Commentary – Page 45

Category: Commentary (page 45 of 982)

Managing my mistrust of Facebook

Like a lot of people, I don’t trust Facebook. A lot of people deal with that by deleting their Facebook accounts, but I don’t want to do that. A lot of friends and family members post their photos to Facebook, so I need an account if I want to see them. It’s also the main way to keep in touch with certain people. That’s Facebook’s hook for the skeptical — they know you like other Facebook users more than you hate Facebook itself.

I have never liked it when you go to a page that’s not a Facebook page and it shows your picture and which friends have liked that page already. That provides no value to me as an end user, but it certainly provides value to Facebook. They track your activity using those buttons whether you click on them or not.

This weekend I learned that when you log out of Facebook, you don’t actually log out of Facebook. They still track wherever you go on the Web. That, for me, was the final straw. I logged out of Facebook and deleted all of my Facebook cookies manually.

From now on, when I want to visit Facebook, I’ll be using the private browser setting in whatever browser I’m using. For Google Chrome, that’s Incognito mode. For Firefox, you use Private Browsing. Safari supports Private Browsing as well. It seems like putting Facebook in jail is the only way to keep it from tracking you everywhere you go on the Web, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Update: Facebook has addressed the logout issue. You can decide whether it has been fixed to your satisfaction.

Where does blogging stop and republishing start?

September 24, 2011 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Blogging is mostly about pointing to interesting stuff and, for some people, commenting on it. Whether you’re paid to blog or not, one of the real ethical conundrums involves walking the line between quoting or summarizing enough of the work you’re commenting on to interest your readers and providing so much detail that there’s no reason to visit the original piece.

For sites like Business Insider and the Huffington Post, that’s no dilemma at all. Their business models are based on essentially republishing other people’s work, as explained by Ryan McCarthy on Felix Salmon’s blog. I found that post through Marco Arment’s first-hand account of having his work reliably published on Business Insider’s site as though he is one of their authors. It’s also worth checking out Business Insider’s response to Marco, in which they argue that Instapaper and Tumblr are essentially in the same business as they are.

Ideally search engines would return links to original material ahead of aggregated material but that strikes me as a really tough problem to solve. Until that happens, aggregating other people’s writing is going to be profitable. And as long as it’s profitable, publishers are going to keep doing it.

Writing code other people can understand

September 23, 2011 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Brent Simmons writes about how wrong he was to assume that nobody would ever see code he wrote, and how coding with the assumption that other people will eventually work on his code makes him a better developer:

But now I write code with the absolute certain knowledge that it will end up in somebody else’s hands. I could be wrong, yes, but I’ve learned that it helps me write better and more-maintainable code if I just assume from the start that somebody else, most likely a friend, will end up working on that code base.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this approach. There are very specific coding habits that solo developers tend to pick up, and the longer many developers work solo, the worse they become.

FourSquare is actually a useful tool

September 22, 2011 / Rafe / 1 Comment

I live in Raleigh, North Carolina, a medium-sized city that I know like the back of my hand. I downloaded FourSquare last year and started using it, but I found it mainly to be a toy. You check in at the places you go and maybe you eventually become mayor. It was kind of fun, but there was no obvious utility.

This weekend I went on a trip and rather than planning where I wanted to eat, I decided to rely on FourSquare to pick restaurants, and it turns out that it’s very useful indeed and becomes more useful the more you use it. You start out by using the Explore feature to show you restaurants that are popular on FourSquare within a certain radius.

Once you’ve started checking in at various locations, FourSquare can tailor its recommendations based on the places you’ve been, providing a pretty good guide to stuff that might be interesting to you around the neighborhood. The tips people use on FourSquare are often useful as well when deciding what to order.

I find that FourSquare works best when combined with other restaurant reviews. FourSquare can tell you what’s popular but not necessarily what’s good, so when choosing it helps to consult other sites like Zagat to get a second opinion on where to eat. Overall, though, I found FourSquare to be significantly more valuable than I would have guessed.

Actually getting involved in politics

September 15, 2011 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Matthew Yglesias answers a question from a reader about what to do to contribute to political change in this country. As the reader points out, reading political blogs, watching The Daily Show, and chatting about it with your spouse is not really going to get it done.

Matt offers two suggestions: write Congress and promote your views out there in the world, among people who may not agree with you. I second both of those recommendations. I can say first hand that I have changed the political views of some friends and family members through sheer persistence and a willingness to be annoying. I would also point out that I have had my changed on some subjects by engaging with people who disagree with me.

I would also add that there are two more organized venues that you can become involved with if you want to create change — activism and campaigning. Getting involved with activism involves joining organizations that advocate for a specific policy or principle and then working on that cause. Amnesty International, the ACLU, and, for that matter, the NRA are national activist organizations. There are activist organizations focused on local issues everywhere as well.

Campaigning is another option. Organizing for America already has volunteers phone banking to recruit even more volunteers and registering voters. We also have a local election in October. When you campaign, you forget what you know about the insufficiency of the President’s jobs plan or the fact that we escalated the war in Afghanistan, at least while you’re volunteering. You’re there to make sure that the least bad viable candidates get elected. I realize that this is offensive to ideological purity, but it is essential work.

Whatever frustrations I have with President Obama or North Carolina governor Bev Perdue, the truth is that they are both infinitely better than John McCain or Pat McCrory from where I sit. Obviously liberals need to pressure elected officials to support the policies that are important to us, but Democrats are more amenable to pressure from liberals than Republicans are. The long term goal has to be to build a progressive political organization strong enough to elect truly liberal candidates rather than moderate ones. To do so, we need liberals to show up and help build the party.

Obviously not all of these options are for everyone, but if you’re frustrated with the state of things, you should choose one or more and throw yourself into it. I volunteered during the 2008 Presidential campaign, but I didn’t really get into it until 2010. It was August 28, the day of the Restoring Honor rally that Glenn Beck was throwing, and I was just incredibly frustrated by the whole thing. It occurred to me that wandering around the house being angry at Glenn Beck wasn’t going to do anything to create a world that resembles my ideals more than it resembles his, so we went down to the local Democratic headquarters and started volunteering.

In closing, I’d urge you to read this post by Ta-Nahesi Coates, which explains as well as anything I’ve read that creating change is the responsibility of the people who desire that change. Being disappointed in President Obama or frustrated with the Tea Party is a waste of time. The only thing we really control is the amount of effort we put into getting what we want.

Responsive design is the near future of Web page layout

September 13, 2011 / Rafe / 4 Comments

Where is Web design headed? For a preview, check out the Boston Globe. It looks like a perfectly normal newspaper Web site, until you start resizing the browser window. The page layout is dynamically altered so that it properly size whatever window is being used to view it. There’s no more “click here for our mobile site” button or a link beseeching you to download the site’s app in somebody’s app store. This technique is called responsive design, and its creator, Ethan Marcotte, consulted on the Boston Globe’s implementation. He’s written about his role in the project on his blog.

I suspect that responsive design is going to be adopted widely. The Boston Globe provides a compelling blueprint. The next step will be approachable frameworks that enable people to create responsive designs without having to build them from scratch on their own. As soon as I saw the new site, other sites that redirect you to a special site just for mobile devices or offer links to a mobile version of the site seemed completely out of date.

I want to build everything in this fashion from here on out.

Racial profiling on 9/11

September 13, 2011 / Rafe / 3 Comments

You’ve probably already seen this story, but I’m linking to it in case you haven’t. On 9/11, fighter planes were dispatched to shadow a passenger flight from Denver to Detroit because several passengers exhibited, in the eyes of the crew, suspicious activity. When the flight landed, the SWAT team showed up and handcuffed and detained the “suspicous” passengers.

I was at the gym yesterday and saw a chyron on CNN about this story, and I immediately assumed that this was yet another case of unfounded panic and probably racial profiling. Without hearing any of the details, I was immediately frustrated by this latest example of the security state gone insane.

Of course the three passengers in question were released after a few hours with no charges against them, because they were not in any way terrorists. Yesterday one of the detained passengers, Shoshana Hebshi, posted a first-hand account of what happened.

The three “suspicious” passengers happened to be brown people who were coincidentally seated on the same row. What happened to them when the plane landed?

Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained.

The cops brought us to a parked squad car next to the plane, had us spread our legs and arms. Mine asked me if I was wearing any explosives. “No,” I said, holding my tongue to not let out a snarky response. I wasn’t sure what I could and could not say, and all that came out was “What’s going on?”

This is America in 2011 and what bothers me most is that my initial leap to conclusions at the gym was borne out completely.

How to fix the economy

September 9, 2011 / Rafe / 4 Comments

Last month Tim Bray reminded me that I should be reading The Economist. The thing I like best about The Economist as a publication is that its editorial stance is to be uniformly in favor of global economic growth. While I am certainly much more left wing than their usual reader or their editors, I am essentially in agreement with them that the number one priority of economic policy must be continued, long-term economic growth, even if I disagree with them on other priorities or occasionally on the best approach to creating sustainable growth.

In any case, whether or not you agree with The Economist on anything, they are the best advocates out there for center-right, pro-business policy. Even if you disagree with their conclusions, their arguments are worth grappling with.

Their policy prescription for dealing with the current jobs crisis and economic slowdown is straightforward — Western governments should pursue policies that prop up demand encourage job growth now and make binding commitments to address structural deficits later. This should sound familiar, because this has been the Obama administration’s position since President Obama took office. It’s also the position of nearly all economists who are not partisan hacks. And the truth is that if President Obama resigned tomorrow and House Speaker John Boehner took over, it would probably be his policy as well.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that this policy course is stunningly obvious, the odds are that a gut-level impulse toward austerity, a misplaced fear of short-term inflation, and pursuit of partisan advantage are all conspiring to render not just the US government, but governments all over Europe, impotent in the face of this crisis. And as The Economist points out, an economic crisis is also a human crisis:

… the human cost of the economic crisis is paid largely by those who are out of work, for joblessness increases depression, divorce, substance abuse and pretty much everything that can go wrong in a life. Worse, today’s joblessness is a particularly dangerous sort. A disproportionate share of those out of work are young, and youth unemployment leaves more scars, in terms of lower future wages and greater likelihood of future unemployment (see article). Joblessness is also becoming more chronic. In America, famous for its flexible labour market, the average jobless spell now lasts 40 weeks, up from 17 in 2007. In Italy half of those without work have been so for more than a year. Long-term unemployment is harder to cure, as people’s skills atrophy and they become detached from the workforce. Its shadow lingers, reducing future growth rates, damaging public finances and straining social order for years to come.

People are looking to Belgium with envy because their lack of a government prevents them from pursuing pro-cyclical austerity measures that deepen the crisis. I thought that multinational organizations like the OECD and the G-20 were created in order to facilitate coordinated responses to global crises like the one we’re facing right now. Instead we’re seeing little collective action to turn the global economy around, and very little on the policy front from individual countries as well. In the meantime, things continue to slide downhill.

Michael S. Hart, RIP

September 8, 2011 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Michael S. Hart, the inventor of the electronic book and the founder of Project Gutenberg, died this week. Project Gutenberg has his (public domain) obituary. Hart was born in 1947. The last published work to pass into the public domain was published in 1923 and it seems probable that copyright terms will be extended indefinitely such that no published works will enter the public domain again.

Update: Nat Torkington has posted a nice remembrance.

Farewell to the Obscure Store and Reading Room

September 6, 2011 / Rafe / 0 Comments

As part of his semi-retirement, Jim Romenesko is shutting down The Obscure Store & Reading Room, one of the few remaining first generation blogs. I always felt honored to be in his blogroll back in the day.

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