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

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.

Ghost cities in the Amazon are rewriting the story of civilization

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

Tumblr is raising rates for Premium membership by 1.75x. And I'm canceling

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.

Kamala is a happy warrior and that is a powerful political strength for her

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.

America still employs a ton of news reporters

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

This blog is breaking up in two

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.

“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

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.

Jo Walton: “The worst book I love: Robert Heinlein’s ‘Friday’”

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 Doctorow: “Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare”

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.

"What Homeless San Diegans Think About the Mega Shelter Pitch"

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

Is linkblogging worthwhile anymore?

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.

“Always carry cash!”

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.

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.”

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

The supermarket is playing XM Radio Worst of the 80s. Pat Benatar. Foreigner. Can Flock of Seagulls be far behind?

I am feeling very good about the presidential election and the direction of the US today.

The Democrats just have to not fuck this up now. Which is admittedly a bar that is usually too high for them to clear.

I’d like to live in precedented times for a while.

I’d like a few decades about which future history teachers say, “We’re not even going to talk about that period. It was boring.”

The 90s were like that. It was lovely. The big news was about a married guy who cheated on his wife with an intern.

I see the fascist New York Times is already going at Harris.

“It seems like there are two acceptable settings for female politicians: nurturing motherly matron or total bitch.”

My friend Meadhbh Hamrick sends a follow-up in email to my post comparing Kamala Harris to the fictional politiian Chrisjen Avasarala from “The Expanse,” a science fiction series set centuries in the future.

Avasarala is a beautiful Indian woman in her 60s, elegantly dressed in traditional styles from that country. Played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, Avasarala is intelligent, fierce, well-educated, honorable, honest, doesn’t suffer fools the least little bit, and swears like a longshoreman.

My friend Meadhbh Hamrick writes:

… women are often (always?) held to a double standard in politics. It seems like there are two acceptable settings for female politicians: nurturing motherly matron or total bitch. Men on the other hand can certainly be “nurturing dad/grand-dad” (Lloyd Benson or Joe Biden on a good day) or asshole (Ron DeSantis or Matt Gaetz), but they also have a third setting: just a guy doing politics.

….

I’ve been a Harris fan for a couple decades. In the late 90s I was randomly in a position to hear her talk to a gaggle of law students. She’s sharp. Some people in California don’t like her because she was so close to Willie Brown and… I get that. But there are a lot worse things you can say about modern politicians. Some people discounted her candidacy in the past because as California AG, she did her job and managed an organization which prosecuted people accused of violating the law. She also took heat for trying to move a capital murder case to life in prison. I’m actually okay with that and when the pundits talk about it, they keep saying it’s a negative.

And yes, she seems to be throwing down an Avasarala vibe, but I’ve been lucky enough to see her talk where she wasn’t campaigning and she did a good job with “option 3: just a person doing a job.”

AOC: Democratic leadership who want to replace Biden have no plan what to do next. None.

The Democratic leaders want to remove Harris as well as Biden, she says.

AOC is disgusted that the leadership is bringing this up now rather than months ago when we had a lot more options and time to plan.

independent.co.uk, thehill.com and newrepublic.com.

The only three Democratic leaders who make sense are AOC, Bernie Sanders, and my own Congressional Rep. Sara Jacobs. As a whole, the national Democratic Party is a bunch of idiots. The Republicans are even bigger idiots, and they’re Nazis too.

Today, I learned that Friday is POETS Day in England.

It stands for “Piss Off Early Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

en.wikipedia.org

On Reddit: “My grandma on Christmas day, 1952. She recently passed and we found this photo of her with a gun as a 17 year old. She was a classy lady so it’s fun to see her as a wild child.” reddit.com

A company that’s supposed to prevent outages caused a big one: A CrowdStrike update crashed Microsoft systems and took down a slew of businesses around the world, including airlines, banks and more. My colleague Diana Goovaerts reports. fierce-network.com

My husband was slowing down. He needed protecting. wapo.st A moving essay by Sally Quinn, widow of Ben Bradlee, about his final descent into dementia.

Occasionally, Bradlee would snap back to his old, fierce self. Is that what we’re seeing with Biden?

I’m regularly checking github for progress on @Mtt’s new Sumo theme for Micro.blog, about which I am absurdly excited.

Hamilton Nolan: “You patsy. We don’t have time for this bullshit”

How Things Work: Labor can become more powerful if unions organize the 90% of American workers who don’t belong. Sucking up to Republicans is not the answer.

Making the Republican Party less hostile to the interests of the working class is a nice goal but if you think that this will be the result of electing a fascist who tried the steal the last election and who famously stiffs people who work for him and who is an egomaniac and who has never supported the electoral agenda of unions and who lies constantly and who is running on a racist platform of demonizing immigrants—you are stupid. You are a patsy if you think this.

Philosopher Alan Watts ponders the nature of consciousness

The Nature of Consciousness:

Let’s suppose you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could for example have the power to dream in one night 75 years worth of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say ‘Well, that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be.’ And you would dig that, and come out of it and say ‘That was a close shave, now wasn’t it?’ Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further gambles as to what you would dream, and finally you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of the life that you are actually living today.

Watts also brings to life the cliched observation that we are not separate from the universe. We are a part of it. We did not come into the world when we were born, we are agglomerations of atoms that existed for billions of years before we were born and will continue to exist for billions more after we die. The distinction between “self” and “other” is an illusion.

just as a magnet polarizes itself at north and south, but it’s all one magnet, so experience polarizes itself as self and other, but it’s all one.

Our individuality was implicit in the universe from the time it began.

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

…

So don’t differentiate yourself and stand off and say ‘I am a living organism in a world made of a lot of dead junk, rocks and stuff.’ It all goes together. Those rocks are just as much you as your fingernails. You need rocks. What are you going to stand on?

Watts also has a theory of consciousness I quite like: Our bodies do almost everything without consciousness. Consciousness is not involved in circulating blood, digesting food, or breathing (most of the time). Even when we consciously decide to walk or move our hand, consciousness is not involved in the micro-movements. I’m sitting here typing just now, but I’m not consciously making my fingers move. I just look at the screen, and I perceive the words appearing on the screen directly from my brain.

Consciousness evolved to handle the small fraction of tasks that our bodies can’t do without consciousness. We think our consciousness is our entire selves — some philosophers say you are not your body — but that’s wrong. Consciousness is only part of our selves.

The wolves are circling Biden

Obama Says Biden Has to Rethink His Candidacy [politicalwire.com]

Also on politicalwire.com:

President Joe Biden’s political world is collapsing. Top allies have either publicly or privately called on him to step aside. Major donations have fallen off a cliff. Grassroots fundraising is not keeping up with the demands of a campaign that needs to aggressively scale up three months before the presidential election. Members of his own re-election effort have already declared he has no path to victory.

DARPA is launching a program to sift through quantum computing hype

networkworld.com:

“Our opening position is skepticism," stated Dr. Joe Altepeter, the DARPA program manager of the project, in a blog about QBI. “Specifically, skepticism that a fully fault-tolerant quantum computer with a sufficient number of logical qubits can ever be built.”

”We will walk into the room and say, ‘We’re pretty sure whatever you’re doing is not going to work.’ I will bring a small army of scientists and engineers, we will listen to your evidence, and we will double and triple check using our own analysis," Altepeter wrote. “And if we’re convinced the technology you’re developing checks out and you’re onto something big, we’ll tell the rest of government and become a strong advocate for your approach.”

Heartbreaking: This Guy Has No Idea That He’s So Strange And Memorable-Looking That Everyone From His Flight Is Using Him As A Landmark To Figure Out Which Baggage Claim Area Is Theirs [clickhole.com]. I have absolutely done this. I’ve probably been this guy, and I’m OK with that.

The Verge: “Dune: Prophecy hits HBO in November. The series is a prequel to Denis Villeneuve’s films, and it just got a fresh trailer.” I didn’t love the movies but I loved the original books. Sure, I’ll give the series a try.

PoliticalWire: Trump says “God was with me” during the failed assassination attempt. I guess God must have hated Corey Competore.

Competore, 50, was a volunteer firefighter who was shot by the assassin who aimed at Trump. Competore died protecting his family.

CBS Austin: Texans are assaulting and threatening linemen working to restore electrical power after Hurricane Beryl.

HOUSTON – Drawn guns. Thrown rocks. Threatening messages. Houston’s prolonged outages following Hurricane Beryl has some fed-up and frustrated residents taking out their anger on repair workers who are trying to restore power across the city.”

Today I learned that “Dogs Playing Poker” refers collectively to 18 paintings by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, comprising one each in 1894 and 1910, and 16 commissioned in 1903 to advertise cigars. Individual paintings have been auctioned for up to $658,000.

Cats are adorable little angels with fur

Lulu, one of our cats, likes to creep up on me when I’m sleeping soundly at night, put her sweet lips against my ear hole, and meow as loud as she can. She’s got a hell of a set of little lungs. Last night, I incorporated it into a dream and woke up abruptly, thinking I was hearing a human baby screaming in agony and terror.

I did not intend to write four posts about Overcast today

Overall, the latest version of the Overcast podcast player has been buggy for me. This seems like a beta 1 product, not production software.

That said, I credit Marco with quick action staying on top of bugs and customer service. He already has distributed a bug-fix beta.

As I recall, he’s a coffee connoisseur and I hope he has plenty of the good stuff.

I use Overcast for its audio quality rather than its user interface. The audio quality remains first-rate, and I remain a satisfied customer.