While walking the dog, I saw this tasteful Christmas decoration.

By the time New Year’s comes around, I have holiday exhaustion. New Year’s needs to be in March. Not a lot of holidays between January and May.

Quintessence is a “barebone Nuzzel clone” for Mastodon, in open beta.

It’s pretty simple: if you follow the @quintsns@mastodon.uno bot account, each day at 23:00UTC it will send you a direct message containing 10 links that have been shared in the past 24 hours by the people you follow, ordered by the number of different people you follow that have tooted/boosted the link.

Brilliant! I’ve signed up.

h/t @Ronkjeffries@mastodon.social

The exiled chief rabbi of Moscow says Jews should get out while they can. [The Guardian/Stephen Burgen]

Pinchas Goldschmidt says that, historically in Russia and the USSR, when things go bad, the government scapegoats Jews.

Jews have been fleeing Russia for a century. In 1926, there were 2.7 million Jews in the USSR, 59% of whom were in Ukraine. “Today only about 165,000 Jews remain in the Russian Federation out of a total population of 145 million.”

My own grandparents bugged out of Eastern Europe around 1900. Poland on my father’s side, Lithuania on my mother’s.

Also:

Ukraine has a long history of antisemitism from pogroms at the end of the 19th century to facilitating Nazi massacres during the second world war. The most notorious of these was the murder of 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar in Kyiv in 1941.

Given this history, Goldschmidt said it was remarkable that Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who made no secret of his Jewishness, was elected Ukraine’s president with more 70% of the vote.

That fact made a nonsense of Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukraine was being governed by neo-Nazis, the rabbi said. “Show me another country that is in the grip of Nazis where the Jewish community is thriving.

“However, I don’t know how Jewish the president [Zelenskiy] feels. He plays the Jewish card to ask Israel for help.”

I imagine Zelensky’s Jewishness is much the same as my own. I am not observant, nor do I have a religious preference in my associations. But am I Jewish? Hell, yeah.

Goldschmidt also noted that while Russia’s Jews faced an uncertain future, antisemitism was on the rise in what had long been seen as a Jewish sanctuary, the US.

In 2018, a gunman killed 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Last year the Anti-Defamation League recorded a record 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the US, ranging from assault and harassment to vandalism.

“For many years, Jews in the US believed that it was an exception, that whatever happened in Europe and other countries could never happen there,” Goldschmidt said. “But over the past three years there have been more attacks on Jews there than in Europe.

I have not been alarmed by the rise of anti-Semitism in the US. It still seems like a lunatic fringe. But perhaps I should be alarmed.

Hooters tried to recruit Elon Musk to refute rumors that it was closing down because of a study showing millennials don’t like boobs. [Mediaite/Zachary Leeman]

Julie and I saw this sign 11 years ago today.

Sign on the restroom door at Shakespeare Pub & Grille, San Diego, where we had Christmas dinner.

Musk’s Twitter cuts include a data center, janitors, and toilet paper [NYTimes/Kate Conger, Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac]

With people packed into more confined spaces, the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors, according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty, these people said. And because janitorial services have largely been ended, some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home.

Jo Walton: In Search of Books in Which Nothing Bad Happens

Cal Newport: On Quiet Quitting.

“Every generation reaches a point where they begin to think more critically about what role, exactly, work should play in their life.”

I’m still working on that. I’ve always been a late bloomer.

Ian Welsh: How To Relax, Change & Be Free.

“… everyone is acting according to conditioning: religious, social, family, school, philosophical, etc… They’re in chains, and they regard those chains as themselves.”

Ben Dreyfuss: Romanian Cops Did Not Find Andrew Tate Because Of His Greta Thunberg Video: “This is a lesson in media failure and misinformation.”

I saw a bulldog wearing a sweatshirt today.

This seems like a black-funny story until you read the charges against Tate. He”s not just your average MRA grifter. He seems like a monster and predator who should never breathe free air again.

Andrew Tate Arrested for Human Trafficking in Romania After Pizza Box Gave Away His Location. [Laura Bassett/Jezebel] “A video the men’s rights activist tweeted in response to Greta Thunberg’s burn about his small dick energy reportedly led authorities right to him.”

Four days after Elon bragged about unplugging an important server rack, Twitter went down hard. — Mike Masnick at Techdirt @mmasnick@mastodon.social

The woke mind virus strikes again!

“I remember reading an interview with a minister of an African state who said approximately, ‘every time a western minister visits us we get a lecture, every time a Chinese official visits we get a new hospital.’”

— Ian Welsh: A Map Showing The Two Main Geopolitical Blocs

Religious upbringing is great for kids, even for those of us who find ourselves nonbelievers, agnostics, or atheists. It helps a person figure out the world and cosmos and their place in it.

Talented trans woman writer Charlie Jane Anders @charliejane@wandering.shop remembers her time as a choirboy. She saw the best and worst of religion—“complicated and messy.”

Hello insomnia my old friend.

While walking the dog, I saw this splendid holiday display.

Crypto craziness craps out — and about time too. By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (@sjvn@mastodon.social) at The Register.

At a recent fintech open source fintech conference, crypto was only mentioned in passing. “People would talk about it in the same way you’d talk about your little brother’s latest embarrassing TikTok video.”

From where I sit, this is the slow but sure fall of what has always been one gigantic Ponzi scheme. There has never – never – been any real value in crypto. Yes, I know all the arguments about how fiat currencies have no intrinsic value either. You know what, though? If I go to the grocer, I can buy milk, bread, and butter with my fiat dollars or pounds. Dogecoin? Garlicoin? Trump NFT trading cards? I don’t think so.

…

At least with famous financial scams of the past, such as the Dutch Tulip Bubble and the 2008 real estate crash, you had tulip bulbs and houses for your money when all was said and done. With crypto, you’ll be left with nothing at all except meaningless, pointless, valueless blockchains.

I’ve been saying that bit about the tulip bubble for years. At least you had tulips.

The Sorta Kinda Life Changing Bliss of Walking Solo. By Craig Mod @craigmod@mastodon.social

Folks seem scared of solitude but solitude is a superpower when used well. Alone, in your basement, it breeds anomie, but out in the world, moving through the world, step after step, clear goal in mind, I’d argue that a solo walk during which you are engaged — paying attention, with your phone turned off, no headphones, no podcasts, no escape routes — is the quickest way to elevate a human. Basement solitude — isolated without serendipity, static, stagnant, stuck with your face in a screen, manipulated by the algorithms — is the death of the soul. The solo walk outdoors, in the air, beneath the sun, the rain, the snow, bumping into drunken horse betters, kind gardeners, farmers covered in blood, women beating mattresses at dusk, tractor trailer drivers leaning against their cabs for a smoke, is the opposite, the antipode, the physical palinode to basement solitude and the death of the mind and body.

I walk the dog more than three miles nearly every day, and that counts as walking alone. But I’m almost always listening to podcasts.

I sorta kinda remember who the author, Craig Mod, is—I think he’s a travel writer, currently living in Japan, and from this essay I gather his daily walks are part of his work. He seems to photograph and video the things and people he sees, and interviews the people, publishes the results on the web, some by subscription only, and sells it in books. Very different from my life (though it sounds appealing). He walks 12-45 km per day (that’s about 7.5-30 miles), carrying 12 kilos of photo and video equipment (26 pounds.

The walk, he says, is his work platform, the way the computer and Internet are mine.

Dogs start the day with a spoonful of Alpo or some other canned meat on top of a heap of patented, vitaminized kibble. In no time the meal is gobbled down and the dish licked clean and, like as not, poked noisily about the kitchen like a hockey puck, amid waggings. But I can recall another era, when every dog took a quick first look into his dish, to see what was in there. It was different each morning, but might contain a last chunk of pot roast or ham hock, plus gravy, from the previous night’s dinner table, a scraping of scrambled eggs, a slice or two of stale bread, leftover lima beans or spinach, a fresh but limp carrot, a splash of milk, and a half-bitten doughnut. It went down just as fast and probably did no harm, but what I’m getting at here is the old phrase “a dog’s breakfast,” because that’s what this book is. A mélange, a grab bag, a plate of hors d’oeuvres, a teenager’s closet, a bit of everything. A dog’s breakfast.

– Roger Angell, “This Old Man: All in Pieces.”

That’s what this blog is. A dog’s breakfast.

Texas Cop Sentenced To More Than 11 Years In Jail For Killing A Woman During A Welfare Check. By Tim Cushing at Techdirt.

Atatiana Jefferson was lawfully hanging around in her Texas home when she heard a prowler outside at 2 am, so she retrieved her lawfully owned gun to investigate. The prowler was police officer Aaron Dean, who was called on a welfare check after neighbors reported Jefferson’s front door was open and light was on at that unusual hour of the night. In the confusion that followed, Dean failed to identify himself as a police officer, and shot and killed Jefferson.

Dean made so many awful decisions in just a few minutes, as did the police department, which defended Dean as reacting to a “perceived threat”—that threat being Jefferson, who in reality was just being in her own home, babysitting her 8-year-old nephew, violating no law.

Amazon begins drone deliveries in California and Texas.

Residents of two towns, one in each state, can sign for drone delivery.

“The drone will fly to the designated delivery location, descend to the customer’s backyard, and hover at a safe height,” Amazon said. “It will then safely release the package and rise back up to altitude.”

Republicans Can Still Win in Blue San Diego. By Andrew Keatts at Voice of San Diego.

Mastodon has rejected five recent funding offers to preserve its nonprofit status. “Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter,” says founder Eugen Rochko.

Remains to be seen whether this lasts. Money is a powerful temptation.

We saw this sobering sign and candle at the vet a few days ago.

If you’re seeing this on Mastodon, I suggest you follow me at @mitchw@mastodon.social. If you think you’re already following me there, you’re actually probably not. I apologize for the inconvenience. Here’s an explanation.

A couple of days ago, I migrated all my followers on @mitchw@mastodon.social to @MitchW@mitchw.blog. “It’ll be great!” I said to myself. “Finally, I won’t have to cut-and-paste to multiple social media platforms to participate in all of them! Write once, read anywhere! Yippee!¹”

Here’s what I soon learned:

1. While micro.blog is an excellent blogging and micro.blogging service, with an outstanding management team, it’s not a great Mastodon experience. Three main reasons for that:

A. Formatting: When viewed on Mastodon, micro.blog truncates posts at 280 characters, rather than Mastodon’s standard 500. Also, micro.blog strips paragraph breaks from posts sent to Mastodon.

B. micro.blog doesn’t support boosts.

2. Once you’ve migrated followers from Mastodon to micro.blog, there’s no automatic way to send them back.

3. Once you’ve migrated followers from a mastodon account, that account is deactivated. I had a vague idea that I’d continue using my Mastodon account to read, boost, and reply, but that won’t work.

I expect 1.A will be corrected soon—management is On It, fixing formatting problems. Until then, I expect I’ll just manually cut-and-paste posts to micro.blog and Mastodon. Once the formatting problems are fixed, I’ll see if I can reactivate micro.blog’s otherwise excellent tool for automatically cross-posting to Mastodon.

However, I expect 1.B will never change. Boosts are antithetical to micro.blog culture. I’m ok with that.

In the long run, I’d like to see better integration between Mastodon and other services, to help folks like me maintain a presence in two or more places at once. I don’t have a clear vision of what that would look like. Maybe a micro.blog Mastodon instance that somehow syncs with micro.blog itself?

San Diego needs to build housing and plenty of it. Forget “neighborhood character” and the environment. Current conditions are a crime against humanity.

STUT: These are the stories of newly homeless San Diegans. By Gary Warth.

When Britain abolished slavery, slaveowners received compensation. But what about the enslaved people themselves? Did they get any financial reparations for the terrible crime committed against them by the slaveowners and society?

7 Reasons Why Britain Abolished Slavery. By Luke Tomes at historyhit.

How a Town Famous for Xenophobia Fell in Love With Immigrants

“We now want as many immigrants as possible,” said Bernard Thompson, the mayor of Hérouxville, Quebec, a onetime supporter of the town’s anti-immigrant code.

The Central African Republic, one of the world’s poorest countries, became one of only two nations in the world to adopt Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency. Eight months later, almost nothing has changed.

Crypto was an alternative to the CFA franc, which gives France effective control of the economies of more than 180 million people in its former colonies.

Critics say the Bitcoin transition was a gimmick to hype up interest in CAR’s own cryptocurrency, which failed.

One of the World’s Poorest Countries Put Its Faith in Crypto – Why?. By Ben Hunte at Vice World News.

My favorite part of George Santos’ self-defense is where he says he never claimed to be Jewish, he just said he was “Jew-ish.” Oy.

Jackie Hoffman steals “Glass Onion.”

Get Blogging! Your easy guide to starting a new blog..

Elon Musk was never a liberal, and his plans for Twitter were never benevolent. “Tech barons’ lip-service to democracy and pluralism was always conditional on preserving their own positions at the top.” By Thomas Zimmer at The Guardian.

“Karens for Hire”—slogan, “We Karen so you don’t have to”—promises “to harness the power of accomplished complainers in the service of beaten-down customers, abused tenants and anyone else with a dispute that outstripped their own capacity to carp.”

Cutting through customer service doom-loops by calling in a ‘Karen’

Steve Hendrix writes this for The Washington Post as a lighthearted story about a plucky startup seeing a problem and fixing it. Doing well by doing good. American entrepreneurial spirit at its finest.

But this is also a story about American society being fundamentally broken.

The Real History Behind ‘The Woman King’ | The Agojie Warriors of Dahomey. By Meilan Solly at Smithsonian Magazine.

The movie’s depiction of the Agojie army of elite women warriors is true-to-life. But Dahomey in real life was a brutal, imperial autocracy and enthusiastic supporter of slavery and the slave trade.

We liked the movie—much better than “Black Panther,” which I thought had too much superhero folderol. “The Woman King” was about 30-45 minutes too long, but most movies today are.

A secularised Jewish American thinks about celebrating Christmas. As a secularized Jewish American, I relate.

Ben Werdmuller: Christmas, the eighth night, and me.

I’ve had essentially no personal encounters with anti-Semitism in my own life—that I’m aware of.

Matt Stoller: Private Equity Gave Your Bank Password to Hackers

Francisco Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital Corp own LastPass. They raised prices, and then fumbled security. You had one job guys!

…

At this point, it’s time to recognize that ownership and management of software firms by private equity is itself a security risk.

Busloads of migrants dropped off at vice president’s DC home on Christmas Eve

The Bible literally says not to do shit like this. Matthew 25:31 and following.

Feline Navidad!

Building a keyboard with a rotary dial instead of a number pad.

In rural Georgia, an unlikely rebel against Trumpism. By Stephanie McCrummen at the Washington Post.

Johnson, a 33-year-old white electrician with no college degree from rural Georgia, rejects hate.

I can’t decide whether I think this is a great profile, or whether it’s patronizing and elitist.

Fleece knobby dog, friends!

We watched the first episode of the first season of “Yellowstone.” We liked it. It’s like “Succession.”

There should be a Yellowstone/Succession crossover.

And it should have Doctor Who, too. Because everything is better with the Doctor.

I migrated my mastodon account to micro.blog but decided I don’t like micro.blog as a mastodon client because micro.blog doesn’t show boosts and I like seeing boosts. So I figured fine I’ll just use my mastodon account to read, and continue posting to micro.blog. But then I found that when you migrate a mastodon account the old account is disabled. So I re-enabled it and now I’ll just go back to what I was doing before and syndicate my micro.blog posts to mastodon.

Except now all my old mastodon followers are following me on micro.blog, which is what I wanted but maybe not what they want? But what’s done is done.

For my next trick, I will saw a person in half. Can I get a volunteer from the audience?

I’m going to use “Bomb Cyclone” as my porn star name.

While walking, the dog and I saw this tree. This is Christmas in a subtropical, semi-arid area.

From my journal, this day in 2013:

We still haven’t seen the two female cats we had that since we uncrated them yesterday, other than Julie seeing the shadow of ears when she looked under the bed. But during the night I heard meowing and felt little feet walking on me in bed. I assume that was the cats;Julie has never gone in for that kind of thing before.

We still have the cats. They are fully visible now.

I just migrated my mastodon.social account to micro.blog—which had the side effect of deactivating my mastodon.social account. I’m not sure I like that.

All of this is experimentation. The fediverse is in early days. We’re still figuring it out, collectively and individually.

McSweeney’s: A Parent’s Typical Day, as Envisioned by My Child’s Preschool

A 28-year-old Meta employee paid $300,000 for a 12-year-lease on a studio apartment on a cruise ship. Austin Wells will work from home while traveling the world.

I don’t think I am the target audience for Andor. Unless you’re supposed to fall asleep halfway through the fourth episode and then your wife wakes you up to let you know the credits are on and it’s time to turn off the TV. If that’s what Andor was going for, they nailed it.

A house down the street has a Santa hologram in the living room window, which I’ve never seen anywhere before. Either that or a creepy guy in a very realistic Santa costume.

We took one of the cats to the vet today.

“There is some kind of a creative power there, to have an unusual name.”

Johnny Cash did a song about that

The best headlines of 2022

Included:

‘How to Murder Your Husband’ writer guilty of murdering her husband

h/t kottke

What Happens When a Group of 12-Year-Olds Is Left with No Supervision for Five Days?

Jason Kottke: “After a brief attempt at cleaning, the boys completely trash their house, eat mostly sugar, divide into factions, and somehow trash the house even more.”

Who are the most influential and important people in history?

Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Genghis Khan, Augustus Caesar, and Napoleon are 1-6, in that order.

Who else is in the top 12?

People who wear short pants and long sleeve, heavy sweatshirts in chilly weather are monsters.

People who wear short pants and long sleeve, heavy sweatshirts in chilly weather are monsters.

“I can’t go here. It would be too easy for him to pick up if I go here.” — The dog, looking for a place to poop while we’re out walking.

"… the App Store’s financial success is the worst thing that’s happened to Apple this century. It’s a distraction at best, and a profound corruption at worst." — John Gruber @gruber@mastodon.social

Gruber raises a good point here. The App Store, and general locked-down nature of the iPhone, is Apple at its controlling worst. I should have a right to install whatever software I want on my iPhone, repair it or pay someone else to do so, and modify it however I like, or pay someone else to do so. The limits on my ability to control my phone should be the law and public safety. Apple should not be allowed to make the rules here.

And don’t accuse me of going full Elon here. A phone is not a social network.

Mastodon is getting popular enough that it’s going to start attracting litigation and regulation. — Amanda Hoover on Ars Technica

As if you didn’t have enough to worry about: eating too many apples might be bad for you.

Why Would Anyone Use Another Centralized Social Media Service After This? — Mike Masnick at Techdirt @mmasnick@mastodon.social.

I’m asking myself the same question. I’m heavily active on Facebook but not looking to get involved in another proprietary social media service.

I like that micro.blog doesn’t support likes or reblogs. On Facebook, Tumblr, and Mastodon, I’m trying to pay very little attention to my likes and reblogs without comment.

Likes and commentless reblogs are sometimes useful. Sometimes a friend I haven’t heard from in a while likes one of my posts, or somebody famous likes or reblogs something, both of which are good to know. But most days, likes and reblogs without comment are just noise.

I wish Facebook, and Mastodon would just give me a daily report on likes and reblogs that don’t have comments. I don’t need or want that information in realtime. Tumblr lets me set something like that up with filters, but it could be easier.

micro.blog’s intentional lack of support for likes and reblogs is just one way it’s different from Mastodon. Here’s a good article from @manton describing why micro.blog is not Mastodon, even though you can connect between micro.blog and Mastodon.

Hi, @manton! Feature request for micro.blog: Let me import my Mastodon follower list, which I can already do when switching Mastodon instances. Right now, I’m syndicating my micro.blog posts to my mastodon.social account. Importing my follower list would be even better.

Daring Fireball @gruber@mastodon.social: Quora is beta testing an AI chatbot.

Shouldn’t be that big a change for Quora, many of whose participants already fail the Voight-Kampff test.

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr: How Apple could open its App Store without really opening its App Store.

Apple will be required to open the iPhone to competing app stores, according to reliable reports, which is a huge deal and runs completely counter to Apple’s iPhone strategy since 2007. But Apple could still pull a fast one, unless regulators are smart, says Cory.

Apple “fights for its users when doing so is good for its shareholders. But when something is good for Apple shareholders and bad for its customers, the shareholders win, every time.”

Hearing Wendell Pierce say “fuuuuuck” in an early scene of S3E1 of “Jack Ryan” makes me want to watch “The Wire” again.

While walking, the dog and I saw this mobile axe-throwing setup. Because is it really the holidays without axe-throwing?

While walking, the dog and I saw this dapper gentleman.

The right believes in absolute free speech for everyone they agree with.

Soon as I saw the headline cross Mastodon, I checked my twitter account. Still active. I feel snubbed.

Thursday Night Purge: Elon Musk’s Twitter Bans Tons Of High Profile Journalists — Mike Masnick at Techdirt.

“… it seems that whatever brakes or controls were in place at the new ‘free speech absolutist’ Twitter have really come off.”

How cable monopolists tricked conservatives into shooting themselves in the face – Cory Doctorow

“No matter how hard conservative culture-war cannon-fodder love big business, it will never love them back.”

While out walking the dog late this afternoon I saw a little four-year-old girl wearing a beautiful green Christmas dress with a red bow on it. She was getting out of the car with her Dad, coming home from daycare I guess.

This was the same little girl I’d seen one morning a week or two ago, getting into the same car with her Dad. That morning she was wearing an elf costume, and was delighted to show it off for me.

So today I said to her, “Don’t you look pretty!” The dog, meanwhile, wanted to say hello, so I took a step or two slowly toward the girl and her father, keeping an eye on the situation.

This time, the girl was not delighted. Her face slowly started to crumple, and she clutched for her Dad’s leg and started to wail. So I backed away.

I don’t think she was afraid. I think she had just had a busy day, with a lot of stimuli and was overwhelmed.

“Kid,” I wanted to say. “A lot of the time I feel just like that.”

Years ago, two friends of mine, one at the CIA, one at the Pentagon, advised me to delete the app. So I don’t want to position the concerns about TikTok as an extreme position. Having a Chinese-owned social media app embedding itself into our lives is not without risk. But it’s worth noting that the things we fear from Chinese software companies—privacy invasions, data selling, democracy disruptions—are things that American social media companies have been doing with our full cooperation. It’s also worth noting that American social media companies have a particular interest in reducing competition from global players, and they’ve never faced this kind of a domestic business threat from a China-based company. In other words, the pressure to ban this outside app could be coming from inside players.

— Dave Pell, NextDraft, Tok Bottom

… a conservative is someone who believes that some of us were born to rule, and the rest of us were born to be ruled over.

— Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers. He was a dick.

The idea that “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product” is utter nonsense. The factor that determines whether a company will treat you like the product is whether they can get away with treating you like the product. A company that is disciplined by neither competition nor regulation will extract value from you in every way it can get away with.

— Cory Doctorow, Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers. He was a dick.

I have just disabled micro.blog’s cross-posting to my main mastodon account, and will instead use micro.blog’s native ActivityPub support. If you want to follow me on Mastodon, you can do so on @mitchw@micro.blog.

This situation is permanent. Until I change my mind. Which could be never. And could be in, like, an hour.

But if you follow me on mastodon, you should probably do it on @mitchw@micro.blog. One reason to do that is that the posts are formatted a little nicer that way.

micro.blog doesn’t show me who’s following me, who likes my posts, and who boosts them. I don’t even get numbers for those statistics. Doing without this information will be character-building for me.

I can’t make up my mind whether I want to cross-post from micro.blog to my primary mastodon account—as I am doing now—or simply use micro.blog’s built-in ActivityPub support. I go back and forth.

When I’m not cross-posting, I boost my micro.blog posts to my mastodon account manually, which maybe sounds like a hassle but it’s actually no big deal

I also can’t decide whether to redirect mitchw.blog to micro.blog.

This back-and-forth is pretty typical for me with regard to blogging and social media. I seem to like fiddling with my setup as much as I like posting.

Crypto Was Always Smoke and Mirrors: The fall of FTX shocked everyone. Except this guy.

The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby.

He’s James Block, and he runs a crypto newsletter called Dirty Bubble Media.

Block, a vehement crypto skeptic, has spent the past 18 months doing forensic blockchain research. He uses open-source tools to follow flows of money between crypto companies, repeatedly demonstrating how shadow banks and nefarious scammers inflate the value of worthless assets in order to generate enormous wealth that exists only on paper.

Charlie Warzel interviewed Block for The Atlantic.

Block: The AMC-meme-stock thing is a good example of how this can happen. People buy the stock of a semi-worthless company because they have this idea about short squeezing, or whatever. They are not financial experts and have a loose or maybe even wrong understanding of how finance works, and want to try to move the market. Crypto takes this abstraction a step further, because there’s nothing linked to it at all. There’s no economic activity in this space. There’s nothing produced by these companies. In fact, it’s a negative-sum game because of the cost of running the blockchains alone—the computational cost is tremendous. The amount of time and money people put into just running these things is tremendous. And they produce nothing of value. There’s a reason these massive companies aren’t all using blockchain for their processes: It is incredibly inefficient. And realistically, who actually wants their financial information public and visible to everybody?

…

Warzel: Do you think most entities in the crypto space are insolvent and know it, and are just pretending right now, post-FTX?

Block: Absolutely. That’s because of what I said earlier about crypto. There’s no value created by any of these companies. It’s all just moving money from Person A to Person B.

Support Railroad Workers Fighting for Humane Conditions and Paid Sick Leave.

The RR workers get NO sick leave and NO regular schedules! They are always under their bosses’ thumb. COVID shows how important sick leave is. Inhumane schedules, and denying sick leave, especially during a pandemic, increases illness, deaths, and disparities, especially among people already vulnerable to Covid.

Sick leave and humane scheduling will not ruin the companies financially. Paid sick leave only amounts to 3.5% of the industry’s soaring profits; in fact, over 50% of their revenue is profit.

— People’s CDC

American healthcare is split into 2 piles:

• Face holes
• Not face holes

— US Healthcare, by Matt Haughey on A Whole Lotta Nothing

h/t kottke.org

“I believe that marriage is a lasting partnership between one person without health insurance and one person who gets pretty good coverage through work.”

h/t kottke.org

“Is there such a thing as accidental praxis? Because as much as I hate oligarchs, in a million years I could not have figured out a way to trick one to walk on stage and get booed for ten minutes straight by the proletariat.”

Speaking as a former comedian, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Because … have you ever had 10,000 people hate you TO YOUR FACE before? Because I have. And humans aren’t wired for that.

I’d note that the 10,000 people hating me to my face were actually just stonily silent while I ate it on stage while opening for a musical act. And while I laughed it off after .. it was rough. And I’d been working for years at that point. But BOOING?!

And for a *narcissist*? Just saying – expect some serious whiplash crazy coming over the next week.

— John Rogers @jonrog1

h/t jwz

jwz: “I would like to report an absolutely absurd use of metaphor.”

Truck fire leads to huge pile of trash dumped in front of police station.

If you walked by 17th and Valencia on your way to lunch today, you may have noticed an enormous pile of trash steaming on the road just beyond the police station doors.

— Will Jarrett at the San Francisco Mission Local

The service I use to track of TV and movies to watch, trakt.tv, has been down for two days. They post occasional updates on Twitter. The latest just says their main database crashed two days ago at 7:30 am PT, and they’re working around the clock to fix things. Good luck!

Idea for a crime novel about a man who steals a yarmulke from his male sibling. Working title: “His Brother’s Kipah.”

Contrary to all good writing advice, sometimes I like to use baroque, sesquipedalian language where monosyllabic verbiage will do.

Orphaned neurological implants. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr.

Second Sight, a company that makes ocular implants, sold out to another company that doesn’t want to be on that business, leaving users blind and with crippling vertigo. Not the first time a neural implants company has done this to users.

Medtech startups are like any other startup. “… when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company’s assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy.”

The solution: Neural implants should be open hardware, and users should have legally protected right to repair.

Cory:

Opponents of this proposal will say that it will discourage investment in “innovation” in neurological implants. They may well be right: the kinds of private investors who hedge their bets on high-risk ventures by minimizing security and resilience and exploiting patents and user-data might well be scared off of investment by a requirement to make the technology open.

It may be that showboating billionaire dilettantes will be unwilling to continue to pour money into neural implant companies if they are required to put the lives of the people who use their products ahead of their own profits.

It may be that the only humane, sustainable way to develop neural implants is to publicly fund that research and development, with the condition that the work products be standard, open, and replicable

Heavy rain when walking the dog this morning. The dog didn’t like it. Neither did I, but only one of us had a choice about being out there.

A few weeks ago, I was communicating with a 26-year-old colleague, talking about increasing work demands in the face of an oncoming launch. I started to say, “I definitely picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.” Then I stopped myself, because I thought she probably hasn’t seen the movie, and doesn’t know about the national panic in the 1970s where kids were supposedly huffing glue to get high.

Enjoyable article about Generation Z’s struggle to adapt to communication style in the office workplace, particularly on Slack and email.

Gen Z came to ‘slay.’ Their bosses don’t know what that means.. By Danielle Abril at The Washington Post.

Gen Z gets rococo and complex in its use of emoji, and they interpret full sentences ending periods as passive-aggressive.

Like every generation before them, they adapt to the older generations’ communication styles. And the older generations adapt to them.

I was standing on the sidewalk outside the pet store tapping on my phone. An old guy walked by very slowly, pushing a walker, with oxygen cannulae in his nostrils, wearing a jaunty Tyrolean hat.

“What did you do before you had those things?” he said.

I didn’t miss a beat. “Stared at the wall.”

He continued walking slowly on, laughing out loud.

— From my journal, this date in 2016.

How the Hospice Movement Became a For-Profit Hustle.

Half of all Americans now die in hospice care. Easy money and a lack of regulation transformed a crusade to provide death with dignity into an industry rife with fraud and exploitation.

— Ava Kofman, with Doris Burke, at ProPublica and The New Yorker.

I’ve been sleeping better for the past month or so. I attribute to more consistent bedtimes and wake times, reduced life stress and cooler bedroom temperatures. Even though summer nights here in San Diego are cool, our bedroom stays warm, and I think next summer I may return to my energy-wasting summer habit from the early 90s of sleeping with the a/c on, under a heavy blanket.

Common wisdom says you should avoid screen time before bed, but I have not found a correlation between screen time and insomnia.

What you can learn about sleep from truckers

Stephanie Vozza at Fast Company:

[Dean Croke, principal analyst at DAT Freight & Analytics, an on-demand freight marketplace] says the body is programmed to sleep twice a day, at night and again eight hours after you wake. The second sleep should be a 30-minute or a 90-minute nap to take advantage of the sleep cycles and avoid waking during deep sleep.

Having a bedtime is important. Croke recommends to trucking companies that they have drivers start work at the same time every day.

Starting work the same time every day encourages a fixed bedtime.

If you have a week that wears you down, Croke says you can make up for it on the weekend.

“The brain is incredibly resilient,” he says. “You’ll bounce back quickly if you’ve got two periods of good sleep at the end of the week. I call it the ‘two and seven rule.’ Get two periods of consecutive sleep each week to get rid of the sleep debt from the previous week.”

After two periods of good sleep, the brain washes away that sleep debt, and you can start Monday morning fresh.

Sleeping in on weekends runs contrary to a lot of other sleep advice I’ve read, but I believe it. With regard to sleep advice, a lot of folklore gets passed as science.

Freedom of reach is freedom of speech.

The online debate over free speech suuuuucks, and, amazingly, it’s getting worse… Billionaire dilettantes have their own stupid definitions of all kinds of important words like “freedom” and “discrimination” and “free speech.” Remember: these definitions have nothing to do with how the world’s 7,999,997,332 non-billionaires experience these concepts.

— Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr

What if failure is the plan?. danah boyd has been studying social media for decades, with a particular focus on young people and other marginalized groups. She applies her insights to the current state of Twitter, with asides on the global war on terror and the real cause of the collapse of local journalism (it wasn’t the internet, Google, Facebook, or Craigslist that killed journalism. It was financiers hungry for the physical real estate—land—that newspaper offices occupied).

I’ve been viewing events at Twitter as an entertaining shitshow with little real world consequence. It’s fun to watch an arrogant billionaire fail spectacularly and publicly. boyd provides sobering perspective.

It is a cold and blustery day here in San Diego. We had brunch with friends. I walked the dog before the rain started. I am spending the afternoon on my keister, reading and blogging, with Julie and the dog. Then I will have dinner and watch some tv. An altogether splendid day.

Also, Julie bought a bag of googly eyes. ⬅️⬅️⬅️ We professional writers call this “burying the lead.”

Blogging is its own form at this point. It isn’t an essay. Nor is it a scholarly article. It has no length requirements: a blog post can be a sentence, a paragraph, 500 words, twice that, or twenty times that. Neither does blogging come with expectations of frequency. Some folks blog daily; others multiple times a day; others twice a week; others unpredictably, as a kind of clearinghouse for random ideas or thinking out loud.

Blogging is the shaggy dog of internet writing. It’s playful, experimental, occasional, topical, provisional, personal, tentative.

— Brad East, Substack vs. blogging.

Yes to this. Also, blogging and posting to social media are different forms of expression. Twitter is obviously different, with its character limitations.

Interestingly, US newspapers from the 19th and early 20th centuries read like blogs. This was before newspapers standardized on the neutral voice from nowhere. They were livelier and had more personality.

Author Scott Lynch responds to a reader who objects to “unrealistic stereotypes of political correctness” in his fiction featuring a Black, middle-aged woman pirate captain. h/t Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Molly White: On anti-crypto toxicity.

I don’t think anyone should be pressured to be nice to evil people. But I think the belief that anyone who engages in crypto is evil has become rampant, and has been used to justify hate towards people who don’t deserve it. There is no doubt that there are plenty of evil people in crypto, but there are a lot of people in there too who, should you care to dig deeper, are after a lot of the same goals that you might be.

…

If you feel the urge to “cyberbully” someone in crypto, direct it at the powerful players behind crypto projects that are actively taking advantage of the vulnerable. Or, just as reasonably, direct it at the powerful tech executives, venture capitalists, elected representatives, and lobbyists who have contributed to the untenable situation we find ourselves in. Or the policymakers and governmental agencies who have failed to uphold their duty in regulating crypto and enforcing existing regulation that would protect people from rampant fraud. But not the artist who hoped to earn a few bucks selling their digital art in what is otherwise an extremely difficult field, or the person who hoped that maybe a lucky crypto buy could help them dig out of crushing debt just a tiny bit faster.

Twitter to Increase Tweet Character Limit to 4,000, Elon Musk Says. By Sami Fathi at MacRumors.

Where Veteran Rockers Go to Reinvent Themselves. How the Hudson Valley and the Catskills became the home to grunge icons, ex-punks and one-hit wonders. By Sal Cataldi at The New York Times.

“Being a dentist up in Woodstock, with all these great musicians, is a pretty great second act. And what other dentist can say he is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?”

On 2024, Romney won’t back Trump, even if he’s the GOP nominee. By Steve Benen.

When you live in a semi-arid climate and you only drive a couple of times a week, you can go for years without driving in heavy rain, and then you find out your wiper blades have turned into ineffectual shoelaces.

Highbrow Films Aimed at Winning Oscars Are Losing Audiences. By Brooks Barnes at The New York Times. Audiences aren’t coming to theaters for these movies, and nobody really knows why.

We watched the first half of “Spirited” last night, because I thought I was in the mood for a lightweight Christmas movie, but it turned out I was not – or at least not that one. Julie wasn’t feeling it either.

So instead, we watched the first episode of “Three Pines,” which turned out to be very good and entertaining.

“Three Pines” is a murder mystery, like about three quarters of the shows we’ve been watching over the last few years. But this one is not British for a change. It’s set in Quebec, and stars Alfred “Doc Ock” Molina.

So far, it’s like “Northern Exposure” but French and with a murder.

A remake of “Happy Days” would be set in the 2000s.

Yesterday I mistakenly had coffee at four in the afternoon. I thought it was decaf. But I slept soundly last night anyway. Makes me wonder what other superpowers I have evolved.

I saw these ducks do this mildly surprising thing at Lake Murray.

The Los Angeles Police Department is here to serve and protect… the powerful. The rest of you are on your own.

After audio recordings leaked of Los Angeles city lawmakers making shockingly racist statements, police want to find and prosecute the leakers.

LAPD Thinks Best Response To Leaked Recording Of Councilmembers’ Racist Remarks Is Going After Reddit Users. By Tim Cushing at Techdirt.

This letter from Mickey Mantle, recalling his ‘outstanding experience’ at Yankee stadium, is delightfully obscene, as is this 1898 memo to all Major League Baseball teams to reduce cursing.

The 1898 memo was “so expletive-laden and obscene as to be ‘unmailable’ to its intended audience via the postal service, and so was delivered by hand to each of the League’s 12 clubs and their foul-mouthed players.”

(Thanks, Daring Fireball!)

Dyson’s Air Purifying Headphones Will Cost $949, Plus Your Pride. By Andrew Liszewski at Gizmodo.

McSweeney’s: Middle School Party Games, Revised for Thirty-Five-Year-Olds.

Truth or Dare

If a player chooses “truth,” they must reveal how much money they make. If they choose “dare,” they must hand someone their phone and let them look at every tab they have open on their browser.

By Nicole Beckley

The New Yorker: Cory Doctorow Wants You to Know What Computers Can and Can’t Do.

A conversation about the “mediocre monopolists” of Big Tech, the weirdness of crypto, and the real lessons of science fiction.

…

This will all be so great if we don’t screw it up.

By Christopher Byrd.

Cory also talks about the limitations of perfect productivity: Once you’ve pared away all the unimportant tasks in your life, everything left is important and there’s nothing left to pare.

Fortunately, this is not a problem for me. I waste plenty of time!

I’m very impressed that Cory was featured in the New Yorker.

I saw this dapper gentleman at the park today.

The promise and the peril of ChatGPT. By Casey Newton.

Reading about the potential for abuse here, I found myself thinking about the classic science fiction story “A Logic Named Joe,” in which author Murray Leinster predicts the consumer internet in 1946. One of the computers on the network gets a little wonky and starts answering questions on how to commit murder.

People are already using ChatGPT to get answers to potentially lethal questions.

Less significantly, ChatGPT could potentially be the end of Google and industries that have grown around it—advertising and search engine optimization. Google gives search results, but ChatGPT provides answers.

Yes, It’s Censorship: Stop picking that nit, it’ll never heal. A few big companies, including Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Twitter, monopolize public discourse, setting the rules for what we’re allowed to talk about.

Cory Doctorow:

The decision to make our “digital public square,” into a privatized, monopoly-friendly corporate shopping mall whose owners can wield the power of the state against rivals who dare to compete with them may not violate the First Amendment, but it sure as hell isn’t good for free expression.

Ancient Rome did not fall. It was destroyed from within, by the same forces we see playing out in America today. By Barry Gander, a self-described “Canadian from Connecticut,” on Medium.

While walking, the dog and I saw these houses with the holiday spirit, and this car 🦮📷

Eugene from Wednesday is my role model. I’m going to wear a retainer and keep bees.

Proud Boy terrorists threaten Columbus, Ohio, drag queen story hour, school asks for protection, police nope out.. On MetaFilter.

Far more children have been molested by youth pastors than by drag queens, as Dan Savage points out.

MetaFilter: “Television news is about consistency and companionship."

jwz: Like Zoinks

jwz: Let Me Kill the Billionaire.

jwz: Normal Country. Functional Democracy

Seth Godin: Confidence doesn’t help win the lottery. There are lots of lotteries in our lives. Always have a Plan B.

One of the best blogs on the Internet. is back. I’m glad to see Jason Kottke has returned to blogging. But I’m sorry to learn he’s experiencing chronic pain. That’s hard.

South Dakota Bans Government Employees From Using TikTok. The Countless Other Apps And Services That Hoover Up And Sell Sensitive Data Are Fine, Though.

Karl Bode at Techdirt:

… policymakers freaking out about the Chinese potentially getting access to TikTok user data are the exact same people who’ve fought tooth and nail against the U.S. having even a baseline privacy law for the Internet era. These are the exact same folks that created a data broker privacy hellscape completely free of accountability, and advocated for the dismantling of most, if not all, regulatory oversight of the sector. The result: just an endless parade of scandals, hacks, and breaches.

Now those exact same folks are breathlessly concerned when just one of countless bad actors (China) abuse a zero-accountability privacy hellscape they themselves helped to create.

Dave Pell is on a roll on NextDraft today:

”At 8:10 p.m., more than nine hours after his family reported him missing, a passing tanker spotted the man near the mouth of the Mississippi River and alerted the Coast Guard." NYT (Gift Article): A Man Fell From a Cruise Ship. And Survived. “Mr. Grimes, whose family described him as an exceptional swimmer, had treaded in 65- to 70-degree water for hours, withstanding rain, 20-knot winds and three- to five-foot waves in the Gulf of Mexico, where bull sharks and blacktip sharks are common.” (That actually sounds better than how I imagine cruises.)

Also:

”To prepare for the depths of winter when food is scarce, many animals slow down, sleep through the cold or migrate to warmer locales. Not the common shrew. To survive the colder months, the animal eats away at its own brain, reducing the organ by as much as a fourth, only to regrow much of brain matter in the spring." This is not unlike my experience being on and then getting off Twitter.

Elon Musk gets mail. “Akiva Cohen, an attorney representing 22 laid-off Twitter employees, sent a letter to Twitter and Elon Musk (shared, of course, on Twitter): ‘If basic human decency and honor isn’t enough to make you want to keep your word, maybe this will…. ‘” By John Gruber on Daring Fireball.

Elon is getting to the “… and find out” bit.

“Robert Moses Is A Racist Whatever.”

Jason Kottke blogs about an interview with Robert Caro, author of “The Power Broker,” a definitive biography of urban planner Robert Moses.

Moses’ racist vision for New York transformed the city, literally paving over Black neighborhoods with highways.

Moses came along with his incredible vision, and vision not in a good sense. It’s like how he built the bridges too low.

I remember his aide, Sid Shapiro, who I spent a lot of time getting to talk to me, he finally talked to me. And he had this quote that I’ve never forgotten. He said Moses didn’t want poor people, particularly poor people of color, to use Jones Beach, so they had legislation passed forbidding the use of buses on parkways.

Then he had this quote, and I can still hear him saying it to me. “Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.” So he built 180 or 170 bridges too low for buses.

…

Robert Moses had always displayed a genius for adorning his creations with little details that made them fit in with their setting, that made the people who used them feel at home in them. There was a little detail on the playhouse-comfort station in the Harlem section of Riverside Park that is found nowhere else in the park. The wrought-iron trellises of the park’s other playhouses and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves.

The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse-comfort station are decorated with monkeys.

One detail I remember from stories about Moses: When he died in 1981, nobody attended his funeral. Even white people hated him.

Alexandra Petri: “Free speech is when you pay me money for goods or services. That’s free speech. When you do not give me money, that is censorship."

Disney’s new neural network can change an actor’s age with ease. The “production ready” neural net makes actors younger or older for film or TV. By Benj Edwards at Ars Technica

I have become fastidious about washing my hands, maybe even OCD, but I have also decided the dog and cats are sanitary, and I am still entirely clean if I have been petting the animals and letting the dog lick my hands and face.

That’s how it works. It’s just science.

I have become fastidious about washing my hands, maybe even a little OCD, but I have also decided the dog and cats are sanitary, and I am still entirely clean if I have been petting the animals and letting the dog lick my hands and face.

That’s how it works. It’s just science.

On Twitter: “You ever just think about how Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is basically whedon’s If I Did It”

A friend reminds me that I started getting healthy and fit after I attended a science fiction convention in around 2007, and saw that a third of the fans in attendance were using mobility scooters. I saw that for my own not-too-distant future if I didn’t lose weight and start exercising.

And so I did.

A few years after that convention, I attended another and was satisfied when I climbed a short flight of stairs two at a time.

That’s not something I’d do today. My wind and muscles would be able to do it easily, but my knees would protest.

Hello again, micro.blog! It’s me, Mitch Wagner, getting a fresh start on a new blog.

If you follow me on atomicrobotlive you can keep right on doing that, or you can just follow me here. I’ll explain what I’m doing later. I’m still figuring it out myself.