in the news

Organ donors, motorcycles, and statistics

Posted 2022/11/28

Over 9 days — the mean duration of a motorcycle rally — the net effect of motorcycle rallies resulted in 14% more organ donors and 19% more transplant recipients per day during rally dates versus non-rally dates (IRR 1.14, 95% CI 1.01-1.30, P=0.04).

“During motorcycle rally weeks in distant regions not containing motorcycle rallies, there was no increase in the number of organ donations or transplants, suggesting that our observed main effect was associated with the rallies rather than other temporal factors such as vacation travel,” the authors wrote.

WaPo: “Texas’s new secessionist platform exposes a big GOP scam”

Posted 2022/06/20

In an opinion today from Greg Sargent:

The new platform, which thousands of GOP activists in Texas agreed to at the state party convention over the weekend, is a veritable piñata bursting with far-right extremist fantasies. It states that Texas retains the right to secede from the United States and urges the Texas legislature to reaffirm this.

It describes homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice.” It flatly declares that no validation of transgender identity is legitimate. It dismisses all gun regulations as a violation of “God given rights,” and sharply rebukes Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) for pursuing a bipartisan gun-safety package that’s extraordinarily modest.

But the document might be most revealing in its treatment of voting and democracy. It declares President Biden was “not legitimately elected” in 2020. It says Biden’s win was tainted by voting in swing-state cities, furthering a GOP trend toward more explicitly declaring votes in urban centers illegitimate.

The Texas GOP is an embarrassment. The GOP everywhere is an embarrassment. None of this is “conservative” – certainly not in the traditional sense of intellectual conservatism in America. All of it is driven by the cult of personality surrounding the former president, and his populist whims. He was willing to upend the American republic without hesitation, to preserve his own power. All of it based on a big lie.

I spent seventeen years of my life working in politics, all of it in support of the Republican Party. In 2020, I had long since had enough and walked away. I still have a lot of friends who work in politics, and who still work for the GOP. I keep wondering when they, too, will have had enough. What is the line that the GOP will cross that will finally be too far for them? At this point, I cannot imagine where that line would be and, worse, what it says about my friends.

The Only Good Platform

Posted 2022/04/25

In light of today’s Musk/Twitter news this is a good time to remind you that if you really care about your online identity, then you need to own it. You have no control or ownership of the content you generate for Facebook or Twitter — all of it can be gone in an instant. My Tweets will only ever exist on Twitter. This website though, is mine. I own the domain and I control the content. If necessary, I can move to another web server (even one in another country!) if necessary. I have absolute control and no one can stop me from publishing my trash opinions here.

Musk now has that kind of control over his Tweets, and the freedom to continue shitposting as much as he, or the SEC, wants. I think Musk’s bloviations about “free speech” are nonsense, but I don’t think he’s going to do anything to make the platform necessarily worse. Twitter banned Trump, a move which I supported, but it didn’t really make the platform less toxic. Political reporters still breathlessly re-post his insane and incoherent press releases to their own Twitter accounts, so it’s like he never left. Should Musk un-ban him in the name of “free speech”, it just maintains the status quo and was probably inevitable whether he purchased Twitter or not. Not that this deal was about Trump, but it is the biggest question in the content moderation/free speech debate.

On the business side, it will be much easier for Twitter to figure out how to actually (finally?) make money as a private company and that will be a good thing for their long-term survival. I do think Musk will discover that running Twitter is going to be a lot harder than he has envisioned. Content moderation is hard, even when you are resistant to doing it.

Here at thomasjpr.com, I will continue to do whatever the hell I want. It’s the only good platform.

2020 Manifesto

Posted 2020/10/02

This November, I’m going to vote for Joe Biden. He won’t be the first Democrat I’ve ever voted for, but he’ll be the first I’ve voted for president. And I will vote for him proudly. Here is why.

“…no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys”

Posted 2020/01/13

Apple responds to AG Barr on phone unlocking: read the full statement here:

Earlier today Attorney General William Barr called on Apple to unlock the alleged phone of the Pensacola shooter — a man who murdered three people and injured eight others on a Naval base in Florida in December. Apple has responded by essentially saying: “no.”

“We reject the characterization that Apple has not provided substantive assistance in the Pensacola investigation,” the company said. “It was not until January 8th that we received a subpoena for information related to the second iPhone, which we responded to within hours,” Apple added countering Barr’s characterization of Apple being slow on its approach to the FBI’s needs. However, it ends the statement in no uncertain terms: “We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys.”

Apple’s position is the correct one. If you create a software backdoor or a weakness in encryption, it will inevitably be exploited by bad actors. How do we know this? Because even the NSA can’t keep its top secret tools and methods out of enemy hands.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella also got in on the debate:

“I do think backdoors are a terrible idea, that is not the way to go about this,” Nadella said. “We’ve always said we care about these two things: privacy and public safety. We need some legal and technical solution in our democracy to have both of those be priorities.”

RIP Paul Allen

Posted 2018/10/16

We lost Paul Allen yesterday. Growing up in the northwest, his influence loomed over the region, but in a good way, not in the possibly bad way of some contemporaries.

Paul Allen existed at the intersection of all of my interests. This probably isn’t much of a feat, because his interests were so many — overlap is unavoidable. It’s impossible for me to visit any of my bookmarked sites today without seeing a tribute to Allen.

As an example of his influence, I just think back to our last family trip to Seattle:

We attended a Seahawks game. Recall that in 1996, moving vans were quite literally packing up the team to move them to Los Angeles before Allen swooped in to keep them in Seattle.
We walked through the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington
We visited MoPOP, the Museum of Pop Culture, that Allen founded in 2000. Most of the exhibits are out of his own personal collection of pop culture artifacts. It’s a spectacular museum.

He was a presence in music and art, exploration, sports, technology, aerospace, science and science fiction. The list is endless.

What a tremendous life.

Subscription hell

Posted 2018/05/07

via TechCrunch:

I’m frustrated that the web’s promise of instant and free access to the world’s information appears to be dying. I’m frustrated that subscription usually means just putting formerly free content behind a paywall. I’m frustrated that the price for subscriptions seems wildly high compared to the ad dollars that the fees substitute for. And I’m frustrated that subscription pricing rarely seems to account for other subscriptions I have, even when content libraries are similar.

This piece is a mess, though I agree with a few of Danny’s points. While he does mention it, I think he loses sight of the fact that these services cost money to operate. This cannot be emphasized enough. There are only two ways to make money in content: ads and/or subscriptions. If you feel that ads are too gross, then you are left with the subscription model. Content costs money. In some cases, very serious money. Netflix could never (at least not in a timeframe that would satisfy investors) recoup their content costs using ads alone.

How do you run world-class newsrooms which are doing real investigative journalism, paid for by advertising alone? Prior to the rise of the web, publishers were able to use revenue from classified ads to fund those operations — subscriptions and commercial advertising were secondary revenue streams in many cases. Classified ads were small and highly profitable. Craigslist took that revenue away from the publishers, leaving them high and dry.

The rise of dedicated streaming services for video are forcing traditional broadcasters to launch their own streaming services compete for viewer eyeballs. Having solid back catalogs of content gives each of them a compelling reason to exist.

The biggest mistake made by publishers on the early web was giving their content away for free, setting the expectation that this would always be the case. Now that they desperately need that subscription revenue, consumers are starting to feel pinched.

This is all a matter of perception though. Subscriptions aren’t new, and people had plenty of them prior to the web. My parents had two daily newspaper subscriptions, 5-6 monthly magazines, and satellite TV service. In our home today, I pay for three news subscriptions, one music, and seven video services. I value the content and I am willing to pay for it, just like my parents did in the 1980s and 90s. If a service is not providing me enough value out of the $5-12 per month, then I will cancel it (and it’s a lot easier to cancel a streaming service than it is to cancel Comcast…)

This is the future, and it’s really not that different from our past.

Thanks for the memories, Chico’s

Posted 2018/01/25

Columbia Basin Herald::

The news that Chico’s Pizza Parlor was destroyed in a weekend fire hit many hard. The Moses Lake community and former residents showed their concern online with a flood of comments on the Herald’s website and Facebook page. People even kept talking on Facebook late into Saturday night, sharing memories and photos of the longtime business. I was right there with them because I loved Chico’s too. Starting the conversation was easy.

An entire region mourns the death (hopefully only temporary, but you know how these things usually turn out…) of an iconic pizza parlor.

I grew up there, and Chico’s was an institution. It’s unthinkable to my own children, but my hometown didn’t have a pizza restaurant. Our choices were: 1. Heat up a Tombstone or, 2. Make the 40 minute drive to Chico’s. Option 2 was always preferred.

It was one of the few places in the area where you could take a group of people for a meal and just relax. So many memories there. The arcade where we kids could play while the pizza baked. The ancient bench seats. The mountains of toppings.

Sausage and black olive was my thing.

Thanks, Chico’s.