Here’s a better-than-usual Verizon mobile data situation in Jupiter, Florida:
Three bars of 5G yields 3/1 Mbps of data, which turns out to be not enough to browse the modern JavaScript and CSS-bloated web. (This was on Indiantown Road, which I hope will soon be renamed, a 6-lane main artery lined with busy strip malls.)
Meanwhile, the Garmin Pilot app (a flight planning tool) informs us that aircraft radar altimeters aren’t going to work because of 5G deployment:
So the 5G signals are strong enough to call aviation safety into question, but not strong enough to support denouncing Donald Trump, Joe Rogan, and Robert Malone on Facebook, the streaming of Neil Young tunes, or reading news regarding the January 6 insurrection.
Whatever we are paying Verizon is not enough to induce them to build a working mobile data network here in Florida. The dead spots are at least as bad as in Maskachusetts despite the flat terrain and lack of skyscrapers that could generate multipath.
Why not switch to another carrier? T-Mobile and AT&T customers report similar unreliable communications.
The worst part of it is that the phone often shows 3 bars of 5G while simultaneously being unable to load a web page for minutes. Upgrading from the iPhone 12 Pro Max (rubbish) to the iPhone 13 Pro Max (a whole new world of greatness) did not help the problem in any way.
If we assume that T-Mobile’s dead spots are not the same as Verizon’s dead spots, the obvious solution is for the phone, which already is capable of dual-SIM operation, to have both SIMs activated simultaneously for mobile data. If the phone can’t get packets out via Verizon it would try T-Mobile and vice versa.
This is not a radical concept. A colocation facility for Web servers can have data links from at least two Internet Service Providers (ISPs) so that the failure of one ISP does not render the servers unreachable. The whole point of packet-switched networking (invented by a 2SLGBTQQIA+ BIPOC American) is that routing can handle network link failures. There is no more common example of a network link failure than in the final segment between mobile tower and mobile device.
Carriers should like this. They can cooperate to get customers’ money for two subscriptions instead of fighting over who gets paid for a single subscription.
One weekend per year devoted to being thankful doesn’t seem unduly burdensome. Today I’m expressing thanks for archive.org. Especially given the recent American tendency to rewrite history in accordance with current #Science/religion/belief/etc., where else would would we be able to find evidence of just how bad things were in the bad old days? (though the evidence might not be complete; see Web publishers can delete stuff from archive.org)
archive.org enabled at least the following blog posts here:
Harvard University attracted a bit of attention when it hosted a theatrical performance restricted to audience members of one skin color earlier this fall. Emboldened by the federal judiciary saying it was okay to discriminate against Asians, the school apparently decided that Massachusetts General Law, Section 98 did not apply (“Discrimination in admission to, or treatment in, place of public accommodation… Whoever makes any distinction, discrimination or restriction on account of race, color, religious creed, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, which shall not include persons whose sexual orientation involves minor children as the sex object, … in any place of public accommodation, resort or amusement, … shall be punished by a fine of not more than twenty-five hundred dollars or by imprisonment for not more than one year, or both, …”). The web page has been scrubbed from the theater’s web site, but it remains alive on archive.org:
We have designated this performance to be an exclusive space for Black-identifying audience members. For our non-Black allies, we appreciate your support in making this a completely Black-identifying evening. We invite you to join us at another performance during the run.
Proof of vaccination or negative test results required to attend.
A Facebook friend attended and wrote “I can now tell my grandkids that I tasted segregation first hand, just like my mom and dad.” He attached this picture that includes a sign regarding Harvard’s expressed commitment to “anti-racism” (which includes “we will not tolerate racism”) and a sign saying that prospective audience members with the wrong skin color should go elsewhere.
Note that the above-mentioned web page contains an admission that the theater is on stolen land:
A.R.T. acknowledges that its theaters are situated on the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Massachusett Tribe.
With a $53 billion endowment, Harvard apparently can’t afford to give the land back to the nearest Native Americans and then pay for a ground lease from them. If the rightful owners do show up to reclaim this land and Harvard scrubs its damaging admissions from the live pages, archive.org will be the dispossessed owners’ best friend.
Readers: What have you found on archive.org that the original authors/publishers probably wish had remained forgotten/hidden?
In the department of what’s old is new and what’s new is old, I’ve used Clubhouse a bit more. It is hard to explain how it is different from old-school talk radio other than not being limited by spectrum and therefore able to handle an infinite number of channels. However, the same could be said about Zello, an app from 2007 that supports public channels. Clubhouse has a Follow button so it is easy to get into the same channel as your friends. Maybe Zello never had that?
Here’s a conversation that I couldn’t resist joining (as an audience member), “Black Voices for Trump 2024”:
It was fascinating to hear how a substantial sized group of Black Americans process the messages being sent to them by the white elites with BLM signs on their lawns.
Some excerpts:
“If you’re Black in America and put your mind to it, you can be whatever you want to be.”
On how she talks to Black Democrat friends: “If Trump were impeached, how would it help your community?”
“Biden has been issuing executive orders at a furious rate. What has he done for the Black community?”
“Why are they trying to feminize all our men?”
“Once all of the illegal immigrants are naturalized, the Democrats will never talk to us again. We will be behind Hispanics and Asians and won’t be relevant.”
“Biden is cut from the same cloth as Strom Thurmond. Why would you vote for someone like that?”
“Obama set off five proxy wars in Africa”
“I’m finishing a PhD on the War on Drugs.”
To a white participant: “You will never know what it’s like to be Black and I will never know what it’s like to be white. We just have to find common ground.”
Woman: “I tell my white friends not to apologize to me for white supremacy because that makes me feel that they’re saying they are superior to me. I grew up in Alabama and my father had a third rate education, but he was able to raise us without my mother having to work and we never felt that there was something we couldn’t do.”
Woman from Texas: Trump stopped the revolving door of illegal immigrants who would get deported and come back a few days later. Despite this, the Black neighborhoods of Texas continue to be wiped out via population replacement with Hispanic migrants.
I posted these in real time to a Facebook post. In an aside, I noted “I am waiting for a platoon of white Democrats from San Francisco to set these folks straight regarding the proper way to be Black!” Right on cue…
White-looking guy named Arjun: “I’m a multi-Ethnic person.” [But if you saw his profile photo you would likely say that he is white.] He thanks the group for their respect and humanity. Says he comes from a different place politically. Disproves the idea that white liberals offer Blacks empty words by speaking for about 2 minutes and saying nothing.
A bit later….
Arjun is back. Talking about working at a farmer’s market in the Tenderloin and “genuinely perplexed” by the fact that only 10% of the customers at this farmer’s market are Black. “A true travesty”. He posits that maybe Black people don’t know how to cook.
(Arjun was right about one thing: when Trump haters showed up they were heard out in full, not interrupted, and responded to respectfully.)
The meeting continues…
35-year-old:: “I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016. Everything Trump was doing once in office was creating opportunity for me. So I voted for him in 2020.”
Guy who went door to door in a white liberal neighborhood recounts all of the whites that told him that he shouldn’t be supporting Trump because he was Black. “Do you really need to know what Joe Biden’s policies are to vote Donald Trump out?” asked a white say-gooder. “Yes, ma’am, that’s what politics is about.”
“White women are getting all of the contracts, jobs, and minority preferences set aside for Black people to make up for Jim Crow.” (Nobody chimes in to point out how difficult it is to be a white woman in North America.)
LBJ’s welfare policies were a Trojan Horse because the welfare system’s incentives destroyed the two-parent Black family. We were rats in an experiment for the white liberals of the 1960s.
“Didn’t nobody rob my mom’s liquor store in the ‘hood because she had a cross around her neck and her right hand on a Glock.” (What would Mom think about Uncle Joe’s latest call for commonsense gun control?)
Arjun can’t be in every room 24/7, so I think that means Clubhouse needs (nay, demands) an army of well-meaning white folks who can explain to these conservatives why they ain’t Black.
(Separately, one aspect of the room that was interesting was how much better informed and thoughtful regarding policy these folks were than my friends who are in the credentialed elite (tenured professors, management consultants, etc.). Where the credentialed elite expresses hatred for Trump either for personal reasons or because Trump does not give the credentialed elite sufficient respect, the Black conservatives were interested in the Trump administration’s policies, not in the personality of Trump-the-person.)
A Massachusetts Democrat on hearing about the above room: “Reminds me of the old (old) joke: The Massachusetts republican party will be meeting in the phone booth at the corner of Tremont and Clarendon this afternoon at 3 sharp.” When I told that there are 2,300 followers of the Black Conservatives club on Clubhouse, that hundreds were connected to the discussion for the 2+ hours that I listened, and that dozens spoke… “Ok, I wish them all well. I suppose it challenges the idea that blacks (et al) all think in one stereotypical way.” (who had this all-think-same “idea” other than him?)
If you’re as late to the party as I always am, see “What Is Clubhouse? The Invite-Only Chat App Explained” (PC Mag). Note that, to ensure that only the insufferable can be heard, this is iPhone-only (preferably with Apple DouchePods in everyone’s ears).
I joined last week. The big rooms are frustrating, like draggy unprepared TED talks. There might be hundreds or thousands of muted listeners, perhaps partly because the app highlights the most popular rooms. Maybe this could be improved with a text chat option so that the muted listeners could chat amongst themselves a bit. This was valuable in our 500-student Zoom class (version of our MIT ground school) back in January. While one teacher was talking, the other could scan the Zoom chat to see if there were open questions that should be answered. There is no way to give a “thumbs up” to a speaker when he/she/ze/they says something interesting or profound.
We have had the most fun in groups that are small enough for everyone to have speaking rights, e.g., 15 people. How can it be better than Zoom? In Zoom you’re expected to sit in one place and not wander out of the camera frame. With Clubhouse you can walk around the house, wander around a city, drive, etc., just as long as you have sufficient data service to support streaming audio (not a given here in the U.S.!).
Maybe the lack of text chat is by design. People on Clubhouse are a lot more measured than on Facebook. A person whose profile photo shows someone who likely identifies as a Black woman said that she didn’t want people with reprehensible, e.g., racist, viewpoints silenced. She didn’t want to drive them underground and even offered that racism was “their truth”. This was in a room full of people interested in astrology (I was invited by a friend whom I met at Burning Man; I told her “I respect astrologers as ‘scientists’ because their predictions are just as accurate as the coronavirus predictions that have been offered by epidemiologists.”)
The enraged statements that are fun to type into Facebook, e.g., regarding the need to imprison Donald Trump and/or his supporters, are apparently not fun to utter as speech.
The app started in Silicon Valley and there are a disproportionate number of discussions regarding living in and/or leaving the Bay Area as well as the mechanics of pitching, funding, exiting startup companies. The same Bay Area folks, who say that they’re the smartest folks on Planet Earth, also are in rooms about “finding love” or “dating” (but they’re old enough to be grandparents). One of their gurus is Logan Ury, whose principal achievement seems to be having landed a husband (but in a world of profitable no-fault divorce, her status could change at any moment under California family law).
One good way to get into Clubhouse seems to be migration as a group. About 10 of us who are part of an aviation chat group on Telegram went in at the same time, for example, and then another 5-10 people who “follow” some of us joined.
Related, the audio community technology favored by University of Florida students in January 2021:
(“The partying never really stopped,” said one gal. “If we lived with our grandparents we would be more concerned about COVID-19. But we don’t interact with anyone who is vulnerable so why should we be afraid?”)
A friend of a friend quotes Benito Mussolini (not as much like Hitler as Donald Trump, but perhaps better acquainted with Hitler on a personal level):
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
He wrote this on top of a tweet expressing concern about the power of an alliance between Silicon Valley’s Big Tech firms and the rulers of the U.S.:
As a demonstration of how irrationally paranoid this guy is for imagining that a combination of political rulers and corporate cronies would suppress his speech via deplatforming, Facebook has deplatformed him… Here’s what he got when trying to post an innocuous update:
(Confusingly, it says that he can’t “go live” despite the fact that he wasn’t trying to “go live”. Nor is he a business and therefore wasn’t attempting to advertise.)
What was the attempted update? “I’m really looking forward to President Biden’s wise leadership.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (not to be confused with Dr. Jill Biden, M.D.), at 1:51 in this 1966 interview:
A riot is the language of the unheard.
Is it fair to say that Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook have moved this statement from “possibly true” to “definitely true”? There were some rioters and now they (and some additional millions of people who also failed to support Presidents Biden and Harris) will be “unheard” for the next few decades.
“Flight attendant union wants pro-Trump rioters barred from flights” (CNBC). Maybe what would be good is a loyalty pledge that people have to take before flying commercial? That would protect against people who have failed to support Presidents Biden and Harris sitting anywhere near us on a Boeing or Airbus.
“Democrats were for occupying capitols before they were against it” (Washington Post): “Thousands of protesters rushed to the … Capitol Wednesday night, forcing their way through doors, crawling through windows and jamming corridors.” That is how one newspaper described the storming of the Capitol — not the one in Washington last week, but the state Capitol in Madison, Wis., a decade ago. Back then, thousands of pro-union activists — many bused in from out of state — rampaged through the historic building in an effort to stop a vote on collective bargaining reform legislation. … House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) praised the occupiers for an “impressive show of democracy in action” and tweeted as they assaulted the Capitol that she continued “to stand in solidarity” with the union activists. In other words, Democrats were for occupying capitols before they were against it.
Donald Trump has been unpersoned by U.S. tech companies, deplatformed from Twitter and Facebook. Parler, the social media competitor to Facebook that had become popular with Trump supporters, has been deplatformed by Amazon Web Services (AWS, which provides Parler’s servers; the site will go dark tomorrow night). Parler has also been deplatformed by Google/Android from phones and will presumably be banned by Apple from the App Store in due course. Amazon previously deplatformed from their ad network anyone who expressed disagreement with the CDC (post from May; maybe Amazon was right… California’s governor followed the CDC’s guidance (old and new) to the letter and California has not been troubled by coronavirus).
Is there a business opportunity here? How about VPNs for Americans to get a Chinese IP address and surf the Internet from inside the Great Firewall so that they can see all of the stuff that has been banned in the U.S.? If they want to do this with apps they can get a Huawei phone (top-rated for camera performance by dxomark), which will soon run software free from American control.
What’s a good name for our VPN-to-China service? “FreePeking”? “YunnanGonnaBeBlocked”?
Separately, I think this is the time to admit that I was wrong about Docker (“platform as a service”). From a senior software engineer friend:
Docker is a form of Kool-Aid. Think Jim Jones. We all drink it here in the Valley.
If Parler wants to spin itself up somewhere other than Amazon (is that feasible given the 24 hours of notice that Amazon gave Parler? They must have a crazy amount of photos/videos to transfer), Docker could actually be useful!
During my November 2019 trip to Shanghai/Suzhou/Hangzhou (awesome!), the U.S.-educated MBAs with whom I talked said that (a) they preferred living in China to living in the U.S. (they’d previously worked in Manhattan), and (b) they had more freedom of speech in China than in the U.S. (there was a clear line of permissible/impermissible drawn by the Party for published speech (they felt free to say whatever they wanted to at a restaurant table)). I wonder if Americans would experience more practical freedom on the Chinese-run Internet than on the Amazon/Google/Apple/Facebook-run Internet.
From Shanghai:
Finally, is it fair to say that Donald Trump is the new Hannibal Lecter and even the most casual contact with him, such as reading some words that he has written, could be dangerous? This Hannibal Lecter-style power is why my Facebook friends are talking nonstop about all of the ways that Trump can be imprisoned forever. It isn’t enough that Trump will disappear in 11 days. They need him inside a Supermax prison solitary cell in order to feel secure.
The Trump Twitter Archive captured some of the hated dictator’s tweets before Twitter put them into the memory hole. Here’s what he wrote just as the Capitol was being trashed:
Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!
I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!
gab.com, a “free speech” platform that foresaw all of this deplatforming and runs its own physical servers (but, assuming they’re in the U.S., won’t their network ISP then simply deplatform their connectivity?)
Ron Paul uses Facebook to link to an article “denouncing ‘shocking and chilling’ censorship on social media” and is subsequently deplatformed by Facebook (New York Post)
“Angela Merkel attacks Twitter over Trump ban” (ft.com): Russian dissident Alexei Navalny echoes criticisms levelled by German chancellor’s spokesman. Angela Merkel, German chancellor, has sharply criticised Twitter’s decision to ban US president Donald Trump, calling it a “problematic” breach of the “fundamental right to free speech”.
I’m not sure how the identity of the president who takes over in January 2021 is relevant to a post regarding a coronaplague vaccine, but it is comforting to be reminded how lucky we are to have Joe Biden. #ThankYouFacebookEditorialDepartment
(The above was highlighted by a friend: “This is like AT&T listening to your call and editing.”)
From our local supermarket, Joe Biden is already an “American Legend”:
Feminism is the movement to liberate women from patriarchy. We stand up for the rights of women to control our own bodies as individuals and to control women-only spaces as a class.
Women are adult human females. We do not believe that men can become women by ‘feeling’ like women. We do not condone the erasure of females and female-only spaces, the silencing of critical thinking, the denial of biological reality and of sex-based oppression. We oppose the ‘cotton ceiling’ and the pressure on lesbians to have sex with men. We resist efforts to limit women’s reproductive autonomy. We condemn the men who exploit and abuse women in prostitution and pornography.
“Women do not decide at some point in adulthood that they would like other people to understand them to be women, because being a woman is not an ‘identity.’ Women’s experience does not resemble that of men who adopt the ‘gender identity’ of being female or being women in any respect. The idea of ‘gender identity’ disappears biology and all the experiences that those with female biology have of being reared in a caste system based on sex.” – Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts
Reddit has deleted nearly seven years of content by this community. I asked a friend who considers herself a TERF whether this forum was, in fact, hate-filled. Her answer:
No, the mods were exacting about following the rules. Couldn’t call people trannies, etc. Purely political decision. They still left all the porn subreddits up so it clearly wasn’t about anything other than clamping down on terfs.
The archive.org server grabbed the front page of the forum, but not the actual content. So those of us who were not participants in the community can never know whether they were haters or not. Some of the older threads do seem to be available. Samples:
“gilded” (posts that others liked a lot?), which contains “Transgenderism seems completely innocuous on first glance, but if you look closer at it has many, many grievous harms. Harms that are so large, they are almost difficult to wrap one’s mind around. It basically spells the end of women being able to name and organize around our oppression, which almost certainly spells the end of our having even nominal rights. We will be pushed out of public life and back into the home in many ways.”
Transgenderism does seem to be winning the war, if indeed there was anyone other than a few terfs to fight against. Walking into a Target recently, for example, the very first display for all shoppers is of LGBTQIA+-themed products:
(the gender critical feminists might not be pleased to learn that a trans woman is more “authentic” than a cisgender woman!)
Near the pharmacy, Johnson & Johnson talks about its “championing” of all matters LGBTQIA (but not “plus”!) and offers rainbow-wrapped Listerine, sunscreen, etc.:
Companies usually like to avoid actual political controversy. Why lose nearly half your customers by saying “We at GreedCo prefer Candidate X”? There are some dramatic differences between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, for example, but how many Fortune 500 companies have endorsed either one? The only time that a company would be willing to alienate customers is on an issue where there are hardly any people who strongly oppose the position being taken. From this, therefore, it seems reasonable to infer that, at least since 2011 when Johnson & Johnson decided it was safe to come out of the closet, there is no significant opposition to LGBTQIA advocacy.
I wonder if this sanitizing of the Internet by Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, et al. will actually work against those who advocate for the causes that are now held sacred and to which no opposition can be voiced. Once all of the terfs are silenced, for example, and there is no record that they ever existed because old content is in a memory hole, wouldn’t that cause people to ask an advocate for transgenderism “Who exactly are you fighting against?”
