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Today I learned that Oxiclean does an amazing job cleaning years of coffee crust from the inside of my Hario insulated metal coffee server. It’s like new. Sadly, my coffee loses some flavor served from a clean container.

Today I am just saying nope to empty news calories.

Two articles about Tucker Carlson’s last broadcast? Another day I might have read one or both but today I just say nope.

A profile of a powerful Democratic political consultant who is apparently an awful person? Another day I would gobble that up, but today? Nope.

I hope I can keep this up.

This blog is a LGBTQ- and trans-friendly place.

I’m posting less about politics nowadays, and that’s a conscious decision by me.

But given all the hate coming out of the red states nowadays, it seems to me to be necessary to take a stand on this issue.

Anti-trans bigotry taps into the darkest impulses in human societies. It’s a step on a dark road that ends in genocide.

You should always start the day with gratitude. This morning I’m grateful that the cat vomit on my blanket was quick and easy to clean up.

Cory Doctorow’s “Red Team Blues” is the most exciting technothriller about a 67-year-old accountant you’ll read this year 📚

“Red Team Blues,” the latest novel by the prolific Cory Doctorow, is a gripping technothriller about billion-dollar cryptocurrency crime. I don’t often encounter fiction that pulls me in as hard as “Red Team Blues” anymore—I’m a jaded reader. But “Red Team Blues” kept me up well past my bedtime on more than one night, and I staggered around bleary-eyed at work the next day. I should send Cory a bill.

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Cats are always disappointed in you, whereas dogs always think you’re amazing and you’re disappointed in yourself for failing to live up to their high regard.

Just a reminder that ALL the sticks in the forest are free. Go out and get yourself a cool stick. You earned it!

I’ll just switch notetaking apps and/or task managers and then my life will be perfect, right?

Tonight I wiki’d and googled about the Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon stories 📚and their author, Spider Robinson. The bar travels through time and space1 but its home base is Route 25A, in Suffolk County on Long Island, which is just a few miles from where I grew up. Robinson went to the same college I did, State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Then I wiki’d my home town, Huntington Township on Long Island, and was surprised to learn about many notable people who came from there, all of which I immediately forgot, because it is late and I am tired.

  1. Like the TARDIS on Doctor Who, if the TARDIS was a bar. ↩︎

Noncompete clauses and related employment agreements are indentured servitude.

Noncompetes epitomize MLK’s “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.” They’re a way for employers to operate in a command economy where the power of the state can be mobilized against uppity workers who dare to seek a better deal…. “

— Cory Doctorow, How workers get trapped by “bondage fees”

📚I reread “Snow Crash, recently and recommend it. It gets better with age.

When people talk about “Snow Crash” today, all they talk about is the Metaverse. But there is a lot going on in that novel, and the Metaverse is only part of it.

I was pleasantly surprised to be reminded that the novel is satire. It’s funny. People talk so seriously about the book that I had forgotten. I laughed out loud at the payoff to the joke about the dog.

📷 Minnie and I hiked the Father Junipero Serra trail yesterday.

In his memo announcing the cuts Peretti took full responsibility, writing “I also want to be clear: I could have managed these changes better as the CEO of this company and our leadership team could have performed better…” which is why 180 other people will be getting fired instead of him. He’s learned so much, and going forward he’ll bring a new spirit of collaboration and humility to the AI garbage he replaces them with.

— Rusty Foster on the BuzzFeed News shutdown

California Isn’t Special: California’s housing problem isn’t what you think it is

Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic:

California’s housing policies are the same as everywhere in the US, but population pressure has made the housing situation here far worse.

In blue and red localities across the country, researchers find a “California-style” preference for single-family homes, hostility to density and renters, a tendency to segregate types of development (industrial, commercial, and residential), and a default toward delaying or blocking the construction of new homes, whether affordable or market-rate.

…

What has made California the worst in the country for housing is not uniquely bad policy but population growth running up against generically bad policy. If both San Francisco and a small, economically disadvantaged town in Mississippi enact a home-building moratorium, that’s going to hurt a lot more in the former, where millions of people want to live, than in the latter, where just a handful of people do.

Jobs and state population growth in California outstripped housing development. From 2010-20, the state permitted—not built, just permitted—one home for every 2.54 jobs it added. That leads the country; Utah permitted one home for every 1.57 jobs.

Legislation to legalize high-density housing is proving politically impossible in California, and elsewhere around the US too.

Terrible housing policy isn’t California’s legacy; it’s America’s.

I’d love to see a Star Trek miniseries focused on young James Kirk, in his first posting to a bridge crew.

I always preferred the TV series Kirk to the movie Kirk. In the series Kirk, follows the chain of command and obeys orders, even when he thinks the orders are stupid. Movie Kirk is a cowboy.

So let’s call the series “Ensign Kirk.” We know that Kirk in Starfleet Academy was a grind, so how does he transform from that to the swashbuckling youngest Captain of a Constitution-class starship in Starfleet history?

"Picard" seemed to be setting up a spinoff focused on Seven of Nine, and I'm there for that.

I love Jeri Ryan. And not just for the usual reasons men love her; she’s also an excellent character actor.

I’ve only ever seen her in a narrow range of roles, but she excels at that range. She plays beautiful, powerful middle-aged bitches. Sometimes she plays villains, sometimes—as in the case of Seven of Nine on Picard—tough heroes who don’t take shit or suffer fools.

Cox shut down Internet service for scheduled maintenance this morning, because apparently it’s 1983 and people don’t need Internet to work from home.

I am not feeling a lot of love for Cox right now.

I had no blue checkmark before having no blue checkmark was cool.

Instagram is letting users put up to five links in their profile and I guess that’s what counts for innovation at Meta. Also, Linktree had $1B+ valuation as of a year ago, and now that’s gone. I thought NFTs were a ridiculous investment but Linktree’s business seems even more ridiculous.

Ever since the dog snatched half of Julie’s Reuben sandwich from the kitchen counter on Sunday, I have been making jokes about the subject.

Like: The dog doesn’t want treats anymore; she wants more corned beef. Or: The dog asked us if we could swing by the deli and bring her back another sandwich.

Julie says she’s sick of these jokes, but I know she doesn’t mean it, so I will keep them coming.

I wonder whether the 12.9” iPad has a future.

Seems like almost anybody thinking about buying one of the big iPads would be better off with a MacBook Air.

For most people, the 12.9” iPad is an ungainly platypus, neither mammal nor bird.

The only people who seem like they’d want the 12.9” iPad would be graphic artists and other people who really, really need that big display and touchscreen and Pencil support.

The 12.9” iPad is too big and heavy to be as portable as the smaller iPads. You can’t hold that 12.9” iPad in your hands for long, unless you’re Andre the Giant. And iPad OS isn’t as versatile as MacOS.

I have an 11-inch iPad Air with a Folio keyboard that I use as a mini-laptop when I want something like that, and I have an iPad mini that I use every day for reading and social media.

Honestly, I’d probably be happier with a MacBook Air than with the iPad Air, but I can’t justify the expense of buying a new MacBook right now.

Truthfully, the iPad mini was a foolish purchase, as I already had the iPad Air. But, still, I’m glad I bought the mini, because it’s my primary iPad now.

Cory Doctorow has got me thinking about doing a better job structuring threads on Mastodon and Twitter.

Damn you, Cory, I don’t have time for this.

*shakes fist*

Ever since I was a little kid, I have thought men’s suits from the 1930s-50s looked great.

When I was a little kid, I watched old black-and-white reruns of Superman, Abbott & Costello, and particularly John Astin in The Addams Family, and thought to myself, damn, those guys looked sharp. Particularly the double-breasted suits.

Well, Lou Costello didn’t look sharp. But Bud Abbot? Sure. A good suit made even Abbott look good.

That feeling continues to this day.

We’ve been watching a few 1930s-50s movies, including the first couple of Thin Man movies (1930s), “My Man Godfrey” (1936), and just this weekend, “Executive Suite” (1954). And I think: Why don’t men dress like that anymore?

Why do we all go around dressed like hobos and toddlers?

And then a couple of days ago, I thought, you know, I could just buy a vintage suit.

I don’t know where I would wear it.

The dog would like me to go to the deli again today and pick up another sandwich. Less lean this time. Not too fatty, but a little more fatty than yesterday.

Julie put a lean corned beef Reuben sandwich on the kitchen counter and left the room for a minute. While she was out, the dog snatched the sandwich off the counter and ate half of it.

The dog has a death wish.

I did 14,000 steps yesterday, about 4,000 more than usual. Climbed Cowles Mountain, about 3.4 miles distance and 890 feet elevation. Then got home and walked the dog for a mile. My knees would like to discuss my choices.

Amazon Web Services sales and support teams are currently “spending much of their time helping customers optimize their AWS spend so they can better weather this uncertain economy,” says CEO Andy Jassy in an annual letter to shareholders.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/amazon_annual_shareholder_letter_aws/

AWS customers are “not cost-cutting as much as cost-optimizing so they can take their resources and apply them to emerging and inventive new customer experiences they’re planning,” Jassy said.

(This is pretty much what we’d expect Amazon to say. It may also be true.)

Amazon invested heavily in AWS during the 2007-8 economic downturn and saw that investment pay off. Jassy sees its “Kuiper” satellite broadband program as being at a similar stage today.

And AWS is putting greater focus on custom silicon.

Cats have no idea how arms work. They’ll park behind you or six feet away, and demand scritches. Cats think arms are 7-foot-long tentacles.

Anxious about the coming week? Cowles Mountain has a message for you.

I saw this sign while hiking today. That’s Lake Murray in the background.

In defense of Mastodon threads (and Twitter threads too):

Threading an essay requires the author to compose it in stanzas, each of which is a standalone, complete thought – and that means that readers can engage with each though separately, by replying to just that stanza.

For me, that stanza-by-stanza discussion – a kind of pro-fisking structural affordance – is the most interesting and powerful innovation of the social media thread. I

— Cory Doctorow, How To Make the Least-Worst Mastodon Threads.

Great insight—but too much work for me, as a general thing.

It’s been years since I hiked Cowles Mountain and I think it’s gotten taller.

Oh my knees.

Good hike though.

Elon Musk’s Free-Speech Charade Is Over

Musk’s “‘free-speech absolutism’ was mostly code for a high tolerance for bigotry toward particular groups, a smoke screen that obscured an obvious hostility toward any speech that threatened his ability to make money.”

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic:

Conservatives built an entire body of jurisprudence around the First Amendment’s protection of corporate speech when large corporations were reliably funding Republican causes and campaigns…. But once some corporate actors decided it was in their financial interests to make decisions that the GOP disliked, conservative lawyers then turned around and argued that speech was no longer protected if it was used for purposes they opposed.

…

For them, free speech is when they can say what they want, and when you can say what they want.

I shot this photo at Lake Murray using the pano setting on the iPhone. It came out a little wobbly.

We watched “Executive Suite” (1954). The powerful head of a nationwide furniture company drops dead on a Friday evening without naming a successor, and five vice presidents fight for the presidency over the next 24 hours. Features the highest high tech of its era: person-to-person calls, intercoms and telegrams. Pretty good movie.

Slouching is bad for your back, unless you’re in bed with a cat in your lap.

When Picard and his posse took their stations on the bridge, I expected them to land in their seats and go “oy” like a bunch of old Jews.

When Picard and his posse took their stations on the bridge, I expected them to land in their seats and go “oy” like a bunch of old Jews.

📷 Happy Friday and here are the ducks you asked for. I saw them at Lake Murray, and photographed them using the Moment tele lens for the iPhone.

I have done laundry without first running out of clean socks and underwear. I am going to put this on my LinkedIn profile.

Why am I still watching the Mandalorian? I am tired of Star Wars. I fall asleep watching every episode. I think I just answered my question.

“‘Hunger Games’ meets ‘Lord of the Flies’” among employees at Facebook’s parent company, Meta, as mass layoffs and absentee bosses create a morale crisis. “While Meta’s peers are chasing a wave of innovation in artificial intelligence, Mr. Zuckerberg has made a big bet on the metaverse,” which nobody wants—at least not in the form Zuck imagines it.

Also, while Zuckerberg is encouraging rank-and-file employees to return to the office, he’s on parental leave, and top executives have fled California for locations including Tel Aviv, London, and New York.

And:

The company is also cutting back on some of its lavish perks, once considered necessary to attract top talent. Last year, Meta ended its free laundry service for employees and pushed dinner service later into the evening — a way to cut down on workers’ loading up free food to take home….

One [employee was frustrated that there was no more cereal in the worker’s office….

— New York Times / Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac

News Is Not a Normal Mac App (Michael Tsai). I like Apple News as a service, but I dislike the app so much that I will probably cancel it. I can’t easily save articles to a read-it-later app, file them for future reference. or share them on social media.

I saw this car. I believe the owner may be an anime fan.

I worked at Google for -10 days

A Russian was hired at Google after a lengthy and onerous interview process. He took an English exam, mandatory tuberculosis tests, received a visa, quit his previous job, vacated his apartment in Yekaterinburg, packed, and got ready to move to London. But he was terminated ten days before he started work, following layoffs and a hiring freeze at Google.

As for what to do next, I am not entirely sure yet. I held a “garage sale” and sold most of my belongings. The remaining items were either discarded, recycled, or packed into two suitcases that I had planned to take with me. Moving to a new country is a difficult task that typically requires months of preparation. Changing these plans on the fly is challenging and somewhat painful. However, I feel that I should say something optimistic at the end. All will be good 🙂

Cory Doctorow reviews “Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream,” a book by Alissa Quart.

Quart addresses “the meritocratic delusion of the ‘self-made man,’ Doctorow says. He adds: “America is not a bootstrap-friendly land. If you have money in America, chances are very good you inherited it.”

… as Abigail Disney has described, in a rare glimpse behind the scenes of American oligarchs’ “family offices,” American wealth is now dynastic, perpetuating itself and growing thanks to a whole Versailles’ worth of courtiers: money managers, lawyers, and overpaid babysitters who can keep even the most Habsburg jawed nepobaby in turnip-sized million-dollar watches and performance automobiles and organ replacements for their whole, interminable lives:

<pluralistic.net/2021/06/1…>

But it’s not just that the America rich stay rich — it’s that the American poor stay poor. … If you change classes in America, chances are you’re a middle class person becoming poor, thanks to medical costs or another of the American debt-traps; or you’re a poor person who is becoming a homeless person thanks to America’s world-beating eviction mills:

<evictionlab.org>

As a factual matter, America just isn’t the land of bootstraps; it’s a land of hereditary aristocrats. Sustaining the American narrative of meritocracy requires a whole culture industry, novels and later movies that constitute a kind of state religion for Americans — and like all religious tales, the American faith tradition is riddled with gaps and contradictions.

Horatio Alger is remembered as the 19th century author of many stories about “street urchins” who raised themselves from poverty to wealth and power. In reality, “19th century American street kids overwhelmingly lived and died in stagnant, grinding poverty.” And Alger’s stories weren’t about self-made men; “the young boys befriend powerful, older men who use their power and wealth to lift those boys up.”

Also:

Alger was a pedophile who lost his position as a minister after raping adolescent boys.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” books “recounted her family’s ‘pioneer’ past as a triumph of self-reliance and gumption, glossing easily over the vast state subsidies that the Ingalls family relied on, from the military who stole Indigenous land, to the largesse that donated that stolen land to the Ingallses, to the farm subsidies that kept the Ingalls afloat.”

Wilder collaborated with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane,

… who used the Little House royalties to fight the New Deal, and, later, to create a school for oligarchs, the “Freedom School,” whose graduates include Charles and David Koch:

<www.politico.com/magazine/…>

All this mythmaking convinces the vast majority of Americans that if they’re struggling, that’s their problem, and they should not “seek redress through mass political movements and unions.” And the myth keep rich people from listening to their consciences.

Quart makes a case that American progress depends on breaking free of this myth, through co-operative movements, trade unions, mutual aid networks and small acts of person-to-person kindness. For her, the pandemic’s proof of our entwined destiny, at a cellular level, and its demonstration of whose work is truly “essential,” proves that our future is interdependent.

I very much like command palettes as an alternative to buttons, icons, menus, and other ways to control a computer.

But I regularly use two apps with command palettes—the Arc browser and Obsidian—and I also use Raycast, which is a system-wide command palette. That gets confusing.

Hannah Arendt on “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship:” Better to Suffer Than Collaborate (Open Culture).

Arendt identifies a third moral choice when living in an oppressive society: You can go along, which is evil. You can resist, which can get you dead. Or you can simply refuse to comply … which can also get you dead.

Also:

“It was precisely the members of respectable society,” Arendt writes, “who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values against another,” without reflecting on the morality of the entire new system.

If I lived in an evil society like Nazi Germany or the Confederacy, I like to think I would have the moral and physical courage to resist, or simply refused to comply. But that’s hard. Easier to just look the other way.

The American religion is “workism,” the belief that employment can provide everything we have historically expected from churches.

As the [20th Century] managerial revolution created a sense of professional progress, the decline of organized religion and social integration in the 20th century left many Americans bereft of any sense of spiritual progress. For some, work rose to fill the void. Many highly educated workers in the white-collar economy feel that their job cannot be ‘just a job’ and that their career cannot be “just a career”: Their job must be their calling.

…

Workism is not a simple evil or virtue; rather, it’s a complex phenomenon. It is rooted in the belief that work can provide everything we have historically expected from organized religion: community, meaning, self-actualization. And it is characterized by the irony that, in a time of declining trust in so many institutions, we expect more than ever from the companies that employ us—and that, in an age of declining community attachments, the workplace has, for many, become the last community standing. This might be why more companies today feel obligated to serve on the front lines in political debates and culture-war battles.

Remote work and AI are challenging the ascendancy of workism.

Perhaps the disappearance of the workplace will increase modern anomie and loneliness. If community means “where you keep showing up,” then, for many people, the office is all that’s left. What happens when it goes the way of bowling leagues and weekly church attendance?

— Derek Thompson, from an upcoming book.

Whoever said there’s more than one way to skin a cat is not someone I would want as a pet sitter.

Easter Sunday. Lake Murray was packed with picnickers.

It doesn’t look packed in this photo, but trust me, it was packed.

Is there any way I can subscribe to a Mastodon user’s RSS or Atom feed that includes boosts and media attachments? Is that supported on mastodon.social?

ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment scandal and named a real law professor as the accused. What happens when ChatGPT lies about real people?

Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus at The Washington Post:

One night last week, the law professor Jonathan Turley got a troubling email. As part of a research study, a fellow lawyer in California had asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT to generate a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone. Turley’s name was on the list.

The chatbot, created by OpenAI, said Turley had made sexually suggestive comments and attempted to touch a student while on a class trip to Alaska, citing a March 2018 article in The Washington Post as the source of the information. The problem: No such article existed. There had never been a class trip to Alaska. And Turley said he’d never been accused of harassing a student.

Was this week’s “Picard” the first time “Star Trek” dropped an F-bomb? Did they boldly go where they’d never gone before?

The gambler who beat roulette. For decades, casinos scoffed as mathematicians and physicists devised elaborate systems to take down the house. Then an unassuming Croatian’s winning strategy forever changed the game. (Bloomberg / Kit Chellel, with Vladimir Otasevic, Daryna Krasnolutska, Peter Laca and Misha Savic)

The poop emoji: a legal history (The Verge / Sara Jeong). Amusing story about a serious problem: Emoji are used in mainstream communications. Those communications are cited in lawsuits. Judges are often confused about what they mean; they’re now taking emoji classes. And legal databases can’t manage them.

‘Farce of Democracy’: Tennessee Republicans Just Expelled 2 Black Democrats for a Peaceful Protest. “Republicans voted to kick Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson out of the legislature, while a vote to oust Rep. Gloria Johnson failed by one vote.” … “Asked why she was not expelled along with the other two Democrats, Johnson told CNN: ‘I think it’s pretty clear. I’m a 60-year-old white woman, and they are two young black men.’”

Republicans are the party that supports free speech.

If It’s Advertised to You Online, You Probably Shouldn’t Buy It. Here’s Why.. Ads are serving us lousy, overpriced goods. (NYTimes / Julia Angwin).

Not covered in this article: Microtargeted ads are reportedly no more effective than contextual ads. So we’re giving up our privacy, advertisers are paying a premium, and the advertisers aren’t even making more money than they’d make if they just advertised their refrigerators against people searching Google for the word “refrigerator.”