Advertising corrupts and digital advertising corrupts absolutely.
When my wife bought her new iPhone 16, the salesperson showed off Apple Intelligence by demonstrating how it would help her shop by pointing the camera at something… or whatever, I don’t remember. What I do remember was that the salesperson, and presumably Apple, assumed that most of what we do is shop. So now I’m reading The Top New Features in Apple’s iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 in Wired, and see, about half way down, “There’s even a feature very similar to Google Lens or Google’s Circle to Search, where you can take a screenshot and then highlight a specific thing on the page you want to search via Google, or through another app that’s installed on your phone that supports the feature, like Etsy. So you can highlight a vase, for example, and then find similar results via Google or similar shoppable vases on Etsy.” And the video image on screen is of a shopping “experience.” Will Apple get a kickback if you buy that vase? If so, it has started down a slippery slope.
More loving.
While digging around through posts on Sly and Brian (see below), I found myself reminded that Kevin Love‘s dad was Stan Love, who was the brother of Mike Love, the Beach Boys front man. Here’s Mike’s memorial Instagram. And whoa… (after further digging), get this: Stan and Mike’s sister is Maureen Love, harpist with Pink Martini, a band my wife and I also (no pun intended, but it fits) love.
On losing the best.
Lindsey Adler on Brian Wilson. Ted Gioia on Sly Stone. Bonus link for those with an LATimes subscription: a 1965 piece about the Beach Boys.
Can one drop off adults? I had no idea there was such a thing as a box where you can drop off unwanted babies.
We’ll fix it.
An Ugly New Marketing Strategy Is Driving Me Nuts (and You Too) is Ted Gioia‘s newsletter today, and it references A Simple Plan to De-enshittify CVS at some length, also kindly sending some of Ted’s 242,000+ subscribers to ProjectVRM, which has been fighting what Ted rightly calls the annoyance economy since 2006. It’s a good sign.
Perspective.
At the end of its day, this blog post had 13 visits. Online Sports Betting is for Losers has had 3,169.
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