Author: Stagger Lee

This article in the Boston Globe is excellent, because it looks at two different ways of considering interoperability. On the one hand you have NATO, which relies on standardization agreements – and thus you have half a dozen different national rifles but one cartridge and one magazine type, and thus troops can all go into battle together with shared resources. On the other, weather forecasting works because we have a common shared temperature scale, common measurements of barometric pressure and standards for sharing data.

A lot of people are comparing the current state of political affairs to Watergate, and that’s an obvious comparison at this point, but this administration has an advantage Nixon could only have dreamed of: twenty-five years of crafting a media ecosystem in which your loyalists have your own sources of information and feel entitled to their own opinions AND their own facts. Between the velvet coffin of the Fox News bubble and the ironclad gerrymander, the House GOP can hold the line for Trump a lot longer than it ever could – or would – for Nixon.

And that’s without taking this House into account. Consider: 75% of the Republicans in the lower body have only been there since the 2010 elections or later. Their entire Congressional career has not only been post-Fox, but post-Tea Party. They have never passed a budget in regular order, never had to confront the world outside the axis of Breitbart. They’ve been part of two government shutdowns and the unprecedented near-default of sovereign debt. They’ve voted over fifty times to repeal Obamacare. Their entire MO is tribal loyalty and their entire range of issues is Benghazi-birth certificate-EMAILS, and they’ve never had to actually govern. And now they are the frontline troops for an accidental amateur President. When Trump says he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his followers would cheer? The ones he means are the ones in the Capitol, because those are the only ones he needs. And they don’t know how to do anything but moo for their side.

Ultimately, this was a big part of where Obama went wrong. He should have looked back at 1992-94 and seen a GOP in opposition that went scorched-earth on any Democratic initiatives. He should have heard the rumblings about the biggest GOP goal being to make him a one-term president, heard Rush Limbaugh openly rooting for his failure, heard about the famous Inauguration-eve dinner where the Republican leadership pledged itself to one long unceasing NO for as long as it took, and he should have adjusted his strategy and tactics accordingly. Maybe he didn’t think he could. Maybe he had more belief in the American public than that.

But Hillary Clinton had been there and done that, and no chance she would have let things slip away by relying on the willingness of Confederates to come reason together in a spirit of harmony. She’d lived through the 1990s. She knew better. But now her watch has ended. In a world where people will argue with a straight face that Lebron James is the greatest basketball player of all time – as if Magic and Michael and Dr. J never happened – it’s not surprising that people don’t respect a past further behind them than night before last.

Left, right. Past, present. Sense, sensibility. When nothing interoperates, the parts start to break. And you know what comes next.

Of which.

I lost my life on May 8, 1997.

That was the day of my second prelim exam of the spring. I think that was the political theory exam, the one I was taking for the first time. I’d taken the American exam on Monday for the second time after failing it the previous September. In theory and on paper, I should have taken one or both of them at the end of the second year, so I was already well behind where I should have been. I suppose in a way you could say the day was Monday May 5, because either fail was enough to end my time, but May 8 was also the day I broke up with my second college girlfriend, the one who arguably cost me my career as an academic. 

Although to be honest, I don’t know how well I would have done even without her in the picture. I went to grad school with the explicit intention of laundering my college experience, and that is the last reason anyone should ever go to grad school. At no point did I ever have any plans for what was to come after Vanderbilt. All the whys and wherefores didn’t matter by then, though. Two days later, I was back in Birmingham and single and unemployed, with no idea what I would do next beyond signing up for a temp agency and hoping that maybe something could be worked out.

I had my room at home, and its contents, and my Saturn – already with over 125,000 miles on it in four years – and six thousand dollars in credit card debt that I’d managed to keep from my parents. Because I was too ashamed of how things had worked out to face my crew in Nashville – some of whom wouldn’t make it back either – and because I literally had zero friends from undergrad that I hadn’t just broken up with, my sole lifeline was a three year old Power Macintosh 6100 with a 33.6Kbps modem and a dialup PPP account. 

At the other end of it was an internet community spun out of a TV show. It included among others a girl in Akron, Ohio, who was technically my third college girlfriend, I suppose – it’s strange to think about, like Joe Namath with the Rams or Conan O’Brien on the Tonight Show, but there was a span of maybe a week or so that we were technically a couple while I was still enrolled at Vanderbilt. I’d driven from Nashville to Cincinnati to meet her halfway for lunch, once, and that was the whole relationship on which my world was hanging by a thread. In retrospect, I don’t know how anyone could think that relationship wasn’t doomed from the start.

Because when I say I lost my life, it’s not really an exaggeration. No friends. No job. No idea what my future would hold, nothing coming tomorrow but $7 an hour in the bowels of a natural gas company’s HR department. That was the point at which you could say with a straight face than I hadn’t made it out, that Vanderbilt was a three year holiday from destiny and here I was back in the same small pond of Birmingham. And not that big a fish, and certainly not with any similar fish around to speak of. And no prospects for the future of any kind.

But that mailing-list-with-a-chat-space-at-one-end gave me a lifeline to some people who became friends, and who threw me a second lifeline, and I seized that one too, and precarious though it was, I found myself pulled up by it by September. I was still bewildered and befuddled and holding a sack of credit-card debt and indentured to a dubious relationship, but I was doing it from inside the Beltway at a full-time staff job with a reasonable income. I was still protean, to say the least. And it was those people, online and in person, who combined to rebuild me anew over the next seven years. A job, a new career, ultimately a wife and the opportunity to move to California, all spun out of that tenuous lifeline made out of a listserv and a MUSH and the RJ-11-connected phone wire into my grad school computer.

It saved me, if I’m being honest. There’s not a great track record for Southern intellectuals consumed with the Southern thing and being stuck in it. There’s a podcast you may have heard of that you can listen to if you want to see what happens when you’re stuck in the sticks with more brains and less need for them than anyone around you. But for someone who’s made a two decade career out of rescuing people one way or the other, this was my moment where some people appeared out of nowhere and said “we’re gonna get you out of there,” and did. And I will always be grateful, because I literally owe them my life.

It would take over a full year before I bottomed out fully with the death of my dad and almost another year after that before I surfaced again, and in that time, the world transformed completely. I went from cassette mixtapes to MP3s, from a pager and a cell phone I dared not leave on to unlimited roaming and free long distance, from I-65 between school and home and work to…well, cross-country by plane and freeway. Chicago and Kansas City and Boston and Vegas and San Diego and Cleveland and Hollywood just by Labor Day 1998, and that doesn’t even count the fact of an apartment in Arlington and a job six blocks from the White House in a field I had never considered working in when I crashed out of grad school.

In a lot of ways, to be honest, I was flung so far and so fast from the explosion of my academic career that I didn’t stop moving for a good nine years or so. You could arguably look at my life and say I didn’t really hit a dull moment until 2006, when I finally had a new wife (!) and a new house (!!) and a promotion at Apple (!!!) that set me up with employee stock purchase and a company cell phone and credit card and two offices with doors, and a new surrogate big sister to smoke cigars and watch soccer with. But that’s where a different story starts.

But nothing in the last twenty years, not one bit of it, was remotely visible from sunset on May 8, 1997. Which just goes to show you never can tell.

 

My grandmother never drove.

From 1910 to 1994, she never got behind the wheel of a car, not once. After her husband died, the last 20 years of her life saw her being driven by friends, family or maybe some sort of senior van service. Or maybe she just walked, depending. Or caught a taxi. Which is not always easy to do in a town of under 30,000 in the South.

The problem in Silicon Valley right now is traffic, because the traditional forms have been inverted. Instead of bedroom communities surrounding a central city where everyone goes to work, the jobs are spread all along the peninsula from San Francisco down to the South Bay. And instead of relocating as they get bigger, these companies tend to stay put. Which is why the tenth-largest city in America, San Jose (population 1,026,908) is inexplicably considered some kind of backwater afterthought by young millennial techies as they commute from their residences in San Francisco (pop. 870,887) to such business hubs as Mountain View (pop. 77,846), Palo Alto (pop. 66,420), Cupertino (60,189) and Menlo Park (pop. 33,309).

Many people will tell you the problem in Silicon Valley is housing, and that’s true – ordinary people who aren’t filthy rich or making high-tech money are being priced out of San Mateo and Santa Clara counties altogether. But the problem with building more housing – even affordable housing – is that those people then need a way to get to work. Or to the store. Or to church. Or school. Or down the pub. And that means a vehicle. Unless you’re a weightlifter or have one of those huge Dutch cargo bikes or live right over the store, you probably need a car to bring your groceries home. Unless you’re Lance Armstrong, you probably aren’t taking your bike all the way to the office thirty miles every day down jammed streets. (You definitely shouldn’t be taking your bike home from the pub after seven pints. A DUI is a DUI no matter what kind of wheels are under you.) 

To make matters worse, people keep building offices. Apple just bulldozed a bunch of empty HP buildings to build Apple Park, which will house far more employees than the HP campus ever did – and they’ll all be taking the same two or three exits off I-280 in a one-mile stretch. Google went through all kinds of shenanigans of dubious ethics to get their huge plot of land on the bay side of 101 in Mountain View, which is served by…101. Facebook took over a bunch of old Sun offices in Menlo Park, right by CA-84 and the Dumbarton bridge. What do these locations have in common? None of them has any kind of rail service; it’s all freeways with one exit right nearby and another to come in the back way if you’re lucky, all on routes that right now don’t have counter-commute at rush hour anymore.

The solution everyone here preaches about is Uber. Or Lyft. Or something else, like the car-share service called Gig whose founder claims takes seven cars off the road for every one of theirs. What he doesn’t seem to have clued in on, unfortunately, is that one car on the road seven times as long isn’t any less traffic than seven cars on the road once – and that his car can only replace one other car at a time. Car-share programs are not new (I had a discount on one when I was still living in greater DC thirteen years ago) and while they and the “ride-share” cab services in disguise (is that why Lyft cars had that mustache?) may eliminate the need for car ownership, they take precious few actual net cars off the road.

So what’s the answer? Part of it is rail, certainly, although this nation’s feeble-minded have ensured that the Caltrain electrification project that would double its capacity is dead in the water, and that doesn’t even directly serve any of those companies. (To make matters worse, a great restaurant in Menlo Park got knocked down so they could build a new high-rise office building right next to the tracks for ease of rail commute. Which might not be such a smart plan for a train system running at 120% capacity at rush hour.) Santa Clara County has light rail that gets weekday ridership around 30,000 but doesn’t go anywhere you need to go outside San Jose other than at rush hour, unless you want to go from Mountain View to San Jose or back in an hour. 

The really interesting thing is that you’re starting to see ride-share services built around pooled use by multiple people, running on a scheduled timetable of sorts, operating on a designated route. I’m not trying to be funny, but I’M ALMOST POSITIVE THAT’S JUST A BUS. Which is not necessarily a deal-breaker. Nothing wrong with a bus. It fits a lot more people than a car, it’s easier to power with electricity or natural gas, slap some Wi-Fi on it and you’re as good as sat in your own living room.  But the catch there is that a bus has to go on…a road. Which is presumably as jammed up as anything else. The “express” bus down El Camino Real, from the Palo Alto train station to the Whole Foods at the intersection with Showers Drive in Los Altos, will take you 20 minutes in the afternoon during rush hour according to Google Maps. To go four and a half miles. It may be transit, but at 13.5 miles an hour, it sure as hell ain’t rapid transit.

The thing is, when you have this kind of traffic and this kind of headache, it’s usually because of some kind of geographic obstacle. The Bay and the Pacific surrounding the Peninsula even before the mountains hem it in further. The Potomac in DC. The island of Manhattan. Artificial constraints, bridges and tunnels and space squeezed to the point where you can’t move things around at all. But in most places, the city is the central focus, and you can build in some mechanisms. Subways, grid systems, high-rise offices and high-rise tower blocks of apartments and condos and the like. Instead,every peninsula city I mentioned up there has seen population growth of 10% or more just since the dot-com bust – and that’s just population growth with limited or no housing development, never mind the additional volume of job growth. Google was a startup in 2000. Apple was just coming back to life on the back of the iMac. Facebook didn’t exist. The smartphone – the basis of Silicon Valley in 2017 – existed as a weird European concept with no uptake to speak of in America. There is no precedent anywhere else in the world for this caliber of massive, massive industry growth – in suburbs.

And it would be possible to say “look this is growth, this is just how the world is” – except for that tenth-largest city in America right down the road, ten miles from Mountain View, perfectly amenable to high-rise construction and new development, with light rail running right through the middle of it and heavy commuter rail from three different directions and an airport right at the edge of town with direct flights to Tokyo and London. A town that’s been billed for twenty years or more as the Capital of Silicon Valley.

And yet, every flagship company in this stupid valley would rather stay right where it is, in a town one-tenth the size, and force it to play global metropolis with a five-digit population. At least when kids these days stay in their parents’ basement, it’s because they can’t afford to move. What’s Google’s excuse?

There are no “moderate Republicans.” They will bemoan and furrow their brows in grave concern and talk a lot of shit, but when the rubber hits the road, they will all get in line and support their party in a way that Democrats, when in the majority, are simply not capable of. If they were, maybe we wouldn’t be in this position, but the Democrats were negotiating with Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson while the GOP stayed together on “NO NO NO NO” and Susan Collins and John McCain and all the other mavericks and moderates went right down the line.

There are no “good Republicans.” Not anymore. Not in 2017. If you want to have the kind of representative democracy we had for two hundred years, it’s going to have to be without the GOP.  And if you think “well the Senate will take care of this,” consider that the Senate has already blown up the filibuster for one function in the last 90 days. They could easily do it again, and there are fifty-two Republican senators. Who fall in line.

And so your healthcare is in jeopardy again, no matter how well off you are or how good your employee benefits are, so that the Confederate party can exult in how they stuck it to the colored boy at last.

Fuck. You.

Last night I went out for ice cream. Well not ice cream – as I am currently on a restricted diet keeping the dairy away – but I was pulling into the parking lot outside Baskin-Robbins for Daquiri Ice at about 9 PM, and it was still unpleasantly warm out, and I had the windows down, and Axl Rose was singing “all we need is just a little patience” on the 90s satellite station, and it felt for just a moment like walking around in the surveillance footage from twenty-five years earlier.

Undergrad lasted almost ’til Memorial Day weekend, basically, not like grad school at Vanderbilt where you were done by the first weekend of May. So down the stretch in late April into May there were a lot of overly warm nights when you just wanted to get away. There was a Baskin-Robbins down US 78 in Forestdale or thereabouts. If you kept going, there was a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Jasper that was open 24 hours. A drive, someplace open, something to do at stupid o’clock at night at a time when I was just beginning to keep proper vampire hours in a way that wouldn’t end until I moved to California.

My first car – the Monte Carlo I pushed from high school all the way through the end of my junior year – had glass T-tops, which seem like a good idea until you realize that 1) they’re hell to remove and put back quickly 2) they get stolen easily so you need locking handle covers which make things even worse 3) they basically make your car a greenhouse. So it was a lot more pleasant to take the car out when the sun was down and the velour seats weren’t holding the sun’s warmth any more. Aftermarket car stereo plugged into the same shitty factory speakers, girlfriend – whenever possible – left to her own devices, whatever they were. By spring, neither of the college girlfriends were the person I wanted to be around.

So off we go. Jamocha almond fudge ice cream, two scoops, sugar cone. Examine whatever new Super Soaker variant had arrived for the summer. Reflect on the fact that I wanted to have the water guns in case a battle broke out in the dorms, knowing one never had and one never would, and laying the seeds in my mind for contemplating “wanting to need the things you want” or realizing I’d botched the college thing for good. Look and see what kind of wacky soda variants were starting to crop up in the gas station coolers. Fill the tank for $20, when such a thing was still possible.

1993 and 1994 were different, though. In 1993, there was the promise that something different was on the horizon, that undergrad would be done this time next year, that there was the possibility of something else, that this – whatever this was – wasn’t forever. And in 1994, the prospect of going away to Vanderbilt, getting a fresh start, basically punting everything for the last three months of college because my fellowship was stitched up and all I had to do at this point was not lose my mind trying to deal with a certain nut job. Better days guaranteed coming, if I just hung on.

In retrospect, I didn’t appreciate that like I should have. Better days guaranteed isn’t something that comes along very often in life. I was blessed – not in the modern hashtag Instagram #blessed sense, but in the fact that I had been given something that in retrospect I really didn’t appreciate and probably didn’t deserve: a second chance. A make-good on four years of blight. The opportunity to know that I could drop the keys in the mailbox and walk away without consequence into a better situation. Not the right one, as it would turn out, but that would come later and for many reasons. But in 1994, I could perch on the new leather upholstery of the Saturn SC2, drum my fingers on the wheel, and imagine a bright future at the end of the road.

Plus, the melting ice cream was a lot easier to wipe off the leather.

I rode Caltrain to work this morning for the first time in months. There was a new feature that I haven’t experienced: someone’s phone alarm was going off for almost the entire ride. Presumably they were asleep and the alarm was not efficacious, but it was annoying as hell. Which is par for the course these days on Caltrain. I specifically take a train that overshoots my destination and take a different shuttle back rather than use the most logical combination of station and shuttle, because that station and shuttle are overcrowded beyond reason – they’re at capacity and it’s not enough.

This wasn’t a problem in DC. Well, it was, during tourist season – but you could generally avoid that if you played your cards right, and besides, it’s entirely permissible in DC to plough through people who stand in the doorway or on the left of the escalator. God, I miss the East Coast. But more than that, there were two factors in the commute:

1) It was about a 10 minute walk from my apartment to the Metro, between five and ten minutes from the Metro to work at the other end, and about 10 minutes on the train in between. One train, running every 12 minutes. If it was absolutely last-refugee-train-out-of-Paris packed, you could always wait and hop another one in 12 minutes (or less, because the packed one was probably late and the chaser behind it would be less so).

2) There was a certain measure of commonality there – you could be standing next to a homeless guy who was next to an two-star Air Force general in service dress who was next to a very attractive GWU co-ed, and all of them in a good mood because the Skins beat down Dallas yesterday. Everyone, regardless of age or station, was taking the Metro. 

I don’t get that here. The proliferation of company shuttles, “ride share services” (read: unregulated cabs) and lack of a central target have all combined to make it impossible to have a service that everyone’s using in the morning. For one thing, instead of everyone coming into the center from outlying spokes, everyone’s shuffling back and forth on one line. No counter-commute (there are very few major roads that even have a counter-commute anymore) and to be honest, precious little actual service. Not every train stops at every station, and if you’re starting from a particularly outlying one, you might have only one or two chances per hour to get on Caltrain. God help you if you want to go from, say, San Antonio to Hayward Park, because you literally cannot catch a direct train at rush hour. You have to change somewhere.

Make no mistake, the changes are what kills you. Instead of one train and a walk, I’ve got light rail-to-Caltrain-to-shuttle bus, which means you’re guaranteed to stand around waiting twice. The vehicle time, strung together, is around 20 minutes, but the waits push it closer to 40 unless you’re willing to take a chance that VTA won’t be too late in the morning to meet the Caltrain, or the bus won’t be caught in too much traffic to make the train on time in the afternoon. And if somebody takes a wrong turn down the track instead of the road or tries to beat the crossing in their SUV, all bets are off.

In DC, there was an additional disincentive to drive – no way could you get from home to work in 30 minutes. Yes, it’s five miles, but it’s going to take at least half an hour and there’s an $11 parking fee when you get to the office. Here’s it’s drive in 20 minutes, park for free and catch the 10 minute shuttle over to the office, and you’ve still made it as quick as you could have on VTA-Caltrain-shuttle. And you’re not crammed into a standing-room-only train or dodging bikes in the tunnel at University Avenue or sitting for fifteen minutes waiting for the light rail to pull out. You have air conditioning and satellite radio and your phone is charging, not draining.

And now we aren’t going to get Caltrain electrification – which might have updated the dreadfully-aged rolling stock and enabled more frequent service – because we are governed by monkeys whose only thought is to throw their own shit at anything someone else thinks is a good idea. The one thing that could have made a dent in the misery of train commuting, the money already allocated previously, but we gave our country’s steering wheel to the oldest, weakest and stupidest among us. But anyway.

Here’s the thing about mass transit: it has to go places you want to go, when you want to go there. What we have isn’t transit. We’ve got a commuter rail that pretends to be transit. If you only have one train an hour at rush hour to get where you want to go, that ain’t transit. If it only runs between 10 AM and 6 PM every half hour, that ain’t transit (sorry, “Mountain View Community Shuttle”, you’re merely a feel-good bandage for Google). And if it’s a freakin’ car, that ain’t transit. Eat shit, “Uber Pool.”

People ask all the time what we can do to improve Silicon Valley transit. I’d say the best improvement would be to actually get some. I’m in favor.

The fact that we even need to have a march for science is absurd. It’s like having a march for mathematics, or a march for language – these are things that we kind of need to have a functioning modern society. And yet here we are. It was officially non-partisan, and rightly so, but let’s face it: we didn’t feel like we had to have this in 1987, or 1992, or 2001 or even 2008. There’s a reason people feel like they have to be in the streets. 

But.

Let’s not forget that the famous “we create our own reality” interview was in October 2004, before Dubya was elected the second time. In fact, let’s have the block quote, which is generally understood to have come from Karl Rove himself:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Basically that’s taking a shit on the entire concept of empirical fact. That’s pissing directly in the face of the Enlightenment. That’s an argument that says we can believe whatever we want and you can’t stop us. It’s the functioning basis of Fox News, of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones, of five straight GOP Presidential campaigns. It’s not a Trump phenomenon, it’s not even Tea Party. It is what the Republican Party has stood for now for over a decade: who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?

This is why there has to be a reckoning. This is why Obama was wrong to try to work with the GOP, to try his whole “come let us reason together” shtick, to desperately try to negotiate with the other side. You don’t negotiate with a five year old having a tantrum. You don’t negotiate with a lunatic screaming on a street corner. You act quickly and decisively to put them out of harm’s way – their own and others – and carry on having an adult society while doing what you can to see that they get the help they need.

The mythical white working class needs help. But so do a lot of other people. And the MWWC frankly needs to be made to sit out politics for a while, because they’re only going to hurt themselves worse. And that means breaking the GOP. The Republican Party has to be read completely out of power as a political force in America.

They have nobody but themselves to blame. Nobody made them take sides against reality.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

So it turns out Apple could have destroyed Uber in a heartbeat two years ago. Because Uber was implementing tracking methods that Apple doesn’t permit, and conniving to hide them from Apple. And Tim Cook let them off the hook. BARN CHEATIN PAWWWWWWWWWLLLLLL. But it should hammer home the point that Uber might well be the worst company in all of Silly Con Valley, barring neither Facebook nor Theranos.

Really, though, Uber should be destroyed for so many reasons. Privacy violations, underhanded business practice, turning “get forgiveness instead of permission” into a business strategy. But mostly, Uber should be destroyed for its role in proliferating the so-called “gig economy,” where you work for a company without actually having the status of an employee. “You can work as much or as little as you want” is basically a reversion to piece-work of the type more associated with the era of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

Because make no mistake, this is a reversion to Gilded Age economics. In fact, the gig economy is basically about facilitating “distributed servantry.” People who would balk at employing a butler and a chauffeur and a cook and a footman have no problem using Uber and Taskrabbit and Fiverr and Doordash and Instacart and Amazon Prime (yeah, I went there) to have things done for them. It’s like the My Weekly Reader vision of sixty years ago where we’d all have robots doing our menial labor – but instead of robots, it’s people, at $5 a pop or $10 an hour or whatever the market will bear. And if you’re not willing to work for that little, somebody else probably is. It’s why the powers that be aren’t bothered about structural unemployment, because structural unemployment means continual downward pressure on wages.

We’re past the point at which we need to start thinking about the changing nature of work. If a freakin’ magical-realist podcast can get this, anyone should be able to: automation and technology means productivity. Better health means longer lives. More people living longer with more automation means fewer jobs. And Ed at Gin & Tacos nails it: when blue collar manufacturing gets replaced with 30-hour part time retail, and Amazon and self-checkout stands at Safeway have nuked retail, what’s left to take? Silicon Valley wants everyone to code, but how many coders do you need? And how many can you make out of people who spent the last twenty years turning a wrench or pushing financial records? In a world where we value human beings first by wealth and then by work, what happens to people who don’t have either one?

And for all their talk about job creation, Uber’s long-term plans don’t involve human drivers. They’re counting on self-driving vehicles, to the point they’re willing to steal from Waymo to do it. Steal from Google, lie to Apple, ignore regulators, break laws. Uber is leading the way in allowing the Eloi to abstract away the Morlocks and call it “disruption” and they’re playing dirty as hell to do it. They need to be made to pay the price, but the Feds won’t do it. Somebody has to, and Apple could have been the heavy – yes, they’re going to accuse you of being a bully and dictating the marketplace and etc etc schwa schwa schwa whatever. You can’t win either way if you’re Apple, so as long as you’re going to catch hell anyway, why not do the right thing?

But that may be expecting too much of an Auburn booster.

Some folks are out of joint because the next iOS release, 10.3.2, will supposedly not include support for the iPhone 5 or 5C. In other words, we’re finally moving to 64-bit-only iOS, four years after the iPhone 5s shocked the world with a 64-bit processor. I don’t know that it’s a big deal to cut off a phone that was new in 2012 (or 2013, for the 5C) – that was the phone with iOS 6, so it’s had four major releases since.  By contrast, my Moto X was first dropped in summer 2013 (I got mine in February 2014) and hasn’t had an OS version update since late spring of 2015 and hasn’t had a security update of any kind in a year. In a world where you can never count on getting the latest Android OS – or ever getting an upgrade – I think four years worth of support is pretty good for phone hardware.

It’s necessary, too, because absent the two-year upgrade cycle dictated by American phone contracts, it no longer makes sense to upgrade your phone every two years whether you need it or not. The iPhone SE I bought almost a year ago had six-month-old innards when I got it, but absent something truly amazing – an AMOLED-based iPhone with the screen size of a 7 in the body of a 5 and 2000mAh battery, say – there’s no compelling need to get another phone. The SE is 64-bit ready, compact, amazing battery life and has already proven itself abroad – and will almost certainly be called upon to do so again.

Still not the case for the Apple Watch, though. Nice to have when it’s on my arm but I don’t miss it when it’s gone – especially since that usually means I’m traveling somewhere, if only to fish off a charter boat in Santa Cruz (notice I don’t say catch. That’s not a mistake. It was a rough weekend). Plus, apropos of my last musings on this topic, the Apple Watch means another charger to carry and another thing to top up overnight, whereas my mechanical watch can be wound once and left on my arm pretty much until the day I die.

International travel has also given me a use case for WhatsApp, because that can easily move between phone numbers – even internationally – and give me cross-platform chat compatibility with people on both sides of the Atlantic. As with so many things, it’s all about having a use case. (And I find it singular that of the social media and messaging products I actually use, two are owned by Facebook without actually being Facebook apps. They figured it out – if at first you don’t succeed, buy someone who did.)

But it’s spring 2017. We’re going on four years since phones added something you really need. We had 64-bit processing, NFC payments and fingerprint ID in 2013; everything since is just screen size and battery life issues (and this SE, almost a year old, still gives me over 7 hours of screen time between charges. Try that with a modern Android). If you want me to buy a new phone, make it one I need.

Air travel was already annoying as hell. But it’s gotten progressively worse in recent years, what with the consolidation of airlines and elimination of duplicate routes. Everything has been about squeezing out excess supply to put a floor under prices. And then there’s the parsing up of all the different levels of service, of boarding, of perquisites and privileges that used to be bog-standard. United’s “Basic Economy” is the latest – the baseline is now no early check-in, no seat assignment, and no use of the overhead bins. Literally everything that was free fifteen years ago is now an extra charge: checked bag, overhead bin, in-flight snack, even knowing what seat you might be in.

It doesn’t have to be like this, and it wouldn’t be if there was a lick of competition. But it’s the age-old story: few enough players in a market with a high barrier to entry, and they’ll divide and conquer rather than compete. It’s why your only broadband choices are either your cable company or your phone company, assuming your phone company hasn’t decided it’s not worth the effort to compete. And it’s why one of the unsung heroics of the Obama-era FCC was their refusal to allow AT&T to purchase T-Mobile in 2011. Without that, there’s no Un-Carrier, there’s no push back toward “unlimited” data, and there’s probably not much in the way of MNVO options, since most of the BYOD prepaid SIM-sellers seem to be backboned on T-Mob. And with only one GSM-based carrier and only two 850Mhz options per market (plus Sprint’s bad bet on WiMax), you’re back to an effective duopoly.

I don’t know if the free market naturally trends toward monopoly, but too much of our modern life is dependent on things where there are inherent limits – spectrum, airline gates, or just the ability to dig up the street – and yet, we allow the fact of two options to let us say “competition!” (Or worse, decide that your cellphone is competition for your home broadband. I’m surprised these airline mergers didn’t raise the danger of Amtrak competition.) The funny thing is, this isn’t as much of a problem elsewhere; Ireland (the size of Alabama) has three cellular carriers and rates half what gets charged in the US. This is all down to a government dictate that GSM would be the standard; by letting the US divide between TDMA and CDMA and GSM, we were condemned to incompatible standards and an inability to move between carriers that has propped up prices and limited real competition to this day. Little bit of regulation – explosion of competition. 

But we’ve had forty years of acting as if the corporation is to be run for the benefit of the stock traders, not the shareholders or the employees or the customers. It’s how we got bloated CEO compensation and three-month profit goosing by layoff and the general casino atmosphere of business. And our business has evolved to match, in case you hadn’t noticed the spray-money-throw-a-dart approach to Silly Con Valley. Seriously, the very “gas delivery” service that was a punchline on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia in 2008 got $3 million in funding in 2015. Just to service Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Redwood City, of all places.

Of which.