Sunday Independent - 17 December 2023

Taxing issue of JP's gifts: Billionaires play by different rules to the rest of us. Their displays of generosity keep us off their backs

"If you suspect that tax is a rigged game, a con, designed to fleece the little guy, you are about to find out how shockingly true that is..."

Taxtopia, The Rebel Accountant

A PR industry has sprung up around billionaires (they make up 0.001 per cent of the world's population) that casts them as humanitarians and heroes. It is important not to rub the little people's noses in it too much. So, you donate a children's hospital wing or support a popular sports star or team and in this way become a national treasure. Except with the bloody lefties and those people before profit commies.

The PR coaxes us not to criticise but to applaud the winners. We are begrudgers if we criticise. We are made to feel spiteful and ungrateful. Why can't you just celebrate the success of these winners? Why are you jealous if their private jets and yachts and helicopters? What the hell is wrong with you?

So, when PBP councillor Madeleine Johansson tweeted "Just pay your f**king taxes," Fianna Fáil TD Willie O'Dea angrily countered, "JP voluntarily donates millions of his own money to good causes. Let's leave the envy to one side and celebrate what's being done."

Or as my good friend Tomás Ó Sé tweeted in 2018 when JP donated €3.2m to the GAA, "Is it an Irish thing or what but the negativity aimed at JP McManus for the gesture he gifted on every GAA club in the country is wrong. He didn't have to do it and does so much no one sees or hears. We should be grateful and let the haters hate!! Míle Buíochas JP."

In this world, billionaires know best how to spend their money. Governments are wasters. Charity, not paying taxes, is the true solution to inequality. The new way of saving the world is private, voluntary and accountable to no one.

Let us imagine for a moment that every citizen of Ireland could register in a tax haven for a nominal fee, say €20. Or that every citizen could simply opt out of paying tax. They could, instead, at their sole discretion, make donations to good causes. It is certain that the vast majority of people would opt out. Within months, without tax receipts, Irish society would collapse. No money for teachers or police officers or bus drivers or schools or hospitals or vital infrastructure. So my question is this: Why should tax be optional for billionaires but not for nurses?

Here is the compromise: Leave us billionaires alone and we will look after you when our winnings are win. We will spend it much more wisely than any government. In this compromise, generosity is a substitute for a fairer and more equal system of living. The winners do not have to make any sacrifices. They do not have to play by the same rules as the rest of us. They are great men and we should be thankful that they sprinkle us with some of the profits of their greatness every now and again. And it works. Their public displays of generosity are enough to keep us off their backs and preserve the status quo.

The trick is to donate in a way that is eye catching and pulls at the heart strings. What better way to achieve it than through a beloved community organisation? This provides moral cover. It feels good. And it does good. As Trump might say, "it really does."

But it is a pleasant fantasy. It means that the billionaire does not have to interact with the messy reality. It avoids the duty of citizenship. It is a dystopian world where the rich and powerful get to decide what is best for the world. And what is best for the world is what is best for them.

But if you are an Irishman, if you have respect and empathy for the people of Ireland, you should pay your taxes here. You should be pulling your weight with the nurses and teachers and firemen. Not counting the days to make sure you don't go over your 182-day residency limit.

John Patrick McManus, pay your taxes here.

Sunday Independent - 17 December 2023

FAI is still making the same mistakes: Hill's idea of staff relations is at odds with reality

The FAI's payments to CEO Jonathan Hill epitomised a familiar form of modern entitlement. Yet again, someone already paid more than enough got to plunge their snout further into the trough.

The Ryan Tubridy deal that almost capsized RTÉ was a classic example. The sums are smaller in Hill's case but the mentality, that fat cats can never have enough cream, is the same.

Former FAI chairman Roy Barrett told last weekend's AGM that he made the extra payment to "incentivise the executive." Seriously? Hill earns €258,000 per annum. Shouldn't that be sufficient incentive for him?

FAI administrative staff, meanwhile, are supposed to stay incentivised on an average wage of €32,000 a year. The figure for development staff is €40,000. Comments that the Hill payment doesn't matter because"€12,000 isn't that much money" is an insult to people for whom it's several months wages.

Hill claims he has a good relationship with Siptu, who represent many of those workers. But Siptu Services Division Organiser Teresa Hannick doesn't agree: "We would like to clarify that relations in terms of dealing with management have broken down to such a degree that the employees are bringing management to the Workplace Relations Commission. Both parties have agreed to attend."

Hannick insists Hill misled Wednesday's Dáil Committee hearing by describing their members as merely, "a small cohort," within the organisation. She says Siptu has, "a sizeable membership within the FAI."

Hill has caused, "extreme annoyance" by failing to recognise the union for collective bargaining purposes. "The staff are continuously told 'we are one' but this is far from the truth," laments Hannick.

What also rankles is the double standard operated as regards pay. While the CEO's pay is benchmarked against the public sector, the FAI refused to do the same for staff. The result is that while Hill's pay has risen by 22 per cent in the last years, some employee's with over 10 years experience have seen their pay rise by just three per cent compared to 2011 figures.

This is a poor reward for people who agreed to pay cuts so the Association could stay afloat during the Delaney era. It's a classic example of the modern trend where those at the top are afforded every consideration, but those lower down must like it or lump it. It's Class War.

Four years ago, Siptu asked for a worker director position to be made available on the board. The request, which still stands, was turned down. The workers apparently aren't qualified to deal with the really important issues.

Corporate Ireland's values were writ large in the Hill payment saga. Barrett implied that he didn't tell the FAI board about the payments in case media leaks led to the public finding out. That's a strange attitude for an organisation in receipt of public money.

This is an effective advertisement by the UAW.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhyMwNQRczA

Sunday Independent - 3 December 2023

So they're trying the Great Replacement theory on us

They are in too deep to see themselves as suckers, the kind of people who trashed the US Capitol for Trump - many of whom have gone to jail for a long time, while their main man is still out there, denying all responsibility. They are McGregor without the money - and when you consider how angry he is despite all that opulence, the mind boggles at how angry they are without it.

Yet because they live in a world of Steve Bannon's bullshit, somehow they will never be angry about the right things.

I keep going back to the great film Nomadland, about this world of people abandoned for the greater good of Corporate America, and that moment when it hits you: that the evil genius of the far right is to persuade such victims of the oligarchs that their problems are caused by those who have even less money than they do.

And that those with the most money - Trump, Musk, Carlson, McGregor - are somehow on their side.

They're not... obviously.

Sunday Independent - 3 December 2023

Icons of hope have much more to offer: McGregor's brand of Irishness is fuelled by hate

Much condescending rubbish was written about the authentically proletarian nature of McGregor's behaviour by those apparently convinced that working class life consists solely of telling people to f**k off and punching them in the mouth.

---

Some Irish people would like to disown McGregor, but to a certain extent he both embodies and magnifies the worst elements of the national character. Take his declaration to Mayweather that he didn't need to be told about racism because, "My people have been oppressed our entire existence. And still very much are."

This particular trope proved popular with the right-wing Yanks who during the Black Lives Matters protests never tired of saying that African Americans had nothing to complain about because Irish people had it just as bad. The same belief, that Irish history is so uniquely harrowing it's made us experts in suffering, is common here too.

In reality we enjoyed a much less terrible 20th century than most European nations by dint of avoiding World War II. But much of the commentary on the immigration issue suggests we still feel so sorry for ourselves there's not much sympathy left for anyone else.

A man who says he loves his home city shouldn't want to see it in flames.

The riot was greeted with barely concealed glee by people who oppose curbs on hate speech yet seem fine with the harassment of library staff by homophobic cranks, use women's sport as a vehicle for attacking trans people and hint that climate change doesn't exist. They highlight crimes by immigrants while ignoring crimes against them, admire Trump and Musk, never stop banging on about Wokeness and will have got a kick out of Russia banning the gay rights movement. When called out, they affect indignation like footballers rolling on the ground feigning injury.

There are those too who, while disapproving of the riot, will be happy if it results in the Government adopting a draconian immigration policy. By showing just how ugly this stuff is when you strip away the veneer of respectability, McGregor might actually have done Ireland a favour.

Well done champ.

I love this video of Cory Doctorow explaining how the dreams of tech workers have changed over the past 15 years.

https://youtu.be/XwvqecNDHF0

This topic also appeared in his speech that he gave to Defcon earlier this year.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

We deserve better than this. We can get it.

An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw It Into Reverse

If tech workers needed an example of the power they possess at this point in time, they need look no further than what happened at OpenAI when Sam Altman was fired by the board. He would not be the CEO today if the workers had not threatened to leave.

It's a small example and it will be interesting to see how Altman and OpenAI will react to try and break that solidarity in the future.

Shane MacGowan passed away on November 30th, 2023. He was a huge figure in Irish music and someone whose music still means a lot to me.

https://www.irishtimes.com/obituaries/2023/11/30/shane-macgowan-obituary-rank-outsider-who-became-one-of-irelands-most-feted-sons/

I thought Philip O'Connor did a great job talking through the history of Shane MacGowan and his band, The Pogues, in a recent episode of The Global Gael podcast. He details the importance of the band to the Irish emigrant community as well as giving his own insights and opinions on the music.

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourmaninstockholm/episodes/The-Global-Gael---Remembering-Shane-MacGowan-e2ckvj7

Well worth listening to.

I was scrolling through my RSS feeds on Friday when I came across the news of Sam Altman being fired as the CEO of OpenAI. After the success of OpenAi's Dev Day the previous week, I was surprised by this. After reading the blog post announcing the decision I still didn't understand why exactly he had been fired.

According to the OpenAI board

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

OpenAI announces leadership transition

This raised way more questions than it answered. I spent over an hour trying to find out what was going on but then I remembered a quote from Brian Stelter gave in an interview about breaking news.

We oftentimes have the most interest in a news story when there's the least amount of information. You know, something's breaking news and we really know absolutely nothing about it but that's when everybody wants to know everything and by the time we know all the facts, everybody's moved on.

Brian Stelter on the Offline podcast

It's important to for me to remember that I don't need to keep up with events like this. It will work itself out eventually and I can deal with it then. There's no point responding to speculation about things that haven't happened yet. It's usually wasted energy.

Cory Doctorow wrote a piece that appeared on John Scalzi's blog that had some great quotes on writing.

I wrote because that’s how I go from being life’s passenger to taking a small bit of control over my destiny. Writing isn’t just a way for me to escape to a better world, it’s a way to help conjure that world into existence.

Science fiction, after all, is a literature that says we’re not prisoners of history. It’s a way to say, “Things can be different. What we do matters. The future is up for grabs.”

Bill McKibben called The Lost Cause “The first great YIMBY novel,” adding “forget the Silicon Valley bros–these are the California techsters we need rebuilding our world, one solar panel and prefab insulated wall at a time.”

Kim Stanley Robinson said, “Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope.  May it go like this.”

For me, these two quotes are the perfect summary of why writing – especially writing sf – feels so satisfying in anxious times. None of us can stop the bus on our own, but if we can break free of the frozen terror of helplessness and understand that the bonds that hold us in our seats are forged of our own constrained imagination. we can grab the wheel and swerve.

The Big Idea: Cory Doctorow

I liked Nate Jackson's book, Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile, on his experience as a professional American football player.

I remember how highly he regarded Mike Shanahan, his first coach on the Denver Broncos, and how much he distrusted Josh McDaniels when he eventually replaced him. When McDaniels was fired as the coach of the Las Vegas Raiders earlier this week, I wondered if Jackson would write about it.

He did. He notes early in the piece how "it has the air of a lover scorned. Of course I'd say Josh McDaniel is a shitty coach: He cut me". He does make a point to show the lack of success the Belichick coaching tree has had in comparison to the coaches groomed by Shanahan. It has become more apparent how much of the success of the Patriots was related to Tom Brady.

The article is worth reading in full but I liked this part about the importance of coaching and what it is. This goes for people in leadership in general. There are engineers promoted to management positions based on the quality of their code but some just aren't suited to the position. Sometimes all they need is time or training to change their mindset from personal to team success. Other times, they just don't get that it's not about them, it's about the team.

Ultimately, this should be a lesson to everyone in the sports world. If you don’t have the respect of your team, it doesn’t matter how clever you are on the fucking whiteboard. Coaching is about connecting with other humans. It's about paying attention to what they are going through and responding to it. It's about listening to what they tell you. It's about putting them in positions to succeed, challenging them to be their best, and respecting the effort they give you. Honoring their sacrifice. Believing in them. Showing them that you love them, not just as players, but as people. 

It's about setting them to up shine, not running off the brightest among them so you can be the star instead.

The Problem Was Always Josh McDaniels by Nate Jackson

"There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints." - Rita Dove

Interview with Jesse Kornbluth for "The Book Report". April 8, 1997.

Interesting development. All WordPress.com users can now use ActivityPub on their blog.

I came across this post on Mastodon and it's a good reminder of what voting for someone actually means.

I was listening to an interview on The Stand with Eamon Dunphy with Philip O'Connor on the current situation in Sweden where the prime minister has called in the head of the armed forces to help deal with a surge in gang related killings.

The conversation progressed to deal with more recent Swedish political history such as the rise of the Sweden Democrats and how they went from neo-Nazi skinheads in bomber jackets to the power brokers in the Swedish parliament. This can provide a warning to those dismissing the Irish far-right figures.

He also mentioned "The Oxygen of Amplification" report written by Whitney Phillips which provides some useful guidelines for reporting on the internet. I want to read that again.

MacRumors reported that all first generation Apple Watch models were going to be added to the obsolete products list according to an internal memo. This includes the gold edition which cost $17,000 when released 8 years ago.

When a product is added to the obsolete product list "Apple discontinues all hardware service for obsolete products, and service providers cannot order parts for obsolete products" according to Apple support. This means there are no more repairs, system updates or security patches. The product should still work as long as the hardware holds up. Once it breaks, that's it.

Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit, gave a great response to Motherboard about this story.

“It's ludicrous,” Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, told Motherboard in an email. “High end watches are heirlooms. You can, and should, pass them down to your kids. Technology the way Apple builds it is a flash in the pan. Civilizations thousands of years from now will laugh at how short-sighted we are. Batteries that wear out in two years? Service networks that shut down after seven? That's not how you build a society that values craftsmanship.”

'It's Ludicrous': Those $17K Gold Apple Watches Are Now Obsolete - Jordan Pearson (Vice Motherboard)

This is the talk that Cory Doctorow gave at the DEF CON Conference earlier this year. The whole talk is a lot of fun. A room full of hackers is a receptive audience for his message. It's well worth watching or listening to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

This is a list of recent podcast episodes where Kara Swisher spent some time discussing Elon Musk that I found interesting over the past few weeks..

Why We Can’t Quit Elon with Ronan Farrow & William Cohan - On With Kara Swisher

This was recorded in the wake of Farrow's article in The New Yorker about the US government's reliance on SpaceX and Starlink. I also appreciated hearing William Cohen's viewpoints on the performance of SpaceX and Tesla on the stock market.

Elon Musk: Somebody That I Used to Know - On With Kara Swisher

This is an interview of Swisher by Nayeema Raza that was originally recorded in November 2022 when Swisher and Musk's relationship broke down after he acquired Twitter.

"Kara Swisher" - Smartless

This episode had the odd event of Swisher defending Musk.

I came across this story of Tim Mackinnon recently. It provided a valuable reminder of the importance of looking at your vision of success and how you structure incentives to realise that vision.

You see, the reason that Tim’s productivity score was zero, was that he never signed up for any stories. Instead he would spend his day pairing with different teammates. With less experienced developers he would patiently let them drive whilst nudging them towards a solution. He would not crowd them or railroad them, but let them take the time to learn whilst carefully crafting moments of insight and learning, often as Socratic questions, what ifs, how elses.

With seniors it was more like co-creating or sparring; bringing different worldviews to bear on a problem, to produce something better than either of us would have thought of on our own. Tim is a heck of a programmer, and you always learn something pairing with him.

Tim wasn’t delivering software; Tim was delivering a team that was delivering software. The entire team became more effective, more productive, more aligned, more idiomatic, more fun, because Tim was in the team.

The Worst Programmer I Know

There is a concept on sports teams of a glue guy. Someone who isn't a star but provides the foundation for teammates to thrive.

Shane Battier was the epitome of a glue guy when he played in the NBA. He wrote of what it took on The Players' Tribune. One part that stuck out was:

One way is by never worrying about looking cool. (Not that I was ever mistaken for cool.)

I knew my value was helping us notch victories however I could. So there were certain things that I did to ensure that my team was always as prepared as possible. For example, I used to ask really basic questions during film room sessions.

“Coach, can we run through that last set one more time?”

“Hold up coach, which direction do I roll out of this pick?”

“Wait coach, which player is supposed to switch here if the point guard drives?”

“Sorry, can you run through that set just one more time?”

Yeah, I was that guy.

Nobody likes that guy. I know that.

But there was always a strategy behind why I did it: I always knew that if I had a certain question about a game plan, there was almost always going to be a younger, less experienced player on the team who had the same question but was too intimidated to speak up. Having that question answered could ultimately pay dividends during a game. If the moment of truth comes and that player is prepared, that’s a plus for our team.

Elite 'Glue Guys' 101 - Shane Battier (The Players' Tribune)

This is difficult to capture in metrics. It's more of an eye test or a gut feeling. The team plays better when they're on the floor. Sometimes it's providing support for less experienced colleagues.

If everyone is trying to be a star then the team won't win. Players take possessions off on defence and are disengaged on offence when the ball isn't in their hands. People will look for credit in a win but avoid responsibility in a loss. They will expend time and energy blaming others instead of looking at how to fix the situation. The team will fall apart. They won't reach their goal.

The incentive of winning a championship provides the opportunity for people to find their role in the collective that will provide the platform for success. The incentive of "I need to put myself in the best position to get a new contract somewhere else" will lead to division and losses. A team full of stars rarely wins. Just ask Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and James Harden on their experience on the Brooklyn Nets.

You won't win a title without stars but glue guys need their flowers too.

I was also reminded of the Bill Atkinson -2000 lines of code story in Apple from the early 1980s. The story goes that managers decided to track productivity by asking engineers to fill in a form at the end of each week. In the first week of this change Atkinson was working on QuickDraw, a 2D graphics library that he had wrote.

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

-2000 Lines Of Code - folklore.org

The idea of using lines of code written as a metric makes sense in a blunt force trauma sort of way. You can use a hammer to open a door when you forget your keys or you could call a locksmith or pick the lock yourself. The first option may be the quickest to route in and may be necessary in some cases. However, you're going to need a new door afterwards.

Incentives can work in a similar manner. Reward people bugs fixed and there is an incentive to write bugs to fix them later. Track lines of code written and the incentive is to write more code, not better code.

This is why the story of Twitter engineers printing out their code for evaluation by Elon Musk and Tesla engineers made no sense. I didn't care much about Elon Musk before that point but when I saw that story, my feelings were summed up perfectly in this post on Mastodon.

Accountability is important and it is important to measure what is and isn't working. Just don't pick the easiest tool you can think of. Pick the right one.

Take the time to think about how I want my team or company to run. What behaviour do I see providing the most value? How can I reward it so other people will be incentivised to copy it? It's not easy and it will require iterations to make it better.

It will require trust. That can mean giving your team some time to experiment with different approaches to the work. It's not efficient at the beginning. But it will pay in the long run.

It won't require bossware or expensive consultants. We know their answers already. Fire people. Hire contractors, preferably from somewhere cheap. Make your service worse for your customers by investing less time and effort into it. Just don't make it so bad that they leave. Buy competitors to lock up the market. If they don't sell, sue them. Cut prices to starve them out. Jack up the prices when they leave the market. If someone offers to buy you, take the money. Don't bother building a business. That's too hard. Take the money and call yourself an entrepreneur. Pretend that you run a business. Write a book.

I heard of this project on This Week in Google and it looks to be an interesting application of LLMs with writing. I haven't found it useful so far but it can worth playing around with.

https://textfx.withgoogle.com

This is a discussion between Mike Masnick of Techdirt and Professor Andy Przybylski from the University of Oxford about research Przybylski has done about the effects of social media on children, mental health and video games and the effects of Facebook on well-being.

https://soundcloud.com/techdirt/social-media-mental-health

In short, he didn't find a lot of evidence supporting the claims that social media and video games had a negative impact on people's well-being.

It is a good conversation to listen to and consider in the light of the increased scrutiny that the tech industry is under. The tech industry has escaped scrutiny for too long but there are times when bad regulation is worse than no regulation. There is a danger of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction.

I want to see better regulations drafted when considering the best available evidence. A major problem is that the data required to perform this research is locked within servers owned by the companies who aren't really incentivised to allow academics to use it, especially if they feel it could impact them negatively. There is need of a transparent process to give researchers the access they need while also protecting the sensitive data that the companies should be protecting.

I didn't know of Jeff Jarvis until I started listening to This Week in Google. He can be quite strident in his opinions but he provides a valuable perspective when it comes to technology policy and regulation.

I came across an interview he had with Andrew Keen on the Keen On podcast back in May. They go on a tour through Jarvis' history on the internet starting with blogging and moving onto social media.

The story of Jeff walking up from the subway in New York after the first plane hit the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 was harrowing.

This is around the time that he started blogging. Listening to his description of the importance of blogging in his life, it became easier to see why he's such a staunch defender of allowing people access to new technology.

There are times when I feel he's too dismissive of potential downsides of a new technology. In his defence, there are many examples of moral panics in the past that have turned out to be overblown.

I lean more towards Andrew Keen's side when it comes to the tech industry. I think that the uncritical coverage of the tech industry has been a major problem but I am more aware of the potential downsides of inaccurate regulations can have. When I hear of a negative news report about the technology industry, I stop and say "What would Jeff say about this?".

A useful anecdote is Jeff talking about seeing some of his old newspaper colleagues and how they are surviving in an industry that is shrinking, if not dying. He recounts how he was told he was crazy to leave his job as a columnist with the San Francisco Examiner. Sometimes taking the risk to move to a more uncertain field like the internet was at the time is the right thing to do.

I was looking at improving some PowerShell scripts I had written in the past and I came across PowerShell.org. While looking around the site I came across the guidelines for blogging at PowerShell.org. They have great answers to some of the common excuses for not blogging.

https://powershell.org/contributing/blogging-at-powershell-org/

My favourite answer is:

It Takes So Long to Make it Perfect!

Stop trying. The world isn’t a perfect place and you’re not writing for Encyclopedia Brittanica. Start with a problem you set out to solve. And then just document the ugly process you went through. What did you try? What didn’t work? Why? What did you try next? You see, teaching isn’t about preventing a learner from seeing the mistakes. It’s about showing them the mistakes, so they don’t have to experience them on their own. The process is usually far more important that the outcome. So just write about solving, and not about solutions. 

Blogging at PowerShell.org

I came across this interview with Jake Tapper on The Bulwark podcast.

And then I try to write for at least fifteen minutes a day every day when I’m in the middle of a writing project because even if I’m busy, everybody has fifteen minutes a day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever.

And if that’s all you do that week, that’s still an hour forty five. That’s two pages maybe. And That’s the lesson is I wrote a novel in my twenties. Mhmm. It didn’t get published.

And then I put it down. And then I didn’t try to do fiction again for another, like, twenty years. And if you don’t sit down and write, then that will happen to you too. Twenty years will go by and you haven’t written a word of fiction, or you’ve written a word, but you know, you never finished anything. And it can happen like that unless you have the the schedule and make yourself abide by it.

Jake Tapper: “All the Demons Are Here” - The Bulwark Podcast

Success isn't guaranteed if you do the work but it will not happen if you don't. That's important to remember.

While reading Kashmir Hill's profile of Mike Masnick I was reminded of the series she did on "Life Without the Tech Giants" while she was working for Gizmodo in 2019.

It was eye opening to see how much of the digital infrastructure runs through such a small number of companies. Sometimes there is no alternative as their services have been embedded into business and government systems and can't be avoided.

I remember being surprised at how many services ran through AWS. I thought someone with the size of Netflix would be running their own infrastructure.

I'd be interested to see how many services are being run through the 3 largest cloud providers today: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

The series is still worth reading and viewing today.

• Life Without the Tech Giants
• I Tried to Block Amazon From My Life. It Was Impossible
• I Cut Facebook Out of My Life. Surprisingly, I Missed It
• I Cut Google Out Of My Life. It Screwed Up Everything
• I Cut Microsoft Out of My Life—or So I Thought
• I Cut Apple Out of My Life. It Was Devastating
• I Cut the 'Big Five' Tech Giants From My Life. It Was Hell

One of the things I appreciate about movies and television is how old songs can be exposed to a new audience. I remember wondering years ago why was "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey was all over the radio. Someone had to tell me it appeared in the final scene of The Sopranos. A more recent example is Stranger Things and the song "Running Up That Hill" by Kate Bush.

I was reminded of this fact this morning. This song woke me up as my alarm clock turns on the radio.

Indigo Girls - Closer to Fine

I hadn't heard it before. The DJ mentioned that it appeared in the new Barbie movie. I still enjoy that experience of finding new music. It doesn't happen as often for me anymore.

It's great for the musicians as exposure to a new audience can breathe new life into their careers. The Indigo Girls seemed genuinely surprised at how their song was used in the Barbie movie and how it was received. They also played NPR's Tiny Desk Concert earlier this year. Hopefully the success will continue for them.

I briefly introduced Mike Masnick and Techdirt in a previous post. I was thinking about writing a longer article about him but then Kashmir Hill did a better job than I could in this profile in the New York Times.

An Internet Veteran’s Guide to Not Being Scared of Technology

I was listening to the Bill Simmons' conversation with Chuck Klosterman on his podcast and this quote stuck out for me.

The size of your reality is the size of your memory.

Chuck Klosterman on the Bill Simmons podcast

It's for quotes like this that I started this blog. I had completely forgotten about it until I was going through my unfinished posts today.

I listen to the Second Captains to stay updated on sport in Ireland. They introduced me to podcasting when they left Newstalk in 2013. I admired their ambition and principles when they took that risk. I'm happy to see how well it has worked for them. Success wasn't guaranteed.

One of the benefits as a member is that I get exposed to some non sport commentaries and interviews such as this one with Mark Jones. Mark Jones is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Global History at University College Dublin and is a specialist in the history of political violence, war, and revolution. He is also a recognized authority on the history of the Weimar Republic.

He recently published a book "1923: The Forgotten Crisis in the Year of Hitler’s Coup". The interview mostly focuses on the period in question. The state of Germany post World War 1 and its relationship with France and the occupation of the Ruhr region. This led to the German response which was to attempt to support what amounted to a strike where the German population of Ruhr region refused to co-operate with the French. They attempted to do this by printing money. This eventually led to hyperinflation that inflicted so much suffering on the German population. This helped set the stage for Adolf Hitler ascent to power.

The book sounds fascinating and I'm looking forward to reading it. Listening to the interview you hear of messages and slogans that are echoed today. There are some worrying similarities in the rise of extremist politics. Just this week there were attacks in Cork and Dublin related to the housing of refugees. The library in Cork had to be closed due to fear for staff safety because of a protest taking place outside. It brings to mind the quote attributed to Mark Twain - "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."

Ken Early does bring up the question of what is the value of knowing this? Jones brings an impassioned defence of historians and the importance of knowing history. How vital it can be to look back to see the similarities in the present. It is important to remember.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

1984 - George Orwell

One disturbing thought is they discussed the possibility of violence, especially when one side celebrates its use. I heard someone say before that violence is never the answer until it becomes the only answer. The Nazis were only defeated after an astonishing amount of violence, death and destruction. It is worrying.

It is important to remember that it is not inevitable. There is always hope even when there are no clear answers.

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Cory Doctorow. I do like Mike Masnick and the work he does on Techdirt. I don't always agree with them but they can make compelling arguments. I appreciate hearing an alternative viewpoint that is smart rather than just contrarian for the sake of it.

Cory appeared on the Techdirt podcast this week to talk about his most recent book "Red Team Blues". A lot of the conversation covers ground that has been dealt with in other interviews.

What stuck out from this conversation comes towards the end of the episode. Doctorow talks about the using the infrastructure that unions and organised labour had built in the preceding decades to participate in protests. He speaks of his experience as those structures were degraded and eventually dismantled.

Once those structures are gone then everything gets so much harder. There isn't a solid foundation to build on. It takes time to build something solid. Digital tools have helped to regain some of the ground lost over the past 40 years.

Mike Masnick has an undergraduate degree labour relations. He suggests that the internal corruption of the unions meant that they needed to be burnt to the ground before they could be rebuilt.

I'd agree with Doctorow's retort the the labour movement should be improved instead of jettisoned.

Once that ground has been taken or that institution destroyed, it is so difficult to get back to where you once were. The opportunity cost can be extremely high.

I listened to a podcast episode from the Things Fell Apart podcast. It's an interview with Jon Ronson and Dolly Alderton on his career and the podcast series covering the culture wars.

The whole interview is worth listening to but I loved this quote in particular.

“No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”
― Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel

One of the podcasts I enjoy the most is The Free State podcast. The normal structure is a discussion between Dion Fanning, a journalist with The Currency, and Joe Brolly, a barrister as well as a former Gaelic football All Star and current GAA pundit.

The quality can vary depending on the topic but as this review attests, the political discourse is where it comes into its own.

Where these two presenters add real value, for this listener, is when they get stuck into politics: class politics, Northern politics, political punditry, and when Brolly in particular brings his personal context to the conversation. He and Fanning air their differences, and it’s smart and heartfelt and fascinating listening. They up the ante to the point of real difference, and still they keep talking. Nobody cancels anybody else, nobody walks out, nobody stoops to insult or opprobrium. That’s the kind of conversation I can pull up a stool for.

"Free State With Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning aims at too many easy targets" - Laura McCann (The Irish Times)

Joe Brolly does have an axe to grind with RTÉ as he used to work as a pundit with them for 20 years before his contract was not renewed in 2020. He has expressed he felt badly treated at the end of his time there.

With that said, the last 2 episodes, which have focused on the ongoing crisis in RTÉ, have been excellent.

RTÉ The Musical - Part 1

RTÉ The Musical - Part 2

Joe's experience as a barrister allows him explain the gravity of the situation that RTÉ finds itself.

One of the topics he narrowed his focus on was the influence of the agent Noel Kelly. I don't think I had heard of him before but when I visited NK Management website I was surprised by the amount of people he represented who have shows on Irish radio and television. Brolly speculated on just how large an influence Kelly had on the programming decisions in RTÉ and it looks to be not insignificant.

I enjoyed his disdain for the RTÉ executives and their appearances before the Oireachteas committees over the past few weeks. It's a valuable lesson that sometimes the people given the jobs with a lot of responsibilities and correspondingly high salaries are sometimes not deserving of those positions.

We learned this lesson before. Fanning brought up this quote from a Michael Lewis story on the Irish banking collapse in 2008.

In McCarthy’s view, the dominant narrative inside the head of the average Irish citizen—and his receptiveness to the story Kelly was telling—changed at roughly 10 o’clock in the evening on October 2, 2008. On that night, Ireland’s financial regulator, a lifelong Central Bank bureaucrat in his 60s named Patrick Neary, came live on national television to be interviewed. The interviewer sounded as if he had just finished reading the collected works of Morgan Kelly. Neary, for his part, looked as if he had been dragged from a hole into which he badly wanted to return. He wore an insecure little mustache, stammered rote answers to questions he had not been asked, and ignored the ones he had been asked. A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will. Two weeks earlier the collapse of Lehman Brothers had cast doubt on banks everywhere. Ireland’s banks had not been managed to withstand doubt; they had been managed to exploit blind faith. Now the Irish people finally caught a glimpse of the guy meant to be safeguarding them: the crazy uncle had been sprung from the family cellar. Here he was, on their televisions, insisting that the Irish banks were “resilient” and “more than adequately capitalized” … when everyone in Ireland could see, in the vacant skyscrapers and empty housing developments around them, evidence of bank loans that were not merely bad but insane. “What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they’d ever seen this little man,” says McCarthy. “And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That’s when everyone panicked.”

"When Irish Eyes Are Crying" - Michael Lewis (Vanity Fair)

This crisis is far from over. There will be more revelations in the coming weeks and months as auditors comb through the accounts of the national broadcaster.

This is also an opportunity. It's an opportunity to display accountability. The people responsible should lose their jobs. If they have broken the law, they should be prosecuted. Justice should be pursued. I've heard too much talk of punishment and cuts. Some people want to see RTÉ tarred and feathered and made to do the walk of shame. I want to see change.

It is also an opportunity for the Irish citizens to define what they want from public service broadcasting. What does it look like in the age of the internet? How should it be funded? Should commercial advertising play some part? Should there be a ceiling for pay? Should the ceiling rise with inflation? Who sets it? What measures should be put in place to make sure that this doesn't happen again?

There are so many possibilities. I hope this moment isn't squandered.

I listen to some of the podcasts on the TWiT network and as someone who uses a Windows PC for work, I enjoy both Windows Weekly and Hands-On Windows. They are useful in keeping up to date in the Microsoft ecosystem but, more importantly, they are entertaining. I was familiar with Richard Campbell for .NET Rocks and RunAsRadio but I enjoy Paul Thurrott's rants.

The latest episode of Hands-On Windows goes through how Paul chooses a browser and I found the check he does using the Cover Your Tracks tool provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) useful.

It's a quick check that displays whether your browser blocks ads and trackers by default or if it randomizes its fingerprint to prevent tracking across the web.

He also displays which extensions should be added such as Privacy Badger and an adblocker like Adblock Plus. It's worth watching the video to watch him go through the different browsers and what he thinks of each.

Hands-On Windows 49: Choosing Your Web Browser

I disagree with his evaluation of Firefox but I can see his point. The fact that it doesn't support progressive web app (PWA) installs does not make sense. All the other browsers have moved to using the Chromium browser engine but I appreciate Mozilla trying to provide an alternative. I mainly use Firefox and Brave in a personal capacity but I also use almost the other browsers at work.

It's always worth checking your browsers using Cover Your Tracks after moving to a new computer or after installing a new browser to see what the privacy settings are.

I was listening to the latest episode of The Irish Passport podcast with Naomi O'Leary and Tim Mc Inerney titled "How the wealthy and powerful muzzle reporting in Ireland". They discuss the report that O'Leary wrote for the International Press Institute detailing the costs of defamation lawsuits and the chilling effect that it can have on reporting.

The report is well worth reading. There are some shocking stories about the threats issued to journalists and their sources. It also goes through the some of the costs involved and how it can cripple some smaller media organisations.

Ireland has been warned about this before. It is past time that the law needs to be updated. Knowingly publishing lies should be punished but those same laws should not be used to hide the truth.

I'm a fan of Cory Doctorow and I came across this section of his interview with the Changelog podcast.

I've started other projects and blogs in the past and have been crippled by perfectionism. Even this blog already has almost 30 draft entries that I can't bring myself to publish.

I don't know what this is going to be but I'm going to start with the intention that Cory wrote about in The Memex Method that

Writing for an audience keeps me honest.

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-method-238c71f2fb46

If I write to explain what I found interesting about the topic to someone else then hopefully it'll be easier for me to remember in the future.

This is going to be an experiment. I'm going to blog about things I find important, fun, interesting, cool, whatever. There are going to be mistakes and missteps. I know I'm going to look back in embarrassment at some point in the future but I've lost a lot by not recording these things digitally in the past.

As Cory writes,

Cringing at your own memories does no one any good. On the other hand, systematically reviewing your older work to find the patterns in where you got it wrong (and right!) is hugely beneficial — it’s a useful process of introspection that makes it easier to spot and avoid your own pitfalls.

The Memex Method - Cory Doctorow

Hopefully there's going to be good times and fun too. Thats's the plan. Let's see how it goes. Like the title says: Welcome to my blooper reel.