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A left-wing 2028 Democratic primary challenge is essential for Democrats

Hamilton Nolan: “Run a Left Wing Democratic Primary Candidate in 2028. No Matter What. Stopping the party’s rightward drift means having a real primary.”

The scariest possible outcome of the 2024 presidential contest is a Trump victory. The second scariest outcome, however, is a scenario in which center-right, anti-Trump voters pour into the Democratic Party and elect Kamala Harris and then proceed to pull the Democratic Party to the right.

Nolan makes these points:

#NeverTrump Republicans like the Cheneys are supporting Harris and may stick around in the Democratic party after 2024, pulling the party to the right.

Joe Biden’s leftward swing was due to pressure from Sanders, his allies, and their supporters. The Democratic Party became afraid of the Left.

But now Harris is afraid of Trump, his supporters and conservatives.

Primaries are the right time to challenge party leadership and force change in direction.

Regarding Dave Winer’s @davew@mastodon.social assertion that journalists should view people writing on the Internet as sources, rather than their competitors: I had this ongoing argument with a friend and colleague who was a very traditional journalist — he later went on to work for the New York Times and then Bloomberg. This was in the 2000s, when blogging was hot, and I was pro-blogging while he was a blogging skeptic.

I eventually stopped arguing with him when I realized that good-faith bloggers criticizing journalists were angry at journalists for not acting like journalists should. It’s fine for random people on the Internet to say random things, but journalists should be reporting what’s actually happening, not just repeating the random things that random people say on the Internet.

Dave also discusses WordPress’s potential as an infrastructure for the social web: “… underneath the cluttered user interface is a strong foundation that you could build any kind of writing software on.” The cluttered interface eventually drove me away from WordPress, and I now describe it as an Internet publishing and commerce platform that incidentally does a mediocre job of supporting blogging.

On this morning’s walk, I saw my first Trump signs of the season. There were many campaign signs for both parties, including one house with many Harris/Walz signs, topped by a Harris/Walz flag on a flagpole, which I have not seen before.

Directly across the street was a house with a lot of Trump/Vance signs. That’s gotta be awkward.

If the stories are great, it doesn’t matter much if they’re true

I found myself this weekend thinking of a friend, sadly deceased for a few years, who frequently told fantastic stories, usually about his sexual exploits. After a time, I began to wonder if my friend was fabulating. After more time, I decided I didn’t care — his stories were great.

I started thinking about my friend yesterday after reading this obituary of Jay J. Armes, a flamboyant private investigator with hooks for hands, accused of lying about many aspects of his colorful life history.

This is one hell of a lead sentence:

Jay J. Armes, a flamboyant private investigator who lived on an estate with miniature Tibetan horses, traveled in a bulletproof Cadillac limousine with rotating license plates and had steel hooks for hands, including one fitted to fire a .22 caliber revolver, died on Sept. 18 in El Paso.

— Jay J. Armes, Private Eye With a Superhero Story, Dies at 92, by Michael S. Rosenwald at the New York Times

The world’s oldest termite mound is 34,000 years old

Franz Lidz at the New York Times: “Scientists recently found the planet’s longest continuously occupied termite colony in an arid region of South Africa. It dates to the time of the Neanderthals.”

Termites are masterful soil engineers capable of erecting cathedral-like edifices out of dirt, saliva and feces. To create and maintain their homes, they become miners, masons, scaffolders, plasterers and roofers. Working together, they don’t just build simple nests; they install air-conditioning, central heating and even security devices.

…

Termites eat, process and excrete organic matter, enriching the quality of the surrounding soil. “Their mounds increase the depth, nutrient and moisture status of the soils, which results in the mounds often supporting more vegetation than the soils surrounding the mounds,” said Catherine Clarke, a soil scientist at Stellenbosch University who collaborated on the new study. “So they increase the productivity of semiarid landscapes and likely make these landscapes more resilient to climate change.”

Court rules that a 12-year-old’s pizza delivery from Uber Eats canceled her parents’ right to sue Uber after an unrelated car accident

A New Jersey couple sued Uber after a crash left them severely injured. An appeals court ruled that they had agreed to settle disputes out of court when their 12-year-old daughter used the Uber Eats app to order a pizza.

Lola Fadulu at the New York Times:

A New Jersey couple was heading home from dinner in an Uber in March 2022 when their driver T-boned another car, leaving them with serious injuries, including spine and rib fractures.

The couple, Georgia and John McGinty, of Princeton, N.J., sued Uber nearly a year later. Now, their effort to bring the case to court could be hampered by a terms-of-service agreement that they say their 12-year-old daughter signed while ordering pizza using Ms. McGinty’s Uber Eats account.

A New Jersey appeals court found last month that the agreement’s arbitration provision – which says that most disputes between Uber and its customers must be litigated privately – was “valid and enforceable,” reversing a lower court’s decision that would have allowed the couple’s personal-injury lawsuit to be heard by a jury.

An in-depth profile of Kamala Harris’s estranged father, the economist Donald J. Harris

The Harris father and daughter live just two miles apart, but rarely speak. NYTimes:

Interviews with more than a dozen friends and former colleagues of Dr. Harris reveal two notable themes. First, Ms. Harris’s father, a Jamaican-born emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, has been a critic of mainstream economic theory from the left but is hardly a Marxist.

Second, Dr. Harris has been a mostly absent figure from his daughter’s life but not an irrelevant one. Well before she set out on her political trajectory, her father was racking up achievements and, like her mother, setting a high standard that in retrospect helps explain Ms. Harris’s own ascent.

Trump accuses the elder Harris of being a Marxist, which is bullshit, like everything Trump says. But his policies are most definitely leftist and helped shape a decade-long economic boom in his native Jamaica. So if Harris did learn economics at his knee, that’s a plus for her.

I love the idea of the Surfed app, which records and organizes your entire browsing history and bookmarks. I haven’t found a use for it. And according to this review, it’s buggy as heck.

"Under the Dome": Stephen King’s small-town allegory for Trumpism

Stephen King’s Under the Dome nails how Trumpism functions at the most elemental of levels — Rick Perlstein at The American Prospect

The 2010 novel, which foresaw Trump by five years, is the story of a small town in Maine that gets cut off from the rest of the world when a supernatural dome is dropped on top of it. In the tradition of political fiction, the town is a microcosm of America. The primary action of the novel isn’t supernatural; it’s about the town’s most successful businessman, a car dealer, who “does what strongmen always do when crisis strikes” and uses the crisis to become a bloodthirsty, brutal dictator.

I love how Grammarly improves my writing, but I hate how intrusive the desktop app is. It gets in my face, overlaying my writing and app controls. It’s worse than Clippy. Is there an alternative?

There are strong moral and ideological reasons for everyone to join a union. But I would be satisfied if everyone joined a union for a much more pragmatic reason: Your money, that you made with your work, is right there on the table in front of you. Do you want to pick it up? You need a union. Or the rich people get it. That’s it. The people telling you that you don’t need a union are the same ones who will take that money off the table, and put it into their own pockets.

– Hamilton Nolan, “Your money is on the table. If you don’t have a union, you can’t have it”

Yesterday, I went to the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club meeting and wrote postcards for Democrats in swing states. If Harris loses, blame my lousy handwriting. I also picked up a few lawn signs to add to our curbside display and received instructions and door hangers for door-to-door canvassing.

"I'll be a pie-eyed emu!" Re-reading Alfred Bester's 1942 story, "The Push of a Finger"

“The Push of a Finger (free Gutenberg download) by Alfred Bester, was my second go at reading a story that I loved when I was 12 years old. I re-read it this past weekend, and very much enjoyed it. (Previously: Revisiting a childhood favorite story: ‘Dreams are Sacred’ still delights.)

As with “Dreams Are Sacred,” the Bester story is still entertaining. Like “Dreams Are Sacred,” the hero is a street-smart, wisecracking New York newspaperman with a brain in his head and abundant common sense. Published in 1942 in Astounding Science Fiction, “The Push of a Finger” is set a thousand years in the future, but the situations and language are straight out of a screwball comedy or noir movie from the 40s.

The hero is Carmichael, one of a dozen reporters for as many different newspapers assigned to the mysterious Prog Building in New York, where the technocrats who run the world issue pronouncements to preserve the Stability that has been the rule of civilization for centuries. The reporters are a brawling, fast-talking bunch, but they keep to their roles. By the rule of the Stability, every newspaper must have a balancing newspaper on the other side, and every decision by the ruling technocrats must be met by full-throated agreement by one newspaper and equal denunciation by its opposite number.

Carmichael finds a way to sneak into the mysterious Prog Building and discovers an event that will destroy the universe in a thousand years. “The Push of a Finger” has a similar gimmick to the far more famous “The Sound of Thunder," by Ray Bradbury, which ran in the far more upscale Collier’s magazine in 1952: The cataclysmic change in the future can be prevented by a trivial change in the present. Carmichael leads a team of technocrats in finding out what that minor, precipitating event is and stopping it.

I’m making the story sound more bombastic than it is. Bester was always a playful writer, fond of wordplay, absurdism and doggerel. In “The Push of a Finger,” a crowd of students at a demonstration chants

Neon
Krypton
Ammoniated
FitzJohn

and that bit of verse has been stuck in my head for days. (And now it’s stuck in yours. Um sorry I guess.)

Later, one of the characters exclaims, “I’ll be a pie-eyed emu!” which proves to be important.

Bester seemed to be drinking from the same creative well as the Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc.), but a decade or two earlier, and pinning his writing to a scaffolding of pulp science fiction.

Bester’s best-known novels were “The Demolished Man” (1953), a murder mystery in a society of telepaths, and “The Stars My Destination” (1956), a retelling of the Count of Monte Cristo in a society where people have the power to teleport from one location to another by sheer force of mind.

The politics of “The Push of a Finger” are typical of science fiction of the day and maybe of the U.S. at that time. The world of the future was going to be highly organized, centrally planned, and run by technocrats, just as the real world was at that time. It was 1942 – World War II was raging, the Depression was just a few years earlier, and the great nations of the world were highly centralized machines governed by technocrats. Surely that would continue forever. That’s the way Isaac Asimov wrote, and even Robert A. Heinlein, later an icon of libertarianism, featured centrally planned societies in his early stories, published at about this time.

I didn’t talk abut racism and sexism in “Dreams are Sacred” and I don’t have much to say about it here. Both stories are typical in that regard for pulp science fiction written and published in the 1940s. Race isn’t mentioned, women are nearly in the background, LGBTQ and disabled people don’t exist.

Something odd along those lines that I did notice: In the American pulps of the 40s and earlier, characters almost always had Anglo or European names: Carmichael, Pete Parnell, Steve Blakiston, etc. This was the norm back then, and I grew up in the 70s immersed in stories from that period and didn’t think twice about it. But re-reading those stories today, the high percentage of Anglo names (and the missing women and nonwhite people and disabled and LGBTQ people) stands out to me as weird. I’m not saying this to condemn the writers of that era; they were living in their world just as I live in ours. But it’s odd and unrealistic.

Bester was a giant of science fiction when I was a young fan in the 70s, and all science fiction fans then would have heard of him and most would have read him. Now I suspect he’s nearly forgotten by anybody under 50. Sic transit gloria mundi.

"The West Wing" turns 25

Fresh Air:

25 years ago, the TV series The West Wing premiered. It was a behind-the-scenes look at a fictional White House. We revisit our interviews with show creator/writer Aaron Sorkin, and actors Allison Janney, who played C.J., and John Spencer, who played Leo McGarry. They talk about the show’s signature walk-and-talk and the quippy, rapid-fire style of dialogue.

Allison Janney describes herself as “five feet 12 inches” tall and said she had difficulty landing roles until her late 30s. Now, she said, “I get cast as either the smartest person in the room or the drunkest person in the room.”

We’ve re-watched the first and second episodes recently, and I think we’ll stick with it.

How phones became the camera for everything

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber in conversation with The Verge’s Nilay Patel about the iPhone, camera photography and more. It’s a wide-ranging interview – more than two and a half hours – but listening flew by, because Gruber and Patel are outstanding speakers.

One particular point jumped out at me: The camera has become a primary input device for iPhones. Cameraphones are now multipurpose machines used to record a wide range of video and photos: Hollywood movies, fine art photography and videos, family milestones such as a child’s first steps and weddings, casual photos (“Hey, look at this!"), and serial numbers on consumer purchases. And the phone is expected to excel at all those things.

R.U.R. reimagined: Adapting Karel Čapek’s 1920 science-fiction play about a robot uprising

“It’s not Jersey Boys!” A conversation on the Take Me To Your Reader podcast with Matthew Zrebski, director and adapter of a contemporary English-language update to the 1920 science fiction play “R.U.R.,” by Karel Čapek. The play was where the word “robot” was coined.

So many people I know hate retirement until they get a hobby that requires them to work. They join a board and do tons of work, or they start crafting and making tables. They do that work and then they relax and have their glass of wine and they have a really nice day because they actually were productive. I think we, as humans, are designed to be productive.

Bluesky's Jay Graber on restoring user control and breaking social media stagnation

Make Identity Central Again, with Bluesky’s Jay Graber. Bluesky’s vision is that your identity is the same across social media services, and you would be able to move your following and follower list from one service to another, like phone number portability but for social media.

“Social is really starting to stagnate because we’re in this trap where users are locked in and developers are locked out. And we need to open that up again,” says the Bluesky CEO in an interview with Mike McCue on the Dot Social podcast.

Something I saw while out walking this morning.

Auto-generated description: A heart-shaped plush toy with the words SNIFF ME written on it lies on a textured surface.

No, I will not sniff random objects lying on the sidewalk.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog. Google cannot explain this sign.

On the Core Intuition podcast, hosts Daniel @danielpunkass Jalkut and @Manton Reece have a more nuanced view than mine on the WordPress/WP Engine dustup.

A more generous interpretation of Matt Mullenweg actions: He sees Automattic contributing enormous resources to WordPress development and his competitors at WP Engine are coasting off that work and money.

I don’t think anybody’s covering themselves with glory here.

Revisiting a childhood favorite story: ‘Dreams are Sacred’ still delights

I had a blast Sunday re-reading one of my favorite stories from when I was 12 years old: “Dreams are Sacred,” by a writer named Peter Phillips. It was easy to track down — a quick Google search on the title (which fortunately I remembered) led me to the Internet Archive and a complete scan of the magazine where it was first published: Astounding Science Fiction, September, 1948

The story holds up — it’s exciting, fast-paced and funny.

The hero is Pete Parnell, a fast-talking wisecracking New York sportswriter who is recruited by his friend Steve Blakiston, a psychiatrist, to help with an experimental technique that could cure the madness of a science fiction and fantasy writer named Marsham Craswell. The writer has fallen into an unconscious fugue state and is trapped in an endless dream scenario from his own stories, which resemble Conan the Barbarian or Barsoom.

Fortunately, Blakiston has invented a machine which allows one person to enter another’s dream. Parnell is tapped for the job of curing Blakiston because Parnell is the fastest-thinking and hardest-headed person Blakiston knows.

Supporting characters include a friendly cop with an Irish accent straight out of cartoons, a surly cab driver and a sexy lounge singer.

I found the story every bit as enjoyable as I did when I was 12 years old. Old-fashioned? Sure! That’s part of the fun.

Phillips, the author, was no New Yorker — he was English. He was a newspaperman who wrote about two dozen science fiction stories. He died in 2012, age 92. In addition to “Dreams are Sacred,” he also wrote another story I loved when I was a boy, “Manna,” about a stack of canned super-food that gets transported accidentally back in time to a medieval monastery. Hilarity ensues.

More on Phillips here, including some wonderful old magazine and book covers.

Astounding Science Fiction, the magazine “Dreams are Sacred” appeared in, was founded in 1930, with the delicious title, “Astounding Stories of Super-Science.” Beginning in 1939, under editor John Campbell, Astounding published groundbreaking writers including Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. The magazine changed its name to Analog Science Fact & Fiction in 1960 and still publishes today, under the name Analog Science Fiction & Fact.

Also last weekend, I re-read another favorite from the same period, “The Push of a Finger," by Alfred Bester. And I downloaded one more, “Farewell to the Master,” by Harry Bates, which was the basis for the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

I read all three stories when I was a boy, in the fat, two-volume anthology, “The Astounding-Analog Reader," which I checked out of the East Northport Public Library about a dozen times, every time I was in the mood to re-read it.

All three stories have newspapermen as heroes. I guess those stories made an impression — I have made my career in journalism of one form or another for my entire life. (In addition to those stories, I also devoured Superman, Spider-Man, and especially the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Lou Grant. I wanted to be Lou Grant when I grew up. I still do.)

The Internet Archive’s fight to save itself.

Legal battles with publishers Hachette and the Universal Music Group threaten to destroy this priceless repository of media history, which includes the Wayback Machine and a lot more.

Founder Brewster Kahle made a fortune in the 90s dotcom boom, and funneled much of that money into the Internet Archive (though it should be noted that he’s not living like he’s taken a vow of poverty — he owns a sailboat and docks it at a “tony yacht club.")

Kate Knibbs reports at Wired:

“The story of Brewster Kahle is that of a guy who wins the lottery,” says longtime archivist Jason Scott. “And he and his wife, Mary, turned around and said, awesome, we get to be librarians now.”

The day I read this article, Sunday, I had previously downloaded a 1948 issue of the pulp sci-fi magazine Astounding Stories so I could re-read a story there that I loved when I was about 12 years old, “Dreams Are Sacred,” by Peter Phillips.

The Internet Archive needs to be preserved, and if that means passing a special law to protect it, then so be it. The shareholders in Hachette and Universal Music Group can pay for it by skipping a day polishing the gold toilets in their mansions.

Mark Zuckerberg criticizes Apple for keeping a closed ecosystem but does the same with Facebook and Instagram. Pot, kettle, black.

Indeed, the Apple ecosystem is far more open than Meta’s platforms.

To be fair, Meta is a champion of open source software and hardware. But its services are closed and locked down and Meta is aggressive about keeping it that way.

Brazilian courts wanted seven accounts suspended and for X to pay fines. Instead of doing that, Musk publicly fought with the country’s supreme court, got the app banned, and allowed thousands of users to set up accounts on competitors Threads and Bluesky only to end up suspending the accounts originally flagged, paying the fines, and also is now paying even more fines. It’s invigorating to watch a true genius at work.

— Garbage Day

The FTC has documented in detail how big tech companies flagrantly violate user privacy. Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr comments:

⁠I understand the reflex to greet a report like this with cheap cynicism, but that’s a mistake. There’s a difference between “everybody knows” that tech is screwing us on privacy, and “a federal agency has concluded” that this is true. These market studies make a difference – if you doubt it, consider for a moment that Cigna is suing the FTC for releasing a landmark market study showing how its Express Scripts division has used its monopoly power to jack up the price of prescription drugs:⁠⁠

⁠⁠https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payers/express-scripts-files-suit-against-ftc-demands-retraction-report-pbm-industry⁠⁠

⁠⁠Big business is shit-scared of this kind of research by federal agencies – if they think this threatens their power, why shouldn’t we take them at their word?

— “Tech monopolists use their market power to invade your privacy”

I'm giving Capacities a try as a possible Obsidian replacement

I downloaded Capacities previously, watched some videos, and read some documentation, but I never actually did anything with it. And now I have — created a few documents, which Capacities called “Objects.”

It feels like Capacities is Obsidian 2.0. It does less than Obsidian, but it seems to do all the things I want it to do and perhaps all the things most Obsidian users need. Capacities is not easy to figure out, but Obsidian seems to require programming skills to make the most of it, and Capacities does not require those kinds of skills.

In the past, when I’ve switched to new productivity software, I attempt to build an organizational system early on, but this time my rule is to wait until it’s hard for me to find something or do something, and then add the bare minimum organization to fix that problem. I’ve got a couple of dozen documents in Obsidian now; I’m not going to sit here and attempt to figure out a system that will scale up to hundreds or tens of thousands of documents.

I like Capacities. It seems to do all the things I do in Obsidian, but easier. Like moving from a command line to a GUI. On the downside, it uses a block editor. I do not like a block editor. We’ll see if I can adjust.

Question for those of you who are familiar with both applications: What do I need to know about changing my Obsidian methods and workflows to suit Capacities? I write research reports and articles, each requiring days or months to research and write.

ME: [Closes MacBook, looking guilty, as Julie enters room]
JULIE: “What were you looking at?”
ME: “Nothing! I was just sitting.”
JULIE:
ME: “I was looking at home repair tips!”
JULIE:
ME: “I was shopping for a gift for you!”
JULIE:
ME: “Fine! I admit it! I was looking at porn! Nasty, filthy, disgusting, kinky, perverted porn!”
JULIE: “Don’t give me that! You were looking at productivity videos on YouTube again!”
ME: [ashamed] “Yes. Yes I was.”

Something I saw while walking the dog: Neighbors set up this sprawling little toy village on the front lawn of a condo complex. There is a lot going on!

Auto-generated description: A whimsical garden scene features a variety of small, colorful figurines and decorations set among rocks and greenery.

When I migrated from mastododon.social to Micro.blog yesterday, I thought I might set up a read-only Mastodon account for accounts I want to keep up with. Then I thought nah. Simplify. One fewer social platform.

Also, I’ve switched off automatically syndicating posts from Micro.blog to Tumblr. For the few posts I want in both places, I’ll just cut-and-paste ‘em there manually.

Simplifying!

I’m moving from Mastodon to Micro.blog

Another way to say that is I shut down my Mastodon account, which was @mitch@mastodon.social, and transferred everyone that followed that account to mitchw.blog, which is hosted on Micro.blog, and where I’ve been posting updates for about two years.

My reason for making the change is to reduce the number of services I’m on, simplify posting, and also because I just plain like Micro.blog (though it can also sometimes be frustrating).

If you’re reading this from Mastodon or another fediverse service, hopefully you didn’t notice the change until I told you I’d done it. The fediverse makes that kind of thing easy (when it works right).

Minnie strained her left foreleg doing zoomies this morning so I think I’m going to be walking solo for the next ten days or so.

Why Everything Is Suddenly Spiraling for Israel.

Israel is speeding down the road to self-destruction, says Thomas Friedman

… anyone with two eyes in his head knows that the only way to defeat Hamas is a strategy of “clear, hold and build”: Destroy the enemy, hold the territory and then build an alternative local, legitimate Palestinian governing authority. Israel’s strategy in Gaza, he said, has been: “Clear, leave, come back, clear again the same place, leave again, come back and clear again.”

I am banging my head against the same multiplatform wall that @davew@mastodon.social and @molly0xfff@hachyderm.io are fighting. I’m currently active on Micro.blog, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Tumbr, Facebook and an email newsletter and that is just ridiculous and yet I can’t bear to walk away from even one of them. I rely on Micro.blog’s excellent automation tools for cross-posting and syndication, and a bit of cutting and pasting, and I just live with it, but I hate it. I want to be able to just post to one place and let everybody read it on whatever platform they prefer, in the native format of that platform.

In Canto 20 of Inferno, Dante confronts a pit where the sinners have had their heads twisted around backwards; they trudge, naked and weeping, through puddles of cooling tears. Virgil informs him that these are the fortunetellers, who tried to look forwards in life and now must look backwards forever.

In a completely unrelated subject, how about those election pollsters, huh?

— Cory Doctorow

In a century of history, we see a new pollster predicting elections with uncanny accuracy a few times, and then failing spectacularly, followed by another polling star repeating the cycle. And the failed pollster has an excuse. For example, after Nate Silver called the 2016 election for Clinton, he backpedaled by saying that he was actually right because he gave Trump a 28% chance of winning.

My $.02: All Silver was saying was that Trump might win. How is that in any way useful?

Allow me to call the 2024 election, based on my polling: Trump might win this one. So might Harris. Also, one or both of them might exit the race (death, disability, etc.)

Related: I regularly see headlines quoting someone who called the last nine (or whatever) Presidential elections, touting their prediction for this one. But tens of thousands of people publicly predict every election. Sheer luck will give one or more of them a perfect record. For a while.

Cory:

When it comes to serious political deliberation, questions like “who is likely to vote” and “what does ‘undecided’ mean” are a lot less important than, “what are the candidates promising to do?” and “what are the candidates likely to do?”

But – as Perlstein writes – the only kind of election journalism that is consistently, adequately funded is poll coverage. As a 1949 critic put it, this isn’t the “pulse of democracy,” it’s “its baby talk.”

Bosses are firing Gen Z grads just months after hiring them.

I admit I clicked on this clickbait headline. Most of the article turned out to be the usual folderol about how the Young People Nowadays are lazy and sloppy and don’t want to work. Same thing that was said about Millennials, GenX, Boomers and every other generation going back to ancient Greece.

The bottom of the article talks about the importance of having a good attitude in the workplace when you are in your 20s. Very true—I had a bad attitude in my 20s, spent much of my 30s unlearning that, and sabotaged my career because of it.

Now I’m working on not being that older worker who … well, who acts like he believes the kinds of stereotypes promulgated in this article.

Ellen DeGeneres returns to standup with a Netflix schedule. Maybe she did run a toxic workplace, but she seems self-aware and witty here.

She describes a set full of laughter, fun and games (like the game of tag she started around 2016 that lasted until the show ended). “We played tag, and I would chase people down the hallways. I would chase them all around the studio, and I would scare them all the time. I would jump out, and I would scare people ‘cause I love to do that – and you know, hearing myself say this out loud, I realize I was chasing my employees and terrorizing them. I can see where that would be misinterpreted,” she says.

A brief history of CompuServe, which pioneered social media in the 1980s with discussion boards, realtime chat and more, before the invention of the World Wide Web.

I spent a lot more time on GEnie than CompuServe but I spent a lot of time on CompuServe too. Like other former CompuServe habitués, I still remember my login: 70212,51.

CompuServe was headquartered in my hometown-by-marriage, the Upper Arlington neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. There’s a big ol' commemorative plaque on the spot now, the kind of plaque you find at historical battle sites and such.

This came up on my YouTube recommended videos: “Is it normal to talk to yourself?”

I know the answer to that one: No!

Absolutely not!

It’s weird!

Talk to the dog instead.

This morning, I was reading a listicle of health tips and one of the most important things they said you should do is, “Get good sleep.”

“I’ll get right on that!” I said. “And I’ve always wanted to be a foot and a half taller so I can play pro basketball, so I’ll do that too!”

The Tupperware party was good while it lasted. We take the benefits of Tupperware for granted, but it was a significant innovation in its time, one that we should be grateful for, says Megan McCardle. “As with so much in life, the strategies that made Tupperware a success in the 20th century also made it hard for the company to adapt to the 21st.” Maybe true, but these days, when a consumer brand fails, my first thought is to blame financial shenanigans rather than business execution.

I’ve been at work for two hours and I’ve already added 12 tasks to my to-do list.

That’s productivity, right?

Here's some of what I saw walking the dog this weekend

A model train layout in a house's front yard. Not very detailed layout, but cool nonetheless. The tracks are in a figure-8 pattern on a brown surface that looks like small rocks or wood chips. There's a little red barn in in the center and a couple of miniature frontier buildings in the distance

A model train layout in a house’s front yard.

This 10-second video of the model train layout gives you a better view of what’s there.

A little free library built into an abandoned newspaper box.

Terraced hill with cinder blocks supporting the terracing and garden gnomes and mushrooms and shit on the steps.

Whimsical, terraced yard decorations.

Two of the terraced steps, with figurines of a frog reclining on a park bench, little red-white-and-blue patriotic garden gnome, surfin' Santa, and more

Detail of the whimsical terrace.

Lawn display of Harris-Walz sign, pink flamingo, and wall on the background with a mosaic with parrots

Tasteful minimalist lawn display featuring Harris-Walz sign and pink flamingo

Silvery sealed canister affixed to a vertical pole in the front yard, with a yellow sign above reading DOG TREATS

Yes, I gave Minnie one of the treats. She thought it was fine but not fantastic.

Why there are so many movies with the word “Amityille” in the title.

because the word “Amityville” is a real place name and consequently cannot be trademarked, there are actually 30+ Amityville movies, with some just being an unrelated movie they slapped the word Amityville onto and some that are actually attempting to remake/recreate/just do a haunted house thing the original.

Also: The science fiction/fantasy writer Diane Duane says she “grew up six or seven miles from one of the Amityvilles” and the “cognitive dissonance involved when the first film came out—knowing the sleepy suburbia that lay just over thataway—was hilarious.”

I, too, grew up a few miles from the same Amityville — the one featured in the first movie. One of the girls I was friends with in high school (who occasionally visits my Facebook profile) dated a guy who lived just down the street from that house.

I am entirely average in appearance for a middle-aged white American man: average height, average weight, average complexion, and average amount of hair. I buy clothes from the center of the rack. AirPods Pro are very comfortable in my ears. If somebody needs to find me in a crowd, I could tell them, “Look for the most average middle-aged white dude.”

"Journalists and other writers are employed to improve the quality of chatbot replies. The irony of working for an industry that may well make their craft redundant is not lost on them."

For several hours a week, I write for a technology company worth billions of dollars. Alongside me are published novelists, rising academics and several other freelance journalists. The workload is flexible, the pay better than we are used to, and the assignments never run out. But what we write will never be read by anyone outside the company.

That’s because we aren’t even writing for people. We are writing for an AI.

…

The core part of the job is writing pretend responses to hypothetical chatbot questions. This is the training data that the model needs to be fed. The “AI” needs an example of what “good” looks like before it can try to produce “good” writing.

…

François Chollet, a bestselling computer science textbook author and the creator of the Keras training library (which provides building blocks for researchers to create their own deep learning models), told me he estimates there are “probably about 20,000 people employed full-time just creating annotated data to train large language models”. Without manual human work, he says the models’ output would be “really, really bad”.

The goal of the annotation work that I and others perform is to provide gold-standard examples for the model to learn from and emulate. It’s a step up from the sorts of annotation work we’ve all done in the past, even unknowingly. If ever you’ve been faced with a “captcha” problem asking you to prove you aren’t a robot – eg “select all the tiles with pictures of a traffic light” – you were actually doing unpaid work for a machine, by helping to teach it to “see”.

…

If chatbots can pretend to write like humans, we can also pretend to write like chatbots … it’s unclear how many outside the field understand that the “secret sauce” behind these celebrated models relies on plain old human work.

— ‘If journalism is going up in smoke, I might as well get high off the fumes’: confessions of a chatbot helper, by Jack Apollo George at The Guardian.

Outstanding viral campaign video from Tim Walz, where he demonstrates how to maintain a 1979 International Harvester pickup truck and contrasts the Harris-Walz economic policy with Trump-Vance:

Look, they didn’t give me a manual for this if you didn’t plan on using it to fix your truck. They didn’t create that Project 2025 just to have it sit around as a doorstop.

Note the 8-Track player with the Cars tape.

The Friendship Paradox: We all want more time with our friends, but we’re spending more time alone

Recent studies add nuance to the loneliness epidemic.

The typical American, it seems, texts a bunch of people “we should get together!” before watching TikTok alone on the couch and then passing out. That is, Americans have friends. We just never really see them.

— Olga Khazan at The Atlantic

Americans typically say they have four or five friends, which is a siimilar number to past studies. But the friends don’t know each other, Americans are frequently busy, we don’t to church much or participate in group activities, so getting together is hard and we don’t do it.

How snacks took over American life

We don’t just snack — many of us are abandoning meals entirely.

In the three decades leading up to 2008, the average American doubled their daily snack intake, and the percentage of adults snacking on any given day rose from 59 percent to 90 percent, according to a comprehensive government report. In the most recent iteration of the same study, which ended in 2020 before the pandemic, that number rose again, to 95 percent; more than half of respondents said they consumed at least three snacks a day.

…

When my mother started her first office job, in the ’70s, eating at work was inappropriate; 50 years later, her daughter wrote much of this article in the company of a little ramekin of mini Reese’s Pieces, provided by her employer, which she ate out of the palm of her hand like a pigeon.

— Ellen Cushing at The Atlantic

I’m still getting over PTSD from my supermarket rearranging the produce section. Plus, this week, they changed the packaging on our favorite swiss cheese.

The charge on my wireless trackball ran down yesterday and I was in a rush and couldn’t find the end of the USB-C charging cord on my desk, so I switched to the Magic Trackpad and kept going.

I liked it for a while, but this morning, I began to feel moderate pains up and down my arms.

At first I ignored them but then I became conscious of what was going on and I said to myself, “This is a terrible idea!”

And I plugged in the trackball and kept going. And the pain is subsiding.

I feel like I dodged a debilitating injury that could go on for years. I’ve luckily avoided RSI problems to date despite how much time I spend on computers, my iPhone and iPad.

Amazon will use generative AI to make product recommendations. I’m curious to see how this works — we are regular and frequent Amazon shoppers. The company should have a nice database of our preferences. Will its recommendations be any good? Or will it be the usual “I see you bought a refrigerator so now we’re going to show you refrigerator recommendations for months as though you were some kind of weirdo refrigerator collector.”

Debunking Milton Friedman’s claim that the company’s only job is to increase shareholder value: It’s “a charter for doing whatever the fuck a CEO feels like doing”

Cory Doctorow discusses the theory of “shareholder supremacy,”, which has ruled economics, business and politics for more than 50 years, and which is now being walked back even by conservatives. One of the theory’s fatal flaws is that “it’s impossible to know if the rule has been broken,” says Cory.

The shareholder supremacy rule is an unfalsifiable proposition. A CEO can cut wages and lay off workers and claim that it’s good for profits because the retained earnings can be paid as a dividend. A CEO can raise wages and hire more people and claim it’s good for profits because it will stop important employees from defecting and attract the talent needed to win market share and spin up new products.

A CEO can spend less on marketing and claim it’s a cost-savings. A CEO can spend more on marketing and claim it’s an investment. A CEO can eliminate products and call it a savings. A CEO can add products and claim they’re expansions into new segments. A CEO can settle a lawsuit and claim they’re saving money on court fees. A CEO can fight a lawsuit through to the final appeal and claim that they’re doing it to scare vexatious litigants away by demonstrating their mettle.

CEOs can use cheaper, inferior materials and claim it’s a savings. They can use premium materials and claim it’s a competitive advantage that will produce new profits. Everything a company does can be colorably claimed as an attempt to save or make money, from sponsoring the local little league softball team to treating effluent to handing ownership of corporate landholdings to perpetual trusts that designate them as wildlife sanctuaries.

Bribes, campaign contributions, onshoring, offshoring, criminal conspiracies and conference sponsorships – there’s a business case for all of these being in line with shareholder supremacy.

Also:

Boeing management earned bonuses by engaging in corporate autophagia, devouring the company from within.