Mitch's Blog

The German Bertha was born into a wealthy family and married engineer Karl Benz, writes Sari Rosenberg at Lifetime.

Bertha used her family money to finance her husband’s creation of a horseless carriage. Under modern day law, Bertha would have actually owned the patent rights. However, German law in the 1880s prohibited married women from even applying for a patent.

Her husband, Karl Benz, gets the credit for the invention, but her money, marketing “and chutzpah” built the business.

Benz’s Motorwagen was made of wood, with two wheels in back, one in front and a “handle-like contraption” for steering, and could reach speeds up to 25 mph, Rosenberg writes.

People were reluctant to buy a machine that only traveled short distances, and “Bertha realized the only way to sell more cars was if they demystified the public’s fear of driving.”

With only a small amount of fuel in the carburetor, Bertha had to plan her route around where apothecaries were located so she could buy ligroin, a detergent that was used as fuel.

…

When a fuel line got clogged, she used a long hat pin to fix it. She used a garter to repair a broken ignition. At one point, she had to employ the help of a blacksmith to help fix a broken chain. When the brakes on the car began to fail, Bertha visited a cobbler who installed leather on them, hence creating the first brake pads. Meanwhile, at a time before roadmaps even existed, she literally forged her own path on the trip via automobile to her mom’s house.

“We used to be better than they are, we used to be good.… Now we are the same.” Journalist Aviya Kushner writes at The Forward about her encounter at an Israeli light rail station with a woman older than the state of Israel itself.

Israelis opposing Netanyahu use the word “hamadena” to describe what Netanyahu is destroying. “For Israelis, that word, hamedina, or ‘the state’ is not just the State of Israel, but the dream of the State of Israel.”

I think the elderly woman is oversimplifying. I, too, used to believe Israel was good. Since the reaction to the Oct. 7 attack, I have come to see that Israel is founded on injustice.

Israel is not unique or fundamentally evil. As Ezra Klein said, nearly every state is founded in blood.

However, Israel can’t just go back to locking the Palestinians in the basement and nailing the door shut. Israel has to do better.

“Mass social media turned the internet into a collective trap, a place where you had to be instead of a place you could run away to.”

This is a thoughtful article, and I agree with the overall thrust. But I disagree with key premises. Many people don’t use social media or just use it occasionally. This is true even in the tech industry, marketing and journalism.

The ‘Trans Boxer’ story isn’t what you think: Gender wars, Russian influence ops, and our addiction to rage bait — Unusual circumstances are great for inciting Internet rage wars, and Russia is happy to fan the flames.

We had stopped for a minute for me to pick up the dog’s by-product. I heard the chickens before I saw them. and thought, “WTF is that?” The sound was simultaneously very familiar and utterly strange.

We live in an ordinary Southern California suburb, not farm country by any means. By SoCal standards, we live in the city. I have heard people keep chickens around here, but have not encountered it in person for 15 years or so.

When you see an El Camino, you are required to photograph it and share the photo. Those are the rules.

“Why I was gone.” Andrea Lopez-Villafaña, managing editor, daily news, for the Voice of San Diego, is a DREAMer. Brought to the United States as a small child by her parents, she qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, in 2013. DACA requires her to re-apply for the right to work in the US every two years. But the federal government was slow to process applications and in June she was forced to take an unpaid leave of absence from work, returning recently.

I missed her voice on the Voice of San Diego weekly podcast, and was glad when she came back.

People who’ve lived their whole lives in the US should have an easy path to citizenship and not have to suffer this ridiculous bureaucracy

OpenAI has a tool that will detect ChatGPT-written text 99% of the time, but won’t release it.

Dave linked to this series of posts on Threads and said it’s “a tutorial on why the social web is so useless.” Yep.

The President Can Now Assassinate You, Officially

Whether it’s Kamala Harris helping to raise other people’s children or Donald Trump going to Epstein Island to have sex with other people’s children, both candidates have made a lifelong impact on other people’s children.

— New York Times Pitchbot

Microsoft is reportedly merging the chat and text channels bits of Teams into a single interface, which would remove a pebble from my shoe.

This time, however, I’m using Stage Manager on my new 34" Dell Ultrawide display, which I received last week, rather than my ancient 14-year-old 27" Apple Cinema Display.

I like to have one app open on my desktop at a time, not a clutter of windows. With the Apple Cinema Display, that was simple: maximize the app. But that result is far too wide on the Dell.

Stage Manager lets me have one app centered on half-width and everything else tucked off to the side, for easy access. Plus I can have two or more apps sharing a screen (Apple calls them “spaces”), which suits me when I have a document in one app and I’m taking notes on that document in another app.

Spaces, which is older technology, is very similar. I’ve hated it in the past, but maybe I should give it a try again. Maybe I would like it, too.

Just thinking about how different the scene between Marty McFly and his mom would be if George RR Martin had written Back to the Future.

— @batkaren@mastodon.online

I laid my phone down on a window ledge barely wider than the phone and instantly thought, “Bad idea. If there’s an earthquake, the phone will get knocked to the floor and might be damaged.”

I have gone native.

Welcome to the shitpost election, by Casey Newton:

… sharing weaponized misinformation in the form of lazy jokes has quickly come to define the developing presidential campaign between Harris and Donald Trump. Across social networks, Democrats and Republicans are flooding the feed with obviously untrue statements about one another and calling it a joke.

I normally eschew both-siderism but Casey Newton may be right on this one. Certainly, Democrats jumped gleefully on couch jokes.

I am using a Microsoft Teams recording and transcription to take interview notes. It’s the first time I’ve used Teams for that, and it requires me to stare at my own ugly face while reviewing the recording much slower than in real time.

This is excruciatingly painful. I am a slack-jawed baboon.

Sonya Massey’s mother called 911 and asked police not to hurt daughter before shooting death. “Donna Massey told a dispatcher: ‘Please don’t send no combative policemen that are prejudiced.’” Heartbreaking.

Rachel Treisman at KPBS.org: While other Olympic shooters showed up wearing “cyberpunk-looking gear … large ear protectors, visors and sci fi-esque shooting glasses, [Turkey’s Yusuf Didek] played it a different kind of cool with regular eyeglasses and barely visible ear plugs.” He wore “a jersey that looked like an ordinary T-shirt, and [shot] with his free hand tucked in his pants pocket,” giving off “a noticeably casual vibe. So casual, in fact, that scores of social media users jokingly wondered whether Turkey had sent a hitman to the Olympics.”

Asking whether a political candidate is too old is ageist. Instead, ask whether they’re competent.

I’ve seen this place, with its vintage space-age Googie architecture, from the highway near Old Town often. I’ve never been inside, though I’ve always meant to. Inside, it’s a classic diner of a type that seems to be a dying breed — my favorite kind of restaurant. RIP.

According to Roxana Popescu at the San Diego Union-Tribune, Perry’s will be replaced by a 223-unit residential complex, preserving some of the original building.

Former San Diego Democratic Party chair Will Rodriguez-Kennedy announced his exoneration from a sexual assault accusation. He stepped down when the accusation surfaced two years ago. His successor was killed in a motor vehicle accident recently.

Trying to move folders around in bookmarks on Safari is a dreadful experience. I have sometimes wondered why The Youngs today don’t use browser bookmarks — it’s because browser bookmarks are stuck in the 90s, so people don’t use them, and therefore browser developers don’t pay them any attention, and it’s a vicious cycle.

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic, What Is America’s Gender War Actually About?

The left has become more adept at shaming toxic masculinity than at showcasing a positive masculinity that is distinct from femininity. Progressive readers of the previous sentence might roll their eyes at the notion that it is the job of any left-wing political movement to coddle men’s feelings. But if a large shift rightward among young male voters helps Trump eke out a victory in November, Democrats will have little choice but to think up a new message to stop the young-male exodus.

Much truth here I think. I have never been bothered by this because I do not feel at all targeted by progressive denunciations of toxic masculinity, and I don’t look to politicians and political pundits to tell me how a man ought to act.

Then again, I am not young.

The Republican vision of masculinity is not only toxic, but it is also false. Donald Trump is a draft dodger and a coward who hides behind his inherited money, and his lickspittle lackeys are no better. I’m not seeing a lot of astronauts, athletes, military combat veterans or other true adherents of machismo in that crowd. Republican President Theodore Roosevelt would have been disgusted with what his party has become.

Trump hits out at Black journalists and lies repeatedly in heated interview that is cut short. Also: Trump is definitely not being weird at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention.

My latest on Fierce Network: We need a new internet The internet as we know it is old and worn out, as are the ways that we think about it.

Training AI using synthetic data seems like a lot of bullshit to me. It’s like learning to cook by reading cookbooks, watching YouTube videos and talking to other people who are doing the same thing, but never actually cooking. All of those things are useful, but the only way to learn to cook is to cook.

Am I missing something?

I’m pleased to see the Goodlinks read-later app has added support for highlights and notes. My Readwise Reader annual subscription runs out in a few days, and I’ve been looking for alternatives. Readwise Reader is a great product, but it is overpowered and overpriced for my purposes.

Meta’s idiot moderation AI strikes again, this time deleting a meme I posted to Threads weeks ago for allegedly violating Meta’s terms of service prohibiting drug sales. Of course, I was not selling drugs — it was stoner humor. I used to run into this kind of thing several times a month on Facebook before I stopped posting there about two weeks ago.

This incident was particularly annoying because I was unable to dismiss the warning notification to click through to the timeline.

A 70-year-old hiker was found alive and well after spending five days alone and lost in the wilderness. Warren Elliott “ate berries and drank from the river to sustain himself. He was found ‘in good spirits’ and uninjured.” Score one for the geezers.

This one time the weirdo hosted a party for himself, Jeffrey Epstein and 28 young women in a “calendar girl” competition..

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day: Conservatives are struggling to get ahead of this whole “weird” thing. (My two cents: That’s cuz they’re weird.)

I’m not thrilled with the ageism in the Democrats' new slogan: “Donald Trump is old and weird.” But I’m happy to see it seems to be working. I’ll deal with my issues after President Harris is sworn in.

Also from Broderick: Musk Is Violating His Own Terms Of Service (And Likely Election Law) If You Even Care.

Kamala Harris tells a funny story about meeting her in-laws for the first time..

A Few Blockbuster Podcasts Are Making All the Money. I listen to about 90 minutes of podcasts daily, but I only listen to one of the listed top ten podcasts. I haven’t even heard of most of these (though some of the hosts are familiar names — they’re real-life celebrities). That’s a testimony to the excellent richness of the podcast landscape, and that richness is, to a large degree, attributable to open standards.

“Nearly 100 million Americans age 12 and older listen to podcasts every week,” according to this article in the Wall Street Journal.

I started listening near the beginning, 20 years ago, when podcasts were very much a nerd affair. It amazes me that they are now mainstream like TV and radio are used to be.

The Data That Powers A.I. Is Disappearing Fast.

Anchorage [Alaska] will one day be the port of exchange between Asia, North America, and Europe…. I don’t think you all are considering how much an ice free Arctic Ocean will change international trade routes. It will become the very northwest passage explorers had been looking for since like 1500.

— Marginal Revolution

An insightful essay on what made Newhart’s work genius, by Jason Zinoman at The New York Times:

Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.

Newhart was a master of the slow build and used silence and his stammer as power tools.

Also: Marc Maron interviews Newhart from 2014 and 2018.

Newhart went straight to the top. Unlike other comics, he didn’t have years of playing small gigs to refine his act before hitting it big. He went from nowhere to a #1 album and had to learn his craft in the spotlight.

Newhart repeats the hilarious story about how his wife met Don Rickles. The Newharts and Rickles became lifelong friends. Rickles was an insult comic who spewed racist jokes at a time when a person could do those things, and it was clear they were demonstrating how racism was stupid. But offstage, Don Rickles was, by all accounts, a kind and gracious man—the opposite of his onstage persona.

Newhart shrugs and does not explain how he and Rickles became close friends. But I think a big part of it is that they were both good men who played Rat Pack shows but were not interested in the boozing, philandering lifestyle. They were family men.

A woman who took an abortion pill was charged with murder and did jail time. She is now suing prosecutors.

I recently upgraded from a 27" 14-year-old Apple Cinema Display to a 34" Dell ultrawide.

Until now, I’ve always run a simple windowing setup: Most of the time, I’m using one app, and it’s maximized to fill the whole screen. When I want to switch apps, I Cmd-Tab between them (that’s equivalent to Alt-Tab on Windows). Often, I use two apps, and I tile them side by side when I do.

But that strategy is not going to work for me on a 34" display because the individual app becomes too big to take in.

If I’m working on just one application, I think I’ll have it centered, full height, 2/3 or 3/4 of the width of the screen. We’ll see how that works out over time. But what goes on either edge?

How do you manage your ultrawide lifestyle?

I use the computer for basic productivity, the web and social media. I’m not a gamer and I don’t generally watch videos or listen to music on my desktop.

I already use Raycast for window management, so I don’t need pointers to software such as Raycast, Moom, or Magnet. However, if there are particular applications you love for window management on ultrawide displays, please let me know.

By the way, I searched the Internet for tips on making the transition and found reddit.com/r/ultrawidemasterrace, where people share tips and photos of their ultrawide setups. 34" seems huge to me, but it barely qualifies for that sub. For example, check this out: a 49" display with another monitor mounted above it.

Jenisha Watts, a senior editor at The Atlantic, writes about the Sonya Massey killing: ‘This Is the Worst Police-Shooting Video Ever’.

I finally had enough and deactivated my Twitter account. Recently Musk has revealed himself to be an even bigger schmuck than previously.

Overheard: “My child was disappointed to learn that Olympic Archery does not involve the teams firing arrows at each other."

“Dexter” is returning, with Michael C. Hall as the titular character.. Good news! The character died at the end of the previous miniseries (spoiler for 2-year-old TV show soz) but there are ways they can retcon this. It’d be a cheap trick, but I don’t care if it brings the show back.

Rob Beschizza/Boing Boing: “The New York Times wanted to summon one of its favorite characters: an everyday Dem so upset with the Left that they were going to vote for Donald Trump instead.” They quoted “Anna Ayala, notable to [the Times] only for being a 58-year-old who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but now likes the other guy.”

But Ayala is “the famed criminal who put a human finger in a Wendy’s chili among various other escapades.”

(Corrected to fix typo, credit Rob, post to correct place. Oy.)

Palestinian Deaths In the Gaza Conflict Are Probably Close To Half A Million — Ian Welsh.

That’s roughly 4% of a Holocaust, and showing no sign of stopping.

Israel and its enablers have learned precisely the wrong lesson from the Nazis.

It started as a a joke on X, with user @rickrudescalves claiming Vance revealed in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy that he lubed up two couch cushions and had sex with them when he was a teenager. It went very viral and a lot of people believed it because, I mean, look at the guy, it seems like something he would do. The Associated Press, however, made the mistake of trying to debunk all this, declaring in a headline that Vance has never fucked a couch. But as many pointed out, can they actually prove that? How do we know? The AP has since deleted the post, but I think we, as a nation, should keep loudly discussing this until November.

— Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day

If you’re participating in get-out-the-vote campaigns, remember that Election Day is when voting ends. For absentee ballots, voting starts Sept. 21. So, get-out-the-vote campaigns start in September.

California’s image will be a weapon in the Trump campaign against Harris.. MAGA aims its messaging at convincing people who have never been to California or New York that those places are hellholes.

I have lived in California for 30 years. It’s great, despite also having real and serious problems.

I’d like something like the Clicks iPhone keyboard but for the iPad mini.

In a win for Uber and Lyft, a California Court upholds a proposition classifying gig workers as contractors.. Uber, Lyft and Doordash win, workers lose.

Dear Tim Apple: Congratulations on launching Apple Maps on the Web. Now do News.

Julie and I are quite enjoying the TV series “Evil,” which is of the paranormal investigator genre, like “The Night Stalker” and “X-Files.” In this case, the paranormal investigators work for the Catholic Church.

We’re partway through Season 1.

Did “Night Stalker” and “X-Files” invent the genre of the paranormal investigator, or was that trope already around and established?

Today I found my reporter’s notebook for South by Southwest 2007. That was the event where Twitter hit its first tipping point. I remember cruising around in a taxi with a friend who had a 17" MacBook open on his lap, connected with a wireless modem, watching Twitter for news about parties.

The notebook has a page of notes about voicemail messages. Remember voicemail?

Read the Plaque: A gigantic map of all the cool plaques in the world.

I’m planning my first international trip in five years. I can’t find my passport, but I did find a receipt for a fleece I bought from LL Bean in 2011.

Although I have declined to renew my Tumblr premium membership, I’m grateful to Automattic for keeping the service going.

Today I learned there’s a tabletop roleplaying game based on “Space: 1999.”

I’m disappointed to hear that “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” was a bomb. We quite enjoyed it.

MacStories' Federico Viticci praises wired EarPods as an alternative to Bluetooth AirPods.

I don’t have a use for EarPods because all my sound-emitting devices are from Apple. Weirdly, that makes me more of an Apple fanboy than the editor of MacStories is.

Congratulations to @mtt on launching the Sumo Theme for Micro.blog. I like it so much that I immediately switched both my blogs to that theme.

The Amazon rainforests seem like “an environment largely untouched by humans.” But new archeological discoveries are changing that perception.

“With so much evidence of ancient human activity, it is now thought the pre-Columbian Amazon was inhabited by millions of people – some living in large built-up areas complete with road networks, temples and pyramids.”

And they did it all without the benefit of agriculture as we now understand it.

These discoveries defy conventional wisdom about the nature of civilization.

newscientist.com (subscription required)

apple.news

“one of the reasons i have no particular problem with the manner in which harris has become the presumptive nominee is that i think plebscitary participation in internal party processes is overrated.put another way: is the primary process actually better at picking nominees then the pre-1972 system of conventions and party elites? i don’t think so!” — Jamelle Bouie

I’ve been disappointed in the direction Tumblr has taken under Automattic, though I acknowledge that it’s a hard business. None of Tumblr’s four owners has managed to make the platform financially sustainable, despite an enthusiastic user base.

Also, I acknowledge that I am not the target audience for Tumblr. I am old enough to be the target audience’s grandparent.

The 75 Best Sci-Fi books of all time. esquire.com I added a couple of these titles to my to-be-read list.

America loves happy warriors; it’s why we loved FDR and Reagan. Biden was a happy warrior as VP, but by 2020, his age caught up with him, and mostly, he seemed tired and angry. That’s not his fault, but it worked against him.

Trump seemed like a happy warrior in the 2016 election — or at least he did in the primary — but now he’s an angry, bitter rageaholic, as are his supporters. A happy warrior can do extremely well against angry, bitter rage.

Wait, does America really still employ a ton of news reporters? Searching for bright spots in the twilight of the newspaper industry. wapo.st

Surprisingly, given the dire state of the journalism industry, America employs about as many news reporters as it did three decades ago.

That’s not a win—America has nearly 20% more jobs and people than it had 30 years ago.

But it doesn’t point to an industry in collapse either.

The catch is that many of these reporters work outside of journalism organizations, often in PR and marketing.

Having read the article, it describes my winding career path well. I’ve been a daily newspaper reporter, covering local government, crime, community and features. I’ve been a business-to-business tech journalist, which some might argue is not actually journalism. I’ve been a content marketer. And now I’m an analyst. During all that time, I’ve been using the same skills. Even the transition from print to the Internet was gradual and involves many of the same skills.

Silicon Valley is getting behind Universal Basic Income but that’s not enough to resolve the tech-driven wealth divide. “‘We get to be billionaires and you get a few hundred a week’ doesn’t really solve the broader problem.” — NextDraft

“One way to think of Llama 3.1 is that it is the free Google Docs to Microsoft’s paid Office 365.” — Casey Newton, Platformer

Israeli former national security leaders and military officials blasted Netenyahu. Biden supports Israel and Netenyahu returns that support with disdain, sending a message to American leaders, particularly Democrats, that there is no benefit to supporting Israel — NextDraft

“The Kamala Harris ascension is bad news for therapists. She just cured depression for about 80 million Americans.” — Dave Pell, NextDraft

I decided I don’t like having the memes, vintage photos and other found media on mitchw.blog, so I spun up a couple of separate places for those.

If you’re reading this in Mitch’s Newsletter, you’ll soon be getting two newsletters, one for my posts and the other for the memes, etc. One is Mitch’s Newsletter and the other is Mitch’s Other Newsletter.. You can tell by those newsletter names that I have worked as a marketing professional.

You can also find the memes, etc., on zestymonkey.micro.blog.

More changes to come.

The Biological Revolt by Philip José Farmer From Science-Fiction Plus, March 1953. Artist: Frank A. Paul

1920s. Ready for a camping trip

This is Robert A. Heinlein’s bibliography. I love nearly all the books listed here in his Early Period and have re-read many of them multiple times. I dislike almost everything later, even though those later works include novels that are generally considered his best work, “Stranger in a Strange Land” and “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,” to name two.

“The racism distracts from all the other ways in which this is a terrible novel, one that foreshadowed terrible Heinlein novels to come.”

I love Heinlein, and several of his novels and stories are explicitly anti-racist. This novel is hard to fit with that body of work.

“There is no ‘online world.’ That was always a metaphor, and as it turns out, a bad one. But what can take its place?” — Karl Schroeder. kschroeder.substack.com

I’d like something like the Clicks iPhone keyboard but for the iPad mini.

San Diego GOP Rep. Darrell Issa Claims Harris Supporters Could Disrupt Netanyahu Speech. timesofsandiego.com — This is not the sick burn Issa thinks it is.

MacOS on the iPad is “surprisingly good.” theverge.com

Walton:

Friday is one of Heinlein’s “late period” novels. The general rule if you haven’t read any Heinlein is to start with anything less than an inch thick. But of his later books, I’ve always been fond of Friday. It’s the first person story of Friday Jones, courier and secret agent. She’s a clone (in the terms of her world an “artificial person”) who was brought up in a creche and who is passing as human. It’s a book about passing, about what makes you human. I think it was the first female out-and-out action hero that I read. It’s also a book about being good at some things but with a large hole in your confidence underneath. No wonder I lapped it up when I was seventeen!

What’s good about it now? The whole “passing” bit. The cloning, the attitudes to cloning, the worry about jobs. The economy. It has an interesting future world, with lots of colonized planets, but most of the action taking place on Earth–that’s surprisingly unusual. There’s a Balkanized US and a very Balkanized world come to that, but with huge multinational corporations who have assassination “wars” and civil wars. There’s a proto-net, with search paths, that doesn’t have any junk in it–that’s always the failure mode of imagining the net. It was easy enough to figure out you could sit at home and connect to the Library of Congress, but harder to imagine Wikipedia editing wars and all the baroque weirdness that is the web.

Also:

Heinlein’s ability to write a sentence that makes you want to read the next sentence remains unparalleled.

The novel predicts a near-future California that is an independent nation. If I recall correctly, the chief executive is called a Sachem and wears a feathered headdress as a token of office. The whole government is structured like B-movie American Indians. Friday, the hero of the novel, says the government is ridiculous — but it works, and California is a good place to live.

I thought about that sequence often during the special gubernatorial election in 2003, when leading candidates included a washed-up action hero, an even more washed-up former child star and a porn star. The washed-up action hero won. He actually was a pretty good governor and has emerged since as an elder statesman.

Much after the election, I came across a retrospective on the former child star, Gary Coleman, which acknowledged he never had a chance of winning but actually had excellent grasp of the issues.

Cory:

Look, cybercrime is a real thing, from pig butchering to ransomware, and there’s real, global harms that can be attributed to it. Cybercrime is transnational, making it hard for cops in any one jurisdiction to handle it. So there’s a reason to think about formal international standards for fighting cybercrime.

But that’s not what’s in the Cybercrime Treaty.

Here’s a quick sketch of the significant defects in the Cybercrime Treaty.

The treaty has an extremely loose definition of cybercrime, and that looseness is deliberate. In authoritarian states like China and Russia (whose delegations are the driving force behind this treaty), “cybercrime” has come to mean “anything the government disfavors, if you do it with a computer.” “Cybercrime” can mean online criticism of the government, or professions of religious belief, or material supporting LGBTQ rights.

Nations that sign up to the Cybercrime Treaty will be obliged to help other nations fight “cybercrime” – however those nations define it. They’ll be required to provide surveillance data – for example, by forcing online services within their borders to cough up their users' private data, or even to pressure employees to install back-doors in their systems for ongoing monitoring.

These obligations to aid in surveillance are mandatory, but much of the Cybercrime Treaty is optional. What’s optional? The human rights safeguards.

Many homeless and formerly homeless San Diegans expressed reservations about a plan to build a 1,000-bed mega-shelter in the city citing concerns about infectious diseases and conflicts. “The hard truth is that though life on the street can be dangerous and miserable, many who spoke with us would rather deal with the unforgiving nature of life outdoors than move into a 1,000-bed shelter.” By Emily Ito and Lisa Halverstadt. voiceofsandiego.org

Dave discusses linkblogging on his podcast:

A 20-minute morning coffee notes rambler podcast, started with a narration of how we do linkblogging these days, mostly by hand, and how Bluesky is being hurt by not having a large-enough character limit. Another plea for textcasting, some standards for what we put on the wire over the social web.

I’ll be interested in hearing Dave’s perspective. I have used Dave’s linkblog as an inspiration for my own, but a few months ago, I began wondering if there’s any value in linkblogging.

I grab links from the same popular websites viewed by everyone with an interest in the news — NYTimes, Washington Post, Reddit, etc. Those websites have far bigger platforms than I do; I provide negligible amplification.

On the other hand, I do enjoy Dave’s links, and he reads those same platforms. So maybe there’s value after all.

I still share links when I want to respond to something (you’re reading an example right now!), or if I think an article might benefit from the boost I give it. Indeed, I drafted multiple link posts at lunch today.

Although I’ve been doing less linkblogging here, I share links most days on reddit.com/r/technology. I have professional motives for that.

I count three ashtrays.

There are always ashtrays.

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The Crowdstrike fiasco is a lesson in the importance of building resilience — on a societal and individual level, Glenn Reynolds says.

On social media I see people stranded in Paris with no working credit cards and dead ATMs, and that leads to another important lesson: Always carry cash! When traveling, I generally carry enough cash to get me through at least a couple of days (often more) and even at home I keep some cash in case things don’t work right.

Back in the 2003 New York blackout, Amy Langfield wrote about the value of keeping a stash of small bills that she could use at the bodegas when the credit/debit card machines were down. The cashless society depends on the flawless functioning of networks that aren’t really secure or reliable. Cash carries its own information with it – a $20 bill is worth $20 – and you don’t need to know more to spend or accept it. That’s resilient. Likewise making sure you have plenty of cushion with regard to supplies of medication, food at home, and the like.

I think about preppers sometimes. They have a reputation as kooks. But natural disasters happen. Utility grids fail. It’s a good idea to have a few weeks’ supply of shelf-stable food, drinking water and meds on hand, as well as the means to bug out if you need to.

A woman of negotiable virtue 1892

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On Reddit: “My 3rd Great Grandpa, sometime in the late 1800s…. His name was Jeremiah Barnes, born 1841 in Pennsylvania. His style is cool to this day.”

I moved my Mastodon followers from @mitchw@micro.blog to @mitchw@mastodon.social, and disabled @mitchw@micro.blog. This is because of a longstanding Micro.blog ActivityPub bug.

At first, I thought I would make this a temporary move until the bug is resolved, but now I think I don’t need two outposts in the fediverse. So maybe this move will be permanent.

More changes to come.

Liverpool, England, 1880

The supermarket has redeemed itself by playing KC and the Sunshine Band. I am getting down.