problems
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Websday
Greater Good Government Phil Windley nails a use case for MyTerms. Lesser Good Government Wired: ICE Is Expanding Across the US at Breakneck Speed. Here’s Where It’s Going Next—ICE plans to lease offices throughout the US as part of a secret, monthslong expansion campaign. Good Community Governance Alex Chalmers: When Decentralization Fails. And how it succeeds. Pull-quote: Continue reading
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Whyday
Yum On the latest Prof G Pod, David Brooks says, “One of my favorite sayings about writers is, ‘Writers are beggars who tell other beggars where they found bread.’” And now I’m disincentivized from subscribing to anything published by Hearst. I don’t know how I started subscribing to the Esquire newsletter, or if I had Continue reading
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Down and Running
I hit a storage crisis yesterday when I needed to copy a lot of fresh photos to my laptop’s hard drive, and it was clear that I would soon run out of room there. The laptop is a 16-inch 2023 M2 MacBook Pro with an 8TB hard drive—the most loaded and maxed-out computer I could Continue reading
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Where Are We?
While the Web isn’t a place, we know it as one. The language we use to describe it is concrete and structural: domains at locations, with sites that are built and have pages that are authored, and contents that are uploaded and downloaded. For a generation or more, we have searched through the Web’s vast Continue reading
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On extracting yourself from the extractors
Here’s the flyer for the next talk in our salon series here at Indiana University: Elettra is one of the most interesting, smart, accomplished, caring, and effective people I know. She is also all of those in English, French, Italian, and German. I met her through our overlapping work around the Berkman Klein Center at Continue reading
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Cerebrations
Can you guess the two voices? Mr. Rogers meets the bass player. Still funny 50 years later. It burped in our direction How and why the Sun grounded 6000 planes last month. Watch out above As of 7pm ET, a solar storm is starting, causing auroras that may be visible in North America across many Continue reading
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Hose cleaning
I was closing in on 2000 unread emails, so I sorted my inbox by From instead of Date, looked through the pile for actual correspondence and other items of importance, opened those, marked the rest of them read, and set the view to Date again, starting with the most recent. If I missed your email Continue reading
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!@#$%^&ingPa55w0rds
I'm trying to sign in to Linkedin on a second laptop, in a browser. Here is my log of how that goes: In an email Linkedin says "You can finish signing in to your LinkedIn account by following the instructions that we sent to your LinkedIn App." There is nothing to click on in the Continue reading
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Questions of Law, not Just Politics
Go to HUD.gov, and you’ll get this: Go to USDA.gov, and you’ll get this: Seems to me these violate the Hatch Act, aka “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities.” It was passed in 1939 and amended a couple of times since then. I am not a lawyer, but I know some, and I can Continue reading
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Wednesday, 16 July 2025
Want a weather show? Look at this: Bet it’s about liability and arbitration. T-Mobile just texted me this: T-Mobile: We’ve updated our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Notices. Get the details and learn about your options in the Privacy Dashboard at secure.t-mobile.com/terms I can’t log on, and doing the password reset thing is a PITA, so I Continue reading
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Tuesday, 8 July, 2025
Book burning in our time. Two places to look for what's happened to science and other do-gooding programs since government research programs that smelled woke got defunded: Columbia Law School's Silencing Science Tracker, and this piece by RealKM. Some clues. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, The Cluetrain Manifesto says. (In its 7th of 85 theses.) A corollary might Continue reading
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Thursday, 3 July 2025
How about borrowing Subweb? I was about to share a Medium post, but just saw it's "Members only." So I won't share it. I'm doing more of that now. Even though I subscribe to Medium, the NYTimes, the LATimes, and the WSJ, I'm avoiding linking to them, unless there's an easy way to pull the piece Continue reading
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Friday, 20 June 2025
Convenient. The 50 Best Restaurants include: Six in Bangkok Five in Tokyo. Four in Paris. Four in Lima. Four in Copenhagen. Three in New York. Two in Munich. Two in London. Two in Mexico City . Two in Dubai. Two in Seoul. Two in Barcelona. One in Gardone Riviera. One in Alba. One in Singapore. Continue reading
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Tuesday
Whatever, it's complicated. The Narrow Path Needs a Floorplan: What Happens When You Feed Tristan Harris’s Vision Into the Meta-layer. The path is between the DYSTOPIA of centralized control and the CHAOS of "unchecked decentralized" whatever. The path is called COORDINATION, and involves "global clarity & coordinated action," which is about "co-governance—a path where humanity chooses structure, Continue reading
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How to Make Customers Hate You
Exhibit A: Welcome to negative option billing at work. Other labels include “sludge,” “dark patterns,” “gotcha pricing,” “subscription trapping,” and “bait-and-default.” Works like this: offer a service at a discount that jumps up to a high “regular” price after the discount runs out, and count on the customer forgetting when the jump happens. It’s a Continue reading
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Future Tabs
Stay Calm and Check it out. Pure libertarians are neither right nor left, nor where the extremes of both meet. Mostly they come from a sensibility outside both redstream and mainstream: one that PJ O'Roarke put perfectly in Parliament of Whores: "The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, Continue reading
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Departments of Correction
Fortunately, we've already got it here: unlimited 2GB/s symmetrical service for $59/month. Bloomington's city fiber rollout has been paused by the mayor. Here's square's story about it, which is also in Bloomdocs—an example of a news commons at work. One more reason to move off Chrome? A URL that begins with chrome-extension://efwhaddfugisallthisjiveepwnj/ before it gets to http:// is not Continue reading
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Of possible interest
In reply to the question "Which blog post took the most work?" the answer is From Hollywood Park Racetrack to SoFi Stadium, which spanned 2005 to 2024 and involved taking many dozens of aerial photographs on approach to LAX, doing research, and writing about it, hoping it helps historians along the way. Two angles on one story. Noozhawk Continue reading
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An Inadequate AI Solution
Let’s take the example of printers, which tend to suck. Here is one example of suckage at work, and the instructive hell it put me through: The Canon MG3600 is my wife’s. It sits by her desk and does a good-enough job. The Epson WF-3520 is mine. It sits by my desk and leaks black ink. Continue reading