Steven Brokaw

David Kaiser in Time:

During the 1990s, two amateur historians, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss, developed a new theory of American history in two books, Generations: the History of America’s Future (1991), and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997). They identified an 80-year cycle in American history, punctuated by great crises that destroyed an old order and created a new one.

The great crises identified by Strauss and Howe included the era of the American Revolution and the Constitution (1774-1794); the Civil War and its immediate aftermath (1860-68); and the Depression and the Second World War (1929-45). Doing the math, they predicted another great crisis sometime in the first 15 years of the 21st century.

On discussing the Howe and Strauss theory with Stephen Bannon:

More than once during our interview, [Bannon] pointed out that each of the three preceding crises had involved a great war, and those conflicts had increased in scope from the American Revolution through the Civil War to the Second World War. He expected a new and even bigger war as part of the current crisis, and he did not seem at all fazed by the prospect.

Trump Hotels tried to have a Twitter conversation about favorite travel memories. Twitter rose to the occasion. Here are a few of my favorite.

At 18 my father fled the Nazis. 2 strangers from a youth hostel put up £200 for his UK visa. They saved his life. https://t.co/kg3IlYXp0C

— Adam Ganz (@harbinger) January 29, 2017

@TrumpHotels Visiting San Francisco – the American city my grandparents settled in after leaving the Philippines after WWII.

— Cate Sevilla (@CateSevilla) January 29, 2017

@TrumpHotels They escaped concentration camps and a country devastated by war. They weren't turned away and I'm here today because of it.

— Cate Sevilla (@CateSevilla) January 29, 2017

@TrumpHotels That time my parents fled apartheid South Africa and immigrated to America where my father became an advocate for abused children.

— Joshua Hale Fialkov (@JoshFialkov) January 29, 2017

.@TrumpHotels My father as a baby, with his brother and mother, aboard the SS Statendam, fleeing Nazi Germany. #NoBanNoWall pic.twitter.com/VUsWPOQl52

— Laura Brahm (@laclabra) January 29, 2017

@TrumpHotels I traveled to LA last weekend, and it was so much fun. pic.twitter.com/sZigl4in40

— Melissa Wantz (@mwantz) January 29, 2017

.@TrumpHotels It was probably this moment yesterday at SFO when Niloufar revealed her father was just released from illegal detention. pic.twitter.com/E3CHp3lGwb

— Peter Corless (@PeterCorless) January 29, 2017

Remember sitting in history, thinking “If I was alive then, I would’ve…”

You’re alive now. Whatever you’re doing is what you would’ve done.

— David Slack (@slack2thefuture) January 28, 2017

For better or worse, history is giving us an opportunity to answer this question for ourselves. Think carefully. Make sure you make decisions that you’ll be proud to explain to your grand kids. To St. Peter, if you like. To your future self in the mirror. And remember: silence is consent.

From a September, 2016 NY Times article on Anwar al-Awlaki, Al Qaeda recruiter:

Today, with the war between Muslims and the West escalating,” Anwar al-Awlaki said in the video, “you cannot count on the message of solidarity you may get from a civic group or a political party, or the word of support you hear from a kind neighbor or a nice co-worker. The West will eventually turn against its Muslim citizens.

It was an audacious pitch. No matter what you may think, the American-born Mr. Awlaki told Western Muslims, sooner or later your governments and fellow citizens will come after you. So you must join our violent cause.

Now, Donald Trump does his best to prove him right. I’m sure ISIS recruiters everywhere are celebrating. Luckily, it appears they are receiving substantial support from their fellow citizens.

Today an item scrolled by on my Facebook feed that alleges evidence of 800,000 illegal votes in the 2016 election. The source of the article was the highly partisan Sean Hannity, quoting a Washington Times piece:

Political scientist Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, has worked with colleagues to produce groundbreaking research on noncitizen voting, and this week he posted a blog in response to Mr. Trump’s assertion. Based on national polling by a consortium of universities, a report by Mr. Richman said 6.4 percent of the estimated 20 million adult noncitizens in the U.S. voted in November. He extrapolated that that percentage would have added 834,381 net votes for Mrs. Clinton, who received about 2.8 million more votes than Mr. Trump.

I decided chase down this study. Here was what I found with just a little bit of effort searching Google for Jesse Richman

As a primary author cited in this piece, I need to say that I think the Washington Times article is deceptive. It makes it sound like I have done a study concerning the 2016 election. I have not.

He has more explanation of his method, and a link to the original article quoted in the Times piece. As a bounus, his original study has serious methodological shortcoming.

Perhaps a bigger problem with utilizing CCES data to make claims about the non-citizen voting in the United States is that some respondents might have mistakenly misreported their citizenship status on this survey (e.g. response error)… In fact, any response error in self-reported citizenship status could have substantially altered the authors’ conclusions because they were only able to validate the votes of five respondents who claimed to be non-citizen voters in the 2008 CCES.

Just a reminder to use your build-in BS detector, or at least try a little Googling.

Texas Monthly round-up of Texas Women’s Marches:

50,000 marchers packed the streets in Austin; 22,000 gathered in Houston; as many as 9,000 in Fort Worth and 8,000 in Dallas; more than a thousand in San Antonio; 2,500 in Denton; at least 1,000 in El Paso; 500 in Amarillo; 350 in Lubbock; more than 300 in Brownsville; hundreds in Beaumont and Nacogdoches; 200 in Abilene; more than 150 in Wichita Falls; about 100 in Corpus Christi; about fifty people marched in Midland, and another fifty in College Station; and even in cold, rainy Alpine, nearly 100 marchers trekked about 1.5 miles up a hill.

Via Daring Fireball, Glenn Fleishman’s Atlantic article on curly quotes:

The trouble with being a former typesetter is that every day online is a new adventure in torture. Take the shape of quotation marks. These humble symbols are a dagger in my eye when a straight, or typewriter-style, pair appears in the midst of what is often otherwise typographic beauty. It’s a small, infuriating difference: "this" versus “this.”

I write my content in Markdown, render it to HTML, and post raw HTML into WordPress. It’s a couple extra steps, but I get to write in a proper text application, and the output is reliable and well-formed. During that process the quotes are “educated” to transfrom plain ASCII inch marks to proper double quotes.

Ironically, the quote above is the biggest problem I’ve encountered in a while: the plain quotes are automatically educated, so I have to update the HTML output and change it back. Then I discovered that WordPress automatically educates my quotes, so I couldn’t display straight quotes even though I wanted to. I would have to update WordPress to remove the wptexture filter. I started this post explaining how easy this was for me, but only proved the point that it is a pain purposely using both proper quotes and dumb straight quotes. Using one or the other is easy.

Mike Ash’s presentation on memory layout in Swift.

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Medicare’s Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund will remain solvent – that is, able to pay 100 percent of the costs of the hospital insurance coverage it provides – through 2028, the program’s trustees wrote in their latest report. Even after 2028, when the HI trust fund is projected for depletion, incoming payroll taxes and other revenue will still cover 87 percent of Medicare hospital insurance costs.

Paul Ryan is dishonest when we charactarized Medicare as going “bankrupt.”

The guys over at CleanCoders made a video series on the creation of an iOS app. While refractoring, they decided to remove keyword arguments.

We also walked through the code replacing most of the keyword arguments with positional arguments – something that swift does not make particularly convenient. We did this because the code just looked better once it was done.

I think this is a terrible idea.

Coincidentally, I’m in the middle of the chapter on function naming in Clean Code. He argues against ternary arguments because it’s too easy to lose track of what arguments belong in the first, second, and third position. “Sounds like argument labels would help,” was my first thought. Looks like he disagrees. It makes me more skeptical of his other advice.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board critizies Trump’s Carrier deal, calling it a “shakedown:”

A mercantilist Trump trade policy that jeopardized those exports would throw far more Americans out of work than the relatively low-paying jobs he’s preserved for now in Indianapolis. Mr. Trump’s Carrier squeeze might even cost more U.S. jobs if it makes CEOs more reluctant to build plants in the U.S. because it would be politically difficult to close them.

Mr. Trump has now muscled his way into at least two corporate decisions about where and how to do business. But who would you rather have making a decision about where to make furnaces or cars? A company whose profitability depends on making good decisions, or a branding executive turned politician who wants to claim political credit?

I fully expected them to give Trump a pass. Credit to them for sticking to their principles.

At the Washington Post, Fred Hiatt characterized the deal as right out of Putin’s playbook:

It’s good that about 1,000 Carrier Corp. workers will not be losing their jobs. But there is a whiff of Putinism in the combination of bribery and menace that may have affected Carrier’s decision – the bribery of tax breaks, the menace of potential lost defense contracts for Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies.

If this were to become the U.S. government’s standard method of operation, the results would be Russian, too: dwindling investment, slowing economic growth, fewer jobs.

It’s always been clear that Trump understands bullying, but doesn’t care about policy. This deal is a reflection of that. There’s no policy or plan to keep manufacturing jobs; just a willingness to bully and bribe a specific company.

This is the culmination of half a days work trying to figure out why my Lambda function didn’t fire:

The console doesn’t support directly modifying permissions in a function policy. You must use either the AWS CLI or the AWS SDKs.

In other words: it is a secret setting that we hide from you. Just in case you’re trying to use a versioned lambda function or a function alias.

Courtesy David Frum:

Nixon 1960: 49.55% Gore 2000: 48.38% Kerry 2004: 48.26% Ford 1976: 48.01% Romney 2012: 47.15% Trump 2016: 46.17%

I keep thinking about this tweet from Garry Kasparov:

Saying that fair elections are rigged is as much a crime against democracy as saying that rigged elections are fair.

It’s an odd twist that Trump is casting doubt on an election that he legally won (even if it was with a national minority). I attribute that to a strategy of working the ref. The lie of voter fraud is groundwork on propaganda that will be needed in future efforts to suppress voting rights.

It also made me think the same idea applies to the news: Saying that fair journalism is biased is as much a crime against truth as saying that biased journalism is fair.

I just realized the iTunes visualizer is still there. I remember Steve Jobs getting up and demonstrating this in a keynote. Does anybody still use this? The only way I would possibly use this is if it were on the AppleTV. As far as I know, it’s not.

There has been lots of ink spilled on the evils of identitly politics and how the Democrats have to embrace the color-blind notion of class. Here are a couple of articles that push back on that.

Michelle Goldberg, in Slate:

The focus of left-of-center politics in the dark years to come must be on protecting the groups of people who are targets precisely because of their identities. To sideline their interests is to accede to a backlash that has just begun and will only get worse. If Democrats standing up for diversity makes Trump voters feel disrespected, the best response is a slogan popular among enemies of political correctness at Trump rallies: Fuck your feelings.

Rebecca Traister, in New York Magazine:

But what’s not funny about all this is that we are in a moment of national crisis, in which the developmental stage of the Dirtbag Left might be mistaken for a flash of political wisdom, when prioritization of the (yes, systemic) approaches to reducing racial, gender, and class inequality is most likely to be walked back in the name of distancing the party from the women and people of color who lost the election.

I spent the better part of the evening reading up on the Facebook Graph API and writing a tool that can do my auto-posting for me. Right now it only works with Facebook. It can post images, status updates, and links in their native format. It’s not too smart about interpreting which of those formats it should use. Also, it’s comically inept at getting an authentication token. Long-lived tokens last about 60 days, so I have a while to fix it.

If you see this, and it says that it was posted by “Emposter,” then it works.