I found a printed listing of the C source code for the first outliner I wrote in 1978. I thought this was long gone, but there it was. #
Jon Udell was tweeting about podcasting, and I had a bunch of things I wanted to say, so I talked for 22 minutes in this podcast. I talk about the Daily podcast and Brian Lehrer, two formats that work. Why has the tech for listening to podcasts evolved so slowly? Who has the ability to innovate? Same with blogging. When was the last time there was a serious innovation?#Trump always talks about how other countries don't pay us for the things we do for them, but they do, they really do. Hugely. The US has the world's reserve currency. We're the only country that can print money that can be spent anywhere. People all around the world use our currency to store value. Even with all the lunacy, our dollar is still the safest place to store value. It means we can always have more money. We don't even have to actually print it, they're just numbers in a spreadsheet somewhere. Trump, of course is doing everything he can to make everyone else not trust us. So if the trance breaks, and the dollar is no longer seen as the most trustworthy country, we would end up being one of the "other" countries, and we'll have to pay China to store our money, along with all the other schmucks. And they'll have the power we still have. It's one of those things that if you don't know about it, and most people don't, you can't understand how global economics works. And when they say "The American taxpayer paid for this," well it's not technically true. #
To give you an idea how this works, suppose you were playing Monopoly with some friends. You're a special player, you have all the money you want. Whenever and no limit to how much. No one else can. That's pretty cool, yes?#
I'm working my way slowly through Borgen season 1. It's very good, and immersive. The format is basically The West Wing in Denmark. The prime minister is a woman with a family. Every episode, as in TWW, they tackle a big issue. It's in Europe, and it's a small country, not the mighty USA. It's very well done. It's slow going because they wrote it so that you need to read things in the show and read the sub-titles (the characters get information from reading headlines in newspapers that go by too quickly to read them). Sometimes they drop into English because the characters would speak English then. It's on Netflix now. There are already three seasons and a fourth is on the way. A side-note, the chief of staff of the PM is Pilou Asbæk, who played Euron Greyjoy in Game of Thrones.#
We are learning more about Trump even if it's coming at glacial speed from Woodward. Also his comment yesterday about climate change was revealing. The snotty look on his face when he said science is bullshit. You can tell he's never had to deal with a health emergency, or he wasn't paying attention when it happened. If he doesn't die of an instant heart attack or stroke, he's going to learn to respect science, at some point. #The fundamental rule of discourse on the net is that you should treat each person as you would treat an actual human being, face to face. Too often people "speech" at you, that is give a speech, addressed to you. Giving speeches is cool, that's what Twitter is for, but then address your speech to everyone, not to an individual. #