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David Frum
@davidfrum 5 years, 9 months ago 919 views

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Yoga employs more Americans than coal. But compare and contrast 1/2

and 2/2

I think many of us carry in our minds an image of the US economy that looks like this

when the reality is this

and this

Let's all resolve to live in the now

-END-

One more detail.
Pre-pandemic, solar installation employed some 240,000 Americans - 5x the number employed by coal https://t.co/FVkYsOXs0I

Sorry, I can't seem to let this go ... one more point ...

Journalists are fascinated by the unexpected. What happened in 2016 was a surprise, so the people who did it drew disproportionate attention.

But surprises are surprising precisely because they are unusual.

More from David Frum

David Frum
@davidfrum

In February 1981, pro-Franco army officers attacked the Spanish Parliament hoping to halt Spain's evolution toward democracy and liberalism. 1/x

The coup was soon suppressed, in large part because of a miscalculation by the dying Franco regime. In 1975, the regime had restored the old Spanish monarchy, hoping to glamorize authoritarianism. Instead, King Juan Carlos opposed the coup - and most of the army obeyed. 2/x

Here's where the story gets interesting for our current purposes ...

The coup launched to thwart Spain's shift to democracy instead consolidated Spanish democracy. The next year, 1982, social democrats won the biggest landslide in Spanish electoral history. 3/x

The elected social democrats formed a government without a single minister connected to the old regime. State support of the Catholic church ended. Family law was modernized, minority language rights were protected. If Franco had opposed it - the new Spain wanted it. 4/x

The process was not instant. Not until 2019 would the state remove Franco's remains from the lavish tomb he built to himself. But the process was inexorable. The pro-Franco attempted coup guaranteed the total doom of Francoism in Spain. 5/x

David Frum
@davidfrum

You're hearing a lot of talk about "irregularities" in the election of 1876 that led to a "disputed" outcome. What is being referred to in this hazy terms?

Across the state of South Carolina, white conservatives had used terror and massacre to deter former slaves from voting in 1876. Here's the story of an attack upon the small town of Hamburg in July

Hundreds of black South Carolinians were killed by white conservative militias. Blacks fought back in many places, but they were out-gunned.

The killings were not spontaneous outbursts. They were part of planned campaign of anti-black voter

Some of the elements of the conservative plan to suppress black votes in South Carolina in 1876 sound queasily familiar in our own time, adjusting for the antique language and technology.

But back of it all was terror and violence, more violence than could be contained by the limited federal forces in the area - who were anyway constrained by the white conservative Democratic House majority elected in 1874.

David Frum
@davidfrum

Lizzie Collingham is one of my favorite social historians working today. I finished the latest of her books, Biscuit, on Christmas Day. #FrumReads4

Collingham's "Biscuit" is the history of hard-baked bread from ancient times to the box of cookies in the grocery aisle. As always with her work, "Biscuit" uses the device of a foodstuff to open a wide eye upon the surrounding culture. 2/x #FrumReads4

Biscuits, in the British usage of that word, were among the very first industrial foodstuffs. They enabled the British empire - Royal Navy sailors lived upon them - and were in turn enabled by that empire to discover a global market. 3/x

Collingham self-presents in a self-effacing way. Her short biography notes that she writes "in a garden shed." She includes recipes for the foods she writes about. Do not be deceived. Collingham's theme over her career is a grand one: the interaction of cultures over time. 4/x

Collingham's "Curry," enraged Hindu chauvinists by demonstrating how Indians synthesized their cuisine from their interactions with others. The word "vindaloo" is an amalgam of the Portuguese for wine and garlo, vinho and alho. Tea-drinking was mimicked from the British. Etc. 5/x

David Frum
@davidfrum

In an early episode of "Mad Men," the young striver Peggy Olson faces a traumatic experience. The principal character, a man whose life is built upon falsehood and evasion, offers his life advice: "It never happened. It will amaze you how much it never happened." 1/x

With the Tanden nomination, we are watching congressional Republicans put Don Draper's advice into effect.

They supported a profoundly corrupt, cruel, vituperative, and generally immoral and unethical president at the head of an inept and unethical administration. They knew it!

But of course those senators never said so. They were scared and they were shamed. Maybe they stopped some bad things - or at least they tell themselves they did. But the experience had to have been profoundly humiliating for almost all of them. And these are not humble people.

So how do they cope? They follow Don Draper's advice. "It never happened."

The Tanden nomination is the opportunity to rev the pretense loud and fast.

The lady was occasionally indecorous! Even ... sometimes ... untoward. We can't have THAT in the US government!

Hypocritical is not really the word to describe this behavior. It's more a kind of post-traumatic coping mechanism, a denial of the radical abuse that they also suffered, along with US allies worldwide, people of integrity in govt service, and so many bereaved American families

David Frum
@davidfrum

I got overnight via email a query from @briansflood at Fox News, the principal part of which I reproduce below. I answered by email too. I'll append that reply in the next threaded tweet:

My reply:

Hunter Biden's dubious business activities have been reported for years. Here for example is @TheAtlantic in September 2019, year *before* @nypost https://t.co/qZBTpyuysM

That emails attributed to Hunter Biden were circulating was also known well before the NYPost story in October. Here's TIME magazine https://t.co/JvpEKdG0U4

What @NYPost added to the work earlier done by others was a new *origin* story for the materials that circulated in Ukraine in 2019. When other media organizations attempted to corroborate that story, hijinx ensued. https://t.co/ZJGZWq7etU @thedailybeast account

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Hemant Mohapatra
@MohapatraHemant

~8yrs ago (Dec’12) I got a job @Google. Those were still early days of cloud. I joined GCP @<150M ARR & left @~4B (excld GSuite). Learned from some of the smartest ppl in tech. But we also got a LOT wrong that took yrs to fix. Much of it now public, but here’s my ring-side view👇

By 2008, Google had everything going for it w.r.t. Cloud and we should’ve been the market leaders, but we were either too early to market or too late. What did we do wrong? (1) bad timing (2) worse productization & (3) worst GTM.

We were 1st to “containers” (lxc) & container management (Borg) - since '03/04. But Docker took LXC, added cluster management, & launched 1st. Mesosphere launched DCOS. A lot of chairs were thrown around re: google losing this early battle, though K8 won the war, eventually 👏

We were 1st to “serverless” (AppEngine). GAE was our beachhead -- it was the biggest revenue source early on but the world wasn’t ready for serverless primitives. We also didn’t build auxiliary products fast enough. Clients that outgrew GAE wanted “building block” IaaS offerings.

1st to hadoop (map-reduce ‘04) but our hosted Hadoop launched in ‘15. AWS EMR was ~200M ARR by then. 1st to cloud storage (GFS ’03), but didn’t offer a filestore till ‘18! Customers were asking for it since 2014. Didn’t launch archival storage or direct interconnect till v. late.

Claire Ryan
@aetherlev

Right, I did some reading and here’s what likely happened with Parler. Lots of crossed wires here.

First up: someone noticed that Parler uses sequential integers in the API endpoint to get content.

An API endpoint is just a URL with a value added onto the end that tells the system what you want to get back.

Using sequential integers means that a hacker can set up an automated script to start at 1 and count up, trying API calls over and over again, to get back content from Parler.

Parler apparently had no restrictions on this API endpoint, which frankly blows my mind as a web dev.

If you had a working URL, it just spat out whatever it had whether you were logged in or not.

It seems that EVERYTHING that had been uploaded - video, photos, text posts - was accessible whether it had been deleted or restricted in the app itself. Even uploaded photos of licenses etc etc.

I cannot describe how amateur hour this is, if true.

David Evans
@pentops4

Years before Andy Grove was attributed with the phrase:

"Whatever can be done, will be done"

A lot of us technologists assumed this was the case anyway.

It's a truism.

What if we could track every person on the planet in real time?

Or at least everyone in a major city

🤔🔮

So, given someone has this idea.

Then the only question is can it be done.

Well, we're already installing all the tech to do this for autonomous vehicles, drones and smart city infrastructure.

It really wouldn't be a huge leap to do that for people.

But how might that be possible 🤔

Sure we can already do it with phones right, but not everyone has a phone and sometimes the batteries die blah blah.

Could we do it in a way that it was difficult to circumvent, and always active?

Well, maybe we could if we put our thinking caps on about the problem.

--- this line intentionally left blank ---

Now I'm going to enter the wild world of wild speculative futurism, so take everything else with a pinch of salt 🧂

--- this line intentionally left blank ---

Turns out cell phone towers pinpoint the location of your phone as part of how they work.

And then as you move around you switch from one tower to another.

I think most people get this.

Something like the image below

Pasquale "Pat" Scopell...
@ThyConsigliori

Prepping for today's thread, the story of the CURRENT CYBERWAR is clearly overwhelming. J.E. Dyer @OptimisticCon links us to this story. Just one quote to

$Walpurga M\xfcller-Schm$

Walpurga Müller-Schm...
@WalpurgaMueller

@AWS hit @parler_app where it really hurts: in their backend.

This thread is to those claiming that this is a violation of the 1st Amendment and platforms shouldn't be taken down.

Free Speech has limits and it definitely ends with thousands of open calls for violence:
1/

OK, so that's just a coincidence. Moving on, Anthony Blinken "attended the prestigious Dalton School in New York City"...wait, what? https://t.co/DnE6AvHmJg

Dalton School...Dalton School...rings a

Oh that's right.

The dad of the U.S. Attorney General under both George W. Bush & Donald Trump, William Barr, was headmaster of the Dalton School.

Donald Barr was also quite a

Donald Barr had a way with words. pic.twitter.com/JdRBwXPhJn
— Rudy Havenstein, listening to Nas all day. (@RudyHavenstein) September 17, 2020

I'm not going to even mention that Blinken's stepdad Sam Pisar's name was in Epstein's "black book."

Lots of names in that book. I mean, for example, Cuomo, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen - all in that book, and their reputations are spotless.