Good morning. Hello. How are you? #494
Apple, surprise surprise, the new Chapel Hill speed trap, trying to find a specific Neubauten song.
Good morning! Hello! How are you this Tuesday morning, my least favorite day of the week? My entire week is geared toward making it through Tuesday, even though, objectively speaking, there is nothing wrong with Tuesday and it is just another day. I’m listening to Einsturzende Neubauten’s album Drawings of Patient OT, because I have an unidentified Neubauten song running through my head. It is a song that chants “Deoxyribonucleic acid” over and over again. It would have come out prior to Haus Der Leuge. But I think I might be imagining it and it is freaking me out. This song runs through my head all the time, but the world is telling me it doesn’t exist? Not good. But I will persist in my search. What other band could it be?
Set up my new phone yesterday. It was my night to watch Jane so I couldn’t play my new video game and I needed that consumer dopamine fix. But, man. God, what an underwhelming upgrade of a phone. All the reviewers were like “if you have a twelve, don’t bother with the thirteen, you don’t need it,” but of course they got me with the camera and like a sucker I bought it anyway, rationalizing that, you know, I am an executive at two different mobile technology companies so I should, you know, be up to speed on these things. They also said the battery life was way better, but that was not my experience yesterday, but I suppose it was spending a lot of time doing network stuff.
But the most important thing was that it copied all my photos over from my old phone, somehow. I asked it to restore from an iCloud backup, and I don’t keep my photos in iCloud, but there they all were anyway. I like getting a new phone and having no photos on it. I like the freshness of it. And Apple makes it impossible to easily delete all the photos, so I had to walk around for fifteen minutes with my finger in a very specific place on the screen to hold down an infinite scroll across six thousand photos thank you Apple for that awesome, user-friendly interface so cool.
The camera is nice, though:
Speaking of Apple: Apple has, and color me shocked, decided to be dicks and not allow Fortnite back into the App Store until the “court’s judgement becomes final and unappealable.” Note that Apple did not say that until Epic stops appealing, they could keep that appeals process alive themselves then use that as an excuse. It is worth noting that Apple said repeatedly in a court room, under oath, that it would not do this. There my have been some legalistic wiggle room, but the judge, the news media, everyone understood Apple’s repeated promises to mean that they would not do exactly what they’re doing right now. They lied, in short. Super cool. I am willing to bet a shiny dollar that if, in the courtroom, Apple said “once you make your decision, unless you explicitly instruct us otherwise, we’re going to keep the app out of the app store,” the Judge would have told them “LOL Nope.” Apple’s having a super fun time cherry-picking quotes out of Rogers’ decision and pretending that they won unconditionally. They did not.
And now we’re in this super weird period where Apple is just sitting around, thinking about how to implement the Judge’s order, a thing they really, really, do not want to do, a thing that they are being forced to do, while pretending that they won unconditionally. Essentially, the Judge told them that they need to let people, you know, use freedom of speech in their apps and tell users that there may be other ways to pay for a download. The judge did not say that Apple couldn’t collect their 30% on those downloads anyway. That is, Apple could theoretically say “okay, you can say “buy tokens directly from us at mycoolgame.com” and still insist on taking their 30% cut when you buy the tokens at mycoolgame.com. And, somehow, collect.
There are problems with this, though: first, it would be some hugely complex undertaking, somehow re-architecting the app store to detect purchases outside of their ecosystem. This would almost certainly involve some sort of tracking technology, i.e. the exact type Apple is so piously claiming to be against. Or they could rely on honesty. It would probably have to be some combination of the two, a la their privacy initiative, ATT, and, LOL, that’s going just great. It is just going to suck. And, not that Apple cares about this anymore, they are going to look like giant, invasive, hypocritical, anti-user dicks when they implement it.
None of that, on its own, would stop Apple. But there is another set of problems for them, which is that they went on and on and on in court about exactly this, about how hard it would be, about how much it would suck for Apple to build, for game developers to implement, and how much it would suck for users. And, even though Apple was probably just saying this to, you know, whine about bedtime, it turns out they were also right! So, now, if they suddenly say “oh LOL it’s actually totally cool we can do this!” They’ll look like they were lying. Of course, they can also be dicks, make it all kind of shitty and blame the courts, but I suspect Apple’s innate, obsessive sense of competition would, hopefully, kill off that idea, or at least I hope there are still a couple people there that, you know, care about the user experience.
The obvious solution is to just accept it and let people link out and buy anywhere — since people already can buy anywhere, and Apple doesn’t take a cut. It seems manifestly absurd that the addition of some text to the app suddenly means Apple should collect on a bunch of purchases they’re currently not collecting. It seems patently against the spirit of the decision. BUT, who knows. Every day that Apple doesn’t just come out and do the right thing and say “yeah okay, go ahead and put your text in the app, we cool,” (the deadline isn’t till December? I think? Maybe November. I’m too lazy to go look it up) is another day that you strongly suspect Apple is plotting some way to be awful about this.
We’ll see!
Speaking of dicks, let’s add the Chapel Hill Police to the list! Now, I don’t know how speed limits get set, or get changed, on US Highways within County and City limits. I don’t know how the absurd, ridiculous change of speed from 45 mph to 35np on a four lane, divided highway with few turnoffs happened, but somehow, it happened. I would bet my shiny dollar (which I will totally still have after my Apple bet) that if you polled all parties involved — the residents, the property owners along the road, the commuters — about whether they thought it was reasonable or necessary to drop the speed limit on that highway from 45 to 35, well over 90% of the affected people would say “yeah, no, maybe make it 60.” Of course, it shouldn’t be sixty, but it sure as shit shouldn’t be 35.
It’s such a peculiar facet of American democracy that we have no control over the things that effect us. Like no one even knows how to vote someone out of their job for this decision, yet everyone effected by it, and everyone in that particular region, almost certainly would vote someone out for it, because it was dumb. And it’s not even, really, like “well Americans are politically disengaged.” The last election had a 72% turnout in that county. And, I mean, I suppose the California alternative of direct democracy seems pretty awful as well. I have no solution here, I just fantacize about bursting into some bureaucratic meeting and offering an impassioned speech and shutting the whole thing down. Of course, that’s what wingnuts are doing everywhere in the country right now and that is going just great. So maybe not.
And yet somehow the speed limit magically changed and, worse, the Chapel Hill Police have decided they’re going to pull everyone over for the new speed limit. Of course, if you’re keen, a goer, you can subscribe now! to the CHP’s Facebook page to learn about when these “speed enforcement actions” are happening, just like it’s a fucking Supreme drop or something. Or, rather, so that if you’re a Chapel Hill Resident, you might not be disrupted by their activities, which are clearly targeted on Chatham County residents, since they only enforce in one direction, coming into Chapel Hill from Chatham.
And no, I did not get a ticket. I don’t go anywhere, remember? I’m just annoyed that, like, the public has had zero say in any of this. I mean, you do have to hand it to the CHP, though, they are definitely sort of rounding up some centrists and republicans into the “defund the police,” movement. Though I suppose this whole thing does raise a good point, that police departments will totally try and raise money through more extortionate means when they are defunded. I mean, I suppose? I don’t even know where the fines go, do they go to the City? The Police Dept? I mean I don’t live in this city, I don’t really know.
Anyway, clearly the CHP were, like, missing being dicks after the pandemic year, when no one is driving and now they’re like “hot police summer, baby!”
Grrr.
OK I think we’re about done today. I am running late, gotta water the plants. I listened to a bunch of pre-Haus Der Leuge Neubauten while writing this and did not find that DNA song, which is not, confusingly, “ZNS,” or “DNS-Wasserturm.”
Let’s do a mix. Ladies mix! Went kinda obscure on this one, mostly new, been listening to a lot of new woman artists. I’ve loved Haley Bonar and Julian Baker for a while, but most of these are new to me, except Olivia Rodrigo, of course. And I knew that one Natalie Imbruglia song, but not this one, a sample of which features prominently on the new Saint Etienne. I learned about Miranda Lee Richards while watching the Dig! documentary a while back, Raquel Norland I learned about from Youtube. Lots of good stuff. Enjoy!
Till we meet again.