Nestor Ramos at the Boston Globe:
Surely I could give up wiping my mouth, rubbing my eyes, and scratching my nose, too. How hard could it be? I’m not a 4-year-old licking the buttons in the elevator; I’m a grown man in control of my various scratching and rubbing functions.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/03/nation/i-tried-go-24-hours-without-touching-my-face-i-made-it-18-minutes/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=website
Wonderful article. While I read it I became aware I was scratching my nose.
Tech journalist Steven Levy, talks about the company’s history on Fresh Air. He’s got a new book out, “Facebook: The Inside Story,” based on interviews with Zuckerberg, other top current and former Facebook execs – some of whom share their misgivings about the company – and Facebook critics.
I’m hooked on Facebook, yet I have strong misgivings about it. Living in the world requires compromising principles, and some of those compromises are appalling.
Super Tuesday, Explained: I listened to this entire podcast episode and I’m still confused. Short version: Lots of states have their Democratic primaries today so it’s a really big deal.
At that time, B&N was the big bad soul-crushing superstore chain killing indy Mom-and-Pop bookstores.
Later, Amazon beat down Barnes & Noble. Yes, the same technology that brought the characters of “You’ve Got Mail” together flattened B&N.
On the Decoder Ring podcast: slate.com/transcrip…
The reality is even more complicated than Decoder Ring portrays. B&N and Borders brought books by the tens of thousands to places that were previously bookstore deserts. Pre-B&N, if you grew up in the suburbs, as I did, or in rural America, your bookstore options were a few sad B.
Today I voted, and spent a good chunk of time updating the local Democratic Club website and social media. Also did some publicity for the next meeting, which is Wednesday. Details here:
I highly recommend volunteering for politics – local politics – as an alternative to arguing about it, on social media or elsewhere. Arguing politics makes you bitter. Volunteering is far more productive – and it’s fun.
It’s his usual mix of cyber-rights, science fiction and retro pop culture. Interestingly, he’s doing it as a daily digest rather than a series of individual posts. I like it.
The design is minimalist. No HTML, not even hrefs. I’m trying out the no-hrefs look here to see how I like it.
Cory and Dave Winer are my blogfathers; when I’m fiddling with an idea, it’s often because I saw one of them do it. Mike Elgan and Jon Gruber are former blogfathers. I’m still fans of both, but their blogging direction is different from mine now.
I don’t have plans to adopt a daily digest format. It doesn’t fit my blogging habits, which are random minutes throughout the day.
Cory’s tagline for Pluralistic.net: “Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don’t collect or retain any data at all ever period.”
Pluralistic.net is both a blog and a newsletter. Subscribe here.
Everybody agrees that social media needs to suppress harmful content while promoting good content, but nobody can agree on what falls into which category. Many people are not acting in good faith, and will knowingly claim that bad content which should be suppressed is actually good.
None of this seems particularly insightful to me, but public policy discussions about social media tend to assume that there is some good faith arbiter somewhere who can absolutely separate good from evil.
That’s one of the reasons why the big social media platforms need to be broken up to eliminate their monopoly powers. Because that kind of power should not be centralized. This is a very old, solved problem; it’s why we have free speech.
Yesterday I did my 3+-mile walk with the dog through a residential neighborhood up at the end of Lake Murray Blvd. No access to bathrooms. After I’d gone about 1/10 of a mile, I thought, “I think I may need to pee now.”
Later, I grew more certain. It was like the end of the Titanic by the time I got home. You may have even heard me exclaim “AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!”
We did pass a port-a-potty somebody had out at the curb while they were remodeling. I got in. Minnie refused to get in with me. And the port-a-potty was wobbling. “This will not end well,” I said to myself, so I did not use it.
Also, it started to rain heavily when we were about halfway out. I did not bring my raingear because rain was not predicted for several hours after that.
AB5 was intended to stop companies like Uber and Lyft from misclassifying employees as contract workers, depriving them of legally mandated benefits. Instead, it’s misclassifying legitimate contractors as employees, and depriving large numbers of people of their livelihood.
The unions and the author of the bill, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, a San Diego Democrat, gave exemptions to a few categories of work. But it’s drawn criticism from artists, photographers, dancers, musicians, journalists and many other freelance workers who say it has damaged their incomes because employers shied away from giving them non-payroll work.
It’s also created great uncertainty on how it might be applied to whole industries. Could, for example, owners of fast-food restaurant franchises be considered employees of the parent franchising corporations?
