Parking Lots Have Become a Digital Lifeline — Without home internet access and with libraries and cafes closed, people are driving to parking lots to get on Wi-Fi.
Over on Twitter, I’m suggesting to @MikeElgan that he might want to consider moving to micro.blog.
I did some research in the autumn and concluded that micro.blog is the ONLY blog platform out there that doesn’t require significant fiddling and configuration. Which is sad for the blogosphere.
I mean, you can do a great deal of fiddling and configuration on micro.blog if you want to do that. But if you just want to type stuff and post photos, then micro.blog is your only option.
On Twitter, @mat asks: “With the benefit of a couple of months of hindsight, what was your best preparing for a pandemic move?"
I replied:
Stocking up on toilet paper. It wasn’t forethought – we routinely buy that kind of thing in bulk and prior to lockdown was when we were due to replenish.
OTOH, I needed a haircut even BEFORE we went into lockdown.
Interesting thread.
That is an awful lot of Rome
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
Yesterday I read some of “Storm before the Storm” a history of the fall of the Roman Republic, by Mike Duncan, and “Silver Pigs,” the first in the mystery series by Lindsey Davis about Marcus Didius Falco, a private detective in Imperial Rome. I’ve read that series before but I’ve forgotten most of it so it’s nearly new to me. I finished re-watching “I, Claudius” Sunday — that’s the fourth time I’ve seen that.
One year ago today I saw possibly the most ridiculous example of security theater I have ever witnessed
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
A young woman ahead of me at airport security was walking with a cane and had a “boot” on her foot – a removable enclosure to immobilize an injured foot. The security guy asked her if she could walk without the cane, and take off the boot, and put them through the security scanner. The security guy was nice about it; he said if taking off the boot and walking without the cane caused any discomfort at all, she should just leave them on.
📺 I have finished watching I Claudius, for the fourth time. I now realize why I didn’t have any memory of the last episode. It is because the episode is weak, bleak and uncomfortably incesty.
I just want a professional haircut. I realize this is literally the smallest problem in the universe compared with the sacrifice others are making, often unwillingly.
I’ve discussed the matter with my wife, who is going to have to do the deed, and we’ve mutually agreed that I should have 100% of my pre-existing ears when the process is done.
Actress Marisol Nichols, star of the TV series “Riverdale,” is a real-life vigilante, hunting down sex predators.
Erika Hayasaki on Marie Claire:
Nichols dresses the part in case a perp glimpses her through the window. She’s 46 but, waif-like and five foot four with a hoodie over her head and a bedsheet draped across her shoulders, can pass for a teenager. Or she might wear her long, dark hair matted and put on a beer-soaked Mötley Crüe T-shirt, and suddenly she’s a young junkie mom prostituting her kid. She can play madam or victim.
On this morning, she wears a black baseball cap backwards, a black V-neck T-shirt, and bell-bottom jeans. She carries a pack of American Spirit cigarettes. She could be anyone. Most of these guys, she says, are “wimps.” Cowards. Sick men who want to take advantage of a girl. She remembers one sting in which she played a trafficker who sets up child sex parties. The target was 38, looked like a real estate agent or something, probably in a fraternity in college. “Looking the guy in the face,” she says, got her in her gut. “These guys look like normal people. And you’re pretending that you just happily and eagerly set up children for them to have sex with.” Nichols kept her cool throughout the interaction, but she adds: “To watch his eyes”—the way they lit up at the mention of an underage kid—“you want to kick him in the balls and beat the hell out of him.”
Jesus.
“Having no plan is the plan! … Plans are for commies and the Danish. Here we do it fast and loose and dumb and wrong, and occasionally we have a man who manufactures pillows come to the White House to show the president encouraging texts. It all works!” – Dave Eggers: Flattening the Truth on Coronavirus
As a newly self-employed person, I’m learning that the weekend is a thing you schedule. My most recent weekend was Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m planning my next one for Friday and Saturday.
Sadly, those of you who need to hear this the most are too stupid to realize I'm talking directly to you. #johncleese #stupid #people pic.twitter.com/TdpO6nBvgc
— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) April 21, 2020
Hospital CEOs are keeping their seven-figure salaries while frontline workers go without pay
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic
++ The pandemic could make Big Tech our permanent overlords
++ Hospital CEOs are making millions while slashing health care worker salaries and hours, announcing layoffs and furloughs. “The average hospital CEO gets $3.1m/year. The average nurse gets $75k.”
++ Workers at Wired Magazine are forming a union.
++ How open source has failed: The focus should be “on protocol documentation … in a cloud-based era, real software freedom comes from being able to make compatible clients for existing servers, and compatible servers for existing clients.” That’s in addition to legal protections against monopoly practices.
The traditional antitrust world did not permit firms to attain dominance through mergers with major competitors, catch-and-kill buyouts of nascent startups, or vertical monopolies where companies that owned platforms competed with the companies that used them. [But these] rules were heavily nerfed by Reagan, then further eroded by every administration since."
Billionaire Larry Ellison has turned the Hawaiian island of Lanai into a luxury health resort, and plans to use it to save the world. Philanthropy, he said, is the definition of unsustainable. Profit is sustainable.
He “is tackling three sets of complex issues on the island: the global food-supply chain, nutrition and the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources.”
Ellison also distances himself from Trump, saying he has worked with every President.
AWS engineer Tim Bray resigns from Amazon following worker firings – Bray quit Amazon in protest over the company firing vocally critical employees. Bray was an Amazon Web Services VP and distinguished engineer, who previously did stints at Google and Sun.
“… remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised,” he said. “The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people…. "
He adds: “I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?”
Inspired by a conversation with Mike Elgan yesterday, I’m going to do Facebook a lot less for a while.
