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An indigenous tech group asked the Apache Foundation to change its name.

Brian Behlendorf, a co-creator of the popular web server, said in 2020 that he chose the name out of a romantic image of the Apache tribe having fought nobly against a conquering aggressor. The problem, says Natives in Tech is that there isn’t just one Apache tribe, there are eight. And they’re not extinct—they’re still around.

Notably, a stereotypical “pure, reverent, and simple” depiction (i.e., a “noble savage”) “distances Indigenous people from modern technology, the very thing the [Apache] foundation represents,” Natives in Tech writes.

We just started watching this show “Jellystone” with Kevin Costner and we’re still waiting for Yogi Bear to put in an appearance. Maybe in a later season?

A couple of weeks from now, I’m taking my first business trip since December, 2019. It’s more than 400 miles. Given the state of air travel lately, I believe I will walk.

WINDOWS: Your fingerprint couldn’t be recognized. Try again with a different finger.

ME: Yeah, sure, I’ll just dig around in my serial killer souvenir box and see if I have a spare.

Laid-Off Workers Are Flooded With Fake Job Offers.

“Virtual hiring and remote work have made it easier to swindle job seekers."

Here are scam warning signs, according to author Imani Moise at The New York Times:

  • Misspellings and others errors in recruitment sites.
  • Interviewers who won’t do video or even phone calls—they insist on text chat.
  • Employers who want you to pay upfront for computers and other equipment, and promise reimbursement.
  • Scam employers will ask for your bank account and social security numbers during the interview. The time to give out your bank account number is AFTER you’ve been hired, for direct deposit of your paycheck.

The Social Security number is a tricky one for me—I can maybe see legit reasons to ask that during the job interview process. Indeed, I can’t remember whether I’ve been asked that before being hired on any jobs I’ve had—maybe I have been, and gave it out.

Exit.

Libertarians such as Peter Thiel dream of escaping society, and they’re tearing society apart to do it.

Hari Kunzru at Harpers:

If freedom is to be found through an exit from politics, then it follows that the degradation of the political process in all its forms—the integrity of the voting system, standards in public life, trust in institutions, the peaceful transfer of power—is a worthy project. If Thiel, the elite Stanford technocrat, is funding disruptive populists in American elections, it’s not necessarily because he believes in the wisdom of their policy prescriptions. They are the tribunes of the “unthinking demos.” If the masses want their Jesus and a few intellectuals to string up, it’s no skin off Charles Koch’s nose. Populism is useful to elite libertarians because applying centrifugal force to the political system creates exit opportunities. But for whom?

…

Fueled by the pandemic and the crypto boom, such exit schemes have multiplied. Bitcoiners look for an escape from financial oversight and transhumanists look to escape their bodies, while rich preppers design personal lifeboats to escape from social collapse. Some exit evangelists, such as the investor Balaji S. Srinivasan, are still touting the project of a new nation of “cloud first, land last.” Others are just making sure that in the great supermarket sweep of life, they get to fill their shopping carts before their neighbors do.

A lot of rain today here in San Diego. Flooding hundreds of miles north of us in Santa Cruz and south to Santa Barbara.

Montecito, a community in Santa Barbara about 200 miles north of us, was evacuated.

No significant damage here so far, but a lot of rain.

The learned helplessness of Pete Buttigieg [Cory Doctorow]

Obama and Trump were patsies for the airlines, Biden is worse. Holiday snafus involving Southwest and other airlines are just the latest example of a dysfunctional industry and regulators.

Buttigieg is the Secretary of a powerful administrative agency, and as such, he has broad powers. Neither he nor his predecessors have had the courage to wield that power, all of them evincing a kind of learned helplessness in the face of industry lobbying.

Contrast Buttigieg’s Transportation Department with the muscular FTC under Lina Khan, who knows the law and uses it for the American people.

Why The American Radical Right Is Powerful And The American Left Is Meaningless.

Ian Welsh:

You have power in electoral politics when you can deliver or deny votes and money and get people elected or un-elected. That’s the bottom line.

Also:

[The radical right] have power because they have solidarity and they expect and get results from their representatives. The American left refuses to use power when it has it, and its members just want performative leftism from the likes of AOC. They don’t want or expect results and they display little solidarity, and that why for over 50 years the left in the US (and the UK) has staggered from defeat to defeat.

I don’t know how Welsh feels about the phrase “virtue signaling,” but it comes to mind here.

On the cutting edge of insurrectionist terrorism

Brazil riots weren’t a repeat of Jan. 6. They were an escalation, says Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day.

Broderick, an American who usually writes about internet culture, lives part of the year in Brazil.

Broderick:

Trump supporters dream of bringing America back to a vague fictitious past, some combination of the Reaganite 80s and a 1950s America that only existed in magazine ads. Bolsominions are much more specific. They want to bring back a military dictatorship and they’re not afraid to say it.

Also:

It feels like America is actually the country least prepared for the existential fight against authoritarianism that lies ahead.

For instance, Brazil’s current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or “Lula,” reacted quite differently yesterday than the US government did two years ago. Lula declared that the rioters were terrorists and triggered a state of emergency and arrested over 1,000 of them immediately. I told a few Brazilian friends this morning that we let our insurrectionists go home afterwards and they looked at me like I had just grown a second head.

We watched “The Thin Man” Saturday night. Second time for me, but I had nearly forgotten it. It was delightful.

I think I’m only going to watch movies made in the 1930s from now on.

Advantage to working from home: When you’re completely stuck creatively, you can clean the massive amount of dog shit that you got on your favorite casual shoes.

Disadvantage to working from home: If you work in a proper office building, you’re not as likely to get massive amounts of dog shit on your favorite casual shoes.

I used a stiff brush, a worn-out toothbrush, and a thin stick. Wet down the brush with warm water, scrub with dish soap, put on the shoes and walk around in the grass for a bit, then take off the shoes and repeat. Use the toothbrush and thin stick to dig in the treads. It’s not magic; it takes a while.

According to the Internet, WD-40 works instead of dish soap, but we don’t know where the WD-40 is.

Important note: When doing the “walking around in the grass” part, don’t step in more dog shit!

Insomnia is not so bad if you have something to do to pass the time. When I have trouble sleeping, I like to imagine every possible awful thing that might happen to me or Julie.

Things I saw while walking the dog 📸

This yard decoration. Clever and patriotic!

These pretty, painted rocks

This house with a cozy looking sitting area on the roof.

This school. “Geckos” does not seem like an inspiring team name.

This nice garden.

This Lambo parked in front of a house. It doesn’t look like the kind of house that would have a Lambo in front.

These cars. WTF do these bumper stickers mean?

This tree.

These cars. Two different cars, not parked close together. I wonder whether the owners are friends.

Dead Santa hanging from the house with the “itty bitty titty committee” sign in front.

This flag. I thought it said “one nation under Gog.” Who’s “Gog?” I said.

Why the [expletive] can’t we travel back in time? [Ars Technica/Paul Sutter]

No known law of physics forbids time travel to the past.

Either time travel to the past is possible, or there’s some fundamental, basic physics we still don’t understand.

Either possibility is exciting.

“It’s obvious that the Universe is telling us something important… we just don’t know what it’s saying.”

I saw this dog at Lake Murray. He would like to say hello, and for you to admire his eyebrow.

Coolio talked about ancient aliens, and making big investments in the metaverse and crypto, in an impromptu podcast interview before his death. [Billboard/Gil Kaufman]

The Coolio interview was bonkers—and poignant. The rapper said he expected he’d be long dead before climate change became a concern. Then he died a month later.

I expect climate change to be a concern long before I’m dead, and I’m only a year older than Coolio. It’s already a concern.

I’ve googled for more about the hidden continent occult belief that Coolio discusses. I haven’t found anything.

The podcast series, Crypto Island, was excellent. Sadly for the host/creator, PJ Vogt, most of the work on the series seems to have been done before the FTX debacle, so series is now obsolete.

The holiday break is over. It’s time to get back to work.

Apparently you can re-use 2017 calendars this year, which is funny to me because I have a 2017 calendar hanging up on the wall next to my bed. I stopped turning pages April of that year, and it’s been April, 2017 in the vicinity of my bed ever since.

I saw this SUV while walking the dog. I feel better knowing we’re protected.

My car keys got hidden in a fold in the pocket of my rain jacket after I was done walking the dog this afternoon. I spent 15 minutes looking for them—on the ground, peering into the car window to see if I’d locked them in, patting my pockets over and over.

It was past dusk, so I was losing the light fast. I didn’t have a proper flashlight, just my phone. And it was raining. And I still had the dog with me, of course.

Also, as a middle aged man, I can’t go more than two hours without peeing, and I was past my limit.

And that’s Jan. 1. The year is going to get better, right?

I saw this house flying a Starfleet flag. I was tempted to ring the doorbell to express my approval.

While walking the dog, I saw this tasteful Christmas decoration.

By the time New Year’s comes around, I have holiday exhaustion. New Year’s needs to be in March. Not a lot of holidays between January and May.

The exiled chief rabbi of Moscow says Jews should get out while they can. [The Guardian/Stephen Burgen]

Pinchas Goldschmidt says that, historically in Russia and the USSR, when things go bad, the government scapegoats Jews.

Jews have been fleeing Russia for a century. In 1926, there were 2.7 million Jews in the USSR, 59% of whom were in Ukraine. “Today only about 165,000 Jews remain in the Russian Federation out of a total population of 145 million.”

My own grandparents bugged out of Eastern Europe around 1900. Poland on my father’s side, Lithuania on my mother’s.

Also:

Ukraine has a long history of antisemitism from pogroms at the end of the 19th century to facilitating Nazi massacres during the second world war. The most notorious of these was the murder of 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar in Kyiv in 1941.

Given this history, Goldschmidt said it was remarkable that Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who made no secret of his Jewishness, was elected Ukraine’s president with more 70% of the vote.

That fact made a nonsense of Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukraine was being governed by neo-Nazis, the rabbi said. “Show me another country that is in the grip of Nazis where the Jewish community is thriving.

“However, I don’t know how Jewish the president [Zelenskiy] feels. He plays the Jewish card to ask Israel for help.”

I imagine Zelensky’s Jewishness is much the same as my own. I am not observant, nor do I have a religious preference in my associations. But am I Jewish? Hell, yeah.

Goldschmidt also noted that while Russia’s Jews faced an uncertain future, antisemitism was on the rise in what had long been seen as a Jewish sanctuary, the US.

In 2018, a gunman killed 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Last year the Anti-Defamation League recorded a record 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the US, ranging from assault and harassment to vandalism.

“For many years, Jews in the US believed that it was an exception, that whatever happened in Europe and other countries could never happen there,” Goldschmidt said. “But over the past three years there have been more attacks on Jews there than in Europe.

I have not been alarmed by the rise of anti-Semitism in the US. It still seems like a lunatic fringe. But perhaps I should be alarmed.

Sign on the restroom door at Shakespeare Pub & Grille, San Diego, where we had Christmas dinner.

Musk’s Twitter cuts include a data center, janitors, and toilet paper [NYTimes/Kate Conger, Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac]

With people packed into more confined spaces, the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors, according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty, these people said. And because janitorial services have largely been ended, some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home.

Cal Newport: On Quiet Quitting.

“Every generation reaches a point where they begin to think more critically about what role, exactly, work should play in their life.”

I’m still working on that. I’ve always been a late bloomer.

Ian Welsh: How To Relax, Change & Be Free.

“… everyone is acting according to conditioning: religious, social, family, school, philosophical, etc… They’re in chains, and they regard those chains as themselves.”

This seems like a black-funny story until you read the charges against Tate. He”s not just your average MRA grifter. He seems like a monster and predator who should never breathe free air again.

Andrew Tate Arrested for Human Trafficking in Romania After Pizza Box Gave Away His Location. [Laura Bassett/Jezebel] “A video the men’s rights activist tweeted in response to Greta Thunberg’s burn about his small dick energy reportedly led authorities right to him.”

Religious upbringing is great for kids, even for those of us who find ourselves nonbelievers, agnostics, or atheists. It helps a person figure out the world and cosmos and their place in it.

Do you set aside time every day to unplug?

Yesterday I read this post by Craig Mod about how he spends a big part of his day just walking around, unplugged, not connected to the Internet or listening to anything on earphones.

The Sorta Kinda Life Changing Bliss of Walking Solo

It made me think about how I seem to be looking at screens or listening to podcasts almost all the time1, and how maybe it would be better if I just … not.

In particular, I thought about how lately I’m listening to many podcasts out of habit, rather than real interest.

So I set aside a half-hour of my walk yesterday to just … walk. I took the AirPods out of my ears and listened to nothing but ambient sound and my own thoughts.

Do you set aside time in your day to unplug?

Or does your life naturally encourage unplugging? I imagine if you’re working with your hands in an activity requiring thought, you can’t be listening to audiobooks at the time.

  1. Phrased that way, it seems shocking. ↩︎

Crypto craziness craps out — and about time too. By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (@sjvn@mastodon.social) at The Register.

At a recent fintech open source fintech conference, crypto was only mentioned in passing. “People would talk about it in the same way you’d talk about your little brother’s latest embarrassing TikTok video.”

From where I sit, this is the slow but sure fall of what has always been one gigantic Ponzi scheme. There has never – never – been any real value in crypto. Yes, I know all the arguments about how fiat currencies have no intrinsic value either. You know what, though? If I go to the grocer, I can buy milk, bread, and butter with my fiat dollars or pounds. Dogecoin? Garlicoin? Trump NFT trading cards? I don’t think so.

…

At least with famous financial scams of the past, such as the Dutch Tulip Bubble and the 2008 real estate crash, you had tulip bulbs and houses for your money when all was said and done. With crypto, you’ll be left with nothing at all except meaningless, pointless, valueless blockchains.

I’ve been saying that bit about the tulip bubble for years. At least you had tulips.

The Sorta Kinda Life Changing Bliss of Walking Solo. By Craig Mod @craigmod@mastodon.social

Folks seem scared of solitude but solitude is a superpower when used well. Alone, in your basement, it breeds anomie, but out in the world, moving through the world, step after step, clear goal in mind, I’d argue that a solo walk during which you are engaged — paying attention, with your phone turned off, no headphones, no podcasts, no escape routes — is the quickest way to elevate a human. Basement solitude — isolated without serendipity, static, stagnant, stuck with your face in a screen, manipulated by the algorithms — is the death of the soul. The solo walk outdoors, in the air, beneath the sun, the rain, the snow, bumping into drunken horse betters, kind gardeners, farmers covered in blood, women beating mattresses at dusk, tractor trailer drivers leaning against their cabs for a smoke, is the opposite, the antipode, the physical palinode to basement solitude and the death of the mind and body.

I walk the dog more than three miles nearly every day, and that counts as walking alone. But I’m almost always listening to podcasts.

I sorta kinda remember who the author, Craig Mod, is—I think he’s a travel writer, currently living in Japan, and from this essay I gather his daily walks are part of his work. He seems to photograph and video the things and people he sees, and interviews the people, publishes the results on the web, some by subscription only, and sells it in books. Very different from my life (though it sounds appealing). He walks 12-45 km per day (that’s about 7.5-30 miles), carrying 12 kilos of photo and video equipment (26 pounds.

The walk, he says, is his work platform, the way the computer and Internet are mine.

Dogs start the day with a spoonful of Alpo or some other canned meat on top of a heap of patented, vitaminized kibble. In no time the meal is gobbled down and the dish licked clean and, like as not, poked noisily about the kitchen like a hockey puck, amid waggings. But I can recall another era, when every dog took a quick first look into his dish, to see what was in there. It was different each morning, but might contain a last chunk of pot roast or ham hock, plus gravy, from the previous night’s dinner table, a scraping of scrambled eggs, a slice or two of stale bread, leftover lima beans or spinach, a fresh but limp carrot, a splash of milk, and a half-bitten doughnut. It went down just as fast and probably did no harm, but what I’m getting at here is the old phrase “a dog’s breakfast,” because that’s what this book is. A mélange, a grab bag, a plate of hors d’oeuvres, a teenager’s closet, a bit of everything. A dog’s breakfast.

– Roger Angell, “This Old Man: All in Pieces.”

That’s what this blog is. A dog’s breakfast.

Texas Cop Sentenced To More Than 11 Years In Jail For Killing A Woman During A Welfare Check. By Tim Cushing at Techdirt.

Atatiana Jefferson was lawfully hanging around in her Texas home when she heard a prowler outside at 2 am, so she retrieved her lawfully owned gun to investigate. The prowler was police officer Aaron Dean, who was called on a welfare check after neighbors reported Jefferson’s front door was open and light was on at that unusual hour of the night. In the confusion that followed, Dean failed to identify himself as a police officer, and shot and killed Jefferson.

Dean made so many awful decisions in just a few minutes, as did the police department, which defended Dean as reacting to a “perceived threat”—that threat being Jefferson, who in reality was just being in her own home, babysitting her 8-year-old nephew, violating no law.

Amazon begins drone deliveries in California and Texas.

Residents of two towns, one in each state, can sign for drone delivery.

“The drone will fly to the designated delivery location, descend to the customer’s backyard, and hover at a safe height,” Amazon said. “It will then safely release the package and rise back up to altitude.”

Southwest’s super-efficiency is destroying it

Seems like the super-efficiency that made Southwest a great airline in good conditions is making it a nightmare now. Super-efficient businesses have no slack in emergencies.

Daring Fireball: Southwest Airlines Has Fallen Apart

We saw that with some household supplies in 2020. And we’re still seeing it in healthcare today. Our healthcare system was designed to serve the healthier population of 2019 (and it served even them poorly, while increasing wealth for shareholders). US healthcare has been operating in emergency gear for almost three years now.

We saw this sobering sign and candle at the vet a few days ago.

The simple sign, with a rainbow symbol, is next to a candle. The sign reads, “If this candle is lit, someone is saying goodbye to their beloved pet. We ask that you speak softly and with respect during this difficult time. Thank you.”

If you’re seeing this on Mastodon, I suggest you follow me at @mitchw@mastodon.social. If you think you’re already following me there, you’re actually probably not. I apologize for the inconvenience. Here’s an explanation.

A couple of days ago, I migrated all my followers on @mitchw@mastodon.social to @MitchW@mitchw.blog. “It’ll be great!” I said to myself. “Finally, I won’t have to cut-and-paste to multiple social media platforms to participate in all of them! Write once, read anywhere! Yippee!1”

Here’s what I soon learned:

  1. While micro.blog is an excellent blogging and micro.blogging service, with an outstanding management team, it’s not a great Mastodon experience. Three main reasons for that:

A. Formatting: When viewed on Mastodon, micro.blog truncates posts at 280 characters, rather than Mastodon’s standard 500. Also, micro.blog strips paragraph breaks from posts sent to Mastodon.

B. micro.blog doesn’t support boosts.

  1. Once you’ve migrated followers from Mastodon to micro.blog, there’s no automatic way to send them back.

  2. Once you’ve migrated followers from a mastodon account, that account is deactivated. I had a vague idea that I’d continue using my Mastodon account to read, boost, and reply, but that won’t work.

I expect 1.A will be corrected soon—management is On It, fixing formatting problems. Until then, I expect I’ll just manually cut-and-paste posts to micro.blog and Mastodon. Once the formatting problems are fixed, I’ll see if I can reactivate micro.blog’s otherwise excellent tool for automatically cross-posting to Mastodon.

However, I expect 1.B will never change. Boosts are antithetical to micro.blog culture. I’m ok with that.

In the long run, I’d like to see better integration between Mastodon and other services, to help folks like me maintain a presence in two or more places at once. I don’t have a clear vision of what that would look like. Maybe a micro.blog Mastodon instance that somehow syncs with micro.blog itself?

  1. I did not actually say “Yippee!” ↩︎

When Britain abolished slavery, slaveowners received compensation. But what about the enslaved people themselves? Did they get any financial reparations for the terrible crime committed against them by the slaveowners and society?

7 Reasons Why Britain Abolished Slavery. By Luke Tomes at historyhit.

The Central African Republic, one of the world’s poorest countries, became one of only two nations in the world to adopt Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency. Eight months later, almost nothing has changed.

Crypto was an alternative to the CFA franc, which gives France effective control of the economies of more than 180 million people in its former colonies.

Critics say the Bitcoin transition was a gimmick to hype up interest in CAR’s own cryptocurrency, which failed.

One of the World’s Poorest Countries Put Its Faith in Crypto – Why?. By Ben Hunte at Vice World News.

My favorite part of George Santos’ self-defense is where he says he never claimed to be Jewish, he just said he was “Jew-ish.” Oy.

“Karens for Hire”—slogan, “We Karen so you don’t have to”—promises “to harness the power of accomplished complainers in the service of beaten-down customers, abused tenants and anyone else with a dispute that outstripped their own capacity to carp.”

Cutting through customer service doom-loops by calling in a ‘Karen’

Steve Hendrix writes this for The Washington Post as a lighthearted story about a plucky startup seeing a problem and fixing it. Doing well by doing good. American entrepreneurial spirit at its finest.

But this is also a story about American society being fundamentally broken.

The Real History Behind ‘The Woman King’ | The Agojie Warriors of Dahomey. By Meilan Solly at Smithsonian Magazine.

The movie’s depiction of the Agojie army of elite women warriors is true-to-life. But Dahomey in real life was a brutal, imperial autocracy and enthusiastic supporter of slavery and the slave trade.

We liked the movie—much better than “Black Panther,” which I thought had too much superhero folderol. “The Woman King” was about 30-45 minutes too long, but most movies today are.

A secularised Jewish American thinks about celebrating Christmas. As a secularized Jewish American, I relate.

Ben Werdmuller: Christmas, the eighth night, and me.

I’ve had essentially no personal encounters with anti-Semitism in my own life—that I’m aware of.

Matt Stoller: Private Equity Gave Your Bank Password to Hackers

Francisco Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital Corp own LastPass. They raised prices, and then fumbled security. You had one job guys!

…

At this point, it’s time to recognize that ownership and management of software firms by private equity is itself a security risk.

We watched the first episode of the first season of “Yellowstone.” We liked it. It’s like “Succession.”

There should be a Yellowstone/Succession crossover.

And it should have Doctor Who, too. Because everything is better with the Doctor.

I migrated my mastodon account to micro.blog but decided I don’t like micro.blog as a mastodon client because micro.blog doesn’t show boosts and I like seeing boosts. So I figured fine I’ll just use my mastodon account to read, and continue posting to micro.blog. But then I found that when you migrate a mastodon account the old account is disabled. So I re-enabled it and now I’ll just go back to what I was doing before and syndicate my micro.blog posts to mastodon.

Except now all my old mastodon followers are following me on micro.blog, which is what I wanted but maybe not what they want? But what’s done is done.

For my next trick, I will saw a person in half. Can I get a volunteer from the audience?

While walking, the dog and I saw this tree. This is Christmas in a subtropical, semi-arid area.

From my journal, this day in 2013:

We still haven’t seen the two female cats we had that since we uncrated them yesterday, other than Julie seeing the shadow of ears when she looked under the bed. But during the night I heard meowing and felt little feet walking on me in bed. I assume that was the cats;Julie has never gone in for that kind of thing before.

We still have the cats. They are fully visible now.

I just migrated my mastodon.social account to micro.blog—which had the side effect of deactivating my mastodon.social account. I’m not sure I like that.

All of this is experimentation. The fediverse is in early days. We’re still figuring it out, collectively and individually.

I don’t think I am the target audience for Andor. Unless you’re supposed to fall asleep halfway through the fourth episode and then your wife wakes you up to let you know the credits are on and it’s time to turn off the TV. If that’s what Andor was going for, they nailed it.

A house down the street has a Santa hologram in the living room window, which I’ve never seen anywhere before. Either that or a creepy guy in a very realistic Santa costume.

Who are the most influential and important people in history?

Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Genghis Khan, Augustus Caesar, and Napoleon are 1-6, in that order.

Who else is in the top 12?

People who wear short pants and long sleeve, heavy sweatshirts in chilly weather are monsters.