Good morning. Hello. How are you? #712
Turns out Ronald Reagan was not a super-good man. Twitter whistleblower. Garden infrastructure plotting.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? I am good! Boy people sure are butthurt about people getting some student loan relief, huh? Gawd. I am not normally one to go in for nostalgia for the past but before Reagan, American’s were just… cool with paying their taxes. They just paid them! Overwhelming support for… paying taxes and helping people and funding your government. And their taxes were way, way higher than ours. Just pay your taxes! Be a citizen! If you wanna get bent out of shape abotu the government wasting money, maybe don’t focus on the places where it concretely, directly helps poor people? Maybe that’s a bad look!
I don’t know where this bag came from but it is sitting in my entryway and it is really freaking me out. Who wants this on a bag:
We’ve moved on to Reagan in our history of conservatism books. Well, chronologically, we’re in the Ford administration. He’s just pardoned Nixon and people are pissed, and he did this half-assed semi-pardon of draft dodgers at the same time and everyone’s all like “equal protection under the law, huh? Run away from being forced to kill people and you don’t get pardoned, but be responsible for, oh, a million deaths or so… full pardon!” And actually it’s worse than that because Nixon was never at any risk of prosecution for the war. Or planning to firebomb the Brookings institution. Or plotting the assassination of a journalist. Or trying to frame a president for murder. Nah.
I will say, though, I am sorta sympathetic to Ford. His speech explaining it is really good. The country was being torn apart by the whole thing, and unlike now, there was this shred of hope that they could put the whole thing behind them and maybe go back to a period of national consensus, because asshats like Reagan hadn’t permanently torn us apart yet. Now, of course, we’re under no illusions. Prosecute Trump or don’t, we’re still a country hopelessly divided. But Ford saw a shred of a chance to go back to the garden, rather than spend years and years focusing on Nixon. It made sense. It was also, probably, wrong, and set a horrible precedent and now every president is a total wuss about prosecuting the last president. It is nice to see that changing, somewhat, this time round.
So. Ronald Reagan in Hollywood. Started off as a liberal, married Jane Wyman, she seemed awesome. He almost became a star but WWII interrupted his rise, he spent the war on an “air base” in Hollywood doing nothing, and after the war he could never really recapture his trajectory as Hollywood wanted another type of man. His career floundered while his wife’s took off. He found solace in politics. Started off Democrat, and pro-labor, and then one day got a visit from some FBI agents who explained to him in their red-paranoia style that the org he was working for was riddled with communists. That began his journey towards conservatism. He talked a lot. His marriage suffered. His wife called him “diarrhea mouth.” His solution for fixing their marital problems: “we’d get along a lot better if you just stopped thinking.”
He eventually sided with the bosses in a union struggle, allowing SAG to break the pickett line of the CSU, the “good” union in Hollywood, in a battle against the “bad” union, run by a mob boss. SAG’s support crushed the strike effort. He jumped on the first opportunity to sell actors out to the government as communists and was an active participant in setting up the black lists.
Jane Wyman, nominated for best actress and a huge star by this point, is sick of her awful husband and divorces him. “You bore me. Get out,” she says to him when he returns home from a trip. They divorce. Wikipedia helpfully says that they departed amicably and stayed good friends and Wyman voted for him both times. Her divorce papers say a different story, citing the reason for divorce as “mental cruelty.”
Which is interesting because there’s a John Prine song, a duet with Kacey Musgraves, called “Mental Cruelty” about a divorce and I always thought that was such a weird term, did people really use that term? But they did, I guess. Also, the song is a cover, originally performed by Larry and Dixie Davis, and later by its writers, Buck Owens and Rose Maddox.
Reagan hits that stag life and basically bones every actress in Hollywood. He was 39. One of them was eighteen. Another has credibly accused him of date rape. He does not seem to be a good guy to date.
I gotta say, I’m not liking this guy! Seems mean.
I put my Twitter home feed back on “home” yesterday, instead of chronological timeline, like I always keep it. I was a little bored, Twitter was a little slow, I thought maybe Twitter had a decent algorithm and it could show me some funny stuff. My god, Twitter on the algorithmic feed is so bad. Is this why people don’t like Twitter? Because the default view is the algorithmic feed and they don’t change it and they see nothing but a bunch of pithy one-liners and meme videos? It really is stunningly bad.
There was a whistleblower against Twitter this week, if you missed it. An esteemed, famous security expert (nicknamed “Mudge,” who weirdly uses his nickname through this whole legal doc which is really strange but whatever) who had been recruited by Jack Dorsey, when he was still CEO, to come in and fix all of Twitter’s numerous security problems. I read his whole complaint, 80-some pages. A lot of it is… not good? Like one real problem with the complaint is it tells the story of how this guy got hired with a sweeping mandate to fix security problems and… did not fix them? And there’s no real explanation for it. Like at one point he presents his plan to the board and the board says “great go fix it.” Um… Okay then, why didn’t you then go fix it. His relationship with the CEO, to whom he reports, seems to be problematic. Jack Dorsey literally never speaks, like in a year says something like fifty words to the dude, goes whole board meetings without speaking. To me this is just funny, but to him its damning, but I don’t get why and it’s never quite spelled out. Like I have been a C-level executive at tech companies for more than a decade here, and a boss who gives me a mandate, authority, a lot of money and leaves me the hell alone is exactly what I want. Maybe he doesn’t, maybe he needs his boss’s help, but he never really explains why.
Then Dorsey leaves and the CTO, Parag Agrawal, becomes CEO. And his relationship with Agrawal seems worse. And since Agrawal was CTO prior to being CEO, and the company never really had a Chief Security Officer, most of the legacy bad shit falls on Agrawal. I mean, not like the dude was the original CTO, and I’m sure he inherited a ton of the mess, but being generous in my reading of this complaint, let’s assume Agrawal was embarrassed about the mess he left the tech state of the company in. So then Mudge explains that Agrawal keeps him from telling the board how bad things are, and even lies to the board a bit, which is all bad, yes, but also… not vital to fixing your security problems? Like he never explains why he can’t just… fix stuff anyway? It’s weird. He does say at one point there is a need to coordinate with other departments, sure, but a) lots of fixes he mentions don’t need departmental coordination, b) his master plan was approved, probably plenty you can do anyway, and c) you control the app! It’s pretty easy to force other departments into assenting to not misuse data when you (theoretically) control the data? Maybe I’m wrong here, but that is definintely what’s missing: why can’t you do your job anyway?
Of course eventually he gets fired, so maybe that’s why — maybe when he got fired he was just about to actually start unilaterally fixing stuff, and someone fired him to stop him, which would be pretty damning, but he never says that.
The document starts off with a section about Elon Musk’s deal that is 100% completely irrelevant to the Musk deal and sorely damages the credibility of the whole document because it really does seem like it’s either there as press grandstanding or indicates Mudge has no concept of the terms of the actual deal. It’s weird.
But there is a diamond in the rough, and a section about how Twitter is in violation of their 2011 SEC Consent Decree has some pretty damning stuff: specifically that Twitter has no Software Development Life Cycle, then they agreed more than ten years ago to have one. Several Twitter execs openly confirm they are in violation of the SEC Consent Decree. This is not good. Also there is zero mobile provisioning, mobile security on employee’s devices at all which is batshit.
So… if Twitter were in violation of the SEC decree, and there was some half-bil fine looming over them and they did not disclose this to Elon when they did the deal, conceivably, I suppose, this could threaten the deal, since that could be considered material, and material omissions are the one thing the deal won’t contenance. So for a hot sec there, I thought maybe this complaint would torpedo the deal, but then Felix helpfully pointed out to me that Twitter does in fact, disclose the SEC issues in their 10-k filings:
So, yeah. Never say never, but to me, at least, it does not seem that this complaint should impact Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk, but hey, who knows. He’s certainly going to muddy the waters with it a bit.
And honestly, 90% fluff, but the 10% in this thing that are real, kind of batshit, totally elementary-school-level security lapses really is pretty awful.
Been spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to raise my hoop house about two-to-three feet for next year. It is about seven feet high, which was nice, but it could have been higher for the tomatoes. I also should have covered the thing in shade cloth for July and August and that was a terrible mistake, but I will fix that next year. The hoops stick into the ground with pointy ends, but they have this four-inch-square plate on the stakes, to show you how far into the ground you’re supposed to stick the stakes. It’s convenient for making your hoop house level, but makes it nearly impossible to, like, strap the stakes to T-Bars to raise the thing. So I think I need to… drive pipes into the ground? So the stake goes into the pipe and the square plate rests on the top of the pipe? That seems… unpleasant? But I can’t really think of any other way to do it.
I also got yet another Birdie’s Bed, I’ve been feeling like I could use one more, all summer I wanted a little bit more space to plant one more crop. Part of that is cuz I used a whole bed for strawberries that never produced, grr, but also I think it will be useful. As to where to put it, however. No idea.
Gotta work tomorrow, so no gardening till Saturday, that makes me sad. I want to plant my snow peas. Also debating another round of potatoes, in the ground. But, god, I hate diffing potatoes out of the ground. Maybe just a couple test plants. Buckets are not cutting it for me. Too small, not enough drainage. Actually, you know what? Grow bags. Ten gallon grow bags. That’s what I’m gonna do. Drainage on grow bags is lit. Yeah. Grow bags. Didn’t use those this year. Lets give it a go. Oh shit! I might even A/B test it! Grow bags and in-ground.
Guess I better dry a few seed potatoes today.
Jane was lovely last night. We played with LEGOs I got her a new set, ages 4+ that was a vetrinary clinic and came with a little LEGO cat and a little LEGO turtle and a little LEGO bunny and no LEGO dog which is extremely our house. Now we need a little larcenous LEGO squirrel. She’s going really slow on breakfast, though. Part of it is because we’re eating bagel sandwiches this week from the homemade bagels (my god, can I tell you how much home made bagels in the house increases your happiness? It’s madness) and they’re chewy so they take longer, but really she’s bored, she wants different experiences, so she does everything slower because she resists and is looking for entertainment and distraction. Things have expanded by about thirty minutes which so far has luckily been fine but eventually some work thing is going to come up and it’s going to be a hassle. Of course on the weekends it’s lovely, but man, it’s stressful on work days. I can’t believe I’ve been doing this for four and a half years. It’s insanity.
She sure is great, though. I’m trying to embrace playing stupid kid things with her a bit more, it is kind of fun, so long as you’re not distracted by the fact that you have other things you need to be doing like work. Weekends are mostly lovely.
Okay a W Hotel Lobby in a Better, Alternate universe mix for you today. All new except for a Bjork song and Insides, a signing to the 4AD sub-label Guernica in 1993. Very fond of the Insides album. They put out a second album almost thirty years later, during the pandemic. It’s good too. Oh wait Buckner and Garcia is on here too, they are old. Funny thing about Buckner and Garcia we talked about them a month or so ago, their 80’s hit, “Pac Man Fever” so I threw the whole album in my “to investigate” playlist and whenever I’m listening to that playlist on random, a non-Pac-Man-Fever” track will come on and I’ll think it’s some new hipster band. They were pretty good!
Until tomorrow. I have not decided yet whether I’ll write you before or after the Walmart run, so, you know, exciting cliffanger. Tune in to find out!
you're probably aware of this already, but i saw potato-specific grow bags on amazon that have a little velcro window on the side to make it easier to get the potatoes out!