Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1134
Gardening, 3 Body Problem, Unwound at Cat's Cradle, More Eras, Deep dive on DOJ v Apple. “I’m doing a different thing I got something else going on, man.”
Good morning! Hello there, happy monday, how are you, etc. etc. Sunny and chilly day here. Looking good. Lotta kids in shorts even though it is 32 degrees out. This amazes me, even though I barely wore a jacket in Alaska in the winter. Nowadays I am a cold old person and I don’t understand all these kids in shorts. It is weird.
Jane has a wound on her abdomen from ill-advisedly going down a slide head first, and her shirt moving and her side getting chafed. She was scared to put antibiotic ointment on. Eventually she summoned her courage and did it herself and put a nice purple bandaid over half the wound. Better than nothing. I am impressed she overcame her fear without me summoning Morning Mommy.
I am listening to a new vinyl pressing of The Cure’s Paris live LP. Very goth opening: Shake Dog Shake, The Figurehead and Play for Today (too lazy to put in all those quote marks sorry). Man remember that Wish tour show at the Worcester Centrum where they played Figurehead and M? That was awesome. I’ve seen The Figurehead and M live twice now. U Jelly?
Speaking of live shows I did manage to go see Unwound this weekend and America’s greatest venue, Cat’s Cradle. They were good. I lasted about half the set. But I mean come on I barely managed to go at all. And, you know, Math Rock. I mean, it’s weird. I love some Unwound albums – the ones that are all repetitive and droney — and don’t love some others — the more punk ones. These distinctions seemed arbitrary at the shows, everything sounded the same. They did do this cool thing where they played a recording of an automated, robotic-sounding weather forecast, customized for Chapel Hill on that specific day. One of those 80’s sounding ones. Didn’t know we still had those.
And the people-watching was top notch.
Also got my Walmart/Recycling errands done, that was all very exciting. This Walmart remodeling is getting more and more chaotic. They moved the beer. And the toilet paper. And they are changing things in individual rows of the grocery area which is super stressful because I pride myself on knowing where everything is in a grocery store and not having to stare blankly at the aisle shelves. This is gonna take some adjusting.
But! When I was perusing the middling vinyl section, I met a woman who works for the vinyl distributor! And they just took over the Walmart account! And she says it’s gonna get a lot better! She also says the vinyl section in Siler City is super extensive, and no one buys any of it, so I might have to go out there. We talked about the Walmart limited edition colored vinyl pressings, and how some of them have decent resale value on Discogs because city hipsters don’t go to Walmart. It was great, she was very nice. We agreed we’d run into each other in the vinyl section again in the future.
Then when I was back in my truck, sitting in the lot, checking my email, two Walmart employees walked by. One was a hip hop dude and one was a Heavy Metal Parking Lot dude (literally). I didn’t hear this part but it seemed very clear to me that Hip Hop dude had just offered Heavy Metal Parking Lot dude some drugs. And in response he said:
“I’m doing a different thing I got something else going on, man.”
A+ professional turning down, there. That dude knows how to de-escalate and not offend. He should be in management. I am going to use that phrase from here on out.
The recycling center would not take my batteries. Their “bin was full.” Apparently getting a second bin was not an option. And they told me I could put my dead smoke detector in the regular garbage? This seems.. incorrect.
And then because Jane was at school and Emma was in Raleigh getting her hair done, I had lunch alone so I went to the burger shop and got a burger, the first beef I’ve eaten in maybe a year and… it was yummy but god my face smelled gross afterward.
But of course the main thing this weekend was gardening, so much gardening. Planted the second rows of my succession planting in the greenhouse: Lettuce, carrots, beets, onions, celery, spinach, etc.
And then I repaired the giant, long Birdie’s Bed. The one I assembled incorrectly like three years ago, forgot to put the inner supports in so that it didn’t bulge out, and so it bulged out. The whole time it was in the hold hoop house and home, it was bulging out. So I ordered some replacement inner support brackets, power washed the inside of the thing, and installed the support brackets. Then I placed the thing below a window on the house, it fit perfectl. Then I spent forever leveling the thing, because there is a slope there. Then I used up the rest of my logs in the bottom of the bed (hugelkultur!), and then a ton of leaves I had hoovered up, and then some sand I had in a trash can from the contractors last year, and then a bunch of worm castings, then mixed the sand and leaves so they would eventually decompose into some good dirt. Then I filled it with about ten wheelbarrow loads of dirt (this thing is big), and that sucked. And with each load of dirty I added vermiculite, perlite, worm castings and Neptune’s Harvewst Crab and Lobster shell to make the stuff more like container mix and not, like, super thick, claylike dirt. And then I added six bags of new quality organic raised bed mix.
It was exhausting. It took three hours.
And when I was done my fucking Apple Watch told me I got eleven minutes of exercise and fuck that watch right in the year. I spent more then 30 minutes just on the shoveling in, never mind the shoveling out and moving the stuff.
So then I planted some tulip bulbs there even though it is totally the wrong time of year, but these things have been sitting in my garage since last fell when I bought them in an overly optimistic period where I thought I would have planters built last year. LOL. But they were sprouting in the bag already and were not gonna make it to fall. Fingers crossed. For good measure I then sprinkled NC native pollinator wildflower seed mix over the whole bed as well. Welcome, bees and Monarchs.
That pretty much took up my Saturday, afternoon. Morning was spent with Jane. We went to Bojangles and then built this amazing rainbow bridge park diorama out of legos and blocks. It ruled.
Sunday morning Jane and I watched some of the Eras tour. She made me skip Evermore and Folklore because they are “boring.” But she liked the rest. We got about an hour in. We also played an hour of bouncey ball. And we cleaned up. Quality kid time my daughter is awesome.
I finished my viewing of the Eras tour movie this weekend too. It was fine. I got into the Midnights section a lot weirdly. But my favorite part, just like the Reputation movie, was the credits. All the video of the attendees making hearts and showing their outfits. And the video of the bloopers. And the video of Taylor doing the rain show. My god. I wish they’d release an entire rain show I bet it was majestic.
Sunday day I filled a ditch. Ten or so more loads of dirt, though this time I only had to lad it into the wheelbarrow, to get it out I just dumped it in the ditch. This trench has been annoying me for about six months now. It is the trench that runs the power and data to the greenhouse from the main house. Except when the crew dug the trench, they drove a spade into one of my drainage lines. So I had to get the stuff to repair that (thank you, Ricardo). And I had to get all the water out of the trench because it rained Friday. And I had to power wash the drain pipe so the Zip Tape would stick to it. So after it dried I cut out the damaged part, stuck a repair coupler on there and wrapped the whole thing up in the greatest material known to man, Zip Tape. That stuff rules. Duct tape wishes it was as awesome as Zip Tape.
Oh and then I had to remove all the gravel that had fallen into the trench. Because I needed that gravel for the surface. Shovels and rakes and pitchforks failed at this job, so I got down and removed all the gravel by hand. No biggie. Took an hour.
And then I filled that ditch.
And then I covered the entire area in a new layer of gravel and mulch.
Oh I also dug out one of the root balls of the old ugly bushes that were in this area. Had to use a friggin sawzall to get that out.
And then I planted the other rose and two of my grape trees into the ground — stuff transplanted from the other house.
I was so sore after all of this. Just in major pain. Exhausting day. And then during dinner the neighbors came by and asked if Jane could scooter with them so we went out after dinner and watched them scooter for a while then the neighbors invited us over and I was just too tired I needed to go lay down but Emma and Jane went for like an hour and I just laid in a chair and waited for all my pain drugs to kick in.
When Jane got back she went straight to bed an hour early. Easiest bedtime ever.
We have now watched three episodes of Three Body Problem and I like it fine, it is not the book, it’s not as good as the book. They’ve actually done a decent job maintaining the Chineseness of the books, even while internationalizing the cast. The chief complaint I have is that it moves too fast. The books are a series of unfolding mysteries. As is the show, but the show gives you the answers to the mysteries too quickly. Maybe it would work if it was airing weekly, so viewers would have at least a week to ponder the mysteries. But Netflix dumped them all at once. And it just feels… too quick? I mean, so far only one mystery has been revealed, there are many more to come.
Some scenes and sections are almost exactly like the Chinese adaptation. Others are wildly different. Some characters are made up completely. Others are brought to different times and places. But I realized that is kind of necessary because (no spoilers) the different books focus on different characters at different times and so the whole thing would be even more non linear if they tried to replicate that structure. But I don’t know. This now means a bunch of characters have to be given “something to do” while they were off stage in the books. Don’t love that.
I do find it engaging, though. Not as satisfying as the Chinese adaptation, though obviously far more technically accomplished. And Emma, who has not read the books, enjoys it. So we will continue on.
Read a bunch of the Apple DOJ suit and… honestly? It is very badly written. It is filled with factual errors. Not, like, differences of opinion, but just things that are outright incorrect. It is also lacking a central thesis. It has five major complaints, and they are not all related. It’s just a muddled mess.
It does make some good points and lay bare some absurdities. It is absurd an app maker can’t make an SMS app for iPhone. It is completely absurd that they very successfully and easily make alternative app stores for companies and universities, all while claiming that they can’t maker alternative app stores.
It very much feels like Apple got an advance draft of this suit. This would not surprise me. Several of the complaints are theoretically going to be moot soon, because Apple has announced — not launched, mind, just announced — fixes for. Things like “no browsers that don’t use Webkit” and “No interoperability between iMessage and Android.” Those are both crap rules and Apple has always known it and I am convinced the only reason they’re fixing either is cuz they knew this suit was coming.
I should also say — and I think a ton of people miss this point — is that complaints like this do not have to explain to us, the layperson, how something is a crime. They just have to say: this thing they did is a crime. The crime we are talking about is X. They did Y in advancement of this crime. They do not have to explain what crime X is, what the law says, why they think these things advance that cause. This complaint is not the evidence, and the complaint is not a primer on the law. So any lay person, even someone like me who obsessively follows anti-trust law, is inherently likely to miss something.
For example a ton of people say “they only have a 50% market share how is that a monopoly that is dumb!” But it is well established in American antitrust law that you do not need 80% of the market to be anticompetitive. But this complaint does not bother to explain that.
I’ve also seen people complain that they had to make a different market — the “premium” smartphone market — to “get the marketshare up.” My reading does not support this. They do argue that the premium smartphone market is a market Apple operates in and does antitrusty things, but they also argue Apple is antitrusty in the normal smartphone market. And heck, smartphone is already a subset of cellphone, so whatever.
I think the absolute greatest failure of the suit, though, is that it took nothing from the decision in the Epic v Apple case. That is insane. Apple paints Epic v Apple as a victory, and they are maybe sort of correct, on balance, but it was barely a victory. Moreover, the judge gave the DOJ everything they need! A huge thing in antitrust is relevant markets, and Epic and Apple both put forth their ideal relevant market. The judge tossed all that out and said that the relevant market was the paid mobile games market. He then said Apple wasn’t antitrusty in that market from a federal point of view, but he said they were from a California point of view.
And they were barely not antitrusty from a Federal point of view. The arguments were certainly a lot stronger than anything the DOJ (and assorted states attorneys general, though not, notably, North Carolina, with our very good Democratic AG Josh Stein, now running for governor) put forth. The anti steering shit is bad. The shit Apple is pretending to do in response to the Epic v Apple decision is half-assed, petulant, and, it could certainly be argued, further evidence of anticompetitive behavior. Their petulant, grudging response to the European Digital Markets Act is further evidence: they aren’t doing that in the US, because monopoly, and even when forced, they do it badly and anticompetitively.
The strongest case the DOJ had is just sitting there and they ignored it.
What’s left is a hodge podge. To be sure, there are plenty of parts of the complaint gumbo that I agree with. But there is also plenty of filler.
If a judge finds for the DOJ in this suit, it’s gonna because the judge crafted the case out of a mixed bag of 10th grade writing. Stranger things have happened, I wouldn’t be shocked, but it won’t be because of any brilliance on the part of the plantiffs.
All right you have a lovely day ta.
Today’s Media of the Day is this live version of “Apart” by the Cure because I just listened to it and it rules. Best song on Wish. Okay maybe second best.
Until tomorrow.