Small change in BingeWorthy. The rank displayed in the program box now matches the rank in the hotlist.#Following up on yesterday's hypothetical, assuming people from blue states relocated to sparsely populated states, let's do an example. The population of Wyoming is 579K. The population one of the boroughs of NYC, Queens, is 2.3 million. So if 15 percent of the people in Queens relocated to Wyoming, that could yield three more non-fascist Electoral College votes, one member of the House and two Senators. #
Facebook, now that you've merged friend requests and notifications of new posts from friends, the fact that spam friend requests are out of control has become a more serious problem. I don't want to deal with the spam while checking out what my friends say. And there's a small chance a friend request is not spam, and there isn't enough info in the list to tell. So I just delete all of them. I get about 10 spam friend requests every day, or at least that's what it was before they got merged with other stuff. Either get the spam under control, or re-separate them. #
I wish they had something akin to the Like button on Twitter that indicates that the author thinks you made an idiotic spammy reply.#
School administrators should listen to yesterday's Daily podcast, which explains how the NBA bubble works, for an idea of what they would have to do to protect their communities adequately. #
- Racism and misogyny are on the ballot this year. Even white men can now feel the effects. I think that's what the last twelve years in the US have been about. Here's the story. George W. Bush was so awful, we needed an antidote, and we liked Obama. We liked how sassy he was, and smart, and how well he spoke, his confidence and ambition. The whole package. It was his moment. Trump is the reaction because there were a lot of Americans who felt tremendous fear and resentment in having a young sassy (they'd probably say uppity) black man as president, no matter that he brought the economy back from the wreck that the Repubs left us. Remember how they drove it into a ditch. #
- So in 2016 it was Trump vs HRC. But before that it was Sanders vs HRC. That's where I, a white man, learned how men keep women down. In the debates I was so angry that Sanders interrupted and screamed over HRC, his arms waved into her space. She had to take it. Could she respond in kind? No way. Not sure what the women's equivalent of uppity is, but it's a real thing. And because she was my candidate, I felt it, felt it in a way I had never felt it before. I was enraged by it. But it seems most people couldn't even see it. #
- The people who hated that a black man was president sure as hell weren't going to follow him with a woman president. No matter that she's smart as a whip, would have been a great president, and look who she was running against. What a slap in the face for women as equals -- that so many people chose a huckster, buffoon, Putin surrogate, man-child, tax evader, draft dodger, rich kid, criminal, instead of HRC. It really says something.#
- This morning while getting ready to write it hit me. The last four years have been a symbolic lynching of Barack Obama. Anyone who still approves of Trump, if they have a mind, must be driven by rage, the kind of rage that results in a young confident black man being strung up on a tree. They're willing to let a virus decimate the country in order to express their rage. Anyone who votes for Trump this time, imho, should lose the right to call themselves an American. #
- It was something of a puzzle to me why racism became the big issue this summer, as the virus was raging through our population. But it would have been even if there had been no virus. Maybe we don't realize it at a conscious level, but the humiliation of the last four years, even for white men in the US, has been that the hatred of blacks and women in our fellow Americans has been exposed, they can't hide from it now. It's out there for everyone to see. #
- It took a fully competent African-American president and a fully competent woman candidate for white men to really see it. Some of us liked the idea of putting racism and misogyny behind us, and others hated it. But it's fully out there now. #
- In 1980-something I was invited to give a talk at Apple along with a reporter from the NYT. The idea was that we would give feedback to Apple people to help them work better with developers and the press. I took the assignment seriously. I showed up with a list of requests, things Apple could do to give their platform an advantage over the IBM PC, their chief competitor at the time. #
- When I finished, Apple people lined up to give me feedback on how ungrateful I am. They do all the work and I make all the money and get all the glory. Funny thing, because I viewed it exactly the other way around. They had real salaries and benefits. I was always skating on thin ice. There were plenty of times when I didn't have any idea how I was going to pay the bills. They never had that concern. They could break me, I couldn't break them. They had all the power. They resented that the VPs at Apple would take my calls or respond to my emails, and those emails would be circulated with notes like "Please do something about this," which of course resulted in nothing happening other than more resentment. The bosses didn't listen to them, but then again, they didn't listen to the bosses either. They really held the keys, the top people at Apple had no clue about how computers worked, so they were at the mercy of the people in the room who expressed their displeasure with me that day in the 1980s. #
- I did have friends at Apple, people I could take to lunch and ask wtf just happened. It turns out that the rank and file at Apple hate everyone. They hate their bosses, their bosses' bosses. And the press. And most of all, developers. On top of the list loudmouth developers like me. #
- What can you say. Some things never change. They were wrong then, developers saved their jobs over and over. Now they don't need anyone to save their jobs, they're floating on a vast ocean of cash. But someday they will need devs. When it works there's tremendous synergy between developers and platform vendors. But employees of the platform vendors are usually big obstacles to success. They hurt, feel unloved, unappreciated, underpaid, dispensible, ripped off. And I don't know of anything that can be done about that. As they say, it is what it is. #
