Steven Brokaw

From the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

The Senate can [demand transparency] by refusing to confirm any nominations until Trump takes the following steps to promote faith that a Trump presidency will not enrich himself and his family:

1. Releases his tax returns;

2. Releases a detailed and current financial disclosure that includes beneficial ownership information on all “shell companies” that are part of the Trump Organization;

3. Follows the advice of the The Wall Street Journal editorial page that “Mr. Trump’s best option is to liquidate his stake in the company” via “a leveraged buyout or an initial public offering";

Entrepreneurs to Trump: Don’t take away our Obamacare

(Warning: Obnoxious autoplay video on that page.)

Before Obamacare, people were tied to their jobs because of a lack of health insurance options on the individual market. Here are five people who were empowered by Obamacare to leave their wage jobs and start new businesses.

The last couple of posts I made went to Facebook as links back to my site. That is not how I meant things to go. I’m not trying to drive traffic to my site. I don’t even have any traffic analytics installed. I just want this to show up in the timeline.

Hopefully, the full text of this post will appear on Facebook. You can read it in its entirety in your timeline, and never visit my site. That it he goal.

I came across this little bit of wisdom via Hacker News:

There’s one trick that everybody who writes sales knows and nobody else seems to know. This trick is so effective that Microsoft Word has it even built in so you can test while you write.

…

The F-K score.

The Flesch-Kincaid score determines what grade level you are writing. If your score is 10, you are writing at a 10th grade reading level. If your score is 12, you are writing at a 12th grade level. And so on.

As it turns out, I wrote an app for that. The thing it has over Microsoft Word is that it caculates the F-K score continuously in the background. It also has a couple of tools that suggests how you can improve your score.

I had a very specific use case for that app: a project my wife had in her publishing job. It also does vocabulary tracking, which she needed. Now that her project is over, I find it hard to get motivated to update it. It makes virtually no money. Maybe I should add a Post to Web feature and reposition it as Write Sales Copy That Coverts kind of tool.

I’ve been reading about IndieWeb and the goal of publishing on my own site and syndicating the content out, or POSSE. I’ve had a personal blog for years, but never really posted to it much. Never as much as Facebook. In part, this is an attempt to break out of those networks. Or at least de-emphasize them.

My current attempt is the SNAP plugin on WordPress. It’s going ok. I like that it doesn’t brand itself when posting. It’s my Facebook app that has permission to post. It has pretty good customization of the post format.

I’d like the ability to customize the post format based on the WordPress post type. The template for a Photo post should be different from a Link, which should be different from a long text article. I’d also like is a way to pull in links to article I’ve liked, or retweeted. It looks like I’ll have to use another tool for that.

I set up an auto poster that will post content from my personal site to Facebook and Twitter. I’d like to make everything originate on my site and get pushed out to other places. I don’t want to be obnoxious about it though. My pet peeve is a tweet that links to a Facebook post. We’ll see how it goes.

Today’s example was a Verge article titled Oh my heavens, the British went and made a Top Gear for wine snobs, but i’ve been annoyed at this usage for a long time. Being a snob does not make you sophisticated. Being a snob doesn’t even mean you like the subject in question (e.g., wine). It means you use your knowledge of the subject as a means to draw a social distinction between you and other clods you perceive as beneath you.

Maybe The Verge is trying to put down the show’s audience (I didn’t actually read the article), but I hear it a lot. This usage may have started as a form of ironic self-deprecation, but it has become so overused that I no longer hear that.

How about enthusiast? Of if you really need a word with an air of sophistication, a connoisseur? Of course, you can call yourself anything you want, but if I call you a snob, it won’t be a complement.