Saturday, November 16, 2024

Startup/Shutdown

(I first published this a year ago.)

 Just about the time my three-year appointment as a visiting professor at Stanford was wrapping up in 2005, a Silicon Valley billionaire invited me to lunch. We met at one of Palo Alto’s finer restaurants. He asked me to come work for a new company he was starting up with his own money.

The offer was intriguing — the idea was to structure the content from world’s leading media sites into a manageable taxonomy that would provide a topic-based news and information service to paying customers — all curated by a small team of editors.

Soon thereafter, I started getting off a few freeway stops earlier on my commute down the peninsula to a high-rise office with a splendid view of jets approaching SFO. I assumed my duties as Editor-in-Chief of this new company.

Virtually everyone else in the venture was an engineer save for me, a two-person marketing team, a research director and a customer service director. I was to supervise the latter two plus hire a couple assistant editors who would help me sort through the global media and select our content.

Our boss and founder was himself an engineer and a man of meticulous habits. He arrived precisely at 9 a.m. at the office every day, departed at noon, came back at 1 p.m. and departed for the day right at 5 p.m.

I suspected that he was the only person in Silicon Valley to maintain such a rigid schedule since the normal routine at other startups I was familiar with resembled a mid-morning to late-night work schedule.

But we patterned our culture after our boss’s tastes. Meetings began precisely at the top of the hour and wrapped up one hour later, without exception.

Soon into my time there, a couple issues came to my attention. The research director told me that the vast majority of our visitors chose the free view version of the service as opposed to the paid.

And the customer service director told me we were constantly getting complaints that the overwhelming majority of our paid customers had been essentially tricked into giving us their credit card numbers during an initial six-week free period that we heavily promoted.

After six weeks, unless they opted out, they were automatically converted into paying customers and their accounts were dinged monthly going forward.

When I explained all this to my boss, he was shocked and said that sounded unethical and that we should change it into an explicit opt-in model.

I was gratified that he wanted the company to function in an honest, up-front manner as opposed to the under-handed system somebody before me had put in place.

But it soon emerged that there was a new problem. Once we’d made the change, practically nobody opted to sign up for the paid service once their free six-week period had expired. So our venture had no way to make any money.

The company sputtered along for a few years anyway, including during an exhaustive, year-long rebranding exercise, but increasingly we all knew it was doomed. 

Meanwhile, Google released Google News to the public, effectively ending any chance our little product had to survive in the new media landscape anyway.

I hate to say it, but that was more or less typical of my years migrating from one web-based startup to another from the years 1995-2012. Then, early in 2013, at the age of 66, I retired.

That lasted around a month before, bored out of my mind, I went back to work at KQED, the largest Northern California public media company.

But that is a story for another day.

HEADLINES:

  • RFK Jr.’s to-do list to make America ‘healthy’ has health experts worried (CNN)

  • House Ethics chair says meeting on Gaetz report has been postponed, not canceled (Politico)

  • Matt Gaetz Is the Best Possible Outcome for Attorney General (The Nation)

  • Pete Hegseth, Trump's pick for defense secretary, faced sex assault allegation (NBC)

  • Inside the Republican false-flag effort to turn off Kamala Harris voters (WP)

  • Trump wants to end ‘wokeness’ in education, vowing to use federal money as leverage (AP)

  • North Dakota Gov. Burgum tapped to head Interior Department *(WP)

  • Many people reported waking up with a bad feeling around the same time on election night. A sleep expert says there's a biological reason for that. [HuffPost]

  • Trump’s choice of Tulsi Gabbard as intelligence chief has sent shockwaves through the national security establishment, adding to concerns that the sprawling intelligence community will become increasingly politicized. (Reuters)

  • Scientific American editor steps down after election comments draw backlash (WP)

  • Wall St tumbles after Powell urges caution on rate cuts (Reuters)

  • Scientists unveil decades-long research about the deep-diving 'mystery mollusc' (NPR)

  • Spy Agency Memo Sets Rules for Artificial Intelligence and Americans’ Private Data (NYT)

  • The AI rocketship may be running on fumes (TechRadar)

  • Some of Substack’s Biggest Newsletters Rely on AI Writing Tools (Wired)

  • Google AI chatbot responds with a threatening message: "Human … Please die." (CBS)

  • Are A.I. Clones the Future of Dating? I Tried Them for Myself. (NYT)

  • Trump Nods Vacantly As Elon Musk Rattles Off 10th Consecutive Video Game Recommendation (The Onion)

 

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Friday, November 15, 2024

Rainy Day Hopes



“One of the perils of life under authoritarian rule is that the leader seeks to drain people of their strength. There is an urge to pull back from civic life.” — David Remnick

***

The rainy season has started in these parts, which is good news because some years it doesn’t come at all. Our droughts are difficult and also one kind of trouble we don’t need right now. We’ve got plenty of trouble already.

The disaster unfolding within our national government isn’t going to be solved anytime soon. It won’t suddenly stop, like the rain, to be followed by sunshine. But the sunshine will happen in our natural world, so we can choose to celebrate that when it happens, regardless of the political storms raging in the days, weeks and months ahead.

One natural impulse under these circumstances is to withdraw and try to ignore the crisis unfolding in Washington D.C. Another might be for some to drop everything and join the resistance movement that will surely develop. After all, this already qualifies as the battle of our lifetimes to save democracy. 

Personally, I aim to be one of the voices of that resistance.

But for now, perhaps he best plan is just to live healthy, honor friends and family, plant crops, appreciate the rain when it comes, and insist on living life to the fullest despite this threat to our common future.

In the end we each will either shrink our dreams in the face of autocracy or we will stand up and say, “Not on my watch!” Either way, the rains will wash away the dirty air and give us another chance tomorrow.

HEADLINES:

 

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Thursday, November 14, 2024

Obey and Disrupt: Trump's Coup From Within

Two things are clear about Trump’s chosen lieutenants as he forms his new administration: They have pledged to be completely loyal to him personally, instead of the constitution, and they are to totally disrupt their portion of the executive branch of the federal government. 

Atop the long list Trump’s dangerous appointees, accused sexual predator Matt Gaetz for attorney general stands out as the worst of the worst. It is literally unfathomable. Should Gaetz be confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, we would no longer be able to say that the U.S. government is based in the rule of law.

It would instead be based in the rule of the unlawful.

But putting that debacle aside for the moment, by naming Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head up a new “Department of Government Efficiency,” Trump is signaling that he intends to rule by chaos.

Consider the scale: The U.S. government employs over 5 million people, including some 2.87 million civilians and 2.24 million military personnel. This is far larger than the world’s biggest private employer, Walmart, with its workforce of 2.1 million or the second largest, Amazon, with 1.5 million.

Meanwhile, Musk only has experience running companies that are far smaller. Tesla has about 120,000 employees; SpaceX 13,000. And then there is X (formerly Twitter), which had 8,000 employers before Musk bought and dismantled it, to the point it now has only 2,300, with barely 550 in full-time jobs.

If Musk intends to do to government agencies what he did to X, which seems obvious, we’re going to experience social disruption on a scale that is barely imaginable, because these are the agencies that affect our health, finances, housing, food supply, jobs and the environment we live in, not to mention our national security and every other aspect of life you can think of. 

Perhaps most dangerous of all is Trump’s reported plan to create a board to purge supposedly “woke” generals from the military. This is truly scary stuff. This has to be viewed in the context of Trump’s racist agenda, because “woke” is code for is eliminating diversity as a value in our armed forces. Anyone with any experience whatsoever with the U.S. military will tell you that its diversity is its greatest strength.

Transforming the military with its proud history of independence free from politics into a tool loyal not to the constitution but to a despot is truly the work of fascists. If successful, it would mark the definitive end of America’s democracy in favor of an authoritarian nightmare.

Our military leaders can be expected to resist, but a command-and-control structure based on following orders will have a very hard time opposing a duly elected Commander in Chief.

These are just a few of the initial dangers we face from Trump 2.0. What they add up to is now obvious — it is a coup from within.

***

I suspect I am not the only one desperately seeking escapes from the news and unable to sleep these days and nights. Yesterday, according to Wordle, I played my 1,000th game, and got the correct answer for the 979th time. That’s a 2.1 percent failure rate, which may shed new light on the phrase, “margin of error.” 

HEADLINES:

 

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Wednesday, November 13, 2024

French Toast

You might call this the second in my occasional series of breakfast posts, since as the weather has turned colder, we’ve been eating French toast with maple syrup lately. And that’s not because everyone around here (but me) is half-French and can speak French, whereas the only thing I can say is je ne parle pas français.

While we’re on that subject, French toast, like French fries, has nothing to do with France. Its origin is believed to stretch way back to the Roman Empire, where it was called “pan dulcis.”

But of course this post is not really about breakfast or my struggles with the mother tongue or the origins of two of my favorite foods. Alas, much like my first breakfast post, “Oatmeal,” it’s about how those of us deeply distressed about the direction of our country can fortify ourselves in the face of what is to come as a consequence of Trump’s election.

In that regard, yesterday I wrote about how the initial wave of authoritarian action Trump intends to provoke at the border is based in racism. It is worth thinking about how this undermines democracy and what will be required to resist and then re-establish a democratic balance in the aftermath:

“To save our democracy, Americans need to restore the basic norms that once protected it. But we must do more than that. We must extend those norms through the whole of a diverse society. We must make them truly inclusive. America's democratic norms, at their core, have always been sound. But for much of our history, they were accompanied - indeed, sustained - by racial exclusion. Now those norms must be made to work in an age of racial equality and unprecedented ethnic diversity. Few societies in history have managed to be both multiracial and genuinely democratic. That is our challenge. It is also our opportunity. If we meet it, America will truly be exceptional.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future

We all know that institutionalized racism is a fact of life in our country but we also know that we can overcome it and advocate for how all forms of human diversity immeasurably enrich our experience of being alive. Part of resisting Trump has to be to celebrate diversity, especially racial and ethnic diversity, in all aspects of American life.

At the same time, it will also be the little things we do for one another that matter as we deepen our sense of connection and reinforce each other’s commitment to resist and withstand the insult to decency and compassion that is Trumpism. It starts with talking to one another about this stuff.

Further food for thought: check out the excellent comments by Chris Rauber and Doug Foster on yesterday’s essay.

(P.S. Thanks to Kenneth for bringing packets of oatmeal to our neighbors group and to Susanna for bringing me a hefty supply of coffee.)

HEADLINES:

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Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Here It Comes

One of the not-so-subtle dangers of living through the transition to an authoritarian society is falling into the trap of “at least I’m okay.”

We are all going to be tested in this regard soon, apparently on “Day 1” of the Trump administration, when his promised mass deportation of immigrants gets underway.

Probably no one reading my words will be affected directly at first. The initial target of Trump’s immigration czars will be specific members of the Latino community, ostensibly those alleged to have criminal records, but the roundups will quickly spread to encompass undocumented individuals living peacefully on the margins of affluent white society.

The Myth of the Hardened Criminal will quickly be discarded because there will be hardly any of those to be found. But this has never been about criminals anyway.

Meanwhile, many of us will start to lose a gardener here, a housecleaner there, or even a beloved nanny when one day they just don’t show up for work. We won’t know why; nobody will tell us. Most will just disappear

So what will be happening to the deportees? 

The architects of Trump’s policy — Stephen Miller, an overt racist, and career border agent Tom Homan — are the same guys who created the “family separation“ policy during Trump 1.0. That is the policy of deliberately ripping children from their parents in order to create mass terror among the Latino community. They’ve vowed to do it again, now on a much greater scale.

And these architects of terror will not stop with the “illegal” people Trump has so effectively demonized.

They’ve already explicitly promised to round up certain American citizens as they forcibly remove millions of people from their homes. These are the children born here to undocumented parents; they are now to be deported as well, which is a violation of the very essence of a society based in law. While immigration judges will theoretically be required to evaluate the legality of such cases one by one, that guardrail will fail when Trump appoints ‘judges’ who support his initiative..

So what choices do we have as this racist spectacle proceeds before our eyes? Again, it won’t be happening to you or to me, for now. But it most definitely will be happening to “we,” as in “We the people.” 

This is precisely how a democracy dies.

Despots always divide and conquer, picking off the weakest and most vulnerable at the start. Next will be the persecution of dissidents, political opponents, those who in Trumpian terms, compose the “enemy within.”

History is clear on what will follow but less clear on how this will all turn out. Democracy’s odds will be much better if the resistance starts on Day 1.

HEADLINES:

  • Dead Last — Authoritarian rule always entails corruption. With Donald Trump in office, watch your wallet. (New Yorker)

  • Ruben Gallego defeats Kari Lake in Arizona Senate race (NPR)

  • Trump expected to announce Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy (CNN)

  • Trump Expected to Choose Marco Rubio as Next Secretary of State (BBC)

  • Trump prepares immigration crackdown with Miller, Homan posts (WP)

  • President-elect Donald Trump said he wouldn’t be a dictator — "except for Day 1." Here’s a look at what he has said he will do once he takes office. [AP]

  • Trump Adviser Sends Ominous Warning to Justice Department Lawyers (TNR)

  • As Trump Returns to Power, Allies and Adversaries Expect a Wave of Revenge (NYT)

  • Round 2 in the Trump-vs-Mexico matchup looks ominous for Mexico (AP)

  • Spirit Airlines and JetBlue planes struck by gunfire in Haiti (ABC)

  • Afghanistan attends U.N. climate talks for first time since Taliban return to power (AP)

  • “Energy transition” has been profoundly misunderstood (Economist)

  • Aid to Gaza falls to lowest level in 11 months despite US ultimatum to Israel (Guardian)

  • US carries out second consecutive night of strikes in Yemen, defense official says (CNN)

  • A new era dawns. America’s tech bros now strut their stuff in the corridors of power (Guardian)

  • Why AI could eat quantum computing’s lunch (Technology Review)

  • How a stubborn computer scientist accidentally launched the deep learning boom (Ars Technica)

  • Mentally Broken Nation Starts Dressing, Speaking Like Frank Sinatra (The Onion)

 

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Monday, November 11, 2024

The Rise and Fall


My choice is normally to look for the positive in situations. While that can be difficult at times, there would be little use in me adding my voice to the monstrous roar of negativity that greets anyone following current events.

And let’s face it — the news is all bad right now.

Things are bad because of the election, and they may get worse before they get better, but I believe in our collective ability to overcome Trump’s imminent threat to our democracy.

And I believe that ultimately we will.

But first we have to be informed. And then we will need to stay alert. A broad-based resistance to what promises to be a slow slide toward autocracy will form the basis of a democratic recovery starting with the midterm elections of 2026.

That is the story I look forward to — the recovery of our norms — two years from now. For now, we all need to stay informed and notice the detail of autocracy’s rise. Among those details will be the seeds of the campaign we will wage together to provoke autocracy’s fall.

***

“Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die

HEADLINES:

  • Trump talked to Putin, told Russian leader not to escalate in Ukraine (WP)

  • Kremlin says reports of Trump-Putin call about Ukraine are ‘pure fiction’ (Guardian)

  • As Trump’s win tests the world order, diplomats are fretting over what it means for the planet (CNN)

  • Trump’s reelection casts a shadow over the start of global climate negotiations (NPR)

  • Trump appoints UN ambassador Elise Stefanik and border tsar Tom Homan (BBC)

  • Smile, Flatter and Barter: How the World Is Prepping for Trump Part II (NYT)

  • Trump on Day 1: Begin deportation push, pardon Jan. 6 rioters and make his criminal cases vanish (AP)

  • Lebanon, Gaza and Syria hit by deadly Israeli strikes, reports say (CNN)

  • The right-wing organization in Trump’s ear replacing the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 (Independent)

  • How Kamala Harris — and Joe Biden — lost to Donald Trump (WP)

  • There’s a Lot of Fighting Over Why Harris Lost. But Everyone Seems to Want to Avoid This Explanation. (Slate)

  • Democrats face a reckoning and a long rebuilding. There is no quick fix. (WP)

  • NY parks employee dies fighting fires; air quality warnings are issued in New York and New Jersey (AP)

  • How Tech Created a ‘Recipe for Loneliness’ (NYT)

  • AGI is coming faster than we think — we must get ready now (Venture Beat)

  • Near plans to build world’s largest 1.4T parameter open-source AI model (Cointelegraph)

  • Large Behavior Models Surpass Large Language Models To Create AI That Walks And Talks (Forbes)

  • CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years (The Onion)

 

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Sunday, November 10, 2024

The Waiting Room


“This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die

***

So it feels like we’re all gathered in an emergency room following a terrible accident and we’re awaiting word on the fate of the victim, who was badly injured and may not survive.

They call him Uncle Sam.

He’s semi-conscious but the internal bleeding may not be able to be stopped. The options for doctors to intervene and save him are limited. We all are aware that a priest is hovering nearby.

Our uncle was elderly, it’s true, but we thought he was in good health and that he would live forever. After all, he survived a brutal assault four years ago in January that left him bruised and battered but more or less intact. Now that his death appears to be imminent, we realize several things:

  • For too long, we took him for granted.

  • We grew accustomed to criticizing him for his imperfections, never thinking we might so easily lose him.

  • We never told him enough that we loved him.

But as a reporter I must insist that there is one detail wrong in this story. What happened to Uncle Sam was not an accident.

Once he passes on, it will be classified as a murder.

HEADLINES:

LYRICS:

“Murder on Music Row” by George Strait

Nobody saw him running from sixteenth avenue.
They never found the fingerprint or the weapon that was used.
But someone killed country music, cut out its heart and soul.
They got away with murder down on music row.

The almighty dollar and the lust for worldwide fame
Slowly killed tradition and for that someone should hang 
(oh, you tell them Alan).
They all say not guilty, but the evidence will show
That murder was committed down on music row.

For the steel guitars no longer cry and fiddles barely play,
But drums and rock 'n roll guitars are mixed up in your face.
Old Hank wouldn't have a chance on today's radio
Since they committed murder down on music row.

They thought no one would miss it, once it was dead and gone
They said no one would buy them old drinking and cheating songs (I'll still buy'em)
Well there ain't no justice in it and the hard facts are cold
Murder's been committed down on music row.

Oh, the steel guitars no longer cry and you can't hear fiddles play
With drums and rock 'n roll guitars mixed right up in your face
Why, the Hag, he wouldn't have a chance on today's radio
Since they committed murder down on music row
Why, they even tell the Possum to pack up and go back home

There's been an awful murder down on music row. 

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