Mitch's Blog

✪ “Resident Alien,” one of our favorite TV shows, is canceled. Son of a bitch! This is some bullshit! deadline.com

✪ Today I learned Ron Goulart wrote a series of mystery novels featuring Groucho Marx as a detective. en.wikipedia.org

✪ “The head of the main UN agency serving Palestinians has said his frontline staff are fainting from hunger, as the number of people dying of starvation in Gaza continued to rise and hopes for a ceasefire faded as negotiations collapsed.” theguardian.com

✪ “A group of far-right Israeli politicians and settlers met in parliament this week to discuss a plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza, annex the territory and turn it into a hi-tech, luxury resort city for Israelis.… Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s leading human rights lawyers, said: ‘This is a plan for ethnic cleansing. Under international law, this would amount to a crime against humanity because deportation is a war crime when committed on a small scale and a crime against humanity when it is committed on a massive scale.'” theguardian.com

✪ “Venezuelan men who were deported by the US to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process are speaking out about treatment they described as ‘hell’ and like a ‘horror movie’, after arriving back home.” theguardian.com

✪ Immigration agents told a teenage US citizen: ‘You’ve got no rights.’ He secretly recorded his brutal arrest theguardian.com

✪ JD Vance Claims One of Our Worst Traditions as His Own. By Jamelle Bouie. nytimes.com Vance echoes the principles of the Dred Scott decision, which declared that Black people were an inferior race who could never be US citizens.

✪ White House Slams ‘South Park’ After Unflattering Depiction of Trump. hollywoodreporter.com The South Park episode includes a realistic, AI-generated image of a naked Trump showing his micropenis. youtu.be

✪ Ghislaine Maxwell Can’t Help But Notice Interview Room Covered In Plastic Sheeting. theonion.com

✪ Today’s labor market is “less like a ladder, more like a slot machine,” resulting in “zero-sum logic” that is poisoning society, writes Kayla Scanlon. kyla.substack.com

In 1957, the Soviet launch of Sputnik triggered a huge US response. It led to 3x funding for science education, created NASA and DARPA, and created massive investment in talent and infrastructure (and optimism). The US looked at a challenge and said: We can build our way out of this.

As economist Alex Tabarrok pointed out in his piece about the Sputnik moment, that kind of mobilization didn’t happen in 2024 when China’s DeepSeek AI surpassed OpenAI’s GPT-4. The US retreated instead of rallying. We looked at a challenge and say: They must be stealing from us.

This is a shift in how we understand problems and solutions. As Alex highlighted, research shows we’re developing what economists call zero-sum thinking, or the belief that my success requires your failure, that wealth and opportunity are fixed pies to be divided rather than expanded. As Alex explains, zero-sum thinkers “see society as unjust, distrust their fellow citizens and societal institutions, espouse more populist attitudes, and disengage from potentially beneficial interactions.” It’s a form of despair that arises during times of economic uncertainty.”

As Scanlon notes: This is reversible.

✪ The Seeds of Democratic Revival Have Already Been Sown. nytimes.com — I love nearly all of this article — but I am deeply troubled by suggestions we should fail to support our LGBTQ fellow Americans.

✪ “You think you’re the coolest guy in the parking lot and then this guy shows up.” “This guy” being a cat. tiktok.com

✪ Skittles gets a hat. tumblr.com

✪ Prepare Batcopter for immediate takeoff. tumblr.com

✪ By the way, is there anyone onboard who knows how to fly a plane? tumblr.com

He was the hero of the Stainless Steel Rat books by Harry Harrison. His full name is James Bolivar diGriz, aka “Slippery Jim diGriz.” Also good names. Harrison had a good ear for how names sound.

I loved those novels when I was a kid.

I also loved Harrison’s “Deathworld” novel series, whose hero also had a pretty good name — Jason dinAlt.

On the other hand, “Jake Cardigan” is a ridiculous name. He was the hero of the Tekwar novels and TV series, created by William Shatner. Ron Goulart ghostwrote the books.

I think I’m going to stick with the Zen browser. I found it confusing at first, even though I used the Arc browser, which is similar, for months. But I think I have it figured out. I particularly like compact mode, where I can easily use a keyboard shortcut to show and hide the toolbars and sidebars for maximum screen real estate and focus.

I prefer to write in Markdown, but often I have to write in Microsoft Word, and I hate it, because I find myself devoting significant time to managing Word, rather than writing and making formatting decisions.

This morning, I had a block of text that I wanted to format in bullets. Simple, right? I’ve done it a million times. But Word would not let me format that particular block in bullets, and I spent 15 minutes plinking around in the user interface and doing web searches figuring it out.

This is not at all unusual behavior for Word. There are even memes about it.

I’ve been using the Zen browser for a couple of hours. I think I like it, but it’s confusing. I used Arc for a few months a year or two ago. Zen is very similar but different in significant ways. Zen also seems very buggy.

My phone is an iPhone 15 Pro Max — the big one. I think I might be happier with a standard-size iPhone.

The standard-size iPhone doesn’t have the iPhone’s best camera, so I think I’d also like a small camera too.

And I think I’d like an iPad mini, for when I want a bigger screen.

Then I think, why don’t I just set a stack of $100 bills on fire instead?

I’m thinking about trying Firefox or one of its forks for the Mac, iPhone and iPad. Does anyone have experience to share and suggestions? I was looking at Floorp.

A friend told me yesterday that I should take up painting. Later, I was reviewing my to-do list and saw, in the someday/maybe area: “Learn to draw? Take a class?” I have no memory of adding that task, but my to-do software says I added it three weeks ago.

I have not tried to draw anything since I was a pre-teen in art class. I expect if I tried now, the result would be so bad that you would not even be able to figure out what I am trying to draw.

And yet….

I have discovered Skymoth, which automatically crossposts Mastodon posts to Bluesky. My inexorable plan for global domination progresses!

I searched on my own name in an AI chatbot, which I have not done for a while. The chatbot universe has now learned that I am not the San Diego trial lawyer named “Mitch Wagner,” but it still thinks I’m a crossfit athlete with strong rankings in national and regional competitions over several years. (Which, no — I would say I am extremely healthy and fit for a middle-class American my age, but no, I am not a competitive athlete. I have seen photos of that Mitch Wagner with his shirt off, and it is very different from the shirtless me I see in the mirror.)