Generation Grumpy

From the NY Times: Generation Grumpy: Why You May Be Unhappy if You’re Around 50

The generation of people born 1962 to 1971, now in what are typically peak earning years, are finding they are not doing as well as they might have expected.

As a fifty-year-old, I can attest that I am indeed grumpy! (Though not necessarily for the reasons outlined in this article.)

Once in a Lifetime

I mentioned yesterday that I missed out on the big Michelangelo exhibit at the Met, which closed a few days ago. I’d only gotten around to reading the NY Times review of the show (from November) yesterday. I was reading another old email from November this morning, and saw a mention of the JoCo Cruise for 2018. I’ve always heard good things about past JoCo cruises, so I thought I’d check the website and see when this year’s cruise was going to be. Well, it’s February 18 to 25. So it’s too late for that too.

The Michelangelo exhibit was likely a “once in a lifetime” thing; JoCo Cruise is once a year. But there’s one other story from November that I just read that, sadly, keeps coming up over and over again: mass shootings. I was reading some comics from The Nib from back in November about shootings and the lack of any reasonable gun control in the US.

I did a little searching to see if I could figure out which mass shooting had happened in mid-November 2017, and I actually found two. On November 15, 2017, a man went on a shooting rampage in California (including going through an elementary school, which was thankfully on lockdown when he got there). On November 5, a man attacked a Texas church, killing more than 25 people.

And two days ago, we had another school shooting in Florida. So the cartoons from The Nib about the political inaction on gun control are just as current today as they were in November. In fact, I also came across a piece in the Times by Nicholas Kristof about how to reduce shootings that was written in November, but has just been updated. (It’s a very good article, by the way. Well-written and well-reasoned. And, sadly, I doubt it required much updating since November, since little has changed, except for more shootings.)

And every time this happens, The Onion re-posts a slightly modified version of their story ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

Good Old Email

I’m a big fan of email. Say what you will, it’s still pretty darn useful. There was news this week about Google wanting to use AMP with email. I ignored this, since I don’t use Gmail anymore, and it didn’t seem like a big thing, on the surface. But there’s a post on the FastMail blog today titled Email is your electronic memory that’s pretty interesting. (FastMail is my current email provider.) They talk about how email should be “immutable.” (Apparently, the AMP thing is more about making email interactive rather than making it faster.) I haven’t thought about it too much, but the immutable nature of email is one of the most useful things about it. The web, in general, is very mutable. Web sites and web pages come and go. URLs change. But, if I’ve got an email in my mailbox, then the text (at least) of that email is fixed. I can search for it and find it and do stuff with it.

I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters. One of the things I notice in these newsletters is whether they contain actual content, or just links to content. In general, newsletters that actually contain content are more useful than those that are just link collections. Warren Ellis’ newsletter is a good example. He includes a lot of text content within the body of the newsletter. He also includes links out to other stuff, which is unavoidable, but the main content of the newsletter is actually in the newsletter, as text. The newsletter for Tor.com goes the other way. It’s mostly just a list of recent articles on the site, with short text summaries and links out to the articles. The annoying thing about that newsletter is that the links expire. They use a link redirection service that, I assume, gives them analytics about how many times the links are clicked and stuff like that. But the links expire after a month or two. And I’m usually a month or two behind in reading those emails. So, if I click any of the links, they just go to an error page. To find the article I wanted to read, I have to search for it. That actually discourages me from reading most of the articles. I have to really want to read it to bother copying and pasting the title into DuckDuckGo or Google.

I also subscribe to a bunch of newsletters from the NY Times. Those are somewhere in between; there’s usually some content right in the newsletter, but also short article summaries and links out to the Times site for the full articles. One of the best newsletters they have is the one for The Interpreter. It generally contains a good well-written article in the body of the email, plus links out to related articles at the Times site and other sites.

And I use an alert service from the Times to get email notifications when new articles are published on certain subjects that I’m interested in. I have alerts set up for articles about comic books, sci-fi books & movies, and a couple of my favorite museums. These are really useful, since they frequently surface articles that I wouldn’t have stumbled across otherwise. But I was disappointed to see today that they have apparently discontinued that service. I haven’t seen an announcement about it, but there’s no longer a link to the alerts page from the account settings, and if you go directly to the alerts page, it’s now a static page that says “The New York Times has discontinued the My Alerts feature.” So that sucks.

Prior to setting up the alerts through the NY Times site itself, I had them set up through IFTTT. They were useful, but sometimes they’d stop working for no discernible reason, and they weren’t nearly as good as the official NY Times alerts at finding relevant articles. But I guess I might have to go back to IFTTT now. We’ll see. There’s probably some other fancy way for me to get alerts about NY Times articles, through a different third-party service, but I haven’t done any research into that yet.

Anyway, this was originally going to be a short post about how I need to catch up with my newsletters and news alerts, since I’m three or four months behind now. I only just read an article about how great the Michelangelo exhibit at the Met is, and it ended two days ago, and I didn’t get a chance to see it. Oh well.

Equifax breach

This week’s Equifax breach is big news, with a few “SMH” moments (as the kids say).

The first SMH moment is the execs who sold a bunch of stock just before the company disclosed the breach: “Three Equifax executives sold a combined $1.8 million in stock just days after the company discovered a major breach of its data system, but well before it disclosed the hack publicly.” — from an AP story in the NYT. Supposedly, these guys weren’t aware of the breach at the time, but it’s still pretty darn fishy.

The second SMH issue is the web site that Equifax has set up to supposedly let people know if they’ve been affected by the breach. As multiple people have figured out, it’s pretty sketchy. At first, it kind of looked like maybe they were completely ignoring the user input and giving everyone the same opaque response. Now, that’s a little less clear, but I’m not sure if they’re actually giving useful responses or just randomizing them.

The third SMH data point is the free year of credit monitoring they’re offering. It looks like you’ll need to enter a credit card number to sign up for it, and it will convert to a paid credit monitoring plan after the first year, unless you proactively cancel before the end of the year. So they’ll likely end up making money off this breach (though not until a year from now, when all those free accounts quietly bill for year two).

The NY Times has some advice, which is all probably good, and similar to advice I’ve seen elsewhere. First is to put a “permanent” credit freeze on your info at all three credit bureaus. That can cost a few bucks, but you can leave it in place for however long you want. Then, you can also put a “fraud alert” on your info, which is free but only lasts for 90 days. (And supposedly you only need to do that with one credit bureau, and it will apply to all three.) And you should also check your credit report at www.annualcreditreport.com. (But you were already doing that, right?)

If you’re looking to read up on this, there are a lot of places to do so. Consumerist has a good, clear, general write-up. If you want a deeper dive, Brian Krebs has a good blog post about it. And if you just want to wade into the muck, there’s a mega-thread at the personal finance sub-reddit that’s everything a reddit mega-thread tends to be: a fair amount of useful information, mixed with a lot of nonsense. (But it’s fun to read.)

What am I personally going to do? Well, I already check my credit report on a fairly regular basis. I last checked it in December 2016, so I’ll try to remember to check it again at the end of this year. If there’s any short-term fallout from the breach, it’ll probably be visible on the reports by year-end. And I know I should do that credit freeze thing, but honestly I’m probably not going to. I’ll see if I can talk myself into it.

And I was initially going to sign up for the free year of credit monitoring through Equifax, but now that I’m thinking about the auto-renew thing, I think I should skip that. I’m betting that Equifax will make the process of canceling before the auto-renew fairly annoying and onerous. And I’ll probably forget to do it anyway. I can get free credit monitoring through my AAA membership, so maybe I should sign up for that. (They appear to be using Experian’s service.)

Warren Ellis – a useful quote

I find myself collecting little quotes from Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations newsletter, as I read through the backlog that I’ve allowed to pile up in my email. Here’s a good one, from July 2016:

Remember – your internet has an off button, and so does your news.  It’s okay to turn the volume down, and even to turn it off. There’s no shame in self care and pausing to take a breath before you re-immerse yourself in the world and its velocity.

…Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t skip work to watch the James Comey testimony today, if you want to.

Philip Roth on Trump

Coincidentally, after reading a fairly old New Yorker article about Philip Roth over the weekend, and blogging about it, I saw today that the New Yorker reached out to Roth for comment on Trump, and any similarity between the Trump administration and the fictional Lindbergh administration from his novel “The Plot Against America.” He has a few interesting things to say, though nothing particularly unexpected.

I’m still curious about “The Plot Against America.” I’m going to have to pick it up and read it at some point.

Harvesting Government History

Here’s an interesting article about a group of librarians archiving pages from federal websites, prior to the start of the new administration:

The ritual has taken on greater urgency this year, Mr. Phillips said, out of concern that certain pages may be more vulnerable than usual because they contain scientific data for which Mr. Trump and some of his allies have expressed hostility or contempt.

Source: Harvesting Government History, One Web Page at a Time

I would have assumed that something like this would just be done as a matter of course by archive.org, but I guess it is a big enough job that it needs some human guidance and curation, beyond just pointing a web crawler at *.gov and calling it a day. The Times article doesn’t mention archive.org, but they are involved:

…the Internet Archive, along with partners from the Library of Congress, University of North Texas, George Washington University, Stanford University, California Digital Library, and other public and private libraries, are hard at work on the End of Term Web Archive, a wide-ranging effort to preserve the entirety of the federal government web presence, especially the .gov and .mil domains, along with federal websites on other domains and official government social media accounts.

As a cynic, I want to say that this is largely pointless, but I guess I do still have some hope for the future, since I’m actually kind of enthusiastic about this. It seems like the kind of thing my brother Patrick (who was a librarian) would have been interested in. (Though he, too, was a bit of a cynic at times.)