It’s sometimes hard to explain to someone why a flat tax is inherently unfair.
“How is it unfair if everyone pays 10%?”
That statement is hard to argue with, unless the person you’re arguing with is able to have a nuanced discussion about tax burden and how a dollar is worth more to someone at one end of the wealth spectrum than it is to someone at the other.
The established rich pay less, everyone else pays more.
Another way to say this is that the wealthy and established are making it harder and harder for people to get ahead by shifting the burden onto those who are just starting out. This hurts small businesses and rewards larger, established businesses.
Last week, Fujitsu added an awesome feature to their ScanSnap scanner line (at least, the iX500 that I have). You can set it up so that, rather than having to have a machine on the same wireless network to pick up the scanned documents, the scanned documents just get shipped to your Dropbox or Google Cloud.
That let’s you do some really interesting things. You can run Hazel rules on your Dropbox folder, just like you can on a local folder, to do automatic sorting, naming, etc. on your machine. You can also do some interesting automation things with IFTTT to trigger other types of activity based off of files getting scanned. Or some combination of both (you scan some sort of receipt, it’s automatically filed into a folder via Hazel, which also triggers an IFTTT action to send an email to someone telling them that receipt is there).
The cloud feature seems small, but it’s a huge improvement to the convenience of what is already a device that has made my life a lot simpler.
Speaking of SNL, they finished off a funny, albeit uneven season with an episode that contained what is probably the funniest sketch of the last few seasons.
His humor and writing just hit me exactly right. Recently, with the SNL season wrapping up, UPROXX did an oral history of one of Forte’s weirder, funnier sketches “Potato Chip Thief”.
(It also includes the origination of Jason Sudeikis’ southern character who became the judge in “Maine Justice”, another one of the hilariously absurd SNL sketches of that cast.)
Solomon: That regurgitation of the potato chip is Will. It was one of those things where I think I said, “People are going to gag when they see this.”
Meyers: I think probably three or four years into my friendship with Forte, I realized there were certain things it was pointless to argue about.
Solomon: Will said, “I don’t care what kind of reaction we get. I just want a reaction. I don’t care if it’s laughs. I just want the audience to react.” And they did! If you listen to people in the background, they are like, “Oh my God.”
Meyers: It’s great because it’s 187 groans and two people who couldn’t be happier – and those are Forte’s people.
Docker is a really cool technology. But it’s local implementation on the Mac was just a mess of a layer on top of a VM, with a bunch of network jankyness.
It was fine for doing a little bit of prototyping, but it fought with my local VMs, added GBs of VMs to my SSD, and was just a huge pain in the ass to work with.
The new Docker beta, in my limited testing, is really nice. It’s much, much faster than the old Docker setup on the Mac, closer to the metal, and seems significantly more efficient.
Docker still doesn’t clean up exited/old containers, which I think would be a useful feature. But I guess that’s why it’s a beta.
I actually like Apple Music. It mostly works for me. I have what I think is a reasonably large music collection (but I’d guess I’m just on the upper bound of average, maybe). I listen to lots of music, both stuff from my music and from Apple Music.
I find the biggest problem is the concept of “my library” vs. Apple Music. I often listen to music and click the little heart to “love” a song, whether it’s on Beats One, or an artist radio, or just because I was checking out a new song I heard on a podcast.
The problem is, I have no idea how to find those songs again. When you create a playlist in iTunes, you can only find tracks that are in your collection. So, if you want to do anything with that song, you have to first add it to your collection, then you can heart it.
If you heart it before you add it to your collection, your collection doesn’t count it as “loved”.
There’s lots of really odd behaviors around rating/hearting/interacting with songs that are not in your library.
I think the simplest fix would be that if I’ve done anything to a song (heart it, rate it, add it to a playlist), that it’s part of “My Library”. If iTunes (or the Music app) want to have a switch/toggle to only show music that’s local to your collection, go for it. But the fact that I can’t just treat Apple Music’s library like my own library forces me to think about the order of how I act with music, and that’s more friction than I should have.
In doing that, it would also change the way search works. Why not have search just graphically show you which music is on your device vs. in the cloud?
There’s too many places where I have to think about whether I’m dealing with Apple’s music or my music.
99% of the time when I talk about being an alumnus of Virginia Tech, it’s in reference to our football (loving the Coach Fuente era so far) or basketball (Buzzketball!).
Virginia Tech, however, has been been making huge strides in becoming a nationally influential university. I’m lucky that a lot of this started 20 years ago when I was in Blacksburg, under the leadership of Paul Torgersen, through Charles Steger, and now with Timothy Sands. I really do feel lucky to have attended Tech during this time of transition.
I couldn’t be more proud when I read about VT’s impact on the Flint water crisis. It’s something I already knew on the periphery, but reading the details made me feel that much more proud to be an alumnus.
Speaking in the Quillen auditorium, Roy described a call he had received from a woman who was in tears because she had given her children and grandchildren tap water. “She told me she poisoned her kids,” Roy said. “It wasn’t her fault. But a mother’s heart could never accept that. She thanked all of us for what we did. This is why we spent the last six months of our life pulling all-nighters, pulling weekends together, because we cared. And it changed who we are as human beings.”
As I mentioned back when I got my new Apple TV, Comcast making it’s internet-based TV solution available for the Apple TV would be a huge win for everyone. It let’s Comcast keep their foot in the door with folks who are heavily invested in streaming media, and it gives Apple a solution for live TV on the Apple TV.
Comcast just announced their Xfinity Partner Program, which in theory, would allow Apple to deliver the app themselves, integrating the Xfinity on-demand library (and maybe even DVR and live tv guide) into the Siri voice search.
For folks who are already invested in the Comcast eco-system, but spend a lot of time on their Apple TVs, this could be a big win, eliminating flipping back and forth between inputs, and bringing Hulu, Netflix, and other streaming services into the same interface as your live cable. Hopefully, Apple sees the value here, as it could act as a gateway to get more folks into Apple TVs.
I don't remember where I came across these, but I didn't have a chance to point to them. It's a few weeks out now, but I find these to both be incredibly fitting and wonderful.
My own Garry Handling story is, I think, incredibly similar to many people's. It's Garry Shandling's Show aired originally on Showtime, but ended up airing on Fox in 1988. I'm not sure how far in I discovered it, but I was 10 or 11, and I thought the theme song, breaking the 4th wall, and meta humor were just the funniest things I'd ever seen. I think it was probably the beginning of me recognizing what I really found funny, and that it wasn't always the TGIF-brand family sitcom.
I remember setting my VCR to try to record as many episodes as I could.
(It was probably both It's Garry Shandling's Show and Sledge Hammer! that let me know my humor leaned a bit to the off-beat. Sledge Hammer! belongs on Netflix streaming.)
Anyway, I thought these two videos were really fitting, human tributes.
Under “Obamacare,” the share of Americans without health insurance has dropped to a historic low of about 9 percent, with room to go even lower. But even as the economy has expanded, major government surveys point to a lackluster rebound for employer-based coverage.
“It’s very clear that the Affordable Care Act has done most of the work in decreasing the number of uninsured,” said economist Robert Kaestner of the University of Illinois Chicago.
It’s really hard to argue, using non-gamed statistics, that Obamacare hasn’t been a success. It’s likely it’d be even more successful with some sort of single payer option, but progress is progress.
Yes, there are problems (e.g. still poor coverage at higher premiums, some confusion and poorly run state markets). But improving Obamacare (again, some sort of single payer option, expanding Medicare to cover more lower income folks) is almost inarguably the path we should be taking.
