canyonwalker: WTF? (wtf?)
I saw an interesting article in my newsfeed yesterday, "Gen Z Doesn't Know How to Act in Bars." I'm always curious to read the latest in how older generations are scorning the young. And this article was published by Vox, which has a strong reputation for insightful explanatory journalism. Perhaps this article would go beyond superficial scoffing, I thought, and show whether there's really a there there. Well, it did, and it didn't.

First, let me summarize the complaints, according to the article, about how Gen Z acts incorrectly in bars:

  • Gen Z closes out their bills each round, instead of leaving a tab open for the evening, making more work for the bartender. Yes, this really is the primary complaint; the article even states that explicitly. ...Which makes me wonder who wrote this, an overworked bartender?

  • In a group of Gen Zs, not everybody will order a drink. ...Again, what sources were used for writing this article?

  • Gen Z groups are more interested in socializing with the friends they came with than chatting up the bartender. ...Seriously?

  • Gen Z groups stay a long time without drinking the whole time. ...Are you sensing a pattern here?

The author shows a moment of self-awareness about the rubbish she's spreading. Before presenting the above complaints she writes:

"Obviously, it’s incredibly satisfying to point out how a person — or, even better, a whole group of people — does something wrong. It’s even more fulfilling to be able to signal a divide, a marker that, for objective scientific reasons, you could never be implicated in this type of chaotic discordance. Look at this worse person — who is nothing like me — move through the universe, incorrectly!"
You could plausibly argue that this foreward to the complaints— which, taken together, all sound like they come from impatient bartenders who wish customers would just pay and get out— invites us to scoff at them and dismiss them. Indeed, for some of us, like me, it does. I love her little passage about thinking ourselves better than others. But in a published work I believe you've got to evaluate the content by its mass. When an essay is 98% complaints and 2% one trenchant little paragraph about how, maybe, the complaints aren't valid, most people— maybe even, say, 98%— are going to take away the 98% as the message.

What's wrong with the complaints in the article, by the way? Here are Five Things. And remember, I'm two generations older than Gen Z.

1. Closing out the bill each round sounds like a store problem, not a customer problem. Seriously, easy and fast payment system exist. Stop being cheapskates and replace your early-2000s technology. Don't tell me you can't afford to upgrade when you sell $1.50 bottles of beer for $10+ each.

2. Yeah, not everybody orders a drink. Deal with it. It was like that 25-30 years ago when I was a regular bar patron, too.

3. Is it because your service sucks? One big reason not everybody among my friends 25-30 years ago ordered drinks was shit service. At a pub I met friends at every week, most stopped ordering food and drink because table service became so erratic. That was one particular establishment, but in general service levels are way weaker today than they were back in the late 1990s.

4. People order fewer drinks because they're expensive. Even as a Gen Xer I order way fewer drinks in bars and food-and-bar establishments now than in the past because they've just so darn expensive. At $10+ for a beer and $15+ for a cocktail I just can't enjoy them much anymore. Plus, if had the weaker finances of a 20-something I certainly wouldn't be downing a lot of $15+ mixed drinks!

5. People linger over drinks. That's how bars have always worked. The thing that's most ridiculous about this article is the bartenders' repeated preference that people just order drinks as long as they're there, then leave. And that's just so many kinds of wrong. To name just two: A, it was never like that. B, do you really expect people to buy a drink and leave— they could buy that $10 beer for $2 at the grocery store if that's all they wanted— or to get soused on multiple rounds of drinks if they stay for a few hours? These bartenders seem like the worst of the doesn't-know-how-to-socialize stereotype typically thrust on Gen Z.
canyonwalker: Y U No Listen? (Y U No Listen?)
Last week the program Marketplace on NPR ran a series of stories entitled "The Age of Work". Tuesday night I tuned in during a long car trip and listened to the episode In Tennessee county, an aging population means business opportunity.

"We start today in the middle of a line dancing class," host Kai Ryssdal started, "Because, silly as it might seem, the people in this class are the driving force behind a changing economy."

"You're talking about Boomers," I said back to the radio. "Boomers are the driving force behind a changing economy. And that's not news because Boomers have been the driving force behind pretty much every change in society, politics, and the economy for the past 60 years!!"

Indeed that's the whole gist of not just this episode but the whole series. A social trend is stretching and shifting to accommodate the needs of the Baby Boomer generation. Gosh, where have I heard that before? How about "Everywhere" and "For my entire life."

In this episode the story is about clubs and businesses in small, remote Cumberland County, Tennessee, that are thriving as they serve the needs of a burgeoning retiree population. The program's host and writers picked Cumberland in conjunction with payroll company ADP because ADP's data show it has the highest average age workforce in the US. What's happening today in Cumberland is coming soon to your community, the hosts tell us, like never before in the world has anyone seen things shift to favor the needs of Boomers.

The first business the show spotlights is the one Ryssdal quips about in the opening: a dancing class. It's full of seniors. It's pretty much all seniors. And it's totally crazy how it's so busy... at 9:30am on a Tuesday. Who could possibly want to take a dance lesson at 9:30am on a weekday? the host says in so many words.

"Because they're retired," I said back to the radio. Retirees can take dance lessons at 9:30am on a Tuesday. Especially when they're cheap, like $5 for a full hour if not longer.

"And do you know why it's only retirees there?" I continued. Well, aside from the fact that younger people might be literally barred from attending. Age discrimination is illegal in the US... but only when it discriminates against older people. Telling the young to kick rocks is socially and legally acceptable.

So, aside from having the police called on them and possibly being arrested for disturbing the peace if they make a fuss about wanting to dance, too, why aren't more younger people at this just-$5, 9:30am-on-a-Tuesday dance lesson?

How about, because a) School, and b) Work?

Seriously, how is this considered news. People under 65 are mostly busy with school or work on a Tuesday morning. And of those not in school or paid work, many of the rest are busy with the unpaid work of raising children at home. My mom was a stay-home parent for several years during my childhood, and never once during that period did she have time on a Tuesday morning to join an adult dance lesson at the town's rec center.

Speaking for myself now, as a child-free adult, I would've loved to have an opportunity like inexpensive dance lessons anytime the past 30 years... but again, not on a weekday morning. Dance lessons at 8pm? Sure! But those are rare. And even more rarely just $5.

The cheap classes on everything at the community center are at... drum roll, please... weekday mornings. Nights and weekends the community center is generally closed, locked, and dark. Programs like these have always been offered during the day, because people who teach them and support them by operating the facility only work during the day, making them implicitly only for people who don't have to work during the day. So they've always been implicitly, if not also explicitly, for retirees. And now because Boomers are retirees it's news!
canyonwalker: I'm holding a 3-foot-tall giant cheese grater - Let's make America grate again! (politics)
I saw an interesting essay in my newsfeed yesterday, Primary Every Democrat. Written by former national political reporter Meredith Shiner and published in The New Republic, it distills my frustration about our most senior/most powerful elected Democratic party politicians: they so completely fail to understand the political and media landscape of 2025— or 2015, for that matter— that they're unable to offer any meaningful check against the Constitutional crisis President Trump has created in just his first two weeks in office as he and his cronies engage in rampant illegal behavior burning down government agencies.

The threat of primarying a politician, verb-ing the institution primary elections, is no stranger to Republicans. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have been primarying mainstream GOPers for years, pushing them to the extreme right or replacing them with extremists in cases where candidates tried to hold on to their scruples of recognizing factual reality and the rule of law. Even now the threat of being primaried keeps the congressional Republicans in line. Trump controls most of the GOP fundraising; and his henchman Elon Musk spent an estimated $250 million of his own money in just the final months of the last election cycle to help elect him. What's a quarter of a billion dollars to the literal World's Richest Man?

Now we Democrats need to do it, too. Primarying, that is. Republicans have shown us they treat modern politics as a knife fight. We Dems have too many leaders who are still playing Pat-a-cake. We need to push out of the way every complacent fossil who still politics like it's 1992. They're failing to represent us anymore.

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
It's been a few months since the last BuzzFeed listicle mis-categorizing everyone over 40 as "Boomers". It's time for another! Earlier this week I read "If You've Done At Least 15 Of These 35 Things, You're 1000% A Boomer"... which I'll note was titled "...You're 1000% Over 65" (emphasis mine) at the time  I first read it. Like the last of these articles I read it shows that Gen Z— the age group that authors who write these fluffy click-bait articles belong to— thinks that anyone who remembers things that were common up through the 1980s must be a Boomer / senior citizen.

Ahem, we kids who were growing up and doing things in the 1980s are called Gen X. And we're in our 40s/50s. And even many older Millennials remember many of the things on this recent list.

BTW, my score on this list was 20/35. And I'm many years short of being a Boomer. Here are just Five Things from the list of supposed "Boomer" items that virtually all Gen Xers, and most older Millennials, would be familiar with:

1. Have you ever manually cranked a car window up or down?

Manual-crank car windows were common up through the 1980s and into the 1990s. The first car I bought, a new 1991 vehicle, had manual crank windows. Yes, power windows were common by then, too, but in that era economy cars still had manual windows. I recall once getting a rental car in the mid 2000s that still had manual windows. I'll bet most people who are 35+, not just 65+, have cranked a manual window at some point.

3. Have you ever watched television on a TV that had no remote control and just dials?

I recall my parents first got a TV with wireless remote control in about 1985. Prior to that changing the channel— or even adjusting the volume— required walking up to the device and turning a knob. Or pressing a button. Yes, there was a middle ground between turning big, chunky, old-fashioned knobs and modern remote controls. TVs had modern push-button controls on the device for years before buttons on wireless remotes became common.

I used a non-remote TV again in 1992-1993 in college. It was an older TV set one of my housemates got from his parents. It had those chunky, old-fashioned knobs on it... but we rarely used them, because with only one, weak, weeny TV station available via antenna, we left the TV tuned to channel 3 for input from the VCR. Ah, tuning to channel 3 for VCRs and video games. that's another 1980s-ism... that virtually all Gen Xers and older Millennials would remember.

16. Have you ever looked up a phone number in the phone book?

Younger people these days may have trouble imagining a world before everything was online, but it wasn't that long ago. Amazon didn't even open until 1995, and back then it was just a bookstore. It wasn't until the early 2000s that most traditional businesses began to have even a minimal web presence, one where you could at least find their address and store hours. Thus, needing to use a phone book to find phone numbers to call for information— if it wasn't already shown in a yellow pages ad— was a regular thing up through the early 00s.

BTW, I say this as a digital native living in Silicon Valley. Less technical people and those living in less connected areas would've used phone books on the regular for a few more years.

19./20. Have you ever eaten at McDonald's when the food still came in Styrofoam packaging / when smoking was still allowed?

This one's a two-fer. I've grouped these two together because they're both about McDonald's and because they're not subject to any one person's memory. Questions like "When did [Company X] start/stop [doing Y]?" can be answered via simple search. Y'know, by using the web, that thing that people mistakenly believe kids these days excel at because they're online 24/7 while Boomers (and "Boomers") squint their eyes at and act befuddled and call their kids for help?

McDonald's went big with styrofoam containers for sandwiches in the 1980s. They started phasing it out in 1990 due to popular campaigns against non-biodegradable waste. I mention both the stop and start dates here because actual Boomers would remember a time long before styrofoam containers became common. And really it was just a period of <10 years. But yes, we Gen Xers remember that era well, because it's when we were growing up and treasuring those visits to McDonald's with our parents.

As far as smoking in McDonald's, smoking in all restaurants was common up through the 1990s and even into the 21st century. McDonald's banned smoking in restaurants as a corporate policy in 1994 (New York Times article, 1994!) but that only affected company-owned stores. Most stores were franchised. Smoking in restaurants was banned by law in various jurisdictions over the next fifteen years. California banned smoking in restaurants (but not bars) in 1995. New York banned smoking in restaurants in 2003. It wasn't until 2010 that many other states banned smoking in restaurants. Example source: List of smoking bans in the United States (Wikipedia article).

14. Have you ever balanced a checkbook?
Yes, two days ago.


canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
Overnight through this morning the SF Bay Area got another atmospheric river rain storm. The colorful and slightly ominous term describes a rain system that comes across the Pacific Ocean— which, since we're basically on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, is pretty damn much every single rain storm we get. Indeed two winters ago we got at least seventeen atmospheric river storms. When news media trumpet a term like "atmospheric river" on something so ordinary it happens about once a week during rainy season it starts to lose meaning.

I remember the first time I heard this term, "atmospheric river", used in weather reporting. It was about 9 years ago and it described a massive storm. There was flooding in the streets all around the Bay Area. Traffic was snarled. Businesses closed. Events were canceled. Did that happen 17 times last year? Hardly.

This time, this morning, there was hardly any of that widespread calamity, either. Though San Francisco did get a tornado warning at 6am (SF Chronicle article, 14 Dec 2024). That's rare. No actual tornado was spotted, though, and the warning was lifted minutes after it was announced. If there had been a tornado it would have been the first in SF in almost 20 years. Instead there were just gusty winds of up to 83mph as measured at SFO airport. Yes, people who know anything about tornadoes beyond alarmist headlines in the news, that's a basically a nothingburger.

For us here in Silicon Valley the storm was, indeed, just an ordinary winter rain storm. We got about 1.5" locally. No drama... except we did get some thunder and lightning overnight. That's unusual here.


canyonwalker: I see dumb people (i see dumb people)
Earlier this week I read yet-another Buzzfeed listicle/quiz for amusement, "There Is No Way Anyone Has Done More Than 25 Of These Things Unless They're Over 65". It's in the same vein as a similar Buzzfeed listicle I read (and wrote about) a few months ago. I suggested Buzzfeed retitle that article as It's Official, Gen Z Thinks Anyone Over 40 Is A Boomer.

Remember that the Boomer generation, aka Baby Boomers, are those born from 1946-1964. The youngest Boomers are turning 60 this year. Yet most people over 40— meaning not just Gen Xers like me, but also older Millennials— have probably done many of the things on the list. I'm years younger than the youngest Boomers and I've done 36 out of the 50, including all 20 of the top 20. Here's my hot take on several of them:

1. Adjusted rabbit ears on a television
I did that into the mid 1990s. My parents and adult relatives pretty much all had cable, but as a college student and grad student, my apartment mates and I didn't want to spend for cable TV. Boomers would remember when cable was $10/mo. We younger generations saw it spiral upwards of $100/mo and had to make decisions.

2. Played Pong in an arcade or at home
Okay, this is more of a late 70s/early 80s thing vs. "common into the 1990s". But I'm pretty sure a large number of Gen Xers get this one. I remember seeing a Pong game in my local Pizza Hut as a kid. But I never played because $0.25 was too spendy for my Boomer/Silent Generation parents.

3. Played pinball in an arcade
Mid 1990s, again. All Gen Xers and older Millennials have probably played pinball. Also, arcades didn't really become a thing until Gen X were adolescents.

4. Video stores with walled-off Adult sections
Video stores were at their peak all the way to 2004. I'm sure literally every Gen Xer and most Millennials remember cruising the aisles at video stores, looking for what to rent. As for the specific trope, though, of a walled-off Adult section.... The last one of those I saw personally was in 1996, but that's because that's the last time I had a membership at a locally owned video rental store instead of a national chain. The national chains deemed X-rated material off-brand and didn't offer it.

5. Kept phone numbers in an address book
Late 1990s. That's when cell phones became common for the average adult to own. Once again, all Gen X and older Millennials.

7. Used/seen a working cigarette vending machine
I recall these being commonplace until the early 1980s, present in every supermarket and drug store, so likely most Gen Xers have seen them. Even after that they were still around, though they disappeared from places like supermarkets and would be found in restaurants and bars into the 21st century.

8. Shopped at a five-and-dime
Dude, inflation. Yesterday's five-and-dime morphed into Dollar stores. ...Where, today, almost everything is more than $1.

13. Done a duck-and-cover drill at school in case of nuclear attack
This is one I actually never did. Dunno if that's because "Hide under your desk because bombs don't affect desks" was phased out by the time I began school, or if it's just that the schools/districts I attended had opted out. OTOH, as a Gen Xer, I was fortunately done with school by the time lockdowns and active shooter drills became a thing.

21. Have you ever balanced a checkbook?
I still do. Does your mom buy your food and clothes?


canyonwalker: Cthulhu voted - touch screen! (i voted)
In a move that should have surprised absolutely no one, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suspended his campaign yesterday and announced his support for Donald Trump. Well, okay, the exact timing of Kennedy ending his failing campaign— he was down to about 5% support in polling averages— was anybody's guess. But the fact he aligns with Trump should be no surprise to anybody.

Kennedy rose to national prominence as an anti-vaccine skeptic and crusader. In 2007 he founded a fringe nonprofit that has gone on to become the most well funded anti-fax organization in the US. He promoted health conspiracies during the Covid pandemic, argued that the government should force medical journals to publish provably flawed research, and wanted Anthony Fauci to be prosecuted. Oh, and recently campaigned on dismantling the HHS. He called the NIH, CDC, and FDA "corrupt" and called for replacing their leadership with "like-minded"— read: antivaxx, anti-government crackpot— people.

This is just one that Kennedy has championed, but it's a big one and it's clearly Trump/extreme right aligned. Still, Kennedy campaigned for the Democratic nomination in 2023 before dropping out and seeking the Libertarian party nomination, then running as an independent. Along the way he's done a lot of his campaigning through extreme right wing media.

Kennedy does have some credibility as a Democratic candidate. Frankly, though, his biggest credential is his name. He's the son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy.

Earlier this year it was widely reported repeated in the news that Kennedy's independent campaign was a big threat to Joe Biden, as he would likely siphon off more Biden voters than Trump voters. This argument was published in right-wing echo chamber media such as Fox News and the National Review. The craven mainstream media credulously repeated these claims, attempting no factual counterpoint— this is why I replaced "reported" with "repeated" above— not even scratching the surface of the claims to show audiences how untrue what they were repeating was.

Now we learn that Kennedy, in a Trump-like move, apparently hit up both campaigns (Harris and Trump) offering his endorsement in exchange for the promise of a cabinet level position. The Harris campaign rejected his overtures through intermediaries, while sources speaking on condition of anonymity say Eric Trump has been brokering conversations with him for weeks.

Kennedy's latest Trump-like move came in his public comments on his endorsement,. He went long on complaining about "attacks on democracy" while endorsing Trump, who's spent 4 years promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen. This is the mindset of the guy they thought would take votes from Democrats?

Trump, who previously called Kennedy "one of the most Liberal Lunatics ever to run for office" and "the dumbest member" of the Kennedy family, now calls him "a brilliant guy", "very smart", and indicates he may offer him a cabinet role in his administration.
canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
President Joe Biden has dropped out of the race for the 2024 election. He announced this morning he's ending his run for reelection. He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for nomination as the Democratic party candidate.

Biden's move comes after weeks of the mainstream news media writing his political obituary. He showed poorly in the presidential debate on June 27, failing to land any rhetorical hits on Donald Trump and occasionally looking like a deer in the headlights. Nevermind that Biden continued to show a firm grasp on a variety of world events and how government and modern technology actually work, unlike Trump whose frequent rally speeches are ongoing word-salads with lengthy descents into nonsensical rants about things like sharks and the fact that batteries can't be put in a vehicle. (It's surprising Elon Musk endorsed him so strongly days after that.) A few billionaire donors turned against Biden, and "Is this the end?" was all the press could seem to write about for weeks.

The Republican party ultimately got in line behind an election-denying openly racist convicted felon and rapist who fomented a violent insurrection against the US Congress and his own vice president on January 6, 2020. But Biden had a weak debate performance 3½ weeks ago. Yeah, that's totally worse.

Look, I don't think Biden was the best candidate ever. I've written before about the problem of older leaders staying in political leadership long past the point where their political skills are showing to be badly out of date. Was Biden's mind also slipping? I'm not sure, as I don't trust most the publicized claims that it was. Everybody making that claim has ulterior motives. That's not to say they're wrong, just that there's reasonable suspicion about various personal motivations. But for anyone arguing that Biden was no longer mentally qualified, have you looked at the other guy?

Well, Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic nominee now. I don't think she's the best candidate ever, either. But again, look at the other guy. Harris in 2024!

canyonwalker: My other car is a pair of hiking boots (in beauty I walk)
Alaska Travelog #21
Glacier Overlook Trail - Tue, 18 Jun 2024, 1:30pm

Yesterday when we visited Kenai Fjords National Park to hike partway up Exit Glacier I noticed there were signs along the road and the lower part of the trail, indicating how much further down the foot of the glacier extended not that long ago. Today we've come back to the park to hike another trail, and I've made a point of recording bits of video showing these historic markers. Check out this 3m43s montage I've put together.



In the video I mention "global climate change" a few times without elaborating on it. Climate change is a real and ongoing thing. The climate on this planet has been changing since long before modern humans first emerged. Consider how different things were even 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. That's natural climate change. But there's also man-made climate change.

Man-made climate change is a real and ongoing thing, too. Carbon dioxide and other substances we've been pumping into the air since the start of the industrial revolution, often called "greenhouse gases" are accelerating the rate of natural warming since the end of the last ice age. And it's not just a little bit of acceleration. Various scientific models show that man-made causes are changing the earth's climate anywhere from 10x faster to over 100x faster than has ever happened before in millions of years.

There is no serious scientific disagreement about man-made climate change. It may seem to a layperson that it's "just a theory" and "there are two sides to the issue", but that is just a distortion created by, on the one hand, propagandists and denialists who peddle disinformation for various financial reasons, and on the other hand, weak minded news media lacking both scientific literacy to sort fact from fiction and the spine to hold habitual liars to account.

canyonwalker: I see dumb people (i see dumb people)
I have a habit of clicking on Buzzfeed listicles in my newsfeed. They're generally light, vaguely amusing reading, perfect for browsing when I'm sitting down at lunch. Occasionally they're even very insightful, such as the listicle that inspired me to write The Unwritten Rules of Being Poor. But most of the time they're just vaguely insipid. Today, though, I clicked on one that was actively stupid.

"Non-Rich People Are Sharing Subtly Obvious Signs Of Wealth, And Honestly, It's Pretty Eye-Opening" the title blared. "Eye-Opening" isn't the term I'd use to describe it. In fact the whole headline buries the lede. It should be something more like, "Online Randos Mock a Question We Post on Reddit, And We're So Lame We Can't Tell We're Being Mocked."

Here are just a few of the things Buzzfeed included in its list of things of subtle signs you're rich:

  • You own a refrigerator with a water dispenser
  • You buy new furniture rather than used
  • You visit the doctor or dentist for non-emergency health care
  • Your mom eats dinner with you instead of pretending she's not hungry because she can't afford enough food for everyone
  • Your Crayola Crayons come in one of those boxes with a built-in crayon sharpener
  • You have a basketball hoop in the driveway
  • You live in a house with stairs
  • You can afford a new mattress
  • You take a vacation that's not visiting family

I grew up in a working-class family (lower-middle class) and had two-thirds of these. Including a mom who could afford to eat. Because, yeah, that's a sign of wealth. 🙄


canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
I read a BuzzFeed listicle yesterday, "40 Forgotten Pandemic Trends From 4 Years Ago That Feel Like They Are From An Alternate Universe" (30 Mar 2024). I thought as I clicked into it, "I wonder how many of these trends, if any, applied to me?" Answer: ONE! One out of FORTY. Clearly I am NOT trendy. (Little surprise there1.)

Among the things I did not do during the darkest days of the Covid lockdown that seemingly everyone else did— or seemingly everyone who Tweeted/Grammed/Tokked a lot on social media at the time did:

  • I didn't hoard anything— or panic because I ran out
  • I didn't do Zoom happy hours. ...Well, okay, I did, like, two then decided they were lame and I'd rather drink alone. Or in the words of George Thorogood: 🎵 When I drink alone I prefer to drink by myself. 🎵
  • I didn't get super-into any TV series
  • I didn't buy a Peloton
  • I didn't buy a quarantine pet
  • I didn't join any cooking trend.

The one thing I did, though only because it was practical and not because it was trendy?

Oh, and none of these are trends I forgot about.

Like, really, people, you forget? C'mon, it's only 4 years ago, and it's likely the most singularly different time of your life. Don't tell me it's because you all became alcoholics. ...Which, yes, that's a 2020 social trend I do remember, but the BuzzFeed listicle-compilers forgot about or glossed over!

[1] I pay attention in life and in the media I consume to stay abreast of trends, to be knowledgeable of them. I only join in when they're practical, genuinely interesting, or stylish in a way I'm curious to try. ...Which is to say, I laugh at most of them and move on.
canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
There's been quite an uproar in the press over the last several days about a manipulated photo of Princess Kate and her kids. Kensington Palace released the photo a week ago to combat rumors that the Princess of Wales, who's not been seen in public since abdominal surgery, is in ill health or even dead. The picture shows her happy and healthy with her 3 children.

Manipulated photo of Kate Middleton and family from Kensington Palace (Mar 2024)The uproar over this seemingly innocuous photograph arose quickly. Numerous photographers and digital image editors online quickly spotted small artifacts in the picture indicating it had been manipulated— or "photoshopped", as many call it.

In this particular picture all the artifacts are small. There's nothing so obvious here as a person with a third hand (because one was digitally added to the picture) or a curved doorway in the background (where someone "bent" the image, e.g., to make someone look curvier or slimmer). But still, it's become a scandal. "Water-Kate," some are quipping. Everyone from celebrities to even The Onion are bagging on Kate. In fact The Onion offers satirical recommendations from celebrities on how to 'shop better (12 Mar 2024).

Lost in the shuffle amid all the jeering and laughter is the reality of just how common "photoshopping" is in photography.

The term "photoshopping", BTW, refers to Adobe Photoshop, a powerful image manipulation tool published by Adobe. Photoshop has been common in industry for a long time. I started using it personally 30 years ago as a graduate student in 2D/3D computer imaging.

Pretty much all professional images you see online or in print have been processed through Photoshop or a tool like it. A good many image shared by amateurs have been "photoshopped", too. Virtually every image I publish in my blog has been touched up in Photoshop. Does being literally "photoshopped" mean they're all fake?

Just because an image has gone through Photoshop does not mean it is fake. There have been a number of interesting posts about that on X this week by Pete Souza, a respected pro photographer who worked in the Obama whitehouse. Souza took some of the most iconic photos of Obama during his time in office, including the famous photo in the Situation Room of the president and his team receiving live updates of Seal Team Six apprehending Osama Bin Laden. His thoughts are nicely summarized in a recent Buzzfeed article (15 Mar 2024).

As Souza explains, it's pretty much de rigeur for photographers to touch up pics by brightening or darkening, fixing highlights and shadows, and adjusting color balance. BTW, these are all modifications that could be done back in the days of film and paper photography, though they were very time consuming and required more skill than needed today with software like Photoshop. And for decades publishers have, correctly, accepted these alterations as reasonable.

Where publishers drawn the line on "Photoshopping" pics is adding, removing, or changing content from the image. Well, some publishers do that. In photojournalism it's not okay to remove an unwanted person from an image or edit the subject to make them look taller, slimmer, or curvier. In advertising, though... well, it's pretty much the rule that parts of the image have been faked to sell better.

In my own pics I do all of the things Souza talks about as normal. I adjust brightness levels and color curves. I also sharpen virtually all of my pics. That's because I keep in-camera sharpening set low as I don't particularly like it. Moreover, I apply sharpening anyway after resizing pics for online.

I also occasionally do the things Souza describes as no-nos for photojournalism: I edit out, or alter the shape of, people in the pics! I did that in one of the pics I shared earlier today from our hike at Flag Hill. Hawk was in one of the pics, a small figure in a wide shot, and her appearance was both distracting and unflattering. Since she was a small element of the pic I was able to edit her out pretty easily— by knowing what to do with Photoshop— and we both agreed the pic was better as a result.
canyonwalker: Mr. Moneybags enjoys his wealth (money)
It's like a case of "Ask, and ye shall receive." After I posted earlier today about the increasing number of 401(k) millionaires and noted that that widely-reported news story only describes the top 2% of the population and doesn't say anything about how well the average American is saving for retirement, I see another article pop up in my newsfeed— this one also from Yahoo! Finance— about the median 401(k) balance (29 Feb 2024). This article shares data from another big brokerage, Vanguard, about the mean and median retirement account balances in 2023, broken down by age range:

AgeAverage
Account Balance
Median
Account Balance
Under 25$5,236$1,948
25-34$30,017$11,357
35-44$76,354$28,318
45-54$142,069$48,301
55-64$207,874$71,168
65+$232,710$70,620

* I've copied the numbers directly from the Yahoo! Finance article cited above and cleaned up the formatting with a table

These figures, especially the median figure, are much more insightful into how the average American is saving for retirement. (As an aside, it's not surprising that the mean average is much higher than the median. I've noted before that mean and median are often very different when discussing wealth.) The news is way different from any kind of champagne cork popping about how many 401(k) millionaires there are. In these numbers we see that ordinary Americans at or near retirement age lack even one-tenth that much wealth.


canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
Well, well, well, my iPhone news reader app is once again watching what I'm reading and trying to give me just more of the same. After I clicked on, I dunno, maybe two articles about Costco in the past week, now it's showing me "Costco" as a news topic:

Now I have 'Costco' as a topic in my news feed! (Feb 2024)

There are seven articles, all about Costco— and all indeed with similar file photos atop the stories— under this news heading, with the option (via tapping "...") to fetch more.

And no, Costco doesn't replace Pizza. My newsreader still shows me "Pizza" as a news topic from that time 4 years ago when I read a few articles on pizza in the same week. 🙄

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
We're having great weather here in Silicon Valley this weekend. Yesterday the temperature hit about 70° at my house. Today is almost as warm. It's sunny and clear, too. We enjoyed yesterday's weather by getting out for a really enjoyable hike in the East Bay hills. Today we met a friend for a leisurely lunch outdoors on the patio.

The pleasant weather isn't just local. Much of the US is seeing warm and dry weather this weekend. A few days ago I saw articles in my newsfeed posing the question, "Is this 'it' for winter?" Sigh. What alarmist claptrap. This is not 'it' for winter. A simple check of the 10 day weather forecast— do people who write news articles know how to read news articles?— shows that next weekend is going to be cold and rainy, at least around here. So, no, this is not "it" for winter. And I'm glad, because as much as I do appreciate the warm, dry weather I also appreciate getting enough rain to refill our lakes and groundwater tables so we're not fretting about drought in six months.
canyonwalker: Mr. Moneybags enjoys his wealth (money)
I saw an interesting article in my newsfeed earlier this week. It's "Are You Richer Than You Think? A Surprising Number Of People Consider Themselves 'Poor' But They're Actually In The Top 10% Of Earners" (Yahoo Finance, 20 Feb 2024). Well, the headline was interesting. The question posed by the article is interesting. But, alas, the article itself was fairly unenlightening. The author didn't have much to say, and half of what she did say was inaccurate as it embedded and reinforced common misunderstandings.

I've remarked before about the generally poor quality of articles in the general media about wealth and finance. An online wag years ago explained, "Imagine that every feature article you read was written by a lowly paid twenty-something with a liberal arts degree." He's not really wrong. Even though the author of this article claims to have "written about personal finance and investment for the past 13 years in a variety of publications"— I'm going to assume that doesn't include her high school student newspaper so she's older than her 20s— the level of the content fits the stereotype.

So here's how I'd answer the question posed by the article. And no, I don't mean the question literally in the title, "Are you richer than you think?" I mean the more interesting question it really poses: Why do many high earners think of themselves as poor?

Five Things:

1) First off, wealth and income are not the same thing. I've written about this before. It's a common misunderstanding to conflate the two. Wealth is like how much water you have in your bucket, income is how fast the spigot is pouring water into it. Over time a gushing spigot (high income) will fill the bucket (generate wealth), but that's A) over time, and B) depends on your expenses. Imagine that bucket you're pouring water into also has water being taken out on the regular. What's being taken out is to pay for housing, food, utilities, health care, transportation, student loans, etc.

2) The earning threshold of $175,000 used in the story is not particularly high. Yes, is small town America it's a lot, but not in costly cities like New York and San Francisco. And BTW, most of the people who earn such high incomes? They earn it because they're in costly cities like New York and San Francisco. Articles like this never seem to acknowledge that major regional cost-of-living differences are a thing.

3) So, what's $175k in HCOL areas like SF? From living here for many years I can tell you it's not "wealthy". Unless you already have significant wealth, an income of $175k lets you afford a middle class lifestyle. If you're earning $175k here and supporting only yourself you're comfortable, not wealthy. Like, you're not going to be able to buy a detached 3-bedroom house on that salary alone, but you could definitely buy a condo. And if you've got to support a family on $175k you're not even particularly comfortable. You'd be tenuously middle class, probably close to living paycheck to paycheck... and not because you're spending extravagantly on fancy cars and travel and luxury goods, but because the basics of housing, food, health care, transportation, etc., are freakin' expensive.

4) Even people who've amassed some degree of wealth from saving and investing over time may feel their wealth is at risk. In the US one of the big hobgoblins of middle class wealth is medical bills. A severe long-term illness can not only knock out much or all of a family's income but it can drain tens of thousands of dollars, even $100,000, per year, even with insurance. And BTW the cost of that insurance has skyrocketed in the past few years. So we're all paying a lot more for health care, even when we're not sick.

5) Finally, there's the conundrum of upwards comparisons. People tend to compare themselves to those who have even more. Yes, this the go-to explanation of pretty much every article nowadays about wealth and happiness, including the one linked to in this blog. Yes, it's also a very real thing— but it's not the #1 thing. I mean, here I'm calling it #5 on a list of 5. It's simply absurd to act like this one thing explains the whole situation and ignore the very valid items #1-4 I've explained here.
canyonwalker: Malign spirits in TV attempt to kill viewer (tv)
Recently I read a Buzzfeed listicle* about things people born since the 1980s won't remember. A few of the entries from the Reddit thread they scraped for the listicle ("listicle" is a portmanteau of list and article; it's a lazy writer's way of producing content) compared how watching TV used to be way different than it is today. I agree! I'm old enough to remember all the differences Buzzf— I mean Redditors— described, and then some. Here are Five Things:

1) Black & White TV. The first TV my parents had, or at least the one they had from when I was old enough to remember, at age 3 or 4, was a black-and-white set. It also wasn't terribly big, even by the time's standards. I think it was a 16" diagonal tube, but it could have been as small as 13". BTW, this was not back in the days when all TVs were B W and tiny. My grandparents had a set that already looked ancient at the time, a TV in a big wooden console, that was larger and color. I think the issue was my parents just didn't watch a lot of TV so didn't value spending money on anything more than the cheapest possible set.

2) The Time Before Cable: So Few Channels. Before cable there were, like, 5 channels. We got the three major commercial networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), the city's PBS affiliate, and one local station. But actually we got two copies each of ABC, CBS, and NBC: our city's affiliates plus the affiliates from another city 80 miles away. We got those through this thing called Community Access TV, or CATV. You might've seen the CATV acronym from years ago and thought it meant "CAble TV". Not quite. It did involve a physical cable... but it was a cable network in our town that was connected to basically a big, shared antenna at the center of town so people didn't have to climb up on the roofs of their houses to strap individual antennas to their chimneys. (Note: years later so many people thought "CATV" meant CAble TV that cable equipment manufacturers appropriated the misunderstood acronym and it became a de facto standard.)

3) Early Cable: A Few Channels More. Having community access TV in our town made it easier to get real cable TV as the industry matured. Basically the CATV company became a Cable TV company, and we got more channels. Though only a few at first. Mostly they were big stations from more distant cities, like Atlanta's WTBS and Chicago's WGN, but there was also Nickelodeon— which was a big gain for us as kids. Though early on Nickelodeon was mostly reruns of American TV staples from 25 years earlier like Leave it to Beaver and Lassie, plus some Canadian and European imports that were kind of hit-or-miss.

4) Free Pay Channels— Briefly. One bonus, for a short while, was that you could watch premium channels like HBO for free— if you had the right TV. It depended on how the TV's tuner was built. Older TVs with chunky analog knobs could only to tune in to channels 2-13 in the VHF range. If they had a knob for higher number channels they shifted to the UHF range. With cable everything was transmitted win VHF range, with channels up into the 30s, 40s, and beyond. Newer TVs at the time with fully electronic tuning controls could select those channels. The cable company glommed on to that after a few years and killed it by scrambling the pay channels so you could only watch them with a descrambler box they provided when you subscribed. Though that led to the brief phenomenon of teens and tweens watching scrambled porn channels hoping to catch a brief glimpse of wavy boobs.

5) Be There or Miss It. The way most of us watch TV is so fundamentally different today from the 1980s. Nowadays with streaming TV we decide when we want to watch TV and pick something from a vast library of available content. In the long long ago there was no choosing your own schedule. If you wanted to watch show "X" you had to be watching when it aired. Like, if it was on Thursday at 8pm, you didn't get to watch it Saturday afternoon or binge-watch 3 episodes on Thursday 2 weeks later. You sat in front of your TV Thursday at 8 or you missed it. Good luck catching it on reruns... those could be months later, and often were shown out of order. VCRs became widely available in the 1980s and changed this equation somewhat, but IMO the quality of recordings and the ease of programming VCRs didn't reach a level of making them practical for routine viewing until around 1995.
canyonwalker: Mr. Moneybags enjoys his wealth (money)
Thanksgiving Travelog #12
Camp Hill, PA - Sat, 25 Nov 2023. 11am.

Yesterday I quipped that Black Friday 2023 was no worse than Medium-Gray. It turns out I wasn't the only one who arrived at that opinion— although the colorful turn of phrase remains uniquely mine, AFAICT. Various news articles in financial and mainstream media noted the same thing.

"Shoppers are tired out; Black Friday deals started last weekend," some explained. "Shoppers are choosy and not seeing great bargains," others opined.

I see both from my own POV. Though I'd note that Black Friday deals actually started before last weekend. Stores were decked out for Christmas sales over a week before Halloween. My email has been full of "pre-Black Friday" sale spam since at least mid-November. And sales while we were out visiting various stores yesterday were hit-or-miss. Some seemed like just the normal level of everyday discounting. Bigger-than-usual deals were mostly the kind that have been available for at least a week. Truly door-buster deals, where current-model electronics are on sale for, like, half price, were extremely few. In fact, I saw just one. And I'm kicking myself now for not scooping it up! 🤣

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
Today was the main day of DevOps World Silicon Valley. As I explained last night, I dressed today as Jenkins the Butler— the logo/mascot/logo/spirit of the open-source project Jenkins CI. And unlike past shows when I've portrayed Jenkins, I stayed in costume the whole day today.

Jenkins, the world's most-used continuous integration engine

Yes, I dressed like the guy in the logo. Yes, I did it convincingly. I posed with a lot of people who wanted selfies and group pictures with Jenkins the Butler. When one of my company execs saw me in character this morning he asked me to present one of his slides on stage during his keynote. We agreed before the keynote and spent two minutes discussing the slide together... and that was all the prep I had. I killed it. Our company founder transcribed my presentation and shared it with the company on Slack. Later in the day I did a 15-minute streaming TV interview with an industry journalist in character.

I'll post pics and links for these Jenkins hijinks tomorrow or this weekend, when I have time and energy. Right now it's late in the evening and I am tired from wearing a tuxedo all day and being in character.

canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
Senator Diane Feinstein passed away today. She was aged 90.

Feinstein had been an icon in politics for decades. She was the oldest member of the Senate, the longest-serving female senator and the longest-serving senator from California. But her political career and reputation as a trailblazer for women in politics started long before her first Senate victory in 1992.

In 1969 Feinstein won election to the San Francisco Board of County Supervisors. Journalists in the media at the time were disgusting with the sexist tropes they promulgated. They wrote about wondering "who wears the pants" in her family and asked her then-husband if he felt "humbled or intimidated" by her success. (To his credit, Dr. Feinstein responded that he felt neither.) But what journos missed with their sexist sneering and offensive questions was that the people of San Francisco had elected her. They were not representing the people of San Francisco with their reporting, they were representing a biased minority.

Nine years after that Feinstein became Mayor of San Francisco under grim circumstances. On November 27, 1978, Mayor George Moscone and and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated— by a fellow county supervisor, no less. The duty fell to Feinstein, who by then was President of the Board, to announce the sad news on the steps of City Hall. As board president she became acting mayor, and a week later the board appointed her to finish Moscone's term. She later was reelected mayor twice.

Two things define Feinstein's long political career: persistence and bipartisanship. While working her way up through politics starting in the 1960s she doggedly pursued her duties and aspirations, not letting insults or roadblocks deter her. She not only endured countless slights along the way but bounced back from several lost elections. She lost her first bid to become a county supervisor, she ran and lost a race for mayor (before later becoming mayor by appointment and then winning reelection), and she ran and lost a race for governor. Despite people opposing her for her politics (though she was always a centrist Democrat) and her gender she remained steadfast in reaching across the aisle to find political consensus. As one of her contemporaries said many years ago, ironically thinking it was an insult more than a compliment, "Diane wasn't in politics, she was in government." We need more politicians like that today.

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