“Wired Endorses Optimism”

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“Right now we see two possible futures welling up in the present. In one, society’s every decision is dominated by scarcity. Except for a few oligarchs, nobody has enough of anything. In that future, we build literal and figurative walls to keep out those who hope to acquire our stuff, while through guile or violence we try to acquire theirs.”

Through five election cycles WIRED has written about politics and politicians but avoided telling their readers who they viewed as the best choice. Until now.

WIRED Endorses Optimism

“The Republicans are the problem”

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“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Washington Post op-ed by Thomas E. Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Norman J. Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

People are deleting advertising from their lives

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“People are deleting advertising from their lives. Many simply don’t like or want it and now for the first time they have a choice in the matter. With the shift to streaming, the so-called ‘millennial’ has abandoned linear TV and, in turn, the ads that grace it. Higher-income consumers are more able to afford an ad-free existence by paying subscriptions for ad-free service experiences such as YouTube Red, Hulu+, or Spotify. This further erodes the pool of young, upwardly-mobile consumers that the ad industry so covets. In the future, only older, poorer people will experience advertising.”

And those ads you “see” online?

“A display ad is considered as ‘viewed by the visitor’ if “at least 50% of its pixels were displayed on the visitor’s browser for at least one continuous second.”

The Ad Industry’s Existential Crisis

50th high school class reunion

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In a few weeks I’ll make the five hour drive to the little town where I grew up for the 50 year reunion of the Kennett High School Class of 1966. I attended the 10 year reunion and vowed I’d never go to another. And didn’t. But there’s a strange (morbid?) appeal to the 50th. Like stumbling across the finish line of a marathon, throwing up and crapping your pants, yet elated to have completed the race.

I suppose this qualifies as a “right of passage,” and there won’t be that many more. Of the approximately 150 people in our class, 33 (22%) have been called to the office of The Great Principal’s Office in the Sky.

I’ve been fantasizing ways to make this event more fun: A prize for the most marriages/divorces? A little trophy for most number of times arrested/years served? Or a plaque for Best (and Worst) Cosmetic Surgery?

I’m not on Facebook so I have not kept up with most of my classmates. I don’t remember much about the 10 year reunion. I think that is the one where you show off your second/trophy wife and hand out business cards with titles of success. Those vanities will, I’m sure, have faded. Replaced by… what? The unspoken reality that this is the last time we’ll see most of these people. A bon voyage party for the Great Beyond.