Tag: Books

If you use technology, read this book

poop

Because I am not made of money, when I buy a book to give someone as a Christmas present (presuming it's one I haven't read yet), if there's enough time I'll read it myself before wrapping it up and sending it off. Thus was the case with one I picked up the other night, the latest nonfic from the great Cory Doctorow.

Doctorow is a longtime tech consumer advocate, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and just on his own, and his new volume explains how the evolution of the Internet has unfortunately coincided with some truly terrible governance to create what he calls the Enshittocene Era, which we are now living trough.

Digital services in particular and the Internet in general are in dire need of regulation, as evidenced by the continually worsening transitions from software being sold to you on a disc or as a download to what we see more and more of today, software that you "subscribe to"—which is to say, rent from a remote server. Further, some of the tech companies like to tweak their user agreements now and then to try and take ownership of not just the physical software, but your work that you create with it in order to "train AI." As more commodities become digital, you as a consumer own less of what you pay for. When once you owned music you bought on a disc, these days if you purchase an album on iTunes, you didn't really buy it—you're renting it for the duration your iTunes account and device is active and paid up. Even physical goods now use Internet connectivity, the so-called "Internet of Things," to try and prevent consumers from actually owning the products they buy.

You've undoubtedly encountered this sort of thing in your everyday lives, but Doctorow details how its done and why in all its greedy glory, and in quite accessible language, in this book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

All the tech outfits are abusing us; bad enough they all spy on us to an extreme degree to facilitate their algorithms and their advertising sales. But over time they've also graduated to just blatantly ripping us off whenever they can and abusing anyone that gets between them and a dollar. Amazon, unsurprisingly, is and always has been the worst offender, but Apple grates my cheese almost as much with the way they insist on control of everything related to any of their products. (Recall my note in the post on the Android app that there was no iOS app; this is because Apple wants total control and wants you to pay for the privilege of giving it to them.) Everyone is in on it. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Adobe, everyone. And a lot fewer companies make up "everyone" after so many mergers and acquisitions and blind-eye-turning on antitrust laws.

Dearth of competition. Dearth of regulation. Diminishing power of tech-industry labor. Binding arbitration of conflicts when the offending company employs the arbitrators. Choices made by companies and governments to gouge consumers without much pushback (but what little there has been is worth paying attention to and replicating). Thus does enshittification metastasize.

Suffice to say, this is a very important book for everyone to read. Especially Americans, since our regulatory system is the most influential (so far) on these businesses.

Some choice quotes:

"Apple didn't treat its customers well because it loved them. It treated them well to lure them into its walled garden, which was then revealed to be a prison."

"Google could spend billions of dollars every year making sure that even someone who's tried every other search engine would still prefer Google. Or it could spend a lot fewer billions of dollars making sure that no one ever tried a search engine other than Google. It chose the latter. ... Apple's single largest source of revenue is a check for more than $20 billion that Google writes it every year to buy the default search box in Safari and on the iPhone."

"The instant Adobe moved its software to the cloud and eliminated the non-subscription versions of its apps, it put a gun on the mantelpiece. It was only a matter of time until someone opened fire on Adobe's customers with that gun."

"If you operate a cloud-based app, you can monitor your customers' every click and keystroke to discover which features are most valuable to your deepest-pocketed users, and then you can remove that feature from the product's basic tier and reclassify it as an upcharged add-on. The CEOs who do this got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is, 'I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.'"

"Here's how perverse [the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, section 1201] is: ... If I, as the author, narrator, and investor in an audiobook, allow Amazon to sell you that book and later want to provide you with a tool so you can take your book to a rival platform, I will be committing a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.... If you were to visit a truckstop and shoplift my audiobook on CD from a spinner rack, you would face a significantly lighter penalty for stealing a physical item that I would for providing you with the means to take a copyrighted work that I created and financed our of the Amazon ecosystem. If you were to hijack the truck that delivers that CD and steal an entire fifty-three-foot trailer full of audiobooks, you would likely face a shorter prison sentence that I would for helping you break the DRM on a title I own."

Doctorow notes some positive changes in recent years and lays out a plan to fix things, but it depends on public and governmental actions that seem unlikely to happen in the near future in this country, at least so long as Republicans are in power. It may be up to the Europeans for now.

Tagged The Internet, Culture, Republicans, Technology, Cory Doctorow, Books, Posted on December 15, 2025 at 2:36PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Celebrating the greats

51s Seattle's Hall of Fame #51s

This past weekend was Ichiro Suzuki weekend at the ballpark by Elliott Bay. The newly-inducted Hall of Famer had his jersey number 51 retired in a pregame ceremony on Saturday, which included a fine speech from the man itself, just two weeks after he gave a different speech at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. He began his remarks by saying, "Who's idea was it to have me give two speeches in English in two weeks?" calling it "one of the toughest challenges of my career." This got the requisite laugh, and Ichiro demonstrated a more than competent command of the language, which he remains somewhat insecure about despite having greater fluency than the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue demonstrates on a daily basis.

It was a nice speech, humble yet acknowledging of his merit in receiving the honor, and pointed in its advice to the current team of Seattle Mariners—seize this moment. "As Edgar [Martínez, Mariner batting coach and fellow Hall of Famer] and Dan [Wilson, the Mariners' manager] know, winning is tough.... The thing about winning is it is always tough and never comes without pressure," he said. "Accept the pressure and figure out how you can perform at your best." The other unexpected thing was the amount of time Ichiro devoted to the man who wore 51 before him, fellow Hall of Famer Randy Johnson. Randy will have his own number retirement next year, and the two of them seem to really enjoy each other. Johnson was among the several Mariner greats and luminaries in attendance and the two of them taking selfies and goofing around afterward was a fun cap on the event before the game began. Ichiro will attend Randy's ceremony as well and will no doubt engage on more clowning around then. (No word on whether or not Rey Quiñones will be invited.)

Yesterday the festivities continued in a way, with giveaway replica Hall of Fame plaques (I didn't get one despite arriving more than an hour early) and video tributes between innings and such, but aside form the Mariner victory—their seventh straight and a capper on a 9-1 homestand—the highlight was the ceremonial first pitch, thrown by Ichiro to Johnson, whose six-foot-ten frame was decked out in catcher Cal Raleigh's chest protector and shin guards, which looked like a grown man wearing the clothes of a six-year-old. Both wore Sunday-variant versions of Mariner jerseys with 51 on the back and posed for more goofy pictures.

I umpired Friday night, missed an opportunity to attend Saturday night, and did attend yesterday afternoon before again umpiring last night. But I watched all three games and enjoyed them all, bookended by umping shifts that were fun and included plenty of appreciation from players. Pretty decent weekend, well timed and needed given the continuing state of the world.

It wasn't worth taking the time to come home after the M's game and then turn around an hour later to go back to Cap Hill to ump, so I spent the intervening time at Elliott Bay Books, where I ran into one of the softball players I've become vaguely acquainted with over the years (and who I would see later in the evening on the field). She recommended to me a sci-fi novel called The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which I purchased and read the first few chapters of while awaiting the start of my shift. So far so good.

 

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners, Ichiro, Umping, Books, Posted on August 11, 2025 at 5:14PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Distractions

LD SoG

There is no escaping the political situation and impending clusterfrak this country and the world is facing, but just to keep sane I've indulged in pop-culture distractions lately. Some highlights:

  • Lower Decks has come back strong in its fifth and final season. I rather enjoyed the Klingon sibling rivalry in the latest episode ("A Farewell to Farms") and the setting of a world newly post-scarcity partying hard while burning all their money in a prior one ("Shades of Green").
  • I've also been enjoying the series Shrinking on Apple+. I watched one with my dad while I was down in California and found that it really is impossible to make any sense of it coming into the middle cold, but that's easily taken care of—just start at the beginning. Jason Segel and Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams, all wonderful as therapists that are more screwed up than their patients.
  • Superman and Lois is in its final season as well, and it's been . . . fine. I mean, at the end of last season they killed Superman, so picking up from that was a mess, and the show had its budget cut by a ton and they had to lose some supporting characters, but I'm still enjoying it because I'm a big nerd.
  • Season two of The Diplomat (Netflix) is just as excellent as season one was. I binged its six episodes in one evening. It might be weird to seek escape from real-life political turmoil in a fictional political mystery/thriller/drama, but I nevertheless recommend it. Great stuff and a big cliffhanger making us suffer the wait for season three.
  • I haven't seen any of The Penguin yet. HBO Max, which I don't have access to. Anyone know if it's any good?
  • I dug out some old novels from my bookshelf to reread, including some Heinlein books. I just finished Friday, which I first read in 1988 and had almost completely forgotten. Now I'm halfway through Job, which I must have read around that same time in the late ’80s but have no recollection of, so it's like a brand new read now. Kind of unfortunate timing in that Job is a sort of multiverse story and we've been inundated with such premises in our pop culture of late. I was going to reread I Will Fear No Evil, but apparently I don't own a copy of that one. Thought I did. I guess I borrowed it from someone else when I read it in high school; maybe I'll pick one up used somewhere. Heinlein was an interesting character, a real dichotomy of political leanings (mostly libertarian, with an unpleasant penchant for people going armed as a measure of civilization, but also in favor of regulations protecting civil rights and equality) and a brilliant futurist while still retaining a shocking-by-today's-standard level of sexism—Friday and Job are among his later works, published in the early 1980s, while most of his catalog comes from the ’50s and ’60s—in nearly all of his characters. But all of his stories have big ideas, big romance, big personalities, and fine writing if sometimes a little scattered. Some of my earliest sci-fi reads were his YA books, and I'd be curious to revisit one or two of those to see how they hold up.

Anyone have other recommendations for good distraction media? I think we're going to need a lot of it.

Tagged TV, Books, Posted on November 12, 2024 at 6:45PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Bits and pieces

car Returned after paying impound ransom. Glass half full.

Howdy. It's been over a week since the last post, but not for lack of material. I'd actually intended to write about a few things since the Great Car Caper, including its own follow-up, but you know how it is. Work, inertia, splitting headaches, a general feeling of "I just don't want to be at my desk anymore tonight." Anyway, in lieu of the various individual posts I'd been pre-writing in my head since then, here's a catchall one with a few bits and pieces from what I'm sure would have been much more elaborate and articulate ramblings had they gotten their due in a timely manner.

  • Car update: The police recovered my car relatively soon after its theft and the only damage to it was superficial (exterior) and annoying (interior), which is to day a chunk missing from the plastic "rain guard" (I suppose it guards from rain getting into the door seal?), a small dent, and what appears to have been an aborted attempt to remove my Biden-Harris bumper sticker; and a truly impressive amount of garbage strewn through the inside. Mostly the trash was food wrappers, candy remnants, fast food bags, fast food detritus, that sort of thing, plus a few empty cans of spray paint. I presume the thieves were graffiti taggers.
    My working theory is that the thieves used the car to go from place to vandalize with spray paint to next place to vandalize with spray paint, with stops at various fast food and convenience store candy marts, until it ran out of gas, at which point they abandoned it to likely steal someone else's car rather than buy fuel. Score one for my inefficient internal combustion engine.
    I emptied all the trash, plus a little of my own trash that was still there, and aired the car out for a day or so to get the smell of fast food out of it. That done, and since I don't care to try and fix the superficial exterior damage, the only real harm done to me aside from the inconvenience of being without it for a few days was the ransom demanded by Lincoln Towing, the company that provided the impound lot the police use. They charged me the towing fee, a city regulatory fee, and hourly storage fees for the time they had the car. Quite the racket they've got going. Other cities have laws that protect auto theft victims from this kind of predation, but not this one. Apparently there was an attempt to pass a measure to address this in the state legislature some time back, but it didn't go anywhere. Alas. Still, way cheaper than replacing the car, so I'm choosing to look at it in a glass-half-full sort of way. And I ordered a wheel-lock thingy for future use when parking on the street.
  • Erik went to Korea. And Taiwan. Who knew? This strikes me as a little weird, not because Erik went to these places, but because not long ago I had a strange dream in which my dad and Marty were planning on moving to Pusan. It made zero sense.
  • The CNN thing with the "Town Hall" debacle featuring former President VonClownstick was something I was all worked up to write a whole screed about, but now that some time has passed I'm less outraged. Not because the event wasn't deserving of outrage, it was. The fact that CNN thought hosting such a forum would result in anything other than a fiasco is mind-boggling. On the other hand, CNN is under new management that wants it to be a place for disaffected Fox "News" viewers to go, so maybe this is just the first taste of their new business plan. Regardless, the thing did serve a positive purpose among all its rampant disservices, and that is that it provided a ton of material for campaign ads against VonClownstick. The program reminded those of us that were no longer paying attention to politics and the news as deeply as others of us do just who this guy is, that he has not changed, that he will not change, that he is among the vilest human beings to have ever lived. And of who his fans are. That he has followers that just eat his vileness for breakfast and regurgitate it onto society.
    Most of the news coverage after the fact has been criticism of CNN. Slate.com has a good analysis of it that includes:
    Absolutely every single moment of this debacle was predictable, and it is enraging to see CNN making the exact same mistakes it made when Trump first entered into the public sphere eight years ago. The network gave a seditious would-be despot carte blanche to openly lie on live television for an hour, in front of an adoring crowd, with ineffective pushback from a reporter who, if Wednesday night is any indication, is nowhere near ready for prime time. The pregame chatter among CNN’s vacuous panelists, meanwhile, used the same empty framing that has long made the term “talking heads” a pejorative.
    All the CNN-bashing is deserved, to be sure, but it misses the bigger issue of what the former president said during the televised hour of journalistic seppuku. He perpetuated his election lies. He once again defamed the woman he has been ordered by a court to pay $5 million to as damages for his sexual assault and defamation of her. He called the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade "a great victory." Instead of answering a question about why he stole government documents after leaving office, he insulted the questioner. Of the January 6, 2021 insurrectionist footsoldiers, he said "They were there with love in their heart. That was unbelievable and it was a beautiful day." He avoided taking any kind of position on the war in Ukraine, lest it upset his good friend Vladimir. That is all very, very important information that should show everyone in the world how this man should not be allowed anywhere near any position of any authority ever again, but because of how it was presented (and subsequently covered by many) I fear that point will not get across to anyone who needs to hear it.
    CNN CEO Chris Licht said, in response to the criticism of his network's production, "You do not have to like the former president’s answers, but you can’t say that we didn’t get them." Except, yes, Chris, I can say you didn't get them. You got propaganda. You got deflections. You got bald-faced lies. When he was all but cornered on the stolen documents thing, you got "You're a nasty person" as his "answer."
    The American news media as a whole is terrible, TV news in particular, but outlets one might consider to be better, like National Public Radio, are guilty of the same kind of malfeasance, treating the sort of behavior DJT and his minions exhibit as basically normal politics when it is anything but.
  • Related to the CNN thing, there is The Gun Thing. I had some further ranting to do on that, on how the gun "debate" is evidentiary just on its own of the fact that the modern Republican party deserves to be labeled a domestic terrorist organization, but instead today I think I'll just let Wil speak for me.
  • I had another umpiring shift yesterday, four games in the sun on the first summery weekend we've seen this year up in these parts. By and large it was a good day, few points of conflict. But there were some, and they put me in mind of something my friend (and softball teammate) Mack posted over on the Book of Faces. I will reproduce it here:
    I'm sure my Laws of Sports Conduct apply to every recreational sport, but I don't play "every" recreational sport, I just play softball, and here goes:
    1. Never so much as grumble to an umpire.
    Teams, you're paying the ump like $20 to have them give an unbiased opinion on balls and strikes, safe and out, so STFU and take their word for it. Without an umpire, you'd have no walks and no strikeouts, and some batters would be there for like twenty pitches before they put the ball in play. Also, don't expect the umpire to be better at umpiring than you are at playing. ???? If you suspect that an umpire is mis-applying the rules, you'd better have your rulebook handy, or else don't go out there. Simply, don't. You have a fixed amount of time to play your game. Every minute you spend interacting with an official can cost your teammates an at-bat or even an entire inning of play. It's not worth it.
    2. Try to not hurt anybody.
    Your job on the field is to make sure nobody gets hurt. So when you're thinking about doing something "sportsmanlike" that can get somebody hurt, don't do it. Don't. Just don't do it. Never ever ever "take someone out" at second base. Don't do it. Your "job" isn't to prevent the double play, it's to keep the opposing player healthy enough to go out to the bar after the game. Don't throw your bat, don't make throws that your teammate can't handle, don't do the "fake tag" thing that makes somebody slide when there isn't even a play on them, and on fly balls—yell loud and clearly that either you're taking it or the other person's taking it. No crashes over a silly pop fly, OK?
    3. Respect the equipment.
    If you're the kind of player who slams a bat down after striking out, or throws a glove after making an error . . . you need to chill the fuck out. You look like a poster child for a domestic violence abuser, and if your teammate is caring enough, they will and should refer you to some counseling. I often joke that a good craftsperson always blames their tools, because it's obvious that it's not the tool, it's the craftsperson. It's really okay if you're a player who drops a ball or swings and misses. The greatest baseball players in history do that. The reason they "act out" is because of some stupid code that "shows they care." You don't have to show you care—because you shouldn't care. The game doesn't matter. We do this for recreation, not recognition, and certainly not for the adulation. Chill the fuck out.
    4. Be supportive of the other team's players.
    You're not being disloyal by showing appreciation when the other team makes a nice play or gets a nice hit. It's been proven that we feel better after a high-five than we do after grumbling about a missed opportunity. You don't have to applaud wildly when they turn a double play against you, but you might feel better telling the shortstop, "Nice play" rather than think, "you fucken bastid!"
    I've had my share of inappropriate interactions on the playing field. I remember each and every one of them, which is a shame, because I've had so much fun on the field, all of those games and all of those innings and all of those at-bats . . . but it seems that those memories of the pleasant and fun times don't linger. Those memories may not linger, the fun of turning a double play or driving in a run or taking an extra base or making a nice relay throw . . . but the effects of those activities DO linger. They help build friendships, they help build community, they help make the world a better place, one play at a time.
    Fun. Recreational sports should be fun. I'm going out there this season to have fun. I invite you, if you're partaking in a recreational sport, to go out and just have fun! And try hard to not hurt anybody!
    Obviously, Mack's first point is the one that resonates most with me because I'm often on the umpire's side of things. I'm paid a bit more than $20 a game, but not nearly enough to accept the sort of treatment that an occasional player will vent my way. To date I have ejected exactly two players from softball games in over four years, and one of those was for physical violence, but I have been tempted to toss many. Three or four I probably should have tossed but didn't. Yesterday my shift began in an unusual fashion in that, before the games started, I was approached by a guy who had been giving me shit last week. "Hey man," he said, "I just want to apologize for last week. I just started acting out of my head for no reason at all, I don't know what the fuck that was even about. Sorry." This was good, set the stage for a good day that was only marred by one further violation (from someone else on a different team) of Mack's Rule #1 and one inadvertent violation of Rule #2 that led to some potentially damaging violations of Rule #4 that I was able to defuse relatively quickly. The Rule #1 violator is a chronic offender, though, which makes me cringe a little when I see his team on my schedule.
  • I can't believe it's taken me this long to read another Neal Stephenson book. Years and years ago I read Snow Crash, which was terrific, and Zodiac, also quite good, but it's only in the last couple of weeks that I cracked open another Stephenson tome. This one is Cryptonomicon, which is, if I'm recalling Snow Crash properly, not as awesome as that but still pretty darn fine. Plenty more when I finish this one, I guess.
  • I am going to unload my tickets to the Mariners/Yankees game on May 31st. That's a softball (playing, not umping) night for me and I'm already missing the prior week's game for similar reasons. Anyone reading this that wants the pair of (quite good) upper deck seats may have them for cost or in trade, otherwise I'm putting them on StubHub for profit. Let me know.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Republicans, Umping, Cars, Softball, News, Books, Posted on May 15, 2023 at 11:12PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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