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O Canada
I applaud Canada’s newly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney standing firm and saying straight up that Canada’s not for sale during his talks with what somehow continues to pass as America’s seat of government. Good on him. Glad he did. But he didn’t have much of a choice in this non-real reality TV series that needs to be canceled.
There’s a trouble-making part of me that would have loved to have heard him say to the decaying orange turd sitting next to him something like, “I’ll tell you what, Mr. President. You agree to step down from your office and our government will give any proposal consideration. Other than that, no thank you.” I mean if we’re going to waste our time on nonsensical fantasies, let’s have some fun. Otherwise this farce is running out of steam while the players play a game that the audience is already exhausted with.
Of course that would ever happen and I’m not criticizing Carney, He laid down the appropriate marker while standing up to the bully-in-chief. But at some point, from some quarter, I’d like to see someone land a harder punch in the nose or a kick in the groin. Even if they were only rhetorical.
Elbows up!
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Apple’s Long Term Challenges Complicate The Short Term
Mark Gurman offers up a relatively thorough summary of the number of challenges Apple is facing going forward in his weekly Power On column. Things always go forward. The question is always how.
The original link above is paywalled, but here’s a web archive link to the story.
And here’s the summary:
Gurman calls this point in Apple’s history a “critical juncture.” I would agree. The many moving parts, both surrounding Apple, and of its own making, have put Cook and company squarely in that critical juncture. This comes as Apple and those that make their living talking about Apple are gearing up for this year’s World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) next month.
Gurman delivers the punchline well below the headline that neatly summarizes why WWDC is not going to be able to address all of these challenges, but also why the turmoil is going to continue.
Speaking specifically about Apple’s race to catch up in the AI realm he says:
it’s going to be a while before we can tell if Apple is heading in the right direction
Perhaps that should have been the lede. He could have easily said the same about each of these challenges he enumerates.
But there’s also a larger, more encompassing challenge that makes surmounting each even more difficult. The tech world is moving at a pace that Apple is unaccustomed to. Apple’s historic long view has served it well over the years, but the window on that long view is increasingly narrowing its aperture.
Apple may spend its June introducing and setting the table for what’s coming later this year, but already most of the smart players who follow and promote Apple are shifting their focus to the bigger, and more critical, table stakes coming long after this year’s summer and fall hype cycles end. The now familiar “coming later this year” now means much less when the real issues may only begin to be addressed further down the road.
Waiting “a while” is not an easy sell. Especially these days.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Sunday Morning Reading
So much is broken these days as we watch more things break. Of course the choice is to watch or not. I prefer watching. I prefer paying attention. That’s why I share these links in Sunday Morning Reading and throughout the week.
Kicking off this week is an excellent essay from Jia Tolentino called My Brain Finally Broke. It’s one of the more powerful pieces I have read on all that’s breaking. The above is the original link. This one is to the web archive of the piece. Obviously I encourage you to read all I like to in Sunday Morning Reading, but this is one you shouldn’t miss.
NatashaMH takes on The Paradox of Choice. If you ask me, we too often enjoy choosing the paradox.
Joan Westenberg takes a look at what happens when one chooses conventional wisdom and the systems and ways things have always worked. Until those ways become a weakness and a downfall in The Cannae Problem. We’re watching this happen in real time folks.
This past week Amazon’s ass-kissing founder Jeff Bezos looked like he might have tired of the stink. In the wake of Trump’s tariffs word got out that Amazon would show customers the amount of a price increase that was due to the Trump tax. That quickly changed. Some say with a phone call from the bumbling boss. Harry McCracken suggests, (I did too), that merchants should let us know who’s screwing who in this broken mess. Check out Of Course We Deserve To Know The True Costs of Tariffs.
What Should We Do If An AI Becomes Conscious? I’m not sure. But then again, look what we as conscious beings are already doing. Mathew Ingram takes a look.
Yanis Varoufakis takes a look at Trump And The Trump Of The Technolords. It’s not a pretty look at the reasoning behind what seems to be happening without reason.
There’s not much new news in Matthew Cunningham-Cook’s piece titled Elon Musk And His DOGE Bro Have Cashed In On American’s Retirement Savings, but it’s a good summary of what has happened for those who choose to pay attention. A better one for those who choose otherwise.
To end this week with an article about hope, take a look at Lessons From A Physician About Hope by Leif Hass. Yes, hope is important. Here’s hoping you always choose wisely.
(Image from Roman Kraft on Unsplash.)
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
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Andor, Or We Are The Heroes We Need
The ever expanding universe of the Star Wars franchise is one that often leaves me colder than I imagine I’d feel if I were floating alone in space. That’s the same with most of these run the IP into the ground franchises. When something comes out of those factories that’s actually decent, it’s a surprise. One of the surprising beacons of warmth has been the Andor series, which is currently streaming in its second season. I’m also a fan of the movie Rogue One for which Andor is a prequel.
Yes, the story is about the rebel rebellion against the Empire, but there’s something different about Andor. Recently I read a piece from Derek Pharr on Nerdist, Hope Without The Force: How Andor Rewrites Rebellion. It helped me put my finger on why the show feels different and surprisingly current beyond the scope of small screen entertainment.
Here’s a quote:
Andor makes the quiet argument that the Jedi weren’t just irrelevant to the uprising against the Empire. They were liabilities and detached from everyday suffering. The Jedi were fixated with balance and prophecy, and wildly ineffective at stopping fascism when it counted. The Jedi Order had their shot. They blew it. Meanwhile, on Ferrix and Narkina 5, regular people are building the rebellion through sweat, sacrifice, and solidarity. Not the Force.
Whether you are a fan of the series or not, I encourage you to read the entire piece. Pharr’s thesis is indeed a good one about the series. But for me it spins off into many of the challenging moments we face today in the wake of our own evolving evil empire. One that’s certainly not intelligently designed, much less preordained.
Bottom line, it’s going to come down to those of us on the ground.
I think we need to eternalize and begin acting on that instead of waiting around and looking for heroes among congress critters, political parties, media mouthpieces, TV lawyers and those at the bar, or even judges to come to the rescue. We know what’s ahead is going to continue to get uglier. We’re probably going to have to meet ugly with a little ugly ourselves. Cue Tina Turner’s We Don’t Need Another Hero.
As Pharr puts it,
The Jedi were legends. The rebellion was real.
No elegant solutions from a more civilized age. Just people. Flawed, desperate, courageous people, who decide enough is enough.
He also argues that noble as they were, the Jedi were spectacularly bad at saving things in their attempts to reclaim balance. I don’t know about you, but that sounds frighteningly familiar.
Read Pharr’s piece if and when you watch Andor. If you don’t watch the show, read the piece anyway.
Pie in the sky? Perhaps. But I’ll take a serving and ask for seconds.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Arrogance Is Not A Good Look
Arrogance is never a good look. We all wear it to a degree. Too many think they wear it well. Until they don’t. When whatever flavor of arrogance they’ve draped themselves in trips them up, the fall makes Icarus look he’s still soaring.
The lessons of history, literature, religion, heck — even cartoons — tell us that all inflated egos, like balloons, either pop or fizzle. As long as the balloon can be kept aloft, life’s a party. Funny how we’re able to brush that all aside. Arrogantly so.
Seeing Apple get a real courtroom comeuppance yesterday, tech titans in general thinking they can out reason human reasoning, and the continual display of cock and bull topsy-turvying in the political world, one would think that most sensible people, especially those with armies of lawyers on retainer, would begin to sense a few chinks in their armor long before they become dangerous vulnerabilities. They’d probably be served better employing fools or court jesters.
Oh, wait….
Given how we’ve turned gambling into the national sport, it makes one wonder how long before we gamify the entire human experience and begin betting on the timing of career stumbles and failures beyond what already happens in the stock market. Predictable as they are though, the odds wouldn’t offer much change of a big payout.
Then again, keep in mind what Terry Pratchett says:
Modesty is only arrogance by stealth.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Dan Moren Questions What It Means To Be An Apple Fan These Days
The headline of Dan Moren’s final column for MacWorld says it all: I’m An Apple Fan In 2025. What Does That Even Mean?
Moren has been writing for MacWorld and been a sensible voice inside the Apple community for close to 20 years. He’s signing off his regular column gig for MacWorld, but he’ll still be around on the likes of Six Colors, podcasts, and I’m sure other places. Which is good, because his voice is an important and reliable one.
In his farewell, he raises the question many are asking of themselves, and the questions many are asking of Apple in its current state and our own state of affairs. As he puts it in a nutshell of a statement:
As Apple started becoming more and more successful, I’ve become increasingly skeptical that one should ever really consider oneself a “fan”of a company.
It’s a well thought out and well reasoned post and one that I think should be read by anyone considering themselves a fan, or a no longer fan, or even someone who just doesn’t care for Apple or its products.
A big part of the self-examination I know quite a few folks are going through in assessing their current relationship with Apple deals with issues bigger than just the products. For lack of a better description call them corporate issues. Even using that label — corporate — feels dirty to type in ways that seem damning in more dangerous ways these days. But that’s a fungible feeling and thinking that’s becoming increasingly tangible.
Here’s the thing. Technology advances. Humans advance. Nothing that feels foundational or allegiance adhering, or even worth being infatuated about is going to ever stay the same. Nor are our feelings about what we first might have fallen in love with, regardless of how the object of that affection itself grows and changes. Change is constant.
Microsoft had my allegiance back in the Tablet PC days because they won it when those much maligned devices provided a better, more productive way to do my work. Microsoft changed. I did too. iPads replaced what Tablet PCs were for me in my work and my play, and those are the tools I still use today. Do I think that will be forever? Not a chance. I mourned the loss of Tablet PCs. I’m sure if Apple stopped making iPads, I’d go through a similar grieving process. But again, that’s change. That’s life.
That’s also growth. But growth on the human side of the ledger rarely equals growth on the corporate side. In my brief time on this planet the two have never added up to successful equation that yields anything other than diverging results. That’s one thing I don’t ever expect to change.
Kudos to Dan on a job and career well done, (and still going) and kudos for a lovely farewell column in MacWorld.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Hostile and Political Amazon
I guess someone at Amazon read my post from a few weeks ago about how it is possible to bring a bully to heal. I doubt it. But it is fun to watch Jeff Bezos make the Trump administration sweat a bit under similar circumstances. At least for the moment.
In response to the Trump tariffs, which are already driving up prices and driving down consumer confidence, Amazon has announced that they will be displaying the amount of price increases that are due to tariffs on its product pages.
Of course this generated an immediate response from the White House with the press secretary, standing at the podium beside the Treasury secretary, labeling Amazon’s move as a “hostile and political act.”
Oh my.
Three things to quickly comment on:
First, when you need to trot out Treasury Secretary Bessent to try and clam waters you’re losing. As I’ve said before, he reminds me of the LaLa guy. Remember him?
Whatever Bessent says seems to make as much sense.
Second, we just reached the 100 day mark of this dangerous farce of an administration and the meaningless polls are telling us folks are unhappy. You don’t need polls to know that, see that, or feel that. The unease in the air is thicker than this Spring’s pollen count.
You can only create a fake reality in the movies. And even then, those fake realities fall apart in the end.
Third, most early bets are Bezos will fold and pull back on this. But one can only bend a knee so far before it breaks. Or they don’t let you launch any new satellites.
And the bending begins.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Sunday Morning Reading
Back from a brief hiatus, there’s plenty to read and share. It feels like it’s becoming increasingly important, and perhaps more urgent to do both. I promise there’s some happiness amidst all of the Strum and Drang down the page.
First up, Canadian Stephen Marche is singing the Red, White and Blues. It’s easy to look from the outside in, or even from within and be dismayed at what’s going on in this country. Because it’s so damn easy to see. Unless of course you’re still in shock, or choosing to ignore it. Marche’s tune doesn’t hit a false note as he says America was a “country of bubbles.”
David Todd McCarty is back Poking The Bear. It’s good seeing him write about politics again.
Drik de Klein of History of Sorts wrote Evil, I Think, Is The Absence of Empathy back in 2019, using Captain G.M. Gilbert’s quote from the Nuremberg trials as the headline. I remember reading it a while ago and it resurfaced this week, proving, as always, just how short our attention spans are. Or perhaps our comprehension and retention capabilities.
NatashaMH says, “I can’t stand people being ignorant bastards” in her excellent piece Our Modern Discontents. Again, a viewpoint from outside the red, white, and blue bubble that feels like it’s ready to pop.
Jacob Silverman’s Welcome To The Slop World: How The Hostile Internet Is Driving Us Crazy is an invitation to a party that turned into something nobody was expecting.
Speaking of bubbles, big tech is in hot water of its own boiling these days. Google is facing anti-trust charges and a possible breakup that probably won’t happen. Wendy Grossman takes a look at Three Times A Monopolist.
Who’d a thunk it? Bot Farms Invade Social Media To Hijack Popular Sentiment. Eric Schwartzman does some digging in those all too fertile fields.
This past week we celebrated William Shakespeare’s birthday. As usual lots of words were written about the writer who used them better than anyone else to describe the human condition. One of the accepted parts of the Bard’s legacy is that he was an absent husband that left his family behind to pursue his calling. But a discovery of a letter might just change that. Check out what Ephrat Livini has to say about the possibility in an Overlooked Letter Rewrites History of Shakespeare’s Bad Marriage.
And for that happiness I promised, I’ll stick with Shakespeare and Cora Fox with ‘I Were Happy But Little Happy, If I Could Say How Much’; Shakespeare’s Insights On Happiness Have Held Up For More Than 400 Years. We often focus on his tragedies, but he reveled in the joys of life as well. Keep those happy bubbles afloat as long as you can. Pop the bad ones.
(Image from Rey Seven on Unsplash)
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
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Néle Azevedo’s Melting Men Reminds Us That Life Is Short
Life is indeed short and it makes sense to pay attention when things that remind us of that come back into focus when someone new discovers them. Néle Azevedo’s famous ice sculptures, known as “Minimum Moment”, seem to be making the rounds again recently and I thought I’d highlight them here. I’ve never seen them in person yet I’ve always been taken by every photograph I’ve seen of them.
The installation features small ice figures sitting on public steps around parts of the world begin melting almost as soon as they are set in place, reminding us our our short time here on this planet and the ephemeral nature of our place.
The photo above is from the 2005 installation “Minimum Moment” in São Paulo and photographed by Marcos Gorgatti. You can read more about it here.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Time For The Shibboleth of Targeted Ads To Die
We all fell for it. We all thought it would be beneficial to us as users. I don’t want to say we were all suckers, so I’ll just say we were naive. But in the end we were all suckers. Targeted advertising was supposed to cater to our needs, desires, and wishes. Surfacing what we were interested in out of the clutter was a hope and a promise that died in colliding avalanches of greed and gluttony.
To be fair some ad targeting actually works. To also be fair, even a broken clock is right twice a day. But the money came rolling in and the temptation to grab it all became far too much and made it far too easy to let slip those early promises.
Now the brains behind Artificial Intelligence are doing what many suspected from the get go and edging their way into the browser wars. TechCrunch has an interesting post talking about Perplexity’s plans to get to know us better by building a better browser.
Here’s the money quote:
“That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser, is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you,” Srinivas said. “Because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is purely work-related. It’s not like that’s personal.”
Focus on the “personal” part.
Both Perplexity and OpenAI have made statements they would be interested in buying Google’s Chrome browser should Google be forced into a breakup for anti-trust reasons. But that’s years away. So why wait? Better to get in the game now before the regulators catch up. Or before all the data that’s good to grab gets grabbed and starts feeding on itself.
There’s irony in all of this that underlies and underlines the dissembling behind it that might just be seeping into the open. One of the promises of this new technology is that it will free us from drudgery, giving us all more time for creative pursuits and more balanced lifestyles. But the underlying goal is the same. Grab as much data as possible, especially “personal” data. That’s the currency. That will always be the currency.
Here’s the second money quote from Perplexity’s Aarvind Srinivasa:
“On the other hand, what are the things you’re buying; which hotels are you going [to]; which restaurants are you going to; what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you.”
AI might continue its move into the enterprise, but that’s not enough. And if the corporate mindset of using AI to replace workers continues, that equation points to diminishing returns eventually, even if the advertisers never catch on.
We all know how this story plays out. Because it’s a rerun. And too often a plagiarized one as well.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3
Musings on life, the theatre, technology, culture and the occasional emu sighting
Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3 