I found this fairly long interview on The Verge with Marques Brownlee (MKBHD on YouTube) to be very interesting:

But what looks effortless and fun to the viewer is often the result of careful planning and investment. YouTubers are entrepreneurs, and Brownlee — my guest on today’s episode of Decoder — talks that talk with the best of them.

Marques Brownlee could be described as “tech reviewer” or a “social media influencer” or a “YouTuber.” I don’t watch all his videos, but I have checked in with his YouTube channel periodically since I first saw him (as a college student!) on an episode of TWiT. While he is telegenic and charismatic, he also presents himself as someone with a strong sense of ethics who is very smart and thoughtful about he approaches his business. This interview gives a pretty long look into Marques Brownlee’s professional world.

My wife, who is a high school teacher, recently reported to me that one of the top “professions” that teens want to go into is “social media influencer.” That is kind of eyeroll-inducing to me, but I suppose it is as realistic and as meaningful an aspiration as “famous writer” was to me. It is important to know how much work goes into that sort of job, and how much time, investment, and infrastructure goes into keeping up with the competition.

This article in USA Today confirms my suspicions that all the anti-COVID measures would drastically reduce the prevalence of seasonal flu in the U.S.:

During the 2019 flu season from Sept. 29 to Dec. 28, the CDC reported more than 65,000 cases of influenza nationwide. During the same period last year, the agency reported 1,016 cases.

I get a vaccine every year for the flu—and luckily have not caught it since I was in elementary school—but other than that, I never think about it. My dream right now is that the COVID vaccine be the same kind of thing: a prick on the arm once a year, and otherwise nothing much to think about.

Pelosi, Schumer Join Chorus Of Calls For Invocation Of 25th Amendment Against Trump. I cosign. Swear in President Pence and swear him out in about two weeks when Biden is inaugurated.

I was having a pretty good day yesterday, full of minor but meaningful personal and professional accomplishments, and then all hell broke loose in Washington, DC. I pushed the news of it away as best I could, so I am less informed than I otherwise would be, but I am sad, angry, and ashamed nonetheless.

Per Philip Rucker in The Washington Post:

The “American carnage” that Donald Trump vowed to end at the dawn of his presidency was revived in terrifying, treacherous form at its sunset Wednesday, as Trump made a fiery last stand and incited his supporters to storm and sack the U.S. Capitol as part of an attempted coup.

I don’t even know how to comment on this event without seeming glib, but I feel compelled to say something anyway.

I am, by trade, an auditor. One thing auditors are trained to investigate is called “tone at the top,” which represents the values expressed by the top management of a company which are expected from everyone who reports up to them.

After auditing for years, I have discovered that “tone at the top” is almost everything you need to know about an organization to get an idea how well and how ethically it is operated. Ethics and decency from the top of an organization really do trickle down all the way to the bottom and permeate it entirely. Moreover, they are strongly indicative of the organization’s solvency—its ability to hold together as a going concern over time.

When the “tone at the top” is selfish, vain, petty, petulant, aggrieved, unethical, amoral, and violent—as Trump’s has been—that tone trickles down to the whole organization, and pollutes the thoughts and corrupts the actions of the people within it. Unfortunately in this case, the “organization” is not just the Executive Branch, not just the federal government, and not just the Republican Party: it is the entire United States of America. What’s more, because the U.S. is a vastly influential country, the corruption and willful deceit at the head of it spills over into the rest of the world.

I feel like I have known this from the beginning—before the slow-moving coup even started—because I understood what the “tone at the top” was, and knew that it was vitally important. Knowing this, sadly, is not enough, because in a democracy a majority of people need to know this for things to turn out better. Being able to know this, like being able to discern the “tone at the top” as a new auditor, is a rare gift. It requires a trait that is not easily acquired, but is so difficult to teach and to learn that it is often considered to be innate: shrewdness.

That’s because “tone at the top” isn’t always as blatantly obvious as Trump’s vitriolic tweets and shambolic rally speeches. Understanding what the “tone at the top” really is, it requires a combination of healthy skepticism, decent powers of observation, and the knowledge of how things are supposed to work. You have to understand both context and subtext; subtext is much harder to grasp than context, but is often the more important to the two. You have to interpret people’s words and actions, and compare them to each other to see if the actions follow the words. You also have to have some kind of ethical foundation—which may be laws of the state, societal norms, or virtue ethics— on which to base your conclusions.

The human mind has evolved to do a lot of this analysis automatically. Consider that establishing whether you trust another person is, and always has been, an essential part of human interaction. But, like a lot of thought processes that are largely automatic, many times mental shortcuts are taken and the wrong choice is made. To be able to second-guess these automatic thought processes takes intellect, some degree of guidance, and a willingness to think a little harder.

I would not be surprised to learn that many of the people trying to unlawfully overturn the election—not counting the elected officials who are operating out of cynical self-interest—really do think they are making an ethical decision, and really do think they are doing the right thing. They just trusted the wrong person, or made the wrong decision about voting for or supporting, because they lack the shrewdness and imagination to discern that the “tone at the top” really does matter, and that bad words from a lazy president really will lead to riots in the streets.

Neil Young and Jimmy Iovine sold part or all of their music catalog publishing rights to Hipgnosis. This closely follows Bob Dylan’s catalog sale to Universal Music Group. Strange things may be afoot in the music industry.

Chipotle launches cauliflower rice nationwide as consumers cut grains from their diets. This is a good idea. Cauliflower rice can be very good, at least when it is not overcooked. Still, it probably won’t get me to go back to Chipotle ever again. 😅

From Adi Robertson in The Verge:

The Enola Holmes case hinged on Sherlock Holmes’ complicated copyright status. Most Holmes stories sit in the public domain, and stories like Enola Holmes — which reimagines Holmes (played by Henry Cavill) having a younger sister — can freely repurpose their elements. But 10 of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories are still protected by copyright, and the Doyle estate argued that they depict a meaningfully different version of the character. (He’s more caring, less overtly contemptuous of women and friendship, and generally less of a jerk.)

I don’t believe Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate should have any rights over Sherlock Holmes at all. Conan Doyle died in 1930. It’s completely outrageous.

A robotic kitchen for rich people is kind of a cool idea, I guess, but the setup looks pretty scary. If robots can cook, where will that leave restaurant cooks in 20 years or so, when the technology gets cheaper?

Live: Here Are the Electoral College Results, By State. Why on earth would I want to track this live?

Per Susan Davis on NPR:

When earmarks were a regular feature of congressional business, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., said Democrats and Republicans were able to cut more deals and pass more bills with bipartisan support.

This sounds like a bad idea at first, but it probably is actually a good one. Congress can’t pass meaningful legislation anymore, in part because there is almost no bipartisan agreement on important bills. Maybe allowing earmarks will make it easier to gain votes “across the aisle”—you know, like it used to.

Wow. Apple’s “December surprise” actually happened:

By moving into the premium headphones space, Apple will directly compete with brands like Bose, Sony, Sennheiser, AKG, Bowers and Wilkins, and others that have years of experience and a long list of products between them. Apple is going higher than just about all of them on price, but the company is riding the momentum of the AirPods and AirPods Pro, which have dominated the true wireless earbuds market.

I shouldn’t be surprised that Apple’s headphones cost more than any in my collection—and I have some pretty impressive headphones.

The headband design looks a little odd at the top. I hope the engineers sacrificed looks for comfort there.

And it’s a shame they charge via Lightning

iJustine’s M1 Macs review video is absolutely hilarious.

Wajahat Ali, writing an op-ed in the New York Times, has given up on Trump supporters:

We cannot help people who refuse to help themselves.

I get it. It was shocking that Trump actually gained in the vote count after four years of doing everything he could to diminish American standing and influence in the world, and the rights and lives of people within his own borders. It is worse to have lived through an era in which the Republican Party went from a political movement with some bad ideas about taxation and social services to a full-on fascist personality cult.

It’s easy to blame Trump. He is a problem. But he is not the only problem. Ali hits at this deep into the article (my emphasis added in bold), stating something that is vital to understanding the predicament we are in:

Trump is an extension of their id, their culture, their values, their greed. He is their defender and savior. He is their blunt instrument. He is their destructive drug of choice.

The thing we should not forget about the Trump supporters is that they empower him—it’s not the other way around. If Trump is a lightning rod, his supporters are the lightning.

You can’t turn your back on those people because they are still here and are not going anywhere. Changing their minds might be a generation’s worth of work, but it is work that has to be done because social institutions are breaking down, and not by accident. The Republican Party transformed itself over the past fifty years into what it is now, through planning, determination, and lots and lots of money. There is no reason that the Democratic Party can’t do the same. It takes a lot of things, but most of all will.

I very much enjoyed Cal Newport’s rumination on Getting Things Done (GTD), and Merlyn Mann’s contributions to personal productivity culture, in The New Yorker.

Finding Getting Things Done, through Merlyn Mann’s 43 Folders, was transformative for me. It supercharged my productivity, for a while at least, numerous times in my life.

GTD techniques and processes have not fixed the root problems with knowledge work, which Newport points out in the article:

In this context, the shortcomings of personal-productivity systems like G.T.D. become clear. They don’t directly address the fundamental problem: the insidiously haphazard way that work unfolds at the organizational level. They only help individuals cope with its effects. A highly optimized implementation of G.T.D. might have helped Mann organize the hundreds of tasks that arrived haphazardly in his in-box daily, but it could do nothing to reduce the quantity of these requests.

We have a workaholic culture that puts a lot of pressure on the individual worker to be responsible for many, many things that are outside the worker’s control. GTD is both a means of dealing with this pressure, and a personal methodology that prolongs one’s exposure to all this pressure. It increases the number of balls you can keep in the air, but doesn’t address the problem that others keep throwing more and more balls at you that they expect you to juggle.

This is pretty great, isn’t it?

Alex Trebek has died. It certainly is the end of an era.

My wife and I watched the Biden-Harris acceptance speeches with our daughter, who has never seen anything like it before. We are feeling excited and hopeful. I am especially eager to follow Kamala Harris’s work as Vice President in the hopes that she will be a transformative figure in the office.

I didn’t realize that Amazon was having a hardware event today. Am I the only one who has been hoping for updated e-ink Kindles?

Come on, New York Times. This type of article is sexist and demeaning. What is Joe Biden wearing? What does it mean?

Brian Resnick’s article on Vox summarizes some of the issues we are all facing in the back-to-school period. Coronavirus is in the air, and being indoors with an infected person for a prolonged time increases the viral load that one is exposed to. This is critical to understand.

As Derek Thompson observes in the Atlantic, a lot of places have put on a big show about cleaning surfaces — what he calls “hygiene theater” — though surface contamination is not thought to be a large source of Covid-19 transmission.

Making places safer, instead, should mean improving air quality. But “have you ever heard a restaurant reopening announce they’ve improved ventilation or increased ventilation?” Lidia Morawska, an engineer and the director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health at Queensland University of Technology, recently told me. “No.”

The “hygiene theater” of surface cleaning is already entrenched in mask wearing. Mask wearing is critical to reducing disease transmission from a public health perspective, but masks aren’t magical COVID-19 blockers, especially when people are wearing them around their chins or taking them off before they sneeze (seriously, I have seen this in the grocery store). I think that a lot of people believe lots of activities, like sitting in a classroom all day, are OK as long as everyone wears masks, at least most of the time. I don’t believe that—at least not at a time in which Covid cases are climbing, and outbreaks have been traced to gatherings of people indoors or families sharing a home.

I am concerned that in schools, restaurants, and other public places, “ventilation theater” will soon run rampant. We will be promised that “ventilation system improvements” will protect us, our children, and our grandparents, even when most buildings can’t be redesigned to circulate or scrub the air with any real effectiveness. The article points this out, too:

Remember: Hygiene theater is possible when it comes to air quality as well. If a school or any indoor space says it has improved ventilation, ask how. Marr suggests asking building operators what the air exchange rate is (if they don’t know it, maybe be wary about the space). Ask about what filters have been put in place. Ask if their HVAC systems have been routinely maintained.

I do wonder when things will go back to pre-Covid normal. I am advocating opening windows and using window fans to exchange inside- and outside air, to the extent that is possible, in public buildings. Most places I can think of aren’t really designed for that, unfortunately.

“Apple Music 1” is not nearly as fun to say as Beats 1.

Myke Hurley’s Podcast Mentorship program is a really good idea:

TL;DR: I want to mentor people who are under-represented in the tech-focussed podcast world. If you are starting out and need some help, please read on.

The mentees that Myke selected appear to be promising new voices who can enrich the tech podcasting space.

I hope that other seasoned podcasters will join Myke as mentors in the future.

This story about Wisconsin’s primary election is very upsetting. It is yet another symptom of a larger problem: American democracy is in deep, deep trouble, now that Republicans, who need low voter turnout to win elections, have taken over the Judiciary.

Corona beer halts production during coronavirus pandemic. This is so stupid, but I get it.

Adam Schlesinger Dies of Coronavirus Complications at 52. This sucks. Fountains of Wayne is one of my favorite bands, and Schlesinger’s more recent work on “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” was really entertaining, too.