Good morning! Hello! What is up? I slept in a bit this morning. Jane is at Grammy’s, thank god. She was rough yesterday, lotta fits. Though not on my morning shift or my hour in the evening before she went to Grammy’s. Or at Grammy’s. Just the entire rest of the day, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but my god, five hours or so of a screaming toddler is a lot. I think she basically over promised on this whole “when I turn four I’m going to start using the potty” thing, and now the chips are down and she still doesn’t want to do it, so she’s acting out. At any rate, the break is welcome. And she was good at Grammy’s, so thankfully she didn’t burn our backup.
So it looks like the dems might actually pull this off with a bill. I have been reading too much twitter lately, and people are ripshit about the stuff not in the bill. I want those things so badly, but I never really thought we were going to pull it off, and I remain amazed we are going to get anything done. A thing that drives me crazy is when a person of any progressive, liberal or even center-left ilk uses the term “the democrats” as a singular group that is bad in some way. Because we live in a country now where we have a death cult and we have everyone else, and everyone else is only really united by the fact that they are not in a death cult and would prefer the country and the world to not burn. When a group of millions whose only common interest is not dying manage to get anything done, it is amazing.
In any case, I ask that you go read this framework for this bill, and instead of focusing on the things that are not in it, look at what is in it and tell me that it’s not pretty awesome. The largest amount of money ever, from anyone in human history to address climate change. And this right before going into COP 26, where China is coming in saying “yeah, we’re just gonna do what we already said, nothing else new.” That alone is an impressive feat of leadership in an age where a lot of people are wondering if democracies can even cut it. And if it spurs China to do even more, well fucking good for the planet then.
Universal pre-K for all 3 and 4 year olds in the country. That’s insane. The first time in a century that we have expanded the number of years of free schooling in this country. I mean, that is nuts!
The child care credit is insane. Child care costs capped out at 7% of your income for every couple making less than $300k a year. That is huge.
In-home care for elderly Americans? Huge. Bernie was talking about this in the primaries and people thought it was pie in the sky ambitous. Now it’s almost done. As someone who has had to wrestle with obtaining in-home care for both of my parents, I know how hard this is, even with good insurance. This is so, so big.
Reducing premiums for people caught in the health insurance gap and have had to buy their premiums directly through the ACA marketplace by an average of six hundred dollars a month.
Closing the medicare coverage gap for 4 million people. This has been a problem for forty years.
And no, we didn’t get Vision expansion of medicare, but we got a hearing expansion!
Making the Child Tax Credit permanent. Don’t be confused, this is on top of the child care tax credit.
Keeping and expanding the solar credits. Making electric cars (and only union made ones! Sorry Tesla!) affordable for millions of Americans. Huge.
Coastal restoration, forest management, soil conservation, a Clean Energy Accelerastor focused on disadvantaged communities, massive aid to the domestic solar and wind industries.
The largest investment in affordable housing in history.
And more.
And on the revenue side, adding a minimum tax for large corporations is huge. You read every day about how many large companies don’t pay any tax at all. This ends that. That alone is a major accomplishment.
And a massive re-investment in the IRS and a focus on the richest tax evaders.
I mean, no, it is not a bill that does everything. But it does a lot and I am going to choose to be excited about it.
Maybe all the negativity is just garbage and those poor souls who were swallowing their pride and fluffing Joe Manchin and stroking Kristen Sinema’s ego are god damn heroes who have done more for the poor of America and have more backbone than every hard core leftist who is acting like this bill is nothing.
In other news, Facebook is changing their name to Meta, LOL. The first fun thing to note about this is that they didn’t, like, do some major clever study to decide their name, or if they did it sure was a weird coincidence that it turned out that the name the chose was already owned by Zuck’s charity. Anil Dash said this best:
Imagine working at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, trying to convince yourself that it’s a serious charity doing serious work and not just a whitewashing of Facebook but at every opportunity, Zuck makes it clear that no, you’re just there for him to pick over whenever he needs an opportunity to whitewash. To the point where he’s just going to take your name and property and give it to Facebook. Cool.
People are saying this is like Google renaming itself Alphabet, but I disagree. Google was very forthright about it’s reasons for naming itself Alphabet, and it was 100% a financial engineering situation. They wanted to report out revenue of some separate divisions, to potentially unlock the value of various parts of the company, to de-conglomeratize in an era where the stock market still (unreasonably, in my opinion, but nonetheless definitively) looks down on conglomerates. Alphabet did not rename itself and simultaneously say “and we are doing this renaming to symbolize our commitment to the technology of the letters AB and C.”
Then I got into a bit of a discussion yesterday with Rex who posited that perhaps this rebranding is more akin to Microsoft announcing the X-Box, and everyone saying that they couldn’t do it, that they weren’t cut out for gaming, that gaming was already a saturated market. I disagree for a few reasons. One, that was Oculus, Facebook was already doing that and they were doing okay. Microsoft did not rename itself the XBox Co while also providing, you know, server technologies to Fortune 500 companies.
The other huge difference with Microsoft is that Microsoft did not say “we’re renaming ourselves GAMECO.” Like the Metaverse is already a thing! Facebook is not especially a leader in it! They are one of many players. It is sheer hubris to just name yourself the thing that everyone is already building.
And that, I think, is the main problem with this. Someone — I can’t find the tweet now, but props to them — said it best: The Metaverse is not the next big thing, the next iPod or iPhone. The Metaverse — in the sense Zuck is pushing — is 3D TV. It is a technology no one wants, for which there is no killer app, being pushed on the public by a conglomeration of technology companies that don’t know what to do next. We already have TV and it’s awesome.
The other thing that kills me about this is the complete lack of acknowledgement that this is already happening. Now, look. I understand that the metaverse is, theoretically, supposed to be different than the alternate worlds of our world’s MMOs. Putting on some funky glasses and seeing my grammy sit at the table with me is different than farming Cobalt in No Man’s Sky or getting Married in Skyrim or something. Except it’s not different. They’re all the same. They are all on a spectrum, competing against one another, competing for our time and attention by presenting an alternate to cold, hard reality. Millions, if not billions of people spend time in these apps already. Why are they going to switch to your app?
But it’s even more problematic than that. Maybe there is an answer why everyone will switch apps, switch metaverses. But I’ll tell you what. That killer app, that reason for change, is not going to be driven by technology, it is going to be driven by creativity. You have to fucking think of it first, and nothing Zuck said yesterday even hinted he understood this.
Let’s assume for a moment that the metaverse — in some way distinct from all of the ARs we spend our time in already — is going to be a huge thing. It’s not, but lets just put that aside for a second. It’s going to be a huge thing because of creativity. It’s going to be a huge thing because someone is going to make an amazing, creative thing in it. I think we all know this is true. We can tell this because every leader in this race — Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, Warcraft, Eve Online, Skyrim, No Man’s Sky, whatever — is a creative endeavor. Yes, technology is involved, but ultimately, artists and their producers are at the heart of this. Zuck has no artists and producers, or at least not enough, not the ones he needs now.
If we’re looking at the XBox analogy again, today’s announcement is 100% evidence Zuck fundamentally misunderstands this. Like Facebook now, Microsoft was under the antitrust glare when they began the Xbox. The Xbox launched in 2001, United States v Microsoft was argues at the exact same time. Yet Microsoft faced no real antitrust backlash to taking their Direct-X technology and expanding the business into video games. Because they were smart about it in two ways Zuck is clearly not: one, they didn’t shout from the rooftops that games were the new future of the company, thus 100% precluding their ability to perform M&A in the sector. “Oh no, ignore our little gaming hobby, it’s no big deal.” Zuck just blew that option out of the water. There is no way he’ll ever be allowed to perform the M&A he has to perform to catch up to Epic, Blizzard, Tencent, Hello Games. God, I would think Zuck might actually win if he could buy Hello Games but LOL, nope, good luck now.
He can’t buy Unity. He can’t buy any tech. He wouldn’t be able to buy Oculus now. He has to build it all in-house. And even if he succeeds at this, at best he’ll have some cool tech, not a vibrant platform.
And that leads to the second way he won’t be able to pull off a Microsoft. He doesn’t even seem to grasp he needs creatives, and he just made it so he’ll never be able to be a Microsoft and buy a Bungie. He has Oculus, sure — whoops sorry, Meta. The Oculus name went away yesterday, my god that was dumb. But Oculus does not make the top-selling games on Oculus. Publishers do. He seems to know he’ll need publishers to make his metaverse a thing. Maybe? I don’t know I assume he does. But there was not a word about why this will be good for publishers, why they should choose Facebook over Unity or Unreal or Havoc or whatever.
And he just closed the door to Microsoft’s approach.
I kinda thought Tim Sweeney from Epic was talking out of his ass when he talked about the Metaverse, but after today I feel inclined to put my chips down on Epic, over Facebook in this battle. Epic games is only valued at $28 bil. Zuck could have bought ‘em without breaking a sweat if he was a better leader, if he hadn’t mired his company in an endless antitrust slog that will never go away.
Okay let’s do a mix. Hrm. Do I have a mix ready? Eh. Mostly. But today is New Music Friday, so we can round this out pretty easily. Here you go. Listened to that Underground Lovers album in its entirety yesterday, I love it so much. That band really just keeps going, but I will love Leaves Me Blind the most, forever. And I’m really obsessed with these BLACKSTARKIDS. One of you recommended them but I can’t remember who, but THANK YOU. They are so good.
Okay! Have a good weekend. Much gardening to do, over here, and a podcast to record. Thinking about stopping the podcast. Feels kind of redundant. But i will persevere today.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? #517
like you, i choose to be pragmatic about sociopolitical advances in that some are preferable to none.
also i thought i was relatively savvy but don't have a clue what a multiverse is or why i might want such a thing. phones are already the most annoying thing in the world (does anyone love when their friends decide to scroll facebook right in front of them—like, thanks for going ahead and telegraphing that you think this is a boring-ass conversation and are choosing to check out with, of all things, the dumbass facebook algorithm!). why would we encourage MORE of this stupid multitasking behavior?
KIDS! ON MY LAWN!