Channel NewsAsia quoted an analyst:
Business press promoted a simplified version of the [GameStop short selling] story and labelled it the battle of David versus Goliath. But there is more to the story.
That’s all journalism: everything is simplified.
See also: the issue isn’t privacy, it’s privacy?
Alice Di Micele (paraphrased), before singing Wise Old Woman in a Whole Wheat Radio house concert:
I finally started getting it. I’m loving this ageing thing.
I take the responsibility of being that guy today seriously. Someone on Twitter posted this about the decluttering author:
Showing Marie Kondo my apartment, which is filled with CD-Rs of Japanese Saturn games and a shoebox full of Sanwa buttons. “This kicks ass,” she says. “Don’t throw anything out”
… she would!
Marie Kondo has sparked a cottage industry of people intentionally misunderstanding her, or making jokes that backfire. It speaks to our society’s priorities, and how we’re conditioned to be good little passive consumers of stuff we don’t need to keep the economy going.
This is well-trodden ground here; I’ve talked about growing up in homes full of stuff and the anxiety I’ve lived with about being walled in and trapped. It’s confronting to be told you don’t need most of the rubbish you own, either under the misguided view that you might need it one day, or through misplaced guilt, or a hoarding complex at worst.
People have conflated her decluttering message with minimalism, which started gaining mainstream traction at around the same time. Minimalism postulates that you find meaning in people and experiences, not things. Marie asks whether something sparks joy, or is useful in a meaningful way. There’s overlap, but my late mum’s calligraphy or a beautiful 1980s graphic equaliser would definitely fit in the latter.
If you love this specific thing, and keeping it isn’t debilitating or keeping you from living the life you want, hold onto it! Your zinger about Ms Kondo isn’t as biting as you think.
Windows 3.1 came with a tutorial application for those unfamiliar with computer mouses and push buttons on screens. What did it mean to click something? How can you tell where you’re supposed to click? Why are some buttons inactive, and some aren’t? How can I adapt my understanding of the DOS prompt to a graphical environment? Then we had to teach ourselves multitouch smartphones, voice assistants, and Skynet.
We’ve build precedent into graphical desktops and phones with a standard(ish) set of controls, much like we did with buttons and dials on appliances before this. There are always exceptions, and specific functionality that requires a variation on a theme or, in extreme cases, an entirely new widget. But fundamentally we understand how to interact with things because we’ve done it with similar widgets before.
I think we’re too quick to discount how critically important this is.
The web may as well be the wild west in this regard. Simple visual cues like coloured, underlined text for hyperlinks have given way to designs that bare little to no resemblance between sites. Antipatterns that work against users are rife, and solved problems are reinvented for no benefit beyond superficial appearance; aka, form over function.
Twitter lets you assign users to lists. Rather than showing you checkboxes, or toggle switches indicating their state and mutability (the ability to be changed) Twitter just shows them as a wall of plain text, styled the same way as a tweet. It’s only when you click them that you realise they toggle, as indicated by a low-contrast tick. Why did they do this? Or more specifically, why did they feel the need to do this?
A banking website I use does a similar thing for accounts, the fundamental thing—pardon, “product”—that you use them for. Buttons without backgrounds and borders, dropdown lists that look like plain text, draggable elements styled the same way as fixed areas, overloading right-mouse clicks and text selection to do other things, widgets and controls hidden behind undocumented and unconventional gestures; they’ve achieved making hamburger menus look usable. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.
I’m starting to think it’s another way CSS has failed us: in the rush to separate content from presentation, we’ve made it easy to jettison visual semantics and cues. This is a bug, not a feature.
Art and crossovers never need to make sense.
I got an email last week advising that some of my personal information retained by an online store had been leaked, despite the database being on a hard drive (thank you). Not from the original store itself, but by an astute reader who knew I’d bought from that store them in the past, and had seen the company’s troubles in the news.
An official email appeared a few days later, apologising for the breach and with promises to build their levees higher next time, presumably to take a Chevy to it. It’s unclear whether they were already intending to inform us, or were in damage control mode after bad press and suddenly felt compelled to. I’d prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt, but given the extended time frame between the breach and when we were notified, the latter conclusion seems, regrettably, plausible.
I’m relieved I hadn’t gone to that store in several years, so all my data with them was different. I’ve moved house twice since, my credit and bank cards have new numbers, and my mobile was changed after a specific charity made my life miserable on a daily basis. I’m sure other customers weren’t so lucky.
(I regularly donate what I like to think is a reasonable amount of my salary each month to charities, aid organisations, medical research labs, and sites like Archive.org. Most are reputable, but I’ve instantly regretted some of them based on calls I can’t opt out of demanding more. No good dead goes unpunished).
This certainly happens more than we know; even sites like Have I Been Pwned only capture a portion. Databases are connected to leaky pipes everywhere. The fact it doesn’t have wider consequences on a more regular basis surprises me no end.
Aimee Picchi reviewed a paper for CBS about the effects of tricke-down economics, with unsurprising findings:
The new paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, examines 18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015 [..] Per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn’t.
But most of all:
The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality,
These sorts of studies are difficult, because we can’t travel trough time retroactively and reverse or apply tax cuts to the same juristictions to witness the outcome. Having studied economics too, I place far more stock in scientific papers because they’re reproducable.
But the broad trend here is clear. Trickle-down economics is, most charitably, ineffective. Get it? Because it’s not charitible! Well, other than for people who don’t need it.
By Edward Hopper, 1932.
I was migrating more of my old nvALT database over to Orgmode, and found this line in a text file about renewing Let’s Encrypt wildcard certs:
You want a chanel bag you get me gucci gucci gucci
Is that how you spell those?
I distinctly remember that afternoon in 2018, sitting at a cafe near our old office in Ultimo. This young group of friends sat down at the table opposite us and spend their time outdoing each other’s conspicuous consumption. It was a female version of peacock preening, with a distinct Jakarta accent.
My stance has softened on this over the years. I think it’s shallow, but do what makes you happy, you don’t need my validation or approval. Right?
But that’s still the one small thing: does it make them happy? I grew up at a rich international school overseas and I’m fairly sure half the crap people bought to impress people didn’t make them happy at all. Or at best it was fleeting.
I also remember sitting at a coffee shop in Singapore one weekend—I’m sure you’ll find that hard to believe—and someone I vaguely recognised from my high school and apartment building was literally across from me with an expensive bag and a sad look on her face. She caught my eye and came to my table, and I ended up helping her carry stuff home in my $30 Mizuno backpack while she ranted about how shit LV was. Is there a moral to the story? Was there more to it? No! I just couldn’t help see the similarities.
(It shows how far removed I am from that world again now, given lv means something entirely different).
I love that George Carlin line about buying things you don’t want, to impress people you don’t like, with money you don’t have.
Dave wrote this last Friday:
If I tried to explain [podcasting] to any of its most avid supporters today, back in 2004, they would have ignored it as the rantings of a crazy software developer. Now there’s so much distance in time, and there are many more media things to do with networks, things that we need now.
I’d say this went for RSS too, the infrastructure that made podcasting possible. I use the past tense, because websites publishing and displaying feeds have been on the decline for a while. Podcasts are the last use case that’s in direct, widespread use by the public.
We can make it the time for RSS again.
