Mitch's Blog

ServiceNow claims a salesman “overachieved” and is not entitled to commissions on more than $27 million sales, according to a lawsuit filed by the salesman.

I’m inclined to withhold judgment on who’s right here. The lawsuit has excessive truthiness.

Christian Nationalism Is Thriving, and “We Should Be Concerned." By Hamilton Nolan

JD Vance says aliens are ‘demons’ — With war escalating in Iran, gas and grocery prices soaring, and U.S. airports in chaos amid a partial government shutdown, Vance thought it was a good use of his time to appear on a podcast to share his deranged UFO theories and obsession.

Market participation is exhausting

Society is optimized for people who love to haggle and think you should haggle for everything, says Cory Doctorow.

“For these people, cheating is just bargaining by another means. They embrace bizarre concepts like ‘revealed preferences,’ the idea that if you say you’re dissatisfied with a bargain, but you accept it anyway, you have a ‘revealed preference’ for the deal. In other words, if someone sells their kidney to Sheryl Sandberg in order to make the rent, they have a ‘revealed preference’ for having only one kidney – and if they sell their privacy to Sheryl Sandberg in order to stay in touch with the people they love, they have a ‘revealed preference’ for having their data extracted and exploited by Facebook.”

‘I Think That MAGA Is Dying’: Inside the Youth Movement at CPAC. “At a sparsely attended Conservative Political Action Conference, young Republicans were eager to start the post-Trump era.” By Nathan Tyler Pemberton at the New York Times

Maybe MAGA is dying — but will be replaced by something worse. These young Republicans still seem attached to nativism and LGBTQ-phobia, with resurgent anti-Semitism added to the brew.

On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: “The Master’s Tools” in Tech Discourse

The enshittification story, at its most powerful, describes a process by which platforms that once served users well came to exploit them. But this framing assumes a prior state of genuine service, a golden age of the open internet, that was for many people never particularly golden. The early internet was structured around the assumptions of its architects: predominantly white, male, Western, educated, and abled.

— Tara Tarakiyee.

The Edmund Fitzgerald Teaches Men How to Feel

Michael Sebastian writes about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (the historical event), “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (the seven-minute folk ballad that somehow climbed to the top of the charts in the disco era), his lifelong and life-changing fascination with the song and ship, and men’s love of shipwrecks.

You’re being rude. Put away your phone.  “Log off, tune in, go out.” By Robinson Meyer

I am posting this because it’s clever and also because it’s illustrative of the variety of the podcast universe. Indeed, I listen to 90+ minutes of podcasts daily and the only one of these types that I listen to with any regularity is the “recapping the movie but it’s longer than the movie” type. And it’s usually TV shows rather than movies and I quite enjoy those. And that reminds me — I need to find a good “For All Mankind” recap podcast.

And I know that listening to 90+ minutes of podcasts daily makes me sound like a weirdo — but I’m always doing something else while listening to podcasts, mainly walking the dog, and also driving and chores around the house.

‘Shameless in a Good Way’: Rahm Emanuel Is Already Shaking up 2028

He’s a fighter, which I like. He works hard, which I also like. But he was historically unpopular as mayor of Chicago, which is going to be a problem for him. And he’s already being blamed for everything working people and the left don’t like about the Obama administration. As one opponent says: “The guys who wrecked the economy took their million-dollar bonuses. You never tried to claw them back. It was a disastrous recovery, because you cut it short.”

I don’t support any candidate at this stage, but if I did it would be Pritzger.

I’m an unusual Trek fan in that I just wasn’t into the series in the 80s and 90s. I checked out of TNG and Deep Space 9, which most Trek fans today consider classic Trek.

My history of Trek fandom goes TOS -> TAS -> movies -> Discovery, SNW and Starfleet Academy.

I have never clicked with the current animated Treks, though I did love the 70s animated series, which I rewatched with Julie sometime in the past 25 years or so and it was still pretty good.

I read “Soul of a New Machine,” by Tracy Kidder, who died last week, at about the time I switched from daily newspaper journalism to trade journalism in the technology industry, either just before making the career switch or just after. The book was published in 1981 and I made the career switch in 1989.

In my work, I wrote about Data General, the company that is the subject of “Soul of a New Machine.” I’m pretty sure I interviewed Tom West, the main character of the book, though I did not connect him with the book until after the interview, and the interview was straightforward and unmemorable, focused on company strategy or a new product or something like that.

“Soul of a New Machine” was a major contributor to the belief that a career in the technology industry could be more than just a career — it could be a calling, a life mission. And that was true for my career as well, as a trade journalist. I believed it.

With regard to trade journalism, I now believe that philosophy to be a myth, which of course benefits publishers, who profit from trade journalists’ commitment.

I now think of trade journalism as a trade, like plumbing or carpentry or electrical work. It’s a good job for people like me. It can be an important part of the foundation on which to build a good life. But it should not be your life purpose.

Jessamyn West, longtime Vermont librarian, technologist and one of the first generation of bloggers, remembers Tracy Kidder, author of “Soul of a New Machine,” who died recently. West’s father was the main character of the 1981 book and he and Kidder were friends.

“Tracy basically lived at our house on weekends while he was writing Soul of a New Machine. Sometimes he and my dad would go sailing, sometimes he’d just hang out at the house or go to work with my dad,” West writes.

While Tom West was legendary for his commitment to work, that meant he was an absentee father.

“My message to the men who told me how much the book meant to them when they were entering the world of technology (and it was always men even though I’m sure the book was useful for other genders of people in tech as well) was to find a more well-rounded life for themselves, to value being a good partner and parent as much as being good at their job,” writes Jessamyn West. “I work in technology now, but I’ve managed a balance that I’ve had to work for. Tech will take your life if you let it.”

This was No Kings in La Mesa, California, a suburb of San Diego. We had about a thousand people by my guess, which is a lot, as the big San Diego event was nearby and easily accessible.

Donald J. Trump, America’s greatest President, interrupted a Cabinet meeting discussion of the Iran war, security lines at airports, rising oil prices and the skittish stock market to deliver a five minute rambling story about Sharpie pens. 

I am catching up on expense reports. Why does “Fontainebleau” have so many vowels? How do they expect anybody to spell that?

The FCC’s new restrictions on foreign-produced consumer routers could gut the home Wi-Fi market, as most routers — even American-branded equipment — are manufactured overseas. By my colleague Monica Alleven on Fierce Network.

There’s no law requiring you to drink at the Nazi bar: A judge dismissed Elon Musk’s X Corp’s lawsuitclaiming an illegal boycott against X by the World Federation of Advertisers and companies including Mars, CVS Health and Colgate-Palmolive.

A few days ago, in an online conversation with a friend, I said:

I was a heavy, heavy iPad user through the 2010s to about three years ago. Now I barely use it. My MacBook Air is my desk computer, my travel computer and my secondary couch computer. My phone is my main couch computer. Indeed, the iPad lives right next to my couch, and usually I don’t bother picking it up — I just get out my phone instead.

I’ve made this point multiple times over the past few months, maybe years. I’ve gone from using the iPad daily, to rarely, to never. I’ve thought about donating it. I’m a little surprised people are buying them.

Last night I said to the same friend:

My iPad lives in a keyboard case. Tonight I glanced at it while sitting on the couch and reaching for my phone, and I said to myself, “Maybe if I took it out of the keyboard case I might like using it?” And I did and I do.

My Facebook Reels are showing me short videos of cats being dusted with flour and kneaded like bread, cats cooking and eating steak, a cat in a chef’s outfit cooking and serving mac and cheese. The videos are realistic but I think they may be AI-generated.