Are my eyes really blue?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– March 28, 2014

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

Break them. Break them all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Dec. 30, 2010

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So in the last two weeks, it’s become readily apparent that the post office is being deliberately sabotaged. To what end, who knows – after all, given the demographic that makes the most use of mail-in balloting, it seems as if this administration is sandbagging itself. But that’s not the point, not by a long shot. The point, as it has been for four years, is to flood the zone with shit to create an atmosphere in which you can’t knock down all the offenses. It’s like a hockey game – you can stop 41 shots on goal, but if they took 42, they score. 

The effect of this has been to slow-boil the American concept of democracy. Four years ago, the active sabotage of the post office to manipulate the integrity of mail-in balloting would have been an outrage. Now, after the Muller investigation, the failed impeachment, the constant daily sideshow of self-dealing and corruption and the ongoing politically-motivated incompetence in the face of a pandemic, it almost gets a shrug. Which is the point. Nobody can keep up with the crimes, the violations of political norms and traditions – shit, that orange fucker will probably stand on the White House lawn to accept his re-nomination and people will just let it go.

And now we probably have QAnon coming into the House of Representatives in more than one place, based off the results of the Georgia primaries and the likely outcomes elsewhere. Which means that even if we somehow battle through and win the Presidency, even if by a miracle we get control of both houses of Congress (forget about 60 in the Senate; the filibuster will just have to go and we’ll have to figure out how to live without it), we will still have a rear guard of the most paranoid, most conspiratorial, most batshit loonball insane redneck-gnostic modern Republicans to deal with, aided and abetted by those who think they can profit by exploiting the madness. And they will still have their amen corner on Fox, on OANN, on Sinclair stations, on AM radio and all over social media.

We have to correct our national values system. We have to make all of this Not Okay again. We have to put up the guardrails again with concrete jersey-walls instead of orange barrels. And the Republican Party is going to have to accept that they went wrong, that they poisoned the well, and read the tinfoil hat lunatics out of power and out of the party and live with being a rump faction of the Not Crazy Party, and let that be our political division for a while. Crazy vs Not Crazy.

I mean, the Democrats did their part. They nominated an old white male for President and backed him with a person who makes the dirtbag left see spots and scream. We met halfway. It’s past time for the GOP to do the same and show some fucking contrition and make good on repairing their mistake.

“This is what happens when cynical politicians welcome support from hate-groups and radical fringes and whackaloon conspiracy nutters. First they cynically welcome support from the fringe, hoping to manipulate and control it. Then they come to seek out that support. Then they come to rely on it. And then they become part of it and it becomes part of them. Mitch McConnell probably still thinks he’s pulling the strings, that he’s the puppet-master who’s using QAnon believers for his own political ends. But now they’ve got strings on him as well…”

Fred Clark, as always, nails it.

1) it’s good to have at least one person in the race who isn’t gonna eligible for Social Security before the next term is up.

2) I would rather stand in the way of a Caltrain than an AKA from Howard.

3) I am amused that the right is calling her a radical militant while the left is calling her a cop. I am less amused that every ticket with a woman on it has always lost. And if we’re honest, the people voting against her because of who she is would probably approve of a white male with the same record of what she’s done. The streak has to break sometime, right?

4) In my lifetime, every race until 2008 had one person on a ticket from a state with a star on the Rebel flag. Since then, Tim Kaine is the only one. This is a good development, if only because…

5) …she’s the first Californian on the ticket since Reagan. The Golden State probably has reason to feel hard done by these last thirty-six years. In the era when California was a safe Republican state from 1968-88, they had two Presidents. It’s been a stalwart Democratic vote ever since, and this is the first time they’ve had a look in.

6) It’s absurd that Kamala didn’t make it to Iowa when the likes of Yang and Bloomberg did. Error corrected.

7) To all accounts, Biden’s advisors tagged Harris as too aggressive and too ambitious, and he deliberately chose her anyway. He chose a person who went right at him in debates. He’s not afraid to be questioned and not afraid to be corrected. That cannot be overrated at this point.

8) One of the reasons I liked her for the ticket originally was because I knew the existence of a smart, sharp, attractive woman of color would cause Dolt 45 to experience a blue screen of death. Based on the first presser, this is clearly the case. I’ll be interested to see if it continues.

9) I’ve been dreading this pick, despite hoping for it, for the same reason one sits curled on the couch in the late 3rd quarter with a lead, afraid to move for fear of a jinx. But for whatever reason, I feel…hopeful? This is a ticket with two punchers. And it’s time to start swinging.

Kamala Devi Harris, age 55, of Oakland California, Howard ’86, Hastings ’89, Alpha Kappa Alpha…you have less than three months to help save the world.