’s the Keystone Kops president.#
Are there any USB-C drives? I was sure there would be by now, but are there?? Can't find them on Amazon. What is USB-C good for?? (Update: LaCie has a 2TB portable USB-C drive. $90.)#
- Have you ever been in a failed friendship, relationship, business partnership? I'm beginning to think most people haven't, based on their willingness to forget that Trump is a lying con artist who is being blackmailed by Putin and probably a dozen other countries by now.#
- A friend posted: "This will be an easily disproven lie" about something Trump said. Please. It's like a wife who's sleeping around. Everyone knows but you (the spouse). Trump always lies. It's more interesting to try to prove he's not lying.#
- Moral of the story, with Trump, always --#
About a protest about Trump firing Sessions. Too early. Let Congress do their job. Let the courts. If they fail, then a march will be huge. Right now, with the election just over, a big victory for the people, for oversight, for health care, the power of the people is just now settling in with our elected reps. The ones who are coming back should feel we have their back if they stand up to Trump. Right now the risk of failure of a protest is too high. It's just the wrong time. As Teddy Roosevelt said, speak softly and carry a big stick. The people are carrying. Clearly. We just spoke. Let's find out if they heard. #
I don't care who the White House lets into their press events. For a couple of reasons. I don't think any news org should send reporters to those events. Too much lying. But if they did, they should report on the lies as lies, not misrepresentations or whatever weasel words they use to describe the lies. And I especially don't care if CNN is there. I blame them for the Trump presidency. Journalism has to be done consciously. What Trump was doing in the years leading up to the 2016 election was terrorism. Race hate. Stuff that when/if we get past this will be illegal. It certainly was unethical for CNN to give Trump such coverage. Now the chickens have home to roost. You reap what you sow. Maybe if they're forced to sit outside of these supposed press conferences they'll reflect on what's really happening, and their role in it. A mea culpa going back to the beginning of Political Trump would help get me to listen to their side. But no such admission has come. Bottom line: I don't see what they do as journalism. #
With all possible humility, I wish pieces like the one I wrote yesterday about the election got more attention. 20 years ago (arrgh) I had a column in Wired that worked wonders. I think part of the reason blogging took off the way it did is because they gave me space to write about it every week. I've asked many people if they know any editors at major political pubs who might give me a column like that. For example, yesterday I wrote a piece that's highly contrarian but also I think more accurate than the account of the election that journalism put together. That will all soon be cemented as conventional wisdom. The time to get an idea in the mix is now past. My blog doesn't have enough pull to get into the conversation. Sadly, journalists only listen to other journalists, it seems. We're already three news cycles past the election, first there was the Sessions firing, Jim Acosta being outsted by the White House and the shooting in Southern California. But the lessons from the election are very important. Very important and being lost.#- I often talk about journalists or journalism as if it were a monolith, and of course it isn't. There is divergence of views, but there is also conventional wisdom, and access journalism and the economics, all of which drive journalism to a sameness. An example, in the mid 90s the conventional wisdom was that there was no new Mac software. You'd see it reported everywhere. It wasn't true. It just made it impossible to launch new software, so eventually it became self-fullfilling. #
- Nowadays in political writing the rut they've fallen into is making the news a theatrical play about the personalities at the top, and overlooks the real import of politiics, what it means for the people who are governed. Not just in the aggregate, but as individuals. Journalism if it ever had the ability to tell that story seems to have lost it. #
- The forces that drive journalism to the same place, may also be there for software. After all, I'm working in JavaScript now. Why? Because so many other people are, there are many incentives to use the same language everyone else does. (And of course I'm taking license with the term "everyone" -- of course other languages are also very popular.)#
- The sameness of political writing makes the outstanding writers stand out even more. Jon Chait is consistently original, thoughtful and thought-provoking at New York Mag. I can't remember reading a piece of his that I didn't feel was both worth passing on and right on the money. #
An idea for the new Democratic majority in the House. Pass a bill that fixes all the problems in ObamaCare. Suggest the Senate could ratify it and the President could sign it. A victory for everyone. The Dems prove that leadership works better than obstruction. #
Sometimes I think my vision is failing but it's just a ripped contact lens. One of the easiest cures known to man -- replace the fucked up lens. Voila. Vision returns to normal. #
- The top line of the news re yesterday's election in the US is that we won. The Constitution won. The US gets another chance. We don't get flushed down the autocracy toilet, at least not yet. Now here are some bullet points. #
- A lot of people who voted for Trump in 2016 voted for a Democrat this year to represent them in the House. The entire House was up for election, so the results indicate the choice of all of America. Only 34 Senate seats were contested, and the nature of the Senate, where tiny North Dakota gets as much representation as California or New York, doesn't tell you so much about the collective mind of the people. And in the Senate the Dems were on the defense, Repubs on offense. What we can see from the results of this election is that if the mood of the electorate is constant, the Repubs will have a much harder time retaining control in 2020. And Trump, if he chooses to run again, will have a much harder time winning in 2020 than he did in 2016. #
- Journalists are reporting that Congress is divided now like the rest of the country. That's such bullshit. As if the government was designed to be controlled by one party with the Congress subservient to the executive branch. What they call "division" is actually democracy. We all get a voice in governing. In 2017 and 2018, the majority of the electorate was shut out of governing. We had no say. As a result the Repubs have run wild with corruption and really stupid decisions (heard of climate change, the Repubs don't believe in it, for example). Now we return to the normal process of governing, where one faction doesn't control the whole thing, and if we want to move, we have to compromise. Yes, that's been rare in the last decade, but a logjam is preferable to one party running rampant. #
- Imagine if it had gone the other way, and the Repubs had retained control of the House. Imagine the demons that would have been unleashed by that.#
- Oversight. I heard a reporter on NPR say that now there will be "more oversight." I suppose technically that's true, but it doesn't really capture the essence. We're going from zero oversight to hopefully intelligent oversight. Imagine the Mafia taking over the government and the police and you have an idea of what the last two years have been like. Now we have a way of looking into the crimes of the Trumps, maybe because they know they'll be exposed they'll be a little less bold? Either way we'll get some ability to see behind the bullshit now. #
- Who will lead the oversight? Very capable people. My own rep, Jerry Nadler will be chairman of the Judiciary committee. Elijah Cummings will chair the Oversight committee. Adam Schiff on Intelligence and Maxine Waters on Financial Services. All are a vast improvement over the hacks the Repubs put in those jobs. And I say that without a hint of partisanship. If any of the Repubs had had the courage to actually do their jobs in the last Congress, I would be singing their praises and the country wouldn't be in such a deep hole. #
- Most important -- the American people are not fascists. Yes there are some who hate Jews and people of color and Muslims and gays and people who don't think like them. Too many. But the majority of Americans are good, and eventually saw through all the confusion the Repubs throw at the process. I expect that more will see it that way in the coming years. #
- I don't know what a "wave election" is and I don't care. I just care that we came back from the edge yesterday and decided as a country to fight. That's as much good news as I could have hoped for, a very good outcome. #
- Disclaimer: I am not a Democrat or Republican. I voted Republican until 2004, when I saw where they were taking us and I became a committed member of the resistance. I couldn't believe we re-elected Bush. And all the events that followed. I could vote Republican again, or even better would love to be part of a new party formed with people who may disagree on all kinds of policy issues, but agree on regular order and the sanctity of the vote and the rule of law. A party that would never try to suppress people's vote, or create misery to try to win elections. A party with real respect for the people. From there we can debate and compromise, win some, lose some, and live our lives with respect for each other. #
As a boy who was raised in Queens, I'm proud that Amazon chose one of their two new HQs to be in my home borough. #
I think my new iMac Pro is more sensitive about wifi connections than my previous iMac, where I could leave a Terminal window open to a server for weeks and it would stay up. Now, typically, I have to restore the connection every the morning. The only variable that changed on my end is the computer and of course the OS. #
An idea for a simple web service. Watch your own Twitter account and keep an outline of all your posts, ready to be copy/pasted into your blog or emails or other writing. This didn't used to be interesting because of the 140 char limit, but 280 is enough to write down an idea. It's easier for me to jot down an idea on my phone in Twitter than in another app. And their API makes this even more useful.#
Can you help Tanaka with his question on embedding a River5 river in a web page. There's a howto, but he's having trouble making it work. #
I don't feel like doing anything until I know what happens tomorrow.#
- Note: I wrote this narrative, then stumbled across a fix, at the end. #
I bought a new Apple Watch. So far it's just like the old one. I bought it for the health features. If it can give me a realtime EKG, that alone is worth the price. Heart rate, etc, all good stuff.#- But I had to update my iPhone to get it to talk to the new watch. And as usual the problems cascade from there. First my phone says I also need a new version of the Watch app. OK. Then the Watch app, first thing it wants to do is update the old watch. Nothing can convince it not to do this. Only other choice is to reset to factory defaults. It gets half-way through, and says oops you have to charge it up to 50 percent or no-go. Okay that takes about an hour. And that's far from the end of the story.#
- Now completely separate from the Watch and its software, most of the apps on my iPhone are gone. Ones I built the use of the phone around. This kind of shit always happens with Apple updates. #
- Get this. The apps are there. If I search it finds them. They just aren't on the desktop. I had about 5 pages of apps before the update. Now I have two pages and there's only one app on the second page. All kinds of apps are missing from the desktop. Apple apps. BigCo apps (Facebook, Twitter). Apps for managing various brands of headphones I have. #
- And then I stumbled across a fix. I deleted one of the apps, and the rest came back. #
The brilliance of the design of our government is that we can have a mini-revolution very two years and an all-out revolution every four. But we are too spoiled and lazy to get this. If we fail to overthrow our Repub masters on Tuesday, we deserve what comes next.#
When you want to remember how weird, wild, wonderful and improbable reality can be, tune into the 10th inning of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. #
Dropbox is finished with its sync. The new iMac Pro desktop is up to date. This caused its own problems. I edit my blog in an outliner that saves to a Dropbox-sync'd folder. This way I can use the same editor on my laptop when I'm traveling. I reloaded the editor this morning, the month of November was gone. I guess overnight Dropbox replaced the new version with the old version. It has missed the last few days of my work. Luckily I was also writing the OPML to a server, so I had a backup copy. I could have always re-entered the text from the website, so it wasn't ever in danger of being lost. Not sure what the moral of the story is. 💥#- People are uncomfortable with male vulnerability.#
- Be strong, be a man, man up.#
- Be happy with what you have, but don't be too happy. :-)#
- I don't mind being strong for others, being a source of protection, but inside I'm just like you. So are your sons and brothers and fathers and uncles.#
- We have to find a good compromise. A way to be true to who we are, and have people's expectations of who we are come closer to the reality.#
- See: Original post 11/3/2014.#
If you want to give Battlestar Galactica a try and you have Amazon Prime, this is the place to start.#
11 Jews murdered in their synagogue by a Trump-enflamed Nazi and the president goes back to his rants. We’re in the abyss. We’ve gone over the edge.#
This morning Dropbox is down to 1.2 million files. Yes, I have LAN Sync turned on, on this machine and on the other machines connected to the same router. I've come up with a new temporary way to get files up to the server so my development work can continue while Dropbox is synching. Also, yes I need to be able to see my whole Dropbox structure from this machine. (Thanks for all the suggestions, I've been using Dropbox since it came out, that's a pretty long time.)#
One of the nicest things about Twitter is they'd let anyone create an app. This has made it possible to build platforms that users can run on their own servers, using Twitter as the identity system. #- Well those days are over. #
- Now you have to apply to become a developer. I am trying to complete my application. I have been using the Twitter API as long as they've had one. But I'm pretty sure I don't match their idea of what a developer is.#
- Luckily GitHub has as liberal a policy re devs as Twitter used to, and I have been (coincidentally) tooling up for GitHub as a development platform pretty intensely for the last month or so. Good timing I guess. #
- But it's a sad moment. I'm guessing this is part of getting control over Russian bots, which is understandable. Maybe what we need is what GitHub is providing. There, the identity system isn't connected to a mass communication system as with Facebook and Twitter. Facebook effectively closed off their API a few months ago.#
- Update: My application was approved. #
I got the new monitor. It's bigger than the old one. Bright. But interestingly nowhere near as nice as the Mac. I guess all money that buys you something. 🤠#
Why are we surprised when President Pussy Grabber makes the border the issue. Boundaries are his playground. He likes to violate them. Do you think once the troops are on the border, they might go into Mexico?#
I checked in with a friend from Berkeley yesterday about stuff I had been writing here. I felt yesterday's piece about Lakoff, family and framing was kind of a breakthrough. Lakoff's strict father vs nuturing mother, along with my recent realization that we as a society exist in a soup of abuse. She said something other people have said, she didn't come from an abusive family. I accept that. It's still true that abuse is the context of our lives. It's hidden. Kids are taught to cover for their parents. Yet abuse is viewed, in our discourse, as exceptional. Something that can be fixed by punishing a few people. It's not going to be that easy. Just look at how our political system has embraced not just a strict father, but an abusive one. People voted for him. Not because they're any of the things people say they are. They voted for him because he is, to them, comfortable and trustworthy. Now look at that and tell me abuse isn't the context we live in. It's meant to be a mathematical statement, btw. Not that we chose it, or deserve it. It is what it is.#24 hours later and Dropbox still has over 1.5 million files to download. Files I already have here in my old Dropbox folder. Yesterday at this time it had 1.6 million files left. I guess it might be done by Christmas. 💥#
I finally found something to buy that I'm genuinely excited about. I keep a second monitor to the left of my main screen. I think of it as a rear-view-mirror in a car. It's where I keep the status readouts, hit counters, server monitors, etc. I watch TV on that monitor (via Spectrum's website). Anyway, the monitor has, until now, been an old Apple screen from 2006 or so. I had bought it to go with my old Mac Pro. That old monitor can't plug into my new iMac Pro. So then I thought, let's buy a new one. Of course monitors have gotten a lot better and cheaper since 2006. The new one is going to be glorious, or so I think. Should arrive later today via Amazon. Watch this space.#In April, I set up a demo river on Glitch, an interesting development system for people getting started in Node. They don't charge to run your application, but if it isn't accessed frequently they put it to sleep, and wake it up next time it's accessed. Just for fun I tried installing River5. It works! And even better, here we are six months later, and the app is still running, and doing a great job of getting the news. I would have thoughth it would have to do a scan for new news when I accessed it, but it's been reading news all night. There must be other people using it? Not sure. But it's good. 🚀#
Somehow gab.com got knocked off the web, by GoDaddy or Joyent or a combination thereof. I wanted to know how this happened, and if people agree that Gab should go, where is the line? It can't be that Nazis use their service, because Nazis use everything. I think the ACLU and the EFF should be involved here, and try to come up with some rules for all parties, so we don't have to wing this every time. #
Did you ever watch the movie Wag the Dog? Trump is doing exactly what the White House did in the movie with one big difference. They aren't hiding the con.#
Apple has finally made moving to a new machine as effortless as it can be, without having everything be in the cloud. Now Dropbox has to figure this out too. My Dropbox folder is where it used to be but it doesn't recognize it on the new system. Perhaps because the name of the boot drive changed? Not sure. But I have a huge Dropbox, with systems built in it that have been running for years. Not happy that I have to re-download every file, when they're all already on the system. It's going to take at least 24 hours based on past experience. #If I ever start a publication, my contributing editors are going to be domain experts who don't have big titles who have the independence to say the truth, instead of having to keep a lot of other people with big titles happy. The way you get and keep a big title is by fudging the truth.#
George Lakoff was on MSNBC last night, along with an affable Republican pundit, to talk about his ideas of how politics works. Lakoff's view is as far as I'm concerned exactly right. Republicans represent the strict father, and Democrats the nuturing mother. When you vote Republican it's probably because in the house you grew up in the father was a strong figure and the mother not. If you vote Democratic, you're seeking the mother, because that's what you trust. #- The Repubs know about this, and play into it, and the Dems think we make voting decisions based on policy. That isn't the observed behavior. If you ever doubted it, Trump is the proof. He says whatever he wants. People don't care. It's who he is and how confident he is that makes them feel comfortable.#
- Lakoff also talks about framing. It matters how you present an idea more than what the idea actually is. Partial birth abortion, for example, sounds horrible. But if you or a family member needed an abortion to save their life, you'd see it differently. Framing. Lakoff says "Don't think about an elephant" as Trump might say "Don't kill Jews." When Trump says it, he's putting the idea of You -> Killing -> Jews in your head. He can say he said not to do it. But it's just as effective at planting the idea when negated.#
- An example from my own life. Talking with an Apple exec at a tradeshow in the 1990s he said "We're not trying to crush you," from which I concluded they are trying to crush me. It's the way the mind works. Lakoff sees that clearly, but TV pundits and Democrats don't know this. They really don't. They think facts are how people make up their minds. #
- Even though he's so brilliant, when Lakoff goes on MSNBC it's a disaster. None of his very important ideas are communicated. He says "Don't think about the elephant," and leaves it to the listener to figure it out. The other panelist and perhaps the moderator have no idea what he's talking about, and unless you had read his book, or attended a lecture, or listened to a podcast, you couldn't. No discussion happens, it's a wasted opportunity. I've seen this happen twice now. Frustrating as hell. Because it's hard to explain how fucked up a system is within the system itself. #
- I think these ideas are as powerful as Moneyball was to baseball when they were discovered by Billy Beane of the Oakland As. Since then it's been practiced by football, basketball, and other baseball teams with much success. Moneyball says you should look at what factors make a difference in winning, and do that. An inexpensive hitter who reliably gets on base, even by walking, is more central to winning than an expensive high percentage hitter. You look at the numbers and do what they say to do. The As, a poor team, couldn't afford to buy the great players, so instead they bought players that made them win. 💥#
- Lakoff is the equivalent of Moneyball, but applied to politics. Lakoff's laws are observable. Hillary didn't lose because she had bad ideas, quite the opposite, she had smart ones, based on decades of experience in government, and a genius mind. She just didn't know if she was a nurturing mother or a strict father. #
- I don't think we're going to dig out of this until the leadership and the marketing people in the Democratic Party learn about Lakoff's family and framing. A book by Michael Lewis would be hugely impactful.#
- PS: We will eventually sort it out, I think, if we survive Trump. The next generation of leaders in the Democratic Party are really something. I'm thinking of Stacey Abrams, Andrew Gillum, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O'Rourke. Any combination of them could be the 2020 ticket. Or maybe something really smart from a marketing standpoint, Stacey Abrams as VP and Joe Biden at the top of the ticket. That would be a Moneyball ticket imho.#
- Good morning sports fans!#
- Just getting started with my new iMac Pro. It seems pretty fast. I got a warning about the OPML Editor, but it launched. #
- One of the big problems with the setup is that I had two old Firewire devices, one a La Cie drive and the other a very old external monitor that have plugs that don't fit into any of the ports on the back of the iMac. Not sure where I'll go with this, but the lack of an external monitor is a real problem.#
- I started a thread for help with my iMac issues. 💥#
- I guess it's time to get a new second monitor. The one I've been using is from 2006. I'm guessing the monitors have gotten better. I use the second monitor for status displays. It's like a driver-side mirror in a car. Now I have to figure out what kind of monitor to get. Figuring it probably won't be from Apple. I hear Dell makes good monitors. #
My new iMac Pro arrived yesterday. Nothing more to say about it than it's shiny and the keyboard and mouse are fancy, but otherwise it looks like a newly unboxed iMac. I have to say though Apple does a first class job on packing these things. There are many levels of redundancy. Not many moving parts. Just a wall plug. Otherwise everything is wireless. Of course wait until I hook up all the bullshit I have on my desk! Scanner, umpteen hard drives, sound system. #No doubt I'm going to buy a new Mac mini. The one I have now, hooked up to the living room TV is over ten years old. It's a real klunker. #
Software design for older people. It's a fact as you get older your short term memory weakens. I think of something to do, get distracted for an instant, and then can't remember what I was going to do. 15 minutes later I remember. That's why even small changes to the way a piece of software work can be so disorienting. In Chrome, they changed the way the popup bookmarks menu works. Instead of popping on the right, it pops on the left. It's also much wider (probably why it pops up on the left). To people don't use Chrome a lot, or whose minds don't lose focus easily, BFD, you'll deal with it. But it's enough of a distraction that I can (just did) forget why I popped up the menu in the first place. I'd love to know why they changed the way this works. Was there any benefit for me? For anyone? #- A friend posted this quote on Facebook. #
- Donald Trump is a stupid man's idea of a smart person, a poor man's idea of a rich man, and a weak man's idea of a strong man. #
- The quote is attributed to Fran Lebowitz, but I can't find it on the web. #
- Anyway this is all about men, and that got me thinking, what kind of woman likes Trump, because there are millions of them. There are also a few blacks, Hispanics and Asians who like Trump. A fair number of Jews, amazingly, like him too. And in each category, it's not just men. #
- I've heard a woman friend say publicly that she thought he was handsome. I see it too. He could be a member of my family, same age as my uncle, and handsome in a similar way. My uncle and mother were good looking people. But they came from a horror show of a house. A real war was fought there, and the children were the pawns. #
- I was raised in a soup of abuse. And even if you think your house was a loving place, your friends houses weren't. And you probably thought they were all Ozzie and Harriet. We're good at hiding abuse. It's the first sin of a lot of kids, lying to cover up their parents' abuse. #
- You want to know why we elected Trump? Because we are comfortable with abuse. We are afraid to stand on our own. A kind of impostor syndrome. #
- I want to say, again, don't make men responsible for Trump. We all find him comfortable because we all were raised in an abusive environment. Ask Lakoff about it. It's a truth we don't want to face, but if we want to grow, to evolve, to get past Trump, we must face it. We must learn to move on, but not forget. #
The deeper I get into this (unnamed) project the more convinced I am that GitHub makes a good object database for a CMS. I haven't hit any limits. It's slow-going only because I don't want to have to live with half-baked ideas long-term, as we did with Frontier. Obvious advantage here is that a big tech company is maintaining the back-end at scale with good economic terms. That is also its biggest disadvantage. On the other hand GIT is very much not exclusive to GitHub/Microsoft. So here's hoping haha that they don't Embrace & Extend devs out of the picture.#I've been thinking how software evolution works much like natural evolution. The more I learn, the better the fit. Now I understand why I like programming so much, esp projects that last years, even decades. If this is evolution, think about it, who's god? Haha. 💥#
One thing I know for sure, if you want to lead a rebirth of blogging, the first thing to do is to start blogging. The resurrection will not be led by non-bloggers.#- Reminds me of a public debate I had with Yochai Benkler many years ago. I was stating something like this, that the best software is developed by users. He asked if you had to have cancer to develop a treatment. He stumped me with that. ;-)#
- My response, many years later, is that blogging is not a disease, not something to be avoided, and the tools we have for it are for human expression. A scientist would not understand the language of the human blogger if she weren't herself a blogger.#
- On the other hand a cancer researcher has to think like the disease, not the human. There is no chance (as far as I can imagine) for the doctor to become the cancer. So the treatments have to be developed without the first-hand experience of being a user.#
Jewish people hiding while an armed fascist hunts them. In America. My grandfather said it would happen. I didn't believe him. Here we are.#
On CBS and CNN and probably others the panelists all agree that of course Trump is not responsible for the massacre in Pittsburgh and the bombings of Democratic leaders. This is the bubble they live in. It's fiction. Of course Trump is responsible for all of it.#
The InfoWorld review of my first product, ThinkTank, in 1983. It was a really good day when this review came out. An ancestor of MORE, Frontier, Trello and all the outliners. Godchild of Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson.#
They found the guy's fingerprints and DNA on the bombs. And they found Trump's programming running his mind. Don't miss this point. Now getting attacked by Trump, in his rallies and tweets, has a new measurable cost, one it didn't have before this week. We used to think (hope) his rallies and tweets were harmless. Now we know they are not.#
Here's a web page published in 1994. Your browser can still read it. That's a minor miracle. If a tech company owned the web, it's almost certain it would have broken long ago. Because no one owns the web, it still works.#
I read a post this morning by Evan McMullen, a conservative Republican saying "the next political tribe in America will care about everyone." I commented "sign me up." Then someone said "That's the Democrats." And I thought "That's bullshit." You want to keep losing elections, keep demonizing white men. There's a lot of resentment building, the Repubs have figured out how to tap into it. On the other hand McMullen's theoretical party, by design, will care about everyone. #If Trump were a regular citizen would the Secret Service arrest him for inciting violence against Democrats and journalists? Is he criminally liable for what his acolytes do at his behest? (BTW, Bernie never told anyone to attack Steve Scalise so that's bullshit.)#
There is a reason for young healthy people to buy insurance even though there is no longer a requirement that you do so. Pre-existing conditions. You probably don't have any when you're young, so you can get insurance. They can't cut you off if you get one if you were previously covered (it would be something if they could, you could get cut off as soon as you need insurance). So starting and maintaining continuous coverage, even if you get insurance through a job, is a good idea. You never know when you might become a person with a P.E.C. #It's really interesting to read my blog on the day after the election in 2008. It was a transitional day, as the day after this Election Day will certainly be, one way or the other. #
Note to self. Fix the 404 page on scripting.com. The current version is too cute by a mile. #
I was thanked via email yesterday for my political posts on micro.blog. A funny thing for sure, because I was not aware that my blog posts appear there. I guess Manton must have hooked up my RSS feed to my account on his site. Or maybe I did it and forgot? Either way, it's good, the more people who can hear me the better. The magic of open formats and protocols at work. #
I would much prefer if we sent 800 students and teachers to the border to feed the refugees when they arrive. Give them new shoes, provided by Nike. Doctors and lawyers. Sing the Star Spangled Banner.#
If a few thousand poor people from Central America walking to the US over 1200 miles away can threaten the well-being of our country, why are we spending $600 billion a year on defense? (The answer is they are no threat. We are set up to process them. That's why we spend so much on borders. We could look this shit up before we accept the premise of Republican hype. Jerry Brown should run for president just to get the Dems back on track hype wise. This stuff is simple, but the current Dem leadership is as Trump says weak.)#
BTW, if you’re worried about 7000 poor refugees 1200 miles south of the US border, don’t freak out but there are 129 million Mexicans south of the US border, most of them closer than 1200 miles. #
I went for a haircut today at a Russian barber shop here in NYC. They had Fox News on, which is unusual, they usually have Turner Classic Movies (one of the reasons I like the place). So Fox News was going on endlessly talking about the bombs. There was very little news, not much to say. I'm totally tuning into this these days. It's all very repetitive. Like the commenters are instruments in an orchestra who can be relied on to play certain notes when called on. The moderator, Wolf or Chris or Jake or Brett or whoever is the conductor of the orchestra. He's following a script that's whispered in his ear by Holly Hunter. Mindless crap that's been focus group tested to the max. Blah and blah oh and btw blah, blah. Polls. When is it ok to politicize. No it's too soon for sure. Stay tuned there's much more breaking news to come. #
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.#
Finally good marketing from Democrats. Not the Democrats, but at least it's a start. Let these guys run the marketing. Give them money to run this as an ad in local markets. Let's stop being so nice to Repubs. #
My mom died on February 5 this year. Since then she’s been alive in my dreams. But now in late October my dreams have caught up. My subconscious has received the news. I’m dreaming the realization that I’ll never see her again. The feeling is of course deeper than the conscious realization. It was a shock, tinged with sadness, remorse and regret, but also a feeling of freedom, the likes of which I've never felt before. #