Elon Musk, the Twitter Fiasco, and Mastodon

I’ve never been a huge fan of Elon Musk the man, but I love my Tesla and have been impressed by what SpaceX has been able to accomplish. I have a Twitter account, though I have rarely used it.

When Musk moved Tesla headquarters to Texas because he didn’t like the politics in California, it bothered me a little. Then when he announced that he was going to buy Twitter and started talking about allowing a certain unnamed ex-President back on the platform, I wasn’t happy. Musk apparently also retweeted a conspiracy theory about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and also tweeted that everyone should vote Republican in the midterms. Oh, and a series of children by several different women confirms that he is not the kind of person I would want to associate myself with.

And finally, for the moment anyway, when Musk took control of Twitter he gutted the company before he could even begin to understand which employees (and contractors) knew how to keep the platform running. I don’t know if it’s ignorance, arrogance, a desire to create a hard problem to solve, or all of those things, but it’s a total shitshow.

For me the outcome is that while I will still enjoy my Tesla, I will no longer recommend the brand to friends. There are other EV manufacturers out there. And while I have not deleted my Twitter account yet, I have deleted the Twitter app on my phone, requested my Twitter data (in preparation for deleting the account), and created a Mastodon account (@mweston@mindly.social).

Speaking of Mastodon, if you are interested in it, this article seems to offer a good summary. Your biggest hurdle is to pick a server. I opted for one based in the United States, since many foreign servers state that users must follow the laws of where the server operates, and I don’t feel comfortable promising to follow laws of another country without knowing what they are. I also wanted a server that was for general content rather than being specialized (e.g., technology), with a very high uptime history, with a middle of the pack number of users, and that was running a recent version of the Mastodon software. You of course may have different criteria. It is apparently possible to change servers or have accounts on multiple servers, and perhaps the most important point is that whatever server you choose, you will be able to follow (and be followed by) users on all other Mastodon servers. So don’t sweat the decision too much.

Podcasts

These are the podcasts I listen to, at least occasionally. Within each category they are roughly ranked. Since many people have more spare time during the pandemic, it seemed like a good time to write this.

In case anyone cares, I almost always listen using an app called Podcast Addict on my phone. It lets you download episodes to listen where reception might be spotty, keep a playlist of episodes you want to hear in the order you want to hear them, and have fine-grained control over the playback speed (I generally listen between 1.2 and 1.5 times normal speed). I used to listen primarily while driving, when I drove enough for that to make sense. Since retiring, and even more so during the pandemic, I listen mostly when running, using bone conducting headphones so that I can still hear my surroundings.

[Originally published on 4/26/2020, and updated on 5/14/2020]

Running:

• Trail Runner Nation: The two hosts don’t take themselves too seriously, but still get real often enough to make it compelling. They also generally have good guests.
• Running Stupid: This podcast is published pretty irregularly, and is often more stream of consciousness than planned, but I’m happy to say that the host is a friend.
• Ultrarunner Podcast: The host has some obsessions and opinions that he has a hard time imagining anyone disagreeing with, but the range of guests is quite good.
• Endurance Planet: I started listening to this before the current hosts took over in 2011, and before I found the other options above. Still, though, there are good nuggets often enough to keep me listening to most episodes.
• For the Long Run: I wasn’t going to mention this one since I rarely listen to it, but since the host’s coach is David Roche, I do listen when he’s the guest. He (Roche) might be the most awesomely positive person I know of. Just today (4/26/2020) I was listening to him when I took a fall on a sidewalk, and right after that happened, Roche talked about saying “yes, thank you” when something bad happens.

Politics:

• Left, Right, and Center: A good weekly political show from KCRW with panelists representing the various parts of the political spectrum in a way that often lets you see the other side in a way that doesn’t make you crazy.
• LRC Presents: All the President’s Lawyers: This is hosted by the host of Left, Right, and Center, and co-hosted by a lawyer who was previously a federal prosecutor. It’s both entertaining and fairly educational.
• What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law: This Radiotopia podcast was created by Roman Mars, the host of 99% Invisible (see the “Other” category), with his neighbor, a constitutional law professor, to talk about constitutional law through the lens of the Trump presidency.
• Trump, Inc.: A podcast about the Trump family businesses, from WNYC and ProPublica.
• The New Yorker: Politics and More: Just what it sounds like.
• This Day in Esoteric Political History: This is a promising new podcast from Radiotopia.

Movies:

• Filmspotting: One of the if not the first podcast I started to listen to back when podcasts first came to the iPod in 2005. Filmspotting was called Cinecast back then, and had only been around for about 9 of their now 774 episodes. They review current movies, though definitely not all of them and with a focus on ones expected to be good. They also look back at older movies, and almost all episodes have a top five list, in the spirit of High Fidelity (which was set in Chicago, where this podcast is based).
• The Next Picture Show: This is a spin-off of Filmspotting, and each pair of episodes compares and contrasts a current movie with an older film, such as Marriage Story with Kramer vs. Kramer. There are frequently spoilers, so don’t listen if you haven’t seen both movies and think you might want to someday.
• The Treatment: This KCRW podcast almost always interviews people involved in a current movie or television show. Elvis Mitchell is the host, and often finds connections that the guests had never considered before.
• Film Reviews: This KCRW podcast has short reviews of current movies.
• Unspooled: The hosts review the AFI top 100 movies of all time. Sometimes one or both of them will not have seen the movie before, but they often have interesting guests who were involved in making the movie or have an interesting perspective on it.
• Movie Crush: The host has guests (celebrities, to one degree or another) talk about their favorite movie in depth.

Money:

• Planet Money: I first became aware of this podcast because of a 2008 episode of This American Life (see the “Other” category) called The Giant Pool of Money, about the financial crisis. The people who did that particular episode went on to create this podcast.
• The Indicator from Planet Money: This is a spin-off from the main Planet Money podcast, runs every weekday, and is a short (under 10 minutes) look at some current financial story.

Growth:

• The Happiness Lab: This is a Pushkin podcast (like four podcasts in the “Other” category), from a Yale professor who created a class about how to be happier. She uses actual science to point out ways that our brain often makes choices that make us less happy. She did one season, came back with many extra episodes to help people get through the pandemic, and season two has started.
• One Extraordinary Marriage: I was looking for a podcast about improving marriages, and this is the best one I’ve found so far. The hosts are far more religious than I am, and it emphasizes sex a bit more than I would have chosen, but there are almost always good nuggets in every episode.
• Unlocking Us: This is a new podcast from Brené Brown, which I heard about when she was on 60 Minutes recently. It’s not up to the level of her TED talk or her recent Netflix special (watch those if you haven’t already), but it’s still worth listening to.
• Crooked Butterfly: This is done by a former special forces military guy, and is also tangentially about running. I originally heard him interviewed on Trail Runner Nation, and find his philosophy interesting, if a bit absolute/extreme, at times.

Beer:

• The Beerists: This podcast seems good, though I’ve only listed to a couple of episodes so far.
• Craft Beer Radio: This was a great podcast, but hasn’t published any new episodes since July 2019. I hope it returns someday.
• Beer Guys Radio: This podcast is merely okay, but there aren’t many choices out there if you are not in the industry and don’t homebrew.

Other:

• 99% Invisible: My wife turned me onto this Radiotopia podcast to listen to a couple of basketball-related episodes, about the introduction of the shot clock and the 3-point shot. But it’s so much more than that.
• Against the Rules: This podcast by Michael Lewis (author of many excellent books including Moneyball and The Big Short) is from Pushkin. Season 2 recently started.
• This American Life: If you know podcasts, or even public radio, you probably know this one already. I might have put it at the top of the “Other” list, but I wanted to give the first two more visibility.
• Revisionist History: This podcast from Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers, The Tipping Point, etc.) is usually excellent. It’s part of the Pushkin family of podcasts.
• Cautionary Tales: This is another Pushkin podcast, and is about things that went wrong. The host is Tim Harford, who is a frequent guest on other podcasts I listen to. Some parts are done as audio reenactments.
• Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me: This should probably be higher, since my wife loves it. But for that reason I’ve mostly not listened to it so we have something to share for road trips. But now that we’ve moved to Hawaii there won’t be many of those, especially during the pandemic.
• KQED Forum: I used to listen to more episodes of this, from the primary Bay Area public radio station, but still listen on occasion when the subject is one I want to learn more about from people I trust. The regular host, Michael Krasny, is a very good interviewer.
• Twenty Thousand Hertz: This is a podcast about sounds, like the Wilhelm scream, which you should learn about if you haven’t already.
• Solvable: At first I was really a fan of this Pushkin/Rockefeller Foundation podcast, about how to solve problems that seem unsolvable, like homelessness. But for whatever reason I haven’t listened to it recently. If I do, it could easily rise on this list.

One-on-one Politics

My politics align better with Dennis Kucinich than with any of the other presidential candidates (now mostly former candidates), and so even though I knew he had no chance of becoming President, I donated to his campaign. That means that I am on his e-mail list, and last week I got an e-mail saying that he would be at a picnic in Menlo Park (which is relatively nearby, for anyone reading this who doesn’t know where I am or the area).

Last October I went to a straw poll in San Mateo, but arrived just after Kucinich spoke, so I decided to check out this picnic. When I arrived I was surprised that his name was not more prominently listed on the list of reserved picnic areas (he was a footnote to the name of the person who had reserved the spot), and arriving at that area I was surprised to not see a typical looking group of liberal Democrats. Instead I saw a group of predominantly Middle Eastern people, but I spotted Dennis and his wife Elizabeth, so I knew I was in the right place.

It turns out that this was a picnic put on by a local Ramallah club (I’m not sure if it was the San Francisco or San Jose chapter, or what). They say that they advocate a more balanced approach to peace in the Middle East than the typical U.S. view, and I learned that Kucinich had spoken at their national convention in Detroit. I had expected a much more formal fund raiser, and what I got instead was a casual Sunday picnic. [Note: The e-mail invitation I got indicated a suggested donation, but no one mentioned that at the event. I ended up just asking Dennis who I should give the money to, and we had to scramble for a piece of paper so that we could record the donation for regulatory reasons. Which seemed refreshingly old-fashioned.]

In the course of the hour or so I was there, I figure I spent a total of about five minutes talking directly with Dennis. At one point I mentioned that I really admired his courage to be against the death penalty, and he asked me why I was against it. In my reply I forgot the important point that it’s hard to undo an execution if you determine that the person is innocent, but my line of “what part of ‘thou shalt not kill’ didn’t you understand?” seemed to be new to him. Shortly before I left, I also asked him if he had any idea if Al Gore’s zero carbon electricity proposal could even make it to the point of being discussed. Dennis didn’t have much encouragement except to point out that if we could save everything currently going into Iraq, that could make a big difference in paying for such a program.

I came away with a couple of things. First, of course, I got a greater sense of Dennis Kucinich the person, beyond the leprechaun jokes on The Daily Show. But second, and much more significant, I realized that I’m entitled to meet my representatives in government, and that making the effort to do so would have a much greater impact than sending the occassional e-mail that some intern answers with a form letter. I intend to make at least an attempt to meet Anna Eshoo (my U.S. Congressperson) this year.

Lastly I’ll pass on a petition request that I got from Dennis. While his drive to get impeachment hearings seems like a very long shot for the short time between now and the end of the current presidential term, I learned that impeachment can be done even after someone leaves office, so it’s still worth sending the message that many of us feel that this administration is guilty of impeachable offenses. The petition is reachable from the home page of Dennis’s web site. The deadline iswas tomorrowyesterday evening (July 30, 2008).

I forgot to include this when I first posted this, but I took one cameraphone picture:

Dennis Kucinich

Taxi to the Dark Side

[Warning: Conservatives who believe that the Iraq war is going well should probably not read this review.]

There have been quite a few documentaries about the ongoing “war on terror,” and I’ve seen many of them. But Taxi to the Dark Side made me more angry than any of the others. I came out thinking that impeachment would be way too kind, and that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld should be tried and (probably) convicted of war crimes.

The subject matter is the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the United States since 9/11, starting with a specific case of an innocent man who was tortured to death, and showing how this is indicative of a pattern driven from the upper reaches of the command chain, and not just a few bad apples on the night shift.

I should definitely warn anyone considering seeing this film that it includes some very disturbing images, but the subject matter is too important to ignore. The soul of our country is at stake. I’ll give it out of .

I saw this on 1/13/2008 at the Camera Cinema Club, where we heard a pre-recorded interview with the director, who also directed Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. I wrote down a few notes:

• There is a grand manipulation of the public going on, through fear
• This shows how useless torture is, unless your goal is to hear what you want to hear, even if it is not true
• The torture also drives al Queda’s thirst for revenge
• No trials have occurred
• The director’s father, who was an interrogator after World War II, says this has got to stop
• We need to show those in power how angry we are
• Even the Democrats are complicit; for example, Nancy Pelosi know about this and did not act

We also heard a little more background on the director’s father. He interrogated kamikazees, and unlike present-day interrogators, he knew their culture and their language. The whole process took a year or more, but it was effective.

The film is nominated for an Oscar®, and the nomination is very much deserved.

What Really Matters

The central issue of the 2004 Presidential election was terrorism and the Iraq war. The first debate of the 2008 election (which I missed – why were there no repeat broadcasts?) also highlighted this topic. But is this what really matters most? Is this what should be getting the money, the manpower, and the attention?

In my opinion, no. The following are what I would choose as the top five issues facing the country and the world today, in roughly descending order of importance:

1. Global climate change, a.k.a., global warming: This seems like the one that is most likely to make a big difference, up to and including death, to billions of people. If sea levels rise much, big sections of land that people live on will have to be abandoned, and in many cases these are people without the means to start over or even evacuate. In places like Africa there could be devastating and deadly droughts. This could change everything, and probably will. Solving it would also have the side benefit of solving the problem of more demand for oil than the supply can support.
2. Intolerance: The biggest form of this seems to be religious intolerance: Sunnis and Shias, Catholics and Protestants, Israelis and Palestinians (at least partly religious), religious people and atheists, and so on. Non-religious intolerance includes things like the divisions between gays and straights, Democrats and Republicans, one race and another race, pro-choice and pro-life, and more. When has a war not had intolerance at its core?
3. Violence and fear: The media encourages us to be fearful, but also to think of violence as a solution (or even the solution) to problems. War and the death penalty is killing done by the government in our names, so it must be okay. Is it?
4. Politics: Do we have to accept that politicians become corrupt and/or cynical, are beholden to big corporate donors, work harder to ensure their own reelection than they do for their constituents, win elections through mass marketing rather than on the issues, and get elected though voting systems that are unreliable and unauditable? I sure hope not. If so, then it’s much harder to fix the other problems on this list.
5. Education: The current system doesn’t work very well. Most students don’t work very hard, and their teachers are underpaid, overworked, and the ones who have the ambition to improve things are far too often stuck in an inflexible system. I don’t have a clue what to do about this, but if we keep turning out graduates who have a hard time operating a cash register or understanding the different sides of election issues, we’re in deep trouble.

After that would probably be pandemics (e.g., bird flu and AIDS), and health care availability and costs.

9/11 sucked, but we (the United States) have responded to it so poorly that the cure has become much worse than the disease. And on top of that, the cost and the attention given to it (and especially the Iraq fiasco) makes it impossible to tackle what really matters.

Update: There is a transcript of the Democratic debate here (New York Times).