Ed Zitron, writing about the tendency of Big Tech execs like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff to endlessly promise amazing innovations and the market’s tendency to keep falling for this dangerous nonsense: Benioff, I note, is no stranger to jumping on a bandwagon. In 2016 Salesforce was the “first comprehensive AI platform with CRM” — a phrase that may seem superficially impressive, but actually doesn’t mean anything when you think about it.
Josh Marshall, on whether it matters that the Stormy Daniels case goes first:
Second, as a colleague helped refresh my memory earlier in the week, it’s really not a notional offense. If we had known in the final weeks of the 2016 election that a presidential candidate would arrange a hefty payment to kill a story about his sleeping with a porn star and do it by committing tax fraud and campaign finance fraud, I don’t think any of us would have said, “Oh, well, that kind of stuff happens all the time. Let’s not pretend those types of fraud are crimes.” Indeed, Trump’s lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, who executed the deal on Trump’s behalf, has already done jail time for the offense. It’s pretty hard to say it’s a non-issue when a guy a rung down the ladder already did time for the exact same facts and actions. In other words, we should all refresh our memories a bit. It’s not trying to commit election fraud, or launching a coup or stealing a lot of classified government property. But it’s not nothing either.
If it were up to me, would I want to see Trump indicted in Georgia or for the false electors scheme first? Sure. But it’s not. And there’s not all that much more to say about it. When you look at all the facts, it’s more irony than travesty. This is a real crime. It’s just that the other crimes are vastly more grave. That’s not a big point in Trump’s favor.
I have been reading Josh Marshall’s stuff for nearly twenty(!) years now, and I still find his perspective extremely helpful when trying to think through the crazy state of our politics.
Frankly, I’m not getting my hopes up that anything comes of any of the various cases against the former president. It’s not because there is no there there, but rathe because I tend to think that our system (writ large) is not really up to the task of dealing with this sort of crisis. That said, I still think all of this stuff is worth pursuing, if for no other reason than that the historical record is there.
I think it’s also worth noting that if one or more of these cases does land, we should be prepared for more Jan. 6 stuff. Again, that’s not a reason not to pursue criminal indictments and prosecutions against him, but it’s not like his hardcore supporters—to say nothing of all the right-wing extremists who have latched onto him for their own purposes—are going to shuffle quietly off the stage.
With The Bad Batch and this current season of The Mandalorian, I feel like the Fav/loniverse is leaning hard into the idea of cloning. Between that and the fact that Thrawn is theoretically still floating around out there somewhere and seems likely to factor into the upcoming Ahsoka series, it really makes me wonder if we are heading toward significant parts of Heir To the Empire (besides Thrawn, obviously) being pulled back into cannon. Maybe some bits of Dark Empire too?
Anne Helen Peterson on doing stuff alone:
What matters, I think, is this continual work of constructing a life that ultimately feels chosen. That doesn’t necessarily mean controlled; there is so much in life we can’t schedule, change, manage, or even anticipate, all manner of disappointments and disasters and swift left turns. But we can choose how we navigate those obstacles and valleys, how we move towards and through and away from others, how we cultivate precious corners for ourselves and also feasts of connection and intimacy.
Matt Birchler has a design change suggestion for the Workouts app on the Apple Watch:
My proposal is very simple, I just want to be able to dismiss the after-workout summary without scrolling through the whole thing.
One thought was to just move the current “done” button to the top and push everything else down, but that would push the time off screen, which is annoying as well. That lead me to using the standard system back button used all over watchOS already, and I think it’s a good fit here. You lose zero vertical space for the content and it uses a system control users understand.
I support this suggestion 100%.
Probably nine times out of ten, I forget to scroll all the way down and tap the Done button, and then find it still waiting there for me the next time I open Workouts. The tenth time out of ten, when I do remember to tap the button, nothing happens and I have to tap it a second time.
This latest episode of The Mandalorian had strong Andor vibes.
Also, autocorrect on my phone seems to have learned the word “Mandalorian,” which is kind of awesome.
Trying to close out the workday on a Friday afternoon and I have deployed ZZ Top.
While scrolling through my RSS feeds, I ran across a Substack newsletter that had a reference to something someone else had written, and when I clicked the link, it to took me to a tweet that then linked to the actual article that was being referenced, and I feel like my brain has just been pulled inside-out.
As usual, I am amazed at how much more productive and positive I feel about work when I do not have some annoying, artificial deliverable (“I just need a few slides showing BLAH BLAH BLAH…”) hanging over my head.