Politics Posts

This is just sort of a stream of consciousness, so apologies if it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I still remember the first time I realized I was directly talking with someone in another country. It was the mid 90s and I was a teenager, hooked on playing MUDs. When most people in my high school could barely turn a computer on, I felt like a wizard who knew about an entire secret world, and it was awesome. I was playing, every day, with people from Scotland, Denmark, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, and so many others I can’t even remember now. And we talked. I learned so much about other cultures just by talking directly to people. And I remember thinking, in my own young, idealistic naivete, that if just everyone could be online, and could have these experiences, we might actually achieve world peace in my lifetime. We could see that we are all human bothers and sisters, separated only by artificially drawn borders. I believed free information will result in the most educated population in human history. And the Internet would bring the whole world a new age. I look back on myself then and mourn the world that we could have had. Humans apparently just aren’t ready for world peace and togetherness.

Some things are as reliable as clockwork. The moon and tides. Death and taxes. Politicians lying. And out-of-touch Silicon Valley tech millionaires and billionaires descending from their gold-plated PCB thrones to bestow upon us us, the unwashed masses, their most brilliant wisdom and thoughts. Today’s myopic missive is brought to you by Sam Altman, of Y-Combinator fame. On Sunday, he opened up Twitter and blessed us with this thought in the middle of an otherwise interesting thread:

So the good news is that things are stating to get better. The pandemic is starting to abate now that vaccines are widely available in the United States. Hopefully they will continue to be effective against the new strains that are emerging, and all evidence suggests that they are. Hopefully things will continue to improve around the world as well. Also equally good news is, with the pandemic abating, we can start to return to a more normal state. But many of us are emerging into a new world, one where it is basically impossible to buy a house because demand for houses is outpacing supply and where the costs of many things are going up due to scarcity. One of the interesting things I have noticed is that some businesses, and this seems to be predominantly fast food and restaurants, are having a hard time hiring people. Some have even shut down because they can’t find employees. What is happening here?

Yesterday, Marc Andreessen, one of the more influential Silicon Valley investors, dropped an essay on the Andreessen-Horowitz blog called It’s Time To Build. I read it with a sense of bemusement because, like most things that come out of wealthy elites, and especially wealthy coastal elites (and especially wealthy Silicon Valley elites), it is filled with the myopia that can only come from spending far too much time in a bubble disconnected from what’s going on in the rest of the world. In short, the main thesis of his essay is that we’ve stopped building “things,” which, in this context is housing and medical devices but can more broadly be interpreted as a loss of civilizational inertia, because we stopped “wanting them.”

There was a great article that was recently posted by the Harvard Business Review that I think bears some very important consideration by everyone. Stress is easy to identify, and we are all certainly stressed. The predictability of our daily lives has been interrupted. Many of us have lost jobs, faced furloughs or pay cuts. Our kids are home from school. We’re worried about our families catching this disease, and ourselves as well. We’re all stuck together in this purgatory of waiting for this crisis to play itself out with no idea of what kind of world waits for us on the other side. We know that this will end - all pandemics eventually do - but we’re going to emerge from our shelters into a changed world. My wife and I have spent the last couple of weekends cleaning out closets. It kind of feels like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at times, but it also keeps my mind occupied for the most part and keeps it from going into pretty dark places. And hey, my closet is now the cleanest it’s been since we moved. But every so often my mind ends up going there anyways. Such as from seeing a pile of T-shirts.

If you ask people over a certain age, they can always tell you where they were when they found out about 9/11. I was a sophomore at Auburn, and my first class that day was at like 1pm, so I enjoyed the great collegiate tradition of sleeping in. Usually when I wake up the first thing I do is check my email. It’s still the first thing I do. That morning my inbox was full with messages on the fraternity mailing list, with things like “pray, a lot of people are dying today.” I turned on the TV just minutes before the first tower collapsed. Stayed glued to the TV the rest of the day. News coverage was on every channel, even Discovery Channel. Class was cancelled. I went and filled up my car in case I needed to drive the 250 miles back home to Tennessee. That evening I was in the SGA office in Foy Student Union folding thousands of little yellow ribbons for a very hastily organized memorial service on Samford lawn a few days later. We listened to President Bush’s speech on a small boombox in the office. I feel like I have been living that day over and over again for the last two weeks.

Those of my longtime readers will know that I very rarely if ever mention anything on this blog other than my ramblings on tech. But today is a very different day and I feel compelled to write about this. So I’ll ask for a mulligan. And, as always, my views here do not represent anything or anyone other than me.

So today the Supreme Court ruled Aereo, the Internet TV streaming service, to be in violation of copyright law. And, at least to me, this was not unexpected.

The Internet is abuzz with the news that President Obama is calling on every American to learn how to code. And while I think it’s a good idea for everyone to have a basic grasp of computer technology and a basic understanding of the role computer programmers play in the world, I have some very specific thoughts about whether or not everyone knowing how to code is really a good idea.

Using GoDaddy as my registrar is one of those things I’ve always felt vaguely ashamed of. Something I knew all the “cool kids” didn’t do, but I was already so neck-deep in them that I didn’t want to transfer. Not to mention I had my DNS hosted with them as well so the thought of going through all that trouble to move just seemed like too much of a hassle to deal with without good reason. In my last entry, I talked about setting up your own DNS server. This was the first part of my attack on moving my domains away from GoDaddy. But I didn’t have a real timeline to move away from them. Then came the news of GoDaddy’s support for SOPA - one of the worst attacks on the Internet since 1996’s Communications Decency Act. Now, to be sure, GoDaddy’s position on SOPA was not the first thing they’ve done to anger me. Their overtly misogynistic advertising has always bothered me, and their CEO Bob Parsons’ elephant killing and shameless exploitation of the natives angered me so badly that I almost left in April. But their aggressive support of SOPA was the final straw for me. I’d been a customer since 2003, but I simply could not take it anymore. So over the course of about 4 days, I transferred all my domains to Namecheap. Having never transferred a domain before, the process was surprisingly quick and easy. Once again, it makes me wonder why I haven’t done it sooner.