Are you making changes to stay successful in your career as AI transforms workplaces?

Getting new training?

Sharpening some skills while letting others fall away?

Changing careers entirely?

How do you see AI changing your job?

This is for an article I’m writing.

Existential threats from AI aren’t on my list of things to worry about. That the super-rich and powerful are concerned is an indication that they’ve lost touch with reality.

That’s not what happened with Twitter. The Twitter acquisition was unique. I’ve never seen or heard of a situation where somebody was forced to acquire a company against his will.

As a business/technology journalist, I’ve covered many M&A deals. Often, they start hostile, then both parties reach a deal and it ends quietly.

Russia was just like that, but with tanks.

Ian Welsh predicts that the US will be a big loser of the Ukraine war, ending the US global hegemony. The war demonstrates that countries can successfully defy the US. China will support defiant nations against US sanctions.

Welsh makes a credible case. I’m insufficiently informed to have my own opinion.

Welsh’s article went up yesterday, before the latest shenanigans.

Yes, the war is going badly for Russia, and was even when Welsh posted. That does not undercut Welsh’s arguments.

Lemmy and Kbin potentially change the face of at least part of the Fediverse, making it more Reddit-like, focused on topics and content, rather than individual people.

A Titanic Disparity in How the World Responds to Maritime Disasters “All travelers, whether migrants or millionaires, deserve rescue. The global response to the Titan’s disappearance should be the model for how we respond to migrant vessels in distress.” (Democracy Now!)

Hearbreaking details on the recent tragedy in which 700 people died when the refugee ship Adriana sank off the coast of Greece, under the watch of the Greek Coast Guard.

Still thinking about last night’s episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.” It was about assimilation and passing, subjects close to me. I’m a Jewish American who mostly doesn’t act Jewish, sound Jewish, or even have a Jewish name. Passing is my default mode.

Gearlinx taps the cloud for ‘Network Resilience as a Service’. Gearlinx provides network resilience and network operations as a service, using cloud software and a hardware device it calls a Duckfone. I talked 1:1 with company president Todd Rychecky, who newly joins Gearlinx after 14 years at competitor Opengear. Read about it at Silverlinings. Thanks to Diana Goovaerts, who contributed to this story.

That was one of the best Star Trek episodes I’ve ever seen. Moving and inspirational.

We often get caught up condemning America’s failures, when what we should be doing is inspiring America to live up to its highest self. Why did so many Japanese-Americans who were interned wrongly during World War II go on to live as patriots?

I was just reminded that we moved to San Francisco on Halloween and moved away on Halloween. This seems somehow significant.

Whenever I hear an anti-woke clown going on about soyboys, alpha males, beta males, and the importance of traditional masculinity, I think: A foundational value of traditional masculinity is physical courage.

I want to ask the clown: How much bullfighting have you done? What mountains have you climbed? What’s your military combat record?

I like a latte now and then, a beverage that wingnuts denounce fervently, enjoyment of which is a sure marker of beta males. When I have a latte, it’s soy or oat milk because regular milk makes me fart something fierce. Is farting an alpha-male thing?

Seven Rules For Internet CEOs To Avoid Enshittification (Mike Masnick / Techdirt)

These are good rules for building a healthy Internet business, or a healthy business of any kind. All the rules are built on the first: “Tell your investors that you’re in this for the long haul and they need to be too.”

Also: Treat the users as the cherished asset that make your site useful and valuable. Users are not products that should be exploited and used up.

When the press talks about the layoffs and chaos generated by a series of completely pointless mergers the blame always falls on ambiguities like a “weakening macroeconomy” and not, say, blistering incompetence by the fail upwards trust fund brunch-lords in the c-suite, obsessed with setting their brands on fire just for a tax break and a fat bonus.

— Warner Bros Discovery Merger Gets Dumber As Layoffs Continue And Company Licenses Streaming Content To… Netflix. (Karl Bode / Techdirt)

VMware’s plan for cross-cloud conquest. I talked 1:1 with Vittorio Viarengo, VMware VP of cross-cloud services, about plans to prosper by delivering software to unify applications across multiple clouds and on-premises. But will those ambitions survive the Broadcom acquisition? Read about it on Silverlinings—and read to the end for links to Viarengo’s music videos.

On Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster has a good backgrounder on the Titanic submersible:

Ok look, in my spare time I do volunteer wilderness search and rescue, so I am the last person to look askance at anyone for doing stupid things in the name of pointless adventure. If your soul calls you to risk death on a mountain in Maine, I will do my best to reach you in time, and if it calls you to die in a carbon fiber and titanium can at the bottom of the Atlantic, I will salute you and hope for your sake it was a hull breach, comrade. 🫡

Much of it is in the form of a FAQ:

Is this submersible, like… safe?

Lmao no….

Meanwhile, on Twitter, free speech absolutist Elon Musk has declared “cis” and “cisgender” to be slurs.

Good heavens, I’ve been calling myself “cis” since I first heard the word. I use it to describe myself whenever I opine on LGBTQ issues, to disclose my perspective. This comes up more often than you might expect, because opining about things is what I do.

Businesses have been laying people off and breaking promises to workers for 40+ years, and now these businesses think remote work is the reason employees aren’t committed. So therefore these businesses are banning remote work—thereby breaking another promise, made in 2020-22, that remote work would be forever.

When Minnie and I walk in the park, we like the opportunity to say hello to other dogs. This was a funny looking dog. 📷

I’m surprised the Republicans don’t like Hunter Biden. Guns and tax dodging are essentially the party platform.

We get a lot of ravens and/or crows around here. Julie found this article about how to tell them apart. Still, I remain low in confidence as to my ability to distinguish them.

A toymaker and doctor partnered to create Resusci Anne, a doll to teach people how to perform CPR. The face of the doll was based on an unknown woman believed drowned in the Seine in the 1880s, who was celebrated in books and poetry as l’Inconnue de la Seine, or the Unknown Woman of the Seine. On the Criminal podcast: “The Unknown Woman.".

Marc Maron interviews Quinn Cummings, writer and former child star who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar when she was 10 years old for her role on “The Goodbye Girl.”

Quinn tells Marc why she rejected acting after her early success and why she prefers to write. They also talk about homeschooling, avoiding marriage and how Quinn became a patent-holding inventor.

Cummings reminds me of those people who used to appear on talk shows in the 1970s for no other reason than because they were great at talking.

“We are living through the end of the useful internet.”

The Last Page of the Internet, by Alex Pareene:

The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.

We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it.”

Reddit is speedrunning enshittification.

Hypothesis: The owners of the company are no longer interested in keeping the business going, and are just trying to maximize financial return by selling off every possible asset.

In Reddit’s case, the upcoming IPO isn’t the beginning of a new chapter in the business. It’s the end of the business.

The most valuable part of Reddit is its fat corpus of content, built by volunteers over many years, suddenly made valuable for training AI. Now, Reddit’s corporate owners want to sell access to that corpus. That is Reddit’s new business. It’s not a long-term business, because the corpus will decay in value over time. But it’s enough for the owners to cash out.

I’m inspired in this thinking by yesterday’s edition of Rusty Foster’s “Today in Tabs.”. I don’t think he’s making this exact point, but he’s putting all the dots down, without necessarily connecting them.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball notes that OpenAI already scooped up Reddit’s corpus of data when the APIs were free. The data has no value anymore.

Reddit already gave all its data to large companies for free. Huffman is trying to charge now for horses that were let out of the barn years ago. And he obviously doesn’t care about Apollo or other third-party Reddit clients, or what these moves do to Reddit’s reputation as a platform vendor. He’s just trapped in a fantasy where investors are going to somehow see Reddit as a player in the current moment of AI hype.

Also, on Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day: “Platforms Don’t Really Make Sense Anymore”:

We tolerated large platforms, that were never all that good to begin with, because they were convenient and useful and part of a larger interconnected network of tools and apps and systems that made the digital world safer and more dynamic. So you’d think, if they were actively deciding to stop being part of that larger system and no longer interested in making the internet, as a whole, function better, they would, at the very least, try and be more convenient! But instead we’ve ended up in a situation where all the local stores are gone, Main Street is deserted, and the large Walmarts on the edge of town are being set on fire and left to rot.

An Anti-Porn App Put Him in Jail and His Family Under Surveillance. After an Indiana man pleaded not guilty to possession of child pornography, courts installed Covenant Eyes spyware on the phones and other electronic devices of everybody in his family as a condition of his release before trial. The man went to jail after the software reported someone using his wife’s phone went to Pornhub. She says it never happened—it’s a bug in the software—and tests of the software confirm that’s very possible.

Julie found this in her papers. I was the one with the PalmPilot; she never had one.

Do you believe in life after death? Are you sure you know? Really sure?

We’ll watch any TV show with a main character whose first name is DCI.

The Binge Purge. TV’s streaming business model is broken.

A good long read by Josef Adalian at Vulture.com:

It’s absolutely conceivable that the streaming subscription model is the crypto of the entertainment business. Like cryptocurrency, which has created massive on-paper fortunes built atop 1 + 1 = 3 arithmetic, streaming TV has always seemed too good to be true but seduced a lot of smart people anyway.”

Also, about a TV adaptation of “Field of Dreams” by Mike Schur, who created “The Good Place:”

Peacock pulled the plug on Schur’s TV adaptation of Field of Dreams even though it was deep into preproduction. “They just changed their mind,” says Schur. “They didn’t want to spend the money anymore.” He notes that the project will have one lasting artifact, perhaps the ultimate monument to Peak TV’s unfulfilled potential: “We built a baseball stadium in a cornfield in Iowa that’s still sitting there as we speak.” They built it, and nobody came.

This is a working weekend for me. I had trouble writing, but I think I have it under control now.

I usually listen to podcasts on my walk but today I listened to this.

Well, I’d like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!
Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily
Ah! Well. Nevertheless,

That’s a popular meme from 2016 that still holds up.

The Apollo story is even uglier. Apparently, Reddit CEO Huffman is telling people that Apollo developer Christian Selig tried to blackmail Reddit for $10 million. Selig says that’s bullshit and he has recordings to prove it.

According to Selig, he said something on a call with Reddit officials that the officials initially took as blackmail. He said it was nothing of the kind, and explained himself, and the Reddit officials apologized—five times.

Enshittifying the Internet seems to be a theme this week. In addition to Reddit knifing third-party apps, Wordpress is adding generative AI capabilities to its blogging software, which will only lead to an explosion in clickbait search engine spam. It’s a naked revenue grab by Wordpress’s parent company, Automattic, at the expense of making the Internet vastly less usable for the rest of us. I thought Automattic was better than that.

Today is a day of petty disappointments. I’ve had a couple of business developments that are discouraging. Hopefully, they’ll come to nothing, but they’re discouraging in the moment.

Also, my five-year-old Macbook Pro is getting flaky. I’ve noticed the Internet slows to a crawl at lunchtime. Do you know what I like to do at lunch? Read things on the Internet. Do you know what I don’t like doing at lunch? Troubleshooting network problems.

Because the Macbook is so old, I routinely reboot it in the morning to optimize performance. Today, I also had to reboot it at lunch to make those networking problems go away. Yesterday, I returned from stepping away from my desk and found the MacBook had spontaneously rebooted itself, which is never a good sign.

I do not have a new MacBook in the budget this year.

I’m disappointed that Reddit is jacking up its API pricing and forcing developer Christian Selig to shut down his Reddit app Apollo. It’s one of my favorite iPhone and iPad apps. It feels like Reddit is flipping a big fat middle finger to me and many other people who enjoyed using Apollo.

I use Apollo to find about half of the memes, vintage ads, vintage photos, and other found media that I post regularly to Facebook and Tumblr. If you’ve enjoyed seeing those, then Reddit is flipping you the bird too.

I also use Tumblr to find those found media, and I’m not thrilled with the direction Tumblr is taking either.

UPDATE: A friend reminds me that Reddit is essentially killing all third-party apps, not just Apollo.

To me the Macintosh has always felt more like a place than a thing. Not a place I go physically, but a place my mind goes intellectually. When I’m working or playing and in the flow, it has always felt like MacOS is where I am. I’m in the Mac. Interruptions — say, the doorbell or my phone ringing — are momentarily disorienting when I’m in the flow on the Mac, because I’m pulled out of that world and into the physical one.

— John Gruber, Daring Fireball: First Impressions of Vision Pro and VisionOS

Yes! And the same is true for me on the iPad and also on the iPhone (but less so). And it’s not specific to Apple products; it’s true for any computer, tablet or phone.

And when I go to Facebook or other social media platforms or read RSS feeds, it’s like traveling to other places. Indeed, it sometimes surprises me to think how much time I spend physically in one room of the house because it feels like I’ve been out and about all day.

Gruber is discussing this feeling of placeness in the context of the Apple Vision Pro, which he tried, and how it will vastly enhance the sense of place when using computers.

The most impressive feature of Vision Pro is that it enables you to hang multiple virtual 4K displays all around your field of vision, some as big as the broadest widescreen TVs.

Gruber again:

Last night I chatted with a friend who, I found out only then, has been using Vision Pro for months inside Apple. … he spent weeks feeling a bit constrained, keeping his open VisionOS windows all in front of him as though on a virtual display, before a colleague opened his mind to spreading out and making applications windows much larger and arranging them in a wider carousel not merely in front of him but around him. The constraints of even the largest physical display simply do not exist with VisionOS.

I absolutely expect to buy the Vision Pro. But not at its opening price of $3,500. We don’t have that kind of money lying around (especially because Julie wants one too). But I expect the price will come down to an affordable range in three to five years.

No, a rogue AI drone simulation did not kill its operator, despite recent news reports. Why make up a story about something like that? Because it enforces the narrative that AI is super-powerful and threatens human extinction, which is bullshit. But it’s profitable bullshit for AI grifters, who are literally the same people who were peddling crytop/blockchain grift untill last year.

Cory Doctorow:

If the problem with “AI” (neither “artificial,” nor “intelligent”) is that it is about to become self-aware and convert the entire solar system to paperclips, then we need a moonshot to save our species from these garish harms.

If, on the other hand, the problem is that AI systems just _suck _and shouldn’t be trusted to fly drones, or drive cars, or decide who gets bail, or identify online hate-speech, or determine your creditworthiness or insurability, then all those AI companies are out of business.

Take away every consequential activity through which AI harms people, and all you’ve got left is low-margin activities like writing SEO garbage, lengthy reminisces about “the first time I ate an egg” that help an omelette recipe float to the top of a search result. Sure, you can put 95 percent of the commercial illustrators on the breadline, but their total wages don’t rise to one percent of the valuation of the big AI companies.

For those sky-high valuations to remain intact until the investors can cash out, we need to think about AI as a powerful, transformative technology, not as a better autocomplete.

We literally just sat through this movie, and it sucked. Remember when blockchain was going to be worth trillions, and anyone who didn’t get in on the ground floor could “have fun being poor?”

At the time, we were told that the answer to the problems of blockchain were exotic, new forms of regulation that accommodated the “innovation” of crypto. Under no circumstances should we attempt to staunch the rampant fraud and theft by applying boring old securities and commodities and money-laundering regulations. To do that would be to recognize that “fin-tech” is just a synonym for “unlicensed bank.”

The pitchmen who made out like bandits on crypto — leaving mom-and-pop investors holding the bag — are precisely the same people who are beating the drum for AI today.

I have a pet theory that a four- or even three-star review would be fine in a rational universe. Ride in an Uber, and the driver gets you there safely, on time and the driver is reasonably personable? Three stars.

Four stars if the driver gets you there on time despite traffic, helps you with a massive amount of luggage, or you have a fascinating conversation.

Save the five-star reviews if you have a cardiac event and the driver restarts your heart.

But because I am not a sociopath, I do like everybody else and routinely give five-star reviews for acceptable service. I rarely give as low as four stars because I know that’s a big deal for the gig worker who provided the service.

On this day of the big annual Apple product launch, I’m remembering that day many years ago when Julie and I went to the Terminator experience at the Universal Studios theme park on vacation.

All these theme park experiences have the same storyline: The audience is supposedly dignitaries taking a VIP tour of some science-fiction location. And Something Goes Terribly Wrong, and the special effects start going off around you.

In the case of the Terminator experience, the audience–which included me and Julie that day–were supposedly journalists at a press conference for Cyberdyne Systems, unveiling its new Terminator model robot soldier.

And, of course, the Terminator runs amok and starts blowing things up and disrupts the press conference.

The funny thing is that I am a journalist, and Julie did tech PR for most of her career. And we have both been to a million product launch press conferences.

So there we were on vacation doing a science fiction simulation of the exact same things we did at work every day.

Writing a corporate blog this morning, I was able to dodge using the word “paradigm,” but I couldn’t resist “holistic” and “actionable.”

Coming back from the grocery store, I dropped six bottles of iced tea in the driveway and gave the neighborhood children vocabulary lessons.

When reading genre novels, often my favorite parts are the parts before the bad things start happening.

That’s particularly true for Stephen King. I want the Torrances to have a nice winter at the Overlook Hotel.

It’s true most of all for one of my favorite of his novels, “11/23/63.” I loved the story of a rootless man from 2010 Maine who finds community and love in 1960 Texas. I was far less interested in the hunt to stop Lee Harvey Oswald.

Idea for the beginning of a horror story: A friend mentioned recently that he works in a six-story building. His job takes him up and down from floor to floor all day. He likes to use the stairs instead of the elevator. To clear his mind, he counts the stairs as he goes.

Here’s the story idea: One day, the count changes.

Stephen King, if you’re reading this—no charge.

📺 We watched the final two episodes of "Succession." I have thoughts. SPOILERS

Screenshot from The Onion. Headline says Succession Ends With Roy Family Saving Christmas. Image is obviously photoshopped, showing grinning Kendall, Roman and Shiv in Santa's sleigh.

I’m seeing some talk that Tom isn’t the winner because he’s just Matsson’s puppet. But Tom is definitely the winner. All he ever cared about was the money, buying luxuries, and the appearance of power and he got all those things. He doesn’t care about the reality of power.

Tom will remain perfectly loyal to Matsson—until the moment Tom sees it as advantageous to throw his loyalty to someone else. Probably Matsson knows this, and sees Tom as a useful tool.

The same person who said Tom isn’t the winner also compared Tom dismissively to Gerri. That’s nuts. Gerri is one of the winners of “Succession.” She was Logan’s loyal consigliere and assassin for 30 years, and she cashed out big and walked away.

Justine Lupe, who played the high-end-callgirl-turned-wife Willa, also played Astrid Weissman, Midge’s sister-in-law on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Her role on “Maisel” is extremely different from Willa. On “Maisel,” she’s a the perfect midcentury upper-middle-class American housewife and mother, a shikse who converted to Judaism to marry a Jewish man and is now more Jewish than her Jewish family.

I love the video playing in Conner‘s apartment, and the kids’ faces as they watched it. We saw another side of Logan there, away from the kids and relaxed, affectionate and warm. Frank, Gerri, Karl and Jess were Logan’s real family, the people he loved and who loved him. Kendall, Roman and Shiv were not part of that family, and they knew it. Connor, on the other hand, was part of that family.

The entire four-year “Succession” story could have been told from Frank and Karl’s perspective, and it would be a very different story.

Why did Shiv vote the way she did? I don’t think we ever get a definitive answer in the show, but I think it was because in the end she just couldn’t stand to see Kendall win. According to discussion on Reddit, there’s a scene just before the vote when Kendall puts his feet up on Logan’s desk, and you see a look of disgust cross Shiv’s face. Neither Julie nor I saw that.

As the CEO’s wife, Shiv is in a better position as Kendall’s sister. But I don’t think she was calculating it through that far until after Tom was named CEO.

Of course, Tom isn’t the real successor. Matsson is the successor.

Roman is finally out, and he is relieved. He never wanted the responsibility. He just wanted to pretend to be a playboy and now he’s back to that.

A theme that emerged throughout “Succession” is that the people who appear to be in power—Tom, the President of the United States—are not the people in power. The real people in power are the people who pay those other people: the Logans and Matssons. In “Succession” we spend a lot of two seasons focused on a Presidential election in which one of the candidates is a neo-Nazi, and it turns out to be a minor plot point, not worth resolving in the finale. Because that election just didn’t matter in the universe of “Succession.”

Shiv is the sort of woman misogynist who sees herself as the exception. She is not the exception. She has become her mother, and is married to a man who literally sits in her father’s chair.

I love the rare sweet moment at the end of the show where Logan’s wives and mistresses all came together as this little supportive sorority. Marcia even takes Kerry’s hand. They were all the women that Logan betrayed, and in the end they stood by each other. Although maybe not—in the universe of “Succession,” you never can assume love and decency is real.

Does Willa care about Connor after all? Or is she just in it for the money? Yes.

In the scene at the bar at the end, Roman orders Gerri’s favorite drink.

I don’t know if we actually enjoyed the final season of “Succession.” Watching it had become compulsive.

I kept expecting Roman’s dick pics to go viral on social media. They were Checkov’s dick pics, and they never were fired.

“Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong shares his view on where the characters go after the season finale: Tom isn’t just going to be an empty suit. He’s got a lot of hard work ahead of him. But he will never be anything other than Matsson’s dog.

Armstrong says Roman is back where he started; the whole multi-year arc was just a detour for him.

Armstrong: “Shiv is still in play … in a rather terrifying, frozen emotionally barren place.”

Also Armstrong: “For Kendall, this will never stop being the central event of his life, the central days of his life, central couple of years of his life… Maybe he could go on and start a company, or do a thing. But the chances of him achieving the sort of corporate status that his dad achieved are very low. And I think that will mark his whole life.”

Why does “Succession” get so much more journalism and social media love than “Yellowstone,” which has similar premises and themes and is far more popular among the viewing public? I think it’s because “Succession” centers on the media business and New York, and therefore has more appeal to journalists and the professional-managerial classes that dominate journalism and social media.

I’ve read that “Succession” is a blue show and “Yellowstone” is a red show, and there’s a lot of truth to that. But “Yellowstone” is more nuanced and ethically diverse and more broadly focused across class lines. Go figure.

In our house, we watch both “Succession” and “Yellowstone.”

The image is from The Onion

Cory Doctorow: The long lineage of private equity’s looting

Fans of the Sopranos will remember the “bust out” as a mob tactic in which a business is taken over, loaded up with debt, and driven into the ground, wrecking the lives of the business’s workers, customers and suppliers. When the mafia does this, we call it a bust out; when Wall Street does it, we call it “private equity.”

…

For years, the crooks who ran these ops did a brisk trade in blaming the internet. Why did Sears tank? Everyone knows that the 19th century business was an antique, incapable of mounting a challenge in the age of e-commerce. That was a great smokescreen for an old-fashioned bust out that saw corporate looters make off with hundreds of millions, leaving behind empty storefronts and emptier pension accounts for the workers who built the wealth the looters stole:

https://prospect.org/economy/vulture-capitalism-killed-sears/

Same goes for Toys R Us: it wasn’t Amazon that killed the iconic toy retailer – it was the PE bosses who extracted $200m from the chain, then walked away, hands in pockets and whistling, while the businesses collapsed and the workers got zero severance:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/06/01/how-can-they-walk-away-with-millions-and-leave-workers-with-zero-toys-r-us-workers-say-they-deserve-severance/

…

It’s a good racket – for the racketeers. Private equity has grown from a finance sideshow to Wall Street’s apex predator, and it’s devouring the real economy through a string of audactious bust outs, each more consequential and depraved than the last.

…

PE shows that it can turn profitable businesses gigantic windfalls, sticking the rest of us with the job of sorting out the smoking craters they leave behind,

…

Today, the PE sector loves a rollup, which is when they buy several related businesses and merge them into one firm. The nominal business-case for a rollup is that the new, bigger firm is more “efficient.” In reality, a rollup’s strength is in eliminating competition. When all the pet groomers, or funeral homes, or urgent care clinics for ten miles share the same owner, they can raise prices, lower wages, and fuck over suppliers.

…

PE’s most ghastly impact is felt in the health care sector. Whole towns' worth of emergency rooms, family practices, labs and other health firms have been scooped up by PE, which has spent more than $1t since 2012 on health acquisitions:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect

Once a health care company is owned by PE, it is significantly more likely to commit medicare fraud. It also cuts wages and staffing for doctors and nurses. PE-owned facilities do more unnecessary and often dangerous procedures. Appointments get shorter. The companies get embroiled in kickback scandals.

…

As bad as PE is for healthcare, it’s worse for long-term care. PE-owned nursing homes are charnel houses, and there’s a particularly nasty PE scam where elderly patients are tricked into signing up for palliative care, which is never delivered (and isn’t needed, because the patients aren’t dying!). These fake “hospices” get huge payouts from medicare – and the patient is made permanently ineligible for future medicare, because they are recorded being in their final decline:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

…

Private equity is behind the mass rollup of single-family homes across America. Wall Street landlords are the worst landlords in America, who load up your rent with junk fees, leave your home in a state of dangerous disrepair, and evict you at the drop of a hat:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights

As these houses decay through neglect, private equity makes a bundle from tenants and even more borrowing against the houses. In a few short years, much of America’s desperately undersupplied housing stock will be beyond repair. It’s a bust out.

You know all those exploding trains filled with dangerous chemicals that poison entire towns? Private equity bust outs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/04/up-your-nose/#rail-barons

…

PetSmart – looted for $30 billion by RaymondSvider and his PE fund BC Partners – is a slaughterhouse for animals. The company systematically neglects animals – failing to pay workers to come in and feed them, say, or refusing to provide backup power to run during power outages, letting animals freeze or roast to death. Though PetSmart has its own vet clinics, the company doesn’t want to pay its vets to nurse the animals it damages, so it denies them care. But the company is also too cheap to euthanize those animals, so it lets them starve to death. PetSmart is also too cheap to cremate the animals, so its traumatized staff are ordered to smuggle the dead, rotting animals into random dumpsters.

All this happened while PetSmart’s sales increased by 60%, matched by growth in the company’s gross margins. All that money went to the bust out.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/09/27/the-30-billion-kitty-meet-the-investor-who-made-a-fortune-on-pet-food/

When you think you have a full cup of coffee left in the carafe, but it’s only this much.

A hand holds a clear glass coffee cup in front of a window. The cup has barely any coffee in it.

Idea for a Star Trek spinoff series: “These are the voyages of the starship Dunning-Krueger…. "

Governor Newsom Desperately Begs NetChoice To Drop Its Lawsuit Over Unconstitutional AADC Bill.

Mike Masnick on Techdirt:

… nothing in this law actually protects children. Instead, it puts them at much greater risk of having information exposed, as we’ve noted. It will also make it next to impossible for children to research important information regarding mental health, or to find out the information they need to help them deal with things like eating disorders, since it will drive basically all of that content offline

…

… we have Newsom lying about the law, lying about the filings from NetChoice, and now lying about the Surgeon General’s report. I know it’s a post-truth political world we live in, but I expect better from California’s governor.

For social media and other Internet companies, the IPO announcement is when the enshittification process accelerates. The IPO announcement is the moment when the service reaches the peak of the enshittification rollercoaster and begins plunging downward. We’re seeing this play out now with Reddit.

Today I learned that it is perfectly fine to say to someone, “I’m sorry, could you speak a little slower–I’m having difficulty understanding your accent.”

Previously I thought it was rude and maybe xenophobic to point out to someone that they spoke with an accent.

I do not want to admit how long I have struggled with this delusion and failed to arrive at the simple solution.

Furries Now Have Serious Beef With Ron DeSantis: A furry fandom con in Florida just announced it would ban minors based on the governor’s ridiculous laws

Many parents whose children are involved with the subculture credit it with helping them overcome bullying, or gain self-esteem. At conventions, [a furry convention organizer] says, “there will be parents crying in a corner because they don’t see their kids so happy every day. We had a mom break down because she’s never seen her kid feel so comfortable just sitting at a table and interacting with other kids.” She says it is “heartbreaking” to think of young furries not having a space to connect.

The furry fandom has been a target of the far-right for years, with numerous politicians baselessly claiming that schools are placing litter boxes in bathrooms to appease students who identify as furries. A number of school boards across the country have attempted to prohibit children from wearing animal ears to school, with Florida’s Brevard Public Schools most recently attempting to adopt a dress code banning clothing “which emulates non-human characteristics.” (A spokesperson for Brevard Public Schools denied that children dressing up as furries was a “widespread issue.”)

Glad to hear that poverty, violence, Covid, cancer, climate change, and rising healthcare costs are now solved problems, so we can go after furries.

The threat of human extinction by AI is only scary for billionaires and centimillionaires

I see now that tech executives are once again warning about risk of human extinction caused by AI.

I think it’s adorable when the plutes worry about that kind of thing, while the rest of us worry about paying for healthcare, food, and housing.

More than 30 million Americans are living below the poverty line. And 40% of Americans were having difficulty paying for normal household expenses.. That’s scary.

AI is only scary to the extent that it will be an excuse to put more people out of work.

Today I learned: A canary trap is a technique to identify an information leak by giving different versions of a sensitive document to several suspects and observing which version gets leaked.

I was familiar with the technique, but I’d never heard the name before, and I was ignorant of the technique’s history.

This Wikipedia article gives 40 years of history. I expect the canary trap is much older than that–thousands and thousands of years.

Researchers are using Shoggoth, a monster out of HP Lovecraft, as a mascot for AI.

Kevin Roose at The New York Times:

@TetraspaceWest, the meme’s creator, told me in a Twitter message that the Shoggoth “represents something that thinks in a way that humans don’t understand and that’s totally different from the way that humans think.”

Attempts to train AI to be more human-like are like putting a smiley face or human mask on Shoggoth. It’s still inscrutable, but it creates the appearance of understandability.

That some A.I. insiders refer to their creations as Lovecraftian horrors, even as a joke, is unusual by historical standards. (Put it this way: Fifteen years ago, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going around comparing Facebook to Cthulhu.)

And it reinforces the notion that what’s happening in A.I. today feels, to some of its participants, more like an act of summoning than a software development process. They are creating the blobby, alien Shoggoths, making them bigger and more powerful, and hoping that there are enough smiley faces to cover the scary parts.

Cory Doctorow: The FDA literally granted pharma company Ferring a monopoly on shit. More precisely, the FDA rescinded its “discretionary enforcement” guidance relating to fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs), where doctors implant a small quantity of processed poop from one person to another, which turns out to be a powerful, safe treatment for serious and potentially fatal intestinal infection. The FDA ruling makes it illegal for doctors to source their poop from Openbiome, a nonprofit that coordinates between doctors, patients, and donors to provide safe FMTs. Ferring conducted clinical trials on FMTs and received approval for an FMT product called Rebyota, which charges $20,000 per treatment, compared to Openbiome’s $1-2k per treatment. So sick Americans will have to pay 10x higher for shit.

We recently learned about “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” a 2017 movie directed and written by Luc Besson of “The Fifth Element,” which Julie and I both love. The previews have the same look and feel as the other movie. It stars Dane DeHaan (never heard of him), and Cara DeLevingne, who appeared in “Carnival Row”—we enjoyed the first season of that—along with a hell of a supporting cast: Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Rutger Hauer and John Goodman.

Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design:

The term brutalism is derived from the French béton brut, meaning “raw concrete”. Although most brutalist buildings are made from concrete, we’re more interested in the term raw. Concrete brutalist buildings often reflect back the forms used to make them, and their overall design tends to adhere to the concept of truth to materials.

…

A website that embraces Brutalist Web Design is raw in its focus on content, and prioritization of the website visitor.

Panpsychism is the view that the mind “or a mindlike aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.”

Possibilianism is a religious philosophy that’s open to exploring possibilities. Neuroscientist David Eagleman described it this way:

Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position — one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.

The iPhone will auto-reply to text messages—but only when you’re in Driving Focus. I want auto-reply in all Focus modes. I hope that’s coming in the next version of iOS.

What novel should I read next? 📚

I woke up this morning and decided to break up with the novel I’m currently reading. This is a new thing for me; I recently decided to start more books and quit reading more books when they’re not working for me.

I’m not finding that resolution easy. A part of me feels compelled to finish a book once I start, as if failure to complete was wasteful, like not eating all the food on my plate. But of course, that’s ridiculous, and quitting reading a book that isn’t working opens up time to read something I might enjoy more.

The book I’m quitting is “Cetaganda,” by Lois McMaster Bujold. It’s part of her Vorkosigan series of novels. These are far-future science fiction about a hero named Miles Vorkosigan. Miles is the son of one of the most powerful men on the planet Barrayar, scion of a warrior caste. Miles’s father was one of the greatest warriors and statesmen of Barrayan history, who saved the planet after a revolution and coup against the rightful Emperor, and then ruled as regent.

But Miles is not his father; he’s disabled, short and frail, with a rare medical condition that makes his bones fragile and easily breakable. He’s also brilliant, hyperactive, a wise-ass, and prone to getting himself into trouble and thinking himself out of it. The books have an enthusiastic fandom and won a lot of awards.

But I always find myself having to push through the middle of the Vorkosigan books, and in the case of “Cetaganda,” it’s too much pushing.

The Vorkosigan stories are mysteries of one kind or another: murders to be solved, spy plots to be uncovered, military capers to be executed. The plots are intricate. I think the books are meant to be read quickly, over two or three days at most. I read books slowly, over weeks or months, and I get confused about what’s going on in the Vorkosigan novels and who’s who.

The books were written in the 90s, and they already seem a little dated.

Julie went to school with Bujold, though they were not close. And here’s an interesting Wikipedia bit: Bujold’s inspirations for Miles include T.E. Lawrence, a young Winston Churchill, a disabled hospital pharmacist she once worked with, “and even herself (the ‘great man’s son syndrome’).” I’ll have to ask Julie what, if anything, she knows about Bujold’s father.

I may come back to Miles Vorkosigan. But not today.

So what should I read next? I think I’m going to stick with series novels. I like series. Once you find a series you like, they’re reliable, familiar, and comfortable. Here’s what I’m thinking:

Blood Work, Michael Connelly’s seventh novel. Connelly primarily writes about Harry Bosch, an LAPD detective, but he also writes novels about other characters, and this character is new to me, Terry McCaleb, an ex-FBI agent retired on medical disability.

Robert B. Parker’s Little White Lies is not, despite the title, by Parker, but instead by Ace Atkins. It’s a novel about Boston private detective Spenser (first name never revealed), who Parker invented and wrote about in dozens of books until Parker died in 2010. Then Atkins was hired by Parker’s estate to continue the series.

The Parker novels meant a lot to me. I read them in my 20s, and they were the last books I read in a period of my life where I drew role models from fiction, which started in childhood. I looked to fictional characters as I tried to figure out how to live life, and Spenser was the last of those for me.

Also, I fell in love with Boston by reading the Spenser books and taking frequent business trips to that city. I moved there in 1992 and decided I wouldn’t say I liked it after all, but I met Julie there, and we moved together to California and got married.

So the Spenser books are a big deal for me.

Ace Atkins has done a surprisingly good job continuing the Spenser series. His first four books are good but could be better, but he gets going with the fifth, Slow Burn. I’ve read other series where a living author tried to pick things up from an original author who died, and they don’t quite work out; Atkins shows that it can succeed.

Slow Burn isn’t Parker’s Spenser; it’s a collaboration between the two writers (one of whom happens to be not living anymore).

Those are the leading contenders for what I’ll read next. Others on the candidate list:

  • A Sandman Slim novel by Richard Kadrey. I quit that series several books in, but maybe I just needed a break.
  • Something by Stephen King. I’ve been re-reading some old favorites and picking up newer books I haven’t yet read.
  • A Harry Dresden novel. Like the Vorkosigan books, they have an enthusiastic fandom. I read the first one, and it didn’t grab me. A fan told me this weekend that they get better after the first few. Maybe I’ll start again in the middle with those. I did that with the Spenser books, and it worked well.
  • After seeing the Jon Hamm Fletch movie, I re-read the first book in that series, by Gregory Mcdonald, and liked it so much I might keep going.
  • The next Stainless Steel Rat book, by Harry Harrison, about a master thief turned elite secret agent in the distant future. I loved those books when I was a kid, and I re-read two last year and thought they held up great.
  • John Scalzi has a book coming up. I could check to see if it’s out already or if I can winkle an advance copy.
  • The second Travis McGee novel. I read the first one last year, and I can definitely see the appeal.
  • Something by Elizabeth Gilbert. This entry doesn’t fit on the list; the rest of the books on this list are sf or fantasy or detective novels, but that’s not Gilbert. She’s an author I’d previously dismissed and compartmentalized, but I heard an interview with her in 2020 about her then-new novel, “City of Girls,” I read the book, and by God, it’s brilliant. And I now seek out interviews with Gilbert because she’s brilliant. So maybe I should read more by her?

I’ll probably go with the Connelly, but it’ll be hours and hours and hours until I decide, and who knows where the world will take me in that distant future of later today?

What great books have you read recently?