Author: Stagger Lee

Not much to say here, except that if you find this outcome surprising or shocking at all, you haven’t been paying attention. Make the police a militarized occupying force, decide that all brown people are A Criminal and all criminals are Magneto, and you end up with a bunch of dumb necks who want to need the guns seizing the opportunity.

We could be the greatest country in the world, but rednecks.

Last night, I took the Moto X out for the first time since getting the new phone. I was immediately struck by how it’s gone from being the bigger phone to the smaller phone; despite having a physical screen of the same size, the iPhone 6 brings a slightly higher resolution and the Moto X is shorter and ever so slightly narrower (in no small part due to the smaller bezels that go along with foregoing the TouchID button and the fixation on symmetry). With the leather case, the thickness is similar, and remarkably the Moto has the larger battery (and a more ergonomic curve in the hand).

It’s entirely possible that the Moto will have improved battery life under Lollipop. i certainly hope so, as it’s going to be the travel-abroad phone next year. In all other respects, though, the iPhone 6 on AT&T is a clear winner: the coverage is superior and the data throughput faster almost without exception. And the day-to-day battery life is far more acceptable; I can hit it as hard as I normally would at work, without worrying about it, and still have about half the battery left by quitting time even if I haven’t plugged in.

It was the right move. I’m glad I was able to hold out, even if it took for damn near ever to get it.

I suppose I should say something about the elections.  It’s incredibly frustrating, to be honest: Mitch McConnell vows to go scorched earth, fight everything, make Obama a one-term president, and then six years later gets a majority in Congress because people are fed up with the obstruction and check out.  Which is really the secret, because the low turnout is what put the GOP over the top (in addition to the disproportionate vulnerability of Democrats defending seats won int he 2008 Obama victory).  The Democrats have to figure out how to make people turn out in the off years and not cede the field to the aging racists on their Medicare scooters forwarding scare mail about immigrants to everyone in sight.

I can pretty much guarantee you that there will be at least one shutdown attempt and one impeachment attempt in the next two years.  They’ll find some excuse.  Forget everything you hear about the “moderate Republicans” or the “grownups” – there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the GOP and the Tea Party, there never was, and the successful laundering of the Republican label in the wake of 2008 while going even further to the right is one of the amazing mysteries of our time.  Ted Cruz is driving this bus, folks, and he sees the 45th President every time he looks in the mirror.  And don’t underestimate the chance of Clinton Fatigue dragging Hillary down to the point where he – or another of his neb-confederate pals in Amen Corner – finds himself in the Oval Office on January 20, 2017.

Better days are coming.  They can’t live forever.  The only catch is, can we last long enough to ride it out.

It’s happening.  The shuttle drivers at Loop Transportation, the shuttle bus company used by Facebook, have voted to unionize under the auspices of the Teamsters (historically appropriate, actually) and will now bargain collectively.  This is being trumpeted as a watershed moment in Silicon Valley – although most people seem to be regarding it as the invasion of old-school backward-thinking legacy business infecting the land of disruption and innovation.

Horseshit.

The union is the natural response to what is blithely called “the 1099 economy.” When everyone below director level is a contractor – especially a completely independent contractor – companies are free from the burden of treating their employees like, well, employees.  You can just “sever your relationship” if you want to get rid of them.  Benefits and health care are their own business, not yours.   The technology industry has managed to create a world where the smartphone-enabled equivalent of picking up guys from the Home Depot parking lot is a preferred business model for the likes of Handy or Taskrabbit or half a dozen “transportation network companies”.

This is exactly what unions formed to prevent.  You can’t just randomly donk off employees for the sake of saving money, or because you don’t want to be responsible for their actions, or say ‘this is the job and you have six hours of unpaid downtime in between, take it or leave it.”  The role of the union is to shift the balance of power so the regular workers have a say.  And in that mythical 1950s Pleasantville that the Republicans constantly talk about wanting us to return to?  Unions represented one out of three American workers.

It’s going to be a useful reality check.  Nothing like a picket line and a giant inflatable rat to make people realize that oops, there are human beings on the other side of the screen, and they’re more than just the $40,000-a-year Morlocks that turn the gears so your cloud-cuckoo-land can carry on.  These are the real human beings in Northern California who were here long before you dropped out of Stanford and they count just as much, because your Ayn Rand paradise here in Galt’s Gulch on Market will go to shit once there’s nobody actually driving the shuttles or catering the burrito bar or cleaning up the gym or restocking the snack harbor. 

And for me, it’s a little bit of the East Coast to cheer me up. The people’s flag is deepest red, motherfuckers.  (Not Cardinal red.  Fuck those guys.)

First things first: switching from the cheap case I bought in advance (which was apparently spec’d out from pre-production info and doesn’t actually fit the buttons right) to the Apple leather case made all the ergonomic difference in the world. Black leather wrapped tight to the phone lends it a premium feel and a lot more comfort in the hand, and it grips well without sticking in the pocket. Approved and worth the money.

Battery life seems to be settling too. It looks good for about 8 hours of real-world use consisting mostly of Twitter, taking and posting pictures, checking mail and reading RSS. No audio playback; this was all screen on and cellular data with no Wi-Fi to speak of, and in a crowded environment. (yes, back at Disneyland again. You got a better torture test for a phone?) And while using an iPad charger is still the fastest, I could throw it on a lipstick charger at dinner and go from under 30 to 94% battery between cocktails and taking the entree plates.

Performance in areas of 4G-non-LTE coverage has, of course, kicked the shit out of EV-DO. I was routinely pulling around 6 Mbps without LTE, which is well over double the theoretical max of Verizon’s non-LTE data speed, which I never reached on the iPhone 5. And good coverage means good battery. Even with the bigger screen, I still outperform the 5. I’m curious how it will go at work.

One other thing I’ve noticed is that I can run voice dictation and get results at least as accurate as something like SwiftKey or Swype. The one finger swishing around the keyboard may not be efficacious, but if you can just tell the phone what to type and get the same or better results, that’s huge. Especially since you now get typing as you talk rather than waiting for it to be piped back for processing. Careful word choice means I can text the wife almost without typographical error purely via Siri. And that ain’t hay. It is in fact a major computing breakthrough, one I started watching for two decades ago as I tried to persuade a Power Mac 6100 to accept the rudimentary voice commands built into System 7.1.2 (in a gravelly Southern accent, natch).

Things I still need to test: battery life on a normal workday. The viability of reading on this rather than a Kindle or AMOLED phone screen. The impact of streaming WatchESPN during basketball season and how badly it kills the power. And once the Moto X (2013) gets Android Lollipop, there’s going to be an all-day utility bake off.

But for now, it looks like this phone (with a small charger in reserve for known full days) might just be ready to go as the One Full Time Device. And not a moment too soon either.

Two months. That’s how long it took for the iPhone 6 I ordered through work to show up. Well, better late than never, and in keeping with tradition, this is banged out on the device itself.

It’s too damn big. In every particular, it conveys SIZE like a Texas pickup with horns in the hood. I know intellectually it’s thinner than the Moto X, but it’s definitely taller and I suspect wider, with a top bevel that really doesn’t need to be that size. 

The keyboard is larger, of course, which alleviates a few of the issues with the iPhone 5 running iOS 8. Haven’t had time to see if the autocorrect runs away with it. 

Battery life is impossible to judge on first run: it’s all syncs and downloads and various screwing around. In a couple of days we’ll know more once I’m back to a standard load out. But this bigger screen means more battery used and I’m not persuaded the bigger battery will make the tradeoff work. Definitely better signal at work, though, and better fallbacks when LTE isn’t offered. That might help. (thanks, AT&T.) And the screen isn’t on for podcast playback, which will hopefully be less of a percentage hit. 

But the size of the damn thing…I’m going to need the slimmest practical case and hope it can stand up to the front pocket, in which it already feels like a slab. This is a purse phone. That’s not a compliment. 

Tim Cook finally unveils the worst-kept secret in Silicon Valley, in the pages of Bloomberg Businessweek.  To be honest, it didn’t seem like it would be a big deal.  This has to be one of the most gay-friendly places on Earth, and the man whose intensity is the stuff of legend never gave the impression that his orientation was relevant – because who can picture him having time for any kind of relationship other than the Auburn Tigers?  But he said it, and sounded much like Anderson Cooper when he did: everyone knows, everyone’s known, it’s not a big deal, but I need to say it for the sake of other people who might need the help or the inspiration or the comfort of knowing it’s not just me.

And that’s not nothing.  In fact, that’s huge, in perspective.  Because the worst thing you can be growing up in exurban Alabama is different.  Gay, black, foreign, or just smart – if you have anything that keeps you from being just like everybody else, you’re going to be on the outside looking in.  The closest thing I ever had to being a minority was that four-year undergrad stint where I wasn’t in a fraternity, and it drove home the point that as a minority, it’s not the active prejudice that does for you as much as the ignorance of your existence. The assumption that difference doesn’t exist – it’s that third Goventa level of power, the dismissal of anything that the dominant power doesn’t wish to acknowledge.

Well, this is going to be hard to dodge.  Possibly the richest, most powerful living Alabamian – and Auburn alum – is gay, and doesn’t care if you know, and thinks his home state should work harder on not being assholes to gay people.  The cognitive dissonance alone might be enough to power the state for a year or two.  (Although it REALLY makes you wonder what would happen if Nick Saban delivered and supported an openly gay Heisman-caliber quarterback who came through with a national title.)

Good for Tim.  He didn’t have to, but he knows the meaning of non nobis solum. And if some kid in Alabama feels less alone and more empowered – or if somebody in the old country rethinks their beliefs as a result – he’s done more than any amount of boosting AAPL stock.

Comes now the news that the woman behind the popular and acclaimed “Tropes vs Women” video series has been forced to cancel an appearance at Utah State University. Anita Sarkeesian received rather extensive death threats, and police said they couldn’t screen for firearms at the event because of Utah open-carry laws.

Setting aside the extent to which the Beehive State chooses to coddle ammosexuals and gunsuckers at the expense of public safety, this is basically a capitulation to terrorism. Some limpdick in a basement made threats to shut down something he found objectionable. That’s terrorism. Full stop. And it all came about because apparently somebody is terrified that a model of masculinity built on homophobic insults in Call of Duty groupchat and 4chan boards might not stand up to modern standards of, you know, mature society.

And really, that’s what we’re dealing with here. Arrested adolescence in a bunch of boys who never evolved past the He Man Woman Haters Club in the basement. Guys who are actively resisting the need to grow up to get along in the modern world. In its way, it’s of a piece with the rest of the Peter Pan syndrome that afflicts way too much of modern society and which I’ve spent plenty of space here decrying. And this is why.

Because you have to grow up. You can’t live your entire life stuck at 14. That’s called Lord of the Flies and that tends to be the usual result when you leave a bunch of spotty student boys to their own devices. And for the pubescent-minded scum that are flogging this movement in the name of fighting off adulthood, I’m sure that’s the dream.

But it’s 2014. And society is for grown-ups, regardless of age. You can be a grownup at 12 or you can stave it off your entire life. But it’s long past time for our society to stop indulging people who won’t grow up.

One hears quite a bit from time to time about the eroding middle class.  It’s well-documented that the disparity in wealth in this country is growing, and that the top of the stack has a greater percentage of the money than ever before, but I’m looking at it in a different way.  It’s impossible not to, with the recent rash of cops killing minorities and stand-your-ground nutballs looking for a chance to shoot a brown person.

PJ O’Rourke spoke of the Whiffle Life, that idea that above a certain point a kid on drugs is going to get routed into a treatment path and sent to a clinic and maybe worst case reform school, rather than jail and a beatdown from the cops and juvie. And that makes plenty of sense when you look around you.  But then look at the kind of gentrification happening in San Francisco, where one formerly working-class area after another gets hipsterized and Googlefied and your nightclub has to close because the people in the new million-dollar condos don’t like the racket and never mind who was there first.

And the middle class…well, that’s not really a thing anymore, right?  Because everybody wants to claim they’re middle class, but you there working in an office at a computer – you’re on an hourly wage, right? And you get more or less whatever benefits they’re willing to cough up, probably a choice of two HMOs if you’re lucky, right? You fill out a time sheet just the same as if you were punching a clock? And you probably get two weeks vacation a year and can’t work from home, can you?  Guess what: from a legal standpoint, you’re indistinguishable from that union pipe fitter who probably has better benefits because of collective bargaining, but you don’t need a union because you work inside at a table, right?

I haven’t read Thomas Pikkety’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century yet.  The take-home message, as far as I’m hearing, is that he asserts that capitalism inevitably leads to a flow of resources to the top of the pyramid, that the rich will only get richer and the rest will be left behind, and that the only reason this was interrupted in the 20th century was due to the impact of the world wars and the confiscatory levels of taxation needed to finance them (and the Keynesian spending to get out of recession in between and thereafter).

This comes around every so often.  Back in the day when Old Navy first launched, no less than Time magazine was concerned that Gap Inc was splitting into its high end and low end brands (and that was before Banana Republic became what it is today).  John Edwards, before he knocked up his videographer, had gone to great lengths to push the theme of “Two Americas” as the basis for his campaign. Naturally, Occupy Wall Street drew a line between the 1% and the 99% and it didn’t get any less bright just because the movement collapsed into its own dysfunction.

But the split comes round in different ways out here.  Sure, there’s the private transit system every major company now employs to move its workers back and forth from the Mission to 650 and back (which keeps drivers on duty for fifteen hours while only paying them for eight). But there’s also the revelation that the split in iOS/Android ownership tracks with economic status pretty smoothly.  And that in turn leads me to look at things like Google or Facebook services where everything is free at the point of use, as long as you’re willing to be data-mined.  You’re paying, just not in cash on the barrelhead – and if you can pay the money up front, you don’t have to have a cellphone contract or an email provider harvesting your data.

Really, the only way to measure class in this country is by the spectrum of diminishing consequences.  I said years ago that the definition of a charmed life was freedom from the consequences of your actions, and in the grand scheme of things, that’s about it.  Debt? Ignorable, written off, repackaged. Crime?  Do a few months in tennis prison or else just catch probation, maybe wear an ankle bracelet. White male? You can do anything.  Black?  Better not get pulled over.  Woman?  Better not want to be a gamer or a sports fan.

And the most annoying thing of all, the very worst thing, is that now you don’t even have to grow up. If you want trampolines and treehouses at work, they’ll build that for you.  They’ll drive you to and from and bring your meals to you.  You can even keep saying girls are icky and passing notes and pulling hair if you like.  As long as you chose a sufficiently lucrative field, you can pretend like it’s still third grade and that fifty years of society never happened and get paid $200K a year for the privilege.  The American Dream is a luxury good but adulthood is a lifestyle option.

It’s worse than it used to be. There are plenty of reasons why. Social networking made it possible for sociopaths to link up and validate their opinions (e.g. Reddit and 4chan). Obama backlash gave voice to all manner of racists with the thinnest veneer of politics smeared over their demands for birth certificates. A whole generation grew up with endless positive affirmation and helicopter parenting and freedom from setback.  And strange and straitened economic circumstances created conditions where unemployment could sit at excessive levels for historic lengths of time while bailed-out investors shot money out of a firehose at any and every stupid idea imaginable.

Twenty-five years ago, in a college education class, the Japanese education model was decried as a system where all through high school, you work like mad, you take extra courses, you attend cram school in the evening, you barely leave your room, because you must get into one of the correct six universities no matter the cost…and once you get there, you switch to glide because you made it into The System and will be all right from now on.  A quarter-century later, it’s hard not to think of that as you walk around Stanford.  If you want a motto for the current tech boom, the current state of American society, the current level of cultural maturity, make it this: Stay seventeen forever.

Or you could declare that we live in a society, and you have to accept that there are other people, and live accordingly.  And if you don’t?  Nobody’s too old to be spanked.  And we as a society need to call out these adultolescents…and reach for the paddle.

Last night, going through a box of stuff from the crawlspace (as the wife dug out T-shirts to be made into a quilt), we unearthed a particularly unflattering sweater of mine, vintage September 1990.  I didn’t want to throw it away, but I couldn’t put into words why.  And then, this morning, came the most unexpected news ever: David Lynch confirming that twenty-five years after the end of Twin Peaks, there will be more.  Showtime, nine episodes, 2016, picking up right where we left off (when Laura Palmer, or her doppelgänger in the Black Lodge, said “I’ll see you in twenty-five years”).

And it all came rushing back, with Gene Loves Jezebel’s “Jealous” underneath.  Because I know what I’ve talked about before with the beginning of my college experience and how it all went wrong, but…

There is another edit.

In this edit, I don’t panic at the failure of my abortive Greek experience, and I don’t latch onto the first girl who shows an interest for fear no one else will.  In this edit, the show I fell in love with over the summer becomes the hook by which I meet some other people, and we watch the season premiere with coffee and cherry pie to see if Dale Cooper was really shot dead at the end. In this edit, I meet some fun and interesting people who aren’t tied to the Greeks or the theater department and who have an interest in politics and this new show called Seinfeld (since Jerry Seinfeld is honoring a prior commitment and doing a standup show on campus despite his new program taking off like a rocket since then). In this edit, I pile in a car with people, go buy ice cream, and have to eat it all because it doesn’t fit in the dorm fridge. In this edit, I don’t have all my chips on one immature and jealous girl and I actually make friends instead, because I make a smart decision instead of panicking.

And that’s where the film runs out, because I don’t have footage of that decision, because I didn’t make it.

I have a vivid emotional feeing around September 1990, because it was a liminal moment at its truest.  There was a brief window where maybe the college experience could have been salvaged, maybe things turn out differently, maybe I get to have an acceptable college experience rather than spending the next twenty years trying to retroactively piece one together out of a scattering of memories and a series of increasingly poorly chosen compensations.

Maybe I want that sweater to be its own sort of memento mori, but in the opposite direction – instead of remembering your own mortality and fragility and inevitable doom, remember that you can make the right call and make life a little better in doing so.