Mitch's Blog

Trump is a scab, the Dems need unions, and the Dems are not faithful friends to unions. Harris campaign advisor – her brother-in-law Tony West – is Uber’s chief legal officer and the architect of Prop 22, California’s scab law that formalized “gig work” labor violations. The fact that when the eminently guillotineable union-buster Howard Schultz tries to win a presidential nomination he does so in the Democratic party speaks volumes. If your political party has room for Michael Bloomberg, it doesn’t have room for workers. Seriously, fuck that guy.

— General Strike 2028: Unions fight fascism

Something I saw while walking the dog: This artful cluster of birdhouses

A friend is lining up all his vaccinations for the next four years to prepare for anti-vaxxers taking charge of the US healthcare system.

Another friend is stocking up on electronics purchases now, anticipating price increases because of tariffs.

Another friend is diversifying his investment portfolio and moving investments overseas.

And, of course, some people are stocking up on survival gear or leaving the US.

How about you?

We’re not doing anything different, at least not now. If the US is going fascist, I can think of nowhere I’d rather be than California. Certainly not outside the US — no place in the world will be free of US foreign policy.

An elephant named Mary uses a hose to shower off, which is totally adorable and demonstrates sophisticated mastery of tool use.

A family built a 50,000-pound full-size replica Stargate in their Ohio backyard. The ring has become a social media sensation — but tourists are not welcome.

How It Went. John Gruber shares a moving story about his mother’s death, father’s wedding ring and the election.

How Trump 2.0 could transform American cloud, AI, broadband and more. President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House and his “America First” policies will reshape the American and international tech landscapes. My latest on Fierce Network.

“Your standing desk isn’t making you any healthier. A large new study found that standing for more than two hours a day doesn’t protect against the cardiovascular risks of too much sitting."

I started using a standing desk in late November 2010 and quickly found it more comfortable and stayed with it. I walk or stand for 12-13 hours or more on most days.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog.

The Washington Post ordered its employees to return to the office five days a week. Huh?

Good journalists don’t work in the office. They go out in the community and find and report on news.

“News isn’t happening at your desk,” according to a great journalist (ChatGPT says it was Christopher Hitchens but I’m skeptical).

What a Trump win means for the FCC and telecom policy.Look for a Repubilcan-led FCC, eliminating Section 230 protections, potential revisions to the Universal Service Fund, good news for Elon Musk’s Starlink, and more.

This is an amazing, fast, in-depth analysis by my colleagues Diana Goovaerts and Masha Abarinova on Fierce Network

After using it once, I switched off Live Activity election results on my iPhone. Too much agita.

Apple users can use Live Activity to track election results from their home screens. I switched this on but will switch it off if it generates too much agita.

Britain’s remaining hereditary members of the House of Lords are fighting against a movement to abolish their seats. They say that eliminating the hereditary seats would be undemocratic — and their argument sort of makes sense.

Researchers from Kyoto University launched a satellite with wood paneling into space. This is not an exercise in 70s-inspired retro-futurism — they’re testing whether wood is a reasonable space construction medium.

How has the Electoral College survived, despite being perennially unpopular? A brief history of a disliked institution.

I’m sure it is great for my mental health and productivity to spend a lot of time on news and social media today. I see nothing wrong with this plan.

jk this actually seems like a good time to do minimal amounts of both news and social media.

I’ve gone door-to-door several years. Every year, I get awful stagefright — I dread it for months. Which is odd, because I do not get stagefright in real life. I love public speaking.

Once I get out there going door-to-door it’s fine. The unpleasant interactions are not particularly unpleasant and are rare. Far more interactions are pleasant. One or two are great. I need to remember that the next time I’m called.

This is a numbers game. Cover ground. You’ll get no response at 90% of the doors you knock on. They’re either not home or not answering the door.

Last week, a woman in the neighborhood caught me when I was out walking the dog and said she was afraid she’d missed her chance to send in a mail-in or drop-off ballot. I reassured her that she had until Election Day. She recognized me from my going door-to-door. That helps me feel good about the process.

There is a complicated script that we’re suppposed to follow but I believe it may have been written by people who have never gone door-to-door, and certainly not in their own neighborhoods. It makes you sound like a broken robot. I have been advised by a veteran at this sort of thing to wing it. Remember to state my name, state that I’m a neighbor and volunteer for the local Democrats. We have door-hangers — offer one of those. Other than that: Improvise. Get in an actual conversation like a normal person. We only go to houses with Democrats in them, so most of the people are glad to see us.

My own rule: Resist the urge to be persistent. Do not knock on doors with “no soliciting” signs. If someone seems to be rushed, just thank them, offer a door hanger, and be on my way in less than a minute.

Also, one house in my neighborhoood, which I have passed hundreds of times, has a wall around the front yard. When I went through the gate, the house had kind of a Texas Chainsaw Masssacre vibe. I left a hanger and skedaddled.

I think I’m done with the election. I may do some more dialing for Kamala today or tomorrow, but probably not. It’s in the hands of the American people now (God help us).

On Reddit: Why do so many people think drinking milk is weird?

Adults Who Still Drink Milk: Are You Okay? — “I’m not saying that everyone who drinks milk is a murderous psychopath – but it is unhinged behaviour.”

Meet The Adults Who Sometimes “Enjoy A Glass Of Milk”

Something I saw while walking the dog this morning: This tiny sticker on a street sign post.

The microphone on my Apple Watch stopped working weeks or months ago. I know the common wisdom is that Siri is useless, but I use it frequently to set timers and alarms on the Apple Watch and I missed being able to do that. Today I once again tried following the care instructions on apple.com and wiping the microphone with a clean lint-free cloth and then trying to scrub it with a toothbrush and tap water. I have tried that before and neither technique worked. Feeling reckless, I decided to poke at the microphone with the end of a dental proxabrush — and by gosh it worked! The proxabrush pulled out a small waxy, white plug, which I think was dried soap. And now the microphone picks up audio, nice and clear.

This has been a vexation to me for weeks or months and I’m happy to have it resolved.

I did another hour of get-out-the-vote calling for Harris-Walz. This time I called Arizona. One of the men I called signed off, “Live long and prosper.” I blanked on the proper response (it’s “peace and long life.")

Bluesky and enshittification: No one is the enshittifier of their own story

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr:

I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.

…

Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there.

I got started much later than I intended, and the website directed me to a zoom meeting in conjunction with the dialing. After 10 minutes they ended and wanted to have a debrief. I did not want to go to a zoom meeting or debrief. I am varsity level at this stuff – just give me a list with phone numbers and names and a script and I’ll jump in and do it.

Today’s calls went to Nevada. Nobody picked up; nearly all went to voicemail. Yesterday’s calls were to Georgia and I got no voicemails. Why is voicemail popular in Nevada but unknown in Georgia?

I just made a final round of donations to the Harris campaign, Swingleft.org and the San Diego Democratic Party.

Swingleft is an organization that supports Democrats in competitive races nationwide.

I don’t know how many Ms there are in “hummus.” Definitely more than zero and fewer than three.

I did it from my house, from my home office, the same place I work all day. I did it after work.

My work involved making cold calls many years ago, so I have no phobias about doing that. When I was in the cold-calling business, I used to dial each number manually, like a caveman; the Harris campaign has an autodialer, so you just call up the website in your web browser and click to dial. The campaign provides a script with contingencies on what to say if the person says they’re not sure who they will vote for, if they’re undecided on whether to vote, if they’ve already voted, etc.

The auto-dialer assigned me to make calls in Georgia. There was (cough) a bit of a language barrier on many of the calls. In theory, Californians and Georgians both speak English, but in reality the dialects are drifting. I predict in a hundred years the languages will be separate.

All the calls went to Democrats. That’s the purpose of making the calls — to get out the Democratic votes.

90+ percent of the calls didn’t pick up. Many of the others hung up on me as soon as I identified myself.

I had a lovely conversation with a 91-year-old woman who said she is not planning to vote this year. I gather from the conversation that she’s not well enough to do so.

Three people I talked to said they want to vote but don’t know where and how. The auto-dialing software has a contingency for that — I arranged to text them information on where and how to vote.

Those three people are why I volunteered.

I only had one outright hostile caller. He answered the phone, “Who the fuck is this?” and I literally laughed out loud at that. I ended the call soon after that. I clicked the button on the website to let the campaign know that I had encountered a hostile caller.

While waiting for the callers to pick up, the software displayed a series of Halloween-themed Dad jokes. It seems possible, though not likely, that Tim Walz picked the jokes himself.

I will try to do this phoning every day between now and Election Day, both to help put Kamala in the White House and for more Dad jokes.

Anyone call do this. Here’s where to sign up. go.kamalaharris.com/calls/ There’s a five-minute video orientation, which is rather confusing; I suggest watching the video and don’t worry about being confused; just push through. You’ll figure it out as you go, and if you make mistakes, it’s not a big deal.

Photos of the outrageous monumental architecture of Turkmenistan, the most isolated country in Asia.

Japan’s mundane Halloween costumes include “Person listening to the song they’re about to sing next at karaoke,” “Cast member at some kind of theme park,” “parents when they were young,” and “That person who brings you weird gummies as souvenir from their vacation.” More. Via

I took an actual taxi, rather than an Uber, on a business trip last week. I paid with a plastic credit card and received a paper receipt.

Now I know what Civil War reenactors feel like.

This year, for Halloween, I’m wearing normal clothes. Somebody asked me, “What are you supposed to be?” I said, “I’m a former gifted child. I was supposed to be a lot of things.”

I don’t like Halloween.

To me, the Halloween season is like a joke that goes on far too long. It’s like a three-hour movie that should have been 90 minutes, but it lasts four to six weeks.

Also, death and decay are awful and not to be celebrated.

On the other hand, I love Thanksgiving and (even though I’m Jewish) Christmas.

The best of Japan’s mundane Halloween costumes for 2024. Includes “Man who keeps getting mistaken for a store employee” and “Students who went to the cafe to study but ended up spending the whole time reading manga and looking at their phones."

We’re still deciding what to give out for trick-or-treaters. We’ve narrowed the choices to carrot sticks and travel-size toothpaste.

I was a night person when I was young, routinely getting to bed well after midnight. In the late 80s, my work often ended after midnight, and then I’d usually go out to bars and often roll home after 7 am.

That drastically changed in 1989, when I got a day job, and my clock gradually shifted over the following decades. I’ve seen a big shift over the last few years. And now I seem to be a morning person.

I’m looking forward to the end of Daylight Saving Time on Sunday because waking up and walking the dog in daylight is more important to me than that extra hour of sunlight in the evening.

Walking Minnie this morning, our neighborhood coyote passed us from behind on the other side of the street, loping along at about 1.5x our walking pace and giving us a wary side-eye. Minnie got excited and wanted to play. Minnie is a wonderful dog, but not intellectually gifted.

What’s the weirdest or most inappropriate thing you’ve seen or done in a video meeting?

She starred in “Young Frankenstein,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Tootsie,” “Mr. Mom,” Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” and the “Assignment: Earth” episode of “Star Trek.” She appeared on “M*A*S*H,” “The Odd Couple,” and “The Bob Newhart Show,” and in many more roles.

Variety:

Starting out as a go-go dancer, she can be seen shimmying behind the performers in filmed rock concert “The T.A.M.I. Show” and in six Elvis Presley features….

Garr’s first speaking role came in the Monkees' offbeat feature film “Head,” written by Jack Nicholson, whom she had met in an acting class. On the “Assignment Earth” episode of “Star Trek,” she played a ditsy secretary, the first in a string of many such roles.

That was the Star Trek episode where the Enterprise goes back to 1960s Earth and encounters a super-advanced alien named Gary Seven, who is undercover as a human secret agent. In later life, Garr said that Trek producer Gene Roddenberry was a perv who kept wanting her to wear shorter and shorter miniskirts, and she didn’t do Trek fan appearances.

Garr explained to the A.V. Club in a viciously frank and feminist 2008 interview why she was often cast as the “long-suffering wife” in films such as “Mr. Mom”: “If there’s ever a woman who’s smart, funny, or witty, people are afraid of that, so they don’t write that. They only write parts for women where they let everything be steamrolled over them, where they let people wipe their feet all over them. Those are the kind of parts I play, and the kind of parts that there are for me in this world. In this life.”

I read a Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr post where he talks about using a plain text file as a to do list. And then I listened to this Cortex podcast where one of the hosts talks about using four different to do list apps and the other host uses two. I’m dizzy and need to lie down.

OMG stop me from looking at election news, and if I can’t stop looking at it, at least let me stop sharing it.

The rallies remain the same. In 2016, writer Scaachi Koul thought she might learn something attending Trump rally. “When Trump and his acolytes descended on Madison Square Garden in midtown Manhattan this Sunday, there was little left to learn about our once-again maybe-president. Nothing feels new anymore.”

There’s a helicopter flying over the house announcing something about a “suspect,” but I can’t make out anything they’re saying. If we’re to be murdered momentarily by a desperate criminal, this would be a cool self-referential final post.

“Not Medically Necessary”: Inside the Company Helping America’s Biggest Health Insurers Deny Coverage for Care

Robin Buller at The Guardian interviews Kamilah Moore, chair of the Californial taskforce on reparations for Black Americans.

We hired five trained economists to help us crunch the numbers to figure out what compensation could look like. We didn’t want to just come up with any number. We wanted it to be rooted in data and a solid methodology.

The final figure – $800bn – got a lot of attention. There was shellshock even among taskforce members. But we weren’t saying that the state should give $800bn to Black Americans in the state. We were saying that’s how much the state has dispossessed from African Americans in California. That’s how much the state has stolen from African Americans in California through exclusionary public policy – like housing segregation, mass incarceration, over-policing and the devaluation of Black businesses – that has hindered our opportunities to build wealth over time.

Then, the University of California, Berkeley, released a poll that found most Californians opposed direct cash payments, and that became the major headline. Speaking from the outside looking in, I think that played into the calculus of the Legislative Black Caucus. To me, it appears their strategy was to take a low-hanging-fruit approach by introducing recommendations from the taskforce report that were easy wins instead of more substantive ones, like direct cash payments and other forms of material reparations.

Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes: ‘We want to make America hate again’. He blames the “corrupt leftwing media” for Jan. 6 attack. Um … sure.

Edward Helmore at The Guardian:

From outside the Post, the CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote on X: “Canceling a newspaper subscription helps politicians who don’t want oversight, does nothing to hurt the billionaires who own the newspapers and make decisions with which you may disagree, and will result in fewer journalists trying to hold the powerful to account.”

Tapper presents a false choice. Subscribers can choose to reedirect their Post subscriptions to publications that are willing to take a stand against tyranny.

I canceled renewal on my subscription. But the Post can win me back.

‘I’m not afraid. Let’s do it’: the Arizona abortion clinic testing the limits of the state’s ban. This is what courage looks like.

Nearly a million Puerto Ricans live in swing states. More than 470,000 in Pennsylvania alone.

I saw this lovely house while walking the dog.

Apple put the Magic Mouse’s charging port at the bottom again. “… Apple still thinks that the best way to charge your Magic Mouse is by flipping it over to plug it in, making it so you can’t use it. Why?”

Jason Koebler at 404 Media:

It is now legal to hack or otherwise bypass technical protection measures on McFlurry machines and other commercial food preparation machines in order to repair them thanks to a new rule issued by the Federal government.

Also, after a challenge, it remains “legal to circumvent manufacturer locks that prevent the repair of medical equipment.”

Bad copyright law combined with arbitrary software locks installed by manufacturers make it illegal for people to repair the devices they own, resulting in “both a huge number of McDonald’s ice cream machines and a large number of medical devices being broken at any given moment.” The beneficiaries of this bad law are the manufacturers of these devices, who have an unjustified monopoly on repairs.

This same monopoly, granted by Section 1201 of the the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is enjoyed by manufacturers of “everything from video game consoles to tractors to ventilators to ice cream machines, kitchen appliances, and trains.”

The US Copyright Office issued exemptions to the law.

But Kylie Wiens, CEO of iFixit, said the new ruls don’t go far enough. Industrial equipment is excluded and the rules do not legalize sale of tools that would bypass software locks.

“This exemption is helpful, but what we really need is Congress to solve this problem and truly legalize repair,” he said. 

Trump praises Chinese President Xi for controlling citizens “with an iron fist."

The Philadelphia DA asked a state judge to shut down Musk’s $1 million election sweepstakes, calling it an “illegal lottery."

A Trump campaign ad claiming America has “gone to hell” under Biden features images from Trump’s term.

Economics From the Top Down: Since Reagan, the US has been on a massive policy of redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich.

By returning this stolen money, the US housing crisis would evaporate. No, I’m not kidding. If the United States were to undo its experiment with rampant inequality and return the distribution of income to the levels found in 1970, the housing crisis would disappear.

via

“Fighting for the right of disabled people to adapt their technology is fighting for _everyone’s _rights.” — Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Please enjoy this 2021 photo of Minnie. She says hey.

Max Read: Anthropomorphic chatbots are a dangerous user interface for LLMs. AI didn’t kill 14-year-old Sewell Setzer. He killed himself with a gun he had easy access to in his house.

The mates who have met for a pint every Thursday for 56 years. “We once talked about soccer and sex. These days it’s more prostates and pensions.”

@possibledog@beige.party/:

#BlueSky is a centralized corporate app, running a theoretically-decentralized network protocol that currently has only one (1) active node on the network: BlueSky. The other minor members of the ATP network are just piggybacking on BlueSky’s 13 million captive users for auth and reach.

Also:

Go ahead and enjoy BlueSky. It’s better than Facebook. It’s easier than Mastodon. It’s sassier than TikTok. It’s not motherfucking Xitter. But it’s not decentralized.

This is my attitude toward most corporate social media. I enjoy Threads, Tumblr and I even recently went back to Facebook. All their corporate overlords are tainted.

I stopped using Twitter around when Musk bought it but I can’t say that was over moral indignation. I had just gotten tired of it; Twitter had stopped being fun or useful for me.

Taco Bell is bringing back the Caramel Apple Empanada and other favorites from the 60s through the 2000s. What about the enchirito tho?

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog.

I recall having dinner with a friend in late 2016 — after the election but before the inauguration. He predicted the US was a year away from the Military Coup to Bring Back Democracy, followed in four years by the Military Coup to End Democracy after democracy turns out not to have worked.

I think my friend may have simply been off by a matter of time.

I remain hopeful that the Democrats win decisively, perhaps in a landslide, and whatever resistance follows is quickly put down. But hopeful is not the same thing as optimism.

I canceled my subscription to the Washington Post after this chickenshit decision.

Speaking out against fascism is a low bar, but the Post failed to clear it.

I don’t feel like I’ll miss out on much. The editorial quality has been declining for a while.

Eight questions to help you think about death.

Springsteen: I rarely see my bandmates - we’ve seen each other enough

Mark Savage on BBC.com:

“The louder you can talk, the better, because I’ve played rock and roll for 50 years.”

Bruce Springsteen has just E Street Shuffled into the room. Uncannily charismatic, he carries the practised ease of someone who knows the destabilising effect their presence can have on regular people.

He takes time to greet every member of the BBC’s film crew individually, then breaks the ice with a joke about a journalist who mistakenly called him “Springstein”. That reminds me of a local radio DJ in Belfast who always used to introduce him as “Bruce Springsprong”.

“Really?” he laughs. “Well, I’ve been called worse.”

I took Uber X instead of Uber Comfort today.

Simon Garfield at The Atlantic:

Comic Sans has long been the “Macarena” of fonts. Type aficionados don’t like it, the way coffee connoisseurs don’t like Starbucks. It is the font everyone loves to hate. But I love to love it. More than the typeface itself, I love the idea of Comic Sans: a set of letters that can make people suddenly intrigued, and sometimes cross. No other font gets people so worked up. When was the last time you had an argument over Garamond or Calibri?

Atlas Data Privacy Corp, which helps its users remove personal information from consumer data brokers and people-search services online, is suing Babel Street, which allows customers to track individual mobile users using tracking data built into everyday Android and Apple phones.

Brian Krebs, KrebsOnSecurity:

Collectively, these stories expose how the broad availability of mobile advertising data has created a market in which virtually anyone can build a sophisticated spying apparatus capable of tracking the daily movements of hundreds of millions of people globally.

In the hands of domestic terrorists and US states that have enacted fanatical anti-abortion laws, the technology can be used to track suspected illegal immigrants, women seeking abortions, public servant targeted by baseless conspiracy theories, and more.

Atlas says the Babel Street trial period allowed its investigator to find information about visitors to high-risk targets such as mosques, synagogues, courtrooms and abortion clinics. In one video, an Atlas investigator showed how they isolated mobile devices seen in a New Jersey courtroom parking lot that was reserved for jurors, and then tracked one likely juror’s phone to their home address over several days.

The article goes into detail about how this service is already allegedly being used for harassment, as well as the possibility of far more. Journalist Brian Krebs recommends turning off tracking on Android phones and iPhones, and includes instructions on how to do so. Do it now, and do it for everybody who lives with you, because if attackers can find people you live with they can find you too.

I saw a guy at Orlando Airport dressed as Silent Bob. I was going to ask him why he was walking around in costume a week before Halloween, but I realized he’d either not answer or give me a 10-minute soliloquy, and I had a plane to catch.

I think my wife and me are the last two people without tattoos.

I saw a guy with an artificial leg with a NY Mets logo on the knee.

I feel bad for anybody sitting in my row on a flight. I fidget something terrible.

I listened to “Never Gonna Give You Up” end-to-end for the first time since rickrolling became a thing and you know what? It is a pleasant song.

Here’s something I saw while walking this dog at the park this morning.

2e2 whooping cough cases currently in my part of Washington state. There’s been a vaccine for that for 80 years.

There used to be a story about turkeys being so dumb that they would stand in the rain, looking up, until they actually drowned. Now I believe that the turkeys were taking a principled stand for their personal freedom.

— @grumble209@kolektiva.social

… just because you’re on their side, it doesn’t mean they’re on your side. They don’t want to prevent AI slop from reducing your wages, they just want to make sure it’s their AI slop puts you on the breadline.

— Penguin Random House, AI, and writers' rights., Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Blue states should play “constitutional hardball."

Provide succor to “medical professionals, teachers, doctors and anyone with a trans kid,” says Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr.

All over America, families are despairing of their lives in red states. Whether you’re worried that you or someone you love might need to terminate a pregnancy, or you’re worried about gender-affirming care for you or a loved one, you can put your worries to rest in a blue state. Same goes for nurses and doctors who are worried they can’t do medicine unless it accords with the imaginary dictates of Bronze Age prophets as claimed by pencil-neck Hitler wannabe Bible-thumper with a private jet and a face from Walmart. Fill the blue states with great schools, libraries and hospitals, and invite everyone who wants to do their job in a free country to come and work at ‘em. Line every state border with abortion and mifepristone clinics, and set up billboards advertising the quality of life, the jobs, and the freedom in blue state America.

…

Dems have to get over their fear of “states’ rights” and start playing state-level hardball. This doesn’t mean escalating cruelty. Quite the contrary: every cruel measure enacted as red state red meat is a chance for blue states to extend a kindness, and capture even more of the best, brightest and kindest of the nation, creating a race to the top that Republicans can only win by abandoning their performative cruelty and corruption.

During our last time going out to lunch before the pandemic, my dad (who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and spent years living in the Polish forest and fighting the Nazis) expressed his dismay that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our country seriously enough. I suggested that while most Americans were concerned, they didn’t see the Trump era as being that ominous because they assumed the kinds of things that happened in his life could never happen here. My dad stopped walking, looked at me, and asked, “You think vhen I vas a kid any of us thought it could happen there?”

— Dave Pell

Surgeons are wearing Apple Vision Pro headsets into the operating room. $3,500 is wicked expensive for a consumer device, but it’s dirt cheap for medical equipment. Other vendors are making specialized devices.

A son writes a hilarious and loving obituary for his father. “He is God’s problem now." Here’s the obituary

A delightful series of life lessons from people just turned 30, 40, 50 and 60, along with a 74-year-old. A selection:

30:

— don’t work for startups, they’re always one ‘innovative idea’ away adding ‘sell your kidneys on the black market’ to your job description.

…

— those little single-use glasses cleaning wipes are 1000% worth the money
— overly self-depreciating jokes just make people uncomfortable, wean yourself off of them

40:

— never get down on the floor without an exit strategy for getting back up

50:

• “loving yourself” is less of a feeling and more of an action. you can start doing it any time and it will make your life better and better as you go on
• this will happen incrementally - be patient
• along those lines, if you haven’t started making an active effort to quit shit-talking yourself, suck it up and do it
• no, shut up. do it. “but it’s haaaaard!” don’t care. do it.

…

• at some point you will encounter people much younger than you arguing passionately and incorrectly about history you personally remember and experienced
• this will be infuriating and annoying
• otoh, most other things just… will not matter to you as much
• at some point you will shift from wanting to go out to being like “eh” and deciding to stay in. this is okay.
• you will have absolutely no idea what The Youth are talking about and you will not care
• but if you keep your mind open to new ideas you’ll never be irrelevant

…

• get a fucking hobby, especially a hobby that involves physically creating/handling something and/or moving your body in physical space. it will do you more good than you can imagine

Trump plans to rule as a dictator, unchecked by Congress, courts, the law or the Constitution. He intends to put millions of American citizens, residents and visitors in prison camps. None of this is secret. He has promised to do it publicly.

Jamelle Bouie: There is no precedent for something like this in American history.

Trump’s campaign rests on an explicit promise to govern as an autocrat. He has announced, repeatedly, his intent to abuse the authority granted him as president to essentially terrorize millions of Americans, immigrants and native-born citizens alike.

If many Americans, from ordinary voters to political elites and the press, seem paralyzed with inaction, unable to accept what is plainly in front of us, it might just be because the stress of the situation has taken its toll on all of us. Faced with the truly unimaginable, many Americans have defaulted to the notion that this is an ordinary election with ordinary stakes.

If only that were the truth.

A school disciplined a student for using AI, and his parents sued.

The parents say there was no policy forbidding the use of AI, but the school points to several policies — and those policies seem reasonable. You can use AI if your teacher says you can, but you must show all your work, including chatlogs and prompts.

The school also says the kid basically just got a slap on the wrist, and he and his parents should stop being crybabies.

In the 20th Century, you could stroll up to a newsstand, see a newspaper with an interesting headline on the front page or a magazine with an interesting article on the cover, and just buy that one issue for pocket change. No subscription, easy transaction.

We need the equivalent on the internet. As we’re all learning the hard way, quality news needs to be paid for, but fake news is free; a decent micropayment system could help mitigate that terrible problem.

Is it possible to globally disable Cmd-P to print in the Mac?

It seems like an artifact from the 20th Century to have a valuable keyboard shortcut like Cmd-P set to “print.” Are there still people who print things out so frequently that they need that keyboard shortcut? Do they stand around the printer waiting for the printout to extrude while smoking unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes and doing other 20th-century things?

Employees describe an environment of paranoia and fear inside Automattic over Wordpress chaos. Mullenweg’s supporters are comparing him to Musk and Trump, which is not the flex they think it is.

On foreign policy, economics and law-and-order issues, I could possibly be persuaded to support the Republican point of view. It’d be a hard sell, but I’m a middle-aged, middle-class suburban white dude, so it’s possible.

But I have at least one trans friend, several gay and lesbian friends, and I support bodily autonomy.

So the harder the GOP pushes on those issues, the harder they push me to the Democratic side.

I expect I am far from alone.

I was blocked on Threads for most of the day. Whenever I tried to log in, I got a notification that one of my posts was deleted for praising or supporting an organization Meta deems as dangerous. This is the post.

I often see front yards covered in artificial turf around here. Is that common elsewhere, or is it particular to southern California?

I dislike it. Just put down indigenous plants, or (if that’s too much bother) gravel is fine, too. Artificial turf makes me wonder why you thought it was a good idea to carpet your yard?

I didn’t even notice how common this is here until I shared a photo online, and people who live elsewhere in the US commented on how weird it is. They’re right — it is.

[@MitchW](https://micro.blog/MitchW) The most true and accurate and wise words on the internet:

don't Google “Goatse"

I’ve been using RSS virtually every day for more than 20 years. My current favorite is Readwise Reader, which is a little pricy, but it combines RSS, newsletters, read-it-later, reading PDFs and ebooks, highlighting, note-taking and building a document library into a single, powerful application.

I’ve recently been struggling to find a decent news portal—something I can glance at and see if there’s any major breaking news, such as when hurricanes threatened Florida. I decided to add feeds for the NYTimes, Washington Post, Guardian, etc., to my reader, on the theory that if news is major and breaking, it’ll show up in the feeds when I glance at them.

I divide my feeds into folders: one for high-priority items, where I want to see every headline, and another for work-related news.

But mostly, I treat the RSS feed as a “river of news” and don’t even try to read every item. I read headlines every few hours. Often, I just mark an item to read later (tap the “L” key in Readwise Reader) and move on.

I’ve been using Vivaldi as my primary browser on the Mac for about six months, and I quite like it. My two favorite features:

• You can switch between vertical and horizontal tabs. I use vertical tabs with page thumbnails on my ultrawide display, and normal, horizontal display when the MacBook is detached.
• Command palette for commands and opening bookmarks and bookmark folders.

A British man is the second person in history with three penises

A jury denied damages to the family of a San Diego Black man who was buried in the wrong grave for 22 years. The deeper you read into this article, the less legitimate the family’s case seems.

Elon Musk’s promise of free Starlink terminals for hurrican victims in western North Carolina was a cruel lie. The service is not free, and Musk is spreading lies about FEMA responders and jeapordizing the lives of people on the ground.

If Musk really wants to help, he can just donate money.

This is an article by my friend and tech journalist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who lives in Asheville and is one of the people displaced by the hurricane; his house is without power, water, internet and cell service.

Hong Kong police busted a fraud ring that used AI deepfake face-swapping technology for romance scams.

“Following initial contact with victims on social media platforms, they first sent artificially generated photos using AI technology to create attractive individuals in terms of appearance, personality, occupation, education and other aspects,” said Fang Chi-kin, the head of the New Territories South regional crime unit.

According to the unit’s superintendent, Iu Wing-kan, deepfake technology was then used when victims requested video calls.

“This technology transformed the scammers' appearances and voices into highly attractive females in terms of looks, attire and speech, making the victims trust them unquestioningly,” SCMP quoted him as saying.

Scammers are also using deepfakes of corporate executives to phish employees on video calls to execute fraudulent transactions.

The FTC finalized a new regulation making it easier to cancel unwanted subscriptions. Republicans oppose it, of course.

The FTC said it’s “modernizing” the 1973 Negative Option Rule in order to carry out its mission of combating unfair and deceptive business practices. (“Negative option marketing” is a term that the regulator uses to mean any business practice where customers need to take affirmative steps to reject or cancel service lest they are billed anyway.)

The only acceptable jobs for Spider-Man.

i dont want any of this “hes a genius tech ceo making millions” SHIT. Spider-man is BROKE and he missed rent this month and he has a tiny apartment and thats how its MEANT TO BE. he doesnt make money because he is our Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-man and not fucking Tony Stark.

Brilliant. Just a few paragraphs. Read the whole thing.