Mitch's Blog
Minnie found a steak-bone on our walk the other day, and I let her carry it home and work on it in the backyard for a while. “What could go wrong?” I thought. It made her so happy.
She sleeps in my office at night, separated from the rest of the house so she doesn’t terrorize the cats. Putting her to bed is the last thing I do before I go to bed myself, and letting her out is the first thing I do when I wake up.
The next morning, when I went into my office to let Minnie out, I found the answer to the question, “What could go wrong?”
Fortunately, she got it all on the mat in front of my desk – bless her! Easy clean-up. And she was SO happy and friendly and affectionate and excited to be let out of my office. I suspect she was partly trying to distract me to keep me from getting angry – not that I would have – and partly she was just relieved, happy, and excited to be out of my office and away from that awful mess.
I left my office windows open the rest of the morning, to air it out. It was some of Minnie’s best work, there.
Bernie has done fine this far appealing to a radical, burn-it-down revolutionary base. But now he needs to appeal to ALL Democrats or he’ll lose the nomination.
And he’ll have to switch gears again if he gets the nomination, to appeal to that additional fraction of Americans who see him as being just as bad as Trump.
The right to repair is the right to resilience
It’s no coincidence that farms and farmers have been leaders in Right to Repair: when you’re isolated and you’re not allowed to fix your stuff, it means that you can neither nip down to the shops for a replacement, nor easily have an authorized repair tech come to your place.
Covid can put everyone – even entire nations – into the position of that isolated farmer.
And if Covid turns out to be a fizzle – and let’s pray that it is on a global scale, although it’s already awful for the people effected – it’ll be something else. Natural and man-made disasters are inevitable, and they will require us to make repairs locally, not wait for authorization from a big corporation.
Cory Doctorow on "Right to Repair" and more
Cory Doctorow talks about how big business and government have taken away your right to repair property you own, how Facebook and other monopolies can be broken up by requiring them by law to interoperate with other services, and other issues related to monopoly control and trustbusting.
INTERVIEW WITH THE FIREWALLS DON’T STOP DRAGONS PODCAST
Cory and other digital rights advocates can often get branded as socialists. And yet your right to do what you want with your own property is the most fundamental right there is in a capitalist/market economy. The Revolutionary War was literally fought to protect property rights.
But we’ve reached a state where Apple, Amazon and Microsoft can sell you music, then arbitrarily decide to delete it from your computer or phone at some point maybe years in the future. This is a thing that has actually happened, more than once.
And more seriously, farmers are literally denied the legal right to modify or repair their own equipment, jeopardizing our food supply.
Ezra Klein: Sanders can’t lead the Democrats if his campaign treats them like the enemy www.vox.com/2020/3/4/…
Coronavirus Porn Is Going Viral on Pornhub
8-year-old boy wins $200 worth of cannabis products at hockey tournament
Trump blasts Sessions on Twitter, inadvertently confirming key Mueller finding
Trump publicly admits to obstruction of justice. Again.
AT&T is looking to cut billions of dollars in spending, starting with “headcount rationalization” (apparently the new bureaucratese for “sorry you don’t have a job anymore”) and “benefit restructuring” (hope you don’t have to go to a doctor!)
Sisters Margaux and Mariel Hemingway struggled with the family history of depression, substance abuse and suicide
Their grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, killed himself, as did Margaux and six other members of the family. Mariel Hemingway survived and became a mental health advocate.
Americans only started calling our country "America" around the turn of the 20th Century. Previously, we called ourselves the "Union," "Republic," and even "Columbia" and Freedonia.
The transition to “America” came about the time the US became a bloody, brutal global empire, committing genocide in the Philippines and conquering Puerto Rico and Hawaii.
Cisco WebEx, Google and other companies are offering free videoconferencing to help restrict coronavirus (and encourage people to subscribe and pay when the emergency is over!)
Republican Darrell Issa moves on to face Democrat opponent Ammar Campa-Najjar in the November election for CA-50
Issa’s primary campaign against Republican Carl DeMaio was dirty. The campaign against Campa-Najjar is going to be dirtier.
ICE's New York office uses a rigged algorithm to keep virtually all arrestees in detention. The ACLU says it's unconstitutional
“… this ostensible problem-solving software was rigged to provide only one solution: detention,” writes Sam Biddle at The Intercept.
According to a lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Bronx Defenders:
While waiting for those hearings, those detained suffer under harsh conditions of confinement akin to criminal incarceration. While incarcerated, they are separated from families, friends, and communities, and they risk losing their children, their jobs, and their homes. Because of inadequate medical care and conditions in the jails, unmet medical and mental-health needs often lead to serious and at times irreversible consequences.
Via Cory pluralistic.net
Why America is so vulnerable to coronavirus
Ryan Cooper:
America’s atrociously inadequate welfare state makes it by far the most vulnerable rich country to a viral pandemic, and the vicious, right-wing ideology of the Republican Party has wrecked the government’s ability to manage crises of any kind….
Indeed, U.S. health care is not only by far the worst system among rich countries, it is much worse than that of many middle-income or poorer countries when it comes to confronting a fast-moving epidemic.
The US has no national healthcare system for testing and treatment. Working people with symptoms like a cold (which is how the virus presents) can’t afford to go to the doctor. And the coup de grace is there’s no national policy mandating paid sick time off, which means infected workers in food service, retail, and personal healthcare have financial incentive to go out there and infect the public.
In healthcare policy, as with gun control and education, American Republicans are convinced of the impossibility of policies that work in every developed country in the world, and many undeveloped ones. The point of Sanders' comments about Cuba is not that Cuba is awesome, but rather that even Cuba, with its broken, awful, government, manages to get healthcare and education right.
Via Cory pluralistic.net
Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet
It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web.
Wonderful article.
American taxpayers have paid $152 million for Trump to play golf, making him the 10th highest paid American athlete.
We have watched two episodes of the second season of “Altered Carbon.” We are almost enjoying it. Does it get better?
I just remembered Joe Biden is fine
“Please don’t show me any footage of Joe Biden saying or doing things.”
A Fantastic Night . . . If You Don’t Like Bloomberg, Warren, or Sanders
AP: Bloomberg is thinking about dropping out after a disappointing Super Tuesday showing.
Inside the race to build the best quantum computer on Earth
Google and IBM are dueling to commercialize a new generation of computing technology, quantum computing. While Google is working on a breakthrough to achieve “quantum supremacy,” IBM is dismissive of that approach, working on evolutionary development with a steady stream of commercial applications from the outset.
Gideon Lichfield goes in depth at MIT Technology Review, along with explaining the principles of quantum computing and differences between the two approaches. Based on Lichfield’s article, Google is ahead but IBM looks ready for a marathon:
Regardless of whether you agree with Google’s position or IBM’s, the next goal is clear… to build a quantum computer that can do something useful. The hope is that such machines could one day solve problems that require unfeasible amounts of brute-force computing power now, like modeling complex molecules to help discover new drugs and materials, or optimizing city traffic flows in real time to reduce congestion, or making longer-term weather predictions. (Eventually they might be capable of cracking the cryptographic codes used today to secure communications and financial transactions, though by then most of the world will probably have adopted quantum-resistant cryptography.) The trouble is that it’s nearly impossible to predict what the first useful task will be, or how big a computer will be needed to perform it. …
As for quantum supremacy itself, it will be an important moment in history, but that doesn’t mean it will be a decisive one. After all, everyone knows about the Wright brothers’ first flight, but can anybody remember what they did afterwards?
I tried to go 24 hours without touching my face. I made it 18 minutes
Nestor Ramos at the Boston Globe:
Surely I could give up wiping my mouth, rubbing my eyes, and scratching my nose, too. How hard could it be? I’m not a 4-year-old licking the buttons in the elevator; I’m a grown man in control of my various scratching and rubbing functions.
Wonderful article. While I read it I became aware I was scratching my nose.
China is using Uighur slave labor camps for manufacturing for US brands including Nike, Apple and Dell.
Miss Staten Island banned from St. Pat’s parade after coming out as bi — still shows up
Jeff Huang: My productivity app is a single .txt file
One file to track to-dos and have-dones.
Aaron Sorkin on his new play based on “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The West Wing,” “Studio 60,” and how he’d write the 2020 Democratic primary.
How Facebook has become one of the least trusted and most profitable companies in the world.
Tech journalist Steven Levy, talks about the company’s history on Fresh Air. He’s got a new book out, “Facebook: The Inside Story,” based on interviews with Zuckerberg, other top current and former Facebook execs – some of whom share their misgivings about the company – and Facebook critics.
I’m hooked on Facebook, yet I have strong misgivings about it. Living in the world requires compromising principles, and some of those compromises are appalling. And yet every day I wonder whether using Facebook is a compromise too far.
Herod Agrippa is the Lando Calrissian of “I, Claudius.”
On the I, Podius podcast: maximumfun.org/episodes/…
Super Tuesday, Explained: I listened to this entire podcast episode and I’m still confused. Short version: Lots of states have their Democratic primaries today so it’s a really big deal.
The true story behind "You've Got Mail:" The movie was based on a real conflict between a New York Barnes & Noble and a local children's bookstore.
At that time, B&N was the big bad soul-crushing superstore chain killing indy Mom-and-Pop bookstores.
Later, Amazon beat down Barnes & Noble. Yes, the same technology that brought the characters of “You’ve Got Mail” together flattened B&N.
On the Decoder Ring podcast: slate.com/transcrip…
The reality is even more complicated than Decoder Ring portrays. B&N and Borders brought books by the tens of thousands to places that were previously bookstore deserts. Pre-B&N, if you grew up in the suburbs, as I did, or in rural America, your bookstore options were a few sad B. Dalton and Waldenbooks in malls, and that’s it, unless you shlepped into a major metropolitan area.
As a teen and into my 20s, I used to love to go to the mall to browse the four shelves of science fiction and fantasy books at the local bookstores. The B&N SF/F section was bigger than the entire previous bookstore.
And a number of factors, not just the Internet, contribute to retail decline: Retail space was overextended, retail chains engaged in fancy financial hijinks. And consumers just don’t view shopping as a recreational activity as much as they used to.
Today I voted, and spent a good chunk of time updating the local Democratic Club website and social media. Also did some publicity for the next meeting, which is Wednesday. Details here:
www.lamesafoothillsdemocraticclub.org/post/meet…
I highly recommend volunteering for politics – local politics – as an alternative to arguing about it, on social media or elsewhere. Arguing politics makes you bitter. Volunteering is far more productive – and it’s fun.
Cory Doctorow’s got a new blog. It’s Pluralistic.net.
It’s his usual mix of cyber-rights, science fiction and retro pop culture. Interestingly, he’s doing it as a daily digest rather than a series of individual posts. I like it.
The design is minimalist. No HTML, not even hrefs. I’m trying out the no-hrefs look here to see how I like it.
Cory and Dave Winer are my blogfathers; when I’m fiddling with an idea, it’s often because I saw one of them do it. Mike Elgan and Jon Gruber are former blogfathers. I’m still fans of both, but their blogging direction is different from mine now.
I don’t have plans to adopt a daily digest format. It doesn’t fit my blogging habits, which are random minutes throughout the day.
Cory’s tagline for Pluralistic.net: “Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don’t collect or retain any data at all ever period.”
Pluralistic.net is both a blog and a newsletter. Subscribe here.
Newsletters are making a comeback.
I have a newsletter too. I have had it for six years. It’s a daily digest of everything I post here. Subscribe here:
“Flarn” is a great domain name.
Everybody agrees that social media needs to suppress harmful content while promoting good content, but nobody can agree on what falls into which category. Many people are not acting in good faith, and will knowingly claim that bad content which should be suppressed is actually good.
None of this seems particularly insightful to me, but public policy discussions about social media tend to assume that there is some good faith arbiter somewhere who can absolutely separate good from evil.
That’s one of the reasons why the big social media platforms need to be broken up to eliminate their monopoly powers. Because that kind of power should not be centralized. This is a very old, solved problem; it’s why we have free speech.
What Happened to the Company That Raised Minimum Wage to $70k/yr?
Business is better than ever.
But will the carriers just look at this as a slap on the wrist?
Yesterday I did my 3+-mile walk with the dog through a residential neighborhood up at the end of Lake Murray Blvd. No access to bathrooms. After I’d gone about 1/10 of a mile, I thought, “I think I may need to pee now.”
Later, I grew more certain. It was like the end of the Titanic by the time I got home. You may have even heard me exclaim “AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!”
We did pass a port-a-potty somebody had out at the curb while they were remodeling. I got in. Minnie refused to get in with me. And the port-a-potty was wobbling. “This will not end well,” I said to myself, so I did not use it.
Also, it started to rain heavily when we were about halfway out. I did not bring my raingear because rain was not predicted for several hours after that.
Radio station ad via
California Legislature’s Battle Over ‘Gig Economy’ Shows No Sign of Ending
AB5 was intended to stop companies like Uber and Lyft from misclassifying employees as contract workers, depriving them of legally mandated benefits. Instead, it’s misclassifying legitimate contractors as employees, and depriving large numbers of people of their livelihood.
The unions and the author of the bill, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, a San Diego Democrat, gave exemptions to a few categories of work. But it’s drawn criticism from artists, photographers, dancers, musicians, journalists and many other freelance workers who say it has damaged their incomes because employers shied away from giving them non-payroll work.
It’s also created great uncertainty on how it might be applied to whole industries. Could, for example, owners of fast-food restaurant franchises be considered employees of the parent franchising corporations?
The Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford: Mark Twain’s Marginalia: Most of Mark Twain’s books have handwritten notes in the margins.
The Oxford English Dictionary is adding Nigerian words, which is proving controversial with some scholars. Interestingly, opponents include Nigerians.
The BBC’s Nduka Orjinmo writes from Lagos.
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle = The Breakfast Club.
There’s an Entire Industry Dedicated to Making Foods Crispy, and It Is WILD - Alex Beggs at Bon Appétit
Jason Kottke spent three weeks in Asia, including extended visits to Saigon and Singapore and 24 hours in Dubai.
As promised by Kottke, this essay is relatively long, but it’s a fast, enjoyable read.
He advises taking a food tour on your first visit to a new city. That’s a great idea!
My superpower is taking an extra day on a business trip to anyplace I haven’t been often, and seeing the sites. I often just take on-off bus tours for a good part of the day. A food tour sounds like another great option.
I anticipate significantly less business travel in the future, but still a lot compared with most people. And visiting a strange city is definitely a plus. Even if it doesn’t sound like a glamorous place to visit – if I have never been there before, it’s a plus to me. I spent an excellent day on my own in Dusseldorf a few years ago.
Kottke correctly identifies the pluses and minuses of solo travel. The pluses are, of course, freedom. The minus is that it can be damn lonely sometimes. Last year after Mobile World Congress, I stayed an extra day in Barcelona and got excruciatingly lonely and depressed, and ended up dialing in to the Friday news meeting, which was 5 pm local time, just to hear friendly voices.
Here’s one of Kottke’s impressions of Saigon:
Because of the motorbikes, the process for crossing the street on foot in Saigon is different than in a lot of other places. You basically just wait for any buses (which will absolutely not stop for pedestrians) or cars to go by and then slowly wade out into traffic. Do not make any sudden movements and for god sake don’t run. The motorbike swarm will magically flow around you. It’s suuuuuper unnerving the first few times you do it, but you soon get used to it because the alternative is never ever getting across the street.
The motorbikes make walking around Saigon absolutely exhausting. It’s not just crossing the street. You literally have to be on the lookout for them everywhere. They drive up on the sidewalks. They drive into and out of houses and buildings, turning every doorway into a potential intersection. Having to look both ways every few seconds when you’re walking 6 or 8 miles a day around the city really drains the ol’ attention reserves.
Things I saw carried on motorbikes in Saigon, a non-exhaustive list: trees, dogs, tiny babies, ice (for delivery to a drinks cart, the ice block was not even strapped down), a family of five, a dessert cart, an entire toy store, a dried squid shop, and 8 huge bags of clams.
The food in Saigon and Singapore sounds wonderful.
Kottke: The secret of enduring Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) during a long winter is just roll with it. Learn to enjoy the long nights and cold weather.
Relevant to me personally because Julie and I often talk about moving to Columbus, Ohio, where she grew up and where she has family. I’ve been there more than a dozen times and I like it but oh, those winters.
Funny thing, for most of my life I was an indoor mole, but in the past dozen years, since I started getting fit, I’ve gotten used to spending extended periods outside every day.
I like San Diego. I like the weather.
But the cost of living here is prohibitive. So much less expensive in Columbus.
Renowned Mathematician And Physicist Freeman Dyson Has Died At Age 96
His daughter Mia Dyson, a nurse and pastor who lives in Freeport Maine, says she fondly remembers her father being stumped by practical things, such as how to operate a soda machine, while contemplating the brilliance of the universe.
“Age of Treason” was a 1993 TV movie about Marcus Didio Falco, a threadbare private investigator working the mean streets of Rome, 2000 years ago.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I read and enjoyed several of the novels, by Lindsay Davies, that the movie is based on.
Bailing on Afghanistan will be a disaster but staying will be worse. 20 years of the War on Terror has gone a long way to destroying America. We still have ample time to recover. Getting out of Afghanistan is the first step.
Now. Just go.
On Selling Your First Novel After 11 Years – Min Jin Lee: A moving essay about an ex-attorney’s 11-year struggle to get her first novel published while dealing with financial difficulties, raising a child, helping her extended family and grappling with health crises.
Underscores my belief that creative writing programs are a scam.
The last time Elyse saw her father was at her college graduation. They’d been close growing up, but then he disappeared, other than a few short emails every year. She learned he moved from their home in Tennessee to the Philippines, where he started a new family, including a daughter he named Elyse.
Sansar, Linden Labs' follow-up to Second Life, was a victim of VR hype & failure to learn from SL mistakes – Wagner James Au
See Newly Digitized, "Super Detailed" Photos Of Old Greenwich Village
The turn of 20th century found Greenwich Village in the midst of a transformation – as affluent residents largely decamped uptown closer to Central Park and 5th Avenue, a bohemian enclave took shape in their wake. Residences were subdivided, housing became affordable, immigration was still on the rise, and “radicalism and nonconformity” were embraced, according to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation….
Robots aren’t taking our jobs — they’re becoming our bosses- Josh Dzieza at The Verge:
On conference stages and at campaign rallies, tech executives and politicians warn of a looming automation crisis — one where workers are gradually, then all at once, replaced by intelligent machines. But their warnings mask the fact that an automation crisis has already arrived. The robots are here, they’re working in management, and they’re grinding workers into the ground.
The robots are watching over hotel housekeepers, telling them which room to clean and tracking how quickly they do it. They’re managing software developers, monitoring their clicks and scrolls and docking their pay if they work too slowly. They’re listening to call center workers, telling them what to say, how to say it, and keeping them constantly, maximally busy. While we’ve been watching the horizon for the self-driving trucks, perpetually five years away, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor, the foreman, the middle manager.
AI supervisors drive Amazon warehouse workers to injure themselves and gobble company-supplied painkillers to keep going. AI determines whether call-center workers have enough empathy in their voices. And home-office telecommuters have their keystrokes measured and are required to turn on their webcams to be sure they’re at their desks.
How to delete all your saved articles in Instapaper
I wanted to delete all my saved Instapapaper article and make a fresh start, but had trouble figuring out how to do it. Here’s how:
From the web, find your account name on the top right, click the dropdown, and click Archive All. Then switch to the Archive folder, click the account name again, and select Delete All.
This can’t be undone.
Charlie, the store manager, 1968
“Mine’s bigger. My cucumber. It’s bigger. I think vegetables can be very sensuous, don’t you?”
One, two, and three years ago today I was in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. Four years ago today was our nieces' Carly and Emma’s B’Not Bitzvah.
Mayor Pete says it’s ok to mix ranch dressing and salsa.
I’ve never tried this combination, or even thought of trying it. Gotta admit, it sounds tasty.
“My Ex-Boyfriend’s New Girlfriend Is Lady Gaga” - Lindsay Crouse:
Social media in 2020 is so ingrained that it’s no longer a supplement or even an addiction. It’s just an accelerated extension of the way humans have always behaved. We live in a culture of constant updates. You want to unsubscribe? Well, you can’t.
Facing Anger from Journalists, Assemblywoman Gonzalez Offers AB 5 Changes
Good news for freelance journalists, but not other independent contractors.
Do you watch scripted TV and movies, such as dramas and comedies, on a tablet, phone, or strictly on the TV? Do you watch a few minutes at a time, or a whole episode or episodes at once?
Sarah Miller: The Diet Industrial Complex Got Me, and It Will Never Let Me Go “I did not see the body positivity movement coming, not at all.”
I just spent 15 minutes shopping for dental floss on Amazon. Sometimes choice is not a good thing.
Copied is a heck of a fine application for saving and managing multiple clipboards, particularly on the iPhone and iPad.
My favorite feature is the way it uses an external keyboard to let you do text transformations while keeping another app open – multitasking even on the iPhone.
I’m looking into Copied as a TextExpander replacement. Just save snippets to a list in Copied, and search for them as needed. By adding titles to the snippets, you can search for text that does not appear in the snippet itself. For example, title the snippet “address” and search for that word, and copied will find that snippet, even though your address doesn’t contain the text “address.”
Copied hasn’t been updated for a year, and hasn’t seen a major update in much longer than that. I expect any day now we’ll get an iOS update that breaks it, and there won’t be an update, and that’s that. That will be a sad day.
Sally Hemings was Thomas Jefferson’s slave and companion for many years, with whom he fathered multiple children, whose descendants are alive today. She won many concessions from him, including a comfortable life and freedom for her children.
Some historians, including some of Hemings' descendants, frame their relationship as a love affair. Others point out that Hemings really didn’t have a choice in the matter, which makes the relationship look a rape victim who has managed to negotiate an arrangement with her rapist. And that’s not even thinking about the big age difference between the two; Jefferson was a grown man when their relationship started, while Hemings was only 14-16 years old.
And yet to simply paint Hemings as a victim does not take into account that she negotiated a pretty good deal for herself within the constraints of slavery. She was relatively powerless, while Jefferson was one of the most powerful people in the new United States, and yet she got a good treatment for herself and her children, which is an extraordinary accomplishment.
And maybe they did love each other. We don’t know.
Also, remembering Ernest Hemingway biographer and friend A. E. Hotchner, who died Feb. 15, age 102. Hotchner spoke with Terry Gross in 1999.
Forget passwords: Secure yourself with a passphrase and these tools - Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
THIS SUMMER MORE WOMEN ARE TURNING TO MEDS! (1944) via
Lucky Skull Ring - made of genuine eternium! - 1950 https://advertisingpics.tumblr.com/post/611084434228346880/lucky-skull-ring-made-of-genuine-eternium via
The Pat Boone & Family Christmas Special (1979) via
New Viking Stereo Compact, 1960 via
“I’ve Done It!’ MARTIN KLASCH via
