Month: June 2023

The Supreme [sic] Court ended its term today with the capper on two days of predictable rulings. Affirmative action in college admissions (for people who aren’t donors or legacies or athletes): gone. The Biden administration’s attempt to make it easier on people who had to take out loans to get through college: gone. The right to discriminate against someone just because you say it’s your religion: enshrined, based on what turned out to be a fictional scenario.

After decades of decrying the Warren Court as some sort of unelected superlegislature for daring to enforce the law as it was written, the Roberts Court – which is really the Alioto/Thomas Court – is merrily shredding the entire concept of stare decisis and wiping their ass with the fragments. The Warren Court established over and over that the power of government cannot be used to shit on people who are different than you, and the R/A/T court has established that the government has no power to prevent private institutions from shitting on people who are different than them. Soft secession again: the Confederacy re-established without giving up the federal sugar tit, and California and New York will foot the bill for Tennessee and Florida to maintain white supremacy in perpetuity. That’s the plan.

But then, that’s the legacy of having handed over the reins to a racist criminal because the people were too stupid and indifferent to prevent it. Utter shamelessness is no longer disqualifying. Criminality is not disqualifying. Demonstrated fraud and falsehood is no longer disqualifying. Outright racism is no longer disqualifying. And the fact that none of those things is disqualifying means that the value system of this country is broken beyond repair, and broken by the people who cried crocodile tears longest and loudest over “values.” In the end, the only thing they valued was keeping power from anyone unlike them. And it shows. Because now the goal isn’t to get more people to vote for you, it’s to disenfranchise and disempower anyone who won’t.

Every election is now about containment. Hold the boomers at bay until they die, and re-write the world without them. And then, take the power from the rednecks and the car dealers and the venture capitalists until they accept that everyone has to pay the freight and everyone has to be allowed in.

We might not get away with this one.

So there is a research firm out there that was willing to pay me $400 for four and a half hours of opinions on electric vehicles. These people are fools, because I have opinions for a lot longer than that for no charge whatsoever (as the almost 17 years of this very blog will confirm…and the notion I’ve recorded a third of my life here is a whole lot of “Of Which More Later”), but it took very little time for me to turn around and hand that cash over to American Giant for a fleece zip-up and three of their new Everest T-shirts.

The fleece has been on my list for a while since it was announced. My employer has given me damn near half a dozen fleeces in the last four years, and I have given them all away to the homeless wherever possible. But this one is American made and does not come with any branding from an employer with whom my relationship is charitably described as “troubled”. I did enjoy the North Face fleece that was my first garment from them, and the last one I disposed of, and I think that’s why I took the plunge to buy this one. Good extra layer, goes under the M-65 or can be stashed in the trunk, whatever. That’s not the big thing.

The Everest T was advertised in the paper catalog months before it became available to order. It is a loosely-cut crewneck T, optimized as a main shirt rather than undergarment later. But the unique selling point of the Everest T is that it is 15.2 oz cotton. By comparison, a typical “heavyweight” T is about 8 ounces per square foot. The super-hardcore manly-man “cotton armor iron wear” sort of work T generally tops out at 10 or 11 ounces. Fifteen ounce cotton is usually associated with terms like “canvas”. It is, hands down, the heaviest T-shirt I have ever owned and arguably the heaviest shirt by fabric weight I have ever owned.

And it is magnificent. The white one – which I bought when I thought no other colors were on offer – looks like something off the cover of a Springsteen album. I only need the one; the other two in a sage green and a light rye color are far more suitable for daily use. They wear like a weighted blanket for the torso. It feels like the T-shirt that’s been missing my entire life, the final replacement for those couple of American Apparel Vermont Army T’s bought back in the Apple days and jealously guarded ever since. It sounds insane to pay $60 for a t-shirt, but when it feels like a T-shirt you can genuinely wear and have for the rest of your life…there you go.

And that’s been the metric for quite some time. I don’t have any problem spending money on something I plan to have and use for the rest of my days. It’s what makes me antsy about buying the Nokia 2780, no matter how tempting it is to have a modern LTE flip phone – because it can’t possibly last more than four or five years until LTE frequencies start getting replaced with 5G, and it’s a random gimmick. It would make more sense to save that $90 and put it on an Apple Watch Ultra, which would have a bigger screen, a bigger battery and the kind of cellular connectivity to use it as the shutdown-night phone…which would itself only be good for what, five years? Tops? My Apple Watch Series 6 is not particularly long in the tooth, and a battery replacement would see it working well for the foreseeable future, so how can I justify dropping that kind of cash? Against that, $500 for a custom lightsaber seems less frivolous than $800 for a five-year watch.

And this is what made me think about Star Wars, and how Star Wars is basically a scarcity economy. Things get repaired, get mended, get used for decades or centuries. They have advanced technology, but they don’t have plenty, and it shows. Rey is using a lightsaber her mentor’s father built fifty years earlier. Han and Leia are honeymooning on a three hundred year old starship. I can’t buy a damn phone without being required to replace it in five years because I either can’t get the frequency coverage I need or can’t plug it into the new laptop or because it’s not getting operating system updates any longer.

Now if someone wants to give me a flip phone with a removable battery and a replaceable cellular module to keep up with 5G, 6G, whatever it takes, and it could be made up-to-date for shutdown night for ten, fifteen, twenty years as the phone of last resort? Then we could talk. But for now, that’s money that could go on another Everest T that will last me the rest of my life.

Go back to 1999, the era of the Golden Convergence, when everyone was convinced that the PC on your desktop and the TV in your living room were going to combine into one big push-stream information furnace. Tell them there that in 25 years, the PC and the TV will converge into a headset that weighs a pound, fits over your eyes, and gives you utterly realistic windows hanging in space with your work in them or screens that can be as big as a house to watch movies on. It would seem like the most natural evolution of things in the world and the obvious next step.

This is why that 2007 rollout of the iPhone is up there with Doug Englebart’s 1968 “Mother Of All Demos” – Steve Jobs and Apple shifted the paradigm and moved the epicenter of the computing experience to the palm of your hand, and made the smartphone the default computing experience for the whole world. The only things we don’t use the phone for are for actual productivity work, or for kicking back and looking at TV and movies on a big display.

Hm.

It’s a mistake to think that the Vision Pro, publicly unveiled yesterday in an event Apple clearly intended to be in lineal descent from the Mac and the iPhone, is supposed to do everything. It is not. They did not show it being used for anything you’d routinely do with a phone other than maybe taking pics of the kids and looking at them. All of the things the Vision Pro does are things that you don’t want to have to do on a 6 inch screen. In so many ways, the Vision Pro is an attempt to take a desktop computer with you.

I mean, think about it. Most of us plug our laptop into a larger display for actual work work. More than one, sometimes. I hate having to have a laptop bigger than 13”, but that’s simply not enough screen at my age when you need to have Zoom and Slack and a browser open with the Jamf console and maybe CodeRunner and Terminal, never mind Outlook or (spits) Teams. Put this thing on, and all of a sudden, you are surrounded by the vision of computing that really began with Minority Report and tool full form in every Marvel movie: multiple virtual screens hanging in mid-air with everything you want surrounding you on top of your normal environment.

Facebook’s approach to VR has been to ship a minimum viable product and rely on hype that someday it will be useful for more than avatar chat with legless torsos. Their plan is to create a Yugo, sell it cheap, and hope people will snap it up on the promise it’ll get better. Apple is selling the Cadillac experience, something you can actually look at and say “ooh, that’s kind of cool” and “wow, that would be neat” and then implying that the price will come down to Ford Escort levels sooner than later (did I just date myself again? Woof) – and on current form, if you look at the iPad and Apple Watch experiences, it stands to reason that you should be able to get the equivalent of today’s Vision Pro for a price closer to $2000 by Christmas 2026 at the very latest.

And the thing is: everyone who looks at the thing in person and uses it says the same thing – it’s a demo, yes, but an exceptional one that quite frankly kicks the shit out of everything else in the AR/VR space. Yes it’s too expensive now for mass market, yes we don’t have an obvious killer app that makes this a must-have in the spirit of Pagemaker or Uber or Instagram, but even the most hardened cynics in the industry with the highest expectations have conceded that Apple has not gone frog-sticking without a light. There’s something there, even if we won’t know exactly what for a few years.

And quite frankly, they need the next thing. The smartphone crossed the finish line a decade ago, and while so many of the tweaks and gimcracks added to iOS in 17 are genuinely welcome and useful, they’re tweaks and gimcracks. If it weren’t slow as balls and riddled with bug vulnerabilities, I could pull out my old first-gen Moto X and have a satisfactory phone experience using Slack and Instagram and Reeder (okay maybe not Reeder) and play back music and podcasts and never be bothered. There’s nothing I need from my iPhone 13 mini, other than compact size, that I can’t get from the five year old iPhone X that is being sawn off by iOS 17. The only existing Apple product that intrigues me is the Apple Watch Ultra, and that’s mainly because it’s bigger and has a huge battery (cellular would be Very Nice To Have but until one of my phone carriers can support it, there’s no point).

Which brings us back to the other problem: my AirPods Pro were bought in October 2019, replaced under warranty in March 2022 (probably with refurbs, let’s be honest) and don’t have the battery life they had. My Series 6 Apple Watch was bought in September 2020 and benefits nontrivially from the addition of low-power mode. I’ve had the iPhone 13 mini a year (bought six months after release) and am already contemplating a battery replacement – and although I still intend to ride it into the ground, I suspect that by 2026 I’m going to need a bigger phone just for ease of reading, never mind battery life. If you have to replenish the ecosystem every five years, there will be a certain urgency to try to bring the price down on all of it if you can (which is a big part of how people end up buying a new $200 Android phone every 18 months). At some point, you’re going to look at the ecosystem and say “is there a piece of this I can drop” – for me, it was the original Series 0 Apple Watch, and I got by fine with a Fitbit for two years instead. If I were to wind up on a Vision Pro, that would probably be the death knell for the iPad, and the next iPhone would just have to be bigger. Apple was more than wiling and able to cannibalize its own products when it was just a question of migrating from iPod mini to iPod Nano, but will they be able to convince people to add that much to their every-X-years Apple rent?

I mean right now, the goal is to get at least three years out of every device and four out of everything with a touchscreen. By rights, there shouldn’t be a new watch on the horizon until next fall, there shouldn’t be a new phone on the horizon before fall 2026 and there shouldn’t be a new iPad in the mix…well, maybe ever at this rate, but definitely not before 2029 or so. We’ll see if Apple can make the Vision Pro indispensable…and if so, at whose expense.

I have way too many Yeti drinking vessels. I started with a 20 oz tumbler, which was appealing because it was insulated and dishwasher-safe (unlike many if not most insulated tumblers). One thing led to another, and sometime lately I realized I had eight different Yetis, including one I bought by accident and one I forgot I had. So this is just a Keltner list in inverse order of utility.

10 OZ TUMBLER: this is the one I bought my work teammates as a gift when we successfully deployed Jamf during the pandemic, aka “how we caught the snipe”. It’s endlessly versatile: cocktails, coffee, cold drink, an overflow cup, a go cup, fits in a pocket or the car cup holder. The only real disadvantage is that size: even though it’s actually 11 ounces, I’ve done shots that size. It is in fact ideally suited for travel, whether for morning coffee or “I’m going to discretely empty the rest of my pint into this before I walk back to the lodge.” For all that flexibility, though, it’s not the best thing for home, because you have to constantly keep refilling it. Still, if you keep refilling, you don’t have to wash.

16 OZ TUMBLER: this is my daily driver, the one I have worn to a frazzle. Like the 20 oz tumbler that preceded it, it actually holds 18 ounces, a comfortable half-liter, which is the perfect balance of size: good for a beer, good for morning coffee, good for iced tea or soda in human portions (learn, Euros). And the tapered stackable profile means it fits any cup holder, which the 20 oz version didn’t (at least in the Malibu). Ironically, being the one I can’t do without means it gets surpassed by more specialized other ones in regular use, especially in warm weather…

35 OZ MUG: Also known as “Veronica II” or “the Redneck Guzzler.” This replaced the 30 oz “Veronica” that I bought when I first tested positive for COVID-19 and needed to minimize my trips inside. I’m not being funny: 35 ounces is a lot. (It’s closer to 34, a comfortable bang-on one liter). The post-COVID role for Veronica was meant to be as a travel mug for long hauls in the car, and this does the job well: you need that handle and straw to make it easier to handle something of this size. When not traveling, it’s just the right size to throw in one family-size tea bag before bed and let cold brew overnight in the fridge, and with the coming of summer, it has become the principle iced tea vessel. The gaping maw makes it easy to hand-wash as well.

10 OUNCE ROCKS: actually holds 12, which makes it perfect as a rocks glass or as a serving size for a brewery growler or coffee cup. I forgot I had it because it was in with the camping supplies for a couple of years, but it is better suited for home use than its counterpart above. For one thing, it’s easier to scrub out, which is important with coffee residue. For another, it doesn’t fit in a cup holder, and you’d probably want more than that anyway. But its greatest utility to me is as a bedside cup of something (usually iced tea) to gulp in the morning when I’m too parched to work my mouth. It’s also the chosen instrument when you need to pour out the tailings of another Yeti to repurpose it as during the morning coffee-to-iced-tea transition.

18 OUNCE BOTTLE: this was bought when I wanted a water bottle to go back and forth to work. It’s good for that, and for other things besides; as long as you leave the cap off, you can use it for most anything you’d use the 16 ounce tumbler for. it’s basically uncleanable by hand, though, so you’d better make sure you don’t crud it up with stuff the dishwasher can’t handle. And while its screw top makes it the only thing that can go in a backpack, it also means you shouldn’t try to put carbonated beverage in it (as I learned, to my cost. Hercules couldn’t have got that lid off.) Even though it’s less concealable than the 10 ounce tumbler, I feel like it would make a very good keep cup for travel in its own right, and I would probably go on a road trip with it and the 35 as my only drinking utensils. It may wind up on my next Disney trip, whenever that is, especially since I do have a belt holster for it.

24 OUNCE MUG: Now we get to the limited utility stuff. This was my late mother-in-law’s, and I am loath to get rid of it for just that reason, but it’s mostly been used as the thing where I brew two family teabags into enough concentrate for a 64-ounce pitcher. It doesn’t fit a cup holder, and I won’t put alcohol in it, but it’s a nice bonus size for coffee in the morning if necessity requires (and means it could be part of substituting for the 16oz daily driver, although I find it significant that it would take three or four things on this list to replace the 16.)

14 OUNCE MUG. This was bought in a moment of mental abstraction during the pandemic, when I thought I might someday be back in the office. It’s meant for office coffee use: too wide to take a standard V60 dripper, it’s meant to be poured into from pot or dispenser and then wide-mouthed enough to cool quickly, while still having a lid that can be popped on to take down the hall to meetings without spills. I would probably have given it away by now except that it has the old star-V Vanderbilt logo on it, and they don’t make those anymore. So now it reposes with the camping gear, where it can be useful for coffee or whiskey or oatmeal alike.

10 OUNCE WINE TUMBLER: the least useful of them all, this one actually holds only 9 ounces of liquid. Great for wine, but as the husband of a teetotal wife who myself gets heartburn for red wine, this is unlikely to ever see a lot of use. It was ordered as the maquette for the 25th anniversary EUS commemorative markings, though (which appear on the Redneck Guzzler), so to give it away would feel a bit awkward especially in the wrong hands. Still, i don’t need EIGHT Yetis, so I suspect it may wind up re-homed at some point.

Phew. That’s a lot. That’s actually too much. I could almost certainly survive with just the 16 oz tumbler, then maybe the rocks glass. Still, it’s nice to have options, especially with Veronica II. But the fact that I could give away three tomorrow were it not for sentimental attachment seems like a significant data point.

I dumped the Ivory app off my phone this week. I can still access both my Mastodon accounts over the web, if I need to look, but there has been no uptake for Mastodon from the people I needed to move there. Too many friends have replaced Twitter with nothing at all, for better or worse, and my friends are of an age where that makes more sense than looking at Bluesky or Picnic or whatever the latest alternative is.

Part of the problem, honestly, is that Twitter’s engineers built a system that failed mostly safe. There are numerous technical issues with the site, but it can be kept limping along in day to day use. It’s only when they try to do something exceptional – like the DeSaster – that things conspicuously break. There has been a steady slow degradation, but if you have a private account following only friends and make a conscious effort not to click on the For You tab, you can still approximate a reasonable experience for now.

Outside that bubble, of course, it’s a disaster. If I use a VPN to Europe, or Safari, it’s mostly dog pictures and soccer news, but for whatever reason, going to Twitter with Firefox on a US IP address offers you a cavalcade of anti-woke zombies, crypto hustlers and general shitposting before you even try to log in. Twitter’s target audience is the well-off fifteen year old boy with no positive male role model and plenty of time for gaming, because that’s who runs it.

The wild card in all this is Instagram, which I crawled back to for want of a viable alternative. It’s still where’s it was in 2016: the safest social network, thanks to only accessing it through the mobile website to cut out the preposterous avalanche of ads. What’s interesting is that Facebook is apparently serious about “Instagram for text”, aka Barcelona or P92 or some such, which would basically be Twitter but using your Insta account for credentials.

And this is a huge deal, simply because people already have Instagram. People already know who they follow on Instagram. The people I miss on Twitter – Greenock Morton Football Club, the San Jose Giants, Vanderbilt University – they’re all on Insta and would have very little trouble migrating their text posts there as well. That might be what it takes to dislodge Twitter: just shift into something else you’re already using. And if people were to do that, I’d be hard-pressed not to pop the app on my phone and call it a day.

And then there’s the wild card, one I described with Announcements ™ last year. People on Signal have not really taken up Stories, but I have a lot more people on iMessage than Signal, and if Apple is adding a journaling app to Health, it’s a short hop to tying everything together in some kind of sharing service. Maybe I’m just desperately trying to will Pal About into existence, but that Cocoon app is sitting out there untouched and un-updated and could probably be bought for a song as part of the framework. It would be nice to have some way to have an ambient presence of friends in your life, especially at an age and in an era where the effort required to maintain the ties can be more than you have in the tank at day’s end.

In any event, it’s important to keep eyes open here. Just because Twitter is Trump and Facebook is Bush doesn’t mean the latter wasn’t a disaster. It’s just the the former turned out to be even worse. And we won’t get better until we wrench the wheel away and demand better.