Politics

Live Blog: FCC Meeting

Posted on by Tom

Since I’m just sitting here watching C-SPAN3, I thought I would write some thoughts about what I’m seeing.

10:30 AM – Meeting begins.

10:46 AM – These witnesses for the Blue Alerts are heart-breaking. I’m not sure I agree that Blue Alerts are a good idea (but I don’t know the full story of it), but I hope this passes for their sake.

10:55 AM – Oh I guess the Blue Alerts are being adopted. Sounds like this is something that began in the Obama administration. Jessica Rosenworcel delivered a harsh rebuke of the cost-benefit analysis.

11:00 AM – Even Ajit, the (alleged) Dark Lord of the Sith, is having trouble getting through this.

11:01 AM – Oh, it did have a vote. And it passed unanimously.

11:02 AM – Next up, item two: Proposal to Strengthen the Rural Health Care Support Mechanism.

11:14 AM – Without the emotional component, I am having trouble paying attention to this second agenda item.

11:15 AM – I get the feeling that O’Rielly (R) will not be voting for this one.

11:19 AM – I’m not following all of this but it sounds like Carr (R) won’t be voting for this one either. Annnnd right when I type that he says the item has his support.

11:20 AM – Oh now I’m tracking what this item is about. Bandwidth to rural hospitals doing “telemedicine.” Rosenworcel supports it.

11:23 AM – I updated my graphic above with annotations showing who appointed each commissioner and their party affiliation, according to C-SPAN3.

11:24 AM – Well dern the second item passed unanimously, too. I am not very good at reading these commissioners, apparently. Next up, item three: Proposed Public Notice Regarding Twilight Towers.

11:32 AM – I have no idea what a “twilight tower” is so I’m a bit lost on this one. No, I wasn’t paying attention when they explained in detail what a twilight tower was and why this is important. There are over 4,000 of them, though.

11:35 AM – It’s something about cell towers that are sitting around and can’t be upgraded/utilized because of government bureaucracy. They keep mentioning historical preservation so are they on historical grounds?

11:39 AM – Oh it sounds like the twilight towers are on Native American territory?

11:42 AM – Item three vote passed unanimously. Next the hard one: Proposal to Restore Internet Freedom.

11:47 AM – I am not sure what this Wireline Competition Bureau is.

11:49 AM – Clyburn (D) is fired up about this.

12:00 AM – Clyburn’s remarks are pretty much the same as everything you see retweeted about net neutrality. All the bad things that could happen, partisan rhetoric, etc. I wonder if there will be a transcript of this somewhere.

12:20 PM – O’Rielly’s (R) comments are pretty much reading from the proposal. Interesting that he addresses the fake public comments. Basically says what I said, that the public comments don’t matter that much. :) And he’s voting yes, not surprisingly.

12:30 PM – Carr’s (R) comments were as expected. He’s voting yes, of course.

12:37 PM – Rosenworcel’s (D) comments are eloquent and expected. The argument against still boils down to “they might do bad things.” She’s more persuasive than anybody else I’ve seen, though. She’s voting no, of course.

12:38 PM – She’s talking about the fake comments now too. She doesn’t like it. I agree with her when she says, “it needs to be addressed.”

12:40 PM – I don’t know who this woman is but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear about her running for some elected office in the future.

12:49 PM – They are evacuating the room on the advice of security!

12:52 PM – Prior to the stoppage, Ajit was rattling off the standard talking points. I don’t really understand why they have to go through with a meeting when literally everyone simply reads from their prepared remarks. Why can’t they just submit their remarks to a clerk and just put it all on a web site or something?

1:00 PM – This stupid meeting is really cutting into my day. Twitter says they are being let back into the room.

1:02 PM – They’re back. Ajit’s talking again. My cynical self wonders if that was just a little political theater to make it look like “the left” is a radical threat to the Internet.

1:10 PM – I have to reiterate this. The argument for rolling back these regulations is strong. The argument against rolling them back is weak. And I say that as someone who completely supports the idea of Net Neutrality. But I think people conflate the Utopian ideal of a “free Internet” with the more nuts-and-bolts rules and regulations of Internet connectivity. I think what we are seeing here is not an attempt to kill the Internet for some nefarious purposes, but a healthy debate on the best way to maintain the Internet. Reasonable people can disagree on the best way to do that right now. I can see merits and problems in both sides here. The solution will never be complete until Congress gets involved and starts making laws. Ajit’s still talking by the way.

1:12 PM – And the vote is in: 3 to 2 to favor of adopting the new regulations. No surprise whatsoever.

1:14 PM – I don’t really care about the rest of this meeting. :)

UPDATE

All of the meeting documents can be found on the FCC’s meeting page. I would have preferred one continuous transcript instead of 50 different links, but it’s better than nothing.

Politics

Behind The Tweet: Fake Comments

Posted on by Tom

Surprisingly few post-election tweets yesterday, but today is the FCC’s vote on “net neutrality,” and this appeared this morning:

You just identified them yesterday, huh? I could have told you most of the comments were fake a long time ago. In fact, I think I did write that in one of my previous blog posts on net neutrality (it was to that same AG guy). Because obviously, when you open up “public comment” in the form of electronic submissions (Internet, texts, faxes, phone calls), you are just asking for a botnet assault. Only in-person comments from someone with a valid identification, and maybe even two forms of photo identification these days, can really be trusted. A handwritten letter is probably genuine, but could also be fake, given that you could pay someone on Fiver two cents an hour to sit around writing thousands of letters, gather them up, then drive around the country mailing them from various post offices with fake return addresses. It’s not like anyone is going to double-check that the sender actually sent the letter. I mean, it would be a lot of work, obviously, but people do crazy things to try to force their opinions down everyone’s throat. The point is that almost every form of communication is gameable by Russians, anarchists, hackers, or activists these days.

And besides, let’s say we delay the vote, what is the plan to stop all the fake comments in the next public comment period? Or is the plan to spam the FCC with favorable fake comments? What’s the point of that?

There is also the minor issue that nobody has any clue what “net neutrality” really means, except for what their favorite activist has told them, which may or may not be accurate, because your favorite activist probably isn’t a network engineer.

This FCC vote is obviously going to pass–today, tomorrow, or two years from now, because this is a Republican administration and 3 of the 5 members of the FCC board are Republicans. I mean, maybe it won’t, just to give myself some wiggle room, but seriously, it will. I skimmed over the draft and it makes some solid arguments that are going to take more than just “oh but we really, really think net neutrality is good” to refute.

The correct course of action for a permanent net neutrality solution is for Congress to get off its butt, learn what an “Internet” is, and pass some laws.

No, I’m not optimistic about that either.

Technology

Patreon Kerfuffle, Part Two

Posted on by Tom

Just to followup, Patreon changed their mind. They will not change their fees as planned. (They still intend to address the “problem” though, so they will need to change something eventually.)

But the damage was already done. Patreon destroyed their reputation with small creators overnight and I am seeing tweet after tweet today indicating they won’t be back. Perhaps a year from now people will forget, but right now, they are still angry (and rightly so).

And while I will say the above apology is a very good one as apologies go, I personally don’t believe a word of it. I have learned over the past ten-plus years to deride all altruistic statements from any software business which maintains users as commodities, which is basically all of them.

Small creators won’t be back because they were never in it for the money anyway–I think they saw it more as a social support system. A lot of small creators pledged to each other, in fact, which is counter-productive from a business perspective. But I think they viewed $1 pledges in the same way they might view a “like” on Facebook or Twitter. Something that doesn’t really cost anything, but is still more than just empty words.

Politics

Behind the Tweet: Number of Senators

Posted on by Tom

Bracing for a lot of tweets like this today:

Soooooo. Yeah. There’s this thing, you know, called a Constitution? It describes this thing, you know, called a Senate? But wait for it, there’s this other thing, you know, called, like, a House of Representatives! They represent people in a way you might like. Perhaps you should read up on it.

Suggesting that the Senate also be apportioned by population is literally advocating mob rule. Maybe you like the mob this morning, but you might not like it twenty or thirty years from now when your kids and grandkids start voting. Smart people already figured this out.

I apologize for the sarcasm, I know I’m not facilitating a constructive dialog here, but this guy has a blue verified checkmark next to his name and claims to be a political scientist and a contributor for news outlet Vox, and that tweet got 6,894 likes. He even claims to be a professor! This is exactly what I was talking about in my other post about how fame creates too much power. He has no idea what he’s talking about–or worse, does know and wants to subvert the country–and he’s an “influencer.” He deserves to be taken down a peg.

Politics

Post-Election Blues

Posted on by Tom

I drank too much hot chocolate tonight, so I can’t sleep. Therefore I’ll add a few post-election thoughts.

Even though it’s none of my business what Alabamians do with their Senate seats, I was relieved to see that Doug Jones won, because it’s really disheartening to think that an accused pedophile could still win a seat in the Senate. If a story about feeling up 14-year-old girls comes out a few days before an election in The Enquirer, it makes sense to be suspicious about it. But this story came out months before the election in The Washington Post. It’s disheartening to think that we live in a culture where an accused pedophile can simply call a Washington Post story fabricated out of whole cloth and get away with it.

So I was happy with the election results. But then I made the mistake of keeping Twitter open, and my relief quickly turned to dismay. The absolutely unbearable smugness that washed over Twitter in gloating about this upset victory was itself very upsetting. These are supposed to be the “good guys?” This vengeful, hateful mob is who we’re supposed to be rooting for to win elections? They were absolutely indistinguishable from the Republican mobs who gloated after Trump’s win, the same mobs who spent eight years trying to tear down the Obama administration.

I did not feel better about America after Doug Jones’s win tonight. America is more fractured than ever, and we revel in it, we wallow in it. We watch elections like they are blood sports, the candidates gladiators. Doug Jones held up the head of Roy Moore tonight and shouted, “Are you not entertained?” And Twitter roared back its approval, and demanded more. It was unsettling.

These elections that split 50/50 are really dangerous. Fully half of the population of Alabama is now seething, watching the victors dance in Bacchanalian glee, and plotting their revenge. From their perspective, a baby-killer stole the election with the help of false allegations.

Don’t get me wrong, I know full well that the gloating would have been exactly the same had Roy Moore won, except it would be Republicans gloating instead of Democrats. See: Election 2016.

It’s just very disappointing to see that the “good” side, where most of my Internet friends reside, is just as unashamedly, unapologetically blind and ignorant as the “bad” side.

There is also the troubling prospect that nearly 50% of Alabamians still voted for an accused pedophile, which hardly seems like “victory.”

Politics

Live Blog: Alabama Election Results

Posted on by Tom

I’m going to write about election results from The Big Alabama Election. I’m starting about 7 PM EST, which is about an hour before the polls close.

Just for the record, I don’t live in Alabama so technically this election is none of my business. But it’s the only election tonight so it’s getting a lot of national coverage. It’s like a Monday Night Football game… it’s the only one on.

I’ve seen this tweet a number of times today:

I’ve seen reports like this in literally every election I’ve paid attention to since roughly 2006. People try to suppress votes, and people try to get out the vote. It happens in every single election. This should not be a surprise.

Incidentally I’ll be watching CNN because I love watching John King and his election data touch screen thingy. I also think Wolf Blitzer trying to make election results exciting with his deadpan monotone is just about the funniest thing on television.

I’m actually expecting that the results will come in at exactly one minute after the polls close. I will be surprised if Doug Jones wins.

Erin Burnett is obviously losing her voice but I guess she didn’t want to miss The Super Bowl of Alabama Senate Elections. :)

That tweet pretty much guarantees a Roy Moore win.

This news about North Korea is arguably more important than this election:

Surprise, surprise: Tillerson and Trump aren’t on the same page about North Korea.

7:32 PM – John King just said that both sides are claiming a high turnout.

7:43 PM – (On the North Korea thing, I suppose it’s possible they are doing a deliberate good cop/bad cop strategy.)

7:48 PM – Incidentally, it is snowing again. I had hoped it would all be gone by tomorrow.

7:51 PM – Unrelated, but:

7:52 PM – (I, obviously, don’t think The Rock is a good choice to be leader of the free world, but since Trump opened Pandora’s Box, I guess it’s pretty much open season now.)

7:56 PM – CNN is doing their last-minute suspense-building before the polls close. I’m still predicting they are going to project a winner at exactly 8:00 PM. :)

8:00 PM – Awwwwwww. What a letdown. “Too early to call.”

8:01 PM – Give me a break. “Overperforming by a few points.” “Underperforming by a few points.” That’s obviously within the margin of error on those exit polls.

8:13 PM – Lulz. CNN reported results with less than 1,000 votes counted.

8:20 PM – “It’s going to be an exciting night,” says Wolf Blitzer. Oh boy! Actually I enjoy watching John King working this map. You can really tell that he loves doing what he does.

8:25 PM – “This is the black belt.” Every time somebody says that, they immediately add, “It’s called that because of the top soil! Really, it’s the top soil!”

8:48 PM – CNN seems to be very excited about Doug Jones leading with only 2-3% of the precincts reporting (mostly absentee ballots). That is not just “too early to call,” that is “don’t even bother.” I am embarrassed to even be writing it here, but there is a definite sense of “Doug Jones is doing great!” from Wolf Blitzer and John King. (Which is, incidentally, the more dramatic result–the come-from-behind victory, so to speak.)

9:07 PM – CNN’s John King is starting to sound like Roy Moore is “pulling ahead.”

9:13 PM – Sheesh. That last tweet expanded to be like a thousand feet tall.

9:36 PM – CNN says 51% counted, 51.4 Moore 47.2 Jones.

9:40 PM – John King keeps saying “the math is possible” but he sure doesn’t make it sound like it’s very likely.

9:42 PM – But on the other hand, we have this:

9:45 PM – I have no knowledge of how it works in Alabama, but here in Virginia, it is typically rural areas who report first, and cities who report later. So it usually looks like the Republican does well early on, with the Democrat pulling even or ahead later.

10:00 PM – CNN says 72% counted, 50.5 Moore, 48.1 Jones.

10:09 PM – John King seems a little more confident about Jones’s chances. Wolf keeps reminding us that it’s a really dramatic race. :)

10:22 PM – Twitter momentum seems to be breaking for Doug Jones. That is, people seem like they’re starting to believe he can actually win.

 

Politics

Behind the Tweet: Cancer

Posted on by Tom

Saw this retweeted:

This is an amusing analogy, but it breaks down because it’s not “modern capitalism” that defines a business’s success, it’s the modern investors, who vote with their dollars on a daily or hourly or even minute-by-minute basis.

Politics

The Duty of Citizenship

Posted on by Tom

I want to elaborate a little bit on a random tweet-thought I expressed this morning.

…I think we are seeing recently that fame is actually more useful for changing the world than holding elected office

My basic point was that it seems to me that popular, famous people are able to motivate the citizenry into action a lot more than any innate sense of civic duty.

Recently (say, in the last 10-15 years, roughly the exact same time period of the rise of The Internet), I think we have seen a conflation of politics and popularity. What people remember about Obama is not his policies, but his likeableness. People presume he was a great president (especially now) because he was a cool guy with great comic timing, while completely forgetting that he authorized the bombing of hundreds of civilians with military drones.

Political consultants place a huge amount of emphasis on a candidate’s “electability,” which is, basically, how good does this man or woman look on television? How articulate are they? Is their hair thick and lustrous? Is their smile perfect and their teeth perfectly straight? It doesn’t matter nearly as much what they say, as long as they have a great smile while they’re saying it.

Trump, obviously, threw a bit of a wrench into that formula. He was like, “I’m me and you can just suck it.” It shouldn’t have worked, but somehow it did. Honestly I think it was a big part of his appeal. A lot of people in everyday life express the same sentiment.

But back to my point. This is just my personal opinion, but I believe most American citizens are extremely uneducated about the government they have been entrusted with protecting. Most people probably have absolutely no idea that they are completely responsible for its safety.

I used to be one of those people. I don’t think I ever voted before 2004, to be honest (well into my 30s). I would have had a very difficult time describing the difference between a Republican and a Democrat back then. I might have been one of those people you saw an Jay Leno’s Jaywalking bit where he asked people on the street to name the vice president, and I would have been like, “Uhhhh. Wait, wait, I know this!” (Actually I don’t think I’ve ever been that bad, but you get the idea.)

My point is that people literally don’t know or care they have a duty as citizens of a representative democracy to educate themselves about politics and government. It’s one of only three ways, by my count, that we can serve our country: By voting, by serving on jury duty, and by serving in the military. Well, I guess it would be four if you count running for office, but that’s just a waste of time these days if you don’t have thick hair and perfect teeth, isn’t it?

There are probably people in Alabama who don’t even know there’s a huge special election with massive political ramifications for their state today. You and I might boggle over that, considering it’s been the subject of almost every news cycle in every publication for the past month, but I have no doubt there are people who go about their lives without reading a single word of news.

Because I used to be one of them. I would get up, go about my computer programming work from home, and go to bed without ever seeing a single thing that happened outside my house all day. Maybe that’s understandable in the 90s, before we all lived on The Internet, but even in November 2016, I personally witnessed many of my coworkers express little or no interest in the election–before, during, or after. I’m quite sure many of them didn’t vote.

So very few people are going to vote in Alabama today because they knew there would be a special election to replace their senator Jeff Sessions, saw Roy Moore and Doug Jones speak, considered their platforms carefully, and made an informed decision based on the issues.

The vast majority are going to vote because a slew of famous people in mostly entertainment industries with very public platforms on television, radio, and the Internet have pleaded with them to vote one way or the other. (News counts as an entertainment industry, by the way.)

And that’s how America is going to die.

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.*

* Okay, I watched Dennis Miller Live every Friday on HBO in the 90s. That’s how I knew who the vice president was.

Technology

Patreon Kerfuffle

Posted on by Tom

A large percentage of my gaming and writing Twitter timelines are abuzz with civil unrest over a change that Patreon will be making to their fee structure on December 18th.

I don’t use Patreon and I can’t really envision a scenario where I would use it prior to becoming famous, but a lot of people I follow do use it, and they aren’t happy.

If you don’t know what Patreon is, it’s a site where you can donate money to a “creator” (artist, musician, writer, etc.) every month to support their work, somewhat akin to pledging money to PBS.

As far as I know, Patreon donations are not tax deductible, which is just one of many reasons I haven’t rushed to patronize people. Another reason I don’t like Patreon is that it very quickly devolved from patronage to a “subscription,” for which subscribers very much expect to receive something tangible in return, as if they are making a consumer purchase. To me, that fundamentally differs from a patronage.

Regardless, I’ve considered starting a Patreon (who wouldn’t consider a vehicle to receive free money?), especially now that I’m on a work sabbatical, but it just doesn’t make sense for me. In order to make a “living wage” from Patreon, I’d need like a thousand patrons, and that’s pretty rare unless the creator is famous to begin with. Mary Robinette Kowal, for example, can make $2000/month from Patreon because she is already an established author and podcaster with a marketable brand. I’m not. If I were lucky, I might get five $1/month patrons, and while it might feel good to know there are five people out there who enjoy my work enough to support me, the amount of sustained effort I would have to put in to keep those five patrons happy would be cost prohibitive. I am very much of the opinion that my time costs a reasonably fixed amount of money. @AlternateChat is admirably transparent about her efforts with Patreon and I simply can’t afford to expend that much labor without enough compensation to pay my mortgage.

Also I’m not entirely convinced that pledging $1/month to someone is equivalent to “supporting” them. I could probably make a case that it’s more of an insult. But I’m weird about things like that.

But back to the Patreon-pocolypse.

There is apparently a very large economy of $1 patron subscriptions that is going to disappear because the cost to the patron will rise about 30 cents, which obviously is a significant percentage of a $1 donation, and has a huge psychological impact. Patrons are cancelling their $1 subscriptions in droves, and creators are left searching for other ways to make money. (At least, that’s the impression I’m getting on Twitter.)

The issue is that the new fee structure doesn’t affect the $10/month or more pledges so much as the $1/month pledges, which probably makes up a huge percentage of the total pledges on Patreon. The result is that users feel (quite rightly) that Patreon is trying to kill off smaller creators in favor of the bigger ones.

As with most issues, I can understand both sides on this one.

It’s really bad for small creators on Patreon, because most of their donors are going to (quite rightly) cancel their $1 subscriptions.

But from the business perspective, I have no doubt that $1/month pledges are a major hassle for Patreon to deal with. I am 100% sure that it costs them disproportionately more to process them, in time and money and computing resources and probably just about any measure you can think of. It’s just not cost effective to process a lot of small transactions of, say, $1.

I remember back in the 1990s, when I was involved in selling Amiga software to consumers, having to pay 4.5% of every credit card transaction to the merchant. That’s a big chunk of money to hand over for every transaction, and we had to eat that. (I doubt we would have even been allowed to process $1 transactions back then.) But it was the only way to receive enough money from consumers to justify the existence of the business. I don’t have any facts or figures, but I would guess there were roughly 100 credit card payments for every check received in the mail. Today I’m sure the ratio would be more like 1,000,000 to 1. It’s probably cost prohibitive to deal with cash and checks, to be honest. I know I hate getting paid with a check, and cash is like, “What the heck am I supposed to do with this weird paper?”

So it is not at all surprising to me that Patreon might start subtly discouraging $1/month subscriptions so they don’t have to process them. The simple fact is that they will make more money per transaction with $5/month or $10/month or $25/month subscriptions.

They also have to process two transactions for every one of those subscriptions. One transaction to take money from the patron, and another transaction to give money to the creator. If one patron pledges $1 to 25 creators, they can take $25 from the patron in one transaction, but they still have to give the money to the creators in twenty-five $1 transactions. Though I’m sure they optimize it more than that, so they only have to deliver one transaction to each creator for the sum total of their pledges. That’s probably the exact heart of their business: Streamlining those transactions as much as possible. The flashy web site and API is just a side-show.

I am seeing a lot of hand-wringing over the “unjustness” of Patreon’s obvious decision to try to make more money, as if they are somehow betraying their customers (ie. creators). Well, first of all, the creators and patrons aren’t their customers, they are just the machine which prints money for them. The investors are their customers. But that’s business 101.

Beyond that, I think people have a mistaken impression of what a “successful” business is, in the eyes of investors. One might think that any business which makes money is successful, but unfortunately that’s not true. Investors need a business to make more money every year. Not just more money, but more profit every year. A business which makes a profit is not a success–only a business which makes more profit every year is a success. And not just more profit every year, but geometrically more profit every year. If you have the same increase in profits as last year, you simply “met expectations” and bore everyone to death. But if you have more increase in profits this year over last year, you “exceeded expectations” and you’re a huge success and worthy of praise!

I’m not saying I like it, I’m just saying that’s the reality. It’s why many of the people who start companies try to get their money quick and get out, because most businesses are doomed to fail eventually, because it’s literally impossible to sustain a geometric growth indefinitely.

Patreon is not (yet?) a public company, but they have still received millions of dollars from investors, and those investors (quite rightly) want to see a return on their investment. They certainly didn’t invest 300 million dollars because they cared a whit about creators getting $1/month from patrons.

Politics

Behind the Tweet: Representation

Posted on by Tom

Another person on the Internet who needs to go back to Civics class (or is a Russian operative sowing dissent):

Just because you don’t “feel like” you’re represented, doesn’t mean you’re not represented. “Representation” in this context has a very specific meaning that has nothing to do with your “feelings.”

Also, you’re suggesting it’s okay to stop paying taxes if one’s preferred candidate doesn’t win?

Yeah, again, that’s not how governments work. What you’re advocating is a system of government where you follow whoever you “feel” should lead, where elections have no consequences, which is basically anarchy, and a return to the tribal warfare of our prehistoric ancestors.

The correct course of action to take when your preferred candidate doesn’t win is to wait patiently until the next election. And if you feel really strongly about it, during the intervening time, you can try to persuade people to vote differently next time. Preferably without annoying anyone or breaking voter laws.