Just found that Pocket also removed the copy link from the sharing option in the web app. I am beginning to think that I need to start considering other reading options. I could revert back to Instaper, but had grown frustrated with it’s lack of development.
While I am venting about Pocket, I have a feature request. Provide readers the option that when they are reading an article and then archive that the next article in the list is loaded rather than returning me to the list. The current process really slows down the reading flow for me.
Think US Evangelicals Are Dying Out? Well, Define Evangelicalism source
Religious evangelicals may look at these numbers and think, “This is not what the term evangelical means.” The assumption is that the term describes those who place high value on the teachings of the Bible and strive to evangelize other people into their faith. However, that understanding of the term seems to be fading, replaced with a more amorphous concept that melds together religious doctrine and an affinity for conservative politics that experts are only beginning to understand now.
The above is a bug, not a feature. One can argue that the assimilation of Christianity into the Roman Empire in 313 huge negative consequences on Christianity, and it probably was not good for empire either.
Secular power always, always, seeks to consolidate power with religion.
I rely heavily on Pocket for my reading workflow because when I find an article in my RSS feeds that I want to read I send it to Pocket. Yesterday the web version of Pocket got an update and it broke the keyboard shortcuts, and I am finding that incredibly frustrating. It’s a failure of regression testing, and frankly not acceptable for a commercial software product.
Amazon sells this home test kit:
For $110!
I don’t get the newsletter craze. I guess it’s just all about making money.
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]