Author: Stagger Lee

Look, there’s nothing shocking or tragic here. If we’re willing to shrug off two dozen kids shot dead at school two weeks before Christmas, then a bunch of Congressmen getting sprayed is just the price of doing business. And it’s not like one political party has gone to the verge of incitement to protect the guns. Or like major network news gives airtime to those spreading lies and slander for the sake or protecting the guns. Oh wait.

Lie down with pigs, you’re gonna get shit on you. Make your highest political value “No Gun Left Behind” and eventually someone’s getting shot. Might be time to change how we think…but we won’t. 

Theresa May had a slim but viable Tory majority locked in through 2020 in Parliament. Owing to the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act the Conservatives passed to protect their LibDem coalition back in 2011, even the change of leadership and the chaos of Brexit meant they could still hang on without having to call a new election. But she decided to call an election in 2017 anyway, thinking that her party could extend its grip on government and have a mandate to push ahead with Brexit.

Whoops.

The Tories no longer have a majority at all. They are dependent on a right-wing Northern Irish party for a majority, one that some Tories are already pushing back against. The Conservative backbench has already gotten the heads of May’s advisors as the quid pro quo for not turfing her out with a leadership contest which would almost certainly send the country out for another election. And oh by the way, EU negotiations over the terms of Brexit are scheduled to start a week from today – and the mandate for a hard Brexit has been blown into a billion pieces as it becomes increasingly clear that the Great British public would kind of like a do-over on the mistakes of 2016.

So say we all.

If there’s a recurring theme in 2017 politics worldwide, it’s that people are puking up the populism they were over served in 2016. In France, an explicitly pro-EU technocrat crushed Yet Another LePen in the election for President – and the pundits said “well he won’t have his own party in Parliament, he’s going to struggle, that’s the real election” right up until Macron’s new party won a landslide majority in Sunday’s voting. Angela Merkel, who some thought might be on the rocks coming into 2017, looks to be shaping up well as the new Leader of the Free World. And oh by the way, the American President is now down to a -20 split on approval rating.

This is the problem with American government: we have parliamentary politics but a divided-powers form of government. It yields a huge structural advantage to a party that wants to undermine the role of government and a party that bases itself heavily in small, rural, overly-white states. When the two dovetail, you wind up with what we get now: the United States of Alabama. While the majority of the country would like to be rid of it – after all, a plurality voted for the other leading candidate, not the winner – we don’t have a lot of options for solving this thing in the near future. Probably not until 2020, if we’re being honest.

Because here’s the thing: we’ve had three impeachments of a President in American history. None resulted in a guilty finding at Senate trial. The most recent one was an explicitly political act to try to undo what the GOP couldn’t accomplish twice at the ballot box, a ginned-up perjury trap formed from a six-year fishing expedition. The secondary impact was to utterly tar impeachment as a political process and effectively undermine its legitimacy for the future – maybe as revenge for Nixon, who knows, but the point is this: we’ve never actually removed a President that way. Nixon resigned rather than go to trial in the Senate. There are no circumstances right now under which this Senate could muster the votes to convict a Republican President.

And what if they could? Bear in mind that even if “the system works” as the goo-goos like to say, think of the implications around what it would take for half the GOP to turn on their incumbent. Something really really bad would have to have happened, and that means that sure, he’s gone, but we’re also reckoning with the consequences of whatever thing made it possible for the Senate to do the deed – collusion with foreign powers, massive abuse of authority, a dead girl and a live boy, whatever – along with, in all likelihood, the activation of a rump faction that has spent decades now dying for an excuse to want to need to use their guns. People hoping for a neatly-timed assassination are asking for a world of nightmares – if you thought the country went seven bubbles off plumb after September 11, and it did, try to conceive of the world of shit that would be unleashed if someone took a shot at the President and succeeded. Hint: you don’t want those problems.

The time to sort this thing out was in 2016. We don’t have the same sort of puke-and-rally mechanism a parliamentary system comes with. Right now is the time to work on flipping the Congress in 2018 to further mitigate the damage, but thinking we have an escape route in less than three and a half years is a fool’s errand. In the meantime, there’s a perfectly usable political party and institutions of government, and the thing to do is use what we have right in front of us instead of trying to magic up some sort of miracle-erase undo solution.

Because no matter how things turn out – even if Kamala Harris has her hand on the Bible on January 20, 2021, looking at a 350-seat Democratic House and 70 seats in the Senate, and the land of milk and honey and fried catfish is at hand – we’re never going to have not elected Donald Trump. That’s something we have to deal with, not wish into the cornfield. And there are a lot of implications to that. Of which…

If there’s one thing you should take away from today’s WWDC keynote, it’s that Apple has heard the mob of developers darkly warning that it’s been four years since the Mac Pro and that Apple isn’t committed to its professional market. This murdered-out hot-rod iMac Pro may be the replacement for the 2013 trashcan, or it may just be a desperate placeholder until a new pro tower can be conceived and birthed. Either way, it’s hard not to hear the subtext of today’s keynote as “Baby! I’ve changed! I swear! Don’t leave! I’ll give you anything you want! I’ll give you APIs for machine learning and augmented reality! Just stay!”

Oh yeah, about that. It looks like Apple is finally arriving for the Great Virtual Reality Fight – and where there are only a handful of phones supporting Google’s Project Tango, it looks like Apple’s plan is to make their solution run on any of their 64-bit hardware back to the iPhone 5s.* Some better than others, certainly, and almost certainly optimized for some notional 2017 iPhone (7s? 8? 10th Anniversary?), but for developers, there will be APIs and a pre-existing installed base. Where Apple hasn’t been first to the fight, they’ve generally arrived with a finished solution requiring only some polish once it’s made contact with reality (iTunes, iPod, iPhone…) so it’s not hard to imagine that within a year, Apple will be punching at equal weight with the likes of the Oculus Rift or the Hololens or Tango.

Except, of course, where the Apple Watch is concerned. We have yet another UI coming for this watch, the third major iteration in as many years, and this one looks like it might stick. When Google was coming up with their watch, I hypothesized that the goal was basically Google Now on the wrist, and that seems to be where watchOS 4 is heading, using Siri and machine learning to mine your device – more on that in a minute – and put the sort of “Your Day Today” stuff on your arm in order. Here a meeting, there a ticket, there driving time home, here tomorrow’s weather forecast, with reminders and notifications slid in as required to alert you to email or advise you to walk that last four minutes you need. There have been God only knows how many attempts at this on iOS – Donna, ARO Saga, Osito, Google Now itself – but they all relied on you giving the app access and mostly depended on you using Google services for mail and calendar. Four years on, this is built in at the OS level, and the key thing will be whether you have to use Apple’s primary apps and services or whether it can work with your Outlook calendar or your Gmail or the like. 

And of course whether that data resides on your phone. Apple is all-in on personal privacy, or at least enough to make it a deliberate selling point. They went out of their way to assuage concerns about their always-listening speaker, to emphasize that their machine learning is searching your phone ON your phone, that your data stays your data. And as the only one of the Big Five tech firms in America whose business model relies purely on selling a physical product for cash on the barrelhead, they can get away with it in ways Google and Facebook simply aren’t and will never be capable of. As iMessage moves into the cloud, of course, this could get complicated, because now some of your data will be obligated to reside on Apple servers somewhere – but that’s why we download Signal, right?

There is a dividing line with this technology. I saw it to some extent when I was doing remote workstation support through ARD and would take over someone’s screen. About half the time the response was “ooh, cool!” and the other half it was “eww, creepy.” That nano-millimeter between cool and creepy is where Apple is trying to tiptoe, trying to offer you a magical experience without giving you reason to engage the suspicion module.  Some of the split may be generational; the Snapchat kids are probably less bothered about the notion that a company could see all their stuff. Then again, when your experience with the Internet began as “they could be ax murderers” instead of “the app said it was OK to get in this guy’s car,” it’s not surprising that your reaction to some of this stuff is “ask questions first and upgrade later.” The goal for Siri – whether in your phone, your arm or the speaker you just parked under your TV – is to be JARVIS without becoming Big Brother.

About that TV…it takes about as much time to take a leak as Tim Cook spent talking about Apple TV. In fact, apart from the news that Amazon Prime Video, the last major streaming holdout, will be available by the end of the year, there wasn’t any news. Instead we got the HomePod, the Apple answer to Alexa and Google Home, and while it is pitched as a music device first and foremost, its Siri and HomeKit integration suggest that it will be the Apple hub for home in a way the Apple TV might have otherwise been. Which is interesting, given that the Apple TV has its own named operating system and App Store and the like.

Two possibilities here, both of which I suspect are true. One is that Apple is getting nowhere with its television plans. Rights-holders and broadband companies aren’t about to play along, especially with Ajit Pai ball-washing the cable companies with every decision, and without some sort of actual television service of its own, the Apple TV is a glorified and overpriced Chromecast. The other possibility is that Apple is really serious about Siri this time, and believes that by the beginning of 2018 it will be a sufficiently capable user interface to be the only interface in very strictly limited circumstances. Play this song, what’s the weather tomorrow, did the S&P 500 close up or down. Not a whole lot, and not appreciably more than you can get out of Siri now, but by using a very tightly-selected few “domains” and making them work well, Apple is betting that it can make voice a plausible UI mechanism which can then be expanded as needed.

It’s an interesting bet, and one that goes along with the emerging meme that the computer itself is being abstracted away. Google is more or less up front about this, saying that Google’s services are the real computer and that your watch or TV or speaker or phone or car or whatever is just your chosen portal through which you interact. Apple is doing something similar, trying to homogenize your phone and laptop and speaker and watch and tablet and desktop into one big lumpy pillow which you can fluff up into whatever configuration you presently require. (The addition of a dock and drag-and-drop and enhanced multitasking and a FILE SYSTEM BROWSER and the like to iOS 11 for iPad suggests that we’re not that far off from one OS to rule them all – “appleOS” maybe, but just as likely “siriOS” at this point. Are they siriOS? Possibly.

The pieces are all there.  The voice recognition is finally approaching usability. The machine learning – if you can get past the suspicion – is starting to get better about surfacing the right information contextually. If you can go between watch and headphones and the larger phone in your pocket without pulling it out, maybe you do only need just the one 5-inch AMOLED-display VR-ready 2500-mAh-battery iPhone Superba that docks in your 4K display at the office instead of a phone and a tablet and a laptop.

In a lot of ways, then, Apple spent today asserting that they’re still here, and they’re still serious about everything, and that they want to build the future. It’s not time to sell the stock yet.

 

*ETA: according to Phil Michaels, the baseline is an A9 processor with iOS, so iPhone 6s and later. Jury is out on whether that includes the iPhone SE, which packs the A9 but not the 3DTouch components.

In the beginning, it was still shirt and tie four days a week. Casual Friday was olly-olly-oxen-free, unlike at Sonat when it just meant you could leave the tie off – any sort of button-up or polo was fine, as were jeans, and I still had those Converse leather All-Stars that I recall wearing, the last time I owned basketball shoes. I still had the Elk for outerwear, the big oversized leather jacket I’d foolishly bought that first semester at Vanderbilt, and (briefly) had an actual trench coat for rain before I quickly returned it at JC Penney to have the credit applied against a MasterCard that was already straining against its credit limit.

It was sometime around the time my dad died that National Geographic went away from any sort of business attire. It wasn’t quite on the level of a dot-com but it was a lot more casual than the rest of DC. I was casting about for the right jeans, and went through several different manufacturers – Britches, Eddie Bauer. It wasn’t until California that I would settle on Levi’s 501s for a decade, followed by the addition of LC King Pointer Brand work jeans – I never owned either one in DC. Same with sunglasses – I went through maybe half a dozen pair of assorted manufacture, here some Clubmasters and there something cheap and there a Fossil or an Oakley. Never adopted amber lenses or the New Wayfarer until California.

I never wore a hat in DC that much – it was too hot in the summer and made my hair a mess, but I did have a Boston Red Sox batting practice hat for when we played softball. Not long after my future wife moved to DC, it was replaced by a Giants BP hat. I certainly owned some Redskins headgear, and there were lids from my alma maters, but they didn’t get much run. If it was hot weather, I didn’t have a hat on, and smartly so – I wouldn’t need a hat on a regular basis until I finally cut my hair down after moving west and getting married.

I wore wide-wale corduroy in the winter and flat-front khaki in the summer. I had mostly black polo shirts in cold weather and mostly untucked button-up resort-type shirts in hot weather, bought on sale from the Macy’s clearance rack at the Ballston mall.  Thus my future surrogate big sister’s dig at my packing: “black shirt, black shirt, black shirt, Hawaiian shirt, black Hawaiian shirt.” Between Easter and Labor Day, I didn’t even wear socks – sometimes with fisherman sandals but more commonly with low four-eyelet Dr Martens brown oxfords with a padded collar…and no socks. I owned half a dozen pair of assorted DMs in DC but never steel toes before joining the fruit company in Cupertino. But the DMs took care of the endless search for the right brown show that had consumed my last year in Nashville.

I carried a much larger Leatherman, every day. I carried a Zippo lighter, every day. For years, I carried a pipe and a tobacco pouch. I carried a pager and a cell phone and a rolled-up magazine and a Walkman or MP3 player or iPod and sometimes a Blackberry or Palm Pilot, all of which were completely replaced by the end of summer 2007 with just an iPhone. I dreaded summer because I needed the pocket space of a jacket, and once invested in Dockers with concealed cargo pockets, zippers down the outside seam, so that I could get my smoking and technology apparatus hidden away.

So many of the things that are central to my wardrobe now – the LC King and American Giant, the Indy boots and canoe mocs and all the American-made workwear, the button-fly 501s and Ray-Ban New Wayfarers with polarized lenses, the New Era low-crown 5950 baseball caps, the endless American Apparel T-shirts in 2XL, the Harris Tweed and the Buzz Rickson and the Filson trucker jacket, the black plastic Birkenstock shower shoes – all of that has happened since I came West. Apart from the Indiana Jones leather jacket and the ubiquitous khakis from April to October, I didn’t have any one particular thing that stood out about my DC wardrobe – just a bunch of pieces in and out in search of a unified theme which wasn’t even “failed grad student gone wild” or “upscale vagrant” or “man wearing clothes so he doesn’t catch an indecent exposure bid on the Orange Line at 9:15 AM”.

Maybe I was more liminal then. Or more creative. Or the climate required flexibility. Or maybe I just had it in my head to handle the bandwidth of a little more variability in how I left the house. I’m not yet on the Steve Jobs school of simplification, but there’s a lot more commonality in what I wear out the door in the mornings now, because the climate here is basically “April in Birmingham” 12 months a year. There was certainly no time in DC when I owned five identical T-shirts, four identical pair of jeans, three different identical T-shirts, eight identical pair of black socks and a dozen different baseball caps with almost as many different pairs of shoes.

I don’t know what any of that means. I feel like it means something, or ought to, but I’m not the one to figure out what it is.

So I bought a SIM from US Mobile ($4) and set up a sample plan for them. 100 minutes, 100 texts (both the minimum) and 4 GB of data. The total cost per month is $27. A more realistic configuration for me would probably be 300 minutes and 10 GB of data (just to be safe) but even that is all of $39 a month. They’re backboned off T-Mobile, so I have a pretty good idea what their network is like, and in the early testing on my iPhone 6 (to eliminate iPhone/Android differences in how stats are calculated and bars shown) it seems to be not-terrible. The only caveat is that they don’t support visual voicemail, although the fact that I even thought about voicemail proves I’m over 40.

In the course of doing this, I have come to realize that yes, the iPhone 6 is just a little too big. The Moto X has the same size screen in a smaller package. Not much smaller – the difference is 2 millimeters wide and 9 millimeters high – but when those differences are all bezel and no screen whatsoever, it makes a world of difference. It also doesn’t help that the iPhone 6 requires a case if you want it to lie flat and not on the camera hump, which only makes matters worse (not to deny that the Apple leather case is very nice). And of course, the iPhone 6 and 6S are infamous for their battery performance, so much so Apple had to produce a first-party battery case. But that is neither here nor there at present, and Apple does deserve credit for keeping the same outward body dimensions (and thus the same cases and accessories apart from headphones) for three generations of the device (as well as keeping the iPhone 5 design from 2012 intact for the SE).

Again, it drives home how the Moto X got it right. Just a hair over 5 inches by 2.5 inches, with a 720p display in AMOLED, 2 GB of RAM, always-listening voice command (“listen up, Friday”) and a 2000 mAh battery (which Apple has yet to fit into a phone that isn’t a cafeteria tray). What I wouldn’t give…but again, neither here nor there.

The point is, I feel like there’s a sweet spot in which a larger phone could be made to work for me. In my continuing quest for the one perfect solution for everything, the notion that there’s one phone that could be the daily driver and the travel phone and a viable Kindle substitute and have my EU SIM card in there at the same time and have replaceable parts in case the camera or battery go south…

And then I see Andy Rubin’s new Essential phone. Standalone device, presumably not bound to carrier updates, ceramic and titanium and a HUGE full-screen display (with a notch for the camera), a real premium device with a 3000mAh battery…and it’s actually longer (by 4mm) and wider (by 4 mm) than the iPhone 7 is already (although thick enough to completely contain the camera, so well done there). Which means that by the time you put the case on the iPhone 6 I currently have, it’s…the same size. Just a hair too big. All screen, which is nice, but it’s still a phone that’s just a hair bigger than the phone that was just a hair too big. And if the Pixel and the iPhone 7 are already a hair too big, I don’t have an answer. I don’t think we’re going to get a phone with a 4.7” display in a compact one-hand-able format again. Which is why I’m back to “you will pry this iPhone SE from my cold dead hands.”  I haven’t had a work phone upgrade in three years, because I wanted this SE to be mine and mine alone, and I’m glad I did (and that I have a viable option for continuing on prepaid for under $40 if circumstances dictate.

A year on, I look at the other things around the cheap-phone space. I only paid $300 for my Moto X in 2014, so any replacement Android device needs to be no more than that. And the thing is…it’s not there. Nothing else at that price point has an AMOLED display AND has NFC AND takes the same size SIM care AND comes in at a comfortable one-hand size. Never mind the crapsack cameras that come with Androids at that price point or the virtual guarantee that you’ll never see more than one major OS upgrade (if that). Sure, it seems nice to have the promise of a 4000 mAh battery(!) in the Moto C Plus, or completely unbranded Android in the Nokia 5 (hopefully with the fit and finish we expected of our old pals from Espoo), but there’s always some kind of compromise.

And then there’s the iPhone SE which I bought cash on the barrelhead last year for $500. Although in a way it was actually kind of free, because it was completely paid for by my share of the court settlement over Apple, Google, etc conspiring to restrain employee movement. In any event, it was the first cell phone I put on a credit card of my own since 2014, and only the second since 2010. So it had to be something special to make it worthwhile, especially since the iPhone 6s was the first iPhone I found less desirable than its predecessor.

After one year of use, the SE has proven to be special indeed. I have bopped back and forth between phone cases, and I’ve still pulled out the Moto X on nights or off-days when I needed to be more fully detached without giving up connectivity altogether (read: I want to see Instagram and I might get a Slack message from Kazakhstan). And I still greatly prefer to use my Kindle Paperwhite for reading, because the SE’s display is indeed a little narrow for everyday use (but serviceable in a pinch). But after a year of everyday use, I took the phone to an Oakland A’s game last weekend, and never needed to pull out the external battery despite six hours of Slack, Instagram, text messaging, taking pictures, paying for beer and generally carrying on out and about with friends.

It fits in a pocket. It fits in one hand. It plays nicely with the car’s integrated CarPlay console or with my new Bluetooth noise-cancelling headphones (and I can walk to the fridge and back at work, leaving the phone on my desk, and be just fine). It took a prepaid EE SIM in London and was just as useful on every frequency band as in the US, and it took a prepaid T-Mobile SIM in San Jose and gave me top signal at a California League baseball game and a fishing boat off Santa Cruz. It takes amazing 12 MP pictures that no point-and-shoot I’ve ever owned would take. It has NFC for payments and a fingerprint reader to unlock it, it works for airplane tickets and baseball tickets and concert tickets alike. And because it came out in the spring of 2016, it probably has a good three years of OS updates ahead of it.

And this one doesn’t belong to work, and isn’t locked to a carrier, and isn’t hobbled by a contract. This phone is all mine, stem to stern, and I could quit work tomorrow and pop my T-Mob SIM in there and carry right on until I settled on a long-term deal with them or with Cricket to carry me forward for less per month than I ever paid before abandoning my own AT&T foundation account in 2012. I can wait for phone makers to come around to the fact that yes, there are people who want something that doesn’t need a purse, and not everyone needs a 5-inch display.

Two phones I’ve bought since 2010. Neither has ever given me any reason to regret them.

(Mind wandering in the cause of distraction.)

For some reason, I am a person who completely missed on what is commonly thought of as “geek culture.” In my life, I’ve seen maybe three episodes of MST3K. I saw a good few episodes of Star Trek – both original and Next Generation – but never really got into them aside from the Borg cliffhanger in 1990, which in my mind was still a better Trek movie than any of the Next Generation-featuring ones. While I was drawn into Doctor Who in my youth, it’s sort of gone by the boards lately. I was into comics for exactly four years between 1983 and 1987, and into tabletop RPGs maybe 1982 to 1987 tops. I was a Star Wars obsessive, obviously, but that just made me a kid in the 70s. I never got much further into the Expanded Universe than the original Thrawn trilogy (and missed very little, by all accounts; the other EU books I did read were pretty much crap). I’ve still never seen Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a single episode of Red Dwarf or Babylon 5, or any of seasons 1 or 4 of Blackadder. I’ve read one Discworld book and don’t remember that much of it and my sci-fi literary canon basically begins with Connie Willis and ends with William Gibson.

I didn’t have a computer at home until I went off to grad school, aside from the times over Christmas break when my dad would bring one home to noodle around on (never to any great effect). I never did online gaming other than at work, in the days of Quake and Unreal and original-flavor Call of Duty. I bought a PlayStation 2 mostly as a DVD player and owned exactly two games for it (NCAA Basketball ’04 and Arena Football, neither of which I played more than twice). My first BBS membership was in 1994. And while I was on Slashdot in the late 90s, I’ve never had an account on Digg or Reddit or anything similar. I don’t even follow Wil Wheaton or Felicia Day on Twitter.

In short, while I did hit some of the most obvious markers and am broadly conversant in the lingua franca, I never really bought into capital-letter Geek Culture. It’s possible that there just wasn’t that much of it accessible in exurban Alabama in the 1980s, or that the pre-Internet world made it a lot harder to find and connect with things. Or maybe it’s just the same pop-culture blind spot that I still have to this day (a short list of current hings I’ve never seen an episode of: Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, House of Cards, Veep, The Walking Dead, Justified). But a healthy grounding in geek culture was something that was necessary if you were going to fit into the people at my undergrad that didn’t fit in, so…well…there you go.

It’s a tough one. On the one hand you want to reject that there’s any qualitative difference between, say, Tolkien obsessives and Auburn fanatics. But on the other hand, you don’t want to reject caring about everything and anything. But on the third hand…I suppose on the third hand, I’ve rejected a subculture that I was entirely fit for, except inasmuch as it hits the mainstream of American life and not always then. (I mean, I own almost every Marvel Cinematic Universe film, but I’ve still never seen the 2008 Incredible Hulk.)

Then again, it’s not like I was in the mainstream of popular culture…ever. I’ve never seen an episode of Three’s Company or Miami Vice, of Mad Men or The Big Bang Theory (to go opposite ends). Never saw Dallas or Dynasty. Never watched past the first 20 minutes of Lost (starting on an airplane might have been a mistake). Never seen a single minute of a single Shonda Rimes show.  These days, my television viewing consists of Silicon Valley, Agents of SHIELD, Tiny House Hunters, House Hunters International, maybe Graham Norton and/or Top Gear, and an occasional smattering of rugby, Premier League soccer or the Oakland A’s. Plus reruns of California’s Gold, of course. And that’s about it. No interest in professional sports on TV otherwise, and precious little college sports aside from bowl season or March Madness. And since you can’t really participate in American sports culture if you’re punched out of the NFL…

I was listening to a podcast about expat life for Americans abroad, and apart from the fact that every single one complains about the dearth of decent Mexican food in France or New Zealand or Germany, one comment stuck out, when someone said that as an expat, she felt kind of lost – not a part of America anymore, and somehow different when back here, but not really a part of her now-home country either. And that struck home with me, largely because it fits so well. I still don’t feel wholly Californian (though I am determined to make the effort more than ever these past six months) but wouldn’t feel right returning to the DMV or Nashville.  I definitely didn’t fit in whilst in undergrad but didn’t fit in with the subcultural alternative either. Somehow, I have managed to make myself fit nowhere exactly, which isn’t always a bad outcome. But it dovetails neatly with the “broad but not deep” which has characterized so much of my life…of which, blah blah blah.

Whatever. I don’t think I saw one thing in the livestream say it was available today other than maybe that Google Photos book printing function…which we had in 2010 and before through iPhoto.  The words “soon” and “later this year” and “in the coming weeks/months” were used enough that as one Tweeter said, “if you had a drinking game you’d be dead.”

You ain’t shit ’til you ship. Real artists ship. Google is trading in vaporware again, when they aren’t taking their second or third bite at the same apple (pun kind of intended). Android O will finally be the one that sorts out the battery life issue (which Lollipop was supposed to fix in 2015) or the update issue (which the Android Mobile Alliance was supposed to fix in 2011). Android Go will put viable non-sucktastic low-end hardware in the hands of developing-world customers, just like Android One was supposed to. The biggest upset was that we didn’t get Yet Another Google Messaging Application, although I suppose the inexplicable Super Chat in YouTube might count.

These days, I look at Google and I see Hooli: the tech company equivalent of a guy who thinks that because he made a lot of money at one thing, he is a genius at everything and qualified to be anything. Apple is a lot more circumspect about it – they don’t actually release their self-driving technology or their virtual reality play or their home voice computing setup when it’s obviously beta-grade, Siri jokes aside – but they’re at no less risk of getting high on their own flatus and disappearing up their own collective ass. Microsoft is yesterday’s news. Amazon is Wal-Mart with a website and a power-wash. Yahoo is a zombie with two legs missing. Facebook is a gigantic data-miner profiting off the most underreported bait and switch in the history of technology, speaking of guys who got rich at one thing and think it makes them a genius.

What does that leave? The broadband companies are pure evil. Most of your third-wave tech companies are some mundane function laundered through an app and enough regulatory arbitrage and loophole-bending to keep lawyers farting through silk for eternity, and almost all of them are losing money and burning venture capital to build market share in hopes they can get rich before they get exposed. Right now, there’s a collection of basic bros with a news site, a co-working room and some rudimentary event planning who have convinced people they’re a VR startup to the tune of $4 million (and a scorching-hot sexual harassment case which they will certainly lose).

More than ever before, there are two tech sectors now. One is plugging along at things like security, back-of-house software, power management engineering, the things that are actually important in getting things done. The other is bending rules and breaking laws to get you everything your mother doesn’t do for you since you graduated and trying to serve up some tits on the side. One of these is getting media and money and being made the harbinger of our modern economy, and it’s the wrong fucking one.

Silicon Valley is where your future is coming from. You won’t like it.

 

ETA: looks like the Google Assistant for iOS did ship today, which is a bit of a conundrum: I’m curious whether it can work with your non-Google email or text or such, or if it’s basically just a voice-activated hook into your Google ecosystem for your non-Android device. But since I don’t have much of a Google ecosystem other than what I test on the Moto X, it’s probably not for me anyway. Which is worth noting – everything is about getting you plugged deeper and deeper into the Google data ecosystem. Apple wants you to buy their gadgets, Google wants to have your information. One is a lot more alarming form of lock-in.

First, the obvious: no matter how much liberal conspiracy theorists want to fantasize about “sealed indictments” or their heroic Wikileaks suddenly coming through for them or The People Risen or whatever, let’s get one thing straight: the only way Trump doesn’t serve out his entire term through 2021, barring divine intervention, is if the Democrats can take BOTH houses of Congress in 2018, unearth SOMETHING that rises to the level of impeachment, and take enough of the Senate that a few wavering Republicans might jump ship (because without 67 votes in the Senate, there’s no removing a President, and the most anyone’s had in my living memory was the Democrats with 60 for about three months in 2009 between when Al Franken was finally seated and Ted Kennedy dropped dead).  

And when you consider what this GOP is willing to swallow for a President whose approval rating is a record low and a Congress whose approval rating is somewhere around syphilis, don’t expect McCain and Collins and Murkowski and the like to suddenly discover their inner statesman. And don’t forget: sitting behind Trump is a Vice-President who is “what if you replaced all of Trump’s Sex Pest with Holy Roller”. The system is already broken. It was broken before Trump ever arrived. Dolt 45 isn’t the car wreck, he’s the spark hitting the gas tank after the car’s already sloughed through the guardrails, through a telephone pole and into a tree. The accident has already happened – happened in slow motion for twenty years before he ever took office – but it’s only now that you get the explosion and inferno that suggest we might not make it out alive.

Because look at the damage that has to be repaired. Health care will almost certainly need to be put back together somehow. Just reverting to the Obamacare status quo ante won’t get it done, because insurers will shift and shake to whatever the rules are now and turning them will be another agonizingly slow process; don’t forget it took five years for all of Obamacare to come into effect and even then, large numbers of redneck states opted out of the Medicare expansion which broke the model.  At this point, realistically, the goal ought to be Medicare For All and to hell with it, and that might be simplest, but “simple” is a relative term here. Look at our relationship with our allies, who now know we can’t be trusted with moral leadership or sensitive intelligence or to cooperate with multilateral agreements. The best case scenario at the end of this is that we’re Italy or Israel, and we’re more likely to be Russia with Hollywood than anything else.

Then there’s aging. Social Security isn’t enough, even if it holds out for another twenty years or so. Pension funds are underfunded and drying up. Retirement plans that depend on 401(k) and the like can be wiped out with a major stock disruption. All it takes is another global-level credit crunch like 2008 and you’ll see your savings for your golden years done by about half. Maybe in time to come back from, maybe not. If the stock market goes directly into the shitter on your 59th birthday, you’re probably going to be faced with working until you’re 70 or worse. And consider this: there are members of Congress explicitly talking about cuts to Medicare. Not Medicaid, Medicare. The thing that everyone over 65 relies on for health care in this country, because geriatric care is inherently too expensive to insure in the open market. If you’re Generation X, it’s time to start grappling with the possibility that you’re going to get put on an ice floe and shoved out into the sea to die. Better hope your house can sell for a shit-ton of money and your kids (if any, ha ha) are willing to take you in. Or that you saw an episode of Tiny House Hunters with everything built on one level. Or that you have a knack for finding the tastier cat-food varieties. But that’s just the economic side of things. I’m not trying to be funny, but that’s important. But it’s not the whole story.

Go back up and look at that bit about “the system is already broke” again. Since 1992, we have had a newly elected Democratic President twice. Both times, the Democrats had control of both houses of Congress. Both times, the GOP ran a scorched-earth opposition in Congress which flipped control to them two years later. And both times, that Democrat served two terms only to be succeeded by a Republican WHO GOT FEWER VOTES THAN THE DEMOCRAT HE RAN AGAINST. Miss me with the Electoral College loophole and how it privileges smaller states and makes the one-cow-one-vote territories look like a landslide on a map. More actual American voters cast their ballot for both Al Gore and for Hillary Clinton. And neither one got to put their hand on the Bible on January 20.

Also in that time, we’ve had three government shutdowns. Hard shutdowns, with a GOP Congress seeking to blackmail a Democrat in the White House. We’ve had a near-default…by a GOP Congress. We’ve had that filibuster of a Supreme Court vacancy for almost a year, by a GOP Senate, just to run the clock out and ensure that the other side would get to fill it – using a candidate who it turns out fewer voters wanted. We’ve had one side outright refuse to participate in governing, aided by partisan cover in the Supreme Court, with the aim of crippling a Democratic President and his signature initiative. Obama never got a budget passed in regular order once the GOP got in. There was none of the usual back-and-forth and legislative fix-work to the Affordable Care Act because the GOP refused to take part even after being put on the study panel that produced it.

Long story short: yes, maybe we can mitigate the damage a little in 2018, but we’re gonna have to ride this Trump train to the end. Because even if the Democrats could take over Congress, all they could do would be the same sort of finger-in-the-dike stuff that they did in the last two years of the Bush administration. Could they keep a maniac off the Supreme Court? Maybe. Could they somehow use the threat of shutdown or default to try to extract concessions the way the GOP tried to? Maybe, maybe not. 

But here’s the thing: there is no reckoning. Nothing happened to the GOP after they went Party Of No on Clinton, or weaponized impeachment to try to undo the 1996 results. Nothing happened to the Electoral College when Al Gore got screwed under shaky circumstances. Nothing happened when the GOP turned the filibuster into a daily process and snowed the catamites of the media into normalizing the idea that “the Senate needs 60 votes.” Nothing happened when the Republican Party nailed its colors to Donald Fucking Trump. And right now, despite all the shit hitting the fan, despite a partisan firing of the FBI director and blood-curdling breaches of national security and patently unconstitutional actions, nothing suggests that the GOP will bend or buckle as long as they think having this fatuous publicity whore in the Oval Office can still deliver them tax cuts and Supreme Court seats.

There are two sides sitting at the gaming table in America. One is trying to win the game and the other is trying to burn the house down so they can run off with the silverware. This is patently unsustainable. It’s the dog humping your leg: it’s in his nature and you can’t blame him for it, but eventually, you have to cut his balls off. And that’s exactly what has to happen to the Republican Party, because as long as this version of the GOP can continue to operate, we cannot function as a country. The last time we had this problem, the Democrats chose to cast off the South and stake their future on the old children’s hymn: “red and yellow black and white, they are precious in His sight.” And George Wallace, Kevin Philips and Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater and George Bush were all ready and waiting to scoop up those who replied “no they’re not.” And then the GOP made them the base of the party in 1994 and it’s literally been downhill ever since. From January 1995, the opening of the 104th Congress, you can date the shutdowns, the impeachments, the near-defaults, the political witch hunts, the propaganda parade on cable news, and the tribal politics of “you’re entitled to your own reality.”

We’re going to keep limping through, with Democrats trying to slap on salve and bandages where they can and Republicans normalizing the notion that there is no such thing as society – just them that has and them that can suck it. In a world where a millionaire apartment developer can tell millennials they could afford a house if they just gave up avocado toast – while Silly Con Valley housing prices skyrocket 20% every year – the Republican meme is that everything bad that happens to you is your own fault, from illness to poverty to skin color to just not being able to keep up with the cost of living. And now the Baby Boomers will pull up the very ladder they used, with affordable college and available housing and defined benefit pensions, and everyone else can go screw.

Which is why it’s time to start thinking about how America will look if we survive. Because this is unsustainable. Our system of government, our entire political culture in the 20th century, depended on certain norms and unwritten rules and cultural guidelines which have all gone out the window, almost entirely of Republican doing. And if they’re committed to their tribal project, there’s no way to prevent them from continuing to vote – we’d have to just make some kind of pact that everyone else will vote for the same person every time to ensure they can’t get in. At which point you’re right back in Alabama, where the party primary decides the statewide result (and has for basically all but three or four statewide elections in the last century). And Alabama is a broke, dysfunctional system of government whereby people only get by because they’ve had the Feds holding a gun to the state’s head.

There’s no one to hold a gun to our heads now. God’s away on business. Send lawyers, guns and money: the shit has hit the fan.

To quote Lifehacker:

The median house price in the US right now is $196,500. If avocado toast costs $22 a serving, and you currently eat it twice a week, skipping those meals will allow you to save enough for a 20% down payment in just 17 years! You’ll probably lose some weight in the process, too.

“The median house price” in my neighborhood is $1.5 million. (Ours is not worth that, and when we bought eleven years ago, it was for almost half its current value at what we thought was the top of the market.) The median home price in my town has gone up 20% year over year since last year and has gone up over 100% in the past five years. In other words: if you cut avocado toast out from the time you are born, then at age 64 you will have accumulated enough money for that 20% down payment, assuming the housing prices never go up after 2017.  In other words, assuming current growth patterns, you can eschew avocado toast forever for your entire life from birth to death and no matter how long you live, you will die before that saves you enough for a down payment.

This is what I mean when I say “home ownership, children, financial stability: pick two.” And the way things are headed, pretty soon picking two might be a luxury if you live in Silly Con Valley or New York or Washington DC or anywhere else that geography and attractive zip codes combine to artificial choke how many people can be stuffed in a spot.

This makes me think about Pitbull.

When I saw Rent for the first time, it was the early 2000s. The mid-90s were a long time ago. The dot-com boom had made it rain on a lot of people who might never have gotten tech money otherwise, and I know this because I was one of them. Retroviral cocktails had made it possible to keep pushing out the HIV/AIDS deadline another year, and then another, to the point where by 2017 it became feasible to live your entire natural lifespan with HIV. So when Benny wanted to replace an artist squat with a cybercafe, my instinct was “am I not supposed to be rooting for this guy?” And when all these broke-ass Bohemians were down at the Life Cafe clamoring for “BEER AND WINE” my thought was “why the hell are you going out if you’re that broke?”

And then 15 years on, after surviving George W. Bush and the financial meltdown and two stagnant “recoveries” and the Bay Area real estate market, someone gave me a mix CD with Pitbull featuring Ne-Yo, singing “I knew my rent was gonna be late about a week ago/I worked my ass off but I can’t pay it though/But I got just enough to get off in this club/Gonna have me a good time before my time is up.”

And I thought to myself, yes.

The game is rigged. It has been, for years and years. If you have an average middle class upbringing and a four-year degree from a decent school, how long will it take before you can get married and have a couple of kids on one salary? How about never? Unless you stumble into something amazingly remunerative and live somewhere with cheap real estate, you and your spouse will both have to work to make ends meet, in which case having kids means the expense of child care on top of the expense of having kids in the first place. And you have to send those kids to college, because we’ve systematically destroyed all the jobs that gave you the prospect of a living wage with just a high school diploma. Neither of my grandmothers ever worked a day outside the home in their lives. One grandfather was a carpenter, the other was a subsistence farmer turned steelworker. I myself had a stay-at-home mom for about four years, my brother for two. By 1979, it was pretty apparent that one single middle-class income wasn’t gonna get it done anymore.

So now look at the prospects for a young person graduating high school this year. If you want a shot at a decent job, you now have to have some degree, any degree, which means you go four years to whatever is the best school you can afford – and still, in all likelihood, two-thirds chance you graduate owing around $30,000 before you even get a job. Now you have that nut to make, on top of rent and whatever else you have.

“This the last $20 I got/But I’m gonna have a good time ballin’ or not/Tell the bartender line up some shots/Cause we gonna get LOOOOOOSE tonight”

$20 a week, every week, is $1040 a year. In fact, let’s assume you’re gonna be sick one of those weekends and probably stuck visiting family another (or maybe it’s your birthday and your friends treat you, why not). That’s a thousand bucks a year. Look back up at that median home price in the US. 20% down payment divided by $20 a week means thirty-nine years and fifteen weeks to accumulate that down payment. If housing prices somehow freeze, if you graduated at age 22 from East Roast Beef State, that means you’re probably sixty-one years old.

Four decades of austerity. Four decades of paying the bills on time and servicing that student loan debt and having no mortgage interest deduction on your tax and no equity on whatever rental property you got. Never mind the question of whether you could even afford to have kids.

Frank Sinatra once famously said “I’m for whatever gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel.” I’m with Frank on this. I’m done throwing shade at anyone who gets high, anyone who got that new smartphone on an AT&T $25/month payment plan, anyone who scrounged under the couch cushions and smashed the piggy bank and found a $20 in their winter coat pocket and heads for the bar.

If home ownership takes four decades to reach, if the Baby Boomers used their ladder and then pulled it up behind them and then throw the blame on you for not having access to their ladder, if the American Dream is a luxury good? Then fuck it and fuck them. Tomorrow isn’t promised to you, because that feeble-brained tomato they elected could nuke us all tomorrow. This is not the time in history to defer any joy you can get out of life. Drink something. Smoke something. Unbutton that extra button. Kiss that person who gives you the eye. If you can find a way to cope, if you can unearth happiness in front of you now and make your life worthwhile instead of saving for two thousand weeks for something you may never catch up to, then fuck the olds and fuck the haters. Live your life and don’t apologize for it.