Idle Time

San Francisco is notorious for forgoing air conditioning in most homes, since we ostensibly “don’t need it”. But the climate emergency is rapidly changing that, and as I write this, it’s powerful hot out there.

In previous years, we’ve been able to go to malls and movie theaters and other air-conditioned venues to cool off. But being in any such building is a risk now due to the pandemic, and going outside at all may not be an attractive prospect due to wildfire smoke.

So, from my experience cooling myself off in multiple pre-AC ways, here are some ways to keep cool at home without air conditioning.

• Drink water. Even straight-from-the-tap is better than nothing—remaining hydrated will help you self-cool.
• If your fridge doesn’t have a cold water tap, put another glass of water in the fridge. When your current glass runs dry, refill it and swap it with the one in the fridge.
• Take a shower or bath. It’ll wash the sweat off and the water will help cool you—as will the air over your wet skin when you get out.
• Point a fan at yourself and spray yourself with water from a spray bottle. This is essentially a manual swamp-cooler. The water will help conduct heat out of you into the wind, and the water’s evaporation from your skin will cool you further.

The person who invented the word “doomscrolling” deserves a Nobel Prize for Literature.

Twitter, at least the way I’d been using it up to now, which I think is coincidentally in broad alignment with how Twitter wants to be used, is two things at once: Both a social network, and a news site.

Its news function, particularly when viewed through a third-party client not subject to Twitter’s injection of hot garbage into the web client’s timeline, consists of curating one’s news intake by following people who retweet the news you want to see. Some, but not necessarily all, of these people may be your actual friends; at any rate, the two almost inevitably mix, as your friends may retweet what you have retweeted and vice versa.

Thus, the place where you hang out with (at least internet) friends becomes the place where you learn what’s going on in the world, and vice versa. Whereupon you can no longer have one without the other—at least, not without ditching Twitter and replacing it with something without that mixing.

Friday morning, I woke up in a peaceful, energized mood, and proceeded to begin my day, like every day before it for the past decade-plus, by reading Twitter.

After half an hour of that, I was too depressed to do anything but hold down my couch for most of the day. Well, that and read more Twitter.

I did basically nothing all of Friday. Like most days before it.

My greatest achievement that Friday was noticing the clear contrast between my mood upon waking up and my mood after looking at even a little Twitter. Whereupon I made a resolution.

Since Saturday, I have hardly looked at Twitter at all. When I have done so, it has been with a Tweetbot filter turned on that blocks all retweets, so I only see original tweets by the people I follow.

The filter helps a little bit, but the mixing is unavoidable; when people aren’t retweeting, they’re quote-tweeting, or subtweeting, or commenting, or venting.

And so my Twitter exposure lasts for only a few minutes at a time now. There isn’t as much there without taking an unfiltered look at the fresh horrors device, and I know what happens when I do that.

As the world (and the United States in particular) has been descending into fascism and climate crisis and long-overdue reckoning with a lot of things that a lot of us have ignored or accepted for far too long, the news on my timeline has gotten more and more captivating in the wrong ways.

This isn’t a new problem; it’s been true for years, even before the 2016 election. But it has gotten worse over time.

Often, I would spend most of the day reading Twitter. Lately, when I had my fill of Twitter—or ran out by hitting the top of the timeline—I would simply lie on my couch, unable to do anything.

How did I spend that time of doing nothing? Thinking. Thinking about the problems in the world; thinking about how I, or we, might solve them.

Not actually doing anything in such a direction. Just thinking about it.

One of my catchphrases is “awareness is not a substitute for action”.

Twitter makes it possible to be very aware of things that we do need people to be aware of. But it is possible to be too aware; to fall into “staying aware” by doomscrolling, or “raising awareness” by retweeting, QTing, etc., and never get around to actually doing anything.

We must be aware, but we must also do something about it.

In the past two days, as I have looked at Twitter for maybe a total of two hours (as compared to my previous daily average of… most of the day), I have had so much more energy to do things.

Much of this has been long-neglected tasks around the home. I’ve done two loads of laundry; put some things away; made some mask pieces. I’ve also made progress in reading a couple of books.

But also, I’ve had more energy for the political activism that has been my focus for a few years now. I can do things more than I’ve been able to do for a long time.

Looking away from Twitter is an immediate remedy, but creates a longer-term problem.

Twitter had been my main news source. “How do you stay so well-informed”, people would ask me, and I’d apologetically tell them that I spend way too much time reading a well-curated and completely irreplicable Twitter timeline, and that I absolutely do not recommend trying to get your news the same way I do.

(Which is completely, seriously true, and not just for doomscrolling reasons. There’s a lot of bullshit out there, from the factually untrue to the misleading to the technically-factual-but-incendiary-instead-of-actionable, which I have experience spotting and rejecting/avoiding and a lot of people do not. Getting your news from social media is highly inadvisable without it.)

Awareness is not a substitute for action, but action requires some awareness in order to not just be dancing in a void. Action is often reaction, which means knowing what’s happened to react to.

I have ideas. Maybe I’ll check NPR’s front page on some schedule. Maybe I’ll check Google News. Maybe I’ll just have to trust that people I work with who have stayed plugged into the news, or the occasional glance at my (retweet-free) Twitter timeline, will fulfill my need for some awareness without overloading or depressing me into inaction.

One way or another, in the meantime, I’m happy to be doing stuff.

I’ve been pretty quiet on Twitter since I stopped reading it, but I may actually start posting more, as I start doing more things worth posting about. Masks and other projects; things I’ve made; some political actions; nail polish.

I have long been intentional in what I tweet and retweet, especially about the sociopolitical. I try to keep things actionable, not contribute to people’s rivers of mood slime. I also try to uplift wins, to highlight the achievability thereof. That will likely not change, though I will probably be retweeting much less simply because I won’t be coming across things I would retweet in my timeline.

So you may see more tweets, and will definitely see fewer retweets. I’ll still be reading my mentions and occasionally replying to tweets I do see. I don’t think I’m leaving Twitter entirely, at least not yet—but my approach to it has already changed and I like the change a lot.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes.

There’s a pernicious, though well-meaning, sort of mindset around “raising awareness” of various evils in the world.

The idea—such as it is—is that it’s vitally important to raise as much awareness as possible of whichever evil, and important as an individual to “stay informed”, which is to say, tuned into some daily dosage of news coverage.

I have a couple of problems with this.

First off, moment-to-moment news coverage, such as you typically see on TV/radio, on most news websites and newspapers, and indeed in all major news outlets regardless of medium, is extremely bad for actually being informed.

Moment-to-moment (often, but not necessarily, “breaking”) news coverage only tells you what just happened. This is insufficient in three ways:

• what: but without much delving into who (or who else, or who didn’t) or when (or when else, or when it didn’t)
• just: only the most recent event/act, with little to no history
• happened: agency may be subtracted or actively denied (language such as “officer-involved shooting”, as well as more generally reporting on events rather than acts)

Truly informative coverage provides history, context, and depth—the sort of information that requires time and work and knowledge to assemble into a coherent and informative story.

Moreover, “staying informed” is only beneficial as a means to an end.

The opening cutscene to “Watch_Dogs 2” bothers me particularly because of this. The player character describes a system of corporate-administered mass surveillance—a system whose name is emblazoned on numerous hackable in-game objects, at least for the player’s convenience but seemingly diegetically as well—and concludes that the hacker group he belongs to, DedSec, needs to expose this system, its nature, and its ramifications to the world.

The problem I have is: That’s a start.

Playing that game in 2019*, I felt like there would’ve been at least four news articles about the fictional system in question already. One in WaPo, one in ProPublica, two in Reason magazine, and assorted reblogs and other coverage on Boing Boing, HuffPo, and various other sites. Plus innumerable tweets and Facebook posts.

And yet the system persists.

It persists because everyone is vaguely aware of it already—it’s directly involved in their lives; part of the problem is that they functionally can’t escape it—and they have accepted it.

Dig into the ramifications of such a system—enabling discrimination; enabling unwanted disclosure/privacy violation; etc.—and most people will go “Wow. Sure hope that never happens to me.”.

We are trained—mostly by news media themselves, passively, as a side effect of how stories are selected, reported, packaged, and delivered—to regard news coverage as spectacle. That thing happened, over there, apart from you, apart from your life. It happened without you, and so you have no influence upon it.

I haven’t played far enough into “Watch_Dogs 2”’s main plot to know whether this spoils a twist or not, but I feel like if it happened in real life (arguably it has; the game’s reflections of its inspirations are not subtle), the consequence to DedSec blowing the lid off the story and revealing ctOS’s true nature to the world would be a worldwide collective shrug.

Not just because that particular story is about a computer system and most people’s eyes immediately glaze over when you start talking computer shit, but because it is a part of their lives already, and such an exposé, with the implication that the system being exposed is bad, in turn implies that a part of their lives is bad.

For each individual person, the response to this is as follows:

• Wow. So what can I, individually, do about it?
• Well, I need to be in this system to get hired, to pass credit checks, to rent an apartment, etc. So, I can’t opt out of it, even if such a thing were theoretically possible. And I cannot personally destroy it, even though I wish it didn’t exist.
• So… nothing. I shall do nothing.

So, what did that exposé accomplish?

Here in 2020, look at the mask thing. It’s so hard to get people to understand that even a mask that only protects other people protects everyone when everyone wears them. Americans don’t grasp collective action and the importance of it.

We really need to fix that. We need to start to see ourselves as part of a society, able to take actions that affect more of that society than just ourselves and able to choose actions that improve rather than harm.

We can’t just stop at awareness forever. It’s exhausting to be aware of problems and just watch them happen. We need to choose some subset of the problems and take action, and encourage others to take action along with us.

As long as we do nothing, nothing will continue to be done, and we’ll all be very aware as it happens.

*It’s now 2020 and I still haven’t finished it. I got distracted by side missions and driving around the fictionalized version of the City. And now there’s a pandemic, so “Watch_Dogs 2” has become the Going Outside In The Before Times Simulator.

As some of you know, I used to have long hair—down to my waist, kept in a ponytail. I’ve gone back and forth a couple times; currently I have short hair.

The ability to maintain short hair is kind of hard to come by right now, which is hard on people who are not used to growing/were not intending to grow their hair out.

There are a couple of solutions to that. One is to acquire a hair-clipper, even if it takes you awhile, and teach yourself how to use it, almost certainly with some hair-styling fails along the way. (There is nothing wrong with this; “sucking at something is the first step to being sort of good at something”, and you can consider this the cultivation of a skill that you will then have available to you for the rest of your life.)

This post is about the other solution.

Hair is a set of trade-offs. Short hair chooses one set; long hair chooses its complement.

One of the best parts of long hair is not having to do anything to it. It just grows, and doesn’t need my help to do that. No regular visits to the barbershop, no having to mow my own head every few weeks. All I need to do is wash it.

On washing it: Yes, the shampoo consumption rate difference is real. As your hair grows longer, the amount of shampoo needed to wash it—and the amount of water needed to both wash and rinse it—will increase. Part of why I’m keeping up my short hair is to make my shampoo supplies last longer; if I didn’t have my hair-clipper, I might have gone back to long, and would see my shampoo consumption just starting to tick up about now.

Styling short hair consists of how you cut it—that is, how short you cut the various sections of it (front, sides, back). There’s also how you part it if the top is long enough for that, bangs/fringe, etc. Styling long hair consists of shaping it or putting things in it. I kept my long hair in a ponytail, which meant I used a ponytail band.

Cleanliness is an underappreciated benefit of short hair. All hair naturally falls out after a certain amount of time; coupled with growth rate, that means hair typically falls out at a certain length. That length is the maximum length you can grow your hair out to. It is also the length of the innumerable fallen hairs you will find on the carpet and on random things all the time, and for years after you switch (back) to short hair—I still find random long hairs occasionally, and I’ve had short hair for over a year now.

Growing your hair long happens in multiple phases.

Phase 0 is when it isn’t long yet—it’s still short, maybe out to a few inches at most.

Phase 1 is when, if maintaining short hair, you’d consider yourself overdue for a haircut.

Phase 2 is the worst part. This is when it is definitely no longer short but isn’t long enough to put into a ponytail. It hangs in front of your eyes, gets in front of your face, and is generally messy for a period of months. (This is the point at which I start wearing bobby pins above the corners of my face to keep my hair out of it.)

Phase 3 is when the hair gets long enough that you can put it into a ponytail or—after even more time—a braid.

Hair is different from one person to the next.

What everyone knows is that hair comes in different shapes. From straight, flat hair to waves to loose curls to really tight curls. My hair is naturally straight with subtle waves, so that’s where my experience is. Different shapes require different techniques, and your hair may require tools and techniques that I can’t speak to.

Less well-known is that hair also comes in different thicknesses. My hair is really thick, which is why I’ve never been able to braid it. (Or at least that’s what I blame it on.) Some people’s hair is really thin. It’s a spectrum.

There are some things you should buy while your hair is growing out (in addition to the 55-gallon drum of shampoo).

One is bobby pins. They come in different colors to match your hair; find yours and buy a big pack of it. You will lose them, and sometimes the paint wears off or a pin looses up and loses its grip.

You’ll also need a hairbrush. I recommend the Wet Brush; where most brushes get a lot harder to use on wet hair, the Wet Brush actually works more easily on wet hair.

Relatedly, buy a metal comb with widely-spaced teeth. Use this to pull hair out of your brush. Throw the clumps of hair in the compost or garbage.

Lastly, buy some ponytail bands (also called “hair elastics” but that’s a more general term). These come in different colors (including both hair colors and decorative colors), thicknesses, and cross-sectional shapes (round or flat). I buy flat black ponytail bands in packs of 15 at the dollar store, and Daiso has some neat round ones that have an ornament on them, which are a fun way to accessorize your ponytail once you have one.

Bobby pins, brushes, and ponytail bands are all consumables. I already mentioned how bobby pins wear out and become trash. Brushes lose detangling effectiveness and eventually start losing bristles; ponytail bands lose elasticity. You will need to replace your brush periodically, and you will need to replace your ponytail bands regularly.

Oh, one more thing: a metal wire brush for sweeping up fallen hairs from the carpet. Way easier to pick hairballs out of this than off of a vacuum roller. Trust me.

One thing that becomes important as hair grows out is its texture.

Hair is not a perfectly smooth cylinder; it is, essentially, barbed. These barbs will catch on each other, tying your hair in knots. These knots will happen, and you will have to remove them.

First, use shampoo with conditioner. Conditioner smooths out the barbs and makes hair less likely to tangle. I’ve always just used Pert Plus but some people prefer to use a separate shampoo and conditioner. You might also look into “dry shampoo”, which I’ve never tried but some people swear by. Use whatever works for you, and consider changing it up and finding a new favorite that may be more suitable for your long hair.

Second, brush your hair every day. (Put your comb away. Once you get to Phase 2, you won’t need it, unless you have a beard and you comb that.) If you skip a day, you will regret it. Brush it every day. If you have a Wet Brush, you can do this right after you get out of the shower, or even in the shower.

Third, sooner or later, a knot will happen. Usually you’ll find it with the brush. If the brush doesn’t pull it apart, you’ll have to do it yourself. Sometimes you can (and might need to) pull it apart piecemeal, pulling small sections of your hair out of the knot at a time; even then, you might just be working to the point where you can tear the knot open by brute force. You will develop a particular kind of strength, doing this. One way or another, the knot—or pieces of it—will come out, and you’ll throw the hair away in the compost or regular garbage.

There are flat ponytail bands that have a grippy coating on one side. These are a scam; the grip layer does nothing but act as a pivot point, and the band immediately tips over to the non-grippy side.

To put on a ponytail band, you will need hair that is sufficiently long—at least down to your lower neck/shoulders—and freshly brushed.

I’m right-handed, so the following instructions are written accordingly. Swap left and right if you’re left-handed.

1. Put the band on your left hand, holding it taut around all of that hand’s fingers, or all but the pinky.
2. Gather up your hair, at the base of your neck, into your right hand.
3. With your left hand, grasp the bundle of hair. (You’re now holding your hair in both hands, one of which has a ponytail band stretched around its fingers.)
4. Take your right hand off of your hair and pick up the band where it’s over your left fingers. Hold onto the band with your right fingers. Pull your hair through the band with your left hand, which will pull the band off your left hand and fully onto/around your hair.
5. Still holding your hair in your left hand and the band in your right fingers, use your right fingers to put one twist in the band. Add your right thumb inside the band, and use your right index finger and thumb to expand the side of the band that has no hair in it until the twist is in the middle of the band and the band has one side with hair in it and one side without.
6. Use your right index finger and thumb to grasp the hair just below where the band is around it. With your left hand, let go of the hair and pick up the band, and pull the hair through a second time.

You now have a double-banded ponytail.

This month, I did something I once thought I would never do.

My whole adult life, I have been what’s known as a “no party preference” or NPP voter. (Sometimes called “independent”, but this is ambiguous as there is a party called the American Independent Party, and they are very much not centrist or big-tent.)

Largely this has been because I don’t like political parties. And I still don’t. In theory, they’re money and resource pools for candidates to draw on; in practice, we often see them working against insurgent candidates who are proposing change. I’d much rather have campaign finance restricted to some equal share of a publicly-funded pool, with strict laws and even stricter enforcement. (Yes, I know there are risks there, too. There are no perfect solutions.)

I also have always held a somewhat idealistic openness toward third parties, largely as a result of all of the shitty things that politicians of both major parties and the parties themselves have done—some credible competition might help keep them honest.

But now?

On top of the significant difference between the two major parties these days, there is also some realpolitik involved.

For one, I’ve accepted the fact that as long as we have a first-past-the-post voting system, our elections will always tend toward two polar parties, with all the other parties and all the candidates and voters arrayed around them like iron filings around a bar magnet. Ranked-choice voting is a prerequisite (but not the only step by any means) to dismantling the two-party binary. And until we get there, power resides with the two major parties and power must be won and wielded to make change.

But more immediately, the current election in California, which started this month and ends March 3rd, is not only a primary—it’s also used by various Democratic Central Committees (county party organizations, basically) to elect their board members.

As a NPP voter, the Democratic Party in California would let me vote in their Presidential primary—this is called requesting a crossover ballot, and it’s done through the same form through which you request a vote-by-mail ballot. You then get a ballot for NPP voters that includes the Democratic Presidential primary.

But a NPP voter cannot vote in their county’s DCCC election. That’s for registered Democrats only.

So that’s what pushed me over the edge. In San Francisco, we have two roughly-defined slates of candidates running, one formed of current and former elected officials looking to transition from holding power in state or City government to holding power in the county Party, and the other a slate of activists who want the Party to drive progressive change.

One of those Democratic Parties sounds a lot better to me—and I want to cast my vote accordingly.

As I mentioned, the election has already begun—I had already received my crossover ballot when I made the decision. I emailed the SF Department of Elections and got confirmation that once I re-register (and check the box to receive mail-in ballots, same as I did last time), a new ballot would automatically be sent to me. So I did the thing, got my new ballot, and will discard my crossover ballot.

(If you want to do this, the deadline to register and get a Democratic mail-in ballot was February 18 here in California, but you can do Conditional Voter Registration at any polling place/voting center in your county. If you’re in another state, check with your Secretary of State or county Department of Elections.)

While playing D&D, I wondered: Is there any difference between rolling 1d8×2 (that is, rolling exactly one d8 and multiplying the result by 2) and rolling 2d8 (that is, rolling exactly two d8s and not modifying the result)?

(For those who don’t know, a d8 is an eight-sided die. A six-sided die is a d6; the 20-sided die is the d20; and so on. In D&D, the d20 is used to check whether something succeeds, and other dice such as d4s, d6s, d8s, and d10s are used to measure damage dealt or occasionally to pick a random one of a small pool of (possibly unknown) choices.)

The intuitive answer is no, they’re equivalent. As is typical in statistics and probability, the intuitive answer is wrong.

I wrote a Python script to simulate 10,000 dice rolls, store the natural results of those rolls for later measurement, and then use them to graph out the results of as many of the requested roll as possible. You tell it something like “1d8x2”, “2d8”, or “1d8x2+4”, and it prints out a histogram of how many times each total result came up.

With 1d8, the distribution tends toward uniform (I used Python’s `random.choice`, which is based on `random.uniform`):

1d8×2 uses exactly the same rolls and simply multiplies the total of the natural rolls, so it produces exactly the same histogram, except distributed over 2–16 (stepping by 2) instead of 1–8:

2d8, however, changes the distribution dramatically:

If this is a damage roll (the moment that inspired this experiment was when I landed a critical hit), 1d8x2 means you’re equally likely to do any amount of damage, including both the minimum and the maximum, whereas 2d8 not only doubles the range (from 1–8 to 2–16), it also makes the lower end of that range much less likely, and makes the high end of the original range (the middle of the new range) the most likely.

There is another aspect to the question of whether to double the result or roll the dice twice, and that’s what does the Player’s Handbook (or equivalent if you’re playing something other than D&D) say?

The D&D 5.0 Player’s Handbook says:

When you score a critical hit, you get to roll extra dice for the attack’s damage against the target. Roll all of the attack’s damage dice twice and add them together. Then add any relevant modifiers as normal. To speed up play, you can roll all the damage dice at once.

For example, if you score a critical hit with a dagger, roll 2d4 for the damage, rather than 1d4, and then add your relevant ability modifier. If the attack involves other damage dice, such as from the rogue’s Sneak Attack feature, you roll those dice twice as well.

So the 5e Player’s Handbook makes crystal-clear that, in the circumstance that inspired this experiment, 2d8 is the correct roll. Fortunately, that’s what I did—but now I can be more certain of that going forward, partly because now I understand why.

TL;DR: It’s $25 (not including case); it’s good; you should get one and set up Pi-Hole on it.

Quick history recap:

When the first Raspberry Pi was introduced, it came in models A and B. Initially, the only differences were Ethernet (the B had it; the A didn’t), USB (the B had two USB ports; the A had only one), and RAM (the A had half as much).

Later, they introduced the B+, with more GPIO (general-purpose input/output) pins.

Then they introduced the A+, with all the guts of the Model A, and the larger GPIO pinout—but on a smaller board, over 20 mm shorter on the board’s longer dimension. (The A+ is still not quite square, but it’s a lot closer.)

Both of the original A models, however, suffered a big drawback over the B and B+: No networking.

On a B or B+ board, you could plug in hard Ethernet, or use your other USB port to plug in a Wi-Fi dongle. No contention with your USB keyboard and mouse (or Bluetooth dongle). On an A or A+ board, with no Ethernet and only one USB port, you had to choose between your input devices and a network connection—or else add an external USB hub, at which point you might as well just get a B+ in the first place.

The second generation skipped having any sort of Model A entirely. There was only the Model B.

The third generation was the first to have built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Like the second generation, it debuted as only a Model B, which supported only 2 GHz Wi-Fi (no 5 GHz). Two years later, that was succeeded by the third-generation B+, now supporting 5 GHz Wi-Fi.

The B+ was followed a few months later by the return of the Model A+.

The Pi 3 Model A+, like the original A+, has half the RAM of its bigger sibling, only one USB port, and no hard Ethernet. But, it has the Bluetooth and dual-band Wi-Fi support of the third-gen B+.

Previously, you basically needed a B+ to do anything networked, including software updates, without having to add an external USB hub. Now, an A+ alone is perfectly sufficient for most Raspberry Pi applications, especially those that treat the Pi as a server.

My Model A+ is my Pi-Hole.

Bonus question: Why did I choose 185?

Pi-Hole is a DNS-based content blocker. You set it as your router’s DNS server, and point the Pi-Hole at your real (ISP) DNS server, and the Pi-Hole will filter all DNS requests from clients on your network, screening out requests to advertising and tracking servers.

It’s similar to a variety of hosts files (I’ve used the WinHelp2002 hosts file for years) that route the known names of such servers to the null address, but unlike setting up a hosts file (which has to be done per machine), the Pi-Hole benefits every device on your network, including mobile phones and tablets.

Pi-Hole is open-source software. You install it on your Raspbian card by running a shell script on the Pi. The setup process is relatively painless and can be done in textmode (I used the Lite version of Raspbian, which omits the GUI; it’s textmode-only).

You do need a sufficiently advanced router to be able to set the router’s DNS IP addresses (if your router came from your ISP, it may be locked down to not provide this option), as well as to assign a fixed IP address to a particular MAC address (that of your Pi).

The default configuration of Pi-Hole maintains a local log and database of requests, both for your own perusal and for the software’s own cache. You can turn this off, and I did, but (as Bill Bumgarner suggested) you should also get a high-endurance microSD card, so that it’ll take longer for any logging—including the system’s—to wear out the card. You can get the smallest capacity available; Pi-Hole doesn’t take up much space.

The Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ is the perfect Pi-Hole machine, and also likely to be a good option for many other Raspberry Pi applications. It’s $25, which is $10 cheaper than the B+. You should probably also get a case, such as the official one, to keep the dust off your board.

Shopping list

Here’s what you’ll need to run a Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+:

• Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ (also available at Micro Center, though not online)
• Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ case (also available at Micro Center)
• A USB micro-B cable (like this one, though I use one from Daiso) and a USB charger dishing up 5W or more (like this one)
• A microSD card, preferably a high-endurance variety (like this one)
• Raspbian; the Lite (no GUI) version will do
• A USB keyboard (like this one)
  • You’ll also need a mouse, trackball, or trackpad if you use a GUI version of Raspbian. The keyboard I linked to is a combination keyboard and trackpad, so it covers both needs.
• A monitor, TV, or projector that can receive HDMI input, and an HDMI cable (full-size HDMI, not mini or micro)

Pi-Hole specific notes

If you’re setting up your Pi as a Pi-Hole, you’ll only need the keyboard and monitor for setup. You shouldn’t need to interact with the Pi again once it’s set up and working.

You should also dig up (or download if possible) your Wi-Fi router’s manual, and the IP address and admin credentials you’ll need to use to administer it. If your router doesn’t let you change DNS servers, you may need a newer/fancier one, like this one.

I assign my Pi its static IP address on the router (by setting the router to always assign that IP address to my Pi’s MAC address). My router has this under its DHCP settings as “Address Reservation”. Your router may call this something different, or it may not have this feature; the Pi can also be configured to request a static IP address, though I have not tried these steps.

UPDATE 2020-01-03: Added the shopping list and Pi-Hole set-up notes.

(This isn’t a particularly cheerful or hopeful or actionable post. It is a rumination on society, and one of its present negative trajectories.)

We’ve had a reasonable debate over the right to be forgotten. The next one will be about the right to lie. Not the right to lie in court or as part of some fraud, but the right to everyday lies and white lies. Digital surveillance deprives [us] of this important part of life.

For whatever reason, I might be ashamed or shy about my age/looks/past/job/health/sexual preferences/race/ethnicity/beliefs/political views/abilities/education/family history etc. It’s valid to lie about such in everyday life. Tracking and ML should not interfere with that right.

— John Wilander, 2019-12-24

We often treat records, such as government records, as authoritative or definitive—reflecting, even to the point of creating, reality or truth. Want to know something? No need to ask the person(s) involved; just look up the record.

This practice and the mindset underneath it is commonplace for a wide range of records, including anodyne ones such as birth certificates and loan records.

Now, as anyone who’s had to correct a birth certificate or clean up a fraud-riddled credit report can attest, treating a record as definitively equal to truth can present some pretty tall barriers to fixing a discrepancy between the two. It involves asserting that there is a truth not created/confirmed by the record, demonstrating that the record is wrong, and convincing the authority who maintains that record to revise it to match reality.

Surveillance isn’t just the act of watching someone, or everyone. Indeed, in the modern era, mass surveillance doesn’t involve any individual person or persons watching anyone at all—it’s the bulk collection of phone call records, voter registrations, addresses from credit card purchases, all this data that is created whenever we interact with any kind of system. Hoover it up, save it somewhere—and you have a surveillance system. A system that creates records of what it observes.

As with classical surveillance, there is a problem here of “but what if they get it wrong?”: Records erroneously merged, data entry errors, people named “Null” who break poorly-implemented checks and comparisons. In modern mass surveillance, rather than there being a human surveillant misinterpreting your intent or mischaracterizing your actions, it is the bare facts of your life and your actions that get misrecorded. Less “surveillant thinks you’re having an affair” and more “surveillant thinks you have more children than you have” or “surveillant got your birthdate wrong”.

But the problem is not merely the accuracy of the record. It is the authoritativeness of the record. It is treating the record as an infallible determinant of truth, rather than a fallible artifact of an observation.

When we try to automatically verify someone’s identity using whatever scraps of information they’ve given us, or to let them board a plane with their face, we treat the data we have on someone as being necessarily, implicitly the same as their actual truth. We assume/trust/bet that the data we have matches the truth; that they are the same as each other, and therefore the record can tell us the truth.

When we make this bold leap into the concrete wall of bad assumptions, we create the sort of dystopia in which you can’t sign up for Hold Mail because “identity verification” just mysteriously fails. We create systems that reject objective reality and substitute their own.

We create systems that seize authorship over reality, and over our own personal truths.

That is an even greater crime of surveillance, even more than knowing too much about you/everyone, or than the risk of there being inaccuracies in the record (both of which are also severe problems).

When Wilander talks, in the tweets I quoted, about the freedom to lie about yourself, Wilander is talking about authorship of your reality. Authority over your reality.

That is: self-determination.

The freedom to lie about yourself is the freedom to tell the truth about yourself. It is the same freedom, the freedom to tell your story as you see fit, and as much as you see fit, and as accurately as you see fit. It is your exercise of your power to determine yourself, and present yourself, and determine how (and whether) to present yourself.

It is your ownership of your truth.

A system that creates records, definitive records, that other subsystems and other systems treat as the truth, and that those other systems query directly without asking us, seizes ownership over our truths away from us.

That’s dangerous enough without introducing malice into such a system. We see that now, when the system gets it wrong, when the record is inaccurate, when we have to spend our precious time and energy trying to find a real, live human being like us who (a) will believe the system got it wrong, (b) has the power to fix the record, and (c) will do so.

But when we think of surveillance, when we warn of surveillance, we are already thinking about malice—the state (or corporations, or both) acting against us.

No wonder that some of us are scared of a mass-surveillance society that has the power to write our reality without us, and confirm that (maybe-parallel) reality behind our backs, and maybe turn that reality into consequences for us ranging from inconvenient (can’t sign up for Hold Mail) to hostile (false arrest). It’s bad enough when it’s trying to help us but not always succeeding; it would be a true dystopia if (or when) it is turned truly against us.

The only record that cannot leak—or in any other way be used against you—is one that is not kept, is not recorded. But this fact becomes irrelevant in the face of malice; a system that chooses to write its records regardless of your reality, or to override your reality with the contents of its records, does not care about recording truth; it has assumed the role of defining truth, and your own truth outside of that system ceases to matter.

To guard against that is to resist surveillance in all forms, malicious and not.

Back in the present, our system of mass-surveillance/data-brokerage/(whatever facet you want to look at) is one that promises convenience. It promises to enable its users, its querents, to learn (or verify) information about a subject without their involvement (which implies without their consent). It promises to enable the construction of other systems, automated themselves, to fulfill the function of querent, to ask the questions about us that the record-keeping system promises to be able to answer.

It promises to obsolete us.

You are no more than a record to be verified and/or updated and expanded. You are not a customer, who has wants and needs and a real life that the record may or may not match; you are not an employee interacting with that customer; you are not a manager responsible for any of this. You are a card in a Rolodex and you do not hold the Sharpie.

The automation of so much of this—of identity verification, credit checks, checking out at the grocery, checking in at the airport—is, I think, part and parcel with the rise of mass surveillance. The more data we assemble on everyone, the more we can automate. And the automated systems feed data back, and contribute more.

I think the opposite of mass surveillance is also the opposite of automation. It is a focus on people, real people in the really-real world, as human beings with lives who are not the same as, nor defined by, a record. It is the awareness that the map is not the territory and the record is not the person. It is the recognition that we cannot automate our society away, because our society is us; it is made of us, by us, for us, and giving all of it over to automated systems means leaving none of it for ourselves.

That said… I have no idea how we’re gonna get there.

But I think lying to surveillance systems might have to be part of the short-term effort.

P.S.: I should say, I’m not 100% anti-automation. I think there are things that could be automated in ways that make us all better off. But we’re gonna have to be suspicious, and ask hard questions about whether any automation technology liberates us, or pushes us out of our own society—and, whenever possible, how we can ensure the former and not the latter.

P.P.S.: The day after I posted this, former Googler (fired for organizing) Laurence Berland wrote a thread, commenting on excerpts from a WaPo article, about a student-surveillance system for universities named “SpotterEDU”. One of the (many) problems with the system has been erroneous reports of lateness or absence—and the school taking the surveillance system’s side.

Of note, the mindset behind the development and deployment of the SpotterEDU system appears to be adversarial: assuming that students will flake out, lie about their attendance, make bogus excuses, etc. unless their movements are tracked at all times. That is to say, the system makes its (fallible, not-always-accurate) records of students’ locations without regard for the truth of the students’ accounts, because the system positions itself as the sole determiner of truth.

I’ve enjoyed “Factorio”, but find it hard to progress in the campaign because it quickly bogs down in militarized colonization: the game turns, from one level to the next, from the fun part of Building Stuff to the much-less-fun task of having to defend that stuff against the “aliens” (lol) who are native to the planet you’re colonizing.

I spent some time thinking about how one might make a game essentially like “Factorio”, but more ecologically-aware, anti-colonization/anti-colonialist, and anti-militarization.

• You land with enough resources to build a small, self-sufficient colony with recycling, composting, and subsistence farming. As in “Factorio”, it’s an emergency landing; this is basically your survival tent. You didn’t come here to colonize, but now you’re here and you have to survive.
• Buuuut, your long-range radio broke, so now you need to pursue one of two goals: Build enough of a tech tree to build a replacement long-range radio so you can summon help, or build a much taller tech tree so you can repair your vessel and escape on your own.
• You can mine/harvest to expand, but doing so risks disturbing the wildlife (and, since you aren’t bringing in colonists, you don’t have much motivation to expand beyond your needs).
• You can protect your resource extraction sites (and the colony itself) with fences or moats, which cost acquired resources (moats require water outside of your drinking supply, whether by diverting existing geological water features or by pumping from wells or collecting rainwater).
• On a related note, there should be a water cycle and rain barrels.
• The deeper tech tree to escape on one’s own requires deeper invasion of the surrounding territory and extraction of resources (such as unobtainium to power the ship’s propulsion), reflecting the devastation wrought by pursuing solo achievement or solo subsistence while pretending that there’s no such thing as societal support.
• Inversely, the shallower tech tree for summoning help reflects how we can achieve great things more easily, and better respect and protect the environment we live in, when we work together in mutual aid.

I’ve never made a “Factorio” mod (and don’t have the time or inclination to do so), so I don’t know how much of this is possible within that game’s engine and how much would require a whole new game. If you have the ability and the will to make this a reality, please do so and let me and the rest of the world know how it goes!

I’m leaving the Fruit Company. My last day is August 17.

I don’t have anything else lined up yet. My immediate plan is a period of funemployment, including a trip back home to SoCal for a bit. Then, I’ll return to San Francisco, and look to begin my next chapter.

I’ll be forever grateful for the past four years. My life has changed in more ways than I can count, and I’ve made so many new friends, and done great work and learned a lot. And San Francisco is my adopted home—there is no feeling quite like returning here after being anywhere else.

I don’t know what’s next, but I’m excited to find out.

Wonder Clips are a particular kind of clip used for clamping fabrics—especially leather and vinyl, for which pins are inappropriate—to be sewn. I have a box of 50 Wonder Clips that I use for most projects.

One of the features of Wonder Clips (compared to, say, clothespins) is markings on each clip at several depths, so you can use how much of the piece is in the clip’s mouth to measure the seam allowance at each clip. The packaging includes a quick reference:

I scanned this in and converted it to black and white, and also made a printable version for Avery 5444 labels. 5444 is a 4×6″ sheet that should work in most printers; that PDF will produce two seam-allowance reference labels of just the right size to be applied to the top of the 50-count Wonder Clips box.

I’ve been thinking a lot about political rhetoric here in the US, and one thing I’ve identified in it is a dichotomy, or maybe a spectrum, between poles of Scarcity and Plenty.

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If you own a wrist brace, but feel like it’s missing a certain something:

Like the fins from Batman’s gloves!

here’s how you can add that to your wrist brace.

You’ll need:

• A sewing machine
• Black thread (polyester is fine)
• Fabric. You’ve got lots of options, but what you need is something either innately stiff, like vinyl, or thin but stiffened by thin cardboard or stiff interfacing. I used this polyester-backed vinyl.
• Either the 3D-printed template or the 2D-printed pattern to cut out of the fabric.
• A leather sewing machine needle, if indeed you use leather or vinyl fabric or you use cardboard as interfacing
• Tailor’s chalk
• A wrist brace you can sew the fins onto (I used the Walgreens one, which has a thin stretch-fabric section that covers the appropriate spot on the arm)

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In my day job, I’m a QA (quality assurance) engineer for a Large Software Company. Today I’ll tell you how to prepare yourself to do a job like mine.

Fair warning: “QA” is a big tent; the details of a QA job vary widely, and your QA job may be very different from mine.

File bugs

(Ira Glass voice) File a lot of bugs. File a huge volume of bugs.

The ultimate responsibility of a QA team overall, and of QA engineers individually, is to produce actionable bug reports that can and do get fixed. The details vary widely, but everything comes back to that.

A good bug report says:

• what you did
• what you expected to happen
• what actually happened, and how that differed

That’s the minimum, actually. That’s the least that’s needed for a bug report to be actionable.

Ideally, a bug report should also include needed diagnostic info (such as a sysdiagnose on Apple platforms), screenshots/video if applicable—as much info as possible, at least at first, to be sorted through for the gems of info that illuminate the actual problem. As a QA engineer, providing as much of this info you can gather is Actually Your Job.

Ah, but what to file? If you’re QAing something manually, you’re looking for:

• any sort of friction (possible interface design issues)
• any sort of fault (crashes, hangs, data loss)
• anything in between (anything that did not do what you expected it to do)
• anything you don’t know what you expect it to do (can be a design/empathy-for-the-user issue)

Also test anything that had been broken before. Look for regressions (previous problem returned) or new problems (“OK, you fixed X, but now it has problem Y”).

Practice, practice, practice

For filing formal bug reports, two good ways are filing Apple developer bugs and filing bugs with open-source projects.

A few caveats re open-source:

• Many open-source projects need fixes more than they need more bug reports, so don’t be surprised if folks don’t rush to thank you for adding to the pile. Concentrate on high-value bugs (security vulnerabilities, crashes, providing desperately-needed steps to reproduce) rather than nitpicks. (Making this judgment call is itself something that’s valuable to practice.)
• Search for duplicates first. Apple actually generally likes duplicates and uses them to influence triage and prioritization decisions, but open-source projects may resent the extra scut work of duping bugs together. (Finding existing bug reports is an underrated skill that is also valuable to practice.)
• I’m a cishet white guy. Your mileage may vary a lot regarding how you and your contributions are received if you are not—anything from well-intentioned over-helpfulness (mansplaining, assumed noviceness) to outright misogyny/racism/anti-trans assholery.

Some open-source projects do code review and/or API review, which can be good practice for spotting designs that invite bugs (random example: “you’re taking a pointer but not the size of the buffer, so the API can’t check that it won’t go out of bounds”).

In that sort of setting, practice asking questions. These could be clarifying (“what does it mean if this returns nil/0?” “This is typed as a String. Are there constants, or what sort of strings should folks pass here?”) or more Socratic (“what does this API do if I pass a pointer to a buffer that’s too small? how does it detect that?”). Even if the immediate response is “that can’t happen” or “don’t do that”, established members of the community/team may back up your question with pressure to resolve the issue (“this should take a length with the buffer, or better yet return a Data”).

Lastly, volunteer for beta tests. I’ve beta-tested Flying Meat’s Acorn once or twice, and I think Panic have also solicited beta testers in the past. Beta-testing is extremely good practice for exploring an in-development product looking for friction and faults and writing up your findings.

As a beta tester, write up everything. Don’t be shy—if it looks wrong, write it up. I have sent in multiple pages of issues and you know what? That makes you worth your weight in gold. (90% of volunteer beta testers are just there for the possibility of a free license. Any developer who’s running a beta test program wants bug reports. They want them urgently—preferably while the product is still in beta.) Even if half the stuff on my list is stuff they meant to do, it’s still worth a second look if a beta tester (or more than one) objects to it, and the other half of the stuff on my list is stuff they may not want to ship with.

The QA mindset

Use your imagination. Try things you wouldn’t ordinarily. Follow the “what does that do?” impulse. Find the cold paths.

Everything that the product engineers thought of is probably really well-tested, and any issues that remain have turned into invisible corners. Your job is to remind them of the invisible corners and tell them about the things they haven’t encountered at all.

Question everything. Is that design optimal? Is the UI copy clear? Could a new user understand both? Was that actually the correct result? Was it the best result?

If you find yourself asking “What does that do?”, that can be a sign of inaccessibility to novices. Inversely, you should learn the product’s domain so you can spot things that don’t make sense in the domain. Try to develop the ability to do both: know the product’s domain and simultaneously spot barriers in the product to users entering that domain.

Be an advocate for users

Make sure the interface is accessible (overly-similar names can cause problems for dyslexic folks; reliance on color or images can cause problems for color-blind or visually-impaired folks).

Familiarize yourself with accessibility tools (on the Mac: Accessibility Inspector, everything in the Accessibility control panel, SimDaltonism) and use them on the product, and file bugs when you get stymied.

Challenge ableist/misogynistic/gender-binarist/racist/otherwise-problematic copy or artwork, using the dual justifications of “this is the right thing to do” and “not doing this is going to repel users/customers and/or cause PR trouble”.

Your QA job may vary

As I mentioned above, “QA” is a big tent. What I’ve described is an important baseline mindset and skillset to a QA engineer, but major portions of an individual QA job could be more sysadmin-oriented (e.g., administering an automated testing or CI fleet) and/or include work with specialized, company-specific internal tools that you’ll have no way to practice the use of outside of that department.

Know at least one scripting language such as Python or Ruby, whether for use in your own QA work (e.g., generating test data, filtering logs) or for working on automation systems (e.g., maintaining Python or JavaScript scripts that drive UI tests). If you’re starting from scratch (and absent any particular job-specific requirements), I’d recommend Python, which you can pick up in a few months, and from which you can learn similar languages like Ruby afterward.

Especially as more automated QA (unit testing, UI automation) becomes more the norm, I’d strongly recommend developing your system administration skills on any platforms you may end up working on. It’s been awhile since I had to start from scratch on this, so I invite you to suggest resources in the comments for learning system administration (on the Mac or otherwise) in 2017.

Each player has one spy among their opponent’s pieces.

On your own turn, you can switch out one of your opponent’s pieces for an equivalent piece in your color (e.g., black rook for white rook), then move it as one of your own. Ever after, it is one of your pieces.

Possible variants:

• Reveal your spy on your opponent’s turn instead of your own (you take their turn instead of them taking it).
• Reveal your spy on any turn.
• More than two spies.
• Unlimited spies.
• Double agents (after revealing your spy, your opponent can reveal that it was their own spy, taking the piece back, ending your control of it).
• Arbitrary-multiplier agents (revealing a double agent does not end control: a N-ple agent can always be revealed to be an N+1-ple agent).
• A requirement that you choose your spy beforehand and seal the knowledge in an envelope (rather than choosing the spy to “reveal” at any time). Open the envelope when you reveal your spy.

I don’t know enough about chess to be able to predict how well this would work, or whether anyone has thought of this before (it’s quite likely).

Last year, I took a sewing class and bought a sewing machine. Since then, I’ve taken another sewing class, bought another sewing machine, and done my first solo project: a leather dice bag, to keep my D&D dice in. (I was keeping them in the tube they came in, but it’s harder to get the dice back in than just pouring them into a bag, and it doesn’t look anywhere near as cool.)

This wasn’t the first drawstring bag I’d made; I’d done one previously at the first sewing class (there’s a whirlwind tour of operating a sewing machine and then they drop you straight into making things; it rocks), and I made a couple of prototypes from cheap muslin before I started actually sewing the leather.

This was the first time I’d worked with leather, however, and that was interesting. Leather is grippier than most fabrics, so you actually need to use a different presser foot on your sewing machine—specifically, a roller foot. Fortunately, I’d bought a no-name variety pack of presser feet off Amazon Warehouse Deals awhile back, so I had one ready to go.

This is largely going to be a photo tour; I took photos the whole way through the project. I posted the photos on Flickr and will be embedding them here.

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(Also works for spools of wire.)

• One ³⁄₈″-inner-diameter galvanized pipe cap
• One ³⁄₈″-inner-diameter 4″- or 5″-long galvanized pipe nipple
• One ³⁄₈″-inner-diameter to ¹⁄₂″-inner-diameter galvanized pipe reducer
• One ¹⁄₂″-inner-diameter coupler
• One ¹⁄₂″-inner-diameter floor flange

Screw them all together, in the reverse order, putting the cap on last after you put the spools onto the pipe.

Left: My solder spindle built from the above recipe. This is with the 5″ pipe nipple.
Right: My wire spindle, built using ¹⁄₂″-inner-diameter all the way down, which it turns out is too big for one of the solder spools. (It was the first draft; the final spindle on the left is the second iteration.)

I bought the Make: Getting Started with Soldering Kit at the Bay Area Maker Faire earlier this year. I recently completed the set of blinky badges included.

The one on the far left is from months ago. I’ve improved a lot since then, as seen by the rest of the badges.

It’s a good start, but incomplete. You will also need:

• Goggles. The web page for the kit explicitly acknowledges this. You need eye protection because a blob of solder can go flying when you’re cleaning your iron. This happened to me—fortunately it didn’t go in my eye, but I made damn sure right then to get out my safety glasses and wear them for all further soldering.

  I had the freebie Google-branded safety glasses that they hand out at Maker Faires, but if you don’t have any, get some.

• A soldering iron that isn’t trash. The iron included in the kit takes forever to heat up, and it’s oxidising all the while. Don’t waste time and energy on it—spend the extra $50 or so to get a good iron.

  Mine is a Weller WES51; it heats to operating temperature in under a minute, and has an LED to indicate when it’s ready.

• A desoldering iron. I found trying to desolder my mistakes using the included solder-sucker tricky. It might have gone better with the better soldering iron, but I already had this thing from Radio Shack by then. It’s not ideal, particularly in how long it takes to heat up, but it’s still better than an unheated desoldering pump.

  Note that you need to tin the tip of a desoldering iron just the same as a soldering iron. In this case, the “tip” is the flat, ring-shaped surface directly around the hole. Lay some solder across the hole, then suck in any excess and spit it out onto your sponge.

• Tip cleaning wire. I use this Hakko model. The wad of metal is an abrasive cleaner that you’ll need any time you get too much build-up on the tip and the wet sponge isn’t enough. Ideally that should be rare, but if you find yourself unable to tin your tip because the solder won’t melt or won’t adhere (“dewetting”) and the wet sponge doesn’t help, you probably need to jam your tip around in one of these for a bit.

• Educational resources. The Make kit comes with a little booklet that isn’t bad, but I needed other sources of info:

  • There’s a free “Soldering Is Easy” short comic book that’s a good introduction.
  • The Adafruit Guide to Excellent Soldering is another good intro tutorial.
  • Adafruit has a “Happy Tip Tips” document that explains common soldering problems and how to solve them.

Being both a creature of habit and a digital packrat, I never install macOS from the “Install macOS” app.

Instead, what I do is have a cache of 8 GB class-10 microSDHC cards (usually bought from Micro Center, but they make great Amazon filler items, too), which I permanently assign as macOS installer media.

(I would buy SDHC cards, but Micro Center sells the microSDHC cards for cheaper—50¢ cheaper as I write this.)

Populating the card

Once you have a card, you’ll need to put the bits on it. DiskMaker X is the easiest way to do this, though there is also a manual process.

Labeling it

Anonymous cards all of the same capacity and speed and possibly even description does not scale well as an inventory system. Ideally, your card comes in a clamshell case, like the Micro Center ones do, or you can reassign such a case that came with another card. You can probably even buy empty microSD cases, like you can CD jewel-cases.

I have a Brother labeler that I use to print a small label with the release’s version and marketing name on it: “OS X 10.7 Lion”, “OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion”, “OS X 10.9 Mavericks”, “OS X 10.10 Yosemite”, “OS X 10.11 El Capitan”, and now “macOS 10.12 Sierra”. That label goes on the front of the case.

I wrote this while the Sierra installer application was downloading.

And then done

Now you have labeled, permanent installer media that you can use forever (or however long the cards last). If you ever need to roll back to an old version, reinstall the dot-zero from the card and then combo-update up to whatever version you want.

I just got this ad for Jane Kim, who’s running for State Senate here in California:

Leaving aside the matters of whether those are livable wages in the City, particularly after taxes and any available savings contributions, and especially for “families” as stated in the headline…

“Join us as we work to lift more families into the middle class…”

A “middle class” necessarily implies a lower class and a higher class.

Right off the bat, this proposition does not even consider lifting families into the upper class. Just the middle class—that’ll do for now, right?

Lifting “more families into the middle class” implies not eliminating the middle class—there’ll still be one, which means there’ll still be a lower class, which means there’ll still be people/families in it.

Certainly this proposition does not suggest ending classes altogether—no; there’ll still be classes, at least three of them. And some will be in the upper class and some will be in the lower class and hopefully more of the latter will move up… to the middle.

Oh, OK.

I feel like this is a lukewarm dish. That’s all you’ve got to offer? You want to make this not only a headline on your flyer, but literally the entire topic of an entire flyer?

I’m not even saying it’s a bad idea. Just… it lacks ambition. It feels resigned. This is the best we can do, it implies.

Really?

NB: I feel I should make explicit that I’m not against Kim necessarily; I haven’t looked at any other candidates. And maybe she’s got lots of good policies and/or ideas. Just, this one ad caught my eye and got under my skin.