The very fabric of reality

Like a lot of my friends and family, I’m really upset about the election. Trump seems like an obvious malign force and I keep trying to figure out why anyone would vote for him.

But I remember how the right was convinced Obama was a Kenyan Socialist Muslim anti-white Baptist under the sway of radicals, and also gay and a cokehead and an idiot and an evil genius. Like, all those conspiracy theories. And they were convinced it was just totally obvious. Then when he got voted into office and was really popular, they felt they didn’t recognize their country, because who could vote for someone who’s so OBVIOUSLY just AWFUL?

So, I have to second guess myself.

Is he a fascist? Or just someone I disagree with on the merits? Would I feel this way about any of the other candidates if they’d won?

Like, the pee allegations, right? We joke that even if they’re true, it’s damning that they’re plausible. But their plausibility comes from us- because we hate him so much we think of COURSE he’d pull that kind of nonsense. The same way the right-wing fever swamps were convinced Hillary Clinton was a lesbian, because they didn’t like her or lesbians, so they go together.

I mean, it starts to freak you out. What ELSE that I assume is actually just a weird superstition brewed up in the fever swamps of liberal Facebook? What if my ENTIRE REALITY is something I’ve made up out of epistemic closure and confirmation bias?

And then someone says yeah, the lügenpresse sure is out to get Trump, can’t wait til he ovens those bitches, #maga, and I start to think that my vision is pretty goddamn clear.

Seething Id

A while back I did a little research on companies delivering customer service through social media. You know, how do you manage a corporate Facebook page or Twitter account, should we be on Snapchat, etc. My conclusion was that customer service delivery over Twitter works OK for a lot of organizations but isn’t right for us, that a financial company using Snapchat looks like it’s trying to be hip when it just can’t, and that nobody should ever use YikYak. I don’t mean for business. I mean, ever.

Obviously, I’m still spending a lot of time on YikYak. If you don’t know, it’s like Twitter, but hyperlocal and even more anonymous. The idea is to let college students complain and chat and share their deepest secrets.

Basically it’s a glimpse into a seething id of people mostly 18-25 in your town.

Complaints about the meal plan. Questions about the best place to buy drugs. Occasional thrilling tales spontaneous hookups or drunken debauchery. And of course, this kind of shit:

I carry it around with me like a pocket-size peephole into the abyss. You know what they say: “And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” And then it calls you a cuck.

Boston Property Brothers

HGTV is more popular than CNN these days, which got me thinking that we don’t have a really good Boston-focused shelter show. And that’s weird, because Boston’s huge in the entertainment biz these days. You can’t have a reality TV show without a Boston contestant, and you can’t go to the movies without tripping over some gritty Boston whatever.

We’ve got Wahlburgers and we’ve got The Town and (ugh) Patriot’s Day. We should have a show like Property Brothers or Fixer Upper, but, you know, Boston-ified.

Like, a couple goes apartment shopping. Their goal is a 2 bed, 2 bath place near transit with room for their dog. They get a room in an illegal boarding house, no pets allowed except bedbugs. It’s “near transit” in that the commuter rail goes right by the back door, but it’s a 2-mile walk to the station.

A couple starts a renovation. The Casey Affleck character from that Dunkin Donuts sketch is the contractor. He doesn’t pull permits, starts demolition, and then disappears.

The inspector’s mother once had an affair with the contractor’s father. The inspector retaliates by nickel and diming every permit until the project is six months behind schedule and $70,000 dollars over budget.

In a Very Special Episode, the tile guy overdoses in a newly finished bathroom.

Someone wants to spend $500,000 on a light-filled condo with Beacon Hill charm. They get a basement studio in Brighton for just under $750,000. It looks good at inspection but turns out to require structural reinforcement and asbestos mitigation. Ultimately the only cosmetic improvement they can afford is buying an unframed movie poster. For The Town. At a yard sale.

Bounce to it

A while back our friend Alex, an inveterate music lover, came by our place and wanted to play us some new hit song. So, he logged into his Spotify account and played it for us.

And then didn’t log out.

Today, I came home and decided it would be funny to play the Jezebel “Sluttiest Christmas Ever” mix that they posted today.

And then I got a text from Alex:

So, “Rudy the Big Booty Reindeer” just started playing in my headphones at work. I assume this (plus some quirk of Spotify) is your doing?”

Anyway, as aggressively difficult-to-listen-to as you might think a Christmas song could be – and a New Orleans bounce rendition of Rudolph with the lyrics changed to be about butts is up there – it’s still better than any version of “Little Drummer Boy” ever.

Shame! Shame! Shame!

So, I wanted to understand people who really thought Trump was better. You know, what policies of his do they like, what is it that appeals to him. It can’t all be racism, can it? There’s all those articles saying I should stop shaming Trump supporters. And I know I live in a liberal bubble. On my ballot, the only non-president candidate with an opponent was running against someone from the Massachusetts Pirate Party. DJT was the only Republican on the ballot.

The problem is, that I’d already unfollowed all… OK, both Trump voters who were in my feed. One after a “what’s wrong with Bay Area house prices” discussion ended with him saying he was OK with density as long as there wasn’t hip-hop dancing at his kid’s elementary school talent show, and one after she posted something insane about how Muslims are all coming to murder us. OK there’s my wife’s uncle from Indiana who’s a single-issue anti-abortion voter. I disagree heartily but at least it’s a coherent explanation. Old-school conservative Catholic, anti-abortion, case closed.

So, in my search for understanding my differences with others, I obviously went and got into a huge fight with a friend of a friend. It’s someone who, I have been assured, is a fundamentally good person. She told me first that a lot of voters voted for Trump because they had been hurt by the Obama administration’s policies.

So I asked her, who’s been harmed by Obama? People who got health insurance? Stock brokers who had to be held to a fiduciary standard? Bankers who had to increase their capital reserves? I know people hurt because they’re out of work now, but what part of Obama’s administration put them out of work?

After all, Republicans blocked stimulus, blocked Medicaid expansion, blocked health care regulation, and then complained there wasn’t enough work, enough Medicaid, good regs on insurers. Break the government, then cry out that it’s broken.

And oh, they hate Obamacare. They don’t feel supported by Obamacare. Remember, Obamacare was a Republican originated policy that Dems adopted because it was better than nothing. And as soon as the Dems picked it up, Republicans claimed it was Kenyan socialism. There’s a branding failure, definitely. Everyone loves the individual components of Obamacare, they hate the idea of it.

They like Trump’s economic policies? Look at Kansas. Brownback and the Republicans wrecked the economy there. And now people are angry at the party trying to help?

And so she went on a tear. I’ve cleaned up the typos but holy shit, you guys, Trump people live in a totally different world.

I’m glad HRC lost because I’m sick of her policies, principles, and her way of life which her supporters are clearly showing to be un-American IMHO. I didn’t like either candidate but no way would I ever vote for her.

HRC has lived off the system for decades. Billions donated to Haiti and not much went there. Why did HRC just move $1.8 billion to qatar? So American she didn’t want to leave the $$ here to be confiscated? And how about the Swiss bank accounts? How about the pedophile ring? Hmmm nice way of life promoting adultery, pedophilia, lying, getting fired from law firms for being unethical LOL.. working the system that’s for sure!!

When I pointed out that those were all lies, she replied with a link to a fake news site about a protest against Hillary over the Haitian earthquake relief effort. I acknowledged that the earthquake recovery was not well done, but that there was no evidence Hillary or the Clinton Foundation were the cause of it.

She sent a link to a New Yorker article about how Hillary’s donors are rich bankers and she has ties to Wall Street. Which, yes, major donors have big money. We know money is part of politics. I said we’ve read her emails and seen her tax returns, which is more than DJT has provided. She’s been far more transparent.

Her: Transparent HAHAH and no Trump’s not my boy but I have to respect who ever is Pres..

Me: How respectful of Obama were you?

Her: I didn’t vote for him and Obamacare has hurt me.. and his policies have hurt my business.. but he is/was the Pres and I didn’t riot, burn business etc. like you HRC supporters are.

Me: Yes, progressives are in the streets. But I don’t see them taking over a national park and threatening to shoot government employees. Protest – even rude and inconvenient protest – is valuable to remind the people in power that they don’t have free reign. And that’s why people are protesting.

But she just went on about immigrants costing us all money. Conspiracies about George Soros paying protestors. Got into a fight about abortion with someone else on the thread, claiming Trump wasn’t really going to cut abortion access. Claiming high property taxes that fund Medicaid hurt her business as a real estate broker,

And I gave up. I guess Northeastern liberals expected too much to hope Florida would do some research somewhere other than Infowars before casting a ballot.

So, I’m going to stop trying to “reach out” and “understand” and just go ahead and be angry.

I’m angry that someone’s going to put a climate denier in charge of the EPA and an evolution-denier in charge of education. I’m angry that people are opposed to immigration when a lot of my friends and co-workers are immigrants or the children of immigrants.

No, my friends aren’t “illegals,” although I wouldn’t mind if they didn’t have papers. But under Trump it will be a lot harder for them to stay, for their families to be here, for other great people to come here and be part of America. My co-workers are from Nepal, India, Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Haiti, Canada. They have come for work, or fleeing natural and manmade disasters, or because their parents came, or because they fell in love. They contribute to this country. They are on H1-B and O-1 visas or green cards or they are naturalized citizens. And there are some folks I don’t know well enough to ask, and it’s frankly none of my goddamn business. I’d love to have more immigration. I think immigrants are awesome. My great-grandfather was an immigrant and if he’d been turned away his whole family would have been destroyed in the WWI-era pogroms or the holocaust.

And I’m angry that Mike Pence is going to be doing a lot of domestic policy and that he thinks my gay and lesbian friends don’t deserve to have their families recognized. I’m angry that millions of people who got medicaid through the ACA are going to lose insurance. That if some jackhole rapes one of my friends, she won’t be able to get an abortion because Pence and co shut them all down and want to punish her.

I get that Trump supporters are angry. Because I’m not satisfied with the progress we made over the last 8 years. I get that people are hurting. I get that people think it’s a rigged system.

But even if you assume that “all politicians are corrupt” (we’ll see just how much more corrupt DJT is soon enough), look at the stated policies:

Trump is against immigration. He’s in favor of an impossible wall. He’s in favor of trade wars that could plunge the world economy into recession. He thinks NATO, the force which stabilized Europe post-WWII, isn’t worth the trouble. He thinks nuclear proliferation is dandy. He’s in favor of torture. He’s against health care for the poor. He’s in favor of tax cuts for the rich. He’s against abortion. He doesn’t believe in climate change. He’s in favor of gutting the EPA, he wants more coal and oil and less solar.

All of those things are demonstrably, objectively, dumb and bad.

So, yeah, I’m going to shame people who support him because “EMAILS!” or “THE ESTABLISHMENT” almost as much as I shame people who support him because they want their white country back from uppity negroes and foreigners and bitches who demand equality and queers who act all different.

I don’t care if you mean well. I don’t care if you’re “fundamentally good.” You’re supporting shameful shit and you should be ashamed.

My great grandfather came here with a weird accent and a foreign religion and worked his ass off as a tailor, deliveryman, rabbi, and anything else he could find. His 5 sons fought fascists in WWII. His daughter worked for civil rights. I will not dishonor the legacy of my family by standing aside and letting America turn its back on immigrants, on the needy, on the different and new. We are better than this.

Draft: Augmented Reality and Marketing Data Ethics Policy

Augmented Reality and Data Privacy Concerns: Pokémon Go is Just the Beginning
Pokémon Go is an “augmented reality” (AR) game from Niantic and Nintendo which has become wildly popular since its release in July 2016. While other apps, including “check-in” apps like FourSquare and the earlier Niantic game Ingress, have used location and interaction features in similar ways, few have been so immersive or so popular, and this new visibility raises the stakes of existing marketing and privacy issues and presents them in novel ways.

How the Game Works
The game requires users to physically go to different places in the real world in order to achieve game goals, mostly capturing Pokémon (adorable imaginary monsters) and having them compete against other users’ captive monsters. The capture locations are scattered around a simplified city map, while key in-game landmarks and competition locations are placed on an existing Google database of real-world landmarks, including public art, restaurants, and commemorative plaques.
The game uses the mobile device GPS and Wi-Fi connection information to determine location, and superimposes the game images over the view through the device camera. Game mechanics encourage users to walk between different destinations, rather than drive – increasing users’ physical activity without creating a “fitness app” was one of the developers’ stated goals.
Pokémon Go is free to play, although users can accelerate their progress using real money.

Privacy and Security Implications for Users
There was an initial error in permission requests that briefly granted the app full access to some users’ entire Google account if they logged in using their existing Google ID, but this has been fixed.
However, even without full account permissions, the app and its developers create an enormous trove of information about the user, most notably camera and location information as well as account and device identity. In other words, it knows who you are, where you are, and when you’re using the app. Location and other information appears to only be recorded when the game is running, but because the game rewards having the app open almost constantly, quite a significant amount of data may be gathered.
Because Google ID is one of the two login mechanisms for the game, many users will find that their game data is correlated a truly vast record of personally identifiable information, including locations of use for other apps, purchases, search history, email, website visits, and more.
Even without hacking or data sales, user privacy is far from assured. At least one suspicious user has checked the in-game record of Pokémon capture locations to catch a cheating boyfriend. Enterprising criminals have also used knowledge of the game’s landmarks to rob distracted smartphone users.

Privacy and Security Implications for Non-Users
In-game landmarks are based on a geographical survey taken a number of years ago. At least one such landmark, a former church, is now a home. It is still designated as a landmark in the game, however, and draws dozens of game users at a time to the door of the bemused residents.
Even when a residence is not marked as an in-game destination, game goals can encourage users to ignore property lines, creating annoyance, trespassing charges, and even gunfire. Presumably, Pokémon Go would also create a good pretext for a variety of illicit activities.

Business Uses for Pokémon Go
Businesses may pay Niantic to be marked as key destinations in the game, drawing users to their locations or simply enhancing their status as landmarks in the real world. For example, every McDonald’s restaurant in Japan is an in-game landmark.
Businesses that are already in-game destinations, or happen to be located near them, can also purchase “lures” to draw Pokémon (and subsequently players). Of course, players may or may not be desirable customers, and the lure purchasers need not be affiliated with a location. For example, the expensive New York restaurant Balthazar, described as an “unlikely Pokemon hotspot,” claims not to know who is buying the lures that draw users to its door.

In the Future
This specific game may or may not be a lasting success, but apps using location-sensitive data overlaid on real-time camera images are likely to proliferate. We will see more games, but also shopping and social media applications that will create and store increasing amounts of sensitive user data.
Pokémon Go does not appear to store camera data or transmit images to the Niantic servers, but it does keep a log of every Pokémon a user has seen and interacted. It is entirely possible that a future application could create an enormous database of real-world images, their AR overlays, and individual interactions with both. This database could be used or misused in innumerable ways for shopping, marketing, consumer research, government surveillance, or criminal enterprise.
Ezra Klein, in Vox, outlines his vision of the future:

Pokémon Go looks like a toy…. [It] is a toy. But it’s also the first widespread, massive use case for augmented reality — even though it’s operating on smartphones that aren’t designed for AR. So what’s going to happen as the hardware improves, the software improves, and the architects learn to use these more immersive environments to addict us more fully?
… [It] won’t remain a toy. It’s going to become an industry, a constant, a coping mechanism, a way of life. It will change how we spend our time, how we compete for status, how we interact with our loved ones. It will change the behaviors we think of as normal — already we’re seeing Pokémon Go run into racism; it won’t be long until AR cuts across other fault lines in our society.

Most of the technologies in AR systems are not radically new: the iPhone was released almost 10 years ago. However, the combined use of GPS, camera, smartphone, and wireless data in a single app is now refined enough to be on the brink of rapid consumer acceptance. Enhanced hardware built to take even more advantage, such as lower-profile virtual reality headsets, is not far behind. This combination will create enormous opportunities and risks for users, businesses, and marketers. The Direct Marketing Association, government regulators, and other business groups will need to pay close attention.

Ethics Policy Conclusions
The data generated and collected by AR software is not radically different from the data that is already generated and collected by other software. Therefore, existing policies should not be difficult to adapt to the new technology.
It is possible that new kinds of data will be aggregated and that new forms of risk may arise from them. However, at this time, the primary impact of AR data collection is that it increases the total amount of data available, raising the stakes for organizations tasked with safeguarding it against leaks and misuse.

Them Days Is Gone, Mickey

Last weekend we went down to Hartford to visit Megan’s family for a day, and Uncle Pete, now in his 80s and recovering from gall-bladder surgery, sat and talked with us a while about the old days. He met my father-in-law’s oldest sister when he was just back from the war in Korea. He was 21 or 22, working at a gas station, and she was 7 years younger, skipping high school to smoke cigarettes. When he met her parents, they were thrilled, because he had a job and wasn’t a drunk. They were married after her high school graduation, and he supported the family on wages from Gerber Scientific and so on.

Several times during the conversation, Pete shook his head and told my father-in-law “them days is gone, Mickey.” (Nobody else calls him Mickey.) Days when a fifteen-year-old girl could bring home a twenty-two-year-old boyfriend to meet the approval of her parents. Days when a man with a high school education and a bronze star could support a family on a single working-class wage. Days when Hartford was a manufacturing center and not just America’s filing cabinet.

Pete’s nostalgic, but he’s not trying to bring it back. Them days, he knows, is gone, and although we lost some good things it was mostly an upgrade.

And that’s why it annoys me to see much younger people like Mike Pecci so convinced that the good old days can be saved. Them days is gone, Mickey. Boston’s not a gritty scene anymore, Allston’s not a good place for underground punk shows, and you can’t make beer money printing zines.

Complaining about how things aren’t what they used to be is a grand tradition of course. In Boston it goes back at least as far as Ben Franklin complaining that pubs weren’t as cool as when he and the boys were plotting the revolution at the Green Dragon or the Bell-In-Hand. 0

But you can’t stop time. Places change and grow or fossilize and die.

Them days is gone, Mickey. Live in these days.

Good Bones

Go read the poem “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith, from Waxwing magazine. I don’t know anything about this poet and I don’t know who sent me the link or where I saw it. But it’s amazing.

That ending, about raising children to be optimistic about the world the same way a realtor tries to sell you on a damaged building with good bones…

I don’t know how parents do it. I really don’t. I am barely optimistic enough about the future to bother investing in a new roof.

The before-and-after photos never look quite right

Reading other people’s houseblogs makes it apparent that there’s a great deal of photographic technique involved in taking good before-and-after photos. None of my pictures really seem to convey just how haunted the house looked before we started, or what a shambles it is now.

Despite sweeping and cleanup, everything is coated in dust, and there are tumbleweeds of various kinds of insulation gathering in corners. The kitchen walls and ceiling are open to the studs and joists, and there are several huge holes in the subfloor made for ducts and pipes. In one spot there’s an actual door laid flat over the joists so you can walk across it, but you still have to be careful where you put each foot when walking around the kitchen area.

It actually looks like it’s further away from completion than when we started. Plus, next week our construction crew is not working because not only is Monday a holiday, but Wednesday is the Dalai Lama’s birthday, which is a serious big deal holiday for Tibet. Everyone deserves vacation, but I was alarmed that other people’s vacation might be inconvenient for me. (Yes, I recognize just how spoiled that makes me sound.)

But progress isn’t always visible, and we had a site visit yesterday with the contractor which was incredibly reassuring. I knew the walls were open because we had to shore up beams and posts above and around the kitchen, and add extra fire/sound proofing between the two units in our building, and to replace all the wiring and plumbing. I didn’t realize, however, that all of that work is now complete, and the plumbing and electrical has passed inspection.

In what remains of this week they’ll stuff more fire-and-sound insulation into the open slots in the kitchen floor, then close that up. While the crew is on vacation, the city will come and inspect the structural work.

Also our plumber has put in the furnaces and water heater, and the Tibet crew has replaced the rickety back stairs and rotten back door. We wound up with gray composite stairs and a white fiberglass door, so it’s not much to look at, but it’s done and it’s solid and it won’t require maintenance for at least a decade.

Once the crew comes back from the holiday, they will re-insulate the ceiling and walls in the kitchen, install air conditioners, and start the drywall-and-paint phase upstairs. We are still on schedule for a habitable room by August.

It seems like construction projects in general move like this: It looks like nothing is happening, and then there’s a giant visible change and everything’s torn apart. Then you wait and wait and it looks like nothing’s happening… and then there’s another big visible change. Then you wait and wait and it looks like nothing’s happening, and so on.

So, we’re moving nicely and nobody’s vacation is an inconvenience to me. Happy 4th of July, and happy 81st birthday to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.