Retirement

I’m officially retired! Yesterday I bought sticky notes.

2019 Tweets of the year

Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune runs a weekly contest for Tweet of the Week. And we need something funny between the more serious posts. He has posted his 40 favorite tweets of 2019 here. Some samples:

A day without coffee is like — just kidding, I have no idea (various users).
If buying new underwear is evidence of an affair, my husband has been faithful for at least nine years (@nerdreign).
Never ever tell yourself, “my idea isn’t good enough.” The entire premise of Marmaduke is, “What if a dog was big?” And that nonsense has been going for more than 60 years (@_AlexHirsch).

How to protect yourself from Google’s surveillance program

Why yes, everyone is spying on you. Or at least Google is:

It’s a scary thought: You and your friends are marching for gun control, climate action or social justice when a crime happens a mile or two away. Now you and the thousands of people who attended are suspects. And guess who turned you in: Google.
That’s because Google knows where you are right now, even if location tracking on your Google apps is turned off. And the company is handing over your location information to law enforcement agencies.
Google calls this program “Sensorvault” and its use by law enforcement for nearly 10 years was a well-kept secret until the New York Times recently exposed Google’s operation.

https://blog.credo.com/2019/10/how-to-protect-yourself-from-googles-sensorvault-surveillance-program/

Note. I have started using duckduckgo.com for most of my searches instead of Google, because they promise that they are protecting my privacy. Search results seem to be roughly as good as Google. You should be able to set this as your preferred search engine somewhere in “Preferences” for your web browser (Firefox, Safari, Chrome etc).

How to turn off smart TV snooping features

A technology called automatic content recognition, or ACR, attempts to identify every show you play—including those you get via cable, over-the-air broadcasts, streaming services, and even DVDs and Blu-ray discs. The data is transmitted to the TV maker, one of its business partners, or both.
ACR helps the TV recommend other shows you might want to watch. But the data can also used for targeting ads to you and your family, and for other marketing purposes. You can’t easily review or delete this data later.

https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smart-tv-snooping-features/

Dave Barry Year in Review 2019

It’s not all about politics. But it was a political year…

In other political developments, President Trump, faced with mounting hostility from congressional Democrats, spends several days vigorously attacking … John McCain. For the record, McCain (A) was a Republican and (B) died in 2018. Nobody can say for certain whether the president (A) is playing some kind of four-dimensional political chess or (B) has the reasoning skills of a Chihuahua on meth.

(…)

In other political news, Joe Biden, seeking to add some “zing” to his presidential campaign, tours Iowa in a bus sporting, in big letters, his new slogan: “No Malarkey!” (“Malarkey” is an ancient Gaelic word meaning “clue.”) This slogan was selected after being tested on a focus group of voters, half of whom were senior citizens and the other half of whom were dead. The runner-up slogans were “You’re Darned Tooting He Can Cut the Mustard!” and “Stay Off His Lawn!”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2019/12/29/dave-barrys-year-review/

Thanks a bunch, Verizon

A couple of years ago, Verizon purchased Yahoo. One of Yahoo’s features was Yahoo!Groups, a way to set up an email list for a group of people. It saved all the messages so you could read them with a web browser instead of getting emails, or review them later; it included ways to conduct polls (“Should we do dinner next Sunday at (a) McDonald’s, (b) Uno’s, (c) etc”); it let you save photos or images related to the group; and various other things. Millions of groups were created for everything from fans for a particular TV show to members of a real-life group to religions to finance (Wikipedia article).

Recently, Yahoo (owned by Verizon, remember) decided to drop all the features except the basic email list: whatever you email to your group still goes out to everyone, but Yahoo (owned by Verizon) will no longer save the emails, and your photos or whatever are gone. They gave users a few weeks to download stuff. I downloaded the group of my family’s relatives. We had used this since 2002 to chat about marriages and new jobs and deaths, and the occasional digression into politics.

UPDATE: I thought that several years of messages had not been downloaded. They were. I managed to lose them, my fault. (And just found them again.) Some apologies to Yahoo (owned by Verizon). I’ve toned down this posting a little.

I’m sure this is saving Yahoo (owned by Verizon) millions of dollars. And I’m sure this is going directly into the pocket of Hans Vestberg, the CEO of Verizon.

Thanks a bunch, Verizon. Remind me to never spend one cent with anything related to your company again.

The Afghanistan Papers

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

Fascinating stuff. Six parts:

At war with the truth. U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.
Stranded without a strategy. Bush and Obama had polar-opposite plans to win the war. Both were destined to fail.
Built to fail. Despite vows the U.S. wouldn’t get mired in “nation-building,” it has wasted billions doing just that.
Consumed by corruption. The U.S. flooded the country with money — then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled.
Unguarded nation. Afghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruption.
Overwhelmed by opium. The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn.

Triumph of the rich

The top-line finding: Among the bottom 50 percent of earners, average real annual income even after taxes and transfers has edged up a meager $8,000 since 1970, rising from just over $19,000 to just over $27,000 in 2018.
By contrast, among the top 1 percent of earners, average income even after taxes and transfers has tripled since 1970, rising by more than $800,000, from just over $300,000 to over $1 million in 2018.