Are my eyes really blue?

I had the same cell phone number from January 1998 through Christmas 2005. It started with an Ericsson phone from a then-fledgling AT&T Wireless, offering me a discount on account of my employer. That number lasted me through half a dozen mailing addresses on two coasts, two different cellular providers, and more actual handsets than I’m comfortable remembering (though at a guess, I’d say there were at least a dozen). I can still rattle it off from memory; at times I have to think to remember it isn’t my current number. It was as much a part of my identity as my own name; my email address changed far more frequently.

Then Apple provided me with a phone and number. And I was faced with a choice. I could continue to carry two phones, or I could take the one work was providing me for free, and they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) port in my personal number…and I was confronted with the prospect of paying over $800 a year for data service and a 703 number. And I reluctantly accepted that I didn’t live in Northern Virginia anymore and gave it up.  And I had my Apple number until I quit a year and a half later, at which time I acquired the number I had ever since…until today.

So yeah, I tend to hang onto a number for a while. That 650 cell number was my personal phone, even after I started working at a place that wanted to provide me a phone.  Instead, they reimbursed my personal phone bill until around the end of 2012 – at which point I accepted their phone and ported my 650 number to Google Voice, and pointed it at their phone for two years until I replaced the phone, changed carriers, and ported it right back in.  In any event, ringing or texting that 650 number has been a known good way to get hold of me since October 1, 2007…again, until today.

I don’t trust Google Voice. I think Google has a bad habit of launching things with a splash, making a big deal of them, promising the moon and stars, getting bored, forgetting about them, and eventually closing up shop in one of their periodic spring cleanings, sometimes with less notice than others. Wave, Buzz, Reader, the free Wi-Fi in Mountain View, Dodgeball, Latitude, iGoogle…the list is long and distinguished. So if you like Google Voice, or your Google Voice number, it might behoove you to get it out of there.

And I was tired of that 650 number. It was the product of what I now look back on as possibly the second biggest mistake of my entire life. The eight years I had it were not always the best of times. And that number had been compromised at work, fallen into the hands of more than one person who shouldn’t have had it. I have a new job now, a new role and a new title and (hopefully) a better and brighter future coming, and it was well time for a change.

People are funny about numbers.  My wife, whose impatience with my phone shenanigans is the stuff of legend, has had the same cell phone number ever since she first got a mobile phone to track the birth of her oldest nephew (who just turned sixteen). But she insisted on that 415 area code back then, because it had disappeared out from under her on two separate occasions, and she was smart to pounce on it in the mobile sphere.  Similarly, I have a burner phone lying around with a 205 number (largely held against the day I might need to port the ancestral home phone to it) plus a couple of disposable numbers still stashed in Google Voice against the possible need to give a phone number to someone I’d rather not have it. But for a permanent number, or at the very least, one that I’ll want until we switch to 14-digit dialing or Slack-over-VOIP or until this employer managed to screw me out of it?  I wanted a number I could live with, a number I wouldn’t have any ambiguity or uncertainly about, a number that wouldn’t provoke unseemly anti-bubble feelings or a vague embarrassment about parts South. A number that reminded me of when I didn’t have any questions about who or what I was. A number that honors where this me was born and built.

I’m back on 703. Like other family of mine, wherever I find myself, I’m from the DMV. As free hiring perks/ self-made Christmas bonuses go, it’s as good as I could ask for. Normal service – whatever that means for me in 2016 – has been restored.

In a different world and a different timeline, the gang is together in Stirling, Virginia tonight, for the renewal of the old tradition last exercised a decade ago, there at midnight for the release of a new Star Wars movie. Of course, we’re living in three different metropolitan areas with five children between us, so a midnight movie on a Thursday night was never going to be on the cards in any event, but it’s nice to dream.

Someone smarter than me blogged earlier that right now is the greatest moment to be a Star Wars fan, because it could still be anything at all and it’s about to happen.  That glorious anticipation – we know there’s a girl and a boy, and we think she’s a desert scavenger and he’s a fallen Stormtrooper.  There’s something awfully Vader-like, and possibly Vader-worshipping, with a lightsaber that has a crossguard.  There’s an even tinier astromech droid than R2-D2 ever was, rolling around on a spherical body with personality that just bursts through even the briefest flash of trailer.

And there’s Leia, and there’s Han and Chewie, and there’s Artoo and Threepio. All the pieces are on the board. All the players are on their marks. We’re about to pull the curtain we’ve spent three decades never expecting to see going up.

This is the movie we’ve wanted since 1983. This is what led a dorm full of Southern frat-boys to rush out and buy Heir to the Empire in hardback the moment they realized it existed. After thirty-two long and winding years, we have something the prequels simply weren’t capable of giving us.

This is the story of what happened next.

Star Wars was my life. When my first baby tooth came out at school, and I lost it, I got my first or second action figure as compensation. The packaging of those toys is iconic to the point that I wanted to run out and buy a crap-ton of action figures when they reused it for the prequels a couple years back. I got the Death Star Space Station set for Christmas in 1978, I think, and my three living grandparents all smiled and nodded with the same bewilderment I now reserve for Pokemon and Skylander Trap Team. I wanted to be Darth Vader, or else be the one that took him down. I wanted a real life snowspeeder more than anything, to the point that I received a Lego one for my forty-third birthday. I spent years running around the back yard with a sawed-off blue mop handle, thrashing endless stormtroopers and God knows what else.  And this was a world without even VCR versions of the movies. If I’d had what exists today – Blu-Ray and streaming and multiple cartoon series and Star Tours and the ability to build my own lightsaber at Disneyland – if I’d had a third of that at age 8, I would have collapsed and died in a weeping puddle of pure emotional overload.

When I walked out of the theater at age 11, it never occurred to me that there wouldn’t be a new Star Wars movie on the screen for sixteen years.  I figured 1986. And it didn’t happen, and 1990 didn’t happen, and they had stopped making toys a year or two after, and it didn’t take long to decide well, they’re done. And I think a lot of people have soured on the prequels, and rightly so in some cases, but they’ve also forgotten that we were willing to forgive and overlook a lot simply because it was new Star Wars. And at the same time, I think a lot of people still haven’t forgiven the prequels for telling us this is how we got to that point, not what came next.

Because we’re older. We know that “and they lived happily ever after” is the biggest lie you ever hear growing up. Maybe the end of Return of the Jedi was good enough for the original vision, although depending on what you believe there were either nine or twelve or six movies originally planned. I know that at age 8, I had my own timeline for what was coming after Empire, and it involved me cropping up starting in the fourth one, a Battlestar Galactica crossover in the fifth one, at least one episode incongruously titled “Run Vader Run” and the whole thing landing on Earth by the eighth one. (If Patton Oswalt’s famous improv monologue actually comes to pass, or the Guardians of the Galaxy show up in Episode IX, I am going to feel legitimately hard done by.)

And from the sound of things, our heroes’ lives didn’t turn out like they expected either. They didn’t all get to show up at the holo-opera on Coruscant for opening night ten years later either. But at some point in the next few days or weeks, in our own separate times and places, we get to touch that again and remember what it was like to all be together, and what it was like to be a wide-eyed kid waiting for that fanfare to hit. And I’m going to see an actor – who said twenty years ago that he couldn’t see playing a role as uninteresting as Han Solo again – go up there and speak for all of us.

Chewie…we’re home.

So Rene Ritchie of iMore has come to the defense of the thinner, lighter, less battery equipped iPhone.  He argues that lightness is critical to usability, and that an iPhone 6 or 6Plus that was as thick as, say, an iPhone 4 would be too heavy to use in the same way, to wit: 

[It] would be too heavy for many people to read iBooks or watch movies for long periods of time, for example, while in bed or while on a flight. It would also be harder to balance and use one handed while walking around.

Here’s the thing: who watches an entire movie in bed or on a plane holding the phone up? It inevitably winds up on the pillow or the cafeteria tray. Holding the phone up is only partially a function of the weight of the phone; it’s as much trying to keep your arm upright in that position. Try it. Nothing in your hand, just hold your arm up like there’s a phone in it, and see how long you can sustain it.

He goes on to say:

With Apple’s current generation of thin-as-in-light phones, you can add a thicker, heavier battery case for those times when you want or need extra power. If Apple made a thick-as-in-heavy phone, you couldn’t tear half of it off for the times when you really didn’t need the extra boost.

This way, usability is the standard and bulk is the option, not bulk as the standard at the expense of usability.

This argument falls flat for one simple reason: Apple didn’t choose to make an external battery case for the 6 Plus. It’s big enough – and consequently so is the battery – that for most people, you can get through the day without needing another battery attached.  Indeed, that seems to be one of the principal use cases for people choosing the Plus.  Battery life is usability, and there have been external battery cases from other manufacturers since the time of the iPhone 4 if not earlier.  But only now, with the advent of an iPhone 6S that has a less capacious battery than the iPhone 6, did Apple feel the need to provide such a case themselves.

 

Chipsets and the processes used to fabricate them will improve, screen technology will evolve, and radios will get more efficient. Add even better race-to-sleep and other power-management techniques and, over time, Apple will end up with a light, usable phone that also has extended battery life.

The iPhone 6 Plus, with its day-and-a-half of charge capacity, shows that strategy already at work.

And the iPhone 6 and 6S show how that strategy isn’t working now. The “strategy” of the iPhone 6 Plus is the exact same strategy that Android phone makers relied on for years: make the phone bigger so you can cram a bigger battery in it. If anything, this just hammers home the point I was making in my last post; Apple’s principal source of innovation in phones in the last two years has been “make it bigger and thinner and plug in an extra battery when it goes flat.”

For reference:

iPhone 6S: 143 g, 1715 mAh battery

iPhone 6: 129 g, 1810 mAh battery

iPhone 5S: 112 g, 1560 mAh battery

iPhone 5: 112 g, 1440 mAh battery

 

So in the body of the iPhone 5, Apple managed to add NFC and TouchID support, keep the weight the same, and still bump the battery capacity up by 8%. Yet for all the hue and cry of “lightness”, the iPhone 6S increased the weight of the phone by over 10% yet sliced a good 5% off the battery capability, all for the sake of 3DTouch. If more weight for more battery is supposedly such a bad tradeoff, how much worse is more weight for less battery?

You want somebody to defend Apple’s bad decisions at all costs, look somewhere else. Rene can probably help you out. From here, though, there’s no getting around the fact that Apple is admitting they botched – and hopefully it means better decision making in next year’s model.

 

On paper, it looks pretty reasonable.  The Apple battery case for the iPhone 6/6S looks ungainly, a one-piece silicon shell with a rectangular bulge under its skin, but in functionality it couldn’t be simpler: connect it to your phone and at that point it’s automatic – plug in your Lightning cable and use normally, and the phone will draw off the external battery seamlessly before switching to the internal.  Functionally it’s the same as increasing the size of the internal battery.

And there’s the rub: this is a $99 fee to make your phone do something it should have been capable of all along. It’s a tacit admission that the battery is not large enough in the 6 (and even smaller in the 6S) and that the price of making the phone hipster-jeans skinny is making it unable to cope with the power demands of an ordinary day. It is a concession in everything but words that Jony Ive’s industrial design ran out ahead of usability.

It’s not the first time, either.  More than one website is showing pictures of the updated Magic Mouse, which is rechargeable with a Lightning cable…by flipping it over and plugging the cable into the bottom, rendering the mouse unusable.  The Apple Pencil, for use with the iPad Pro, charges straight from the iPad’s own Lightning port…where it juts directly out like some kind of wack-ass antenna, just asking to be broken off. Don’t even get me started on the MacBook’s single USB-C connector, rendering it functionally useless as a desktop system – even with the adapter, you can at best attach a monitor, power, USB Ethernet at 10/100 speed and hope that you don’t run out of power on the aforementioned Magic Mouse and keyboard.

Yes, I hear the MacMacs argue, but these are horses for courses and the MacBook isn’t meant to be a desktop replacement and you don’t have to charge the mouse every day and…this is not going to wash with Ed Earl Brown. The whole point of Apple’s premium for hardware and software was that it just worked, and the number of pain points where you have to work around their way of doing things is increasing. That’s bad design, full stop. And the rumors of an iPhone 7 with only a Lightning port and no headphone jack only make things worse – if you have to eliminate the headphone jack to make the damned thing even more thin, how much battery do you expect it to have, especially once you’re relying on Bluetooth for headphones?

At the risk of sounding like the other sort of MacMac: none of this would be happening if Steve were alive. The original iPhone eschewed things like 3G and GPS, and for good reason: an all-day battery was a bigger priority. None of the phone’s whizzy features are worth a damn when it’s a dead lump of metal in your hand. Tim Cook is a fine gentleman and perhaps the greatest operations mind in corporate history, but he’s not someone who can tell Jony Ive to reel it in and come back tomorrow with something that doesn’t sacrifice usability in the name of ooh shiny.

It’s chilling but it’s true: the first-generation Moto X, the very one at which Ive threw shade in the pages of the New Yorker, the one that debuted in early-autumn 2013, is still more compelling to me than any iPhone Apple has produced since. Hand feel without giving up screen size, quality materials without outrageous expense, spec sheet glory ruthlessly sacrificed in the name of user experience – Moto, however briefly, got the game exactly right, and all Apple has come up with since is to make it bigger and thinner and plug an extra battery in to make up the difference.

At this point, I’m going to see what happens with this rumor about a notional iPhone 6C, so-called, in March of 2016. Because right now, the camera is the only thing preventing me from just taking the Moto X abroad next summer. That’s what it’s for, and it’ll do just as good a job of getting me through the day without a power cable as this iPhone 6 does currently. And that’s not an endorsement for Apple.

I mean, you can’t tell the mass shootings without a scorecard, and people are scrambling to throw shit in the air about “prayer shaming” and “terrorism” and try to obscure the fact that people getting shot in large numbers is a now-routine and uniquely-American fact of life. It sounds like the dude in San Bernadino bought all these guns in a perfectly legal fashion without having to go to Secret Criminal Terrorist Free Gun Costco anyway.

It’s fine.  It’s life now.  Once we as a country rolled over on the mass-murder of elementary school children at Christmas-time, that was the end. Movie theater? Church? Facility for the developmentally disabled? SHRUG EMOJI. Apparently this is just the price of doing business because we gave away a non-trivial amount of political power to the professionally piss-pants frightened, and we decided that being fucking stupid was a valid way to live your life.

It’s getting really really hard not to feel like I need to decamp to some country with better broadband and less likelihood of getting gunned down because Bubba the Redneck Reindeer wants to pretend he can fight off the 82nd Airborne.  Meanwhile, I’ll just sit here and try to suppress the urge to consider myself superior to these dumb fucks.  Not trying real hard, either.

Something about the Y Combinator thing reminded me of the Republican presidential race – those half-dozen “unicorns” that have yet to go public or be acquired, just sitting there hoovering up VC money on business that may or may not ever turn to standalone profit.  And when you look at it that way, of course there are still fourteen candidates in the race. Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker couldn’t cut it, but it’s not as if Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum or Jim Gilmore – or Carly Fiorina or Ben Carson or Donald Trump, for that matter – are any more plausible or serious or qualified candidates.  But when the pie is chopped 14 ways, if you can get to 10% share of the vote, you’re probably in the top 5, so where is there any incentive to drop out so long as your backers are willing to keep putting up money?

The difference is, unlike high tech, there’s going to be an IPO for these candidates whether they like it or not. One in Iowa, one in New Hampshire, and ultimately on March 1 when pretty much the entire SEC goes to the polls. By March 1, we’re going to know for sure that at least a half-dozen of these candidates are sufficiently no longer viable that their backers and donors will not be willing to dip into the wallet one more time, and their candidacies will come to a swift and ignominious end. I mean, I had completely forgotten that George Pataki is even in this race. None of the second-tier debaters have ever yet been promoted except for Carly Fiorina, in a move by the RNC that every single candidate would be screaming to decry as “affirmative action” had it happened on the Democratic side.

People can caterwaul all they like about government being more like a business, but at least in 2016, government has a deadline to shit or get off the pot.  It’s more than you can say for Silly Con Valley.

Last week’s Economist included an article about one of the neighbors. Y Combinator is an incubator/startup boot camp/venture capital provider in Mountain View that has become the poster child for people who think entrepreneurship can be reduced to a simple process capped with the standard rich and famous contract at the end.  Go read the article, I’ll wait.

Back? Good. Let’s go:

1) I find it singular that of the half-dozen “unicorns” the article cites, not one has gone public or been acquired.  These are all privately held companies whose valuation is based on what some entity was willing to pay for a percentage. In 1999, the exit strategy for your company was to go public and cash in with a breathtaking IPO. In 2009, the exit strategy was to sell out to Google, or Facebook, or Apple, or maybe Amazon or Microsoft, or if you’re really desperate, Yahoo.  Now, in 2015, the goal seems merely to be to get the highest possible valuation by enticing one VC firm or another to give you the most money for the smallest percentage, thereby “valuing” your company at some astronomical sum.  The problem is, not one bit of that is liquid.  AirBnB is the highest-valued of these companies, and it certainly seems to have a viable business model and generate revenue from same (legal issues around people using it to go into the hotel business notwithstanding*). But the question becomes: who, if anyone, is going to pay $25.5 BILLION dollars to acquire them? And if they go public,  are they really going to offer a hundred million shares at $255 a share on opening day?  There are an awful lot of unicorns, so-called, whose expansive valuation almost certainly could not survive exposure to an open market.

2) We’ve defined the tech-sector down to “anything that has an app.” AirBnB is a short-term rental company. Instacart is a food-delivery logistics company.  Stepping outside the Y ecosystem, Uber – maybe the poster child for the current bubble – is a taxi company desperately trying to pitch itself as actually being Tinder for cars rather than a taxi company. It’s been said before and better by smarter people than me, but the current model really seems to be one of “think what your mother doesn’t do for you anymore” -> replace all normal communication/commercial infrastructure with smartphone app -> SWEET SWEET FILTHY LUCRE FROM THAT DICKHEAD ANDRESSEN. Nice work, if you can get it.

3) Way way WAY too many of these ideas are a product of regulatory arbitrage, loophole-seeking, and sheer bloody-mindedness.  AirBnB is NOT your hotelier. Uber (and Lyft and Sidecar and Gett) are NOT taxi companies. WeWork is NOT a commercial real-estate company. DraftKings and FanDuel are NOT wagering. Instacart and DoorDash are NOT in the food business. If you get work via Uber or GigWalk or Fiverr or TaskRabbit or (fill in app-based task-driven contract-labor service HERE), you are NOT their employee, you just happen to have contracted with this other private party. So we have a bunch of companies which are worth way more than the sum of their profit and assets, surviving on the steady intravenous drip of VC money, dependent on a workforce of people who are absolutely not their employees.  How the hell is this supposed to be a viable economic model?

And in the meantime, here is Y Combinator, which the article openly says that “aspiring entrepreneurs clamor to attend…as much for what they learn there as for the stamp of approval and network they can claim when they leave.” As much? Y Combinator has managed to out-Stanford Stanford, and an industry that supposedly scoffs at legacy ideas of credentials and old ways of thinking about pedigree now instead throws an automatic seal of approval behind whoever comes out of this particular three-month boot camp.  And it’s desirable enough that two guys from Brazil will spend thirty hours in transit – each way – for the sake of the single ten-minute interview that determines whether or not they will get accepted into the ranks of the Elect. Ten minutes. My scholarship interview for a no-account liberal-arts college in the Deep South took longer than that. But that magic Y is now so coveted that it’s worth spending two and a half full days, round-trip, for the sake of ten minutes to see if the golden finger will bless your idea.

If that isn’t a bubble, I’ll kiss your ass.

 

 

 

* AirBnB is one of those things where they keep pushing the original model, i.e. “let out the spare room and meet people while making a little extra scratch.”  We have actually done this. It has worked out well. The problem comes when somebody buys a building, evicts all the existing tenants, and turns it into what is functionally a hotel administered via AirBnB. This was a big part of the backlash that manifested as a couple of voting propositions earlier this month in San Francisco, and I expect it to continue to be an issue in any market where housing supply is constrained and former private accommodations are converted for AirBnB use full-time.

There used to be a bookstore, a music store and a tobacconist in every mall.  Frequently more than one book or music store, at a time when they weren’t lumped together (it’s singular to me that I have seen the beginning and the end of the all-in-one media store, whether it be Borders or MediaPlay or the local likes of Bookstar or Davis-Kidd). In high school it was Musicland and Sound Shop at the Galleria, along with B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. By the time college came round, you could roll the sports-wear stores in there too: Foot Locker and Champs both in every mall. (I hesitate to say “sporting goods” because for the most part, those stores didn’t actually sell bats or gloves or balls or helmets.) And toward the end of graduate school, cell phone stores were of equal interest.

All of that has changed.  Finding a tobacconist in a mall in California is like trying to find a rack of pork ribs at a mosque. Amazon did for the mall bookstore, and Apple largely managed to do for the music store and the cell phone store alike – sure, every carrier has a shop at the mall and a few kiosks besides, but you only go in there if you need to buy a phone on a legacy contract, not to check out the new hotness. And at my age, there’s precious little you want from the likes of Foot Locker. 

In so many ways, that sums up how different life is. The mall as a point of interest was barely hanging on when I got here in 2004 – it was a short hop from Apple to Valley Fair, the principal temple of competitive commerce in the South Bay, and I dutifully did the rounds there if only for the sake of “this is how I orient myself in a new place,” just as I’d wandered through Cool Springs and Rivergate and Green Hills and Hickory Hollow and Bellevue in Nashville or through Ballston Common and Tyson’s Corner and Pentagon City and Fair Oaks in Northern Virginia.  But it didn’t really last.  I don’t know that I ever saw a music store or a bookstore in that mall, the tobacconist of those early cigar-smoking nights is long gone, and even the Apple store isn’t a draw any longer.

All of this came to mind in the wake of going through the AT&T store to replace my wife’s phone – she is still carrying a legacy foundation account plan which is damn near theft, so the corporate store is the only way to go.  It’s the same AT&T store where I reluctantly acquired an iPhone 3G in 2008 after damaging my original model. That’s very literally the last time I’ve ever bought a cell phone in a carrier store – everything since was direct from the manufacturer or through work. Aside from the occasional glance at the new hardware, I don’t ever go in an Apple Store anymore, and I basically never go in a cell phone store (which is why it was such a jarring experience to wait over an hour for no service on Halloween. Everybody wants to be AAPL but nobody wants to put the resources into it).

And looking back, that makes perfect sense. If you need to sum up what’s changed in the last 10 years or so, make it this: the Internet is where you buy things. If I go to Santana Row, the most I’m liable to splash out for is a cup of coffee at Peet’s or maybe a pen. If I go to Valley Fair, I might go nuts and get a pretzel or maybe some Coldstone – if it’s even still there and I can’t swear it is. The only destination at a mall for me for as long as I can remember is to get that ham-and-cheese-and-pineapple sandwich from Steak Escape and that’s a special occasion sort of thing. Clothing? Ordered online. Phones? Bought from work or off the manufacturer’s website. Caps? Ballpark or online. Jackets? Japan, New York, or online. Watch? Apple Store or online. Socks? Books? Flask? Steel tumblers? If it isn’t food or drink, the odds are strong that it’s coming straight to my house or office in a UPS or FedEx box.

Which is a shame, in its way. Going to the mall was an event – maybe the defining social event of the 80s, although it came to me quite literally in a dream that walking the mall with your friends would be an ideal pastime before I was ever aware that the culture was way ahead of me. It was a heavy lift for me until well into high school, just because I was a half hour drive from the nearest mall, but eventually I sort of got there – and when I had to get off campus in college, the first stop was the mall, pretty much always. The malls at the points of the compass were my orientation and anchor in Nashville. The mall was on the way to work and on the way home for the first year and a half in Arlington. And now, a decade on, the mall has evolved into – at best – some place to quickly return the stuff you bought online and maybe a place to grab a bite if you’re in the neighborhood. Maybe.

And thus does the mall become one of those things we just don’t do anymore. 

The phrase is Japanese. Wikipedia calls it “a Japanese term for the awareness of impermanence, or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.” One of Barry Eisler’s characters in A Lonely Resurrection calls it “the sadness of being human.”

National Geographic Partners is a joint venture owned by the National Geographic Society and 21st Century Fox. As of earlier this year, NGP has basically taken over all the functions of the Society – publishing, content, brand, the whole enchilada. Much like Google and Alphabet, only in this case the non-profit NGS has created a mechanism to essentially sell three-quarters of itself to Fox. There are a number of levels on which this is dismaying, especially vis-a-vis the media properties of Fox in the United States. But one of them hits extremely close to home – and that is the inevitable takeover of back-office operations by 21st Century Fox. Marketing, finance, and of course IT – all being replaced with the economy of scale that comes from a major media corporation’s existing structures.

Basically, my old job is ceasing to exist. And all my old colleagues are being laid off.  There will probably be packages, there will be an as-yet-undetermined date final for them, and they will go their separate ways for good.  Maybe some will get re-hired in local roles, but I wouldn’t count on it – this is, in many ways, an end altogether for the old firm.

They were seven odd and turbulent years, to be certain, and the first year and a half were traumatic in the extreme. But it was where my life was rebuilt from scratch. The old crew went to work on me when I was dangling by a thread with my career in ruins and no future – when the black hole of the past had opened up all the way to the tiptoes beneath me – and rebuilt me smarter, surer, better than I had been before. You could argue that much of my troubles the last few years have revolved around trying to figure out who I am and where I’m going and what is to be done with my life. If there’s one thing I can say with absolute certainly about my time in the DMV working with my gang under that yellow rectangle, it’s this: there was never a sliver of doubt about who I was or what I could do.

So much has changed since those days. Some people out of my life altogether. Some scattered to the four winds. The old pub gone, and now the very jobs themselves gone. The place we worked is no longer the same place, and what seemed like a fixture of American life – that non-profit magazine publisher dedicated to knowledge of the world and all that is in it – is now just another media property lumped alongside the likes of Joe Buck, Bill O’Reilly and Family Guy.

I’ve said it before – treasure the things you love, because you never know when they’ll be taken from you. But that includes your memories, because sometimes the ground shifts beneath the past and the things you remember are themselves altered. This, though, is a fact, and it is indisputable: from 1997 to 2004, I had the privilege of being a giant standing in a forest of giants, and I’ll take that to my grave.  There’s sadness in its transience, to be sure, but there is glory in its having happened.

After failing to ride the wave of Rom-mania in 2012, Paul Ryan will go to bed tonight as Speaker of the House.  Once upon a time, this would have made him one of the most powerful people in DC, on a par with a Supreme Court justice or Sonny Jurgensen. As it is, since John Boehner gifted him a budget deal on the way out the door, his main job will be to mill about aimlessly and occasionally vote through some bills to try to make it tough on the Democrats in 2016, which is just as well, because the House Redneck Caucus seems bound and determined not to play nice with anyone, least of all their own party’s leadership.

You can blame this on the Tea Party if you like, or you can point to Sarah Palin as the wellspring of it all, or you can go back to Newt Gingrich and the predictable consequences of pairing a Southernized GOP Congress with an amiable dunce from Texas in the White House, or you can go all the way back to Lee Atwater running a Wallace campaign on behalf of a patrician New Englander with a Houston hotel suite. But really, it all goes back to Nixonland, and the explicit decision that the reactionary forces of 1964 could be combined with a rebellious South to build a new engine in the national GOP. This was the inevitable result of fifty years of nurturing the worst impulses of this country, and for the GOP establishment and its amen corner in the national press to suddenly look up and decry what’s happening to the Republican party is risible in the extreme. In the immortal words of Chris Rock, that tiger went tiger.

I mean, what did you expect?  You spend years if not decades telling people to live in fear, that everyone to the left of John Kasich is Joe Stalin and that the government wants to grind them all into free meatloaf for Mexicans, that they are the true salt of the earth and their racist impulses are to be indulged rather than overcome…this is not an accident, this is not a fluke. The Tea Party is the GOP. This has been the Republican party for the last 20 years. This was the plan all along. This is a designed play. A vast plurality of ignorance, racism and outright stupid, providing automatic response in reaction to constant stimulus from TV, radio and a million “Fw:fw:fwd:FW:FW” emails isn’t a bug, it isn’t a feature, it’s the whole goddamn operating system.

The thing that scares me most isn’t the necks, it’s the people who look sorrowfully on the mess that’s made and still pull the GOP lever anyway. Sure, these hayseeds are all gun suckers who think the country is at risk of Sharia law from ACORN-organized illegal immigrants, but Al Gore is fat and Hollywood liberals are dumb, so vote Republican. That’s exactly how we got here, and it’s the biggest scare going into 2016: that the likes of Donald Trump could wind up in the White House because enough people realize he’s a loudmouthed business failure who spun an ego into reality stardom, but they’re tired of Hillary, so whatever.  Meanwhile, we continue with the Republican primary clown show. There are 14 candidates still in play, not because they’re viable candidates in any way, but because there’s enough loose money floating around – not enough to run a viable campaign, but enough to keep your campaign bobbing along at 7% and build name recognition for an inevitable Fox News commentary job and book deal and speaking engagements. There are maybe three serious candidates, a couple of maybe-tweeners and not less than five outright grifters on the march (and the grifters have the top three spots at the moment.  You can tell they’re grifters because the three of them combined have zero days experience in elected office and want you to believe that President of the United States is an entry-level job in politics.)

Then again, Paul Ryan managed to spin an unworkable budget that he never had to pass, a smattering of applause lines and four undignified months on the campaign trail into being only two heartbeats away from the Presidency rather than one. The hustle pays off, if you’re the hustler.