Lost day, online surveillance, corruption run amok, and lost Canadians

A few scattered items for this afternoon...

• Gravitational forces: The Black Hole of depression is sometimes hard to measure/identify because its effects are often gradual. One's orbit falls just slightly when you start to tire, but just a tad, it's not really noticeable. But a lower orbit means the gravity is stronger, so the next gradual shift comes a little bit faster, putting you under slightly heavier gravity again, but you still haven't really noticed, and on and on until you realize, hey, it's really hard to stand up now.

  Well, yesterday it was really hard to stand up. It was basically a lost day. Then last night/this morning I had grief dreams, my subconscious apparently looking for ways to bum me out by creating a dream-movie wherein my grandpa dies all over again and Pixel goes missing. Sometimes my subconscious is a real asshole.

  In retrospect I can see that over the last week-plus I'd been slipping in my orbit. More easily distracted, unfocused, slower to process. Much more irritable. Whether that realization means that now I can blast myself back into high orbit remains to be seen, but usually it's not so much a blast off as a hard climb. One good thing about my lost day yesterday is that I slept a lot, so maybe banking more rest will help. We'll see.

• You're being watched: There's a website called Since You Arrived that does nothing but inform you of what information is being given by your browser/computer to sites you visit online. It's interesting, might be surprising if you're not into the workings of the interwebs. Check it out, if you dare.

• Worse before better: Even the relatively utopian universe of Star Trek postulated that we as humans would have to go through some nightmares before we achieved the dream. So I'm actually hopeful that Preznitwit Felon47’s latest scheme of blatant corruption, settling a $10 billion "lawsuit" between himself and the IRS that he controls—which should be thrown out and deemed not subject to any settlement for any amount of money or "damages" (he sustained zero injury)—for over a billion dollars to be allegedly-but-not-really used in a "weaponization fund" to aid those prosecuted by the Biden DOJ (e.g. January 6 rioters, among others) and thus amount to a payment scheme for his private militia of MAGA goonsquad will be seen for what it is: the alleged President of the United States backing an armored truck up to the U.S. treasury and stealing for himself, whether he uses it to pay people to do violence for him or not. And with that recognition, tip the scales such that the career of Felon47 starts crashing down in earnest. (I mean, you'd think the illegal war and DHS murdering people would be plenty, but it wasn't enough.)

  Of course, I was also hopeful that people would see the destruction of the East Wing and the blatantly corrupt ballroom project for the scam that it is too, and the Qatari jet bribe for what it is, and the cryptocurrency frauds for what they are, and the myriad other thefts and frauds perpetrated on the American public be recognized as the actions of a criminal. So far, bupkis, so maybe people won't care about having a billion dollars-plus of their money just outright stolen from them in a literally criminal abuse of the legal system. But I think they will, I think most care about all of it, it's only Mike Johnson and his GOP caucus that don't give a damn. The question is, will it get bad enough that even some of them start to see the light or will it take defying the attempts to rig the midterms and retaking control of Congress to see any action?

  I heard some former Republican wonk on a podcast the other day say that if even a few Republican Congresspeople were smart—ha!—they'd join the Democrats to impeach Felon47 now, before the midterms, as any future in politics they want to have after he's gone will be severely damaged by their record of aiding and abetting. I doubt that will happen, though, because they aren't smart or they're so cowed that they just won't defy Dear Leader. They'd need to be inundated with communications from their constituents demanding why they are even tacitly approving of all this blatant corruption for that scenario to have even the slimmest chance of playing out.

  Because Americans en masse only seem to care about politics when their personal finances are affected, maybe the combination of a president personally stealing money from them and $6 gasoline and everything at the grocery store costing $5 or more (I just did some shopping today—bag of chips, $5; jar of mayo, $5; box of Grape Nuts, $5; tub of salsa, $5; brick of cheese, 2-for-$5; bottle of fruit juice, $5....) and the repeated playing of Felon47 saying out loud into microphones that "I don't think about Americans' financial situations, I don't think about anybody" will finally be enough. Maybe.

• Know your lineage: If the decline of the USA is getting to be too much and you want to leave, maybe look into your family tree for Canadians. The Canadian Supreme Court recently ruled that there was a flaw in that nation's citizen-by-parentage laws, so Parliament passed Bill C-3, which says that  any individuals with a documented, traceable direct ancestor who was a Canadian citizen are themselves eligible to be Canadian citizens. So far as I know, I have none in my background, at least on my mom's side—my grandfather was an amateur genealogist of sorts and traced his tree back to Civil War-era USA, and I know my mom's mom's parents came over from the UK. But if you do, and if you can prove it (government birth records should exist going back a ways), you too may be a Canuck-in-waiting.

Off now to watch baseball.

Tagged The Black Hole, Politics, The Internet, President VonClownstick, Posted on May 15, 2026 at 7:08PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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If you use technology, read this book

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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What's that stench?! It's Elon Musk

I like Twitter. I mean, sure, it's problematic; lots of people use it to be nasty and there has never been a proper solution to how to moderate it as a whole. But it's been a useful tool for promotion and for connecting with people who share interests and for, you know, screaming into the void when you just have to vent about Rand Paul or whatever.

That was Twitter in the Before Elon era. Here in the Elon Reign era of Twitter, well, it's not so great. Mostly because it's now far, far more permissive of misinformation than it was, and it wasn't great about that before. Plus, it's chaos now. Elon Musk is like mini-Trump here, it's much like the John Mulaney bit about a horse in a hospital. It's just a social media platform, not the entire country and effects on the world, but the metaphor still works. Elon took it over with no idea how it functions and wants to monetize things with no idea what the purpose of the thing is; he went and fired people who, you know, make the thing run; he's alienated pretty much everyone who works there; and his great accomplishment to this point has been to do away with the function that lets people know that a public figure on the platform is actually who they say they are and not someone impersonating them to make trouble. Because reasons.

So people are fleeing Twitter, and I get it. Elon is a dirtbag of, if not the highest order, then a lofty order. I'm sticking around, at least for now, though I'm not checking it nearly as often. It's still useful to me. Sort of. I think. Less so now that it isn't baseball season—it's good for ranting about bad managerial decisions in the moment and arguing the merits or lack thereof of a lineup choice or sharing quips about Commissioner Manfred's bad idea du jour.

Anyway, mostly I'm just curious now. I'm a rubbernecker at a car accident. Will it implode? Will Elon find himself with no staff and the thing turns into a runaway train of some kind? Will the only advertisers left be grifters trying to sell cryptocurrency or NFTs? What level of insanity will the buyer's remorse from this rash impulse purchase drive Elon to? And will that be entertaining?

It's not like Facebook. Facebook is frustrating for other reasons, such as the way so many people use it as their access point to the Internet at large and ignore other means of surfing the web despite the fact that it has turned into a fairly useless platform, what with its constantly changing algorithms turning my feed into a random hodgepodge of unrelated gunk that was posted days or weeks back with no rhyme or reason to it. It's a rarity when something I'm actually interested in shows up near the top of the feed. I haven't used that platform for anything but promoting posts on my website(s) and the very occasional comment on that rare interesting post it shows me. We'd be better off if Facebook disappeared tomorrow.

Twitter is somehow simpler, less overwhelming of the Internet, much more controllable.

At least, it was. We'll see how it evolves from here.

Tagged The Internet, Posted on November 19, 2022 at 8:29PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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