Month: March 2019

Why does this feel familiar?


One of the creepiest Zuckerberg photos of all time, which he himself cluelessly posted on Facebook

The sound of derisive laughter from the entire civilized world almost drowned out the din of the Washington circus. Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook will “pivot to privacy.” Yes, and pigs will pivot to flying.

We veterans of the Apple-Microsoft wars, which went on for years, have been there before. Apple is still in the game, but Facebook is the new Microsoft. Facebook’s evil-empire strategy really is the same as Microsoft’s. The strategy is not about giving people what they want and treating customers with respect. Rather, it’s about domination and control, trapping one’s customers rather than delighting them.

As Slate and other publications have pointed out, what Zuckerberg’s “pivot to privacy” is really about is domination. Apple owns that high ground at present, with its smooth-as-silk iMessage ecosystem. And as Consumer Reports points out, encrypted messaging is already here and has been for a long time. Apple’s iMessage has had encryption all along. And even old-fashioned SMS phone-to-phone texting is secure, as long as the cellular carriers keep their promises not to snoop.

I sometimes wonder if Apple’s messaging system didn’t lead — or at least feed — the trend away from actually talking on our phones versus using our phones for texting. Millennials, and the coasts, have led the way. According to Forbes, some companies are eliminating voice mail, because so many employees don’t want it and don’t use it.

I am right on the edge of changing the answer message on both my phone lines to say that I never answer the phone, but that if it’s really important and you leave a message, I might call you back someday. More than half the time when my phone rings, it’s a spam call. The rest of the time it’s somebody that I don’t want to talk to, because my friends (as well as most of my political associates) text me or email me.

So Zuckerberg has accurately noticed that texting is now the future and that people are disgusted with Facebook (and with social media in general). It took about 10 years for people to realize that social media, despite its early thrill, would inevitably rot because of the drag and corruption exerted by the lowest common denominator. There is even a precedent for this rot, though latecomers to the Internet would not be aware of it. It was called Usenet. Usenet started around 1979. All the early Internet computers had it. During the 1980s, Usenet was a marvel of elite communication. All the universities had it. But after Usenet reached a certain size, it became useless because of the spam, the trolls, too many people, and those who tried to bilk it for promotion and advertising. This is now happening to Facebook. Consequently Zuckerberg is desperate for new terrain to dominate and control.

I predict that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, like Microsoft and Bill Gates before him, will fail. That’s because Facebook will continue to build traps. Apple will compete by building better and better stuff.

Improvising Asian sauces


That’s miso broth in the cup, and fermented black beans in the jar.

I have encountered two big challenges in trying to improve my competence with Chinese cuisine: wok cooking and the sauces.

Recipes for Chinese dishes may call for one or more of an array of Chinese sauces that some of us have never even heard of. It’s then tempting just to give up on Asian cuisine and not even try a recipe, because of the sauce mystery. For example, here is a list of sauces gleaned from Wikipedia: Douban sauce, hoisin sauce, mala sauce, mee pok sauce, oyster sauce, peach sauce, plum sauce, soy sauce, and shacha sauce.

Part of what’s sophisticated about Chinese cooking, though, is what I call the sense of sauce. A sense of sauce is one of the things that makes French (and Irish) cooking so good. Of course, the Irish also have Kerry butter.

With Chinese sauces, I find that some are essential and must be store bought (soy sauce, for example). But many can be made at home. If you lack an ingredient, just improvise. You probably already have what you need to make hoisin sauce. Oyster sauce can be improvised, even a vegan version.

I improvise shamelessly. I’m not ashamed to use ingredients that are traditionally Japanese, or even African, in Chinese food. Pepper paste, for example, is pretty much pepper paste. That which isn’t entirely authentic can at least be good. It’s all about umami. All sorts of things that you already have in your kitchen are useful for improvisation: blackstrap molasses, many types of vinegar, raisins (whizzed in a food processor), and any type of pepper sauce (I use harissa sauce). One of my inauthentic secret weapons is Better Than Bouillon, which will add a lot of oomph and color to a sauce that calls for water, allowing you to reduce the amount of soy sauce.

With black bean sauce, there is no improvisation. You’ve got to have the real thing. The black beans are not the same as what we call black beans here. They’re actually a type of soybean. They’re fermented, and it’s the fermentation that gives the beans their sassy taste. I couldn’t find fermented black beans even at Whole Foods, but Amazon has them.

So if a Chinese recipe calls for a sauce, and you don’t have it, Google for a recipe. Then improvise. As for wok cooking, it’s like breadmaking and getting to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.


The tofu and vegetables here ended up in a black bean sauce.

The inequalities of banking

Increasingly, liberals are noticing that it’s very expensive to be poor. It may seem strange to those of us for whom bank accounts are an ordinary fact of life. But many people cannot afford bank accounts. Consequently poor people pay more for just about everything.

Often when I go to the post office, I see people buying money orders and paying with cash. Fortunately, money orders from the U.S. Postal Service aren’t expensive — $1.20 for up to $500. But cashing a check may have cost them up to 12 percent. Many people with precarious finances do have bank accounts, but they get eaten alive by fees. Americans paid $34.3 billion just in overdraft fees in 2017. The poorest are the most vulnerable, with a typical poor person with a bank account being charged about $450 each year.

Democrats — in particular Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — have proposed that all U.S. post offices offer retail banking services. Republicans, naturally, don’t like the idea. Even some centrists don’t like the idea. But it seems to me that any serious plan for reducing economic inequality must include a mechanism for giving poor people options that allow them to avoid financial predation, which is at present a lucrative and ugly business.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks, those who are solvent and who know how to manage money make money from their banks. “Rewards” cards are the main vehicle for that.

Rewards cards are increasingly controversial, because merchants are charged more by credit card companies when customers pay with a rewards card. Some people have even made a hobby of juggling rewards cards to maximize cash back, using spreadsheets to track the best deals. According to the New York Magazine article that I just cited, more than 90 percent of credit card transactions now involve “rewards.” This is costing banks more and more money, so powerful financial interests are fighting for changes.

Though it is merchants who have to pay for the use of credit cards, we all pay for the credit card industry through higher prices charged by merchants. What rational person would not want to get some of that money back, if the banks let you do it?

I confess that I have two rewards card. Each year I earn a significant sum from my Bank of America rewards card by paying the full balance each month and collecting the rewards. Recently I acquired an Amazon Prime rewards card. I really didn’t want another credit card, but 5 percent cash back on everything I buy from Amazon and Whole Foods was just too good a deal to turn down, since Amazon and Whole Foods are my two main supply lines. And, strangely enough, Bank of America even sweetened the deal a bit last month by allowing customers to choose their 3 percent category, with online shopping as one of the categories. That probably was to compete with Amazon’s card. But the difference between 5 percent and 3 percent was too much to pass up.

The unfairness built into this system is apparent. Those who are financially stronger are making money off of those who are financially weaker, through higher prices on virtually everything from groceries to gasoline. Does that mean that I should abstain from using a rewards card? No, because the rewards that I don’t collect would be pocketed by the bank, not by the poor.

Instead, we should demand financial reform that is fair to the poor and less harsh on merchants — at the banks’ expense. If that means an end to rewards cards, I’ll understand. As long as merchants reduced their prices to reflect reduced expenses for accepting credit cards (would they?) then we’d still get the money back through lower prices.

A Place to Call Home

Last night I finished watching the first season of “A Place to Call Home.” I can’t believe that I didn’t discover it sooner. It is superb melodrama and a superb soap opera. It’s perfectly cast and beautifully filmed. The dialogue is magnificent, some of the most intelligent dialogue I’ve ever seen in a TV series.

No one ever accused me of being up to date on matters of entertainment. I go for the good stuff, not the new stuff. This series, which went through six seasons and 67 episodes, premiered in 2013 and ended in 2016. I watched it on DVDs from Netflix. It also can be streamed on Amazon Prime Video (with an extra charge), and it’s included with a subscription to Acorn TV.

Here’s a link to a trailer on YouTube.

The story is set in 1953, in Australia. The traumas of World War II linger. Like two other great soap operas — “Downton Abbey” and “Upstairs, Downstairs,” the central setting is a big house. But around the big house live an array of complicated characters with complicated pasts and complicated secrets. It’s an Australian production created by Bevan Lee. It’s a period piece that beautifully evokes the 1950s. Keep your hanky handy.

I won’t be going hungry for good television for a good while now. In addition to five more seasons of “A Place to Call Home,” I need to re-watch the previous season of “Game of Thrones” before it returns with the final season in April.

QAnon?


Vice President Mike Pence with members of the Broward County, Florida, SWAT team on Nov. 30, 2018. The officer wearing the “Q” patch was later disciplined and lost his tactical assignment. Wikipedia photo.

One of the many disturbing things about the Trump era is learning just how crazy many Americans are. For years now, susceptible old white people have been taught that only right-wing propaganda can be trusted. Anything else is fake news. All Trump supporters are immersed in a sea of propaganda. On the far fringe is QAnon.

NBC News reported yesterday that a QAnon book was No. 56 on Amazon’s list of bestselling books.

“The book claims without evidence a variety of outlandish claims including that prominent Democrats murder and eat children,” the NBC News story says. QAnon believers regularly appear at Trump rallies holding up “Q” signs.

“Adherents of the Qanon conspiracy theory falsely believe that the world is run by a Satanic cabal helmed by former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton,” the NBC story says.

In an article about QAnon last August, the Washington Post wrote: “QAnon flirts with eschatology, fascist philosophy and the filmmaking of Francis Ford Coppola. Adherents believe a ‘Great Awakening’ will precede the final storm foretold by Trump. Once they make sense of the information drip-fed to them by ‘Q,’ they will usher in a Christian revival presaging total victory.”

A friend who monitors Twitter (I stay away from Twitter) sometimes sends me “tweets” from QAnon crazies. Not only do they really believe that stuff, they also believe that they’re the smart ones, that they’re on the inside of what’s really going on. It’s the rest of us who are fools.

QAnon, it would seem, serves two purposes. For one, it helps to keep right-wingers inflamed and alienated by demonizing those who practice rational politics. And, for two, it makes money for some very nasty people.

NBC News writes: “Conspiracy theory researcher Mike Rothschild told NBC News that ‘An Invitation to the Great Awakening’ is a new way for those pushing the QAnon conspiracy theory to make cash, since recent changes to YouTube’s algorithm have made it harder for conspiracy theorists to find new followers and cash in on true believers.”

The larger problem is that right-wing propaganda is highly profitable. In 2016 (the most recent year for which I can find numbers), Fox News had profits of $1.67 billion. MSNBC didn’t even come close, at $279 million. CNN is moving up, and is probably moving to the right, as well.

If we ever get out of this mess, one of the problems to be solved is to figure out how to deal with the fact that duping ignorant old white people is so profitable. According to Michael Cohen’s testimony last week, that’s why Trump ran for president in the first place. The Trump campaign was to be the “greatest infomercial in political history.” Inseparable from the problem of the profitability of right-wing politics is the profitability of right-wing religion — tax free. Christian revival indeed.

Lily learns to listen

What? No cat videos lately? What good is all this digital stuff if we can’t aim it at our pets?

The abbey’s organ used to terrify Lily. She would run to her most secret hiding place at the faintest sound from the organ. She still does not like sound that is too loud. But now, whenever the organ is being played, she sits on a nearby table and listens as she looks out the window. I’m pretty sure that she enjoys it. Back in the days when I had a dog and a piano, the dog would come and lie under the piano whenever I played. Animals do like music.

That’s the abbey organ in the video above, but it’s not me playing. It’s a MIDI (electronic keyboard capture) performance made by an unknown organist. I have pretty much the complete organ works of J.S. Bach in MIDI format.