Wednesday Morning

In case anyone needed a reminder.

Tuesdays seem to be the new doc dump day. I guess that makes the story old news by the time the Sunday talk shows roll around.

Tuesday Evening

enjoy

Choose A Path

It isn't perfectly simple, of course, but I've always leaned towards social media platforms - and that includes publishing sites like BLOGGER - being as content neutral possible. For social media you do have to give users good tools to control who they let themselves interact with, and some lines for dealing with users who engage in actual harassment (and twitter specifically has a bot problem), but they make a big mistake getting to deep into the content filtering game. Of course Facebook has always had strong content "standards" of a certain type.

Let me post stupid shit on my wall. If other people want to share it, who cares. The problem is that facebook specifically has had ever evolving ways of not just letting you do this, but actively encouraging "sharing" and the placement (purchase) of ads which push bullshit content, along with their own content curation. And that's because they want to make money off of the bullshit. I mean, I only see bullshit on facebook, aside from the what trusted friends actually post. That's where the money is.

And there's no such as a neutral "algorithm." Again, they don't need the damn algorithms. But that's where the money is...

Well Then

What can one say, really.

"Trump lies frequently, or tells falsehoods frequently, or stretches the truth frequently, but he also often tells the truth," Haberman said.

Headlines

I, also, too, sometimes drive a self-driving car in manual mode.

Uber self-driving cars back on public roads, but in manual mode

Welfare For The Right Sorts Of People

Trade is a much more complicated issue than The Discourse ever allows for and quite possibly "tariffs plus subsidies" is actually good policy sometimes! It depends on your policy goal! (This is another economics-influenced issue, that some abstract yet weirdly selectively applied Econ 101 notion of efficiency is the only legitimate policy goal). But, well...it is what it is.

White House readies plan to extend about $12 billion in emergency aid to farmers caught in Trump’s escalating trade war

Above my pay grade, but I'm sure most of this isn't going to kindly Farmer Joe and his 50 acres. Big ag.

TRONC'd

I think Athenae slightly exaggerates with her "nothing to do with the internet" take on the newspaper business's problems, but it was certainly was used an excuse before the internet really existed. "The internet will hurt us one day unless we change" was flipped to "the internet has killed us, dead, in 2003" and was stupid. I do think small local papers probably would've had problems even if perfectly managed and alt-weeklies, which once thought they were immune to the evil internet or even thrived on it, seem to have been killed by it. Of course we can always argue a bit about whether "newspaper" means print copy or just a news organization resembling what we think of as a newspaper.

But it's hard to believe papers in larger cities - LA, Chicago, Philly - could not have found ways to survive, and fairly easily, if not for various waves of mismanagement (yes all those cities still have papers, but they've all had their problems) and looting.

Shockingly, these things didn’t magically make the papers more money. In fact, they started bleeding readers, and the advertisers followed. You’ll notice I haven’t talked about THE DASTARDLY INTERNET yet. That’s because while all this was going on the Internet barely existed.

When it finally came to be, and mobile devices brought news to people wherever they were, news organizations were enfeebled, directionless creatures wounded by so many years of mistreatment that they couldn’t take advantage of a new medium even if they wanted to. And let’s be honest, a lot of the people involved didn’t want to take advantage of the Internet. They wanted to take a damn nap, and could you blame them really.

Morning Thread

Hahaha! Of course, Cohen kept the dirt. It's the only insurance he had.

Sing

Such fun.

As the newfound silence between Trump and Cohen turns into a potential cold war, Cohen has told friends that one of his biggest regrets is the embarrassment heaped upon First Lady Melania Trump. This weekend, the First Lady’s spokeswoman said that she was “focused on her role as a mother and as First Lady” and would have no further comment regarding the tapes. Cohen has said he hopes to apologize to her someday. Meanwhile, his feelings toward her husband, and towards those he believes are part of the strategy to discredit him, are chillier. “If they think for a second that the efforts to discredit me aren’t known to me, they are sadly mistaken,” he has told friends. “Did they think I was just going to roll over and die?”

Monday Evening

enjoy

BoomerCorps

Oh yes, that's the ticket.

NYC Can't Exist Without The Subway

If all the rail in Philly disappeared over night, it would be bad but the city wouldn't collapse. NYC would just collapse. You can't have that kind of population density (both resident and daytime) without a high capacity mass transit system. There is no room for all the cars.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, after declaring the subway to be in a state of emergency, promised that a rescue plan by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority would deliver results. The authority’s chairman, Joseph J. Lhota, said subway riders would see improvements “relatively quickly.”

But one year later, subway service remains in many ways the same — dismal.

There Will Always Be National News Coverage

It's the local news that's the problem. Bad management and vultures have hastened its demise, but I don't quite know what the business model is.

The New York Daily News is shedding about half of its editorial team, marking a grim development for the venerable but beleaguered tabloid.
An email sent to staffers on Monday morning said that the paper's parent company Tronc is "fundamentally restructuring the Daily News," an effort that will gut the newsroom and dramatically shift editorial priorities. The unsigned email was sent from Tronc's "talent and engagement" team.

So What

I guess if you're a politician trying to save your job then blaming everyone else is a useful strategy, but it won't change the reality that the EU doesn't particularly care and "no deal" is going to destroy the country.

Britain’s foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has warned there is a risk of the UK leaving the EU in March 2019 without a deal because of stalling by the bloc’s negotiators, and that British views of Europe would sour as a result.

The Attention Span of A Gnat

Another Monday, another day of President Deals making crazy war threats (Iran) on the twitter machine.

By day 2 of war he would have forgotten all about it.

Morning Thread

Shut up Comey edition.

America's Worst Humans

Democrats, please, please don’t lose your minds and rush to the socialist left. This president and his Republican Party are counting on you to do exactly that. America’s great middle wants sensible, balanced, ethical leadership.

— James Comey (@Comey) July 22, 2018

American Journalism In One Tweet

Republicans claim the classified documents reveal FBI bias in favor of Hillary Clinton; Democrats say the documents are evidence of deep connections between Russia and the Trump campaign. https://t.co/94btCjbQEi

— NPR (@NPR) July 22, 2018

Do Better

It's really not much to ask of politicians, is it?

Morning Thread

Saturday Night

Rock on.

Saturday Evening

Scott killed himself. I don't know why. We all have demons. I saw frabbit a few months before he died.