Author: Stagger Lee

On paper, there’s not much to recommend the iPhone 12 this year. Sure, slightly faster new processor. Sure, 5G if you have a carrier that actually has it anywhere nearby. Sure, half a dozen tweaks to the camera or the battery or what have you, and nothing that would make you turn in last year’s phone to get this one. The days of wild radical change are over.

Except.

I made a list over a year and a half ago of the things I would want from a notional “iPhone X-Minus” in those innocent days where a bigger phone was “Plus” and not “Pro Max”. A surprising number of them were picked up by the new iPhone SE when it dropped in spring (and when I promptly bought it). But the rest went by the board for a long time, because the new SE itself – in the hair-too-big body of the iPhones 6 through 8 – was smaller than the smallest X-series 5.8” phone.

Except now we have all but confirmed that there is a 5.4” iPhone 12 mini, so-called, and it does have an AMOLED display that goes edge-to-edge and will have all the assorted features of the new phones like night mode, Animoji, or a battery over 2000 mAh and puts all these features into a package somewhere between the two SEs in size – making it just about the size of the original Moto X, the only Android phone to ever sufficiently tempt me into buying it. I said for years that what I wanted, as Apple’s handsets got ever larger, was a Moto X capable of running iOS. And the iPhone 12 mini might just be it.

That’s why I’m still tempted. If the smallest iPhone 12 were still 5.8”, I would be no more desirous of owning it than I was of owning the iPhone 7 once I bought the original SE. My iPhone X from work has sat untouched in my backpack ever since iOS 14 dropped for the new SE, bar some experimentation last night for the first time in a month because reasons. I don’t need the newest iPhone at all. It’s just the temptation of a bigger screen in a smaller package, something I’ve been coveting the notion of for three years at a minimum and in some ways longer, ever since the Moto X put the same size display as the iPhone 6 in a smaller device with a bigger battery.

I guess we’ll see if it’s worth it.

So Instagram turns 10 today. I don’t recall the exact timetable but I think it lasted a couple of years before being eaten by Facebook for what in retrospect was the low price of $1 billion. It was of its time when it began: yet another photo app offering filters to help make up for the comparatively shitty experience of phone cameras of the era (don’t forget, at the time it launched 5 MP was the new hotness from Apple) but within six years, it had grown to be the only part of Facebook I could still tolerate the use of.

And that’s sort of gone by the boards now. Constant UI tampering, the privileging of Stories and the addition of Reels and the focus on shopping and above all, the constant Facebook-ian need to show you things you didn’t ask to see. Having turned Facebook from a millennial college party into the canonical safe space for racist Boomers, Werner von Zuckerberg needed something new he could crap up beyond recognition, and Instagram is it.

It’s funny how these apps all seem to fail in the same way – they reach a point at which, for whatever reason, it’s not enough for you to see what you asked to see; they MUST show you things you didn’t ask for in hopes of triggering “engagement” or some bullshit like that. It happened with Twitter and the algorithmic timeline and the dry-snitching from what other people liked (or even just follow). Instagram has gone all in with a continuous scroll of stuff you didn’t ask for, presumably in an attempt to ape TikTok (because Insta is where Facebook rips off any possible competition now, be it TikTok or SnapChat or whatever).
Meanwhile, you’re back to the problem of wanting to follow your friends without having to bring all of their friends along into your private space, and either having a dozen different apps or just giving in to the modern social media world. I still don’t have a good answer.

May her memory be a blessing. It’s a sin and a shame that she had to spend her last years constantly grinding, unable to rest and recuperate and recover. It’s a crime that an 87-year-old woman was the last defense against a tide of corruption and malfeasance unparalleled in our history. And it’s an outrage that the GOP will, inevitably and undoubtedly, claim they must fill this seat forty-six days before Election Day after denying Barack Obama his last pick for eleven months before an election.

I’m officially terrified, in a way I managed to avoid all year. The fear is exactly where it was on November 9, 2016, and for the same reasons. All bets are off – a stuffed Supreme Court with the willingness to act on behalf of Dolt 45 in the same fashion as Bush v Gore. It means that judicial remedies will have a thumb on the scale all the way up the line, and that legal manipulation could easily be used to take what could not be won at the ballot box fair and square. The last safety catch was John Roberts’ tentative sense of maintaining the legitimacy of the court, and if a third Tr*mp appointee is seated, he will be surplus to requirement. And the Senate GOP does not have enough members with the backbone to stand for anything but what Moscow Mitch tells them to, so now matters are worse.

So now the challenge is even greater: this election has to be won, handily, on the day of the election in public view. Anything that depends on hand-counted votes after the fact will be challenged in court and in all likelihood will not survive a challenge. It’s Florida 2000 without controls or shame. Ambiguity means losing. Complications mean losing. Explaining means losing. Every set of rules depends on the notion that you will follow the rules, or else there are consequences. The tragedy of the 21st century is that the GOP has learned and internalized that there are no consequences for breaking unwritten rules, and as a result, they are now in a position to dictate the written rules and break those as well.

We have to win, somehow. I don’t know what I’m going to do if we don’t.

It’s BIG. The 44mm Series 6 is my first Apple Watch since the original, and the screen is bigger and the bezels smaller than before, to the point that my arm feels like it’s got some sort of Jitterbug AARP phone on it. You can feel the weight – I was wearing my Fitbit Inspire HR and my mechanical watch together this weekend, and I think it’s a wash.

I chose the velcro sport band (sorry, “hook and loop”) because I didn’t much trust the sizing on the Solo Loop and want to buy it once I can evaluate in person. Turns out this was the correct move, not least because if you don’t like the Loop it came with you have to return the whole watch. Which is a debacle now that the wait time is a month for shipping. It turns out I can barely squeeze my hand through it, but that’s fine for now; it may be a bigger deal after a few days of charging.

Which is really the trick, isn’t it? I finally went to the Charge 3 over a year ago after tooling around with a mechanical watch plus a Fitbit, and actively avoiding taking the Apple Watch abroad or anything, because I couldn’t be arsed to charge it every day and because the performance was slower than waiting for Christmas morning. Five years on, we have adequate storage for a dozen local playlists AND adequate processing power to actually make Siri responsive in less than a year AND sufficient telemetry on movement, heart rate and blood oxygen to make it a useful addition to one’s health care information. It occurred to me as I went out for the first time with it that this watch has to last at least until the end of 2023 to match the original, and I suspect there may be issues with that depending on how the battery works out.

But the battery is bigger, as the Watch gets on the iPhone train of ditching Jony Ive’s ridiculous 3DTouch and replacing the space the circuitry took up with actual battery. A mostly-black OLED display will help with this too; no wacky photo displays this time. It’s supposed to charge faster, probably when I’m in the shower, and even if I don’t it can explicitly stand up to some water now in a way the original could not. There’s a watch face with eight complications for real-time environmental awareness (UV, dB level, air quality, temps with high/low, heart rate) and next stuff up, there’s the Siri face (in eternal optimism that maybe this time Siri will be useful), and there’s three swappable faces for shutdown time to give me a clock and either the AppleTV remote, the music playlists or just the temperature outside. And one of me, a Memoji with a face mask on, just for the hell of it in this year of Hell.

I could theoretically use the walkie-talkie function if I had anyone I spoke to regularly who owned another Watch. I could theoretically use it as a SmarTrip card on the DC Metro. I could theoretically use Citymapper to navigate around JNUC in Minneapolis, or a weekend in Portland, or two weeks in London, if any of those were remotely feasible. It’s a new gadget, it’s health monitoring taken away from Google’s acquisition, it’s a little slice of a pretend future that it doesn’t always feel like we’re going to last long enough to experience for real. And it’s the phone on the shelf every Sunday or Tuesday night, surplus to requirement, with me still able to listen to podcasts and music and step out of the world for a smidge.

Now if only it had the space-time GPS and the quantum time-travel suit in it. I could go work on getting those stones.

My vision of management and leadership comes from three places. One is the novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine, in which Robert Fahmel is a consulting architect who staffs work out to three subordinates and has them check each other. His secretary only sees him work when there is a discrepancy, at which point she realized he really does know what he’s doing as he sorts out the problem himself with pencils and slide rule. The second is the novel (very much notthe movie) Starship Troopers, in which you’re not eligible for officer school until you have served as an enlisted trooper for some time and your higher-ups think you show the aptitude; the notion of training someone for management who hasn’t actually done the job is anathema. And the third is my own experience these last twenty-three years, where sometimes I’ve had a manager who did the job themselves and sometimes I didn’t. And there’s a distinct difference.

Last year, we were functionally outsourced. We still do the exact same job supporting the exact same people, but our paycheck comes from a different organization with reduced benefits and (based on the last 365 days) precious little interest in our actual jobs. Our management doesn’t much care whether we live or die, to all appearances; it’s been literally months since I heard from my boss’s boss and we are an afterthought at all-hands meetings of the new org. We still have to use the tools and resources of the organization we support but are not employed by, and as a result, we have no one in our line of command willing and able to make decisions on our behalf. 

It was not substantially better before, if we’re being honest. I’ve been answering the same phone and email for almost twelve years now, and in that time, not one person at my level has ever been promoted into a management role. Hell, before the back end of 2015, no one had ever been promoted, period. If you were Tier 2 support, that was the end of the road until they belatedly created Tier 3 and lead positions. But at the same time, they brought in all-new managers across the org chart, none of whom were internal hires. The collected effect has been to convey the message that “what you do is not important, and your work is worthy of neither recognition nor reward.”

This is partly because of the paucity of leadership and vision that’s endemic to this particular setting in the first place. But I think part of it also stems from the cult of the MBA – that you can teach management abstracted in every particular from who and what you’re managing – and from the notion that if you haven’t changed jobs every two years in this godforsaken Valley, you’re an indolent layabout without the drive and initiative to hop at the next opportunity. I don’t know what was more harmful last time I went on the job market, a college graduation in the 1990s or five years with the same company when I handed out resumes.

Problem is, sometimes you need leadership that came up through the hawser hole. You need those senior non-coms who have experience in your environment and institutional memory and know the ins and outs of how things work. The idea that the only role for the crafty veteran is to be retired and big-dicking around as a VC is why Silly Con Valley is a tech-washed Wall Street now; the money thinks it’s actually smarter than the brains now. And it probably goes a long way toward explain the cult of freedom from accountability espoused by Elon Musk and Paul Graham and Peter Thiel and the rest of the Hitler Youth at Y Combinator. Beware the man who only knows one thing and claims it’s the only thing worth knowing.

That’s why the 21st century has consisted mostly of vaporware and gaslighting. People sell promises and idiots buy, which is how morons like SoftBank can fund bullshit pyramid schemes like WeWork and Uber and Theranos that have no pathway to profitability. Companies like Lyft and Grubhub and Doordash complain about legal efforts to strengthen protections for gig workers while their long-term plans rely entirely on self-driving automation. And really, automation of everything is inevitable, because we’ve run out of places to which we can ship the labor. As humans come to demand a living wage, even in Shenzen and Dacca and who knows where else, the alternative is to mechanize and automate. If you don’t believe me, look at curbside delivery during the pandemic, ordered on your phone, and think how many waiters and cashiers are surplus to requirement even before you use the touch screen at McDonald’s or the self-checkout at Safeway.

These fuckers will legislate and agitate to pay you $2.13 an hour plus tips, pocket the tips, and then look you straight in the eye and say they’re fighting for your freedom. If the last four years hasn’t convinced you the extent to which people will gladly bullshit you about their misdeeds as they are in the process of committing them, then I can’t help you. We’re doomed as a society until we can make the cost of bullshit too great to pay for the bullshitters, instead of for us.

…anything that leads people to have greater concern for privacy – and that makes them want better control over their own data – is quite literally taking money out of the pocket of Google and Facebook.  And yet, as long as Google and Facebook collect this data, they can be subpoena’d for it or otherwise compelled to hand it over by whatever legal instrument exists.  Therefore, Google and Facebook have to kneecap the NSA as quickly as possible – not because the NSA is a flagrant violator of the rights of citizens, but because they’re ultimately the competition.

The surveillance society arrived five or six years ago, and we all signed up for it without thinking too hard about what it meant.  Now you get to spend the rest of your life either deciding you don’t care and it probably won’t affect you, or otherwise looking over your shoulder…forever.

– March 28, 2014

Apple shouldn’t have backed down. Their latest ad shows why they need to keep doing what they’re doing. If Apple’s attempts to protect privacy break the ad industry, tough shit. There is no right to surveillance. If the courts are going to rule that the program that Fast Eddie Snowden blew the whistle on was illegal, how bad is what every advertiser on the Internet does? News sites are unreadable for pop-over ads and airplay video and chum boxes. Facebook didn’t even make any bones about racial targeting until last week; what else are they doing?

Break them. Break them all.

The monkey’s paw is the archetype. You make a wish, and it get interpreted in the most literal and damaging way possible. Wish for your loved one’s suffering to end, and they die. Wish for vast wealth, and find yourself a drug lord with the DEA on your back. Wish for something you want, and get it in a way that makes everything worse. You’re not even supposed to tell your wish when you blow out the birthday cake candles, because then it won’t come true. All the stories work out like this. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. King Midas. Making a wish only gets you misery, so be content with what you have and accept your lot in life. 

Down South, they are pushing ahead with football for all they’re worth. A thousand C-19 cases at the University of Alabama, sixteen just among the Auburn football players, or even the plethora of issues at Vanderbilt – none of it is enough to make people say “hey let’s call this off,” even after the Big 10 [sic] and Pac-12 already have, along with just about everyone below FBS level (including the MEAC, the Ivy League and more). At some level, there is some kind of primal need driving the SEC and its cousins in the ACC and the Big [sic] 12 [sic], and if I had to narrow it down, I would attribute it to a line that literally came to me in a dream:

Football is huge down South because it’s the most violent thing to which the Scotch-Irish can legally affiliate themselves as tribes.

And this is where you have the problem Vanderbilt football cannot escape. Only private school out of 14 in the SEC (which in retrospect never should have grown beyond 10 once Tech and Tulane decamped). Does not have the same sidewalk fan culture as any of the other 13. Plays in a metro area where there are actual major league professional teams competing for the dollars less than five miles away. Overshadowed by other teams in the same school in a way unlike any other SEC team bar Kentucky. Vanderbilt football’s fans are few but mighty, but it’s still not on a scale with even the Kentucky or Mississippi school football fandoms. And as a result, Vanderbilt doesn’t generate the kind of income necessary to punch at equal weight with those programs. And as a result of that, Vanderbilt doesn’t have the kind of success on the field that would change minds about what Vanderbilt football is.

And yet. In 2017, Vanderbilt’s football budget was $22.15 million. Which ranked it…44th in the Power 5. More than TCU, more than Oklahoma State, more than Mizzou, more than West Virginia or K-State or Georgia Tech or Purdue. There are other programs having more success for less money in our own damned division. So clearly, it’s not enough to spend money – it has to be spent well. Granted, most of these programs have probably been spending more for longer, and don’t have as much ground to make up as Vanderbilt – but nevertheless, it reflects cold reality: merely shooting money out of a firehose won’t get this done.

It’s a catch-22 and a vicious cycle: Vanderbilt football will never be taken seriously until it is successful, and Vanderbilt football will never be successful until it is taken seriously. Not only by the fans, not only by a college football media that classifies teams based on how good they were in the sportswriter’s youth, but by its own university administration. And one of the things that matters there is finding a coach who can have some modicum of success without immediately flying the coop for bigger and better things. David Cutcliffe has been at Duke since 2008, David Shaw at Stanford since 2011, Pat Fitzgerald at Northwestern since 2006. All have had more than six wins in the regular season and none has taken off for another gig after three years. Vanderbilt ought to be able to find a coach who can at least see a full class of recruits through to graduation without having to accept four-win seasons as the cost of doing business.

A decade ago, we wished for better. We wished that we could at least be good enough to win more than we lost. And we got that, for three years, and then wound up right back where we started, layered on with creeping damage to the culture of the program and the bitterness of knowing that it was possible to do better than four or five wins. But even at the peak, Vanderbilt’s best success in a century added up to 8-4, beating the arch-rival, and being under-slotted for a non-prestige bowl bid.

You don’t want to just accept what is. You want to dream, you want to hope – but in the end, there’s a reason they say “be careful what you wish for.”

They literally could not be bothered to have a platform for the Republican National Convention. How lazy do you have to be not to type out ten simple words?

“Freedom from consequences, for white conservatives, and absolutely nobody else.”

I mean, what else could the message be? When you have a series of blowouts with badly blended makeup – some actual criminals, some only crime-adjacent – blathering about nepotism on a night where two Tr*mp spawn were speaking and blathering about corruption on a night when the Third Lady wiped her ass with the Hatch Act.

The thing that makes me scared about this election is the extent to which they aren’t even hiding it anymore – and nobody in the GOP cares, and no one in the news media will hammer the topic. Shut down the post office to occlude postal voting? Sure. Give a political speech from the Rose Garden? Why not. And the constant bleating of the Sabbath Gasbags: “no one outside the Beltway cares.” No, nobody inside the Beltway cares, and nobody outside the Beltway realizes what is happening because the White House press corps is too hip and inside to explain it. The willingness of Washington elites to shrug and say “all in the game, yo” will destroy American democracy in the long run.

But the other thing that springs to my mind – especially looking at Christine O’Donnell’s newfound trouble with her election cash – is that sometime in the last twenty years, talk-show hosts and their anointed candidates became the new televangelists. Whereas in years past, the stereotypical person of a certain age would send the whole Social Security check to Oral Roberts, now the money all goes to Cash4Gold and SarahPAC. And for much the same reason – if you can trade cash for salvation, temporal or heavenly, you have to make that deal, right?

–Dec. 30, 2010

 

The current administration, when you think about it, is almost an inevitable endpoint. I have argued previously that a core part of the Republican mission in the last 50 years, ever since Kevin Philips wrote The Emerging Republican Majority, has been to weaponize ignorance in defense of wealth. Set against that, the Trump movement makes perfect sense, because it has taken things to the logical extreme endpoint: the weaponization of racism in defense of personal wealth.

The delicious irony of Steve Bannon being pulled off a boat by US Postal Inspection Service agents like some kind of Arrested Development pastiche merely points up what I said ten years ago: this is the new televangelism. The same people who would have shipped their money to Oral Roberts to keep God from calling him home gladly pivoted to shipping their money to another brand of asshole hucksters (Anal Roberts?) who would assure the salvation of their faith: give us your cash so we can use it to shit all over the brown people. And meanwhile, pockets were lined and backs were scratched and metaphors were abused. And it’s worth asking why the Attorney General fired the DA for the Southern District of New York and tried to insert his own replacement, given that the ultimate replacement was the lady reading out the indictments this morning. (History will record that Bill Barr is the most corrupt defender of the Trump machine, and he must be pursued in the After if we ever have one.)

And so here we sit, looking at a GOP whose purpose and mission has been turned entirely toward the protection not of wealth in general, but of the Trump Organization and the constellation of grifters and con artists that orbits it. The Republicans are going to have to be made to wash the slime off before being allowed back into polite company, never mind actual power, and I suspect there are plenty of people who would love to do so on their side. But I’m gonna need to see contrition, penitence and a little bit of “NOT IN THE FACE” before I’m willing to regard any elected Republican as other than a stooge for the hustlers.

None of the alternatives seem to work. The various chat options work as chats but not much else. And alternatives like Cluster or Cocoon or micro.blog/Sunlit don’t really work…because we’re already committed to Twitter and Instagram. It’s not going to be possible to get everyone to change apps until everyone changes apps. Like Hemingway’s bankruptcy, it happens two ways: slowly, then quickly.

Signal is probably the best example of this. It’s a viable replacement for WhatsApp, cross-platform and ad/snoopware free, and I have two or three ongoing chats there. And honestly, it seems to be the one app you can convince people to add. Every week or so another name appears, “so-and-so from your Contacts is on Signal” and the arc grows a little larger. Until Apple opens up iMessage to Android, it’s the only cryptographically sound way of doing chat that is safe across ios, Android and MacOS (I cannot speak to its efficacy on Windows). If only it worked with CarPlay.

If only there were some master reader app. I could have some people’s Insta, some Twitter, maybe even a random SnapChat or TikTok going into a single feed. This was the promise of RSS, and it fell apart quick because the social media model relies on everyone in one app (all cross-posted to Facebook as it happens).

TikTok is interesting, though – separate it from its Chinese parents (who are shady AF, irrespective of whether they have done shady things yet) and you have the first legit challenge to Facebook since Instagram and one FB is powerless to merely buy. They cloned it, of course, as they do with anything they can’t buy. But it is a threat to FB and to YouTube, which is as much a social medium and engine of radicalization as anything on FB despite the fact nobody is holding Google to the fire. And that alone makes TikTok interesting in a way that hasn’t been possible for years now.

I suppose in a lot of ways it’s about just having something else. Twitter is trash, Facebook is evil (as are all its properties) and I’m too old for Snapchat and TikTok. I just want something to keep up with my friends that doesn’t make me feel like part of the problem.