Scripting News
Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution...
Note: these are my opinions only.
Another topic at breakfast this morning with Rex was the spying the NSA is doing on all of us.
I think, if the President decided that it was more important to level with us than continue to deceive us, which they have been doing, there's no way of denying it now (and they haven't tried to), this is what he'd have to say.
1. The clock is running out on our civilization. Our financial system almost fell apart in 2008, and the only way we were able to get it functioning again was to throw a lot of bullshit at it, to re-inflate the bubble. Any other approach would have meant going into a kind of depression the world has never seen.
2. While that's happening, we've done nothing about the changing climate. Our coastal cities are going to be underwater soon. There will be chaos when that happens, orders of magnitude greater than the chaos that ensued after 9/11.
3. Also, our economy is now built around computer networks, whose security is a joke. One day, probably soon, hackers are going to get into the banking system and "disrupt" it. When you check your bank balance you'll see $0. No one will know who did this. It might even be the US government.
We can't change any of these things. We will have an economic collapse. The climate will disrupt our lives in unimaginable ways. And hackers will rule us. All this will happen. So if you believe this, how do you prepare for it, such that the people who control the US govt have a chance to survive with their lifestyles intact? That's why Obama supports NSA spying. His bosses ordered him to.
What should we do about it? Probably nothing. Both of us, Rex and I, are in our late 50s. This stuff will play out over the next 20 years or so. Neither of us has enough of a stake in it to devote serious energy to it, esp if the younger people, who really do have a stake in the outcome continue to be uninterested.
I thought it was notable that they blame us, the boomer generation, for the mess we're in. When we were younger we did protest. Study the history. We were even effective at stopping the war we objected to. Our crime, if you want to think of it as that, is that we became middle-aged, and decided to live our lives instead of trying to change the world. We created the networks they love so much, and think we don't understand. So on the whole, I'd say we did okay. Not great, but not too bad. The question is why are today's young people acting so middle-aged?
BTW, the President going on camera and telling us a big truth is not unprecedented. Check out Eisenhower's farewell address. It's amazing how he laid it out there. If only we had listened. It's the beginning of an incredible movie called Why We Fight. Highly recommended.
My friend Rex Hammock from Nashville was in town this weekend and we went for a couple of bike rides. It's all good. Last summer I visited Rex and his wife Ann in their home town, and we did bike rides there too.
Rex is a publisher. He does magazines and turns them into blogs. He's parked in an interesting place and has been for quite a few years. He's smart, but keeps it simple. And he reads my blog, and I his.
A couple of pieces caught his attention last week. One about scripting in Fargo, and the other about ignoring what you don't understand. Rex has a funny sense of humor so I can't always tell when he's serious. But he says in a self-deprecating way that there's a lot of stuff he doesn't understand, but he asks questions, and I usually try to answer them when I can.
So he wanted to know about scripting in Fargo this morning. I tabled the discussion because I was enjoying Brooklyn Diner corned beef hash with poached eggs. We went on to other topics, and I realized later that I forgot to answer his question! Ouch.
Better late than never. Here's the deal on scripting in Fargo.
1. It means you can customize the app. Probably not a big deal for Rex, because he's not an every-day user of Fargo. But for people who are, the ability to add just the command you've been wanting, without waiting for the developer to add it, could turn out to be important.
2. You can build systems with editors that work on the net, are hooked into a CMS, and understand structure, as outliners inherently do. It's funny because in all the writing I've done about scripting in Fargo, I've missed this one. Building systems means having a way for an administrative person add to a database that is incorporated into your web presence, without content management in their way. We were on the cusp of it with Frontier, but for some reason we never encouraged people to look at the product that way. I guess by that point we weren't focused on scripting anymore.
It occurred to me that given what Rex does, #2 might actually turn out to be important.
Boston Globe sells for $70 million
The NYT sold the Boston Globe to the owner of the Boston Red Sox for $70 million.
1. Manny Ramirez had an 8-year contract worth $160 million with the Boston Red Sox.
2. The highest paid actor in 2013 is Robert Downey Jr who earned $75 million.
3. HootSuite, a Twitter and Facebook utility, raised $165 million in its Series B round.
4. RockMelt, widely viewed as a failed software company, sold to Yahoo for between $60 and $70 million.
$70 million was an incredibly good price for the Globe. Media properties are worth a lot. For example, according to Forbes, the Red Sox are worth $1.3 billion.
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