Looking Up

Still one of the best movie songs ever.

You know what?

Things are actually looking up.

No, really: I mean it. 

Tomorrow is the beginning of classes, which means I now have to deal with students — but as always, though teenagers are frustrating, they are the reason why my job exists, and the aspect of it I actually enjoy. Teaching is hard — but it’s better than inservice. And since classes start tomorrow, that means inservice is over. (My district tried to extend it, pushing a two-day training on how to teach ACT prep — actually there are somehow three two-day trainings for English, one in reading, one in writing, and one in…English… but when I said I didn’t want to go, my direct supervisor said I didn’t have to go, in contrast to his supervisor who said he “strongly recommended” that ACT prep teachers be SENT to this training. But my boss said I didn’t have to go. Which means that inservice is over. And also that my boss is on my side, which is — well, it’s lovely.) My students make me laugh as often as they make me grit my teeth in rage; and they sometimes tell me that I helped them, that I taught them, even that I inspired them. And I like that.

I am typing this on my brand-new MacBook Air, which I got for my birthday as a present from my brother. Which means not only that I have this sweet new machine (Which, admittedly, I am having trouble adjusting to, but that’s only because it doesn’t have a ten-key pad on the right side of the keyboard, and because the Command key I have to use to copy and paste and so on is in a different place than it has been on the last two laptops I’ve had, both Windows machines — and because I didn’t know that you ran two fingers together over the touchpad to make the screen scroll BUT IT TURNS OUT YOU DO THAT ON THE GODDAMN WINDOWS MACHINES TOO I JUST DIDN’T KNOW IT BECAUSE I MOSTLY USE A PLUG-IN MOUSE AND TRYING TO DEAL WITH THE WINDOW ON THIS LOVELY NEW MACHINE WITHOUT BEING ABLE TO SCROLL WAS A TRIAL, BELIEVE ME but then I figured this out, and now it’s easy. And now I know this new thing, so that means I’ll never have this struggle again.

That’s amazing, isn’t it? That there can be single pieces of knowledge that you don’t have, and without them things are hard or confusing or even frightening; but then you find out that one thing — and the problem is gone. Gone entirely. Never going to be a problem again. Things can actually get solved. Not everything, certainly, but there are situations that are like that: you find the answer, and then you have it. The answer. The solution.

But also, anyway, the other thing about getting this beautiful new (EXPENSIVE) computer as a gift from my brother is this: my brother gave it to me. He and I haven’t always gotten along, sometimes even emphatically not; but that, too, has gotten better. I don’t think the relationship has been solved by a single answer that suddenly came clear, because relationships aren’t really like that; but definitely things have gotten better, and they will stay that way as long as we keep working on them — and he got me this absolutely lovely and generous gift, which I think was a very nice thing for him to do.

Thank you, Marv. I love the laptop. Though I feel dumb about the touchpad scrolling thing. Also it just autocorrected your name to Marc, so. Something to think about. And I’ll make you a deal: if you go by Marc (Or Marcin, in full), I’ll go by Dussy. Which was recently given me as an interpretation of my name at my optometrist’s office. It’s a new one.

Though to be honest, I’m not sure how it would benefit you for me to go by Dussy. Or how it would help me if you went by Marc. Nah, forget the whole thing. I’m still grateful for the gift, and glad that we’re doing well with each other.

And speaking of family, I finally mailed away my spit, in the tube my wife bought for me, to ancestry.com (That was a Christmas present, if you weren’t aware of how bad I am at following through on some things in a timely manner), and so I found out a little bit more about my family: mostly German and Scottish and English and French, all of which I knew — but also, about 3% African. Which I did not know. 1% each from Ivory Coast and Ghana, Benin and Togo, and Cameroon, Congo, and Western Bantu peoples. Obviously it is not a significant amount of my heritage — but it is significant that it is there, that I am that much of a mutt, that I have a little bit of African DNA in me. I think that’s wonderful and fascinating. I can relate even more closely to my dogs now, as they are both mutts.Which are obviously the best kind of dog.

So thank you, Toni. It was a very cool gift, and I’m sorry it took me so long to use it. 

Oh — and speaking of white people with just a tiny bit of Africa in them, and also speaking of  things I would spit on: Elon Musk is now not only a goddamn idiot, but he’s a goddamn idiot that has shown himself to be a goddamn idiot, and therefore proof positive that there is no meritocracy in capitalism, that even complete dipshits like Musk — who, I’m sure, would prefer to be called Xxxx Xxxx, so that’s what I’m going to be calling him from now on. Or maybe just Muxx? (Or Marc?) — have too much money and absolutely do not deserve it, and do not deserve our respect for their ridiculous hoarding of wealth. Because their wealth does not show their brilliance.

So the guy buys Twitter, right, and it isn’t really clear why. It seems mostly like he wanted to prove to everyone that he could do it, because Xxxx obviously believes his own hype to a truly epic degree, like Trumpian level delusion here: and literally every choice he’s made in running this company has been a bad one: first he let all the extremists and slanderers and liars and shitbags back onto the platform, which made the platform not only actively worse for everyone but also genuinely dangerous for some; and then he destroyed the verification system, which reduced the value of being a name on Twitter and of following names on Twitter, which reduced the value of the site and of the company; then he introduced a bad subscription model, which is still a cheap gag for everyone on the site who doesn’t have a blue check; and then he expanded the length of the Tweets; and then he limited the number of Tweets that someone could see in a day; and somewhere in there he also threatened to remove (and did remove) a number of people and a number of tweets that he disliked or disagreed with, thus proving to everyone but his legion of sycophants (Also suffering from Trumpian levels of delusion) that he as not actually interested in protecting free speech like he pretended do be doing when he bought the site; and now the crowning glory, his most recent conversion of Twitter to — X. Twitter is a household name, with Tweet a known slang verb used across the internet; and he threw all of that away. Because he thinks X is cool. And X, in actuality, is a shit name for a company, and a shit name for an app, and he picked a shit logo, and the rollout has been absolutely terrible — mine just switched over today, and it still says Tweet and Twitter all over the site. I mean, even I could do a rebranding better than this, and not because of my business acumen or my marketing skills — but just because I’m not a goddamn idiot. I can tell you that I am already filled with a visceral loathing for the X app, and am really just hopeful that it will go ahead and finally die so I can stop looking at it. 

Just look at that garbage.

It’s possible that that’s what Musk wants, too. There is profit to be made in breaking a company up and selling off the pieces; but it doesn’t really seem like Musk is doing that, because everything he’s done, other than fire all the workers and refuse to pay bills (In the short term, dumping salary and holding onto cash would be profitable if you meant to destroy the company and sell the pieces — but he hasn’t done that yet.), everything has reduced the value of the company: which would seem to really reduce the potential profit he could be making as a vulture capitalist. On the other hand, if he planned on keeping the company and building something bigger out of it, which is what he has claimed to want to do, then firing half the staff and refusing to pay bills is a shit-stupid way to handle a company that does an incredibly difficult and complicated thing like maintain a free marketplace of ideas on the internet — let alone grow it into an all-inclusive financial network where people can handle literally all of their business interactions. I saw an article that said this:

Expanding the platform’s reach to include things like shopping and paid subscription content could actually help it flourish in the long term by creating several revenue streams and making it less reliant on large companies’ willingness to spend money, analysts said. 

In the short term, building out those capabilities would require a massive investment in staff and infrastructure. It’s far from clear if a company that slashed about three-quarters of its staff and is now embroiled in multiple lawsuits over unpaid bills can deliver that.  

“The investment is a lot in terms of cloud infrastructure — we’re talking about $40 billion, $50 billion in upfront investments,” Singh said. “Twitter as a standalone app doesn’t have the infrastructure to become an everything app.”

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-rebrand-x-name-change-elon-musk-what-it-means/

And also this:

But the name change suggests Musk is likely to keep control of the company for the near future, said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh. After Musk’s takeover in April of 2022, some observers believed the billionaire could make some changes to Twitter and quickly flip it to a different owner, Singh said.

“That option is off the table now given the name change — I don’t think there’s any other prospective buyer who will take it now,” he said.

So maybe Xxxx is shit-stupid.

I will note that his new sign got turned off because it was too bright.

There is also a profit to be made in being a corrupt oligarch who opposes and helps to suppress free speech and the free exchange of ideas; and one of the ways you could achieve that, as a corrupt oligarch, would be to buy the marketplace of ideas and just set the whole thing on fire. And it very well could be that this is really want Xxxx wants, and if so, on this front, he’s doing a bang-up job.

I will definitely say that that is a sad thing. Communication is one of the highest forms of human endeavor and accomplishment: our ability to share ideas and spark new ideas in each other is unmatched in the natural world, so far as we know. And the internet and social media have made that possible on a scale unheard of before now; Twitter was part of that. But now it’s not. Because now it’s X.

Speaking of corrupt oligarchs fucking up things that were once worthwhile: Trump is another example of something that actually seems to be going right. I don’t want to count my chickens before they’re hatched, because I, like most of us rational, thinking people, was deeply overconfident in 2016, and I just could not believe it when TFG won the election. But it does really seem like he is facing a whooooooole lot of serious legal trouble, and at least in the Mar a Lago documents case, he’s clearly as guilty as sin: and when you put that shithead in front of a jury (Not that he’ll show up for his own trial, if he can possibly avoid it), he’s not going to get a pass like he did in both impeachments under a corrupt senate. 

Oh right — and let me take a moment to wish Mitch McConnell ill. Forgive my schadenfreude, but that fucking no-neck piece of shit has ruined untold numbers of lives with his power mongering, so fuck him. I hope he did have a stroke, and I hope he suffers in his declining years.

Anyway, the court system is not as easily bought as Congress: so Trump will likely go to jail. And while that doesn’t mean he can’t run for president, it surely does mean that most Republicans will not vote for him, and his base still will, or they won’t vote at all; and that likely means a runaway victory for the Democratic Party — which, if Biden is the nominee (And I personally hope he will withdraw from the race and let someone younger take it over), and wins a second term, I will say that he has actually been doing a goddamn good job so far at restoring the American government to what it should be, and we could do a whole lot worse than the guy who has re-established NATO even while supporting Ukraine in the war, and who is establishing new alliances across Asia, and who has passed the Inflation Reduction Act and the Build Back Better Infrastructure Act, and who has therefore done more for American manufacturing and industry and for fighting climate change than literally any other American president. We could do a whole lot worse.

So let me just say that, too: this time we all have to try to do our part to make sure we don’t do a whole lot worse. Joe Biden is old, yes. I do not want an octogenarian President. But he’s actually doing a good job. And if Trump goes to jail, the democrats might just win both houses of Congress — and then maybe we can name a couple of new Supreme Court justices, too. But if we’re too overconfident going in, we might get another TFG presidency, and that might just turn all of this back around, and send us all spiraling down until we crash. Let’s try to make sure it doesn’t go that way. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize, and keep things looking up, okay?

So okay, this wasn’t exactly the most cheerful blog, because things have been pretty bad for a while. But hey. School starts tomorrow.

Let’s make this a good year.

Actually just found this. The band is donating proceeds to the ACLU. Plus a player piano!