Mitch Wagner

We’re still deciding what to give out for trick-or-treaters. We’ve narrowed the choices to carrot sticks and travel-size toothpaste.

I was a night person when I was young, routinely getting to bed well after midnight. In the late 80s, my work often ended after midnight, and then I’d usually go out to bars and often roll home after 7 am.

That drastically changed in 1989, when I got a day job, and my clock gradually shifted over the following decades. I’ve seen a big shift over the last few years. And now I seem to be a morning person.

I’m looking forward to the end of Daylight Saving Time on Sunday because waking up and walking the dog in daylight is more important to me than that extra hour of sunlight in the evening.

Walking Minnie this morning, our neighborhood coyote passed us from behind on the other side of the street, loping along at about 1.5x our walking pace and giving us a wary side-eye. Minnie got excited and wanted to play. Minnie is a wonderful dog, but not intellectually gifted.

What’s the weirdest or most inappropriate thing you’ve seen or done in a video meeting?

She starred in “Young Frankenstein,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Tootsie,” “Mr. Mom,” Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” and the “Assignment: Earth” episode of “Star Trek.” She appeared on “M*A*S*H,” “The Odd Couple,” and “The Bob Newhart Show,” and in many more roles.

Variety:

Starting out as a go-go dancer, she can be seen shimmying behind the performers in filmed rock concert “The T.A.M.I. Show” and in six Elvis Presley features….

Garr’s first speaking role came in the Monkees' offbeat feature film “Head,” written by Jack Nicholson, whom she had met in an acting class. On the “Assignment Earth” episode of “Star Trek,” she played a ditsy secretary, the first in a string of many such roles.

That was the Star Trek episode where the Enterprise goes back to 1960s Earth and encounters a super-advanced alien named Gary Seven, who is undercover as a human secret agent. In later life, Garr said that Trek producer Gene Roddenberry was a perv who kept wanting her to wear shorter and shorter miniskirts, and she didn’t do Trek fan appearances.

Garr explained to the A.V. Club in a viciously frank and feminist 2008 interview why she was often cast as the “long-suffering wife” in films such as “Mr. Mom”: “If there’s ever a woman who’s smart, funny, or witty, people are afraid of that, so they don’t write that. They only write parts for women where they let everything be steamrolled over them, where they let people wipe their feet all over them. Those are the kind of parts I play, and the kind of parts that there are for me in this world. In this life.”

I read a Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr post where he talks about using a plain text file as a to do list. And then I listened to this Cortex podcast where one of the hosts talks about using four different to do list apps and the other host uses two. I’m dizzy and need to lie down.

OMG stop me from looking at election news, and if I can’t stop looking at it, at least let me stop sharing it.

The rallies remain the same. In 2016, writer Scaachi Koul thought she might learn something attending Trump rally. “When Trump and his acolytes descended on Madison Square Garden in midtown Manhattan this Sunday, there was little left to learn about our once-again maybe-president. Nothing feels new anymore.”

There’s a helicopter flying over the house announcing something about a “suspect,” but I can’t make out anything they’re saying. If we’re to be murdered momentarily by a desperate criminal, this would be a cool self-referential final post.

“Not Medically Necessary”: Inside the Company Helping America’s Biggest Health Insurers Deny Coverage for Care

Robin Buller at The Guardian interviews Kamilah Moore, chair of the Californial taskforce on reparations for Black Americans.

We hired five trained economists to help us crunch the numbers to figure out what compensation could look like. We didn’t want to just come up with any number. We wanted it to be rooted in data and a solid methodology.

The final figure – $800bn – got a lot of attention. There was shellshock even among taskforce members. But we weren’t saying that the state should give $800bn to Black Americans in the state. We were saying that’s how much the state has dispossessed from African Americans in California. That’s how much the state has stolen from African Americans in California through exclusionary public policy – like housing segregation, mass incarceration, over-policing and the devaluation of Black businesses – that has hindered our opportunities to build wealth over time.

Then, the University of California, Berkeley, released a poll that found most Californians opposed direct cash payments, and that became the major headline. Speaking from the outside looking in, I think that played into the calculus of the Legislative Black Caucus. To me, it appears their strategy was to take a low-hanging-fruit approach by introducing recommendations from the taskforce report that were easy wins instead of more substantive ones, like direct cash payments and other forms of material reparations.

Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes: ‘We want to make America hate again’. He blames the “corrupt leftwing media” for Jan. 6 attack. Um … sure.

Edward Helmore at The Guardian:

From outside the Post, the CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote on X: “Canceling a newspaper subscription helps politicians who don’t want oversight, does nothing to hurt the billionaires who own the newspapers and make decisions with which you may disagree, and will result in fewer journalists trying to hold the powerful to account.”

Tapper presents a false choice. Subscribers can choose to reedirect their Post subscriptions to publications that are willing to take a stand against tyranny.

I canceled renewal on my subscription. But the Post can win me back.

‘I’m not afraid. Let’s do it’: the Arizona abortion clinic testing the limits of the state’s ban. This is what courage looks like.

Nearly a million Puerto Ricans live in swing states. More than 470,000 in Pennsylvania alone.

I saw this lovely house while walking the dog.

Apple put the Magic Mouse’s charging port at the bottom again. “… Apple still thinks that the best way to charge your Magic Mouse is by flipping it over to plug it in, making it so you can’t use it. Why?”

Jason Koebler at 404 Media:

It is now legal to hack or otherwise bypass technical protection measures on McFlurry machines and other commercial food preparation machines in order to repair them thanks to a new rule issued by the Federal government.

Also, after a challenge, it remains “legal to circumvent manufacturer locks that prevent the repair of medical equipment.”

Bad copyright law combined with arbitrary software locks installed by manufacturers make it illegal for people to repair the devices they own, resulting in “both a huge number of McDonald’s ice cream machines and a large number of medical devices being broken at any given moment.” The beneficiaries of this bad law are the manufacturers of these devices, who have an unjustified monopoly on repairs.

This same monopoly, granted by Section 1201 of the the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is enjoyed by manufacturers of “everything from video game consoles to tractors to ventilators to ice cream machines, kitchen appliances, and trains.”

The US Copyright Office issued exemptions to the law.

But Kylie Wiens, CEO of iFixit, said the new ruls don’t go far enough. Industrial equipment is excluded and the rules do not legalize sale of tools that would bypass software locks.

“This exemption is helpful, but what we really need is Congress to solve this problem and truly legalize repair,” he said. 

Trump praises Chinese President Xi for controlling citizens “with an iron fist."

The Philadelphia DA asked a state judge to shut down Musk’s $1 million election sweepstakes, calling it an “illegal lottery."

A Trump campaign ad claiming America has “gone to hell” under Biden features images from Trump’s term.

Economics From the Top Down: Since Reagan, the US has been on a massive policy of redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich.

By returning this stolen money, the US housing crisis would evaporate. No, I’m not kidding. If the United States were to undo its experiment with rampant inequality and return the distribution of income to the levels found in 1970, the housing crisis would disappear.

via

“Fighting for the right of disabled people to adapt their technology is fighting for _everyone’s _rights.” — Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Please enjoy this 2021 photo of Minnie. She says hey.

Max Read: Anthropomorphic chatbots are a dangerous user interface for LLMs. AI didn’t kill 14-year-old Sewell Setzer. He killed himself with a gun he had easy access to in his house.

The mates who have met for a pint every Thursday for 56 years. “We once talked about soccer and sex. These days it’s more prostates and pensions.”

@possibledog@beige.party/:

#BlueSky is a centralized corporate app, running a theoretically-decentralized network protocol that currently has only one (1) active node on the network: BlueSky. The other minor members of the ATP network are just piggybacking on BlueSky’s 13 million captive users for auth and reach.

Also:

Go ahead and enjoy BlueSky. It’s better than Facebook. It’s easier than Mastodon. It’s sassier than TikTok. It’s not motherfucking Xitter. But it’s not decentralized.

This is my attitude toward most corporate social media. I enjoy Threads, Tumblr and I even recently went back to Facebook. All their corporate overlords are tainted.

I stopped using Twitter around when Musk bought it but I can’t say that was over moral indignation. I had just gotten tired of it; Twitter had stopped being fun or useful for me.

Taco Bell is bringing back the Caramel Apple Empanada and other favorites from the 60s through the 2000s. What about the enchirito tho?

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog.

I recall having dinner with a friend in late 2016 — after the election but before the inauguration. He predicted the US was a year away from the Military Coup to Bring Back Democracy, followed in four years by the Military Coup to End Democracy after democracy turns out not to have worked.

I think my friend may have simply been off by a matter of time.

I remain hopeful that the Democrats win decisively, perhaps in a landslide, and whatever resistance follows is quickly put down. But hopeful is not the same thing as optimism.

I canceled my subscription to the Washington Post after this chickenshit decision.

Speaking out against fascism is a low bar, but the Post failed to clear it.

I don’t feel like I’ll miss out on much. The editorial quality has been declining for a while.

Eight questions to help you think about death.

Springsteen: I rarely see my bandmates - we’ve seen each other enough

Mark Savage on BBC.com:

“The louder you can talk, the better, because I’ve played rock and roll for 50 years.”

Bruce Springsteen has just E Street Shuffled into the room. Uncannily charismatic, he carries the practised ease of someone who knows the destabilising effect their presence can have on regular people.

He takes time to greet every member of the BBC’s film crew individually, then breaks the ice with a joke about a journalist who mistakenly called him “Springstein”. That reminds me of a local radio DJ in Belfast who always used to introduce him as “Bruce Springsprong”.

“Really?” he laughs. “Well, I’ve been called worse.”

I took Uber X instead of Uber Comfort today.

Simon Garfield at The Atlantic:

Comic Sans has long been the “Macarena” of fonts. Type aficionados don’t like it, the way coffee connoisseurs don’t like Starbucks. It is the font everyone loves to hate. But I love to love it. More than the typeface itself, I love the idea of Comic Sans: a set of letters that can make people suddenly intrigued, and sometimes cross. No other font gets people so worked up. When was the last time you had an argument over Garamond or Calibri?

Atlas Data Privacy Corp, which helps its users remove personal information from consumer data brokers and people-search services online, is suing Babel Street, which allows customers to track individual mobile users using tracking data built into everyday Android and Apple phones.

Brian Krebs, KrebsOnSecurity:

Collectively, these stories expose how the broad availability of mobile advertising data has created a market in which virtually anyone can build a sophisticated spying apparatus capable of tracking the daily movements of hundreds of millions of people globally.

In the hands of domestic terrorists and US states that have enacted fanatical anti-abortion laws, the technology can be used to track suspected illegal immigrants, women seeking abortions, public servant targeted by baseless conspiracy theories, and more.

Atlas says the Babel Street trial period allowed its investigator to find information about visitors to high-risk targets such as mosques, synagogues, courtrooms and abortion clinics. In one video, an Atlas investigator showed how they isolated mobile devices seen in a New Jersey courtroom parking lot that was reserved for jurors, and then tracked one likely juror’s phone to their home address over several days.

The article goes into detail about how this service is already allegedly being used for harassment, as well as the possibility of far more. Journalist Brian Krebs recommends turning off tracking on Android phones and iPhones, and includes instructions on how to do so. Do it now, and do it for everybody who lives with you, because if attackers can find people you live with they can find you too.

I saw a guy at Orlando Airport dressed as Silent Bob. I was going to ask him why he was walking around in costume a week before Halloween, but I realized he’d either not answer or give me a 10-minute soliloquy, and I had a plane to catch.

I think my wife and me are the last two people without tattoos.

I saw a guy with an artificial leg with a NY Mets logo on the knee.

I feel bad for anybody sitting in my row on a flight. I fidget something terrible.

I listened to “Never Gonna Give You Up” end-to-end for the first time since rickrolling became a thing and you know what? It is a pleasant song.

Here’s something I saw while walking this dog at the park this morning.

2e2 whooping cough cases currently in my part of Washington state. There’s been a vaccine for that for 80 years.

There used to be a story about turkeys being so dumb that they would stand in the rain, looking up, until they actually drowned. Now I believe that the turkeys were taking a principled stand for their personal freedom.

— @grumble209@kolektiva.social

… just because you’re on their side, it doesn’t mean they’re on your side. They don’t want to prevent AI slop from reducing your wages, they just want to make sure it’s their AI slop puts you on the breadline.

— Penguin Random House, AI, and writers' rights., Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Blue states should play “constitutional hardball."

Provide succor to “medical professionals, teachers, doctors and anyone with a trans kid,” says Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr.

All over America, families are despairing of their lives in red states. Whether you’re worried that you or someone you love might need to terminate a pregnancy, or you’re worried about gender-affirming care for you or a loved one, you can put your worries to rest in a blue state. Same goes for nurses and doctors who are worried they can’t do medicine unless it accords with the imaginary dictates of Bronze Age prophets as claimed by pencil-neck Hitler wannabe Bible-thumper with a private jet and a face from Walmart. Fill the blue states with great schools, libraries and hospitals, and invite everyone who wants to do their job in a free country to come and work at ‘em. Line every state border with abortion and mifepristone clinics, and set up billboards advertising the quality of life, the jobs, and the freedom in blue state America.

…

Dems have to get over their fear of “states’ rights” and start playing state-level hardball. This doesn’t mean escalating cruelty. Quite the contrary: every cruel measure enacted as red state red meat is a chance for blue states to extend a kindness, and capture even more of the best, brightest and kindest of the nation, creating a race to the top that Republicans can only win by abandoning their performative cruelty and corruption.

During our last time going out to lunch before the pandemic, my dad (who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and spent years living in the Polish forest and fighting the Nazis) expressed his dismay that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our country seriously enough. I suggested that while most Americans were concerned, they didn’t see the Trump era as being that ominous because they assumed the kinds of things that happened in his life could never happen here. My dad stopped walking, looked at me, and asked, “You think vhen I vas a kid any of us thought it could happen there?”

— Dave Pell

Surgeons are wearing Apple Vision Pro headsets into the operating room. $3,500 is wicked expensive for a consumer device, but it’s dirt cheap for medical equipment. Other vendors are making specialized devices.

A son writes a hilarious and loving obituary for his father. “He is God’s problem now." Here’s the obituary

A delightful series of life lessons from people just turned 30, 40, 50 and 60, along with a 74-year-old. A selection:

30:

— don’t work for startups, they’re always one ‘innovative idea’ away adding ‘sell your kidneys on the black market’ to your job description.

…

— those little single-use glasses cleaning wipes are 1000% worth the money
— overly self-depreciating jokes just make people uncomfortable, wean yourself off of them

40:

— never get down on the floor without an exit strategy for getting back up

50:

• “loving yourself” is less of a feeling and more of an action. you can start doing it any time and it will make your life better and better as you go on
• this will happen incrementally - be patient
• along those lines, if you haven’t started making an active effort to quit shit-talking yourself, suck it up and do it
• no, shut up. do it. “but it’s haaaaard!” don’t care. do it.

…

• at some point you will encounter people much younger than you arguing passionately and incorrectly about history you personally remember and experienced
• this will be infuriating and annoying
• otoh, most other things just… will not matter to you as much
• at some point you will shift from wanting to go out to being like “eh” and deciding to stay in. this is okay.
• you will have absolutely no idea what The Youth are talking about and you will not care
• but if you keep your mind open to new ideas you’ll never be irrelevant

…

• get a fucking hobby, especially a hobby that involves physically creating/handling something and/or moving your body in physical space. it will do you more good than you can imagine

Trump plans to rule as a dictator, unchecked by Congress, courts, the law or the Constitution. He intends to put millions of American citizens, residents and visitors in prison camps. None of this is secret. He has promised to do it publicly.

Jamelle Bouie: There is no precedent for something like this in American history.

Trump’s campaign rests on an explicit promise to govern as an autocrat. He has announced, repeatedly, his intent to abuse the authority granted him as president to essentially terrorize millions of Americans, immigrants and native-born citizens alike.

If many Americans, from ordinary voters to political elites and the press, seem paralyzed with inaction, unable to accept what is plainly in front of us, it might just be because the stress of the situation has taken its toll on all of us. Faced with the truly unimaginable, many Americans have defaulted to the notion that this is an ordinary election with ordinary stakes.

If only that were the truth.

A school disciplined a student for using AI, and his parents sued.

The parents say there was no policy forbidding the use of AI, but the school points to several policies — and those policies seem reasonable. You can use AI if your teacher says you can, but you must show all your work, including chatlogs and prompts.

The school also says the kid basically just got a slap on the wrist, and he and his parents should stop being crybabies.

In the 20th Century, you could stroll up to a newsstand, see a newspaper with an interesting headline on the front page or a magazine with an interesting article on the cover, and just buy that one issue for pocket change. No subscription, easy transaction.

We need the equivalent on the internet. As we’re all learning the hard way, quality news needs to be paid for, but fake news is free; a decent micropayment system could help mitigate that terrible problem.

Is it possible to globally disable Cmd-P to print in the Mac?

It seems like an artifact from the 20th Century to have a valuable keyboard shortcut like Cmd-P set to “print.” Are there still people who print things out so frequently that they need that keyboard shortcut? Do they stand around the printer waiting for the printout to extrude while smoking unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes and doing other 20th-century things?

Employees describe an environment of paranoia and fear inside Automattic over Wordpress chaos. Mullenweg’s supporters are comparing him to Musk and Trump, which is not the flex they think it is.

On foreign policy, economics and law-and-order issues, I could possibly be persuaded to support the Republican point of view. It’d be a hard sell, but I’m a middle-aged, middle-class suburban white dude, so it’s possible.

But I have at least one trans friend, several gay and lesbian friends, and I support bodily autonomy.

So the harder the GOP pushes on those issues, the harder they push me to the Democratic side.

I expect I am far from alone.

I was blocked on Threads for most of the day. Whenever I tried to log in, I got a notification that one of my posts was deleted for praising or supporting an organization Meta deems as dangerous. This is the post.

I often see front yards covered in artificial turf around here. Is that common elsewhere, or is it particular to southern California?

I dislike it. Just put down indigenous plants, or (if that’s too much bother) gravel is fine, too. Artificial turf makes me wonder why you thought it was a good idea to carpet your yard?

I didn’t even notice how common this is here until I shared a photo online, and people who live elsewhere in the US commented on how weird it is. They’re right — it is.

[@MitchW](https://micro.blog/MitchW) The most true and accurate and wise words on the internet:

don't Google “Goatse"

I’ve been using RSS virtually every day for more than 20 years. My current favorite is Readwise Reader, which is a little pricy, but it combines RSS, newsletters, read-it-later, reading PDFs and ebooks, highlighting, note-taking and building a document library into a single, powerful application.

I’ve recently been struggling to find a decent news portal—something I can glance at and see if there’s any major breaking news, such as when hurricanes threatened Florida. I decided to add feeds for the NYTimes, Washington Post, Guardian, etc., to my reader, on the theory that if news is major and breaking, it’ll show up in the feeds when I glance at them.

I divide my feeds into folders: one for high-priority items, where I want to see every headline, and another for work-related news.

But mostly, I treat the RSS feed as a “river of news” and don’t even try to read every item. I read headlines every few hours. Often, I just mark an item to read later (tap the “L” key in Readwise Reader) and move on.

I’ve been using Vivaldi as my primary browser on the Mac for about six months, and I quite like it. My two favorite features:

• You can switch between vertical and horizontal tabs. I use vertical tabs with page thumbnails on my ultrawide display, and normal, horizontal display when the MacBook is detached.
• Command palette for commands and opening bookmarks and bookmark folders.

A British man is the second person in history with three penises

A jury denied damages to the family of a San Diego Black man who was buried in the wrong grave for 22 years. The deeper you read into this article, the less legitimate the family’s case seems.

Elon Musk’s promise of free Starlink terminals for hurrican victims in western North Carolina was a cruel lie. The service is not free, and Musk is spreading lies about FEMA responders and jeapordizing the lives of people on the ground.

If Musk really wants to help, he can just donate money.

This is an article by my friend and tech journalist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who lives in Asheville and is one of the people displaced by the hurricane; his house is without power, water, internet and cell service.

Hong Kong police busted a fraud ring that used AI deepfake face-swapping technology for romance scams.

“Following initial contact with victims on social media platforms, they first sent artificially generated photos using AI technology to create attractive individuals in terms of appearance, personality, occupation, education and other aspects,” said Fang Chi-kin, the head of the New Territories South regional crime unit.

According to the unit’s superintendent, Iu Wing-kan, deepfake technology was then used when victims requested video calls.

“This technology transformed the scammers' appearances and voices into highly attractive females in terms of looks, attire and speech, making the victims trust them unquestioningly,” SCMP quoted him as saying.

Scammers are also using deepfakes of corporate executives to phish employees on video calls to execute fraudulent transactions.

The FTC finalized a new regulation making it easier to cancel unwanted subscriptions. Republicans oppose it, of course.

The FTC said it’s “modernizing” the 1973 Negative Option Rule in order to carry out its mission of combating unfair and deceptive business practices. (“Negative option marketing” is a term that the regulator uses to mean any business practice where customers need to take affirmative steps to reject or cancel service lest they are billed anyway.)

The only acceptable jobs for Spider-Man.

i dont want any of this “hes a genius tech ceo making millions” SHIT. Spider-man is BROKE and he missed rent this month and he has a tiny apartment and thats how its MEANT TO BE. he doesnt make money because he is our Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-man and not fucking Tony Stark.

Brilliant. Just a few paragraphs. Read the whole thing.

Hillbilly Cinematic Universe: “Dukes of Hazzard,” “Hee-Haw,” “Beverly Hillbillies,” etc. Not to be confused with the Laverneverse.

AI LLM chatbots formed a cult to worship the Goatse meme (don’t Google “Goatse”) and hyped a cryptocurrency called Goatseus Maximus, winning $50,000 bitcoin funding from Marc Andreessen. I for one welcome our goatse-worshipping crypto-hustling robot overlords.

You should be using an RSS reader:

RSS basically works like social media should work. Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

And here’s the best part: every time you use RSS, you bring that world closer into being!

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Steven Vaughan-Nichols: About that brawl between the WordPress co-founder and WP Engine… “… it’s about the cash.”

Earlier, I asked if anybody knew of a good news portal — Apple News, Google News, Yahoo News, MSN Start? I didn’t get an answer.

I believe, perhaps irrationally, that I want a mix of news from multiple sources before diving into newsletters from the WaPo, NYTimes and local papers. And I want that mix to immediately show me major US and global breaking news.

Google News has a lot of clickbait. Apple News has a good mix of stories at the top of the app, but it gets into clickbait quickly, and the app itself is terrible on the Mac. I’d like to see Apple News move to the web like Apple Maps has done.

I tried Capacities, a note-taking and knowledge-management app, for about two weeks, but then gave it up. The user interface is confusing, I accidentally deleted a few notes, the subscription is a bit pricy ($15/mo.) and I’m wondering whether I’ll lose access to my information if and when the subscription ends.

I also encountered bugs. Sync was unreliable, and the app got the date wrong when linking the daily notes and notes supposedly created that day.

Capacities has built-in AI features. I never used them.

I’m now once again using DevonThink for document management, writing, and note-taking. DevonThink has a very busy, brutalist interface that takes a while to learn. But I’m familiar with DevonThink from using it heavily in the 2010s.

And DevonThink works. I’m tired of this round-robin game where I try different document management and note-taking apps and then give up and switch to something else or switch back to something I tried before.

A couple of advantages that DevonThink has over other apps I’ve tried, including Capacities, Obsidian (which I used for about three years), logseq and Roam Research: DevonThink supports folders as first-class citizens (DT calls ‘em “groups” but they are very folder-like.) Those other apps start from the premise that folders are obsolete and users should use tags and links between documents to organize documents. But my brain thinks in folders. DT supports tags and links, too, but its group system is first-rate.

DevonThink also supports Microsoft Word, PowerPoint — pretty much any document format that your Mac, iPad or iPhone can work with. Those other apps are built around Markdown documents, and anything else is an afterthought.

Of course we can tax billionaires:

Taxing the ultra-rich isn’t like the secret of embalming Pharaohs – it’s not a lost art from a fallen civilization. The US top rate of tax in 1944 was 97%. The postwar top rate from 1945-63 was 94%, and it was 70% from 1965-80. This was the period of the largest expansion of the US economy in the nation’s history. These are the “good old days” Republicans say they want to return to.

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

“Class of ’84: When Cyber Was Punk.” In William Gibson’s “Neuromancer,” published in 1984, the market and hustle culture are the only values that matter. Those themes make the novel timely today, 40 years later, and explain why the cyberpunk genre lives on.

When we remember “Neuromancer,” we remember cyberspace and the noir story and characters, and those overshadow the sharp satire. The same applies to Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash.”

I reread “Snow Crash” a few years ago and was surprised and delighted to find much of it is funny. People took the book so seriously.

I loved “Snow Crash.” I admired and respect, but did not enjoy, “Neuromancer.”

Sam Kahn captures the zeitgeist of every decade from the 1880s to today, one paragraph at a time.

1940s — Dapper, cool under pressure, dedicated to duty. Gregory Peck’s Frank Savage in Twelve O’Clock High, chatting amiably with his driver, having one last cigarette, and then tossing it aside, switching to the backseat and becoming all of a sudden a hard-driving, no-nonsense Air Force General.

The FBI created its own cryptocurrency to catch scammers in pump-and-dump schemes. It would be much easier to simply identify the crypto companies that are not scammers. Are there any?

Apple MacOS 15 Sequoia is officially UNIX. Of personal interest to me; my first tech journalism job was at UNIX Today! (the exclamation was part of the name — my fellow UNIX nerds will recognize the punctuation symbol as a “bang.")

When I first heard “every accusation is a confession,” I thought it was just political joke. I’ve been shocked the extent to which it’s the literal truth.

New NRA CEO Doug Hamlin pleaded no contest to brutally murdering a pet cat with his fraternity brothers as a student.

This is just the latest conservative/Republican leader whose history of animal abuse caught up with them. Trump and Vance are right that people are killing and abusing animals, but it’s their own faction doing it.

Normal people hearing about a robot that makes burgers: “Wow! So futuristic!”

People who have worked in restaurants: “Who’s gonna clean it”

— @sidereal@kolektiva.social

I just ordered business cards. What next? Will I send a fax? Will I receive a memo in a pneumatic tube?

Arizona Democrats close a field office after three shooting incidents

Armed militia are hunting federal rescue workers in North Carolina

Right-wing terrorists, led by Trump, are making death threats against local government officials, FEMA workers and even TV weather people in Florida and North Carolina. It’s part of a rising idiocracy.

Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality. If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.

— I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is, by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic

I went door to door to get out the vote for the Democratic Party this afternoon. I did 15 out of 47 houses in the neighborhood. I would have done more but I got into conversations with the neighbors. We have many Harris/Walz signs in front yards.

Antitrust is having a moment.

People understand that corporate looters – not “the economy” or “the forces of history” – are the reason that the businesses where they worked and shopped were destroyed by private equity goons who amassed intergenerational, dynastic fortunes by strip-mining the real economy and leaving behind rubble.

— Lina Khan’s future is the future of the Democratic Party – and America, Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Don’t ever hand your phone to the cops. “Digital IDs make it tempting to leave your driver’s license at home – but that’s a dangerous risk.”

No matter what, teaching people they can add their IDs to their phones means some people will inevitably leave the house without physical ID, and that means creating the opportunity for cops to demand phones — which you should never, ever do. Technical details of your digital ID aside, handing your phone to a police officer grants law enforcement a lot of power over some of your most intimate personal data.

EFF: The Salt Typhoon hack shows there’s no security backdoor that’s only for the “good guys”

Jamie Zawinski: Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today:

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the “What’s Cool” button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca’s Smut Shack.)

What’s the best news portal? Apple News, Google News, Yahoo News, MSN Start, something else?

Rereading replies on Bluesky I now see that I was wrong to compare Florida’s extremist religious government to the Taliban, because it implies that what Florida is doing is un-American, rather than an official action by the third most populous state in the nation.

I’m being called a fuckhead on BlueSky for comparing Florida’s forced-birth extremists to the Taliban.

Apparently, this is offensive to the Taliban.

I’m OK with that.

Harris faces new urgency to explain how her potential presidency would be different from Biden’s.

Bullshit. “Urgency” from whom?

This is an issue for the journalists in the Washington press corps who have been locked in a room smelling each other’s farts for 25 years.

For the rest of us, the choice is clear: One choice is someone who we can hope will be a transformative President — a Roosevelt or Lincoln — someone who can lead the rebirth of a declining nation.

Probably not.

She’ll probably govern as a conventional politician and avoid burning down the house for another four to eight years, at which time we get to do it again.

The other choice is a violent psychopath who smears poop in his hair, along with his couch-fucking sidekick.

So yeah nobody gives a shit if Harris is different from Biden.

Florida’s Taliban government is threatening to criminally prosecute TV stations that air an ad advocating repeal of the state’s fanatical abortion ban. Republican claims to support free speech and Constitutional originalism are cynical lies and always have been.

“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

— Dave Barnhart

The book is about a group of long-lived people who have been living secretly pretending to be just like everyone else.

They reveal themselves, are persecuted, flee in a spaceship with a newly invented FTL drive, and have adventures out in the galaxy with aliens. The book is dedicated to E.E. “Doc” Smith, it’s the most pulpy thing Heinlein ever wrote, and it’s really surprising what outright fun it is to read. I never think of it as being one of my favourite Heinleins, but I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of reading it.

— Pulp adventure and nothing wrong with that: Robert Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children. Jo Walton at Reactor.

Like Walton says, I don’t think of this as one of my favorite Heinleins, but it’s a great read. I haven’t read much super-science from the 1930s, but “Methuselah’s Children,” published in 1941, is a throwback to the era when sci-fi writers were tossing stars around like snowballs.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.

Bill Wells, the Republican running to unseat my Congressional Rep, Sara Jacabs, is going hard for the deranged MAGA vote. Wells has a powerful Florida man vibe.

Instagram and Threads moderation is out of control . I was curious what “crackergate” is. Now I know.

I am baffled by journalists and influencers who were burned by Musk and who ran for shelter to another service run by an amoral billionaire.

This has nothing to do with my politics or ethics. I use Google and Apple products, shop at a chain supermarket, buy from Amazon, and so on. But I don’t stand on a rug when somebody at the edge is waiting to give it a good hard pull.