If not - when do you stand on bullying? Just keep taking it?

If it is - then … well read on … is Chris Rock America?

Take #1: Will Smith’s assault on Chris Rock violated the law—so if Rock wants to press charges against Smith, Smith should face punishment. But Rock provoked Smith with a cruel joke about his wife, and he shouldn’t have made the joke.

Take #2: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine violated international law—so Ukraine’s armed resistance to it is justifiable, as are sanctions and other forms of punishment. But America provoked Russia with NATO expansion and various other policies that America, if in Russia’s shoes, would have found unacceptable—and America shouldn’t have done that.

I don’t have any polling data to back this up, but my sense is that if you espouse the first of those two takes you won’t get much blowback. In fact, you may be credited with unusual balance, prudence, even Solomonic wisdom.

But if you espouse the second take—and here, though I have no polling data, I do have relevant personal experience, since I’ve been espousing a version of it for weeks—you do get a fair amount of blowback.

Read The Whole Thing

Post Script

I am not saying Rock or America was bullying - but its surely in the spectrum?

“The Economist estimates zero excess deaths among the elderly in New Zealand, for instance, and gives the whole region an excess-mortality range of negative 31 to positive 37 per 100,000 residents, meaning it’s possible fewer people died there than would’ve had we never even heard of SARS-CoV-2.”

and …

“The U.S. drove an unprecedented vaccine-innovation campaign in 2020, which empowered much of the world to turn the page on the pandemic’s deadliest phases, then, in 2021, utterly failed to take advantage of its power itself. But what is perhaps even more striking is that American vaccination coverage isn’t just bad, by the standards of its peers, but getting worse. About two-thirds of Americans have received two shots of vaccine, a level that is in line with Israel and not far off from the U.K., though below many other wealthy countries. (And even in the U.K., vaccination was more effectively directed toward the old.) But over the last six months, the country has had an opportunity to make up that gap with boosters and has simply not taken it. Only 29 percent of Americans have had a booster shot of the vaccine, which puts us behind Slovenia, Slovakia, and Poland and means that less than half of those people happy to be vaccinated a year ago have chosen to get a third shot through Delta and Omicron. Booster campaigns seem like an obvious opportunity for easy public-health gains, yet remarkably few Americans seem to think it’s worth the trouble. Why? For everything we think we know about the pandemic and how people have responded to it, that one remains a maddening mystery.”

Read The Article (Apple News)

Sad.

I listen to my podcasts via Castro .. and every now and then revisit the occasional alternative in the hope of getting a missing piece of functionality.

Overcast just delivered.

Or is it that I just found the functionality in Overcast?

What I wanted?

When listening to a podcast just be able to add it to your playlist of choice … rather than leaving the podcast, going to the playlist to add a podcast, scrolling down the list to find the podcast and then adding it.

Overcast is now where I am listening.

Now - because we are never satisfied are we?

If only the smart lists were really smart and let me create a playlist purely of (say) any and all PBS and BBC podcasts for example? NO manual selection needed.

Read the article on Wired here …. (Paywall)

It’s not yet ready for prime time .. but still ….

So, using Visual Studio Code, I wrote a plain ol’ comment describing the first step I needed done:

write a function that opens a pdf document and returns the text 
 For about four seconds, nothing happened. Then Copilot wrote this: 
 def pdf_to_text(filename): 
pdf = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(open(filename, “rb”)) 
text = “” 
for i in range(pdf.getNumPages()): 
text += pdf.getPage(i).extractText() 
return text

”With this method, it is possible to achieve as many as 2 to 3 tasks in a single day, so long as you live alone and nobody else tries to contact you.

If at any point during the Puttanesca Method (so-called because there are more olives in it than in the Pomodoro) someone tries to contact you – whether by text, by phone call, by email, by saying your name quietly in the next room, whatever — cease all work at once and go directly back to bed.

Read It All

I just got my iPad out with its Magic Keyboard and started to work. I was reminded how I like the focus of just a single app, no multiple windows, just lock-in on what you are doing - no distractions - lovely and really makes sense - but - BUT … that screen sure does feel tiny.

And then I pulled the keyboard off and just starred at that giant piece of glass.

My goodness - the screen is enormous!!!

If I share an article to Drafts from NetNewswire, something like this appears in my draft

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/single/2022-02-25-0

If I first open the item in the browser … the full info, created in Markdown appears in my draft, like this.

Nelson Mandela’s paintings from prison to be sold as NFTs – Web3 Is Going Just Great

Anyone know if I can get the full Markdown direct from the feed rather than needing to go to the browser first?

In another life I worked for Oracle in the UK and thence onto the US. When I first met my boss to be, the UK offices were in Richmond. By the time I had joined, they had moved to Chertsey. Within a couple of years we had moved to Bracknell and around year 6 (by which time I was in San Francisco), Reading became their home.

Trying to find some picture of the buildings for a different reason and came across this.

Just a couple of examples. Click through for the mess that it was.

How sad.

The Cherstey offices were always my favorites and home to good friends and good people working on so many things including Oracle’s FIRST applications - delivered through C.A.S.E. Who knew it had fallen into such disrepair? The photos seem to date back to 2015 … but looks like they are no more - and an elderly care home is now there. I wonder if there any residents today that worked in those office back then?

It was long enough ago.

This post originated as a comment in another thread, but it made me think more - again - about how language is constantly being twisted to operate against people.

I wrote

“Language is powerful - funny how we use the term ‘right to work’ state - rather than ‘union busting’ state ….

and

It’s like how we used to have data warehouses - but now we have data ‘lakes’ and ‘mountains’ that we keep in ‘farms’ - so that we can ‘harvest’ information … it’s all so wonderfully natural - and nothing to worry about …

What say you?

Stone Age culture in the Orkney islands

When I was eight years old, we took a family trip to the Orkney islands off the north coast of Scotland. I don’t know why we went there particularly, but it was amazing. I almost don’t want to go back because it might break the spell the place has cast over my life.

I was 18 when I did that journey (sans family)

Never been back - despite it being amazing. Not really thought about it before - but I think subconsciously Doug has drawn out my reasoning.

In case you hadn’t noticed - I am in a bit of a catch up mode.

This for example is a set of links that clearly at one time all connected in my head, but for the life of me - I can’t see that now. That said - I am pretty sure that all of them date back to January 2021.

Work

Tom Evslin - Who’s Pocketing the Profit - I think we know!

Josh Bersiin - The Crusade For Employee Experience: How Did We Get Here? - I find it telling that ‘Employee Experience’ is so far behind ‘Customer Experience’ - just in case you had any doubt where Corporate priorities lie.

Free Speech

Benedict Evans - Speech and Publishing

Beyond Platforms: Private Censorship, Parler, and the Stack | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Robin Rendle - Hijack

Apple and Chips

Stratechery - Intel Problems