$8 blue check mistermix

I have to admit I’ve been hate watching Elon’s many meltdowns on Twitter. One example: his discovery of something every app developer knows — that Apple takes a 30% cut of everything sold on the App Store by devs who do more than $1 million of business. If Elon ever read a book on his Kindle, maybe he’d wonder why Amazon doesn’t let you buy books directly from the Kindle app. (Hint: it’s because Jeff Bezos didn’t want Steve Jobs to get his 30% cut whenever Jeff sold a e-book.) It will be perhaps even more than $44 worth of entertainment when Apple and Google yank Twitter from their app stores after Musk turns it into another Gab (which isn’t on either app store). However, since Truth Social is still on the app stores, that’s probably too much to hope.

The latest mordant chuckle comes from Elon’s picture of his bedside table, which has two pistolas on it, along with a bunch of empty cans of diet caffeine-free Coke, the drink of manly men everywhere. (Not pictured: his bottle of lotion and a dirty sock.) Well it turns out that one of his little bang-bang “guns” is a replica flintlock, and the other is a replica of a video game gun. The reason is obvious: Elon has a bunch of security (probably ex-SEAL, ex-Mossad and ex-KGB), and those guys wouldn’t let this numpty go within a mile of an unsecured real gun.

While we’re on this loathsome subject, a few quick hits:

• Elon isn’t going to make a phone and the right response is to point and laugh.
• I signed up for Mastodon but I can’t see how it will scale, since the overhead of every server talking to every other server to exchange messages will ultimately swamp those servers. Social media scaling is hard enough without adding in the extra complexity of distributed servers.
• I didn’t sign up for Post.News because there’s no fucking way I want to connect my LinkedIn with a social media site*. One of Twitter’s strengths is that it combines verified blue checks with anonymous clever folks like DougJ, who have tons of followers simply because their posts are good, no matter the identity of the source.
• There may be many other Twitter alternatives, but they haven’t been discovered, at least by me. If one of these alternatives is compelling, it will struggle when it is flooded by even a fraction of the current Twitter user base.

I suppose I should close with a comment about the terrible fact that someone like Elon can destroy a company that actually did a bit of good in the world, but, frankly, I’m out of fucks to give on that count. We’re doomed for so many deeper reasons than some rich dude acting out his midlife crisis in 240 character increments.

(* To be clear, you don’t have to connect your LinkedIn, but Post.News’ tagline is “Real People, Real News and Civil Conversations”. That’s 1 for 3 as a Twitter replacement, as far as I’m concerned.)

$44 Worth of EntertainmentPost + Comments (117)

A lot has been written about Rich Fierro, the man who saved countless lives in the Saturday’s Q Club massacre. But let’s not forget that it all began like this:

Fierro said he, his family and friends had gone out to see a show at the club and “have a good time.” 

The whole point of MAGA is a bunch of people who aren’t having a good time, have never had a good time, and couldn’t find a good time with a map and a search party, are trying to suck us into their bad time. If you’ve ever been to Colorado Springs, my condolences: it is a place of wide streets, narrow minds and, above all, bad times. There are megachurches everywhere. Focus on Family and other haterade-dispensing “christian” organizations have found a place where their angertainment has a receptive audience. There is nothing fun about fat white guys in goatees and Oakleys, AR-15s, Stepford wives and child molesting pastors.

Drag shows are, above all, a good time. Everything about them — the costumes, the dancing, the athletics — is fun.

Going to a drag show for a good time is something “average” Americans do — it is not a niche activity. Tucker Carlson, Focus on Family and all the other haters want to turn our good times into killing floors. Fuck them. My advice is that everyone should take in a good drag show over the holidays, and tip well, because those queens work hard.

The Death of Good TimesPost + Comments (189)

It’s fitting that the mass exodus of Twitter engineers coincided with the death of Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month. There is no more influential book about software engineering, and I really can’t say enough about how Brooks influenced my thinking about my chosen profession. The key insight that everyone repeats from the book is that adding engineers to a project won’t make it go faster, and might make it go slower. For me, though, one of the big lessons from the book is how Brooks takes an obvious fact — some engineers are far, far more productive than others — and tries to use that insight as a basis to form software teams. Brooks used the analogy of the “surgical team” where one surgeon (the best engineer) performs the most critical work, to try to leverage this disparity in ability.

Last night, a bunch of surgeons left the building at Twitter: this Twitter thread of Twitter engineers signing off is full of people with multi-year tenures. There is no recipe for building a major real-time system like Twitter, and there is no off-the-shelf software that can be purchased to keep it running. Every long-tenured engineer leaving the building is leaving with some special knowledge of a bespoke system. In normal times, those engineers would have been replaced and the rest of the team would educate the new engineer on the ins and outs of whatever system they’re maintaining. Yesterday, entire teams left. The knowledge they took with them is irreplaceable, in this context.

Like every big tech company that’s been around for years, I’m sure Twitter had more than a few senior engineers who were phoning it in. Being constructively lazy is one of the important characteristics of a good engineer, but some of them just build a sinecure and collect their big paychecks. So, over time, an owner of Twitter who had clue fucking one about software engineering might have undertaken strategic layoffs to lean down the organization without losing too much knowledge. Musk’s ultimatum: be hardcore or take three months’ severance, was a stupid, hamfisted effort to selectively cull the lazy that turned out to be a no-brainer for pretty much anyone who isn’t restricted by a visa or an absolute need to have a paycheck.

I’m not going to make predictions about when or how Twitter will fail. We may see major outages, or maybe Musk will hire enough contractor troubleshooters to keep it limping along. But the simple fact is that a man who died yesterday wrote a book almost 50 years ago that encapsulated everything that Elon doesn’t know about software, and we’re all going to see how violating those rules turns $44 billion into a tiny fraction of that number in less than a month.

Fred Brooks, RIPPost + Comments (249)

After shitting the bed running the NRSC, Rick Scott decided to challenge Mitch McConnell. And Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, among others, said the leadership vote should be delayed. Here’s how that went:

I hate Mitch McConnell as much as anyone, but Scott, Cruz and Rubio are just such laughable morons. Arguably, the loss of the Senate was a folie à deux between Trump’s shit candidates and Scott’s waste of millions of dollars.

Edited to add: I hope McConnell makes Cruz the ranking member of the Go Fuck Yourself Subcommittee of the Learn How to Wipe Your Ass Committee.

You Come at the King, You Best Not MissPost + Comments (218)

Jennifer Rubin nails it (gift link) in the second part of her piece on the Trump challengers:

[…] Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has abused immigrants, run roughshod over the First Amendment, regularly intervened in free markets for political reasons (e.g., bullying Disney for criticizing his policies), fanned white nationalism with his scaremongering about “critical race theory” and used the power of the state to persecute disfavored groups (e.g., LGBTQ students). It’s not even clear whether he rejects the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. (He has become adept at sidestepping questions.) In other words, DeSantis reflects many of authoritarian attributes the MAGA cult reveres; he’s just more disciplined than Trump.

Meanwhile, too many in the D.C. media bubble have treated Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin as a departure from Trumpism or a return to “normal” GOP politics. Wrong! Youngkin in his campaign for governor embraced election “integrity” measures premised on the need to prevent nonexistent fraud. He has waged war on public schools and also pushed the “critical race theory” issue. He even campaigned with Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, arguably the worst of the election deniers this campaign cycle. And let’s not forget the appalling “joke” he made about the vicious attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which he later apologized for. Despite his slightly better manners, he, too, is a MAGA figurehead.

Some other 2024 contenders — such as Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.) — tried to implement Trump’s coup plot by pushing the “big lie” and objecting to electors with no basis. They also both voted to acquit Trump twice in his impeachment trials and smeared the Justice Department and FBI for conducting a search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club for highly classified documents. And Cruz, who acknowledged that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection amounted to a “terrorist attack,” later groveled before Fox News’s Tucker Carlson to disassociate himself with his own remarks. It’s possible Hawley and Cruz are even worse than Trump, since they certainly should know better and understand the injurious impact of their lies.

The first part of her column is a heartfelt paean to conservativism that never was and never will be, but she definitely is not buying the DC bullshit that DeSantis is some kind of normal alternative to Trump. He’s just as bad or maybe worse.

Here’s a gift link to Josh Marshall and Kate Riga’s interview with Fetterman campaign manager Brendan McPhillips. If you have an hour to spend on it, this is some great insight into one of the best campaigns of this cycle.

Finally, I have a feeling that the right wing effort to shit on Gisele Fetterman will be successful in the way that the effort to shit on Pelosi, AOC and others has been successful: it may motivate a nutjob to attack her, but overall most sane people will see the misogny and hatred and be repulsed.

Morning ReadsPost + Comments (135)

Since I was complaining about bad/nonexistent national House race coverage, here’s a piece in the Seattle Times about the winner of the WA-3 contest, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. This was the R+5 seat occupied by Jaime Herrera Beutler, who lost the Republican primary to a nutcase named Kent because she voted to impeach Trump for 1/6. Read the whole thing, but here’s what stood out for me:

• A number of Democrats crossed over and voted for Kent in the primary. This sort of behavior is frowned upon by our betters in the political press, but it happens all the time, and so what? Herrera Beutler did one good thing with her impeachment vote, but let’s stop acting as if a Republican who did the very minimum she could do somehow deserves a pass.
• Gluesenkamp Perez runs a auto repair shop with her husband and stuck to a basic issues-oriented campaign. Kent wanted to overturn elections, ban abortions and prosecute Fauci for murder.
• Gluesenkamp Perez pledged not to vote for Nancy Pelosi for speaker, and she said she would vote to preserve gun rights. In CO-3, Frisch made the same pledge about Pelosi.

Just in case it isn’t clear, by a basic issues-oriented campaign, I mean one that did not shy away from talking about abortion, quite the contrary:

In 2020 I miscarried and needed immediate medical attention. Planned Parenthood was the only clinic that could see me, and I had to pass through a wall of protestors to get the care I needed.

The fight for our rights is my fight too. Honored to be endorsed by @PPact @PPAAWest pic.twitter.com/hTpwaSoSpm

— Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (@MGPforCongress) September 22, 2022

By the way, fuck those assholes who stand around in front of Planned Parenthood.

Anyway, If you have some stories on local races, please share them in the comments below. I’m still thinking about the failure here in New York and will have more to write about after the counting is done, but I’d rather focus on places where Democrats worked their asses off.

Be the Change…Post + Comments (106)

This Dan Froomkin piece on just how badly the political press blew their coverage of this election is worth a read, though most of you already know and understand it. In normie world, anyone who fucked up as badly as the US political press might at least take a minute to wonder why and perhaps correct course. Instead, they immediately double down with garbage like this:

That’s the Post. Immediately after the election, the Times hired a third reporter to crawl up Trump’s rectum to see what he had for dinner three days ago. (WTF does “back to basics” mean for Trump anyway? It’s not like he’s returning to lying and grifting — he’s never left.)

At the moment, one of the most fascinating events in recent politics history is unfolding before our eyes: we are headed for an almost-tie in the House, with the possibly winning party under the sway of the political equivalent of a cage full of feral cats. Some races that supposedly competent politicians should have won were lost, and others were won by energetic, interesting newcomers. There are tons of stories to be written about the election and its aftermath. They would contain the same soap opera elements of the Trump stories, so these reporters wouldn’t have to cloud their beautiful minds with tawdry, boring stuff like policy.

Instead, we get the same old, same old tedious coverage of the Presidential horse race with zero soul searching about the horrible wrongness of the last three months of press coverage. Nevermind that idiot fodder like a Trump/DeSantis poll is completely worthless until things settle after this election. Political reporting, for the national press, is nothing but 2024 horserace bullshit.

I’m about as big of a political junkie as you’ll meet, and I don’t even bother reading much of today’s political coverage because it is all the same shit. That’s not to say that there isn’t any decent coverage. For example, this Slate piece covering the gross failure of Sean Patrick Maloney’s campaign is a combination of campaign history and score settling, which is typical of assessments of losing campaigns. It isn’t the acme of political journalism, but at least it isn’t about Trump or Biden in 2024. But it is telling that I’d rather read Ruben Gallego’s Twitter feed than most of the current political coverage.

No Tears and No Hearts Breaking, No RemorsePost + Comments (301)