Diatribes of Jay

This blog has essays on public policy. It shuns ideology and applies facts, logic and math to social problems. It has a subject-matter index, a list of recent posts, and permalinks at the ends of posts. Comments are moderated and may take time to appear.

26 October 2018

The “Caravan”


[For ways to manage your media to avoid being duped and stay sane, click here. For a plea to Tim Cook to shape up Apple’s OS X before it goes the way of Microsoft’s consumer operating systems, click here. For how I voted early and why, and how easy it was to vote, click here. For a description of how mind-raping propagandists get people to vote against their own interests, click here. For all the reasons why the FBI’s “investigation” of Christine Blasey Ford’s claim of sexual abuse was a sham, click here. Fox sixteen reasons to vote this time for Democrats only, click here. For a note on the likely electoral consequences of the GOP ramming Kavanaugh through to the Supreme Court, click here. For a note on why the issue has become personal for many, click here. For a short note on how important Professor Ford’s charges are, click here. For comment on President Obama’s decision to join the political fray, click here. For a possible path to Trump’s impeachment and removal, click here. For comment on Trump’s deal with Mexico, click here. For a brief homage to John McCain, followed by reasons to support Stacey Abrams, click here. For a brief note on vote suppression in Georgia as a reason to support Stacey Abrams, click here. For other good candidates and causes and how to contribute easily, click here. For recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

As I write this post, a “caravan” of several thousand Central-American migrants is wending its way from the Southern Mexican town of Huixtla toward the US border. Our own press promotes so many lies and misconceptions about this migration as to make it seem more myth than reality. Yet real it is. It’s advancing relentlessly toward our Southern border with all the deliberate speed of a slow march—about three miles per hour. At this rate, at ten hours a day, it will reach our border in about thirty days, after our midterm elections.

Even its name is a lie. It’s not really a “caravan.” That word implies a collection of some sort of vehicles, if only primitive covered wagons. Real “caravans” are familiar from Gypsies in Europe or our own American Westward migration over the prairies in the nineteenth century.

But this “caravan” has few if any vehicles, not even animal-drawn wagons. There was no time to assemble or build them, and no money to buy the materials.

In fact, almost everyone in this “caravan” is on foot. The “caravan” is nothing more or less than a 1,500-mile group hike of penniless and nearly hopeless Central-American migrants seeking a better life.

The “caravan’s” reason for being is also a lie. Despite Trump’s usual facile falsehood, American Democrats had nothing to do with it. Only a moron could believe that Democrats would give Donald Trump a such a good reason to whip his rabid “base” into a frenzy just two weeks before the midterm elections. And American Democrats are hardly present in Central America, let alone in numbers or with a plan sufficient to organize such a grand march.

A final lie about the “caravan” also comes from the fevered brain of Donald Trump. In an early-morning Tweet he claimed that “Criminals and Middle Easterners are mixed in.”

As far as two crack reporters for the New York Times were able to determine from a day-long investigation, there never was any evidence for this bald assertion. It was based on the president’s own supposition—i.e., he made it up. Every attempt to check it led right back to the president’s Tweets and to average statistics on immigration generally from prior times, having nothing to do with this “caravan.”

In other words, the notion of criminals and Middle-Eastern terrorists in the “caravan” was an ipse dixit—a Latin phrase meaning “he himself said it.” The phrase comes to us from ancient times when there were no news media, facts didn’t matter, and Emperors could make things up out of whole cloth and have them serve as the basis of policy and action.

A recent honest report in the Washington Post did reveal the “caravan’s” true origins. They’re entirely local economic and social conditions.

There is no factory work in the failed states of Central America. The maquiladoras of the recently re-negotiated NAFTA (now called “USMCA,” the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement) don’t reach down there. They never did. And when locals try to make money in small businesses such as restaurants, violent gangs like MS-13 try to commandeer fifty percent of their profits and can kill them when they don’t pay up.

So there is no way for “little people” to make an honest living outside the peasantry in Central America. Only the rich with their bodyguards can escape violence and terror in the cities.

So by telephone, word of mouth, and social media they came together. They counted on safety in numbers. Rightly or wrongly, they thought that the coyotes and other parasites who regularly prey on migrants would not attack so large a group, let alone one that attracted media attention. They thought that, by walking, they could reduce to zero the coyotes’ fees of up $10,000—which often go for little more than being abandoned to die in the Sonoran desert or in overheated, locked trucks. They cast their fates into the hands of God and their own health and hardiness.

In consequence, the “little people” are marching northward through the killing fields of Mexico toward a land rich with a simple, basic promise. They hope to live, to keep the fruits of their own labor, and to raise their families without fear of mayhem or murder. That’s all they dream of. Dodging “La Migra,” with its red tape, jails and internment camps, is nothing but a relief from dodging the murderers and extortionists of MS-13 and corrupt government death squads. Walking over a thousand miles is doing something—anything—that they can do now that offers the bare promise of a longer and a better life.

Under these circumstances, no wall in creation can stop the flow. They will climb over it, swim or sail around it, blast or cut through it, or burrow under it to secure a life free from extortion, murder and fear. They will wait months or years in the shadows, until a gap in the wall opens up, or until persistent parasites offer a way over, under, through or around it for a fee.

They will keep coming unless and until the failed states where they were born begin to offer people like them some semblance of a decent life. Yet there is no current prospect of that and no current plan in our nation, or in Mexico, to foster any such prospect. So they come.

The phenomenon in Europe is much the same. There migrants regularly flow in “caravans” from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa toward the relative peace and stability of the European Union. The driving force is precisely the same: the desire to live by the fruits of one’s own labor without fear of extortion, mayhem or death.

There are distinctions between the “caravans” in Latin American and those in Europe, but they don’t make much of a difference. The European “caravans” often become seaborne as they transit the Aegean or Mediterranean Sea. Sometimes, but not always, they include people fleeing the fear of Islamist terror and totalitarianism, or the right-wing reaction to them. But the drivers of the migration are precisely the same: violence, chaos, failed states, and little prospect of a peaceful life of honest gain through one’s own labor.

Will this global problem cure itself? No, it’s likely to get worse, possibly much worse. Why? Global warming is the underlying driver. Drought has driven much of the civil war that has devastated Syria. Drought is driving much of the unrest in sub-Saharan Africa. And vastly more destructive hurricanes, tornadoes and other storms are about to join drought as drivers of massive human migration throughout the globe’s tropics and subtropical zones. The massive destruction caused by Hurricanes Harvey and Michael in our own American South are but a tiny sour taste of things to come.

At any moment, melting of the Greenland Ice Shelf or the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica could add precipitous sea-level rise as yet another driver of global migration. Positive global-warming feedback could produce sea-level rise not on the time scale of decades, but on the time scale of weeks or months. Already warming greater than the desired limit of 1.5 ºC is baked into our atmosphere, and further warming is almost inevitable.

So the current “caravan” from Central America is hardly a political ploy of misguided American Democrats. It’s a metaphor and sign of things to come. Climate change is just beginning to cause economic, social and political pain on a vast global scale. Before this century is over, it will cause dislocation and migration at levels never before seen in human history, even at the end of World War II.

How developed nations respond to the dislocation will write the history of this twenty-first century and our Third Millennium after Christ. There are only three options. The developed world can get to work and use its good organization, science, industry and technology to save, welcome, accommodate and assimilate as many migrants as possible. Or it can use its dreadful weaponry and machinery of death to perpetrate the vilest genocide in human history—one that will make the Holocaust, in comparison, seem like a garden party. Or it can dither, fight among its own people and so cause nearly as much unnecessary suffering and death as deliberate genocide.

There are no other alternatives. Right now, dithering and infighting appear to be our species’ “strategy.” But they don’t have to be. How the “North” (and the equivalent temperate zones of the Southern Hemisphere) respond to this challenge will write the future history of our species, if not its epitaph. We had all better start applying our species’ chief evolutionary advantages—our empathy, cooperation and grapefruit-sized brains—while the “caravans” are still only a trickle, before the deluge begins.

Endnote: It is no coincidence that Germany, which once perpetrated the Holocaust and now reflects the sincerest contrition of any brutal conqueror in human history, best sees the stark options now confronting our species. Along with Sweden, Germany has done the most of any nation to accommodate and assimilate desperate migrants. It is also no coincidence that Germany’s current leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, was once a physicist, trained to see and understand reality, unblinking, with the aid of science and mathematics.

Lest we wring our hands too fearfully about the recent Bavarian elections, in which Merkel’s party lost ground, let us recount the numerical results. The far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland, won only 10.3% of the vote—a far cry from Donald Trump’s now-47% approval in this country. The Greens in Bavaria won much more: 17.5%. They are the party that recognizes the ultimate source of the disaster—anthropogenic global warming—and seeks to ameliorate it by replacing fossil fuels.

There are rational responses to the common problems our species faces, and Germany and Scandinavia are quietly leading the way. Other developed societies can follow.

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posted by Jay Dratler, Jr., Ph.D., J.D. @ 10/26/2018 02:51:00 AM   0 comments

22 October 2018

How to Avoid Being Duped and Stay Sane


[For a plea to Tim Cook to shape up Apple’s OS X before it goes the way of Microsoft’s consumer operating systems, click here. For how I voted early and why, and how easy it was to vote, click here. For a description of how mind-raping propagandists get people to vote against their own interests, click here. For all the reasons why the FBI’s “investigation” of Christine Blasey Ford’s claim of sexual abuse was a sham, click here. Fox sixteen reasons to vote this time for Democrats only, click here. For a note on the likely electoral consequences of the GOP ramming Kavanaugh through to the Supreme Court, click here. For a note on why the issue has become personal for many, click here. For a short note on how important Professor Ford’s charges are, click here. For comment on President Obama’s decision to join the political fray, click here. For a possible path to Trump’s impeachment and removal, click here. For comment on Trump’s deal with Mexico, click here. For a brief homage to John McCain, followed by reasons to support Stacey Abrams, click here. For a brief note on vote suppression in Georgia as a reason to support Stacey Abrams, click here. For other good candidates and causes and how to contribute easily, click here. For recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

1. Shun “live” or “hot” media like the plague.

2. Filter your Internet: get “news” only from selected, trusted sources, and limit social media to your own in-person social circles.

3. Use “print” media exclusively to inform yourself about the world outside your own social circles, and especially about politics.

4. Pick your print media with care.

5. Think about what you read, hear or see.

The election season in which we are now knee deep is a big time for lies and propaganda. Many voices are trying to persuade you that up is down, black is white, and right is left. Some will even try to get you to go to the wrong polling place, on the wrong day, just in order to waste your vote.

Avoiding being someone’s dupe and staying sane are two skills that every voter should have. Here are five ways to acquire those skills, in rough order of importance:

1. Shun “live” or “hot” media like the plague.

You don’t need to know “news” as it “breaks,” far less to vote sensibly. So avoid “live” or “hot” news, such as TV, radio, and streaming Internet. They will only tend to distract, delude and confuse you.

This kind of “news” has a single purpose: to grab your attention and distract you from whatever you are doing or thinking at the time. The underlying aim is nearly always to sell you something—a sponsor’s product or service, the news source itself, or an idea. In one way or another, “hot” or “live” news is out to dupe you from the get-go.

At best, this kind of “news” will distract, titillate, or entertain you. At worst, it will delude or deceive you. Or it will make you fear or hate your neighbor without good reason. You don’t want to let anyone do that to you, especially right before an election.

“Hot” news is “news” without thought, reflection, or perspective. Often it’s misleading, incomplete, or simply wrong—just like initial reports of deaths and injuries from a plane crash or a multi-day hurricane.

Not only will paying close attention to this breathless, “breaking” news just waste your precious time. It will often give you a false and misleading impression. You’ll waste your effort digesting half-baked preliminary reports that will have to be revised, updated and corrected later.

Paradoxically, those distracting little “push” notifications on your cell phone can help you avoid this waste of time and effort. In a few seconds, you can read them and mentally note major headlines that you think may be worthy of sustained attention later. Then, after a day, two or three, when the story has matured and all the data are in, you can pick the best summary from a leading source of “print” journalism and inform yourself in depth.

Focusing on “breaking” or “live” news is not only a waste of your precious time. It can become an addiction—one that kills all reflection and higher reasoning. The only kind of “hot” news that merits unquestioned attention is news that a tornado or hurricane is heading your way.

Anyway, reading is always more efficient than listening or viewing. Nearly everyone but dyslexics can read much faster than any announcer can speak. Our busy modern life doesn’t give you enough spare moments to waste listening or viewing when you can read. So use your eyes, not your ears, and use them for reading.

2. Filter your Internet: get “news” only from selected, trusted sources, and limit social media to your own in-person social circles.

Unfiltered by source, the Internet is an open sewer of lies, rumors, speculation and gossip. If you’re old enough to vote, you know that stuff you yourself write can appear on almost anyone’s Facebook page, e-mail inbox, Website, or What’s App screens. There’s no telling where what you write can end up on the Internet, especially if you have a little skill with computers and software.

If you can write on almost anyone else’s social media pages, then anyone can write on yours. If you’ve been alive and sentient during the last two years, you know that Russian and Chinese military intelligence, right-wing and left-wing ideologues, extreme political “operatives,” white supremacists, and other hate-mongers—all have probably written on your own social media.

There’s no way you or anyone else can stop them because the folks who run your social media have no clue how. Furthermore, they have no incentive to stop them. What social media platforms do for a living is sell your attention to advertisers, political operatives and other opinion masters. Distracting and deluding you—or letting others do so—is part of how they make a living.

So there’s no way, even with a reasonable amount of care and effort, that you can protect yourself from lies on the unfiltered Internet or social media. You can either be a dupe, or you can close the valve and cut the flow of sewage. There is no other alternative.

So man (or woman) up and cut off the flow. Limit your use of social media to your own personal, social interactions with people you know outside of cyberspace, people you’ve met in the real world. Delete Facebook and Twitter, or at least limit them to “Friends” whom you know and select personally. Never open your social media up to Friends of Friends, who could be anyone. Pick your sources of information and social media contacts as carefully as you pick the real friends you spend time with in the real world.

3. Use “print” media exclusively to inform yourself about the world outside your own social circles, and especially about politics.

“Print” media don’t have to be on dead trees. They can be on line. But “print” is not video or audio; it’s writing. And that makes all the difference.

Print differs from “live” or “hot” news in that a trained expert—called a “journalist”—has taken the time and trouble to digest the news for you—to verify its truth, to organize it, to analyze it, and to present it to you through the crowning achievements of the human mind: language and Reason.

Unlike video and audio, print doesn’t rely on or target your immediate perceptions or your emotions. It addresses your capacity to think, remember and reflect. It invites you to consider the news in the same way that the trained journalist has presented it to you: from all sides, with all perspectives, and in light of both probable and possible consequences. It invites you to reason, rather than just react. Your own and our species’ survival depend upon us doing that.

4. Pick your print media with care.

Of course writers can lie, distract and deceive in print, just as announcers can in video and audio. But there’s a long and solid tradition of truth, honesty, balance and professionalism in print journalism. People who practice it for a living care about these things. And they correct themselves when they err in promoting falsehood, even accidentally.

Learn how to spot sources of print journalism that spring out of this professional tradition. The best way to do so is to focus on longevity. If a news source has had a good reputation producing print journalism since long before TV and the Internet even existed, you can rely on it.

Examples are well-respected national newspapers in the United States, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. (The Wall Street Journal also has been around for a long time, but Rupert Murdoch—the dark master of “hot” news and entertaining propaganda—bought it a few years ago and converted it to the Dark Side.) If you live in a major city outside New York, you also may have local print media with similar reputations and longevity.

An even better strategy to gain accuracy, perspective and freedom from bias is to rely on foreign print media. They are less likely to lie and delude you about American politics simply because they have no dog in our national fights. Such British news media as the Financial Times and the Guardian fit this description well.

A third way to seek accurate and balanced journalism, as well as to save time, is to subscribe to weekly news magazines. These sources use even more time and care to select and report their stories than dailies. Among them are Newsweek and Time Magazine in the United States and The Economist in Britain. The last has the advantages of being both a weekly and foreign.

It’s worth repeating that you needn’t subscribe to good “print” media on dead trees. Virtually every good print news medium today has an on-line presence to which you can subscribe. Many allow you to “sample” a small number of stories for free each month, so you can get to know them without spending any money or committing yourself.

And when you get ready to buy, a digital subscription allows you to access print news wherever you are, from a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or even a smart phone. You needn’t lose the convenience of modern digital communications to get the benefits of good, accurate and reflective print journalism and the elements of Reason that written stories provide.

5. Think about what you read, hear and see.

By far the most important aspect of your relationship with good journalism is your own active engagement.

Human life and history are continua. In real life there are no miracles. To the well-informed, there are not even many big surprises (besides occasional crashes and natural disasters).

In real news, as distinguished from “fake news,” almost everything is logically and consequentially related to everything else. That means—as one of my most popular blog posts once advised college students—that “Context is everything. If you know little or nothing, it’s easy to lie and mislead you. The more you know, the harder it gets.”

Almost every conspiracy theory you will hear or see is utter nonsense. People don’t work by conspiracies; they work by custom, habit and tradition.

So try to put it all together. Try to connect the dots. Above all, just sit and think about what you read, and discuss it with others.

I’ll give just two examples. The Republican Party has reflexively fought every aspect of the modern American social safety net since its inception during FDR’s New Deal. Republicans fought to prevent the enactment of Social Security and Medicare. They fought the expansion of medical coverage through Medicaid. They fought the enactment of “Obamacare,” and they fought to “repeal and replace” Obamacare once it passed into law. Now they’re fighting to bring back exclusions for pre-existing conditions, so that insurance companies can pass off as “health insurance” policies that don’t even cover the very risks to your health that are most likely to recur—i.e., those that have already happened before.

So as you consider Republicans’ claims that all they want to do is lower costs and increase the coverage of health-care insurance, how likely do you think that is? How likely are those “efforts” to be successful? Are they consistent with past performance?

Second, a core tenet of so-called “conservatism” is that taxes should be as low as possible. That goes especially for the rich, who got the vast bulk of the benefits of the Trump Tax Cut. So when Republicans claim that the Trump Tax Cut was intended mainly to boost the economy, how likely do you think that is? Do leopards change their spots?

If you get excited about every Trumpian Tweet and every Trumpian lie—of which there were already reportedly more than 5,000 as of this September—you can easily drive yourself crazy and lose the forest for the trees. That’s why it’s better to pick a reliable source of print journalism (or several) that you like and get your news from it. Believing a single pol for your information—any single pol—is a fool’s practice; it’s almost the definition of being a dupe.

Be skeptical. Things in politics and public life are often too good (or too horrible!) to be true, just as they are in the world of buying and selling. Approach pols’ own announcements and declarations as you would paid advertising for a very expensive product. In truth, that analogy has a lot of merit: they are trying to sell you a very important product: the future of your country and our democracy.

A good source of print journalism won’t try to distract or delude you or sell you anything, including a point of view. In fact, it won’t push a coherent point of view at all. Instead, it will try to put things together for you and let you see things in perspective.

Sometimes that can be frustrating. Good journalism often gives you no answers, at least not before they’re entirely clear. Instead, it gives you good questions. It forces you to think and wait for answers. Isn’t that much like real life?

As you find and immerse yourself in good journalism, pay attention to bylines. You will find that some authors are better than others, or that some are more to your style. My own personal favorite is David Leonhardt, the opinion-page editor of the New York Times. He has superb training in quantitative economics and writes simply and clearly. He runs a daily opinion newsletter, free of charge, that you can subscribe to here.

As you assimilate professional journalism, you will come to know individual writers like him, by name and by byline, whose reporting you trust and whose style you like. More than any shady “Friends” or “Friends of Friends” on Facebook, you can rely on them. They will become your real friends. Unlike Friends on Facebook, they will not rise out of the Internet’s digital sludge, vanish abruptly, or turn against you at the click of a mouse.

More than any other people on this planet, the respected journalists you pick as your reliable sources of real news will help you avoid being duped, stay sane, and stop wasting your precious time. If you take care in selecting them, you can count on their not being Russian or Chinese intelligence agents, or political agents provocateurs bent on making you their dupe. You just have to find them and get used to sampling their work product regularly. Only then can you be truly safe on line.

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posted by Jay Dratler, Jr., Ph.D., J.D. @ 10/22/2018 12:56:00 PM   0 comments

18 October 2018

Apple: Please Spin Off OS X (An Open Letter to Tim Cook)


[Today’s essay is a brief break from politics before the final push to the midterm elections; it’s a rare addition to my comments on the computer industry. For how I voted early and why, and how easy it was to vote, click here. For a description of how mind-raping propagandists get people to vote against their own interests, click here. For all the reasons why the FBI’s “investigation” of Christine Blasey Ford’s claim of sexual abuse was a sham, click here. Fox sixteen reasons to vote this time for Democrats only, click here. For a note on the likely electoral consequences of the GOP ramming Kavanaugh through to the Supreme Court, click here. For a note on why the issue has become personal for many, click here. For a short note on how important Professor Ford’s charges are, click here. For comment on President Obama’s decision to join the political fray, click here. For a possible path to Trump’s impeachment and removal, click here. For comment on Trump’s deal with Mexico, click here. For a brief homage to John McCain, followed by reasons to support Stacey Abrams, click here. For a brief note on vote suppression in Georgia as a reason to support Stacey Abrams, click here. For other good candidates and causes and how to contribute easily, click here. For recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

Dear Mr. Cook,

I’ve praised your corporate leadership repeatedly in this blog (see 1 and 2). In refusing to “consider the bloody ROI” while trying “to leave the world better than we found it,” you have challenged the profit-only perspective that is corrupting our entire society.

But today I’m writing to complain about a specific software product, namely, OS X. It seems to me that you have virtually abandoned this industry-leading operating system as a major product of your firm. At least you are no longer giving it the consistent attention and quality support that a major product deserves. (More on this later.)

In so doing, you are effectively abandoning all the superbly designed computer hardware that has made Apple the go-to vendor for consumers, artists, writers, educators and small businesses. For no matter how solid and reliable the hardware itself may be—even with solid-state “disk” storage that never breaks down—a computer is only as good as its OS. Without consistent, quality support of OS X, your slimline “Air” laptops and “Mini” desktop bricks are becoming about as useful as, well, bricks.

Here, in decreasing order of importance, is a short list of unsolvable problems that I’ve had with OS X in just the last several months:

1. An attempt to force-quit Safari on my Mini while having it save a number of windows and tabs on re-opening “broke” the software. It remained frozen and immobile despite various attempts to repair it. Even a complete OS X upgrade (to Mojave) failed to unfreeze it. I had to abandon Safari on that machine entirely and switch to Google Chrome, which works well. (I also tried to replace Safari separately, but the upgraded software wouldn’t let me do it, warning me that Safari is part of the OS. If that’s so, shouldn’t a complete OS upgrade replace it and therefore fix it?)

2. My Macbook Air, vintage mid-2011 (running OS 10.13.6), regularly bogs down, showing the spinning ball and getting nothing done for minutes. (I can also hear the fan increase speed as this happens, indicating overloading of the CPU.) I have to hard-reboot the machine regularly, using the power key.

Perhaps the machine has caught a virus, but I don’t see any other signs. When I use the computer, nearly always while away from home, this happens as often as several times a day. (It seems to happen less often while I’m using Chrome than while I’m using Safari.)

Maybe my Macbook Air is “too old.” But why bother to design superbly durable hardware, with solid-state memory that never fails like hard drives, if you want to build Apple’s fortune on planned obsolescence like that in Detroit’s miserable 1960s-vintage cars? Should a Lexus fail as often as a Ford Pinto?

3. On both my Mac Mini and my MacBook Air, my screens are awash with useless warnings saying some subprogram needs an administrator’s permission, without specifying for what. Most of these useless warnings relate to the printing function or some aspect of Javascript. None of them gives the slightest hint what program or function is calling the subprogram or why. I have searched the “hive mind” of Apple’s users’ forums and applied many remedies, but none works reliably, let alone permanently. The useless warnings keep appearing like pimples on an adolescent.

Surely your programmers could: (1) provide a field in these screens showing what specific program or function is requesting an administrator’s permission and/or (2) provide a means to permanently shut down calls from the same source. But no, they just leave the user wondering whether granting permission could compromise security, or not granting it could compromise some unknown and entirely unspecified function that might later be useful, and ever waiting for the next distracting screen.

* * *

Back in 2003, I permanently abandoned all of Microsoft’s products in favor of Apple’s. I had many reasons. The precipitating event was a software meltdown even more severe than the recent meltdown of Safari on my Mini. It was a total collapse of Microsoft’s Windows OS after my attempt to make a global permissions change.

Another major factor in my abandoning Microsoft was a proliferation of useless warning screens like yours today. Eventually, the warning screens proliferate beyond even the hive mind’s capacity to adapt. Then sophisticated customers lose patience and seek alternatives, just as I am looking at ChromeBooks now.

All this, it seems to me, is repeating computer-industry history. It’s what once drove me from Microsoft to Apple and later drove the consumer, artist, school and small-business markets from Microsoft to Apple, too. They, as I, concluded that Microsoft and its products work best for firms with full-time, dedicated computer professionals.

I’m no computer novice or computer phobe. I have a Ph.D. (1971, UCSD) in physics. I’ve programmed in Fortran and Basic and now do my own HTML formatting on this blog. I bought my first PC in 1986 (a Leading Edge) and programmed some functions on it before the software industry caught up. For the last twenty years or so I have been on line about 10-20 hours per week. As a law professor, I’ve taught courses in computer law, antitrust law, telecommunications law and the intersection of these fields. So I have a good feel for the conduct of firms like Microsoft in its heyday, which use monopoly power to push inferior software on customers and squeeze out competitors.

When I have a software problem, I seldom suffer those horrible telephone queues, which I’ve parodied on this blog, and which are not much better at Apple than anywhere else. I literally sleep on the problem or browse the user forums. I usually come up with a solution or work-around the next day.

But the frequency and depth of the recent problems with OS X have overwhelmed my interest, patience and persistence. I have no desire to become an expert in Javascript or how it works on various websites, although I’m happy to enjoy the extra security that Chrome provides by letting me choose which specific websites can run Javascript on my computers. (The recent explosion of on-line security issues in the news only confirms that decision.)

Collectively, problems with OS X and its plug-ins are now approaching the levels that once made me abandon all Microsoft software. I fear the same process of degradation in quality and unnecessary complexity is overtaking OS X. There are several key indicators.

Mobile devices are a far bigger money-maker for Apple than computers. In the rush to provide a consistent “ecosystem” among iPhones, tablets and computers, Apple appears to have shoved computer users to the back of the bus. Hence OS X suffers gratuitous and annoying (and sometimes even inconsistent) changes, such as jettisoning the venerable “Save As . . .” command, which dates from the dawn of the mini-computer industry.

More important, the perennial battle between the Cloud and local storage is reaching a critical phase. Apple is far behind Google and Amazon in making the balance between the two kinds of storage efficient, seamless, transparent and friendly to users. The problems of passwords for Apple’s “Application Store” alone would require a whole separate essay.

Some computer users with large storage needs will used the Cloud in volume; others may not. Apple increasingly doesn’t seem to understand this. Instead, it appears to be trying to “monetize” the Cloud regardless of users’ needs or preferences.

Finally, there’s the reluctance—for which Steve Jobs was notorious—to “play nice” with independent firms like Adobe and Oracle. At the moment, Apple is far behind Google and Amazon in making plug-ins like Adobe’ Reader and Flash and Oracle’s Javascript operate well and transparently for the user’s benefit. Sometimes Apple’s apparent recalcitrance degenerates into neglect and even minor acts of sabotage—behavior of which Microsoft once was suspected and for which it was sued (as a means of maintaining its monopoly).

Customers who (unlike me) did not teach courses in antitrust and computer law don’t care about the business reasons or the justification, if any, for their troubles. Nor in retirement do I. All we see is software that doesn’t work, produces numerous unwanted distractions, requires high maintenance, or otherwise imposes burdens on users that its own programmers self-evidently ought to bear.

I have great respect for Apple as an institution. I have cited it on this blog as an exemplar of the coming “corporate rule” during humanity’s third millennium after Christ, pointing out that it once had greater cash reserves than France. And of course I’ve made a good deal of money investing in Apple’s stock—although more on a slow “in-and-out” basis than might once have been appropriate for a “blue chip.”

But for some users there is no substitute for a real computer—a machine with a full-size screen and a complete keyboard, loaded with so-called “productivity” programs that do more than just communicate or display. You cannot do serious writing, art, curriculum development, or product development on a tablet or iPhone. Nor can you run a small business on one.

So if Apple cannot maintain the excellence, solidity, transparency and ease of use of OS X, which makes its laptops, consumer desktops and professional desktops work, I beg you to spin off the product into an independent firm that can. Doing so would be entirely consistent with Steve Jobs’ legacy. After all, it was his wandering in the wilderness with the “Next” operating system that gave rise to OS X and Apple’s second life.

There is also a good practical reason for separating OS X from the rest of Apple’s software “ecosystem.” Computer users are a different breed. They are both more “serious” and more specialized than the vast majority of phone and tablet users. Their “apps,” aka “programs,” are necessarily larger, more precise, generally more demanding technically, and generally less forgiving of errors and casual changes.

Computer programs also have far more history and legacy than the average app. They have such things as that venerable “save as” command, which lasted 50 years before some underage phone guru killed it. The abandoned “save as” command once enabled a user to do at least each of the following in a single step: (1) save a variant copy of an original file, i.e., another version, (2) change the saved original, (3) move the same original to another location (file), (4) make an exact copy under another name, or (5) prepare a new draft of the original for later work, without disturbing the original.

Computer users are the old men and women of the device world. They have more established, particular and specialized needs that only they fully appreciate. Therefore they and designers who serve their needs primarily, if not exclusively, should design their hardware and software. To think otherwise is to believe that motor-scooter makers ought to begin designing cars and trucks.

Respectfully yours,

Jay Dratler, Jr., Ph.D., J.D.

Goodyear Professor of Intellectual Property, Emeritus
University of Akron School of Law

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posted by Jay Dratler, Jr., Ph.D., J.D. @ 10/18/2018 01:36:00 AM   0 comments

12 October 2018

How I Voted and Why


[For a description of how mind-raping propagandists get people to vote against their own interests, click here. For all the reasons why the FBI’s “investigation” of Christine Blasey Ford’s claim of sexual abuse was a sham, click here. Fox sixteen reasons to vote this time for Democrats only, click here. For a note on the likely electoral consequences of the GOP ramming Kavanaugh through to the Supreme Court, click here. For a note on why the issue has become personal for many, click here. For a short note on how important Professor Ford’s charges are, click here. For comment on President Obama’s decision to join the political fray, click here. For a possible path to Trump’s impeachment and removal, click here. For comment on Trump’s deal with Mexico, click here. For a brief homage to John McCain, followed by reasons to support Stacey Abrams, click here. For a brief note on vote suppression in Georgia as a reason to support Stacey Abrams, click here. For other good candidates and causes and how to contribute easily, click here. For recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

This post is for new, young and infrequent voters. It shows how easy voting is and, under the unique circumstances of this election, how easy it is to do the right thing.

The whole process took me a half hour, including parking at a public lot and walking a few blocks to the County Clerk’s Office. There I voted early without waiting in line.

For whom did I vote? Easy. I voted for every Democrat and against every candidate listed as a Republican. I even voted to recall a judge who had recently been appointed by a Republican governor.

New Mexico, my home state, lists candidates for judgeships by their party affiliation, so that made my task easier. But if your own state doesn’t do that and you can’t spend the time to research the party affiliations of candidates for judges, you needn’t vote for those offices.

I also voted “for” two amendments to the New Mexico Constitution, one of which would set up a new commission to investigate and expose ethical violations by public officials. Then I voted “for” every bond issue or tax re-authorization proposed. There were five of them, to fund (respectively) rural public transportation, senior citizen facilities, public schools and school buses (in a rural and widely dispersed state), and higher education, including special and tribal schools.

Why did I vote for all Democrats? Because Donald Trump is not just a bad, unusual or incompetent president. His vile style of campaigning and governing could, if repeated, destroy our democracy and make future elections meaningless.

Trump’s entire pitch, and most of his political success, is based on the three B’s: bullshit, bullying and bigotry.

According to the Washington Post’s latest tally, he has told 4,713 lies and misleading tales in less than 20 months. He has bashed his (our) own allies and supported tyrants like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and would-be Saudi King Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). In “return,” Putin reportedly tried to destabilize our election and had a peaceful resident of London and his daughter murdered with the nerve-agent Novichok. MBS recently was accused of having a well-known Saudi journalist—a journalist!—killed and dismembered inside the Saudi Embassy in Turkey. As for bigotry, just ask any aware Hispanic, immigrant, African-American, Muslim, woman, or homosexual (especially one complaining about sexual assault or harassment) what Trump has said about and to them.

This is not business or politics as usual. Trump is not a normal politician. Nothing about him or his regime is normal, usual or American. If his “style” of leadership continues, or if others pick it up, we will lose our democracy, as surely as effect follows cause.

Yet no Republican will publicly call Trump out or challenge him where it counts, with their voices and their votes in Congress. Brett Kavanaugh, now on our highest court, is still accused of perpetrating or being involved in the most vile sexual assaults on as many as three women. While Congress brushed the charges against him under the rug, all Republicans but Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) voted to confirm him with only the most cursory and inadequate investigation.

These are all reasons why I voted against every Republican on my ballot. Not one of them (except Murkowski, who wasn’t on my ballot), voted for right against might, for due process over bullying, or for the rule of law. Every man and woman (but Murkowski) among the GOP tried to excuse the inexcusable for the sake of expediency and raw political power. None of them (but Murkowski) were anything like Shakespeare’s “honorable men.”

Trump and his political party have broken not just all the rules of American politics, but all the rules of civilized behavior. If they get away with doing so, and if others copy them, our own civilized democracy will soon be gone forever. Even if Trump is impeached after the midterms or loses the 2020 presidential election, a terrible precedent will have been be set: bullshit, bullying and bigotry will look like legitimate means of winning elections and taking power. Most of what our Founders left us will be lost.

These midterm elections, with early voting (in many states) in October and the big day on Tuesday, November 6, are the last clear chance we have to repudiate decisively what Trump and his party have done and how they have done it. The only way to show our political and ruling class that this vile behavior doesn’t pay is to crush Trump and every Republican at the polls.

Even 2020 could be too late. If we don’t crush them all now, many will read the wrong lesson from these elections. Then the rot in our society that today calls itself the Republican Party will continue to fester and grow. If you who are under fifty or who don’t usually vote want to see a real democracy in your own future, you cannot let that happen.

Endnote: As for my voting to approve all the desirable local bond issues, the reason is simple. They are all things that need doing—and so need money—for the people of my state.

Trump and his minions have run up a cumulative a $1.5 trillion debt doing things that don’t need doing: giving tax breaks to the rich and corporations that they don’t need, don’t deserve and mostly didn’t even ask for. The GOP’s scheme in all this is to so boost the deficit that no one will consider things like Social Security, Medicare for All, or necessary bond issues that the most of the people need or want. If anyone suggests such measures, the GOP will say, “We can’t do it. We already have too big a deficit.”

But here’s a dirty little secret. Two can play that game. If the people want money for things that make their lives better, and if they increase the deficit for that purpose, at some point the Congress is going to have to decide where to compensate. It can just as well compensate by cutting the gigantic earnings of the rich and corporations, by raising their taxes back up, and by giving the people what they want.

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posted by Jay Dratler, Jr., Ph.D., J.D. @ 10/12/2018 04:27:00 AM   0 comments