Author: Stagger Lee

Last week’s Economist included an article about one of the neighbors. Y Combinator is an incubator/startup boot camp/venture capital provider in Mountain View that has become the poster child for people who think entrepreneurship can be reduced to a simple process capped with the standard rich and famous contract at the end.  Go read the article, I’ll wait.

Back? Good. Let’s go:

1) I find it singular that of the half-dozen “unicorns” the article cites, not one has gone public or been acquired.  These are all privately held companies whose valuation is based on what some entity was willing to pay for a percentage. In 1999, the exit strategy for your company was to go public and cash in with a breathtaking IPO. In 2009, the exit strategy was to sell out to Google, or Facebook, or Apple, or maybe Amazon or Microsoft, or if you’re really desperate, Yahoo.  Now, in 2015, the goal seems merely to be to get the highest possible valuation by enticing one VC firm or another to give you the most money for the smallest percentage, thereby “valuing” your company at some astronomical sum.  The problem is, not one bit of that is liquid.  AirBnB is the highest-valued of these companies, and it certainly seems to have a viable business model and generate revenue from same (legal issues around people using it to go into the hotel business notwithstanding*). But the question becomes: who, if anyone, is going to pay $25.5 BILLION dollars to acquire them? And if they go public,  are they really going to offer a hundred million shares at $255 a share on opening day?  There are an awful lot of unicorns, so-called, whose expansive valuation almost certainly could not survive exposure to an open market.

2) We’ve defined the tech-sector down to “anything that has an app.” AirBnB is a short-term rental company. Instacart is a food-delivery logistics company.  Stepping outside the Y ecosystem, Uber – maybe the poster child for the current bubble – is a taxi company desperately trying to pitch itself as actually being Tinder for cars rather than a taxi company. It’s been said before and better by smarter people than me, but the current model really seems to be one of “think what your mother doesn’t do for you anymore” -> replace all normal communication/commercial infrastructure with smartphone app -> SWEET SWEET FILTHY LUCRE FROM THAT DICKHEAD ANDRESSEN. Nice work, if you can get it.

3) Way way WAY too many of these ideas are a product of regulatory arbitrage, loophole-seeking, and sheer bloody-mindedness.  AirBnB is NOT your hotelier. Uber (and Lyft and Sidecar and Gett) are NOT taxi companies. WeWork is NOT a commercial real-estate company. DraftKings and FanDuel are NOT wagering. Instacart and DoorDash are NOT in the food business. If you get work via Uber or GigWalk or Fiverr or TaskRabbit or (fill in app-based task-driven contract-labor service HERE), you are NOT their employee, you just happen to have contracted with this other private party. So we have a bunch of companies which are worth way more than the sum of their profit and assets, surviving on the steady intravenous drip of VC money, dependent on a workforce of people who are absolutely not their employees.  How the hell is this supposed to be a viable economic model?

And in the meantime, here is Y Combinator, which the article openly says that “aspiring entrepreneurs clamor to attend…as much for what they learn there as for the stamp of approval and network they can claim when they leave.” As much? Y Combinator has managed to out-Stanford Stanford, and an industry that supposedly scoffs at legacy ideas of credentials and old ways of thinking about pedigree now instead throws an automatic seal of approval behind whoever comes out of this particular three-month boot camp.  And it’s desirable enough that two guys from Brazil will spend thirty hours in transit – each way – for the sake of the single ten-minute interview that determines whether or not they will get accepted into the ranks of the Elect. Ten minutes. My scholarship interview for a no-account liberal-arts college in the Deep South took longer than that. But that magic Y is now so coveted that it’s worth spending two and a half full days, round-trip, for the sake of ten minutes to see if the golden finger will bless your idea.

If that isn’t a bubble, I’ll kiss your ass.

 

 

 

* AirBnB is one of those things where they keep pushing the original model, i.e. “let out the spare room and meet people while making a little extra scratch.”  We have actually done this. It has worked out well. The problem comes when somebody buys a building, evicts all the existing tenants, and turns it into what is functionally a hotel administered via AirBnB. This was a big part of the backlash that manifested as a couple of voting propositions earlier this month in San Francisco, and I expect it to continue to be an issue in any market where housing supply is constrained and former private accommodations are converted for AirBnB use full-time.

There used to be a bookstore, a music store and a tobacconist in every mall.  Frequently more than one book or music store, at a time when they weren’t lumped together (it’s singular to me that I have seen the beginning and the end of the all-in-one media store, whether it be Borders or MediaPlay or the local likes of Bookstar or Davis-Kidd). In high school it was Musicland and Sound Shop at the Galleria, along with B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. By the time college came round, you could roll the sports-wear stores in there too: Foot Locker and Champs both in every mall. (I hesitate to say “sporting goods” because for the most part, those stores didn’t actually sell bats or gloves or balls or helmets.) And toward the end of graduate school, cell phone stores were of equal interest.

All of that has changed.  Finding a tobacconist in a mall in California is like trying to find a rack of pork ribs at a mosque. Amazon did for the mall bookstore, and Apple largely managed to do for the music store and the cell phone store alike – sure, every carrier has a shop at the mall and a few kiosks besides, but you only go in there if you need to buy a phone on a legacy contract, not to check out the new hotness. And at my age, there’s precious little you want from the likes of Foot Locker. 

In so many ways, that sums up how different life is. The mall as a point of interest was barely hanging on when I got here in 2004 – it was a short hop from Apple to Valley Fair, the principal temple of competitive commerce in the South Bay, and I dutifully did the rounds there if only for the sake of “this is how I orient myself in a new place,” just as I’d wandered through Cool Springs and Rivergate and Green Hills and Hickory Hollow and Bellevue in Nashville or through Ballston Common and Tyson’s Corner and Pentagon City and Fair Oaks in Northern Virginia.  But it didn’t really last.  I don’t know that I ever saw a music store or a bookstore in that mall, the tobacconist of those early cigar-smoking nights is long gone, and even the Apple store isn’t a draw any longer.

All of this came to mind in the wake of going through the AT&T store to replace my wife’s phone – she is still carrying a legacy foundation account plan which is damn near theft, so the corporate store is the only way to go.  It’s the same AT&T store where I reluctantly acquired an iPhone 3G in 2008 after damaging my original model. That’s very literally the last time I’ve ever bought a cell phone in a carrier store – everything since was direct from the manufacturer or through work. Aside from the occasional glance at the new hardware, I don’t ever go in an Apple Store anymore, and I basically never go in a cell phone store (which is why it was such a jarring experience to wait over an hour for no service on Halloween. Everybody wants to be AAPL but nobody wants to put the resources into it).

And looking back, that makes perfect sense. If you need to sum up what’s changed in the last 10 years or so, make it this: the Internet is where you buy things. If I go to Santana Row, the most I’m liable to splash out for is a cup of coffee at Peet’s or maybe a pen. If I go to Valley Fair, I might go nuts and get a pretzel or maybe some Coldstone – if it’s even still there and I can’t swear it is. The only destination at a mall for me for as long as I can remember is to get that ham-and-cheese-and-pineapple sandwich from Steak Escape and that’s a special occasion sort of thing. Clothing? Ordered online. Phones? Bought from work or off the manufacturer’s website. Caps? Ballpark or online. Jackets? Japan, New York, or online. Watch? Apple Store or online. Socks? Books? Flask? Steel tumblers? If it isn’t food or drink, the odds are strong that it’s coming straight to my house or office in a UPS or FedEx box.

Which is a shame, in its way. Going to the mall was an event – maybe the defining social event of the 80s, although it came to me quite literally in a dream that walking the mall with your friends would be an ideal pastime before I was ever aware that the culture was way ahead of me. It was a heavy lift for me until well into high school, just because I was a half hour drive from the nearest mall, but eventually I sort of got there – and when I had to get off campus in college, the first stop was the mall, pretty much always. The malls at the points of the compass were my orientation and anchor in Nashville. The mall was on the way to work and on the way home for the first year and a half in Arlington. And now, a decade on, the mall has evolved into – at best – some place to quickly return the stuff you bought online and maybe a place to grab a bite if you’re in the neighborhood. Maybe.

And thus does the mall become one of those things we just don’t do anymore. 

The phrase is Japanese. Wikipedia calls it “a Japanese term for the awareness of impermanence, or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.” One of Barry Eisler’s characters in A Lonely Resurrection calls it “the sadness of being human.”

National Geographic Partners is a joint venture owned by the National Geographic Society and 21st Century Fox. As of earlier this year, NGP has basically taken over all the functions of the Society – publishing, content, brand, the whole enchilada. Much like Google and Alphabet, only in this case the non-profit NGS has created a mechanism to essentially sell three-quarters of itself to Fox. There are a number of levels on which this is dismaying, especially vis-a-vis the media properties of Fox in the United States. But one of them hits extremely close to home – and that is the inevitable takeover of back-office operations by 21st Century Fox. Marketing, finance, and of course IT – all being replaced with the economy of scale that comes from a major media corporation’s existing structures.

Basically, my old job is ceasing to exist. And all my old colleagues are being laid off.  There will probably be packages, there will be an as-yet-undetermined date final for them, and they will go their separate ways for good.  Maybe some will get re-hired in local roles, but I wouldn’t count on it – this is, in many ways, an end altogether for the old firm.

They were seven odd and turbulent years, to be certain, and the first year and a half were traumatic in the extreme. But it was where my life was rebuilt from scratch. The old crew went to work on me when I was dangling by a thread with my career in ruins and no future – when the black hole of the past had opened up all the way to the tiptoes beneath me – and rebuilt me smarter, surer, better than I had been before. You could argue that much of my troubles the last few years have revolved around trying to figure out who I am and where I’m going and what is to be done with my life. If there’s one thing I can say with absolute certainly about my time in the DMV working with my gang under that yellow rectangle, it’s this: there was never a sliver of doubt about who I was or what I could do.

So much has changed since those days. Some people out of my life altogether. Some scattered to the four winds. The old pub gone, and now the very jobs themselves gone. The place we worked is no longer the same place, and what seemed like a fixture of American life – that non-profit magazine publisher dedicated to knowledge of the world and all that is in it – is now just another media property lumped alongside the likes of Joe Buck, Bill O’Reilly and Family Guy.

I’ve said it before – treasure the things you love, because you never know when they’ll be taken from you. But that includes your memories, because sometimes the ground shifts beneath the past and the things you remember are themselves altered. This, though, is a fact, and it is indisputable: from 1997 to 2004, I had the privilege of being a giant standing in a forest of giants, and I’ll take that to my grave.  There’s sadness in its transience, to be sure, but there is glory in its having happened.

After failing to ride the wave of Rom-mania in 2012, Paul Ryan will go to bed tonight as Speaker of the House.  Once upon a time, this would have made him one of the most powerful people in DC, on a par with a Supreme Court justice or Sonny Jurgensen. As it is, since John Boehner gifted him a budget deal on the way out the door, his main job will be to mill about aimlessly and occasionally vote through some bills to try to make it tough on the Democrats in 2016, which is just as well, because the House Redneck Caucus seems bound and determined not to play nice with anyone, least of all their own party’s leadership.

You can blame this on the Tea Party if you like, or you can point to Sarah Palin as the wellspring of it all, or you can go back to Newt Gingrich and the predictable consequences of pairing a Southernized GOP Congress with an amiable dunce from Texas in the White House, or you can go all the way back to Lee Atwater running a Wallace campaign on behalf of a patrician New Englander with a Houston hotel suite. But really, it all goes back to Nixonland, and the explicit decision that the reactionary forces of 1964 could be combined with a rebellious South to build a new engine in the national GOP. This was the inevitable result of fifty years of nurturing the worst impulses of this country, and for the GOP establishment and its amen corner in the national press to suddenly look up and decry what’s happening to the Republican party is risible in the extreme. In the immortal words of Chris Rock, that tiger went tiger.

I mean, what did you expect?  You spend years if not decades telling people to live in fear, that everyone to the left of John Kasich is Joe Stalin and that the government wants to grind them all into free meatloaf for Mexicans, that they are the true salt of the earth and their racist impulses are to be indulged rather than overcome…this is not an accident, this is not a fluke. The Tea Party is the GOP. This has been the Republican party for the last 20 years. This was the plan all along. This is a designed play. A vast plurality of ignorance, racism and outright stupid, providing automatic response in reaction to constant stimulus from TV, radio and a million “Fw:fw:fwd:FW:FW” emails isn’t a bug, it isn’t a feature, it’s the whole goddamn operating system.

The thing that scares me most isn’t the necks, it’s the people who look sorrowfully on the mess that’s made and still pull the GOP lever anyway. Sure, these hayseeds are all gun suckers who think the country is at risk of Sharia law from ACORN-organized illegal immigrants, but Al Gore is fat and Hollywood liberals are dumb, so vote Republican. That’s exactly how we got here, and it’s the biggest scare going into 2016: that the likes of Donald Trump could wind up in the White House because enough people realize he’s a loudmouthed business failure who spun an ego into reality stardom, but they’re tired of Hillary, so whatever.  Meanwhile, we continue with the Republican primary clown show. There are 14 candidates still in play, not because they’re viable candidates in any way, but because there’s enough loose money floating around – not enough to run a viable campaign, but enough to keep your campaign bobbing along at 7% and build name recognition for an inevitable Fox News commentary job and book deal and speaking engagements. There are maybe three serious candidates, a couple of maybe-tweeners and not less than five outright grifters on the march (and the grifters have the top three spots at the moment.  You can tell they’re grifters because the three of them combined have zero days experience in elected office and want you to believe that President of the United States is an entry-level job in politics.)

Then again, Paul Ryan managed to spin an unworkable budget that he never had to pass, a smattering of applause lines and four undignified months on the campaign trail into being only two heartbeats away from the Presidency rather than one. The hustle pays off, if you’re the hustler.

I.

There is another edit.

In this edit, I miss the boat on that television show the same as every other overhyped TV show. I don’t get interested enough to look for things about it online. I don’t find a mailing list, or the mailing list spun off from it. I don’t subscribe. I don’t have those people backstopping me, providing moral support. And when everything finally goes off the rails, I wind up washed out of school, broken up with the girl who ruined everything, living at home and commuting to my $9-an-hour temp job in the HR department of a company so stodgy that Casual Friday means you can omit the necktie if you like. I’ve got a four-year-old Saturn with 100,000 miles on it already, a 3-year-old Power Macintosh that’s already starting to show its age, a cell phone I don’t need and can’t afford, and thousands of dollars in credit card debt.

No Ohio girl to put me up for the summer waiting for things to happen. No Notre Dame grad willing to talk me through snapping SIMMs into a logic board or take a chance interviewing me for his old job. No Metro. No Quake. No Sign of the Whale or Ireland’s Four Provinces. And no life-altering wedding weekend in Santa Cruz. Just me, and Birmingham, and no future.

It could have gone a couple different ways. In the best case scenario, I find a better job, find a way to live downtown somewhere, meet someone (possibly an alumna of my old high school?) and carve out a little blue bubble of my own in the sea of redneck. But it’s just as likely I end up over the mountain, married to some ex-sorority girl whose Greek letters still decorate the back of our SUV with the two car seats in it, regular doses of Alabama football and the occasional Atlanta getaway for shopping and fancy stuff we don’t have at home. 

A life lived as a medium-sized fish with its fins clipped, in a not-particularly-fresh pond. A life of lying awake at night, wondering what I’d missed out on by so rarely venturing outside the confines of my childhood, of staying stung and bruised by the failure of my one limited escape attempt. A life measured out in Panther basketball games, in too many helpings of Milo’s fries, in family arguments and gritted-teeth smiles and quiet desperation.

 

II.

I’ve said it before, over and over: had Birmingham in 1990 been more like Birmingham in 2010, I would have felt better about staying around.  More restaurants, better beer selection, places like Bottletree or Iron City.  But how much of that depends on the Internet? Had there been Facebook and Twitter and Yelp, maybe I would have done a better job of finding what was there already.  But I would have had to live downtown, because there wouldn’t be any hopping transit over from someplace else. The buses don’t run that way and there hasn’t been a streetcar since the early 1950s. And despite the presence of a new bike share that just opened last week, there’s still no indication that transit is going to be a thing anytime soon.  Avondale and Lakeview are exciting new neighborhoods to go along with Southside in general and Five Points in particular, but getting back and forth might be a trial. 

I distinctly remember living in DC when the state quarters first started to emerge, and being surprised that I saw them when I went back to Alabama at the holidays. And being surprised at South Park references on the radio, as if they didn’t get Comedy Central there. The Internet came to Birmingham just the same as anyplace else, and people line up for the new iPhone at the Summit just the same as they do in Palo Alto or Clarendon. Geography alone doesn’t make the change happen, and I would have moved right along with the rest of the world – on the leading edge, certainly, relative to the people around me, but I would have still gone out and bought the first iPhone the day it landed, most likely. I would have had my phone on Powertel just so I could be on GSM. I would have signed up for BellSouth DSL at the earliest opportunity. Even in those dark days in early summer of 1997, I was already plotting to figure out how I could replace that PowerMac 6100 with a PowerBook 1400. So some of what helped me along would have come to town – not so much and not so quickly, but some of it.

And there were things there already. City Stages was the event of the year. The SEC played its football and basketball championships in town – not permanently, but it happened. Not one but two independent coffeehouses were open in Southside by 1994. That little stretch of Highland Avenue had a Frank Stitt restaurant, and Charlemagne Records and McNolia’s and the Lion and Unicorn comic book shop. By the end of my undergrad time, Red Mountain Red Ale was on sale, the first new beer to be made in Alabama since Prohibition. There was enough there to tempt my appetite for more, which is probably what helped propel me to Nashville in the first place.

 

III.

Much has been lost, as much as gained. City Stages is no more. Bottletree folded, as did Freshfully. The Mill is gone, where you could first buy Red Mountain Red Ale. Both of the coffeehouses vanished, one replaced with a bar that’s been there ever since. Gorin’s Ice Cream, Dugan’s, Jonathan Benton Booksellers, Dexter’s on Broadway, the Tired Texan BBQ, Eastwood Mall, the Birmingham Bulls hockey team: all gone. Century Plaza: closed and empty. The Riverchase Galleria, the Colonnade, Wildwood: sparse and dying. My old high school: decamped to the suburbs and turned into a resume line for the heavily striving instead of a redneck-Hogwarts refuge for the gifted. Parisian and Pizitz have both become Belk and the old Pizitz building downtown is being gutted for condominiums. Neither the school my father attended nor the one where he worked are in the same building anymore. Gussied-up strip malls predominate and have metastasized at every major freeway on all sides of town. And while the Barons have a new stadium in the heart of downtown, the old stadium – which had the misfortune to be five years too early for the new-old retro-park look – sits empty except for high school football and the SEC baseball tournament.

There are newer and better things, and they are more likely to appear downtown than in Hoover, but there aren’t necessarily more of them. Frank Stitt has three restaurants now, and you can find unrelated places like Saw’s (three restaurants) or Babalu (tapas and tacos) or Revelator Coffee across from the Alabama Theater, and the bikes will take you from Lakeview to Uptown to Railroad Park. But the transit situation is still inferior to what it was sixty years ago, and the schools haven’t gotten materially better, and the city is still divided on whether to allow Uber to operate. And Birmingham’s biggest handicap remains Alabama: a state where the doctrine of “I got mine; fuck you” is written into law at almost every level alongside a pervasive sense that allowing something to change and be different is a danger to be prevented and obstructed at every turn.

I didn’t have twenty years to wait: that’s my refrain, my excuse, my justification for why I had to leave for someplace with more trains and fewer Finebaum callers. But upon further review, looking at what’s around now, it’s tough to say that things have been altered that much relative to anywhere else. You can get Apple products there, sure. You can get Amazon Prime. You can get DirecTV and U-Verse and access the internet. Twitter and Instagram and Slack and Yelp and Swarm work just the same there.

But you’re going to need a car and you’re going to have to drive it. You’re not going to be summoning a ride with an app and you’re not going to be checking timetables and stepping onto the light rail. You’re not going to find Indian food or Brazilian rodizio or a half hour jaunt to the beach or a winery. You’re going to have to be prepared to do a lot of online ordering. And if you can live with all that, you maybe can get an approximation of sort of what you’d have in DC or Silicon Valley. 

 

IV.

I wonder where the black folks are.

Not in Birmingham generally. In a place where the airport is now named for a civil rights leader whose national recognition is shamefully thin, in a place that still suffers internationally for the sins of its fathers and grandfathers fifty years ago and its shameful slowness in coming to terms with that sin, you can find plenty of African-American folks. The question becomes: can you find them in Railroad Park, at the Uptown, at lunch at Babalu and in the lobby of the Aloft at the XYZ bar and riding the share bikes on 20th Street? Is all this Birmingham change just another chapter in the gentrification story, or is some of this money and building and newness going to be sown in North Birmingham and the West End?

On early evidence, it looks like the potential is there.  The nonwhite population in Birmingham is certainly a majority, and if you look for a nonwhite presence in the restaurants and coffeeshops and other new modern cool places, you see it. The proportions may not be quite what you see in the gentrifying areas of Silicon Valley, but that’s as much an indictment of the extent to which the Valley has elevated its own historical minorities as opposed to people of color who just flooded in to attend Stanford or just arrived fresh from IIT Kanpur.

You look at the Valley, though, and the spread was up the Peninsula and into San Francisco. SoMa isn’t any better for the people who were already in SoMa, not that there were that many, and it’s possible to say the same in Birmingham. When so many old buildings were sitting abandoned because it wasn’t worth the money to pull them down if no one wanted to build over them, there’s not a whole bunch of folks there. Uber may be controversially going into Oakland, but the East Bay hasn’t had nearly the caliber of tech colonization. Mountain View may find that Castro Street is being turned into the methadone Mission, but Fremont and Newark and San Leandro are same as it ever was.

It’s possible that there isn’t a Southern-fried version of the New Urbanism – maybe this is just bog-standard Millennial twentysomething-ism, same as everywhere else where people have suddenly decided they can only live in the city. Portlandia with a gravelly drawl, the overflow room for the new-look Nashville with dark beers instead of hot chicken. Maybe in the twenty-five years I waited, Birmingham evolved into…Birmingham twenty-five years on. And yet that isn’t an indictment, necessarily. Birmingham’s improvements aren’t coming from a geyser of venture capital in search of a unicorn, they aren’t coming from the loose money chasing a bubble economy, they’re slow and steady alterations that nonetheless alter the fabric of the city. Eleven acres of green space with free wireless and bike share, a brand new baseball stadium, derelict light industrial space turning into restaurants and apartments and nightlife…these are changes that are persistent and will hopefully stick for a long time.

And in another ten or twenty years, maybe it gets attractive enough that people downtown start to agitate for the things that will seep deeper into the fabric of the city and its surroundings. Maybe instead of pulling up sticks and moving to Vestavia, they agitate for better schools downtown and the taxes to pay for them. Maybe they get tired of driving and lean on MAX to run buses in a way that you can actually use, or even implement bus rapid transit. And maybe that’s just the way things would be heading anyway, maybe that’s what Generation Z will demand everywhere, but if it gets better, it hardly matters why, right?

Is it a place I could live now? Under what circumstances?  I don’t know any more than I did two weeks ago, but for different reasons now. And it’s forcing me to take a closer look at where I live and how I live now.  And for that alone, it was worth the trip.

Well, Volkswagen is currently having that dream where you’re standing butt naked in the middle of a stage and suddenly the walls drop away and the whole world can see you. With the revelation that the 2-liter TDI diesel engine was beating emissions tests with software chicanery rather than actually running clean, literally millions of automobiles from the Volkswagen Automotive Group (which includes Porsche, Audi, Seat and Skoda, and for crying out loud could you come up with a better collective acronym) are suddenly out of compliance with government regulation – the repair of which will cost billions of dollars and almost certainly result in compromised performance both in power and fuel efficiency.

I have multiple friends who have recently bought TDI VWs and they are Frisbee pissed about it. And this almost certainly lops off the Golf SportWagen from the list; if its mileage suffers even a little it’ll drop below the financially viable point. We’re basically down to the Prius V and the Chevy Volt, and the last right now is only a semi-serious concern of mine until I can actually sit in the 2016 model and see what’s going on. But as with the phones I’ve so heavily discussed, the best car is the one you’ve already got, and despite its erratic performance, the VW Rabbit is going to remain the car for the foreseeable future.  After all, all our travel plans now call for trains and planes through the end of January at least, and I don’t think we have to drive anyplace further than a BART station until then.

The thing is, for an all-electric vehicle to be viable, it’s got to have a range of a legit 100 miles. And right now that’s not out there unless you splash out on a Tesla S, and I don’t want to spend $80K for a mid-to-full-sized car. I don’t need anything much bigger than the Rabbit myself, and the family consensus is that the Prius V is as big as we need – because it’s a hatch. A non-hatch sport sedan is asking too much, and Tesla doesn’t play in the non-Eloi marketplace yet. (The notional Tesla 3 is being forecast for 2018, which makes it as nearly vaporware as makes no difference. Both our cars aren’t going to last three more years in normal use.)

More to the point, it’s starting to look like a legit range of 75 miles would be plenty for most of our purposes, especially if charging is available there (electric charging at Daly City BART would be a game-changer). At that point, if you can charge in SF or Berkeley, those are viable destinations, and even if you can’t, you can get to the BART or Caltrain that takes you there. Work, groceries, the San Jose Giants, collecting folks from the airport (long as you fly through SJC), or even the ever-rarer trip to the mall or for a Victory Slice – all doable with a range of about 75 miles.  And at that point, as the wife has pointed out, long-haul trips to Disneyland, or the Central Coast, or Tahoe, just mean renting a car for less than the cost of a monthly payment. Which means you could get by with, say…an e-Golf.

Electric is coming. Might be time to jump on board.

So Google has gone back to LG for their Nexus 5X. LG made the original Nexus 5, which two years ago was generally regarded as the best Android phone out there: pure Android experience for a low unlocked price, basically setting the model that Motorola would follow thereafter. It’s got a 1080P display, 2 GB of RAM, shoots 4K video from a 12 MP camera, and starts at $379.

Looking at the early comments on Gizmodo, though, there are already people wondering whether this is sufficiently future-proof and will be OK in two years – but complimenting the price point because $800 is too much to spend on a two-year device. And I’m starting to wonder how much longer the two-year model will hold for phones – it began as a function of contracts and now appears to be more a function of financing than anything else; all these new plans that offer monthly payments seem to be on an 18- or 20- or 24-month cycle (when they’re not offering to upgrade your iPhone every year).  And this informs my own position, certainly.  I’d much rather be on the S cycle than the integer one with iPhones. If I had to buy a new phone now, I’d pay for the unlocked iPhone 6S, because even though it’ll be $800 up front, I’ll more than make up the difference on a $30 or $45 prepaid plan rather than the exorbitant sums you pay for postpaid service.  But I don’t have to buy one at all – I have my Moto X, and the wife will be freeing up her iPhone 5S shortly.

And that’s where things get interesting. Those are both phones from 2013, when (as I previously asserted) the smartphone crossed the finish line. Everything since has been bigger batteries, better cameras, added gimmicks like pressure-sensitive screens or fingerprint readers or NFC payment (and with an Apple Watch, you get all that with an iPhone 5S anyway). In the real world, a two year old cellphone is largely just fine – hell, my mother is still pushing an iPhone 4S (and I bet anything the battery is shot to hell, but still).

And then yesterday we saw announced the Fairphone 2: not a sealed device, not breathtakingly thin or breathtakingly light or breathtakingly hyperbolic, but something repairable for an estimated life of five years. Smashed screen?  Replace it.  Battery flat? Replace it. 100% user-repairable, and presumably upgradeable.  It doesn’t have to be the Project Ara vaporware where you mix and match all the little modules on the fly, it just has to be a phone that you can keep up and keep running for a while. It’s not ridiculously sized – the peak thickness is comparable with that first-gen Moto X and thinner than the iPhone 3GS.  And if you could somehow get the VAT refunded on purchase, it wouldn’t be that much more expensive than that Nexus 5X.

One of my biggest hopes going forward is that this will be an end of the automatic 2-year cycle. It has to be possible to buy the service and then upgrade the phone when you want/need to upgrade the phone, not because you have to do it in this window or else be screwed into paying full price. I’d like to have a phone that I can keep using for a while, and if I can somehow get another year out of that iPhone 5S…maybe.  But the other side of the problem is software: the upgrades will do for your iPhone after 3 years, and your Android phone may never get an upgrade depending on what you got. So how long can you keep it viable? Is it reasonable to expect the same five years out of the phone that you can expect out of your home PC (battery replacement permitting, and knowing the last year will drag ass)?

Maybe the next project is to find out.

It’s been an interesting couple of days for Marco Arment – the programmer who gave the world Tumblr and Instapaper (and less famously, a short-lived iOS Newsstand periodical called The Magazine) wrote a new Safari Content Blocker for iOS. Called Peace, and sold for $3, it shot straight to the top of Apple’s App Store sales charts directly it was released. 

Today, he pulled it down.

It’s blunt force trauma, certainly, and I understand his unease with blindly stopping everything. But the point remains just as it was a few months ago when Gruber first addressed this at DF: there is no way a 537-word text posting on a website should be a 14 MB download in the browser. None. And on mobile devices – where data is usually metered and where every electron of battery is precious – the current state of web advertising is untenable.  It’s not the fact of advertising that gives offense; that ship sailed decades ago. It’s the fact that the advertising is so resource-hungry. This isn’t billboards on the road, it’s more like being forced to detour and drive down a side street composed of nothing but billboards in order to reach a destination that’s 90 degrees the other way.

Ironically, I’ve been ad-blocking in my own way for a very long time; I’m one of those cranky old dudes still using an RSS reader – in my case, a $2 monthly Feedbin subscription and Reeder for iOS. And just like that, I’m reading about a hundred sites a day, and missing all the pop-ups and JavaScript crap weighing down the modern web.

When this guy whipped up a content blocking proof of concept in an hour at WWDC, the page-load time on the site dropped from 11 seconds to 2, and the javascript that kept hitting the network for a full minute after the page was loaded wasn’t there anymore. That ain’t hay, folks. That’s getting back serious CPU time, which means battery. And in a world where battery is the most important thing in gauging the value of your smartphone, that’s like taking a thorn out of your paw. And the world agrees, because that guy’s proof of concept, blown up into a full-fledged app, is currently sitting #2 behind Marco’s blocker in top paid apps.

If the phone has become the primary interface to the Internet for most people, this is a serious blow struck for the users, and one long overdue. Peace and Crystal are both on my iPhone, and they’re going nowhere.

* I’m going back to the Rose Parade. This makes me so very happy, you have no idea.

* I went to another San Jose Earthquakes game last night, which was plenty of fun. That stadium is the perfect size, brand-new and shiny, with plenty of refreshments and restrooms and not a bad seat in the house, and a pleasant experience watching the team. The only drawback is the transit…it’s inherently intermodal and the various trains are so poorly timed relative to games that I basically can’t get home without someone driving a car some portion of the way. This could be a problem in future.

* Everyone I talk to who’s gone to the Quakes says it’s a superior experience to Levi’s Stadium. I concur, even if the train goes right by Levi’s and obviates the need for a connecting shuttle. MLS has yet to be laden with all the freight and bullshit that goes along with the NFL, and it’s a superior experience in the absence of a hardcore emotional attachment.

* More and more I think I have reached the conclusion that the viable future for me, if I have to change my cellphone circumstances, is just to buy the iPhone 6S outright and unlocked and go with that $30 T-Mobile plan until I need more than 100 minutes. If I go back and look at the average use in 2015 – and even snipping out the two weeks I was in Japan – I still only average about 120 minutes of talk time per month. So unless the overages are ridiculously expensive, that’s the way to go.  Next step up is the Cricket $45 plan.

* Much as I love that little Moto X, and it *is* unlocked for travel abroad, the camera just isn’t gonna get the job done. And going abroad with just the Moto X means no Apple Watch. If the time comes to change my cellular circumstances, I’m going to have to splash out for an unlocked 6S – like computers, it’s slowly turning into “buy the best thing you can” especially if you’re going to be relying on it for more than two years. Taking over the wife’s 5S would be a viable alternative if necessary, and might buy another year’s worth of waiting, but by the end of 2016, replacing this phone from work will almost certainly mean buying the latest iPhone unlocked.

* On the night of September 11 or 12 (I forget exactly when), 2001, there was a soccer match in Tehran. Before the game kicked off, the entire stadium observed a moment of silence for the victims of the tragedy in America. Somewhere between a third and a half of the population now wasn’t born when the American hostages were released from the former embassy in Tehran in 1981. Iran is implacably opposed to Al-Qaeda and ISIS on religious grounds. And yet, for some reason, any sort of dealings with Iran are beyond the pale for the GOP and we must start bombing as soon as possible. One more reason why nobody with an IQ above room temperature has any business voting for a Republican until they go through party-wide detox.

* Similarly, Jeb Bush is back on the one-note parade saying his dry-drunk borderline-special-needs brother “kept us safe.” As someone who lost two co-workers on the plane that hit the Pentagon, walked past National Guard on the corners on the way to work for weeks, and almost saw my boss evicted because his rent check was trapped in an anthrax-affected post office, let me say two things to Jeb Bush: 1) BULLSHIT. 2) FUCK YOU.

* If Carly Fiorina were 11th in a field of 10 on the Democratic side, and the rules were bent and numbers strained to get her into the top 10 for a debate, the Republicans would be screaming themselves laryngitic about “affirmative action.” As it is, the RNC has apparently chosen her as the anti-Trump: an engaging cipher who can take shots at Hillary that would draw cries of sexism if launched by others, and “CEO” status that overlooks how she managed to shit-wreck the flagship company of Silicon Valley…maybe she has more in common with Trump than we think. But it’s going to take more than two X chromosomes and a willingness to stand in front of a camera and lie through your teeth if she’s serious about being President, and based on the legend of Demon Sheep, it’s hard for me to take her seriously in anything related to politics.

* iOS 9 brings with it “content blockers” – you can install software on your iOS device that will let you kill off certain web content before it even loads.  Mostly this revolves around advertising, especially when the various trackers and javascript and nonsense add up to about 10 MB on a single webpage and far outweigh the actual content of the page.  From a mobile standpoint, this is a godsend: blocking all that shit saves data usage and battery life, not to mention the speed burst that comes when you only have to show the actual page and not all the stuff that shits it up. It completely destroys a lot of the revenue model of the web world, which is fine.  You have all the right in the world to show advertising, but this is the equivalent of a television draping ads over the program while it’s on and making it impossible to change channels or turn down the volume.  Which is in fact what a lot of broadcast advertisers would love to do.

* Speaking of, fuck Draft Kings with a rusty rake. It’s become impossible to avoid their douche-a-riffic advertising in almost any sports-related venue. At games, on television, hell, the podcast of the Sports Junkies is bracketed by Draft Kings ads at the beginning and end of EVERY SEGMENT.  That’s 26 Draft Kings ads a day, for a “service” that is basically an attempt to offer sports gambling via loophole.  The plan, such as it is, seems to be to make all the money before Congress has a chance to weigh in, which makes it of a piece for the tech economy in 2015. Loophole arbitrage is the only place America innovates.

* The detachment from college football continues apace, with varying degrees of success.  The only thing that matters for the rest of the season is Saturday, though, and if Cal doesn’t beat Texas then Sonny Dykes should be left behind in Austin, just as Jeff Tedford should have been dumped in the parking lot of Jack Murphy Stadium without his wallet after the Holiday Bowl fiasco of 2011. It’s a moral imperative. Win or GTFO.

* I wish I knew what my buddy Vince sez these days.

 

Fin.

First, start with this.

A lot of people will read this and think the outrageous thing is that the cops beat the hell out of an aging foreigner who didn’t speak English and paralyzed him, after a neighbor saw a dark-skinned stranger walking around and felt the need to call police.  That’s shameful, but it pales in outrageous compared to the fact that 10 out of 12 jurors, all white men, wanted to acquit the cops involved.

Violent crime – and the killing of police in particular – is at an all-time low. And yet, the usual suspects are circling the wagons and accusing the President of leading “war on police” in the face of a “crime epidemic”, which is risible all by itself until you consider that these are universally the same assholes who are constantly screaming about governmental tyranny and the overreaching power of government and “I love my country but I fear my government” as if you aren’t infinitely more likely to run up against  your local PD at a traffic stop than an ATF tactical raid coming for your precious guns.

We have reached a point where we simply can’t extend the benefit of the doubt to local law enforcement anymore. After decades of hype, the police have internalized the conservative doctrine that all suspects are guilty and all criminals are super-powered movie villains. That’s why the cops of my youth had a big-ass revolver and a nightstick and the cops of today have a Glock with three clips, a taser, tear gas, a tonfa stick, a heavy aircraft-aluminum flashlight and as likely as not a couple of assault rifles in the trunk. All that surplus military gear had to go somewhere, which is why that limp-dick with the SR-25 in Ferguson was perched on top of the Army truck in the most vulnerable possible position – because he knew he wasn’t taking fire.

It’s about time the cops went back on Barney Fife rules for a while. You get one bullet in your pocket and you can load it when the sheriff says so. Having unlimited firepower to spray around like pissing off the porch – and carte blanche from racist juries – only incintivizes the worst sort of policing from the sort of people who should never have had access to a badge to begin with.

And miss me with the bitching about why people still think the way they do about Alabama. You know why? Because fifty-two years after four little girls were blown up in church, there are still plenty enough rednecks who don’t care if the cops only paralyze brown people.