While walking, the dog and I saw this mobile axe-throwing setup. Because is it really the holidays without axe-throwing?
While walking, the dog and I saw this dapper gentleman.
The right believes in absolute free speech for everyone they agree with.
Soon as I saw the headline cross Mastodon, I checked my twitter account. Still active. I feel snubbed.
Thursday Night Purge: Elon Musk’s Twitter Bans Tons Of High Profile Journalists — Mike Masnick at Techdirt.
“… it seems that whatever brakes or controls were in place at the new ‘free speech absolutist’ Twitter have really come off.”
How cable monopolists tricked conservatives into shooting themselves in the face – Cory Doctorow
“No matter how hard conservative culture-war cannon-fodder love big business, it will never love them back.”
While out walking the dog late this afternoon I saw a little four-year-old girl wearing a beautiful green Christmas dress with a red bow on it. She was getting out of the car with her Dad, coming home from daycare I guess.
This was the same little girl I’d seen one morning a week or two ago, getting into the same car with her Dad. That morning she was wearing an elf costume, and was delighted to show it off for me.
So today I said to her, “Don’t you look pretty!” The dog, meanwhile, wanted to say hello, so I took a step or two slowly toward the girl and her father, keeping an eye on the situation.
This time, the girl was not delighted. Her face slowly started to crumple, and she clutched for her Dad’s leg and started to wail. So I backed away.
I don’t think she was afraid. I think she had just had a busy day, with a lot of stimuli and was overwhelmed.
“Kid,” I wanted to say. “A lot of the time I feel just like that.”
Years ago, two friends of mine, one at the CIA, one at the Pentagon, advised me to delete the app. So I don’t want to position the concerns about TikTok as an extreme position. Having a Chinese-owned social media app embedding itself into our lives is not without risk. But it’s worth noting that the things we fear from Chinese software companies—privacy invasions, data selling, democracy disruptions—are things that American social media companies have been doing with our full cooperation. It’s also worth noting that American social media companies have a particular interest in reducing competition from global players, and they’ve never faced this kind of a domestic business threat from a China-based company. In other words, the pressure to ban this outside app could be coming from inside players.
— Dave Pell, NextDraft, Tok Bottom
… a conservative is someone who believes that some of us were born to rule, and the rest of us were born to be ruled over.
— Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers. He was a dick.
The idea that “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product” is utter nonsense. The factor that determines whether a company will treat you like the product is whether they can get away with treating you like the product. A company that is disciplined by neither competition nor regulation will extract value from you in every way it can get away with.
— Cory Doctorow, Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers. He was a dick.
I have just disabled micro.blog’s cross-posting to my main mastodon account, and will instead use micro.blog’s native ActivityPub support. If you want to follow me on Mastodon, you can do so on @mitchw@micro.blog.
This situation is permanent. Until I change my mind. Which could be never. And could be in, like, an hour.
But if you follow me on mastodon, you should probably do it on @mitchw@micro.blog. One reason to do that is that the posts are formatted a little nicer that way.
micro.blog doesn’t show me who’s following me, who likes my posts, and who boosts them. I don’t even get numbers for those statistics. Doing without this information will be character-building for me.
I can’t make up my mind whether I want to cross-post from micro.blog to my primary mastodon account—as I am doing now—or simply use micro.blog’s built-in ActivityPub support. I go back and forth.
When I’m not cross-posting, I boost my micro.blog posts to my mastodon account manually, which maybe sounds like a hassle but it’s actually no big deal
I also can’t decide whether to redirect mitchw.blog to micro.blog.
This back-and-forth is pretty typical for me with regard to blogging and social media. I seem to like fiddling with my setup as much as I like posting.
Crypto Was Always Smoke and Mirrors: The fall of FTX shocked everyone. Except this guy.
The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby.
He’s James Block, and he runs a crypto newsletter called Dirty Bubble Media.
Block, a vehement crypto skeptic, has spent the past 18 months doing forensic blockchain research. He uses open-source tools to follow flows of money between crypto companies, repeatedly demonstrating how shadow banks and nefarious scammers inflate the value of worthless assets in order to generate enormous wealth that exists only on paper.
Charlie Warzel interviewed Block for The Atlantic.
Block: The AMC-meme-stock thing is a good example of how this can happen. People buy the stock of a semi-worthless company because they have this idea about short squeezing, or whatever. They are not financial experts and have a loose or maybe even wrong understanding of how finance works, and want to try to move the market. Crypto takes this abstraction a step further, because there’s nothing linked to it at all. There’s no economic activity in this space. There’s nothing produced by these companies. In fact, it’s a negative-sum game because of the cost of running the blockchains alone—the computational cost is tremendous. The amount of time and money people put into just running these things is tremendous. And they produce nothing of value. There’s a reason these massive companies aren’t all using blockchain for their processes: It is incredibly inefficient. And realistically, who actually wants their financial information public and visible to everybody?
…
Warzel: Do you think most entities in the crypto space are insolvent and know it, and are just pretending right now, post-FTX?
Block: Absolutely. That’s because of what I said earlier about crypto. There’s no value created by any of these companies. It’s all just moving money from Person A to Person B.
Support Railroad Workers Fighting for Humane Conditions and Paid Sick Leave.
The RR workers get NO sick leave and NO regular schedules! They are always under their bosses’ thumb. COVID shows how important sick leave is. Inhumane schedules, and denying sick leave, especially during a pandemic, increases illness, deaths, and disparities, especially among people already vulnerable to Covid.
Sick leave and humane scheduling will not ruin the companies financially. Paid sick leave only amounts to 3.5% of the industry’s soaring profits; in fact, over 50% of their revenue is profit.
— People’s CDC
American healthcare is split into 2 piles:
- Face holes
- Not face holes
— US Healthcare, by Matt Haughey on A Whole Lotta Nothing
h/t kottke.org
Speaking as a former comedian, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Because … have you ever had 10,000 people hate you TO YOUR FACE before? Because I have. And humans aren’t wired for that.
I’d note that the 10,000 people hating me to my face were actually just stonily silent while I ate it on stage while opening for a musical act. And while I laughed it off after .. it was rough. And I’d been working for years at that point. But BOOING?!
And for a *narcissist*? Just saying – expect some serious whiplash crazy coming over the next week.
— John Rogers @jonrog1
h/t jwz
jwz: “I would like to report an absolutely absurd use of metaphor.”
Truck fire leads to huge pile of trash dumped in front of police station.
If you walked by 17th and Valencia on your way to lunch today, you may have noticed an enormous pile of trash steaming on the road just beyond the police station doors.
— Will Jarrett at the San Francisco Mission Local
The service I use to track of TV and movies to watch, trakt.tv, has been down for two days. They post occasional updates on Twitter. The latest just says their main database crashed two days ago at 7:30 am PT, and they’re working around the clock to fix things. Good luck!
Idea for a crime novel about a man who steals a yarmulke from his male sibling. Working title: “His Brother’s Kipah.”
Contrary to all good writing advice, sometimes I like to use baroque, sesquipedalian language where monosyllabic verbiage will do.
Orphaned neurological implants. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr.
Second Sight, a company that makes ocular implants, sold out to another company that doesn’t want to be on that business, leaving users blind and with crippling vertigo. Not the first time a neural implants company has done this to users.
Medtech startups are like any other startup. “… when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company’s assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy.”
The solution: Neural implants should be open hardware, and users should have legally protected right to repair.
Cory:
Opponents of this proposal will say that it will discourage investment in “innovation” in neurological implants. They may well be right: the kinds of private investors who hedge their bets on high-risk ventures by minimizing security and resilience and exploiting patents and user-data might well be scared off of investment by a requirement to make the technology open.
It may be that showboating billionaire dilettantes will be unwilling to continue to pour money into neural implant companies if they are required to put the lives of the people who use their products ahead of their own profits.
It may be that the only humane, sustainable way to develop neural implants is to publicly fund that research and development, with the condition that the work products be standard, open, and replicable
Heavy rain when walking the dog this morning. The dog didn’t like it. Neither did I, but only one of us had a choice about being out there.
A few weeks ago, I was communicating with a 26-year-old colleague, talking about increasing work demands in the face of an oncoming launch. I started to say, “I definitely picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.” Then I stopped myself, because I thought she probably hasn’t seen the movie, and doesn’t know about the national panic in the 1970s where kids were supposedly huffing glue to get high.
Enjoyable article about Generation Z’s struggle to adapt to communication style in the office workplace, particularly on Slack and email.
Gen Z came to ‘slay.’ Their bosses don’t know what that means.. By Danielle Abril at The Washington Post.
Gen Z gets rococo and complex in its use of emoji, and they interpret full sentences ending periods as passive-aggressive.
Like every generation before them, they adapt to the older generations’ communication styles. And the older generations adapt to them.
I was standing on the sidewalk outside the pet store tapping on my phone. An old guy walked by very slowly, pushing a walker, with oxygen cannulae in his nostrils, wearing a jaunty Tyrolean hat.
“What did you do before you had those things?” he said.
I didn’t miss a beat. “Stared at the wall.”
He continued walking slowly on, laughing out loud.
— From my journal, this date in 2016.
How the Hospice Movement Became a For-Profit Hustle.
Half of all Americans now die in hospice care. Easy money and a lack of regulation transformed a crusade to provide death with dignity into an industry rife with fraud and exploitation.
— Ava Kofman, with Doris Burke, at ProPublica and The New Yorker.
I’ve been sleeping better for the past month or so. I attribute to more consistent bedtimes and wake times, reduced life stress and cooler bedroom temperatures. Even though summer nights here in San Diego are cool, our bedroom stays warm, and I think next summer I may return to my energy-wasting summer habit from the early 90s of sleeping with the a/c on, under a heavy blanket.
Common wisdom says you should avoid screen time before bed, but I have not found a correlation between screen time and insomnia.
What you can learn about sleep from truckers
Stephanie Vozza at Fast Company:
[Dean Croke, principal analyst at DAT Freight & Analytics, an on-demand freight marketplace] says the body is programmed to sleep twice a day, at night and again eight hours after you wake. The second sleep should be a 30-minute or a 90-minute nap to take advantage of the sleep cycles and avoid waking during deep sleep.
Having a bedtime is important. Croke recommends to trucking companies that they have drivers start work at the same time every day.
Starting work the same time every day encourages a fixed bedtime.
If you have a week that wears you down, Croke says you can make up for it on the weekend.
“The brain is incredibly resilient,” he says. “You’ll bounce back quickly if you’ve got two periods of good sleep at the end of the week. I call it the ‘two and seven rule.’ Get two periods of consecutive sleep each week to get rid of the sleep debt from the previous week.”
After two periods of good sleep, the brain washes away that sleep debt, and you can start Monday morning fresh.
Sleeping in on weekends runs contrary to a lot of other sleep advice I’ve read, but I believe it. With regard to sleep advice, a lot of folklore gets passed as science.
Freedom of reach is freedom of speech.
The online debate over free speech suuuuucks, and, amazingly, it’s getting worse… Billionaire dilettantes have their own stupid definitions of all kinds of important words like “freedom” and “discrimination” and “free speech.” Remember: these definitions have nothing to do with how the world’s 7,999,997,332 non-billionaires experience these concepts.
— Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr
What if failure is the plan?. danah boyd has been studying social media for decades, with a particular focus on young people and other marginalized groups. She applies her insights to the current state of Twitter, with asides on the global war on terror and the real cause of the collapse of local journalism (it wasn’t the internet, Google, Facebook, or Craigslist that killed journalism. It was financiers hungry for the physical real estate—land—that newspaper offices occupied).
I’ve been viewing events at Twitter as an entertaining shitshow with little real world consequence. It’s fun to watch an arrogant billionaire fail spectacularly and publicly. boyd provides sobering perspective.
It is a cold and blustery day here in San Diego. We had brunch with friends. I walked the dog before the rain started. I am spending the afternoon on my keister, reading and blogging, with Julie and the dog. Then I will have dinner and watch some tv. An altogether splendid day.
Also, Julie bought a bag of googly eyes. ⬅️⬅️⬅️ We professional writers call this “burying the lead.”
Blogging is its own form at this point. It isn’t an essay. Nor is it a scholarly article. It has no length requirements: a blog post can be a sentence, a paragraph, 500 words, twice that, or twenty times that. Neither does blogging come with expectations of frequency. Some folks blog daily; others multiple times a day; others twice a week; others unpredictably, as a kind of clearinghouse for random ideas or thinking out loud.
Blogging is the shaggy dog of internet writing. It’s playful, experimental, occasional, topical, provisional, personal, tentative.
— Brad East, Substack vs. blogging.
Yes to this. Also, blogging and posting to social media are different forms of expression. Twitter is obviously different, with its character limitations.
Interestingly, US newspapers from the 19th and early 20th centuries read like blogs. This was before newspapers standardized on the neutral voice from nowhere. They were livelier and had more personality.
Molly White: On anti-crypto toxicity.
I don’t think anyone should be pressured to be nice to evil people. But I think the belief that anyone who engages in crypto is evil has become rampant, and has been used to justify hate towards people who don’t deserve it. There is no doubt that there are plenty of evil people in crypto, but there are a lot of people in there too who, should you care to dig deeper, are after a lot of the same goals that you might be.
…
If you feel the urge to “cyberbully” someone in crypto, direct it at the powerful players behind crypto projects that are actively taking advantage of the vulnerable. Or, just as reasonably, direct it at the powerful tech executives, venture capitalists, elected representatives, and lobbyists who have contributed to the untenable situation we find ourselves in. Or the policymakers and governmental agencies who have failed to uphold their duty in regulating crypto and enforcing existing regulation that would protect people from rampant fraud. But not the artist who hoped to earn a few bucks selling their digital art in what is otherwise an extremely difficult field, or the person who hoped that maybe a lucky crypto buy could help them dig out of crushing debt just a tiny bit faster.
Twitter to Increase Tweet Character Limit to 4,000, Elon Musk Says. By Sami Fathi at MacRumors.
Where Veteran Rockers Go to Reinvent Themselves. How the Hudson Valley and the Catskills became the home to grunge icons, ex-punks and one-hit wonders. By Sal Cataldi at The New York Times.
“Being a dentist up in Woodstock, with all these great musicians, is a pretty great second act. And what other dentist can say he is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?”
On 2024, Romney won’t back Trump, even if he’s the GOP nominee. By Steve Benen.
When you live in a semi-arid climate and you only drive a couple of times a week, you can go for years without driving in heavy rain, and then you find out your wiper blades have turned into ineffectual shoelaces.
Highbrow Films Aimed at Winning Oscars Are Losing Audiences. By Brooks Barnes at The New York Times. Audiences aren’t coming to theaters for these movies, and nobody really knows why.
We watched the first half of “Spirited” last night, because I thought I was in the mood for a lightweight Christmas movie, but it turned out I was not – or at least not that one. Julie wasn’t feeling it either.
So instead, we watched the first episode of “Three Pines,” which turned out to be very good and entertaining.
“Three Pines” is a murder mystery, like about three quarters of the shows we’ve been watching over the last few years. But this one is not British for a change. It’s set in Quebec, and stars Alfred “Doc Ock” Molina.
So far, it’s like “Northern Exposure” but French and with a murder.
A remake of “Happy Days” would be set in the 2000s.
Yesterday I mistakenly had coffee at four in the afternoon. I thought it was decaf. But I slept soundly last night anyway. Makes me wonder what other superpowers I have evolved.
I saw these ducks do this mildly surprising thing at Lake Murray.
The Los Angeles Police Department is here to serve and protect… the powerful. The rest of you are on your own.
After audio recordings leaked of Los Angeles city lawmakers making shockingly racist statements, police want to find and prosecute the leakers.
LAPD Thinks Best Response To Leaked Recording Of Councilmembers’ Racist Remarks Is Going After Reddit Users. By Tim Cushing at Techdirt.
This letter from Mickey Mantle, recalling his ‘outstanding experience’ at Yankee stadium, is delightfully obscene, as is this 1898 memo to all Major League Baseball teams to reduce cursing.
The 1898 memo was “so expletive-laden and obscene as to be ‘unmailable’ to its intended audience via the postal service, and so was delivered by hand to each of the League’s 12 clubs and their foul-mouthed players.”
(Thanks, Daring Fireball!)
Dyson’s Air Purifying Headphones Will Cost $949, Plus Your Pride. By Andrew Liszewski at Gizmodo.
McSweeney’s: Middle School Party Games, Revised for Thirty-Five-Year-Olds.
Truth or Dare
If a player chooses “truth,” they must reveal how much money they make. If they choose “dare,” they must hand someone their phone and let them look at every tab they have open on their browser.
By Nicole Beckley
The New Yorker: Cory Doctorow Wants You to Know What Computers Can and Can’t Do.
A conversation about the “mediocre monopolists” of Big Tech, the weirdness of crypto, and the real lessons of science fiction.
…
This will all be so great if we don’t screw it up.
By Christopher Byrd.
Cory also talks about the limitations of perfect productivity: Once you’ve pared away all the unimportant tasks in your life, everything left is important and there’s nothing left to pare.
Fortunately, this is not a problem for me. I waste plenty of time!
I’m very impressed that Cory was featured in the New Yorker.
I saw this dapper gentleman at the park today.
The promise and the peril of ChatGPT. By Casey Newton.
Reading about the potential for abuse here, I found myself thinking about the classic science fiction story “A Logic Named Joe,” in which author Murray Leinster predicts the consumer internet in 1946. One of the computers on the network gets a little wonky and starts answering questions on how to commit murder.
People are already using ChatGPT to get answers to potentially lethal questions.
Less significantly, ChatGPT could potentially be the end of Google and industries that have grown around it—advertising and search engine optimization. Google gives search results, but ChatGPT provides answers.
Yes, It’s Censorship: Stop picking that nit, it’ll never heal. A few big companies, including Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Twitter, monopolize public discourse, setting the rules for what we’re allowed to talk about.
Cory Doctorow:
The decision to make our “digital public square,” into a privatized, monopoly-friendly corporate shopping mall whose owners can wield the power of the state against rivals who dare to compete with them may not violate the First Amendment, but it sure as hell isn’t good for free expression.
Ancient Rome did not fall. It was destroyed from within, by the same forces we see playing out in America today. By Barry Gander, a self-described “Canadian from Connecticut,” on Medium.
While walking, the dog and I saw these houses with the holiday spirit, and this car 🦮📷
Eugene from Wednesday is my role model. I’m going to wear a retainer and keep bees.
A new Indiana Jones movie, starring 80-year-old Harrison Ford? Sure, why not?
I’ve seen criticism of the trailer and of all the movies after “Raiders.” And much of that criticism is valid.
But the best reaction to the trailer was from Jason Kottke: “Ok fine I will watch one more Indy movie.”
I have enjoyed every Raiders movie, even “Temple of Doom” and “Crystal Skull.” I have no doubt we will watch this one and enjoy it.
The parts I enjoyed in “Temple of Doom” were the little kid and the girlfriend, who screamed very fetchingly.
Marion stole the movie in “Crystal Skull.” She had all the good scenes.
About that trailer: The bullwhip scene is classic Indiana Jones: “Look at me I am doing this swashbuckling thing… Oh shit that was a really bad idea.” All conveyed with his face and body language.
That scene is a visual response to the swordsman scene in the first movie, only this time it’s the other guys who have the guns.
Proud Boy terrorists threaten Columbus, Ohio, drag queen story hour, school asks for protection, police nope out.. On MetaFilter.
Far more children have been molested by youth pastors than by drag queens, as Dan Savage points out.
jwz: Like Zoinks
Seth Godin: Confidence doesn’t help win the lottery. There are lots of lotteries in our lives. Always have a Plan B.
One of the best blogs on the Internet. is back. I’m glad to see Jason Kottke has returned to blogging. But I’m sorry to learn he’s experiencing chronic pain. That’s hard.
Karl Bode at Techdirt:
… policymakers freaking out about the Chinese potentially getting access to TikTok user data are the exact same people who’ve fought tooth and nail against the U.S. having even a baseline privacy law for the Internet era. These are the exact same folks that created a data broker privacy hellscape completely free of accountability, and advocated for the dismantling of most, if not all, regulatory oversight of the sector. The result: just an endless parade of scandals, hacks, and breaches.
Now those exact same folks are breathlessly concerned when just one of countless bad actors (China) abuse a zero-accountability privacy hellscape they themselves helped to create.
Dave Pell is on a roll on NextDraft today:
”At 8:10 p.m., more than nine hours after his family reported him missing, a passing tanker spotted the man near the mouth of the Mississippi River and alerted the Coast Guard." NYT (Gift Article): A Man Fell From a Cruise Ship. And Survived. “Mr. Grimes, whose family described him as an exceptional swimmer, had treaded in 65- to 70-degree water for hours, withstanding rain, 20-knot winds and three- to five-foot waves in the Gulf of Mexico, where bull sharks and blacktip sharks are common.” (That actually sounds better than how I imagine cruises.)
Also:
”To prepare for the depths of winter when food is scarce, many animals slow down, sleep through the cold or migrate to warmer locales. Not the common shrew. To survive the colder months, the animal eats away at its own brain, reducing the organ by as much as a fourth, only to regrow much of brain matter in the spring." This is not unlike my experience being on and then getting off Twitter.
Elon Musk gets mail. “Akiva Cohen, an attorney representing 22 laid-off Twitter employees, sent a letter to Twitter and Elon Musk (shared, of course, on Twitter): ‘If basic human decency and honor isn’t enough to make you want to keep your word, maybe this will…. ‘” By John Gruber on Daring Fireball.
Elon is getting to the “… and find out” bit.
“Robert Moses Is A Racist Whatever.”
Jason Kottke blogs about an interview with Robert Caro, author of “The Power Broker,” a definitive biography of urban planner Robert Moses.
Moses’ racist vision for New York transformed the city, literally paving over Black neighborhoods with highways.
Moses came along with his incredible vision, and vision not in a good sense. It’s like how he built the bridges too low.
I remember his aide, Sid Shapiro, who I spent a lot of time getting to talk to me, he finally talked to me. And he had this quote that I’ve never forgotten. He said Moses didn’t want poor people, particularly poor people of color, to use Jones Beach, so they had legislation passed forbidding the use of buses on parkways.
Then he had this quote, and I can still hear him saying it to me. “Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.” So he built 180 or 170 bridges too low for buses.
…
Robert Moses had always displayed a genius for adorning his creations with little details that made them fit in with their setting, that made the people who used them feel at home in them. There was a little detail on the playhouse-comfort station in the Harlem section of Riverside Park that is found nowhere else in the park. The wrought-iron trellises of the park’s other playhouses and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves.
The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse-comfort station are decorated with monkeys.
One detail I remember from stories about Moses: When he died in 1981, nobody attended his funeral. Even white people hated him.
What weird food habits did you have in your family when you were a kid? If you’re a parent, how would your kids answer that question?
I’m remembering that one summer when I went to day camp where the kids brought their lunches. My mom made a big batch of hamburgers on Sunday, and froze them, and so I had a desiccated frozen hamburger for lunch every weekday.
On good days the hamburgers were fully thawed.
My mom was great, and she was a wonderful mother, but she was not a good cook most of the time.
Disney’s new neural network can change an actor’s age with ease. The “production ready” neural net makes actors younger or older for film or TV. By Benj Edwards at Ars Technica
This made me happy this morning
This morning while walking the dog I saw one of the neighbor men in front of his house, getting ready to take his three-year-old daughter to school. I shouted, “Good morning,” as we do, and he smiled a little and nodded back, distracted.
I saw the little girl. I shouted, “Good morning!” to her.
She struck a pose, facing me, standing up straight, with her arms stretched out at her sides and her head held high.
Then I saw that she was wearing red tights, and a green top with triangular notches along the bottom.
“You’re an ELF!” I shouted, and she grinned broadly and nodded.
I hope your day is as happy as hers.
How can the Democrats claim to be pro-union and pro-labor and also do this?
The bill that the House passed forcing railway workers back to work requires the workers to take a deal they voted to reject before, giving them only one sick day a year.
US House Passes Bill Forcing Railway Workers Not to Strike
Ian Welsh:
People’s backs are to the wall. Since about 1980, the predominant policy in the US has been to immiserate workers, especially wage workers. This was possible because the New Deal and post-war eras had made workers well enough off that they had some surplus which could then be stolen from them.
But now a lot of people are up against the wall. Many full-time workers, especially at places like Amazon, live in their cars or tents, for example. There is nothing left to give.
People with nothing to lose are dangerous.
I have become fastidious about washing my hands, maybe even OCD, but I have also decided the dog and cats are sanitary, and I am still entirely clean if I have been petting the animals and letting the dog lick my hands and face.
That’s how it works. It’s just science.
I have become fastidious about washing my hands, maybe even a little OCD, but I have also decided the dog and cats are sanitary, and I am still entirely clean if I have been petting the animals and letting the dog lick my hands and face.
That’s how it works. It’s just science.
“You’ve got to vaccinate people against the hate”
MetaFilter: In Russia, China, Iran, and the United States, autocracy is stumbling and liberal democracy is looking resilient. (But in the US at least, the far right isn’t taking no for an answer.)
Noah Smith: “… although liberal democracy is the GOAT, each generation is driven to fuck around and find out.”
Also Smith: “People love to think of themselves as the inheritors of a great civilization. But I’d rather think of myself as the ancestor of a great civilization yet to come!”
Also Smith: We’re entering another period of conflict between great world powers. In those conflicts, there are no good guys, only bad guys and less bad guys. Hopefully, we’ll be the less bad guys this time.
A friend reminds me that I started getting healthy and fit after I attended a science fiction convention in around 2007, and saw that a third of the fans in attendance were using mobility scooters. I saw that for my own not-too-distant future if I didn’t lose weight and start exercising.
And so I did.
A few years after that convention, I attended another and was satisfied when I climbed a short flight of stairs two at a time.
That’s not something I’d do today. My wind and muscles would be able to do it easily, but my knees would protest.
Hello again, micro.blog! It’s me, Mitch Wagner, getting a fresh start on a new blog.
If you follow me on atomicrobotlive you can keep right on doing that, or you can just follow me here. I’ll explain what I’m doing later. I’m still figuring it out myself.
Wherever you go, go with all your heart. 📷
27 years in California and sometimes I’m still amazed by palm trees. 📷
Nice work, neighbors. 📷
Would you like to see a one-minute video of Minnie running around the backyard and digging? Of course you would. 📷
Lake Murray in the morning, San Diego, CA, 7:40 am PT. A Day In The Life #adayinthelife
My home office needs a name. I am choosing between:
- The Room Where It Happens
- The Cockpit
- The Boom Boom Room
- The Dangerous Exotic Bamboo Tiki Lounge and Bowling Alley
Robert A. Heinlein’s Red Planet was the gateway drug to books for me. My 3rd grade teacher, Miss Kaufman had a little area of bookshelves in the corner of her classroom. I read Red Planet and a biography of Helen Keller and was hooked.
I told that story on Facebook a few years ago and in 2018 I heard from Miss Kaufman. She said she remembered me well. Holy crap. Mind-blowing for me. I imagine it was for her too – she remembered an 8-year-old boy and now she was messaging with a 57-year-old man, who was typing to her from a hotel room in Florida. But I expect she’s used to that by now.
I think my Heinlein addiction finally subsided, within the last three years or so. The supply is exhausted – he’s not writing any more – and I’ve reread everything a million times. I still do love history though.
There was a new Heinlein published in the last year or two – a previously lost manuscript – “Pursuit of the Pankera.” Supposedly pretty good, but I’m just not highly motivated to read it. It’s an alternate version of “Number of the Beast,” one of my least favorite of his novels.
This house has a dinosaur in the yard. The dinosaur wears a nametag. His name is Burt. 📷
Out of curiosity, I rewatched “Dance of the Dwarfs,” a 1983 low-budget horror-adventure that was in heavy rotation on cable TV around the time it was released. Back then, cable TV didn’t have a lot of content to choose from, so you saw a lot of the same thing over and over. I ended up seeing this movie a few times then, and then not since.
It’s based loosely on “The African Queen.” And I mean, very loosely. A then-famous actress named Deborah Raffin plays an anthropologist, who hires drunk helicopter pilot Peter Fonda to fly into the jungle to investigate legends of a race of pygmies. The cast also features John Amos as a witch doctor. The location is unspecified, but I expect it’s Latin America based on the supporting cast of Latino stereotypes – bandits, street urchins, servants and a couple of hookers.
I don’t know if it’s a good movie, but I enjoyed seeing it again. Raffin is leggy and gorgeous. She does what the role requires of her. Fonda plays a down-on-his-luck drunk very well, in a stained luau shirt and tropical white pants; you can almost smell him. There are a couple of nice comedy bits, some decent action sequences. Raffin screams piercingly, but she is also an expert shot and thinks her way out of trouble. The monsters, when finally revealed, look cheap. Raffin and Fonda have no chemistry – you can understand why she comes to like and respect him, but not why she falls in love with him, other than that’s what the script requires.
The director, Gus Trikonis, did TV and exploitation movies. He started his career as a dancer in the movie “West Side Story,” and was Goldie Hawn’s first husband. His latest IMDB credit is 2001, on a TV series with the delightfully cheesy name. “18 Wheels of Justice.”He does a good job on this movie, there are some nice shots of the helicopter in flight with the jungle below. And the helicopter itself is gorgeously decrepit.
I watched the movie over several days. It goes well with lunch. I do not expect to watch this again; there are too many other options for entertainment today. But if it’s 1983 and you’re looking for something to watch, “Dance of the Dwarfs” is a good choice.
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We don’t get many majestic trees like this in San Diego. 📷
We’ve been living in this house more than 20 years and last night Julie showed me an extremely useful lightswitch which I had previously been ignorant of.
My brothers and me having a Tarantino moment at Niagara Falls around 1971. 📷
I think the white car was our car. Dad liked a muscle car. It was an era when you could get a family-size muscle car.
Even when I was a little boy, I understood the importance of personal style. Around 1964. 📷
Just look at this beautiful house we saw on a trip to Athens, Ohio, to visit family a few years ago. Just look at it. 📷
African safari journal: Homeward bound
June 2019 Our final Africa safari stop was Little Kulala Desert Lodge, in Sossusvlei, the Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia. We took another small charter flight, from Hoanib Valley Camp – or, rather the nearest airstrip from that camp, which was about two hours’s drive away from the camp itself. Sossusvlei Geluk Airstrip is the usual empty airstrip, just a cleared length of land with one or two sheds. As at our other camps, one of the staff picked us up in a Toyota truck converted for passengers, enclosed but not air conditioned. The weather was another scorcher of a day with bright sunlight, even though it is the African winter. We were accompanied by the pilot of the plane, Graham, who was staying at the lodge overnight. About 15 minutes in, Graham conversed with the driver of the truck, Alfred, in Afrikaans, and then Alfred turned the truck around. Graham confessed that he was supposed to start a beacon on the plane to let his company know he’d arrived safely, and he’d forgotten to do that. When we returned to the airfield, Graham did that thing and then we turned the truck around back toward the camp.
I have to confess, we were road-weary at that point and ready to come home, but we still had four more nights in Africa ahead of us plus 28 hours on planes and in airports. And now as I write this a week after our return, I miss being in Africa.
There were only two things you could do in Sossusvlei that appealed to us: Seeing and climbing the majestic dunes, and visiting the Seasrim Canyon. That’s meant a two-night stay would have been ideal; we stayed for three and so we had some time on our hands. And because of the heat, Kulala Desert Lodge was not the ideal place to sit around and rest. There are other things to do in the area, but they did not appeal to us: Ride e-bikes and fat bikes, or go on a wine tasting. You can also take a balloon ride, but that would have cost $1,000, which seemed like a lot for a short experience. I’ve ridden on hot air balloons twice, once with Julie, it’s wonderful but we weren’t interested this time around.
Aside: I wrote all my other journal entries in Africa, with unreliable or no Internet access. Now I’m home with our lovely, home WiFi. And I can just look things up if I don’t know what they are. The name of the lodge we stayed at? The name of the canyon? Pow! Type in a few characters in a browser and there’s your answer. [Update from 2020: I wrote this journal entry in July 2019, a few weeks after returning home, based on notes on the trip.]
The lodge is laid out similarly to the other places we stayed, with a main building in the center, done up like a giant hut, containing the dining room, bar, outdoor seating, and offices and reception desk. The entrance is in front of that building. Spread out on either side were 23 cabins for guests, which are actually big, furnished canvas tents on platforms, as with Xakanaxa and other places we stayed. The lodge calls the cabins “kulalas,” from an African word for sleep. Because of the number of cabins, service was more hotel-like and impersonal; we enjoyed the family feeling at the smaller lodges we stayed at, such as Xakanaxa and Hoanib Valley, and liked Kulala Lodge less.
The dining room has big plate glass windows overlooking the flat desert plain, which seems to stretch off for miles to the distant mountains. We’d been to several African deserts by then, as well as the Anza-Borrego Desert at home, and each one seemed more austere and barren than the last. The shrubs at Sossusvlei are sparse and many tens of yards apart. There are few other animals there, just some birds and lonely impala and kudu.
The big draw at Sossusvlei, though, are the dunes. They are just piles of loose sand, hundreds of feet high and miles long, marching across the desert. One of the highlights of the visit is climbing one of the biggest dunes, called “Big Daddy.” 130 meters high. It’s strenuous, like walking on the beach but also climbing. The sand fights you on every step. And you’re standing on a relatively narrow path, with a steep slope on either side. The path is wide enough that I was only worried a little bit about falling. I was worried a little more about just getting down. I’d been assured by both tourists and guides that getting down is easy and fun, but I was skeptical; I have a lousy sense of balance and anything involving anything like climbing is tricky for me.
Climbing up the dune you have a long string of hikers both in front of and behind you. It isn’t crowded, but if you’re like me and you move slowly, you’ll be passed a couple of times. Like I said, it’s not crowded, but I got to thinking about the famous photos of climbers lined up to ascend to the summit of Mount Everest, like people waiting to get on a bus.
Despite the crowds, tourism isn’t a problem for the dunes, because every night the wind blows and cleans up the footsteps and repairs the damage. The dunes are like new every morning. That’s the theory at least.
I got about two thirds of the way up the dune and decided I had gone far enough. I wasn’t tired, but I’d spent enough time on the climb and didn’t have anything to prove. Also, I didn’t want to keep the other people on our bus waiting. So I turned to my right and went down the steep slope.
And it really was fun going down. I fell twice, but backwards, on my butt, and the sand is so soft it didn’t hurt a bit and I just popped back up. Both my feet were sunk in sand halfway up to my knees, so walking was more like wading and slow going. After I got about two thirds of the way down, I found a rhythm and the rest of the way down was like gliding slowly. Delightful!
We don’t intend to return to Sossusvlei – we feel like we’ve seen and done everything we want to there – but if we somehow do find our way back I want to do that climb again, and this time go all the way up to the summit and do the walk down properly.
In addition to Big Daddy, the attraction next to the dune is Deadvlei, a white clay pan that’s so dry that nothing lives there. Some trees are still standing, 800 years after they died. We were instructed not to touch the trees, lest they shattered.
After lunch, we decided to skip the afternoon activities, and just sat around the cabin in the heat.
The next morning, we were up early, and off to the Seasrim Canyon, which is about 100 feet deep and the third biggest canyon in the world.
We had the guide to ourselves that morning – and the entire canyon, too. Our guide said most people do the dunes in the morning and the canyon in the afternoon, when it can be excuse-me-pardon-me crowded. But we did not see another soul on the climb down and nearly the whole climb up, with just a lot of magnificent geology to ourselves. By that time we were overwhelmed by magnificent nature and a little burned out on it, but we still had enough awe left in our souls to be stirred, at least a little bit.
In the afternoon I began to get cabin fever, and decided to go for a walk along the dry riverbed that the lodge is built alongside of. It was perfectly safe, and a lodge-approved activity. I walk for exercise in a park at home, and this was similar, only dryer, and hotter, and instead of being accompanied by our dog, I had a fly following me much of the way and trying to land on my face. Festus, our guide previously, said flies there don’t bite; they’re trying to drink water from our faces. That must have been one thirsty fly. Along the route, I realize I did not have any solo selfies from the trip, which is like a violation of international law, so I took a couple. The fly photobombed one of them, landing on my face. A flyless African selfie from that afternoon is now my default online profile pic.
The next morning, we began the long journey home, which took two or three days. The nine-hour time difference and 28+ hour flight time from Johannesburg to San Diego make it confusing as to how much time has actually elapsed. The first step was back to the airfield, where we waited a half-hour in the truck for the “ground pilot” – the airfield’s one employee - to show up and open the gate. We didn’t mind; by then we were used to how things are done in Africa. Prior to our trip, I’d talked to a colleague who’d lived six months in South Africa; she said be prepared for things that should be easy to be difficult, and things you’d expect to be difficult to be easy. That stuck with me in incidents such as the wait for the ground pilot to show up. The plane wasn’t going anywhere; we were the only passengers.
We flew a bit more than an hour to the Windhoek Airport, and were met at the gate by our old pal Antone, who had driven us from Windhoek to Okonjima a week or so earlier. He waited with us to check in, poor bastard – there was a very long line and he had somewhere else to be.
The flight to Johannesburg was a commercial flight, and getting on the plane was the end of our safari adventures, because one-hour commercial flight in Africa is not too different from one in the US or Europe.
We arrived in Johannesburg, breezed through customs, and checked into the City Lodge. We were scheduled to get up the next morning for an 8 am private, guided city tour, but neither of us were excited for that. When we’d had Internet access, I’d checked Yelp and TripAdvisor and Google for things to do in Johannesburg and didn’t come up with much of anything. The Apartheid Museum got rave reviews, but it sounded depressing to me. I wanted to see Soweto, which had been the only place Blacks were allowed to live during apartheid, but Julie wasn’t enthusiastic about that. So we put off the tour until 10:30 am so we could pack at leisure.
The driver picked us up in a town car with leather seats, a far cry from the open, battered trucks we’d been bouncing around in for weeks. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of South Africa, Johannesburg, and its history. The one other place we wanted to see, other than Soweto, was Maboneng, which travel guides billed as a bohemian shopping district.
The driver, whose name was Seabo, offered to take us to Soweto in the morning and then to a native African place for lunch. I said hell yeah, because I was always on the lookout for native foods – nearly all the foods we’d eaten on this trip were European, although nearly all of it was delicious – but Julie said no. I thought for a moment and realized that it was not a great idea to sample street food in an unknown cuisine a few hours prior to getting on a plane for a 28-hour flight. So I passed too. Instead, we went to Maboneng, and Seabo dropped us off for lunch and a bit of walking round.
Maboneng was disappointing. It was crowded and a little threatening, like much of the rest of Johannesburg we’d seen, with a few cheap-looking shops and stands set up selling crafts that looked no different than the kind of thing you’d find at the airport. There were also a few Ethiopian and other African restaurants and a coffee cafe, which would have been tempting to me on another day, but like I said I didn’t want to try any strange cuisines just before a long flight. So we ate at an Italian restaurant/sports bar that was actually very good, and friendly. When we got out the neighborhood looked friendlier too; I even spotted one man who looked local, dangling a big camera from his hand. People don’t dangle big cameras in a dangerous neighborhood. Not for long at least.
Seabo returned shortly after lunch and took us to Soweto.
Soweto, he explained, is home to 1.2 million people, which makes it a respectable city within the city. It has neighborhoods of great poverty – shantytowns and slums made of scrap metal – which, Seabo noted, are all that you see in photos and video of Soweto. There are also middle class homes, and even affluent residences. Even the affluent residences seemed cheek-by-jowl close to each other, and small to me, though Julie said she thought some of them were larger. They had high fences around them, suggesting a high crime rate. And you’d see poverty and affluence very close – a shed or just open air tables selling a hodgepodge of merchandise, just a few steps from a scavenged home. Hand-painted advertisements adorned walls, touting businesses; I noted a lot of building contractors. Businesses mingled with housing. If there were any zoning laws in Soweto, I didn’t see evidence of it.
I saw livestock grazing in empty lots, cattle and goats. In the middle of the city!
Seabo lived in Soweto; he seemed to like it.
Seabo offered to stop to let us out at Nelson Mandela’s and Desmond Tutu’s homes, he seemed disappointed when we didn’t get out. But that street was dense with panhandlers, buskers, and other street people, who seemed aggressive; not violent, but not inclined to take no for an answer. Julie and I were not in the mood to run that kind of gauntlet.
We arrived back at the hotel at 3:30 pm, said goodbye to Seabo – who really was a good guide; we were just bad tourists – and made our way to airline check-in.
All in all I was not impressed with Johannesburg. It seemed to me the kind of place you’d only ever go to if you for financial reasons. Maybe, like Seabo, you were a poor villager looking to make a living. Maybe you’re a millionaire looking to be a billionaire. Or maybe you’re just somebody in the middle.
And then we were on our way home. I barely slept on the 28+-hour flights, watched something like five movies, two seasons of The Good Place, then slept most of the next 24 hours when we arrived home. Several days later I drove a car for the first time in a month; I did not hit anyone or go off the road.
We talk a lot about going back. We went to Africa really on a whim; it felt like a fun adventure. And it was, and we’ve fallen in love with it. Maybe in three years, if we can afford it financially. I’d like to see gorillas and chimpanzees, visit the Olduvai Gorge where the first people on Earth lived millions of years ago, see Cape Town, spend a day each in Windhoek and Swakopmund, spend more time in Botswana, get Festus to guide us around. Africa is a big, beautiful continent with so much to do! 🌍📓
"Dance of the Dwarfs"
In the early 1980s cable movie channels didn’t have much inventory and they’d play the same movie over and over, multiple times a day. And if you had the TV on for digital wallpaper, you’d sometimes end up watching the same movie a few times over the course of a few weeks.
One of those movies, for me, was called “Dance of the Dwarfs," and I quite liked it. It was a ripoff of “The African Queen,” about an uptight, beautiful woman anthropologist who hires a drunk, down-on-his-luck helicopter pilot for an expedition into the jungle to find a mythical race of monster dwarves. Or dwarfs. The helicopter pilot is played by Peter Fonda.
I have no idea if the movie was any good. I fear not, but I’d like to watch it again to find out – and oho, I see it is uncut and remastered on YouTube!
The co-star was an actress named Deborah Raffin, who I remember thinking at the time was a recognizable B-list star and I now don’t recognize much of anything she was in before this movie. Or afterward.
The movie also featured John Amos in a supporting role.
The preview DEFINITELY looks low-budget, with some cheesy acting and cringey dialogue … but kind of charming?
I remember the scene where she shoots all his liquor bottles. A woman who was adept with a gun was a novelty in movies at that time. To my uneducated eye, she seems to be using a proper shooting stance, not waving her gun around like most movie characters.
I’ll see if I can get Julie to watch the movie with me. I’m not hopeful.
Later: I rewatched it. Not bad.
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I’m about halfway through reading the very first Perry Mason novel, “The Case of the Velvet Claws,” published 1932. Perry has virtually no inner life. The same for his supporting characters. Supposedly it’s this way throughout the series. We never learn Perry’s backstory, his hopes and dreams, his anxieties and fears. He just solves crimes and protects clients.
Perry Mason seems similar to Nero Wolfe. You get more backstory from Nero Wolfe. But as with Perry Mason, neither Nero, nor his little created family of employees and allies, suffers the kinds of doubts, fears and neuroses the rest of us do. They’re singularly focused on their work.
Today we’d consider that a terrible writing flaw. I’m enjoying it. If I want neurosis and anxiety my own brain keeps me in good supply.
In the Perry Mason novel, we’ve already had a scene where Perry’s femme fatale client throws herself at him. That’s mandatory in any noir novel. She’s gorgeous and sexy and lets it be known that she is fully available to him. I’ve seen that scene a few times in the Spenser novels, where Spenser was always tempted but able to muster the strength of will to resist. Perry isn’t tempted the least little bit. (Maybe he has a thing with Paul Drake. Heh.)
Perry Mason in the novels has little relationship with the recent HBO TV series and I’m OK with that.
A colleague on a Zoom meeting this morning shared his Mac screen with red numbers in the dock for App Store and operating system updates, and now I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight.
Thank goodness his battery was fully charged.
We are enjoying “Endeavour.” It gives me an idea for a Star Trek series: “Ensign Kirk.”
This is the story of a young Starfleet Ensign, fresh from the Academy, on his first assignment. He’s a rising star of Starfleet but that doesn’t mean he’s given special treatment; it just means expectations are higher for him. He’s just another junior officer, considered expendable, sent on dangerous missions to spare more valuable officers.
The first episode finds him on his first day of duty out of Starfleet Academy graduation, assigned to a new ship, where he meets and befriends an older doctor named Leonard McCoy.
Younger versions of other characters from the original series will put in occasional appearances, but mainly this is Kirk’s show, with support from McCoy.
This is not the Kirk of the 80s and 90s movies, who broke the law and disobeyed orders. And this is especially not the Kirk of the J.J. Abrams movies, who was a spoiled-rotten privileged fratboy.
This is the Kirk of the original series, where Starfleet is an egalitarian institution and you get ahead on merit, not connections. Jim Kirk is just a plain old farmboy from Iowa who got into Starfleet on talent and hard work, and who respects and obeys regulations and the chain of command (but doesn’t have to like it). He’s a model officer, able to act independently, improvise or obey orders when appropriate.
Like the young Endeavour Morse, Jim Kirk is hungry and ambitious. He yearns to become the youngest person to command a Constitution-class starship and hustles and throws himself into danger to fulfill that dream.
I got this idea from Endeavour and also from a novel I read when I was in my teens, “Ensign Flandry,” by Poul Anderson. Anderson was a prolific, popular and highly respected midcentury science fiction and fantasy writer. He wrote a series of novels in the 50s or so about an interstellar secret agent named Dominick Flandry – like James Bond, a thousand years in the future. This novel was about Flandry on his first assignment. Great fun!
In the 90s, Justin Hall was a rich kid with distant parents and a need for attention. He fell in love with the Internet and started sharing intimate details of his life on his website, links.net. He was, maybe, the very first personal blogger, and paved the way for legions of people to share their own intimate details on Facebook on YouTube. He produced an autobiographical documentary in 2015.
overshare: the links.net story
Today, he is apparently in a committed relationship, with young kids, and he’s a cannabis entrepreneur because of course he is.
Hall’s philosophy of radical personal exhibitionism was commonplace in the 90s and early 2000s. I admired it but never participated myself, and now I’m glad I stayed away. These days, I try to be extremely active online in ways that don’t compromise my, and other people’s privacy.
I never participated in the radical transparency internet culture when that idea was popular, and now I’m far more careful about privacy than I used to be.
For example, a few weeks ago, a cousin shared a photo of my mother as a young woman, dressed up and looking pretty for a wedding. My Mom was older when she started a family, so this is really a view into another life for her.
I thought for a moment about sharing the photo online, but then decided, no, that one’s just for me and friends and family.
I get relaxation from certain kinds of low-stakes digital activities, requiring little or no thought, like organizing email newsletters and suchlike.
In the past I’ve beaten myself up about that, considering it wasted time.
Now I think instead I need to make it work for me. Because sometimes you need to unwind.
People collect stamps, right?