Good morning. Hello. How are you? #815
Kitchen organizing, KitchenAid freakout, Google case, Pittsboro PFOA case, Jane's bedtime
Good morning! Hello, there, friend. How are you? Did you have a nice weekend? I hope you had a nice weekend. Nice weekends are nice. Nice weekends are tight. I, myself, had a pretty lovely weekend. Lots of socializing! Two nights of socializing. It was lovely. It was very social.
Neighbors had a bonfire Friday night, and it was just great. It had been ages. There were about 20 people, old friends and new. Just a splendiferous time, A+ no complaints.
And then on Saturday night we had a different neighbor couple over for Smores, and my god, Jane was so excited. Usually when we have local friends over in the evening they stop by after Jane’s in bed, but this time she got to hang out. And she loves these neighbors. They’re the ones whose pool we use in the summer so she hangs out with them a lot in the summer and then hasn’t seen them much since. We put their numbers into Jane’s phone so she can text them now. That will be funny. They also got her into DuoLingo, so now she’s learning Spanish? Sort of? I’m not sure that one’s gonna stick.
In other weekend fun tasks, Jane and I made waffles, I made more Tom Yum Bone Broth for the week, which is very important this week since my colonoscopy is next Monday and, you know, clear foods for me for a day or two before that. Processed a lot of HOA dues payment checks using my splendiferous HOA bank account FOR MOBILE DEPOSIT ONLY stamp I had made a year ago man I love those stamps.
Then I did a whole re-org on the baking supplies shelf because I now seem to have, god help me, eleven different types of flour? I remember when I first started watching Bake Off and one contestent mentioned how he’s gonna use a different type of flour for this one challenge and I’m all like “huh? What’s that?” And now I have eleven types. It is out of control. They really do proliferate. I never did find any more flour-sized 16-cup Rubbermaid Brilliance containers, but it turns out I had a few that weren’t really being utilized to their full potential, so with a lot of reshuffling, everything worked out. It is very exciting check this out:
I mean how satisfying is that for kitchen porn?
Speaking of the kitchen this whole KitchenAid lead thing is crazy. I mean, is it true? is it not true? Who knows. Seems like it’s probably true. If you’re not following this, a mommy blogger on the internet has convinced the entire world that all of KitchenAid’s mixing attachments for the last 30 years have lead in them. Despite her amateur looking blog that looks trapped in the 90’s she makes a fairly convincing case and, of course, who wants to unwittingly poison their family accidentally? Better safe than sorry. The stainless steel attachments are fine, sort of, at least the new ones are, the old ones still have an aluminum head on them and it’s the aluminum you gotta watch out for apparently cuz it’s all tainted with lead for some reason involving Chinese factories which of course my or may not involve xenophobia who can tell.
So everyone’s trying to get new stainless steel mixer attachments. Some people are calling KitchenAid and berating them until they cave and agree to send the new attachments. Some people, like yours truly, are just sucking it up and buying new attachments because, you know, not a big fan of berating customer service reps. But of course they’re sold out everywhere. And there’s massive confusion in the marketplace because of the old stainless steel attachments, with the aluminum collets, and the new ones, which are 100% stainless steel. They sell a three-piece set of the new 100% stainless steel ones on their website, but a) don’t ship till march, b) some confusion if they will fit all mixers, they won’t. They say “for KitchenAid stand mixers” at the top but then in the fine print it says the 5-quart only? Unclear. And I have a 6-quart. And c) they say “100% stainless steel” but KitchenAid is still in full-on denial that they have a massive consumer freak-out problem. Whether it was justified by the facts or not, the obvious reality of the situation is that boat-loads of KitchenAid customers desperately want new 100% stainless steel attachments and want to know for sure they don’t have aluminum, but KitchenAid is reluctant to address the issue directly. There oughtta be a big sign at the top that’s like “NO ALUMINUM, THESE ARE THE ONES YOU WANT” but they are in denial. It is weird. But hey what do I know, I do not run a mixer company.
Anyway, the whole thing is crazy. Crazy! A complete customer freakout about a product that hasn’t changed in decades and there’s absolutely no way to be sure one way or the other if it’s true or just internet folklore and paranoia. I suppose you could just… order your own lead tester?
Modern life is rubbish.
Read the entire 140 pages of the DOJ plus a bunch of states’ antitrust case against Google. This is distinct from the Texas one from a few years ago, which I also read. This one is new. Last week.
First off, it is a monumentally fantastic education into how ad tech works. The first 30 pages or so are really the best primer I’ve ever read on the business. Only minor quibbles. Secondly, the complaint only addresses Google’s anticompetitive behavior on web page advertising, distinct from mobile app advertising, which is the field I work in, so, only mildly applicable to my day-to-day life. But all in all, pretty damning. For a good twenty, thirty years, Google has just been monumentally, utterly uncompetitive, costing publishers and advertisers billions of dollars.
It’s interesting because most of us in the biz have known that Google doesn’t play fair – the lack of transparency around fees was obvious, it was obvious they were self dealing, it was obvious they were cheats. And sometimes people would ask something like “why don’t these people perform as well as Google” and you’d say “oh, well, it’s because Google cheats.” And everyone basically would answer “well, yes, but how?” And Google was so opaque that it was very, very difficult to answer. And so this suit really cracks that open. The exact various nefarious mechanisms they’d use through the years, culminating in a very convenient bulleted list:
It was pretty funny watching the government explain how other parts of the government messed up letting Google buy DoubleClick, which I knew about at the time and lots of us could tell was terribly monopolistic, and AdMeld, about which I knew nothing at the time. DoJ very unimpressed with the FTC of the day.
Honestly, reading this one seems a lot more open-and-shut of a case than the Texas suit, and the remedy of making Google divest itself of its entire off-site ad tech apparatus makes me salivate with excitement. Bring it bring it. In, I guess, 2030 or so when this is finally through the courts, assuming some Republican president doesn’t shut it down before the government finally wins.
Also, the discovery period on this is going to be insane.
Speaking of lawsuits, the town near us, Pittsboro, NC, has sued 3M, Dupont and a bunch more over PFOA contamination to the Haw River and the city’s water supply, for the mitigation and remediation costs. I don’t know if other cities have done this yet or what, but I’m glad they’re doing this. The whole thing has been an awful mess. Our water is supposedly safe as it comes from a different source. I had it tested a while back but who knows man who can you trust in this modern world this is the age of paranoia. Also the reason it’s safe is because… Pittsboro gets its water from the river, and the county gets its water from… a lake the river runs into so… it’s diluted more? Or something? Oh right and also has a better treatment plant but man this PFOA thing is a giant mess and it really is something how America, even now, lets chemical companies just invent crazy fucked up chemicals and dump them into our water for decades and only eventually steps in, like two generations later, when it turns out, whoops! Those chemicals are killing us. Does not seem to be a particularly controversial or difficult innovation to, I dunno, pass a rule that if we don’t know what a chemical does to humans and the environment, we can’t dump it. How is that not the law? How!
Last night I did Jane bedtime and it was mostly fine but she didn’t want me to leave and so I told her if she needed me I would come right back. So Emma and I were watching (the really excellent) Poker Face and Jane called to me on the monitor. So I go back upstairs and she said she wanted to give me love, and she hands me some love, which is a thing we do. I put it into my heart and then she said she wanted to ask me a question and so I say OK and she asks, pretty much out of the blue, whether or I was hit by a car when I was a kid? I mean, we do mention the possibility of getting hit by a car from time to time in our safety talks but I can’t think of a recent one? Anyway I tell her that no, I was not hit by a car as a kid but I was hit by one in 1997 and she asks if I was hurt and I say no, only scared. And she says were you scared and I say yes I was very very scared — because it was scary! And she says she could feel me being scared about the car crash when she was in mama’s belly.
I ask her if she could feel other things from me when she was in mama’s belly and she said she could feel my love.
Damn.
Got an ambient record for you today. Maybe lay face down on your home massage bed with the face ring and listen to this while burning some incense or something and, you know. Just take it easy today.
Until tomorrow!
Have you read Chokepoint Capitalism? https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710957/chokepoint-capitalism-by-cory-doctorow-and-rebecca-giblin/ Chapter 3, "How News Got Broken," baby!