First walk in snow fall this year.
I’ve come across a very comprehensive spreadsheet of SARS-COV-2 and COVID-19 links to information.
Engadget reports that the price on Amazon for the iPad Magic keyboard is $200, which I think makes it easier to recommend. For me, the keyboard is critical to how I use my iPad Air.
The Internet is not a public square. It’s been owned by corporations since the mid 90s. People now want the corporations to act like a public entity but capitalism doesn’t work that way. The genie has been out of the bottle for a long time, and there is no way to put her back in.
Amanda Gorman, The Hill We Climb
Vogue has a great interview of Amanda from before the inaugaration.
Be Careful What You Ask For
What’s ironic is that every person arrested for the insurrection on the U.S. Capital on January 6, 2021 will expect, and demand, that everyone provide, the presumption of innocence, which requires the accuser to prove by providing evidence in court that the accused commited a crime. Yet, these people wanted state legislatures, the Supreme Court, or Congress to nullify the election results based on their accusuation of voter fraud.
The point being, the people storming the Capital really weren’t defending the Constitution nor do they really want to live in the world they think they are fighting for. Presumption of innocence means they have the possibility of not being put in jail by a force greater than themselves and that same presumption of innocence might be the only thing that saved the Republic, this time.
It is scary to me that the future of democracy in the United States is almost entirely in Republican hands because I am not certain a majority of Republicans want democracy.
The conclusion I reach after reading the New Yorker story, “Among the Insurrectionists” is that at the least we live in two Americas, if not in two realities. I also don’t see a way for any real resolution because the people described in the article cannot be reasoned with, they only want their way. Democrats can’t fix this, and while Republicans have the only chance, even those who do not “comply” will not be listened too.
For me, it comes down to principles. Republicans had principles at one time, such as demonstrated by John McCain when he pushed back when someone wanted to brand Obama a Muslim, implying all Muslims are enemies.
The fact that so many Republican members of Congress abetted the insurrection is proof to me that the lust for power and having their own way is far stronger than the principles of democracy.
When Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt established business regulation, a basic social safety net, and government-funded infrastructure in the 1930s to combat the Great Depression that had laid ordinary Americans low, one right-wing senator wrote to a colleague: “This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty…. The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom.
Seems to me a problem is that we don’t have common agreement on the core principles on the founding of the United States as stated in the preamble to U.S. Constitution, particularly, “promote the general Welfare.”
Google’s acquisition of Fitbit is complete, will we now see something new relating to Wear OS?
The Verge has an overview of Windows 10X that as they show appears to be nearly an exact duplicate of Chrome OS. Can’t imagine this ships without the ability to run traditional Windows apps. It is interesting to me that Microsoft continues to chase their perceived competitors.
It seems to me that cancer has evolved over a long time like humans.
Manuel Hutaffe has a reMarkable 2 and has written a good review.
Jill Lepore’s article, What’s Wrong with the Way We Work, is a really important read. I think it gets at a lot of things that people who are unhappy are dealing with. Here is one of the important points:
Outside of agriculture, more than one in three working Americans belonged to a union in the fifties. In 1983, one in five belonged to a union; by 2019, only one in ten did. Union membership declined; income inequality rose. To explain this, Suzman points to the “Great Decoupling” of the nineteen-eighties: wages and economic growth used to track each other. From about 1980, in the United States, the G.D.P. kept growing, even as real wages stagnated. [Emphasis added]
I really don’t think anyone should buy the Wear OS watches just announced by Fossil because they don’t have the Qualcomm 4100 chip. You are being asked to pay a lot of money for a watch that does not have the best battery life and is slower that what watches with the 4100 chip will provide. I really don’t understand why none of the new watches have the 4100 chip.
Given the recent actions of Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, I think there is a real threat to Section 230, which protects the companies behind Internet platforms from liability of the actions of the uses of the platform. Smaller such platforms, like micro.blog will be at risk. There will be political back blow.
Cancel culture is not the way to handle differences in a democracy. It creates victims from people who are not and leads to more polarization. Further we shouldn’t react to a failure to prepare for dangerous behavior planned out in the open by forcing it under ground. The problem was not that the actions of January 6, 2021 where planned on social networks, the problem was the failure in recognizing the plans as a real threat.
4 Abel also brought an offering, but from the firstborn animals of his herd, choice cuts of meat. GOD liked Abel and his offering, 5 but Cain and his offering didn’t get his approval. Cain lost his temper and went into a sulk. 6 GOD spoke to Cain: “Why this tantrum? Why the sulking? 7 If you do well, won’t you be accepted? And if you don’t do well, sin is lying in wait for you, ready to pounce; it’s out to get you, you’ve got to master it.” –Genesis 4:4-7, The Message
And so it started through seeking status and the superiority it brings. Matthew 5:21-22
“The only way to stave off another Trump is to recognize that it always happens. The temptation of anti-democratic cult politics is forever with us, and so is the work of fending it off.”
What We Get Wrong About America’s Crisis of Democracy | The New Yorker