Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Typepad to Shut Down on September 30

Ending an act

This blog is named Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3. I may be a theatre geek, but I’m not a fan of the three-act structure. The name came about because there were first and second acts preceding it. The first act was on Windows Live Spaces (long since dead and gone) back in the day before I ever thought of this as something I’d enjoy doing. Then there was a Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 2 on Typepad.

Well all plays, regardless of act structure have an ending. The curtain is coming down on that second act in the same way it did on the first one. Typepad is shutting down. Per the announcement on the Everything Typepad blog, the service will shut down on September 30th, 2025.

Typepad users have until September 30 to export their data. After that, all access will be terminated.

Everything in the corporeal world reverts back to dust. So do all the bits in the digital one.

Fall Feelings and Cotton Candy Clouds

Changes

I think we’ve moved out of the summer heat for this year. Temperatures have cooled. Humidity and the haze from Canadian fires have been replaced with direr air and crystal blue clear skies. It feels like we’re moving into Fall.

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I’m not sure if it’s the real thing, or what some call Faux Fall. Either way I’ll take it.

Mornings are cool. Not quite crisp yet. Just cool. Midday temperatures are comfortable. And then the nights cool off again. We’ve experienced that in three different Midwest states on our travel recently.

The icing on the cake has been a steady stream of what my daughter used to call Cotton Candy Clouds. They’ve been floating through the crystal blue skies constantly since Saturday, regardless of where we’ve been.

I’m just going to call it all pleasant. Yup. That’s the word. Pleasant.

Of course we’re bound to have a warmup again at some point before things change for good and we complain about missing Summer.

Governors Are Standing Up

The Chicago Way

For the moment at least it looks like Democratic governors are going to be leading the way rhetorically as we attempt to find our way out of the dictatorship we find ourselves in.

Yes, you read that correctly. We’re already in a dictatorship. That’s my view. Most, including the dictator himself do not want to openly acknowledge it, because as I said in this post, once he claims it all, he cuts off the spigot of easy money from campaign donations. A grifter never cuts bait while there’s still a pond to fish.

But that’s not what this post is about.

Governors are indeed standing up and making some noise. We’re getting different styles and approaches and that’s a good thing. Tossing different kinds of rhetorical punches from different directions makes it tougher to defend against, certainly when your opponent has a tough time completing thoughts and sentences.

If you’re paying attention at all, you already know that Gavin Newsom is playing hardball in his mimicking of Trump’s bombastic style, albeit more in the style of the Savannah Bananas. Juvenile as it may be, on that level it’s working, and has gotten under Trump’s skin more than whatever disease is causing all of that skin discoloration and makeup experimentation on those small hands.

Wes Moore of Maryland has invited Trump to take a walk with him on the streets of Baltimore. If you’re going to talk the talk, you need to walk the walk. Moore even offered a golf cart.

Taking a different approach, Minnesota Governor and former VP candidate, Tim Walz isn’t being shy about expressing his thoughts either. It feels very midwestern stern even as he did take a jocular swipe at Trump’s cankles.

Washington State Governor Bob Ferguson also issued some strong words about Attorney General Pam Bondi’s threats to prosecute government officials over immigration policies. Ferguson is strong willed, lawyerly, and reminded Trump of his legal defeats at his hands in Trump’s first turn at the wheel.

And rounding out the current pushback, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker addressed the Trump threat to send National Guard troops into Chicago by telling the Trump administration to stay out of Chicago. You have to admire this quote:

If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.

You can find the full text of Pritzker’s statement here and watch it below.

In discussing Pritzker’s remarks on social media today I responded to a friend who wondered what could be done to actually stop Trump from sending in troops. I answered that there was probably nothing. But once they get in, they’ll have the devil of a time getting out if it comes to that. That’s The Chicago Way.

It’s good to see these governors taking stands, at least on a strong rhetorical level. That’s the first step and is long overdue. Multiple approaches on multiple fronts addressing the multitude of threats is a positive.

Cynically you can argue that they each may be positioning themselves for higher office. I don’t think that matters, because this is when and where the fight is. More governors need to do the same because obviously the politicians in Washington (if they ever return from hiding) don’t have any knees left to bend.

But tough words are going to need to be matched with tough actions in the days ahead.

Buckle up.

You can also 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.

AI Smoothing The Rise of Fascism

The proliferation of greater fools

This a quick link to a great piece by David Todd McCarty called The AI Ponzi Scheme And The Greater Fool. Go read it.

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Although the piece is richer and deeper than the point I’m singling out, McCarty ties the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence to rise of fascism, neatly summed up by this quote from the piece:

“Once we get to a point where nothing is trustworthy, an authoritarian regime is free to lie with impunity.”

I concur.

I will also go a bit further and say we’ve already reached that point. It’s how we handle it now that we’re here that matters.

Again, go read the piece.

Image from Annie Spratt on Unsplash.

Sunday Morning Reading

The ant hill of humanity

Crazy travel rhythms this summer. Spending time at the lake this weekend. The good thing about lake time is there’s time to do some reading. Here’s some good stuff I stumbled onto, worth sharing for this week’s edition of Sunday Morning Reading. Quite a bit revolving around Artificial Intelligence and other mind games. There’s also ants.

For some inexplicable reason defining what it means to be an American has actually become a chore these days. It shouldn’t be. Kieran Healy has written a piece simply titled American that recounts his thoughts and feelings on becoming an American citizen. Well worth your time, espeically in these crazy times.

“Memory isn’t linear; it’s relational.” That’s the thought NatashaMH leaves us with in her piece The Mind’s Mischief. The mind is indeed a curious thing.

Matteo Wong says the AI Doomers Are Getting Doomier. I don’t know about you, but if we’re all doomed at the hands of AI (does AI have hands?) human intelligence never really advanced as far as I thought it did. Or maybe we just hit the ceiling.

Speaking of AI doom, Charlie Warzel wonders why one of the impacts of AI it to make us feel like we’re losing it in AI Is A Mass-Delusion Event. I get the points and they’re well made. Referring back to my comment from the previous entry, if we’re such easy marks for this kind of delusion… well…we are such easy marks.

David Todd McCarty argues why we should resist AI with ecclesiastical fervor, especially those who create for a living. Check out The Moral Failure Of Using AI In Your Art.

Reece Rogers is marking yet another change brought about by AI. Take a look at The AI-Powered PDF Marks The End of An Era.

Barry Betchesky tells us that It Took Many Years And Billions of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes. You read that right. The money quote is:

“But now we have Microsoft apparently determining that ‘unpredictability’ was something that some number of its customers wanted in their calculators.”

Rounding out this collection of links on AI, is another article by NatashaMH where she says instead of Fearing the Machinery, Interrogate The Mindset. Excellent piece. The underlying current is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. We’re creating these machines in our own images. Or at least the images we imagine of ourselves. Humans are far too human, even when we look past or try to accelerate beyond our humanity.

One of the joys of spending time in the great outdoors is that it reminds you we’re not the only intelligent species on the planet. Although as the theme of this week’s reading has emerged, we might want to reevaluate that, just not with Microsoft’s math tools. On another front, in politics it’s certainly easy to argue for a reevaluation. Kate Knibbs takes a swipe at it in a look at how Government Staff Cuts Have Fueled An Ant-Smuggling Boom.

I told you there’d be ants.

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. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

Who Controls History If AI Is In The Mix

Time in a bottle of bits

One of the scariest things about this insane period we’re living through is the attempt by those in power to rewrite, alter, or just get rid of history they don’t like. Whether it’s banning books, changing curriculums, forcing the closures of libraries, or what museums can display, I find it a cowardly, yet effective way to hide heads in the sand, bury the sins of the past, and admit we’re actually ashamed of ourselves.

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I know this because I have lived this. My early education certainly tilted the American narrative towards the mythology of the Old South. It wasn’t until I left home, and got involved in the theatre that I discovered just how much I hadn’t learned, how much more I needed to, and how the future depends on the past, no matter how complicated it was.

Fortunately the information was there. It was up to me to do the work.

What happens when it’s not there? Or it’s wrong?

I find It hard to imagine that large chunks of the world’s history can be erased, growing up in an era when my access to it seemed to expand exponentially. But it’s been tried before. It’s succeeded with entire generations of populations. Now we’re facing the very real possibility of it happening again in this digital age with the aid of Artifical Intelligence.

There’s an interesting piece by Benji Edwards in Ars Technica about a college student who trained a small AI model that he called TimeCapsuleLLM on Victorian texts. During his experiments his time capsule spit out some actual history he didn’t know about real protests during the era. He checked into the info and the LLM was indeed accurate.

At first glance, that feels like a very positive AI story. Discovering lost history is a good thing. However, with the way I understand AI training it all depends on what data it’s trained on. That leaves things up to who controls the training data. Leave out, change or bias the historical record and…

Well, you can see the problem.

Elon Musk has already hinted at this kind of manipulation. I’m sure there are others thinking the same. They say history repeats itself. Actually history doesn’t. Humans do. History is just the record of the repetition. Humans just use newer and different tools to mold the past into something more comfortable. I may be mistaken, but I think history, in the long run, also proves that never really works out.

Correcting and rewriting history is not for the faint of heart. But when there is no heart, there’s a problem.

Time machines and time travel have always been fraught with danger in the history of science fiction. So has Artificial Intelligence. I’m reasonably sure we’re not smart enough to walk whatever fine lines might exist in a future when the past can be more easily manipulated. We haven’t been in the past when the erasing was harder. But I am dead certain we’re going to be facing this unreal reality.

Again.

Just with newer methods.

Without anything resembling Artficial Intelligence, we’ve managed to forget, alter, or set aside many of the horrible lessons of human history. Why should any new tool we create be any different? I’m sure these AI geeks think they can strip ego and emotion out of these robots they are building.

I doubt they will ever remove hubris.

(Image from Peter Herrman on Unsplash.)

You can also 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.

The Reason Trump Won’t Declare Martial Law

Follow the money

Drip, drip, drip. The daily dilly dallying on the margins that the Trump administration keeps doling out continues. Horror after horror is revealed on this fascist march into demolishing the world’s oldest democracy. But the money keeps rolling in.

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The ongoing debate as to whether or not these despicable actions are distractions is in and of itself a meaningless distraction. We’re essentially living under a dictatorship already, and yet the putzes with power can’t really go there. Doing so would cut their mother’s milk off at the teat.

There’s a reason for the pace of things. There’s a reason why Trump hasn’t just declared a full national emergency and implemented martial law and shut the place down. That reason is political fundraising. That’s where the money is. That’s where the suckers are.

Without elections the con men and women can’t shake down the public, corporations, and foreign countries for political donations. Cut off that cash flow and you cut the power, quicker than flipping a switch. It’s not just money for candidates and causes. It’s money for consultants, think tanks, and the advertising dependent media. Declare martial law and the spinning wheel stops.

In order to keep the money flowing there needs to be an opposition. Without one it would be all about selling meme coins, fake gold phones, and silly shoes. The shake downs would still continue, just on a different levels. Gifts, grifts and gunpoint.

Of course the silver lining is all of those fundraising emails would stop.

(Image from Freddie Colins on Unsplash)

You can also 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.

Apple TV+ Price Increase and the Dummy Price

Death, taxes, and subscription price increases

Times have changed how money changes hands. Back in the day purchasing a subscription meant you got a deal. It also created a relationship between the customer and the service, that often, but not always, protected subscribers from price increases. At least for a time. That really no longer exists. Sure there are deals and free trials to seduce new customers, but typically those deals are for a period of time and then the price goes up. It’s changed the definition of what we used to call “the dummy price.”

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“The dummy price” was for those who didn’t subscribe, thus paying full price. We used to joke in the theatre biz that “the dummy price” was for the guy who’s wife told him she wanted to see a show, and then he’d have his secretary use his credit card to buy the tickets when he got to the office.

When we had to raise prices we’d do so on single tickets and reward our subscribers by telling them we’d keep their current prices intact, thus increasing their savings and further building trust in relationship. That made it a bit easier sell when we inevitably had to raise subscription prices.

It was similar to buying the newspaper each day, instead of subscribing. A subscription was always cheaper than the newsstand price.

The only thing I think I subscribe to these days that actually offers any type of real savings is an E-ZPass, which in my state cuts the cost you pay at the toll booth by 50%.

Of course those are different markets than streaming entertainment, which didn’t exist when I was setting “dummy prices.” Subscriptions for streaming entertainment only gets you access. Certainly a lot of content is available for the price you pay, but realistically it’s more than anyone could ever consume. But the promise is access. The quantity makes much of the content as disposable as it is available, even if it is cheaper than back in the day when you had to purchase physical or digital media in order to view it at home.

The only thing you’re really buying is the inevitable price increase and a bit more frustration in balancing out your entertainment budget.

The new definition of “the dummy price” is hoping there are enough customers who don’t pay attention and miss the price increase.

Apple announced today it’s increasing its monthly subscription price for its streaming entertainment service, Apple TV+ from $9.99 to $12.99 a month. Other streaming services do the same thing, more frequently than Apple. But every player in the market affects the perception of all the rest.

It’s led to a sort of comedic game for consumers who want to stream from different services. They cancel a service for a period of time, often waiting for new content to become abundantly available or a particularly desired title, and then they’ll resubscribe after canceling another service. Or they’ll just keep creating new email accounts, resubscribing under a new name.

Currently the streaming companies seem to be comfortable enough with this type of customer churn, but it builds more attraction to titles than it does to a service’s brand, which in turn drives up the marketing costs for each new title. I imagine at some point streaming companies will find a way to clamp down and try to minimize that churn, the same way they have done with password sharing.

But the subscription game is not just an entertainment industry business practice. There are quite a few services that want your monthly tithe and offer the same kind of price inducements. But it’s certainly easier to cancel Netflix for a period of time than it is some of these other types of services once the inevitable price increase comes along. It will be interesting to see how the AI market shakes out once the first big company needs to break the $20 a month barrier for general consumers.

Bottom line it’s a shell game for both customers and companies. Death and taxes used to be the only constants in that old axiom about the only things certain in life. That needs to be amended to include price increases for subscription services.

You can also 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.

Lightning and Thunder and Memories

Haunted by storms from my past

We’re all always watching the weather, especially as the dire promises of climate change become reality. Hurricane season in the Atlantic is swinging into the its most dangerous months after some guy who wants to build gigantic energy sucking and polluting server farms got let loose in the U.S. government and did his best to dismantle departments and the science that help us know more about what’s to come.

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I grew up in the hills of central Virginia and survived a few dangerous storms during my childhood. One of those was Hurricane Camille in 1969. I wrote a piece about the night that the storm many had thought already dissipated dumped 25 or so inches of water on our county creating massive flooding and mudslides, and taking lives. That night haunts me to this day.

You can check out the piece on the Medium publication Ellemeno called The Thunder Never Stopped. I hope you go and check it out.

Thanks to David Todd McCarty and NatashaMH for letting me publish the piece on Ellemeno.

You can also 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.

Everywhere Else is the South

Political geography knows no borders

I laughed out loud. As we watch some states sending National Guard troops into Washington DC bowing subserviently to the convicted felon’s desire to stop everyone but him and his followers from committing crime, a friend in frustration said “the South is sending all of these troops.” Well, not exactly.

Mason and Dixon Line.

But then again, maybe so.

Yes, South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana and Mississippi are sending troops and they are indeed Southern States geographically, socially, and historically in the context of the American Civil War. South Carolina makes perfect sense as it was the first state to secede from the Union. Some of the others with their secessionist histories do as well. But at first glance, Ohio certainly doesn’t, nor does West Virginia.

The American Civil War has been studied and written about so much, it’s amazing how much so many just don’t know. It’s actually a bit stupefying how many accept the mythologies about the sentiments and ideologies that underpinned that conflict. The maps in the history books make it easy with their North/South divide. But it was never easy. In an ironic twist in this latest reactionary resurgence of racist rewriting history, West Virginia actually split off from Virginia to join the Union after Virginia seceded from the Union.

Like I said, it’s enough to make me laugh at the ignorance of it all.

But then I remember a line from Lanford Wilson’s play Talley’s Folly. A lovely two-hander that features Jewish New Yorker Matt Friedman wooing Sally Talley in Missouri. As she demurs with objections about their different backgrounds and ways of life, in frustration he tells her:

…there is New York City, isolated neighborhoods in Boston, and believe me, the rest is all the South.

I’ve found Wilson and Matt’s observation to be extremely accurate in my travels through life, and certainly it resonates the same in today’s insanity as well.

Put it this way, in this Civil War we’re inching into there won’t be anything like a Mason and Dixon Line dividing the opposing sides. Actually there never was.

You can also 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.