Author: Stagger Lee

So Apple has announced the PowerBeats Pro. They’re basically AirPods on steroids; at $249 the cost is a solid $90 more than the AirPod equivalents with no wireless charging (of which more in a minute) but the battery life, sound quality, noise isolation and customizable fit are all supposed to be far superior. Which makes sense, on paper. The charging case might be too big for a pocket, but at 9 hours that might not be a problem (especially if you can go one ear at a time or something, or charge all day at work, or…

Actually, let’s think about this. I bought the BeatsX for $100 about a year and a half ago, and for the most part I’ve been reasonably happy with them. The little wing things and ear tips mean they fit reasonably well and keep other sounds out, the fact they hang around my neck makes me less wary of losing one accidentally, and the fact they charge with a Lightning cable makes it easy to use them with my phone because I can top up from the same cable. But the BeatsX don’t quite make it through a full day, and you definitely want to make sure they are fully charged by 4 PM if you’re heading up to the city.

And the annoying thing is – that’s $100 for, right now, a little over 18 months of use. How long can I expect these to last? Given that the battery life is already not what it was, how long can you expect any regularly-used built-in battery device to last anymore? We got acclimated to buying a new phone every two years, and then when we started keeping phones longer than two years, we had to pony up for battery replacements to keep them viable. How about AirPods? Will you get two years for $160? Three years? Can you reasonably expect the Powerbeats Pro to last almost twice as long as the AirPods? And for goodness sakes, will any of these things ever have battery replacement as an option so we don’t keep throwing away more electronics?

Ultimately, there’s a good case here that you just need to pay the price for something that has a replaceable battery and can be used with a cord in a pinch. I don’t know offhand where that might be found, and there’s the age old problem of not wanting to carry big over-the-ear cans everywhere, but it drives home a point I’ve thought about for a while: it’s getting harder and harder to put money on things you know aren’t going to last. This isn’t $19 for a replacement level pair of corded earbuds, this is the same money I paid to replace my iPhone SE. $249 is more than I’ve spent on most phones in my life. 

Still, I suppose I should be grateful they came out at all. The AirPower fiasco – Apple cancelling a product without ever shipping it, over a year after announcing it and less than a week after having it featured in the instructions for the new AirPods – is one of those things where you can say without fear of contradiction “this never happened when Steve was around.” Folks will point to the white iPhone, and that was indeed slow off the mark, but 1) it was a colorway rather than a whole new product and 2) eventually it shipped. We’re still waiting on the alleged new Mac Pro. The HomePod took forever to show up. The original AirPods were delayed past the holiday season, and the new ones were allegedly held for the AirPower mat which never showed up. Apple announces things now with nothing but a season, if that, as an anticipated ship date. A far cry from the days of “this is available for purchase today,” even if FCC filings and Chinese supply chain leaks make that sort of thing impossible now.

I was just about able to commit to $99 for a pair of wired Bluetooth earbuds. I don’t know if I can go over double that, especially when nothing seems to last more than a couple of years anymore. That’s bad arithmetic.

After months and years of being absolutely airtight, the Mueller team is slowly starting to leak in response to the media’s credulity in accepting the Barr whitewash. They’re making it known that the report is not an exoneration, that it looks bad for Trump, and that – critically – they explicitly prepared executive summaries and abstracts that could be quickly or immediately made public and were not.

It’s not surprising. We all knew that Barr was there for one reason: stonewall the report. And while it might seem surprising that a credulous media bought the spin without question, why wouldn’t they? After all, “there was nothing to see here” is not only an exoneration of Trump, but of their own indolence in failing to pursue or report on this. If there was no collusion and no obstruction, then they can’t have been asleep at the switch, right? 

Which is why the clapback is coming now. And loudly. The press in this country has either been complicit or afraid of its own shadow, and at some point any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. The first duty of journalism was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. That includes comfortable journalists.

So Theresa May has apparently finally caved and agreed to start meeting with Jeremy Corbyn to cobble together some kind of compromise that can reach 325 votes. This was inevitable, because there was never any hope of doing this deal purely within the Tory party, and the fact that it took her until four days past the original deadline to accept this is the final indictment of what a horrible job she did. But this is also a bigger deal inasmuch as it concedes the Tories are broken beyond repair. They rode the tiger for years and it finally ate them.

I still think we end up with no deal, just because it’s the same problem as when the GOP couldn’t pick an alternative to Trump: there were so many options and everybody thought their alternative could be the last one standing, so nobody would prune down the decision tree enough to get behind one alternative to the worst case. And then the worst case won by default. I see no reason that May, the Tories or the Brits are any brighter than Americans.

Oh yeah…the EU also has to go along with all of this nonsense, including a second extension. That ought to go over well.

So the third meaningful vote has failed. A bunch of Brexiteers caved and supported the deal for fear of the alternative, and a bunch more didn’t, and even though they only lost by 58, the government has now seen its Brexit plan go down to defeat for the third time in 2019 – and hopefully the last.

So now what? As our friend Rob Watson said, the branches of the decision tree are slowly being pruned away. None of the alternatives in the so-called “indicative votes” commanded a majority. The negotiated May agreement is in one MP’s words “deader than Monty Python’s parrot.” As it stands right now, we are on a glide path to a no-deal Brexit two weeks from today unless something can be formulated to give the Brits more time.

Here’s the problem now: someone is going to have to work across party lines to do a deal. I say this because Labour will never be able to claim a majority as long as Jeremy Corbyn is in charge, but the Tories will fall apart as soon as they split between hard Brexiteers and the rest of the party. The Conservatives, as in the US, have been riding the tiger so long that as soon as they try to climb off they will be eaten, and right now, they’re desperately trying to avoid that.

Which Theresa May could have avoided. She could have held off on Article 50, she could have reached out to Labour from the beginning, but she thought she could do it all in-house, and then called an election and got her ass kicked to the point where she could no longer do it in house. Once the DUP was the key to her majority, the choice became either a softer Brexit or the return of the Troubles. 

So what happens now? I still think it’s going to be a hard crash in two weeks with unforeseeable results. The alternative now is that the UK kicks the can way way way down the road, or else negotiates a cottony-soft Brexit with a custom union and soft border in Ireland. Which the UKIP types will howl “is no Brexit at all”, and then you probably wind up with Brexiteers deserting the Conservatives en masse for UKIP again, and then you have three parties (Labour, Tory, UKIP) and a couple of meaningful smaller ones (SNP and LibDem) and, very possibly, the beginnings of multiparty government on the order of Italy or Israel with similar consequences for stability and the future of British politics.

And more than ever, I suspect we wind up with Scotland going its own way and back into the EU, and with Ireland unified again in my lifetime – especially if remaining in the EU proves more lucrative than remaining tethered to a disintegrating UK in the wake of a hard Brexit. 

Meanwhile, this pretty much nails everything I’ve been saying all along.

Remarkably, for all the talk about Apple’s TV service announcement, we ended up with absolutely no material details. We don’t have a date, we don’t have a list of channels or services, we don’t have a price. All we have is the use of a + sign, which since Google gave it up has become the new hotness (ESPN+, Disney+, now Apple News+ and Apple TV+). In fact, we don’t really have a firm date or price on the Apple Arcade app (not that some of those games don’t look intriguing to me) nor on the forthcoming Apple Card (which if you’re willing to be tied to the Apple ecosystem looks like—)

Time out.

We really are getting into these silos where you have to pick your ecosystem for everything. Apple, Google, to a slightly lesser extent Amazon, to a considerably lesser extent Facebook and Microsoft: time was you would have an ISP and they get you online and provide your email and maybe even some webspace to go with your USENET feed, LOL. Nowadays you buy a phone, and with that phone comes the ecosystem of mail, calendaring, App Store, virtual digital assistant, GPS and mapping application, digital wallet, online document tools and photo storage, instant messaging/text application, streaming music service, digital bookstore, and now – television service AND revolving credit AND AND AND. Although to be fair, once you’re tied to all that other stuff, throwing in HBO and a no-annual-fee Mastercard is basically lagniappe. 

Anyway.

The Apple Card is a mildly attractive proposition, and would probably be even more so if I wasn’t already on three credit cards – one of which I would long since have cancelled except I’ve been a customer for 20 years and can’t do that to my credit rating. But for a college kid who wants no fees, no hidden traps, something smoothly integrated with the phone with easy-to-read billing and actionable information, this is probably a godsend. I know I would have been a lot better off with this at Vandy than with a handful of $500-limit cards that quickly got out of hand.

But it’s that weirdest of Apple events: something that leaves you walking away with nothing in hand but the promise of a bunch of amazing stuff coming Real Soon Now. And in some cases, not even that. Apple is obviously paying over the odds to try to jumpstart a Prestige TV experience and make up for lost time against the Hulus and Amazons and Netflixs of the world (and doing so just as Google appears to be giving up), and appears to be rebuilding the old Newsstand app as some sort of streaming all-you-can-eat solution for curated published print news (which we used to just call “news”), and even seems to be on the same subscription gaming service tip as Google, with their just-announced Stadia platform.

And this is bad. See, we seem to have decided that instead of actually owning anything, you will pay a monthly nut for everything in perpetuity. Cable bill? We’ve whopper-choppered that into separate fees for Amazon and Hulu and Netflix and HBO Now. Music? Apple Music or Spotify, and no more of the Jobsian “you bought it you own it, it’s yours” approach to music. Now we’re gonna pay every month for video games? I know I was an early advocate of the concept of “cash on the freakin’ barrelhead” as a business model for Silly Con Valley, but nobody wants to sell you anything any more. They want to rent it to you, forever.

Which makes sense. After all, as I decried long ago in this space, Silly Con Valley isn’t in the business of selling things that last. Your grandad’s old WWI revolver can still shoot someone dead. Your ’66 Mustang can run just fine. Your peacoat will last you the rest of your life. Close your eyes and think: what is the oldest electronic device you currently use? Phone? Fitness band? DVR? How long did you get out of your last digital watch? The shift to “services” is part and parcel of an ephemeral world, where you will pay and pay and pay for things you didn’t think you could get a monthly bill for.

Gary Shteyngart said it, and William Gibson co-signed it, and I concur: “If only my books came with ejection seats.”

I think the Mueller report was always doomed to be a letdown, because it was an artifact of a different time: an investigative report produced by a respected arbiter which would then be turned over to proper legal channels for appropriate action. This might have worked years ago, but it was never going to function under a 21st century GOP administration, because that sort of process relies on a system that respects process and has room for shame and consequences. That’s not what we have right now.

William Barr – who was hired to do just this, put a “respectable” face on a whitewashed stonewalling – has fulfilled his mandate: filter things in such a way that “exoneration” becomes the cat-toy the press uncritically bats around. Nancy Pelosi knew this, which is why she’s been working to downplay the notion of impeachment for weeks now. She knew damn well that there would never be 67 votes in the Senate, at which point, you do yourself more harm than good. There’s still plenty to investigate, and the report will provide a fine jumping-off point for House hearings on all manner of topics (as well as ones that have been back-burnered ahead of the report), and that will be fine.

Because we were never going to be let off the hook for this. There’s no get out of election free card. There’s no undo option. The only way we are going to end this is at the ballot box, by a big enough margin that it can’t be bent or played off or rigged. Infinity Stones aren’t real, there’s no going back through the quantum realm, we have to ride this turd all the way to the ground and hope we survive the splatter.

The Charge 3 has one minor flaw: it’s a little too secure. By which I mean I keep having to re-enter the PIN to enable Fitbit Pay more often than I thought I would. Other than that, it seems to be getting the job done in multiple ways. I do get notifications on the arm almost all the time – I think it might have dropped one or two, but so did the Apple Watch, honestly, and it’s a hell of a lot better than what I was getting from the Alta. The NFC payment has actually worked most places (although because of Lent I haven’t tried it on vending machines, which is where it was usually an attractive nuisance). The breathing exercise only has settings for 2 and for 5 minutes, but that seems to be fine, and in fact the efficacy of the vibrating alarm is such that I now have alarms set for breathing exercises morning and night. 

And best of all, I don’t have to plug it in every night or take it off to shower. Although I will take it off to shower if I’m already over my 10,000 steps for the day so I can top it up, and as a result I haven’t even got close to running out of juice yet. And that is a singular accomplishment.

In a lot of ways, in fact, this feels like the final form of the Pebble that I first bought this time four years ago. The Pebble was a bit experimental (and in a lot of ways, was meant to be the methadone to keep me off the Apple Watch until my heart rate got out of control during the stress-meltdown of 2015), and like the Apple Watch was still bumping around the question of what is a smart watch for? The Charge 3 has refined that down to the same thing as everyone else: notifications and fitness tracking, and maybe payments. Anything fancier than that is right out – hell, even the Apple Watch’s music controls are superfluous to requirement if you can just hit up Siri through the headphones–

Hold up.

The new AirPods dropped today, same price as the old ones, with the option to have wireless charging in the case (or to just buy a wireless charging case to use with your old ones). The biggest difference in the new ones, aside from a new chipset and slightly better battery life? Is the “Hey Siri” function always on. Which is big. Because now you don’t have to take your phone out of your pocket. You could have one bud in and say “Hey Siri” and there is your virtual assistant ready to skip ahead or play a different playlist or give you directions, possibly. That is another huge step toward the JARVIS future.

I’m tempted by the AirPods anyway. I know there’s still something to worry about with all the Bluetooth through your dome piece, and I’m not insensitive to that, but there is a utility to the AirPods that I don’t have with any other wireless headphones I’ve ever owned, and it is this: the thing will charge in its case in your pocket. Which is to say, if I walk out the door in the morning, I know I would be good until I got home at night. I can take one out, top it up in 15 minutes, switch ears, top the other one up, and go all the way through – whereas with my BeatsX, I know if I don’t juice them up around 2 PM, they won’t go until bedtime, which is no small consideration if you think you’re going to be taking the train up to the SF Giants on a semi-regular basis this year.

My only concern is I don’t know for sure if the AirPods are going to fit my ears and stay there comfortably. It’s not a small ask, and it’s a big fail if you lay down $160 for something that doesn’t fit. And I like how low-key the BeatsX are, except the battery life is starting to suffer. But small practical steps toward a more wireless future…if anything happens to the BeatsX, I know what the first option is going to be, cashflow willing.

But in the meantime, the Charge 3 has almost everything I need and absolutely nothing I don’t, for half the price and five times the battery life of my old Apple Watch. That’s a good get.

So apparently the EU has had enough to know they have had enough. They will not countenance a delay that goes past May 29; any longer than that and Britain must elect European Parliament members and then you have the spectacle of Britain as a participating member while still negotiating their exit, a circumstance which opens the door for all kinds of shenanigans.

My old mate Rob Watson (who interviewed me on a street corner in Georgetown 17 years ago when we both had hair) has said that there are three options for Parliament: 1) pass the May Deal, which has been rejected twice and cannot be brought up again in this parliament without material changes, 2) revoke Article 50 and call the whole thing off, or 3) crash out on the 29th with no deal. He also cheekily mentions option 4: “try to think of alternative to 1-3”. Which mode of wishful thinking has really been at the heart of Brexit all along: the idea that somehow Britain can build a wall and the EU will pay for it and pay more to go through it.

Because no one knew what Brexit meant. Formulations like “Brexit means Brexit” only show the caliber of glib indifference that has driven this whole process. A majority of MPs knows this is a bad idea with worse consequences, and they are paid to know better, but Theresa May cannot stand up to the know-nothings in her own party. Neither could David Cameron, who scheduled the referendum for fear of defections to UKIP. The Tories made the same mistake the GOP made in the US: they countenanced ignorance as a pillar of support and are now paying the price. The honorable thing to do would be to do a deal cross-party, call it off with Article 50 altogether, and call an election with the notion that the parties will seek a mandate for what is to be done. Or at the very least, to arrange the simpler steps of a Norway-esque membership of the EEA and customs union and pass it with Labour votes and then fall on the sword.

Not that Jeremy Corbin has covered himself in glory. He could probably get the general election he wants by doing that Norway-Lite deal with his own MPs and waiting for the implosion across the aisle, but the general election is the priority and is a good example why the Democrats need to steer well clear of Bernie Sanders this time out. No one in the Cabinet, government or shadow, has been willing to de-prioritize the political requirements long enough to save the country, and it is for this reason that I am more convinced than ever that a no-deal Brexit on March 29 will be the final outcome. 

Theresa May doesn’t have a plan beyond finding a way to have Parliament keep voting on her deal over and over and over until it passes. There weren’t enough votes, so she pulled it, then she put it through anyway and got clobbered, and then she made some facile changes to the deal and got clobbered again, and now in all likelihood intended to use the alternative of no deal at all to blackmail Parliament into passing the deal at the eleventh hour – until John Bercow stood up for Parliament and refused her a second (or third, or arguably fourth) bite at the same apple. 

The votes are there for a soft Brexit. They were there a year ago. This could have been a piece of piss, but Theresa May had to do this all within her own party and thought she could bring her nutters around rather than stand up to them. Which just goes to show she didn’t look across the Atlantic at all.

So this is kind of a big deal: John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, has invoked rules dating back to the 1600s and said that Parliament may not consider the same bill twice in a session. Which means that Theresa May’s apparent strategy of just bringing back her EU deal over and over until it passes has been kneecapped for good. Ten out of ten for the colorful Speaker (or should that be colourful?) making sure everyone plays by the rules, but this makes things very complicated very quickly.

May’s deal, heretofore known as the last best offer from the EU, is deader than fucking fried chicken. It would have to be modified “substantially” to be allowed back before the house, but it’s plainly not going to tilt any more toward Britain than it already does. The only substantial concessions that could be made are toward the EU and back in the direction of a more Norway-like arrangement, with a customs union and free movement and no say in matters, and that will drive the hard Brexiteers insane. But it’s also in the direction of what Labour claims to have been kicking around, and looks like the outline of something that could conceivably pass if the choice is between that or a hard Brexit.

Because we are 11 days out. On March 29, Britain crashes out of the EU, and on present form, that looks like happening. Parliament said they don’t want it, but that was an advisory vote, and there would have to be another bill to cancel Brexit outright because it’s not at all clear that the EU can or will countenance another extension at this point with no idea what it would be used for. So right now, the options before us seem to be down to these, in ascending order from least to most probable IMHO:

 

1) Parliament revokes Article 50 and cancels Brexit, to start over at a later date.

2) Parliament slams through the soft-Brexit bill with mostly Labour support and a rump faction of Tories, which almost certainly means that Theresa May will have to quit and call elections immediately thereafter.

3) The EU offers an extension based on renegotiation around something like 2) above, with an indeterminate timeframe that is probably long enough that Britain is obligated to hold MEP elections in May.

4) Nothing happens, everyone runs around like decapitated chickens but can’t get something together in time, and on March 29, Britain is cast out of the EU and all hell breaks loose.

 

Based on the world in the last three years, I’m betting heavily on #4.

So as I understand it:

* Parliament today voted that Britain should not leave the EU with no deal.

* This is functionally meaningless, as right now, Britain WILL leave the EU in 16 days if no further affirmative action is taken. The default, if nothing else is passed, is to crash out with no deal at all.

* Parliament has now rejected Theresa May’s deal twice in succession.

* Any extension to the March 29 deadline would require the unanimous consent of the other 27 EU countries, whose patience has reportedly been taxed to breaking. 

* While the UK could revoke their Article 50 declaration and stop the entire Brexit process dead in its tracks for good, this would require a vote of Parliament – which does not appear any more likely to come through than previous votes on the topic.

* So: they don’t want to leave with no deal, they don’t want to leave with the deal that was negotiated, but they still want to leave, and if nothing is done they WILL leave in the most uncomfortable possible manner in two weeks and change.

* After saying that the vote on the no-deal option would be a free vote, an amendment modified the bill to say that the House would stand opposed to a no-deal Brexit for good, not just on the 29th. After this, the government immediately revoked the free vote and began a three-line whip AGAINST the bill. From Wikipedia: “A three-line whip is a strict instruction to attend and vote according to the party’s position, breach of which would normally have serious consequences. Permission not to attend may be given by the whip, but a serious reason is needed. Breach of a three-line whip can lead to expulsion from the parliamentary political group in extreme circumstances, and even to expulsion from the party.”

* There were actual cabinet ministers who abstained from the critical vote. Let me say that again: THERE WERE CABINET MINISTERS WHO ABSTAINED FROM VOTING UNDER A THREE LINE WHIP. In normal times, if a Cabinet minister refused to vote under a three line whip, the Prime Minister would have that Minister dismissed, probably expelled from the party, and possibly fistfight them in the street after.

* If the sun rises tomorrow at 6:17 AM in London and those ministers are still ministers, it can be said with absolute certainly that the British parliamentary process is broken and that the government of Theresa May is not fit for purpose. Which, well, she did grasp the nettle at a difficult moment when David Cameron ran like a chickenshit from the mess he made, so full marks for being willing to step up to the plate. However, given that the referendum was basically the Great British public voting to blow its own balls off with a shotgun, she can hardly be lauded for delivering a plan after two years that amounts to “we’ll blow them off one at the time” instead.

* You know who wouldn’t have this problem? Prime Minister Nancy Pelosi. Because if there’s one thing Pelosi gets, it’s the old adage about politics as the art of the possible. Once something isn’t possible, it’s not on the board anymore for Our Nancy, and that’s why she blew off impeachment as a realistic goal (but made sure to do it in the most insulting fashion possible, because she’s not going to refrain from taking a wide-open shot). 

It should be obvious at this point, but it plainly isn’t: institutions are no defense against the wrong person at the helm. Theresa May’s best hope is that enough of the credit for making this shit sandwich will land on David Cameron that people forget about her dropping it on Britain’s collective shirt.