Still Think It's a Level Playing Field? →

The Washington Post’s article on the creation of the North Carolina bill intended to disenfranchise minority voters is eye opening for how brazen the attempt was.[1]

“Of course it’s political. Why else would you do it?” he said, explaining that Republicans, like any political party, want to protect their majority. While GOP lawmakers might have passed the law to suppress some voters, Wrenn said, that does not mean it was racist.

“Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was,” Wrenn said. “It wasn’t about discriminating against African Americans. They just ended up in the middle of it because they vote Democrat.”

Wow.

---

1. The “rationale” for this law? Voting fraud. Which happens at incredibly low rates, except when done systemically, i.e. through electronic means. None of which would be impacted by this law. There are moments I can see both sides of arguments, even if I don’t agree with them. This is not one of those times. This is detestable.  ↩

The Olympics and Blaming Millenials

(Note: I’m not sure why these two articles bugged me so much. But they did.)

There was a somewhat poorly written (or, at least, poorly titled) article on Bloomberg (shocker) about the down ratings for the Olympics on NBC. In typical Bloomberg fashion, it’s a clickbait title (who can resist blaming millenials), as the article itself points out that it’s the 18–49 demographic that saw ratings down (with no breakdown inside that demo to determine where the real drop was).

And in the 18-to–49-year-old age group coveted by advertisers, it’s been even worse. That audience has been 25 percent smaller, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

In response, a millenial (presumably) attempted to defend his peers and lash out at NBC (though, really, it was more about the cable industry) and the inability for the cable/broadcast industry to meet the needs of cord cutters.

The issue I have with the article isn’t so much the argument. I agree that the cable and TV industries are going to have to change the way they think about the broadcast model. And, while it may not be changing as fast as we’d want, it’s changing incredibly fast!

Think about that ten years ago, being a cord cutter meant using an antenna, borrowing DVDs from the library, and maybe downloading a show from iTunes.

Today, you could conceivably use Hulu, Netflix, HBO, Sling TV, and iTunes, and probably cover everything except live sports. And ESPN may be going over the top in the next year. That’s progress.

The article, however, takes almost 1800 words to complain about how difficult it was to watch the Olympics online without a cable subscription and then complains about too many advertisements and the lowest common denominator announcing during the opening ceremonies, as if these are new things. And, while cord cutters are a growing audience, it’s still something like 80% of households who have cable. Cord cutters alone didn’t cause the audience to drop.

No, it’s not until the last segment of the article, which mostly hits on what I believe to be part of the real reason for the ratings being down:

It opened with Simone Biles and Co., but then, despite being filmed earlier in the day, inexplicably goes from the earlier rounds of Gymnastics to Swimming. Hours pass before we finally get to see the resolution to those Gymnastics rounds

The ratings were down because NBC couldn’t figure out how to show events in real time to both the East and West Coasts. With clips showing up online, on ESPN, on Twitter, the audience&emdash;millenials or not&emdash;couldn’t be bothered to stay up until 11:30pm ET to watch the gymnastics finals that had already happened that day. Or worse, for the half of the country on the West Coast, that had happened many hours before.

NBC’s real crime is not figuring out how to get more of the core live events in front of the audience when it was live. Live sports are the only thing left that really can keep audiences from cutting the cord, and NBC (while well intentioned with their wall-to-wall online coverage) forgot that.

In the end, Bloomberg incorrectly blamed millenials, and, in turn, millenials (or this millenial responded in the stereotypically myopic millenial way.

Apple TV on the Eve of tvOS 10

It’s been almost a year since I got the new Apple TV. We’ve been using it a ton lately, since network TV is in mostly reruns, and it’s a good opportunity to catch up on some shows and movies. When I got the Apple TV back in November, I mentioned three things that I thought would make a huge difference: an Amazon Prime app, a Comcast X1 app, and support for the iCloud Keychain. Well, none of those things have come true. But the last is almost coming true in tvOS 10.

iCloud Keychain support would make entering all the TV provider passwords easy. In tvOS 10, you’ll only need to enter the provider password once, and it’ll activate all of the TV apps you have access to. That’ll be surprisingly helpful and will reduce the number of times a password needs to be entered (or you hit one of those stupid activation screens) considerably.

Almost a year in, apps are starting to take advantage of the capabilities of tvOS. I plan to write about some of the apps that I’ve found really nice (and some that aren’t great) in the near future. If you want a preview, check out Fox Sports Go. It’s multiscreen live feature is pretty fantastic, and a perfect use of the Apple TV.

Improvements to Siri and the Apple remote have made the Apple TV much nicer to use since the launch. I find myself using Siri more frequently now, since it has a pretty high success rate of finding the show that I’m looking for, and dumping me one click from opening it. That’s useful, given that some of the interfaces (I’m looking at you, HBO Go) are pretty horrific for navigating around.

We use the Apple TV pretty regularly at this point, and I find new useful apps every week (Last weekend I discovered the awesomeness of the ABC app, if you can believe it. Schoolhouse Rock and Sports Night.). If it had Prime and Xfinity X1 support (which, in both cases, isn’t crazy, since I’m paying for subscriptions for both), we’d probably have the Apple TV on the first input of the TV.

Evernote to Apple Notes

I’ve been an Evernote user for about 8 years now. The earliest note I have in Evernote is from May of 2008. I’m not an uber-power user, but I’ve used Evernote for a lot of things over the years and have about 1400 notes in Evernote. It has been a big part of my move to go paperless.

I store manuals for devices and equipment in the house in a notebook, recipes, articles, receipts. However, over the years, the app got bigger and bulkier and my usage got more refined. There are loads of stories about where Evernote went wrong. In their defense, they’ve been trying to refine the product over the past year.

My issues are reasonably simple: the app got too complicated for a note taking/archiving.

With the convenience of Apple Notes (it’s syncs on all my devices, is reasonably lightweight), I’ve been toying with the idea of dumping Evernote (and saving myself a little money) and moving my notes into Apple Notes. I think, by and large, it does an ok job of replacing Evernote.

Except it’s missing the Web Clipper.

There’s a Web Clipper for Apple Notes for iOS via Workflow (warning: I haven’t tried it yet).

But there’s not one for the Mac that I’ve found yet.

While I search for one (anyone found a solution?), I’m going to slowly test moving different notebooks over to Apple Notes and see if I can simplify my paperless workflows and make life a bit more convenient.

Aaron Hernandez' Collateral Damage →

Amazing article by Michael Rosenberg in Sports Illustrated on Aaron Hernandez’ brother Jonathan and the impact the trial and conviction have had on his life.

Shortly after the conviction, D.J. makes two key decisions. He will leave coaching, and he will no longer be D.J. That was a sports name, he says, and he doesn’t need it anymore. Time to start fresh. He won’t go by his first name, Dennis, because that belongs to his father. So his middle name, Jonathan, it is. He hears about a job working for a roofer in Dallas and decides to try it out.

Aaron, meanwhile, is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Just like that, two football dreams have died—but so did Odin Lloyd, and people think that’s all that matters. Understandably.

It’s a wonderfully written story, covering the brothers growing up in Connecticut, their football success, and the toll Aaron Hernandez took on the various people in and around his life.

Obama 2024 →

Michell Obama’s speech from the opening night of the Democratic National Convention was stunning. It is, I think, going to go down in history as one of the great convention speeches of all time, and, possibly, one of the great political speeches of all time.

The section that’s resonating with everyone is so pitch perfect:

The story that has brought me to this stage tonight. The story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all our sons and daughters now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.

If she was a Senator or some other political candidate, it would have been a home run. For a non-politician, it was a grand slam.

Michelle Obama’s Speech for the Ages - The Atlantic:

(Via www.theatlantic.com)

Boston's Methadone Mile →

This is an absolutely amazing, heartbreaking, enlightening piece of journalism by the Boston Globe. It’s a must read for anyone who’s been touched by the opioid epidemic, which at this point, is probably nearly everyone.

He finds a bed at a detox facility on the Cape, but they can’t take him for a few days — long enough to go into withdrawal. So Barbara drives him to his dealer in the city to get heroin to hold him over. Taking her money, he shoots up while she waits in the car — a new low, he says.

Who are the Liars? →

We didn’t create the graphic, but we shared it on our Facebook page. It promptly shattered all previous benchmarks for reach and engagement by a factor of at least 20. Almost a hundred people were so shocked by it that they hid it in their newsfeeds; twenty-seven decided they never wanted to see anything shared by MormonPress ever again; one person unliked our Facebook page.

Judging by the comments, the harsh response wasn’t because the graphic claimed that Jeb(!) Bush and Joe Biden are relatively honest politicians. No, our commenters were infuriated that Hillary Clinton was rated as being rather honest. Many of the comments on the photo can be summarized as “Hillary’s a lying liar who lies.” One commenter suggested that Mormon “would not stand for [MormonPress’s] lies.” Well, I guess we’ll have to ask him down the road.

PolitiFact’s rankings of truthful statements of the Presidental candidates

This isn’t an election that’s going to be won by persuasion. Either you hate Hillary enough to vote for a liar, or you’re willfully ignorant.

Best Argument for a Progressive Income Tax (vs a flat tax) →

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.

This little sketch by David Akadjian does a good job of making that argument without needing to be particularly nuanced:

David Akadjian, 2016

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.

ScanSnap Directly to the Cloud

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.

← Older Newer →