Mitch's Blog

I used “harrumph” in a work chat this morning. I’m at an age now where I can “harrumph,” and I plan to take full advantage of this privilege.

The Best Apples to Eat Right Now, According to an Apple Reviewer

I love apples. I literally eat an apple a day. My go-to apple is now Cosmic Crisp.

For a few years, I loved Honeycrisps, but I now find them barely edible. I think Honeycrisps are different now.

Reviewer Brian Frange ranks SweeTango as number one. I’ve never had one but I’ll watch for it.

Trump says Illinois governor, Chicago mayor should be jailed

Stephen Miller Cited ‘Plenary Authority,’ Then Paused. Conspiracies Started Flying.

I work on a core team of eight people, five of them women, including the manager. We use ❤️ to acknowledge messages on Teams. But lately, I have been uncomfortable with the ❤️ and I am using a 👍 instead. On the other hand, I don’t want to send a message to my colleagues that I don’t like them — I’m just not comfortable with the ❤️.

Unrelated: I’ve been told I overthink things.

For me, the answers are:

1. Facebook. Sigh.
2. Reddit, but 90% of my activity is reading and the occasional comment
3. Tumblr
4. Mastodon
5. Bluesky is a distant fifth

I don’t like Discord, so I decided to drop all the Discords I participate in. If those communities go to a proper community platform, I’ll gladly rejoin.

I do LinkedIn for professional reasons.

I don’t do Instagram and Threads now, but I might go back.

Here’s where you can follow me elsewhere.

C Spire overcomes AI ‘stigma’ — C Spire accelerated trustworthy AI adoption via a CEO-backed Center of Excellence, a customer-first strategy, and early tooling wins that saved time and blocked threats. My latest on Fierce Network.

Congratulations to Cory Doctorow on the publication of his new book, “Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it,” and his blockbuster profile in The New York Times.

Times writer Joseph Bernstein met with Cory over “an avocado malted and poached eggs at a Lower Manhattan diner:”

Doctorow had arrived to the diner with custom-printed poop emoji stickers, a design that appears on the cover of the new book. He’d won favor with the owners on an earlier visit by explaining that their seltzer maker could be modified to fit a large carbon dioxide tank, rather than frequently replacing smaller, proprietary canisters.

Across Doctorow’s fiction and nonfiction is a central theme: That technology can be used either as a tool of human empowerment and creativity, or repression and control by the state or big corporations. In this vision, tinkering, customization, and individuality are good. Conformity, consolidation, and passive consumption are bad – even if it’s about something as seemingly small as seltzer.

“I am simultaneously extremely excited and hopeful and energized about the possibilities of what technology can do for us as people trying to thrive,” Doctorow said, “and terrified of how bad technology will be for that project if we get it wrong.”

Cory’s theory of enshittification in a nutshell:

First, a platform is good to its users. That may look like Facebook connecting you to all of your friends, or Amazon providing a giant, reliable marketplace for goods.

Then, when enough people have joined a platform that there aren’t any alternatives, the platforms start exploiting their own users to entice businesses. That may look like Facebook providing personal data about its customers to advertisers, or Google prioritizing paid ads over organic search.

Then, when those business customers are also stuck on one dominant platform, the platform puts the screws to them, too: Ad rates skyrocketing on Facebook amid reports of ad fraud, or Amazon sellers having to pay Amazon to be featured on Prime, just to appear high up in search results.

In the end, according to Doctorow, no one is happy except the shareholders of the big platforms.

“All our tech businesses are turning awful,” Doctorow writes in the book. “And they’re not dying. We remain trapped in their carcasses, unable to escape.”

Minnie does zoomies.

This is Tina and Ray’s dog Walter. Tina had about a dozen people over to her house this morning, and Walter greeted every one of them at the front door with a rope-toy in his mouth. Walter excels at tug-of-war.

What’s Wrong With Las Vegas? Prices are rising, international tourism is falling, and visits are down 11% year-over-year.

Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and the city’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread.

By Ben Fritz at the Wall Street Journal:

Los Angeles is full of transplants who moved here to pursue dreams of working in movies and TV. Few earned millions as stars or A-list directors. They build the sets, operate the cameras, manage the schedules and make sure everything looks and sounds perfect. The work isn’t steady, because film shoots end and TV shows get canceled. But established professionals had rarely gone more than a few months between gigs—until now.

The entertainment industry is in a downward spiral that began when the dual strikes by actors and writers ended in 2023. Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and the heart of L.A.’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread.

“This is the first year since 1989 that I haven’t had a show to work on,” said Pixie Wespiser, a 62-year-old production manager and producer who has worked on 36 TV series, including the original “Night Court” and its recent revival. “I look around and I see so many people who are seriously suffering.”

At the end of 2024, some 100,000 people were employed in the motion picture industry in Los Angeles County, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Two years earlier, there were 142,000.

The primary reason is that Hollywood is making less stuff.

…

Thomas Curley won an Oscar recording the sound on 2014’s “Whiplash” and had more job offers than he knew what to do with as recently as 2022. The 49-year-old hasn’t worked since April of last year, save for one week on a movie that was made in Europe but needed to shoot exteriors in San Francisco.

The hardest part isn’t watching his savings wither while he does home improvement projects and hunts for jobs, Curley said. It’s missing the creative camaraderie he has enjoyed for most of his adult life on movie and TV sets.

“Feeling like you’re part of a team that’s making something that can provide joy for millions of people around the world is what drew me here in the first place,” said the native of upstate New York. “That level of purpose is a really hard thing to let go of.”

The mafia hitman who dreamt of being a pop star: The scarcely believable true story of convicted Israeli assassin Avner Harari

Drew Scanlon, the face of the three-panel Blinking White Guy meme, is using his Internet fame to raise money for multiple sclerosis.

Many Germans look back with bafflement at how the country that produced Bach and Goethe succumbed to rule by Hitler and his enabling thugs. Americans may someday look back with bafflement at how the country that produced Washington and Lincoln surrendered to Trump and his enabling thugs.

— Edward Packard

Nine Things I Learned in Ninety Years. By Edward Packard, writer, whose work includes the prototype Choose Your Own Adventure book and many other books in that series, and native son of Huntington, NY, where I grew up.

Rebekah Riess and Bill Kirkos at CNN:

Adults and children alike were pulled from their Chicago apartments, crying and screaming, during a large overnight raid that has left tenants and neighbors shaken.

“I’ve been on military bases for a good portion of my life,” said Darrell Ballard, who lives in the building next door. “And the activity I saw – it was an invasion.”

Ballard recalled seeing residents detained outside the building for hours, after seeing a Black Hawk helicopter flying over the five-story building in the city’s South Shore neighborhood and military-sized vehicles and agents filling the parking lot early Tuesday morning.

…

…. Eboni Watson, said she and others ducked for cover when hearing several flash bangs go off.

“They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other,” Watson told WLS, recalling trucks and military-style vans were used to separate adults from their children.

If ICE doesn’t want to be compared to the Gestapo, they could maybe try not acting like terrorists.

One of my neighbor kids is doing trumpet practice. This is a sentence one hopes never to utter.

We had a great meeting of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club yesterday. It was wonderful to get together with people doing the work of preserving democracy against fascism.