Category: news

Somerset County changes

I don’t post a lot of political stuff on this blog, but here’s an article from the Courier News that contains a few items worth noting:

  • This is the first time since 1965 that Democrats have controlled the freeholder board in Somerset County.
  • “Since the Democrats last had control, Somerset County’s population has more than doubled and the non-white population has increased from 3.2 to 32 percent.”
  • “About 70 percent of the county’s population was not alive when the Democrats last held control.”

So that seems like a pretty big change. Somerset County has certainly changed quite a lot just in the last 25 years, which is about how long I’ve been living here. I don’t know if the change in the freeholder board will actually matter much, in the grand scheme of things. But it’s an interesting change and it’s worth noting.

On a national level, it’s also been interesting to keep an eye on our new local House rep, Tom Malinowski, over the last year. He’s the first Democratic House rep we’ve had since I moved to Somerset County. I’m trying to figure out when Somerville last had a Democratic House rep, and it’s a little confusing, since we switched districts at least once. We’ve been part of the 7th district since 2000, I think, and the 7th hasn’t had a Democratic rep since 1980. Prior to that, we were in the 11th, where Rodney Frelinghuysen was the rep from 1995-2018, and the last Democratic rep was a guy who served from 1963 to 1984.

Back when Frelinghuysen was our rep, it just seemed like a given that he’d get re-elected every two years, and that was never going to change. In 2000, Michael Moore ran a ficus against him in the primary, to make a point about how House incumbents often run unopposed in primaries and how often they get re-elected. Frelinghuysen was part of a political dynasty that stretched back to 1793. (Malinowski, in contrast, was born in Poland and came to the US as a child.)

Anyway, Malinowski has made national news a number of times since he was elected, and it’s mostly been for saying something reasonable or doing something useful, which is refreshing. This recent New Yorker article has a few quotes from him. And his Twitter feed is a breath of fresh air, compared to a lot of the political discourse that you see on Twitter.

This whole ramble started because I was curious to see if there was any mention in the news of an anti-war protest that happened yesterday here in Somerville. I didn’t find any, but I did find an article about a protest in Woodbridge related to the “SeaQuest petting zoo aquarium” in Woodbridge Center Mall. I have to admit that I had no idea that “petting zoo aquariums” were a thing, nor that there was one in Woodbridge Center Mall. I should really get off the internet now and start doing something useful with my Sunday.

Equifax settlement decisions

After first seeing the news about the big Equifax settlement, I kind of breezed past it, assuming that it was one of those things that would mostly just enrich some lawyers and not result in any real money trickling down to consumers. But this morning, a friend posted a link to this article on Facebook, so I decided to go ahead and file for the $125. First, $125 is enough to make it worth spending five minutes filling out a web form. And, second, their argument that it’s the right thing to do, to make sure that Equifax pays for their mistake, is a good one.

Of course, a little later in the morning, I found this article, indicating that the free credit monitoring might be a better choice than the $125. And this one, pointing out that I probably won’t get anywhere near $125. So, yeah, my initial impulse to ignore the whole thing was probably the right one. I’ll probably wind up getting a check for 37¢.

My time on the internet is probably better spent watching Patrick McGoohan drum solos on YouTube. (OK, so McGoohan wasn’t actually playing drums in that clip, but it’s still a good drum solo.)

Notre-Dame

Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris Catches Fire

This is breaking my heart. I have fond memories of visiting Notre-Dame back in high school, when my French class took a trip to Paris. And, in college, I took a class in medieval art and architecture, which got me interested in the subject, and set me on a path of learning more about it, in other classes and on my own.

I know that so many worse things have happened in the world over the last few years, but this one is just hitting me hard.

I see that, in the most recent updates, it looks like most of the structure has been saved, but a lot of damage has been done to the roof. So I’m hopeful.

 

Tom Malinowski

I just watched a segment from Amanpour & Co with Tom Malinowski, my newly-elected congressperson. My local House district has been in Republican hands for as long as I’ve lived here, so it’s kind of a big deal that a Democrat got elected. I actually didn’t see much of Malinowski in the news during the campaign, and I have to admit that I didn’t know that much about him. I never really bothered to do much research. I knew the basics: he worked in the State Department under the Obama administration, and had previously worked for Human Rights Watch. I don’t think I’d ever even seen him speak during the campaign. He seems to be a soft-spoken, reasonable, guy. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of years, with the House back under Democratic control. I don’t want to go too far down the politics rabbit-hole, so I’ll leave it there.

Uber and Lyft

This is probably going to be a rambling, incoherent, post. I woke up at 4am this morning, and couldn’t really get back to sleep. Now it’s almost 7am, and I’m trying to have a normal breakfast and proceed with a normal weekday. It’s a little abnormal already, since my car is acting up and the dealer can’t look at until Monday, so I’m probably working from home today. I used Lyft to get to and from work yesterday, and I could do that today too, but I don’t know if I really want to spend $40 just to sit in a cubicle all day and not talk to anyone, which is pretty much what I did yesterday. (It was a productive day. I got a lot of programming done. But zero interaction with coworkers.) On the other hand, if I spend all day alone in my apartment, I might go stir-crazy.

I’ve used Uber several times recently, in New York, during NYCC, and back at home, due to my ongoing car problems. It’s convenient, but a bit expensive. Uber has a pretty bad reputation, of course. I was just looking for a link to include here, but there’s so much bad PR for Uber, you can just search the NY Times and find a bunch of examples. (Here’s one at random.)

I installed the Lyft app on my iPhone a few months ago, but never got around to trying it. So I gave it a shot yesterday. There aren’t as many drivers working in my area as there are for Uber, but there were enough to get me rides back and forth to work yesterday without any hassle. And if you search the NY Times for Lyft, you get mostly financial articles, and none of the bad PR stuff that you see about Uber. So maybe Lyft is a better option, at least from a moral standpoint.

There are a lot of “Uber vs. Lyft” articles on the web. Here’s a pretty reasonable one from How-To Geek. From a user’s standpoint, they’re really similar.

Either way, I feel bad for the drivers. They’re not making a lot of money. Most of the drivers I’ve had recently, when I’ve talked to them, say that they’re working multiple jobs. And, in many cases, I don’t think any of those jobs are providing heath insurance.

UPDATE: I was afraid to hit “publish” on this post this morning, given how loopy I was, but it’s now 7pm, and I’m rereading it, and it’s not that bad. I did decide to go in to work this morning, using Lyft to get there and Uber to get back home. I think I’ve decided that Uber drivers, in this area at least, are a little better than Lyft drivers. Anyway, it’s probably for the best that I didn’t drive today. I was pretty tired in the morning, and again in the evening. I think I was fairly productive at work, at least. But again, I really didn’t have much human interaction and could easily have worked from home.

 

 

Email Newsletters (and the ever-present backlog)

I’ve blogged in the past about the ways in which I’m trying to shape my news/information consumption. One of the things I’ve been trying to do is get more info from email newsletters and less from randomly dipping into the Facebook/Twitter/Reddit fire hose. I have a “read/review” folder in my email where these newsletters get filed (based on some rules). Then, in theory, I read them. In practice, I’ve usually got about 400 emails in that folder, unread. I dip into it on weekends and read some stuff, but I never really catch up.

I discovered something interesting this weekend, so I thought I’d write it up. I subscribe to several newsletters from the NY Times. One of them is their “NY Today” newsletter, which has news and information for stuff related to NY (and sometimes NJ), daily. My current backlog has me reading stuff from April right now, so a lot of stuff in that newsletter isn’t too useful. But, on Friday, I wanted to check some stuff about what was going on in NYC this weekend so I thought I’d open up the current one and read it. When I went to the top of the read/review folder, I couldn’t find it, or any other NY Times newsletters. (And I checked my spam folder, and they weren’t in there either.) It turns out that I stopped receiving all of them in early June. I went to my subscription page, and I showed as still subscribed to everything. So I decided to fire off an email to customer support. I didn’t really expect much from that, but I figured that, as a paying subscriber, maybe they’d get back to me with something useful. Well, surprisingly, they did. It turns out that, apparently, if you’re not actively clicking links in the email newsletters, their system automatically stops sending them to you at some point. I’m a little unclear about how that actually works. The way they phrased it, it sounded like you’d be dropped if you haven’t clicked a link in a newsletter in the past 90 days. But I’ve clicked plenty of links within the last 90 days, though they were mostly in newsletters that were more than 90 days old. So maybe you need to have clicked a link within the last 90 days, in a newsletter that’s less than 90 days old?

Anyway, I found that interesting. I resubscribed to a couple of newsletters, so the backlog will start building up again, but I’m not going to resubscribe to everything I’d previously subscribed to. For one thing, their system requires me to go through that annoying reCAPTCHA “prove you’re human” stuff every time I subscribe to a newsletter. And that’s gotten more and more onerous lately. I’ve notice that it’s less annoying if I do it while not connected to VPN. (I guess that using a VPN makes me more likely to be a robot?)

I really think that the Times should hook their “paying subscriber” info into their newsletter system and just let the fact that I’m giving them money every month be enough evidence that I’m human. (And maybe also exempt me from that 90-day timeout thing.)

This has all got me thinking about news consumption in general again, and maybe tweaking things a little more. But that should probably be a subject for another blog post, on another day, since I think I’ve wasted enough time on this stuff today. I should go outside and get some fresh air.

Digg is probably done

I just found out that Digg has been bought by a company named “BuySellAds.” So… that doesn’t sound good. The previous owner, Betaworks, used it as a kind of “curated” news site, and it was interesting to check on once in a while. (But not interesting enough to check regularly.) The original Digg was pretty cool, but lost out to Reddit in the war of, umm…, sites that allow users to upvote and downvote stuff. (There’s probably a name for that category, though I guess Reddit is the only site left in that specific category?)

I guess the pending acquisition is why they shut down Digg Reader recently.

Betaworks also used to own Instapaper, which is a service I still use a lot. Instapaper is now owned by Pinterest, which worried me at first, but they seem to have mostly left it alone. (The Ten Years of Instapaper post on the Instapaper blog is interesting.)

Meanwhile, Facebook is still kind of horrible, but I’m still checking it every day. I have decided to delete the Facebook share button on this website though. Nobody was ever using it, and I assume it was pulling in some Facebook tracking code, so it seemed like a good idea to turn it off.

Amazon is kind of horrible too, but I placed two orders with them this week already, and of course just bought a new Kindle. Much like Facebook, they’re too convenient to just stop using them. (I mean, if Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos actually teamed up, super-villain style, and went on a mad killing spree, I’d reconsider. Until then, though, I need my cheap USB cables and Bloom County comics.)

Democracy and Facebook and other depressing news

I’ve mentioned here before that The Interpreter is probably the best email newsletter I get from the NY Times. I’ve been catching up a bit with my “read/review” email folder this morning, and saw a link to their video on democracy, from back in January. The video distills some themes that that have come up in their newsletter/column repeatedly over the last year. It’s all quite worrying.

Following a link on Twitter, I also saw their current article about Facebook use in the developing world, titled Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match. I usually see Facebook from a very first-world perspective, getting annoyed with dumb ads and misleading memes, but those are usually harmless. It’s eye-opening to read about the effect that Facebook can have when it becomes popular in the developing world. I’m not sure how mad I should be at Facebook for this stuff, but they could definitely be doing more to mitigate the worst of it. There’s one quote in the article that states the problem with Facebook more succinctly and poetically than any other statement I’ve seen:

“We don’t completely blame Facebook,” said Harindra Dissanayake, a presidential adviser in Sri Lanka. “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind, you know?”

Yep.  As I mentioned recently, I use Facebook with a bunch of add-ons that strip out most of the evil stuff. There’s a new tool from Firefox that puts Facebook in a “container,” making it a little harder for them to track you, hopefully. I haven’t tried it, since I’m assuming it would be overkill for me, since I’m already using three add-ons to filter Facebook. There’s still too much good stuff on Facebook for me to consider dropping it, but I definitely don’t feel guilty stripping ads from it and depriving them of a little ad revenue.

Twitter too

After posting about Facebook a couple of days ago, I though I’d follow up with a quick post about Twitter. I’ve been using Twitterrific on both my Mac and iOS devices for some time now. Like Facebook, Twitter also has an “algorithmic” feed, by default. Twitterrific uses a straight chronological feed, with no ads or promoted tweets confusing things.

Twitter, unlike Facebook, has allowed third-party clients to access the service via a supported API and present their own interface to the service. (Facebook’s feed can be altered by monkeying with their web page, via browser add-ons and stuff like that, but there’s no way to write an authorized third-party Facebook client, using a supported API.) But Twitter has been slowly backing off on their support for third-party clients over the last few years. The most recent issue is described here. (The description on that page is clear enough that I won’t try to restate it here.) I hope Twitterrific and other third-party apps remain viable and useful for the foreseeable future. I really kind of like Twitter. I follow some interesting people there, and I’ve found a lot of interesting stuff via my Twitter feed.

On a related but more general topic, the Mozilla Internet Health Report for 2018 is interesting. (Though I think they got a little too creative with their page design…)

I’ve also been following a few threads around alternatives to Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc. One thought is that RSS is ready for a comeback. I’ve mentioned that recently. I haven’t really been able to talk myself into checking my The Old Reader page regularly just yet. I need to clean up and organize my feed list before I’d consider it to be really useful. Maybe the next time we get a rainy day, I’ll look into that. I’m mildly curious about things like micro.blog and mastodon, but I’m not sure either of them has enough momentum to really go anywhere.

Facebook adjustments

Even after all the Cambridge Analytica stuff and Zuckerberg’s 10 hours of testimony in DC this week, I’m still using Facebook. I’ve known for a long time that a lot of the free stuff on the Internet involves a tradeoff between privacy and convenience, and I’m generally careful of what I share and what I don’t, and which apps and services I use and which ones I avoid.

On the desktop, I use Facebook in Firefox, with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and FB Purity all installed and running. On iOS, until recently, I’ve just been using the regular Facebook app. But I switched to using an app called Friendly recently. It’s pretty good, though it’s got a few rough edges. It does ad blocking (after a $2 in-app purchase), and lets you re-sort your news feed chronologically, and some other little tweaks. I’ve also recently set FB Purity to sort my news feed chronologically, so now I’m seeing stuff that way on both desktop and iOS. It’s funny how different Facebook looks when you’re seeing stuff in simple date/time order, rather than whatever order their algorithm decides to use. I’ve also reviewed and tweaked my privacy settings a bit. This page at iMore has some good advice for that.

I’ve been reading a comic book called The Private Eye recently. It’s a science fiction comic set in a world where there’s been a major internet privacy meltdown, and society has essentially reconfigured itself in a way such that personal privacy is a core value, and is taken to extremes. It’s a really interesting take on the subject of privacy and trust, and it makes me wonder what our world’s going to look like in 100 years.

Ben Thompson has a good overview of the Zuckerberg hearings at his site. A lot of interesting stuff has come out of all this, but I agree with Thompson on the bottom line: “The most likely outcome of Facebook’s current scandal continues to be that nothing will happen.”