That’s the title of this op-ed by Solomon Missouri, pastor of a rural church in eastern North Carolina and an Alabama native. While he is perhaps best known for a viral Twitter thread about modern romance, he was as serious as a heart attack in his discussion of the many flaws in the concurring opinion of Chief Justice Tom Parker–both in theology and in science. Pastor Missouri concludes (and I agree) that the ruling is pro control–just like the Dobbs decision from the Supreme Court which preceded it.
This paragraph in particular calls out his home state for its hypocrisy regarding the sanctity of the lives of children:
Pastor Solomon Missouri, Is the Alabama embryo ruling pro-life or pro control?, February 29, 2024
The whole piece is well-worth your time to read in full, and share far and wide. These questions he ends his piece with are aimed directly at Christians:
[W]hy is cruelty the singular currency of your faith? Can a Gospel that breeds such hostility and animus towards its neighbors be considered good? Is it a “faith” if the state forces you to do it? And why are people who don’t share your faith required to follow your tenets under threat of prosecution?
Pastor Solomon Missouri, Is the Alabama embryo ruling pro-life or pro control?, February 29, 2024
The very first of the freedoms enumerated in Amendment I of the U.S. Constitution says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” Yet so-called conservatives both in state legislatures, state courts, and federal courts seem bound and determined to compel adherence to a Christianity that bears no resemblance to the example of Christ.
The Atlantic chose the second day of Black History Month to publish this piece by David Frum to advocate for the “uncanceling” of Woodrow Wilson. In this post I will reiterate and expand on remarks I’ve made on social media, as well as those of others in opposition to Frum’s insidious project.
I read [Frum’s] piece and its primary utility is making clear how fully he stocked his administration with anti-black bigots. Expanding the imperial footprint of the U.S. in Haiti while supposedly putting the Philippines on a path to independence is especially telling.
Particularly given the volume with which Frum sounded the alarm regarding the dangers of Trump and Trumpism to the republic before he was elected, it is especially curious to me that he would choose this moment to advocate for the uncanceling of one of the most dedicated bigots to ever occupy the White House. This 2015 piece from Government Executive Magazine (which is worth reading in full) makes clear that in a post-Civil War United States where the racism dial went to 10, Wilson’s went to 11. Wilson resegregated a federal bureaucracy that however imperfectly, had begun to integrate–even though the city surrounding it was still very segregated. In 1901–in the very same magazine where Frum makes the case to uncancel him–Woodrow Wilson argued against suffrage for black men, prior to his tenure as president of Princeton University. Frum’s recounting of Wilson’s anti-black, while rather detailed, still fails to capture its full breadth and depth. Wilson as Princeton University president blocked black students from attending the school.
Having already elected Trump once, in spite of (or in too many cases because of) explicitly racist and xenophobic appeals, the United States could very well elect him again despite numerous criminal indictments, a finding of fact that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll, and even more explicitly white nationalist appeals than those in his 2016 run. This is the context in which Frum chooses to ask this question:
But if one man is judged the preeminent villain of his era for bigotries that were common among people of his place, time, and rank, that singular fixation demands explanation. Why Wilson rather than Taft or Coolidge?
David Frum, Uncancel Wilson, The Atlantic, February 2, 2024
My initial answer was this:
Not only should Wilson stay cancelled, every president who presided over Jim Crow in the South and the conditions that triggered the Great Migration should be judged more harshly.
As president, Wilson did advocate for lower tariffs, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, and the League of Nations. Wilson did nominate Jewish people to serve on the state supreme court as governor of New Jersey, and the Supreme Court as president. But that does not trump all the ways in which he used the increasing power he was given over the course of his life to make life worse for the black citizens of this country in every way possible. Frum touches lightly on the ways in which Wilson’s scholarship (he was trained as an historian) reflected his personal bigotry. Wilson wrote a five-volume history textbook that adhered to the Lost Cause propaganda regarding the Civil War. Here is Wilson writing in one of those volumes, A History of the American People: Reunion and Nationalization:
The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers: … There was no place of open action or of constitutional agitation, under the terms of reconstruction, for the men who were the real leaders of the southern communities. Its restrictions shut white men of the older order out from the suffrage even. They could act only by private combination, by private means, as a force outside the government, hostile to it, proscribed by it, of whom opposition and bitter resistance was expected, and expected with defiance.
In this brief passage, we see Wilson’s views of black citizens in their full ugliness. We see his wholehearted adoption of the pro-Confederate views of his parents, particularly his father (who served as a Confederate chaplain and preached sermons in defense of slavery). Wilson fairly explicitly argues in subsequent pages that forming the Ku Klux Klan and engaging in violent anti-black terrorism was the only resort for the white insurrectionists of the American South. It is therefore no surprise that D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation quoted Wilson’s book in its title cards. To the extent that Woodrow Wilson is judged the preeminent bigot of his day, perhaps it is because he promoted the Lost Cause in his scholarship, in his presidency of Princeton, from the White House, and in popular culture through screening and popularizing a gleefully racist film. As numerous Republican governors send National Guard contingents in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling acknowledging the primacy of the federal government in policy at the international borders of the United States, and a supposed contestant for the GOP presidential nomination advocates openly for the right of Texas to secede from the country, it is hard not to look at these words from over a century ago and not see ideological support for contemporary lawlessness.
Wilson’s early and ardently anti-black scholarship stands as a rebuke to Frum’s feeble excuse of Wilson’s 1919 stroke as the reason that black citizens were undefended by federal power during the so-called Red Summer of that same year. Per Frum’s own piece, he threw disillusioned black supporters out of his office in 1914 and never received them again. He made W.E.B. DuBois regret ever supporting him in a way paralleled decades later by Jackie Robinson’s disillusionment with Richard Nixon for the same courting of white grievance Wilson engaged in generations earlier. Frum attempts to treat the imperialist and xenophobic stances of Henry Cabot Lodge (who attempted to justify and excuse the lynching of 11 Italian immigrants in New Orleans in 1891) as somehow equivalent with Wilson’s anti-black bigotry. But if we’re comparing flaws, it needs to be said that nearly 3000 black citizens died at the hands of white lynch mobs during Wilson’s presidency alone. Wilson was no less an imperialist than Lodge, for while he granted greater autonomy to the Philippines (which Lodge wanted to annex), he also ordered the invasion and occupation of Haiti. Wilson’s anti-blackness was such that it did not even stop at the borders of the United States. Whatever his other shortcomings, Lodge at least saw fit to author and sponsor a House bill to protect Black voting rights in the South (a legislative effort which would not be repeated for another 70+ years). If there is anything Frum’s piece makes clear, it is that anti-blackness has never been the sole province of either the progressive or conservative movements in this country.
An actual historian would better articulate the negative consequences of Wilson’s lifelong failure to acknowledge the humanity of the black citizens of this nation. They would provide a better tribute to the Harlem Hellfighters, maligned by their white countrymen and commander-in-chief at home, disrespected by most of their military commanders abroad, more honored by the French under whom they actually fought, and feared by the Germans (who trolled them with leaflets dropped from planes for their service to a country in which they could only be second-class citizens at best). The open and unapologetic racism we see both in the political class and in the country at large is in too many ways a throwback to America of Wilson’s day. For Frum to choose this moment to advocate for Wilson to be “uncancelled” is to repudiate everything he has ever written and said about the dangers Trump posed–and still poses to the survival of multi-racial, multi-ethnic democracy in this country. It should be seen as a deliberate insult to every black citizen in the present day. I wish David Frum the worst in his efforts to rehabilitate Wilson and his racism. I hope this small piece of writing encourages further scrutiny of Wilson and his contemporaries and brings them greater scorn and contempt.
The fellow who blocked the account above, Michael Darius, includes Apple pioneer, skeuomorph, and protégé of Steve Jobs in his Twitter bio. His actual opinion regarding taking notes during meetings is literally this:
Suffice it to say, design meetings are not a criminal conspiracy. His subsequent comment about the copious note taking that occurred after those meetings exposes the absurdity of the practice he’s touting.
I can’t recommend the practice of taking notes during meetings highly enough. Whether you’re an pen-and-paper note taker (my preference), or someone who types notes on a laptop on-the-fly, you’ll be far more likely that you’ll know not just what you need to do, but how your work connects to the work of others if you capture the right information. Depending on your role (and I’ve found this to be more and more true as I’ve gone further in management), if you distribute your notes you can become the person that doesn’t just keep track of agendas, but the person who sets and drives them as well. Depending only on your memory in a professional context is effectively trying to work with both hands tied behind your back. And that’s before you even get into meeting length, subject, or any other attributes of meetings at work.
Taking notes isn’t merely about recall, but reuse. One of the original reasons I started blogging 20 years ago was to have a public place to capture things for future use for myself. Writing blog posts about how I solved particular programming challenges over time gave me a resource that I could and did search to accelerate solving similar problems in new contexts as I moved around during the course of my career. While the earliest blog posts weren’t about meetings per se, they did ultimately lead to my taking more notes in meetings.
Being a working professional is challenging enough without having to deal with cult-like hangups regarding note taking from the Dariuses of the work world. Do what you need to do in order to put your best foot forward at work. No employer who would impose such an arbitrary, stupid, and ultimately discriminatory requirement on how you process information at work is worthy of your time.
It is January 6, 2023 and in an even more depressing turn than I could have imagined, numerous so-called liberals joined the crowd of conservatives calling for Colorado’s Supreme Court ruling disqualifying Trump from the ballot on the basis of the 14th Amendment to be overturned. Governor Gavin Newsom is on record as disagreeing with any efforts to keep Trump off of California’s ballot. Lawrence Lessig has also added his name to the list of those for whom the plain text of the 14th Amendment is merely a suggestion. Jonathan Chait’s argument in favor of ignoring section 3 of the 14th Amendment is rightfully skewered by Adam Serwer in The Atlantic.
When even conservative law professors who are active with the Federalist Society conclude that Trump engaged in insurrection (as indicated in a law-review article Serwer links in his piece, and reported by the New York Times months before the Colorado Supreme Court ruling), it is difficult for me to conclude that anything other than cowardice motivates the opposition from certain professional liberal (and centrist) members of the chattering class. If Mitch McConnell can call January 6th an insurrection, then it was. Serwer describes January 6th this way:
The mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6 was the culmination of a series of efforts to overturn the election results, which included not merely legal appeals or extreme rhetoric—both of which are constitutionally permitted—but the use of the authority of the presidency to pressure state legislators to unlawfully overturn the elections in their state, to coerce the Department of Justice to provide a false pretext for overturning said results, and to intimidate then–Vice President Mike Pence into using authority he did not have to do the same, a request he nearly tried to fulfill. The failure of all of these schemes rested not on a lack of intent, but on not having consolidated federal power in a way Trump and his advisers are openly planning to do in a second term should he prevail in November.
Adam Serwer, Who’s Afraid of Calling Donald Trump an Insurrectionist?, The Atlantic, January 5, 2024
In this description, Serwer reminds us that Pence actually tried to fulfill Donald Trump’s wishes, contrary to the narrative of personal integrity and heroism he crafted for himself. It was former vice president Dan Quayle telling Pence he lacked the power to do what he was contemplating that ultimately tipped the balance.
This line from the last graf of Serwer’s piece is perhaps its most incisive:
If the Constitution’s provisions apply only when they are popular, then the Constitution is meaningless.
Adam Serwer, Who’s Afraid of Calling Donald Trump an Insurrectionist?, The Atlantic, January 5, 2024
This line is especially important because the Reconstruction Amendments which intended to give full citizenship to the formerly enslaved while ratified, were not broadly popular. President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth before even the first of the 3 amendments was ratified. States in the former Confederacy enacted Black Codes to circumvent the 13th Amendment. The 14th Amendment was necessary in order to kill the black codes because Andrew Johnson (who became president as a result of Lincoln’s assassination) used the office of president to oppose the full citizenship of formerly-enslaved black people. Reconstruction (which we too often fail to study) was ultimately abandoned by the federal government in the interests of a false and hollow unity. The Jim Crow laws that arose in the aftermath of Reconstruction’s abandonment did so in direct defiance of the Reconstruction Amendments. For black citizens living in southern states, the Constitution was meaningless. The Great Migration of this country’s black citizens out of the south to points north, midwest, and west was their response to the federal government’s abdication of its responsibility to provide them equal protection under the law.
Professional opinion-havers calling on the Supreme Court to overturn what Colorado and Maine have done have decided that the full citizenship of black people in this country should again be subject to the popular will. History tells us what happened the last time the country made this decision. But far more people than just black people will be harmed if the whims of whoever holds power decide what parts of the Constitution apply and what parts don’t.
Intuit decided and announced last year that Mint (an excellent personal finance app that I’ve used since 2009) would go away. They’ve pushed CreditKarma (another Intuit acquisition) as its replacement along with putting a migration option right into Mint. You’re also given the option to download all of your transactions as a CSV file, which should come in handy for exploring prospective replacement apps. Logging into Mint again after the migration is complete gives you a link to your Net Worth page (which at least as of this writing does not appear anywhere in CreditKarma’s regular menu navigation options). This lack of menu option becomes pretty annoying pretty quickly, because the Net Worth page is also the only place you can access the Link more links that enable you to connect more accounts to CreditKarma. Unfortunately, Intuit also decided to leave Mint’s budgeting capabilities behind in 2023 as well.
I began the process of exploring Mint alternatives for managing my personal finances within the past month or so. Copilot (the personal finance app, not the generative AI chatbot developed by Microsoft) is the one I’m looking into the most closely right now. Another one of my cousins is using PocketGuard. Another is trying out Monarch. One of the co-founders of Monarch is the former project manager for Mint, so that’s probably what I will try next if Copilot doesn’t work as well as I want.
Brief impressions of Copilot so far (in no particular order):
I hate the product name. Too much stuff already has Copilot as a name or in the name somewhere.
I like that they have a desktop app and a mobile app. In my limited usage so far, they’ve managed to make the experience across the desktop and mobile as close to the same as possible while still taking advantage of what iOS does well with touch.
By default, Copilot does not categorize an Uber Eats transaction as a Restaurant or Food transaction, so you have to add a name-based rule to make sure the app handles that correctly.
The initial set of categories Copilot supports does not include gifts or charitable deductions.
I really like the Year in Review and Month in Review features
The transaction list views also display whatever notes you’ve added to the transaction after a colon
I’m not sure if limiting their addressable market to iOS and macOS users is the best idea, but I think I understand why they’re doing it (Apple users = money)
I’ll continue to try the Copilot personal finance app for this month before I try Monarch and decide which to keep after that.
The number of hours left in 2023 is down to single digits as I write this. This year as in past years, the majority of my charitable giving is to churches within my denomination (Seventh-Day Adventist), with additional giving to non-profit journalism and other non-religious causes.
Religiously-Motivated Charitable Giving
Unlike previous years, where I only donated to my home church, I also donated to every church that I attended either in-person or online at least once this calendar year. This included Boston Temple, which I attended in-person when I visited my cousin there in October, as well as Oakwood University Church (online), Revision Church Atlanta SDA (online), along with the churches in my local area I visit most often in-person.
Having finally added back to the roster of charitable donation recipients I missed in past years, one change I anticipate making in 2024 is donating to whatever the organization resulting from the merger between CIR/Reveal and Mother Jones is ultimately called.
In 2024, consider supporting a non-profit newsroom in your local area. The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) has a tool that will match you with such organizations so you can donate to them directly and follow their coverage. I might be adding some Maryland non-profit newsrooms to my charitable giving plans before this time next year.
One of my mutuals on social media takes special glee in puncturing strongly-held beliefs. His latest target: the belief in America’s upward mobility relative to other countries:
A social media mutual shooting down an assertion regarding upward mobility in the U.S.
With the full awareness that some people will oppose what you say regardless, I’ll share information I’ve come across before in previous iterations of this same debate.
Key Statistics
Per this article from the World Economic Forum, the top 10 countries in their Global Social Mobility Index (as of 2020) are as follows:
Denmark
Norway
Finland
Sweden
Iceland
Netherlands
Switzerland
Austria
Belgium
Luxembourg
Canada, Japan, and Australia rank 14th, 15th, and 16th per the same index, with Britain ranking 21st and the U.S. a disappointing 27th. The full report weighs in at a stout 218 pages. While I won’t be doing a “I read this so you don’t have to” in this post, I will zoom into a couple of areas that highlight the challenges well.
One of the more interesting questions posed recently was how long it takes to get from the bottom economically to the middle class in reference to an NPR piece from 2014 indicating that economic mobility in the U.S. was worse than that of other wealthy countries.
Also, I just realized this 8% refers to the group that rises from the bottom to the top. But it doesn’t mention the percentage who rise from the bottom to the middle or upper middle.
As it turns out, part of the answer to Mr. Wilson’s question is in the following figure from page 10 of the same report.
Per the figure, a family in the US that started at the bottom of the income distribution could approach the mean income level in 5 generations–slower than in most of the countries ranked ahead of the U.S. in socioeconomic mobility, and on par with countries with global social mobility index scores similar to or slightly lower than the U.S.
Global Social Mobility Index Framework and Thoughts on Its Pillars
The diagram above does a nice job of depicting what makes up their social mobility index. The 10 pillars of the index provide some clues as to why the U.S. might rank where it does when you think of local and national policy decisions. The Health pillar reminds me of the debates around the Affordable Care Act, successful attempts to undermine it in key respects, and continuing efforts to repeal it entirely through the federal judiciary. Due only in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, life expectancy in the U.S. has been trending downward. The U.S. also has maternal mortality rates far higher than most peer countries in the OECD (and non-OECD countries like Romania and Croatia). Maternal mortality rates seem primed to worsen due to the impacts of the Dobb’s decision on access to abortion, since states where abortion access is most restricted already have worse rates of maternal mortality than states where the procedure isn’t banned. Infant mortality rates are also higher than that of most of our peer countries in the OECD as well.
The Efficient and Inclusive Institutions pillar includes the courts and public services (the robustness of which vary widely depending on which state in the country you’re talking about). When it comes to the education and learning pillars, the mobility framework focuses much more on very early childhood education, vocational training, and other primary and secondary education factors. When I think of education, I think of how much more constrained it has become at the post-secondary level over the past 20 years due to significant increases in tuition. During the same time multiple states (including my home state of Maryland) drastically reduced the level of subsidies that had made in-state tuition a bargain and a no-brainer for students who were bright and ambitious but lacked the funds for truly elite education.
Technology Access as a pillar of social mobility is near and dear to my heart, given my career and past experiences from childhood and adulthood with dial-up internet at home. I seriously doubt I could have built the middle-class lifestyle I enjoy (and that I have provided to my wife and children over the past dozen years) without the education access, quality, equity (and affordability) and technology access I’ve been given going back decades. Access to high speed internet (at home, school, and/or public libraries), affordability of home and/or school access, accessibility in rural areas, monopolies on broadband provision, and electricity availability in rural areas have probably combined to make this access very unevenly distributed across the country. The shorthand for this in numerous news articles and other reports is “the digital divide”. There appears to be a growing body of scholarship around inequality in remote learning quality during COVID-19 subsequent to this social mobility report that should shed more light regarding the impacts of insufficient technology access internationally.
Pillars 6-8 cover work opportunities, fair wages, and working conditions. The Working Conditions pillar in particular uses the following benchmarks “the level of workers’ rights, collective bargaining coverage, meritocracy at work, labour-employer, cooperation, as well as the percentage of workers working longer than 48 hours per week” (page 17 of the full report). Here in the U.S. we have right-to-work states, a very low federal minimum wage, and unions which had been steadily eroded in strength up until very recently. All those factors before even talking about the ways in which certain employers have used illegal/undocumented workers–including migrant children, and the downward pressure undocumented labor puts on wages.
Last but not least, the pillars touching on the relative strength social safety net in each country measured. Compared to other wealthy nations, our social safety net is weak. How we handle unemployment (and unemployment benefits), job transitions, etc are just a few areas of consideration. One area where this is the most obvious might be maternity leave and paternity leave. An ex-pat friend of mine who lives and works in Berlin described a much more generous and family-centric system when it came to the experience of his wife having their son there than my own experience with my wife having twins here in the U.S.
Why Do So Many Immigrants Still Come Here?
This is one question usually posed in response to the sort of data and statistics I’ve shared earlier. But the same data statistics also answer this question. If you look toward the bottom of the global social mobility index rankings, here are some of the countries we find there:
Honduras (73rd out of 82)
Guatemala (75th out of 82)
India (76th out of 82)
Senegal (80th out of 82)
Cameroon (81st out of 82)
Côte d’Ivoire (82nd out of 82)
Further from the bottom but still in the second half of the index are countries like China (45th), Vietnam (50th), Thailand (55th), Mexico (58th), Brazil (60th), Philippines (61st), El Salvador (68th), and Ghana (70th). Even at 27th, the United States still offers far more social mobility to ambitious immigrants from these countries. The United States is also the third-largest country by population on Earth, behind only China and India. The ethnic diversity of the United States might also be attractive to immigrants because it increases their likelihood of finding community in an otherwise-new place. While it was a much earlier era for my parents and their family and friends coming here from the Caribbean in the 1960s, they built new community here and had more educational and economic opportunities here than they had at home in places like Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad.
Whether the United States remains the destination of choice for most immigrants is an open question. Much depends on the results of the 2024 presidential election. Even if the nominees are as expected (Trump for the GOP and Biden for the Democrats) and Biden manages to win re-election, Biden has retained certain Trump-era policies around immigration in his first term. A second Trump term would certainly bring an even harsher version of the immigration regime initial championed by Jeff Sessions as attorney general and by Stephen Miller, and include attacks on birthright citizenship despite it being part of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
What’s the Bottom Line on the American Dream?
There is no shortage of anecdotes from people coming to the U.S. and achieving great success. My parents and many of their friends achieved much greater success for themselves and their children here than they would have had in their own country. That success was by no means easy. Both of my parents earned all of their degrees (undergraduate and masters’) in night school. My sister and I were latchkey kids as a result. Success anecdotes aren’t the only data points though. The results of emigrating from one’s country of origin do not fall neatly into a binary of “success” or “failure”. For every story like that of my parents, there are probably others of people who have achieved less than my parents and would still count coming to America as a success. There may be others who achieved more than my parents but would still judge their emigration experience a failure.
The immigrant experience of America is definitely not the only one that matters when it comes to how people regard the American Dream, and whether it can realistically achieved. People born and raised here, with parents, grandparents, and other prior generations born here have had a different experience and a different set of expectations. Some people have cynically used (and continue to use) the success of my parents and their generation (and their children) as a way to blame black people with many generations of American heritage for their relative lack of achievement. The white grievance politics ascendant on the political right these days has found a ready audience among those who resent that the days of households where dad worked, mom stayed home with the children, and a high school education was enough for steady employment, a middle-class lifestyle, and being able to send those children to college are long gone. It is easier to blame immigrants, “wokeness”, and foreign aid for that changing than it is to acknowledge the reality that by both inertia and conscious policy choices, government and corporations both undermined each of the ten pillars the social mobility index framework is built upon. That’s why the American Dream–while still achievable–is harder.
Success at switching to a truly bundled Disney+ and Hulu experience (both with no ads) from the janky status quo where both services were billed separately and Hulu had ads but Disney+ didn’t required the great customer service experience I had earlier today. In prior months, I’d made the mistake of following the instructions provided as the self-service approach to accomplishing this, and failed miserably. I switched from annual billing to monthly on Disney+ and tried to switch to the Premium Duo multiple times over multiple months, only to be redirected to Hulu and be blocked from signing up for what I wanted.
Today I tried the chat option (with a live human being) and finally got the bundle I wanted–and a refund for the price differential between the new bundle and what I’d been paying. It ultimately took being manually unsubscribed from both Disney+ and Hulu, which the customer service rep accomplished by reaching out to whatever department and systems she needed to, in the span of about 20 minutes. Definitely a 5-star customer service experience–unfortunately made necessary by terrible self-service options.
Plenty of companies almost certainly believe that they will be able to use ChatGPT (or something like it) to replace the people that do this work. But at least initially (and probably for quite awhile after that) the fully-automated customer service experience is likely to be worse (if not much worse) than the experience of customer service from people. I’m very skeptical of the idea that an AI chatbot would have driven the same outcome from a customer service interaction as a person did in this case. And this is in a low-stakes situation like streaming services (some number of which will very likely end up on my budget chopping block in 2024). High-stakes customer service situations will not have the same tolerance for mistakes, as shown in the FTC’s 5-year ban on Rite-Aid using facial recognition for surveillance. These are the sorts of mistakes warned about in the documentary Coded Bias years ago, but I have no doubt that other companies will make the same mistakes Rite-Aid did.
In an episode of Hanselminutes I listened to recently, the host (Scott Hanselman) used a comparison of how AI could be used between the Iron Man suit and Ultron. I hope using AI to augment human capabilities (like the Iron Man suit) is the destination we get back to, after the current pursuit of replacing humans entirely (like Ultron) fails. Customer service experiences that led by people but augmented by technology will be better for people on both sides of the customer service equation and better for brands.
Flipboard is jumping into the fediverse with both feet, according to a piece from The Verge. While the fediverse isn’t where I saw the piece first (that would be on Threads), when Flipboard first announced it was experimenting with Mastodon some months back, it was the first time I’d thought about Flipboard in years (much less used it). Since The Verge piece first ran December 18th, it’s been updated with links to both their Flipboard account, and their Mastodon account.
If you’re not familiar with Flipboard, their key organizing principle is the magazine. Articles you read from any number of sources can be “flipped” into a magazine you create, along with any commentary you may want to provide. As in other social media networks, you can follow other members and be followed by them. You can comment on shared articles and other Flipboard members can respond. Another interesting feature (which I never took advantage of myself) is Invite contributors. I presume this feature allows multiple Flipboard members to contribute articles to the same magazine. This might be how The Verge handles its own presence on Flipboard.
Unrelated to the whole fediverse pivot, reviewing the features of Flipboard makes me wonder if they ever actively pursued the sorts of people who write newsletters. From what I’ve seen of Substack, I haven’t seen anything it does as a service that Flipboard doesn’t do as well or better–and they probably have a much larger number of monthly active users.
The key difference I’ve found so far between the mobile app experience and the web experience of Flipboard is that you can only flip articles into Mastodon via the mobile app.
Another thing Flipboard has changed since I last looked at what they were doing with Mastodon is allow you to add any Mastodon profile URL to your Flipboard profile and display a verified link on your profile page. I’ve already set that up and now my profile looks like this:
This is the sort of attention and interest that Tumblr could have generated had they moved more aggressively in exploring integration with the fediverse via ActivityPub. Tumblr is a first-class citizen on IFTTT, an awesome site for creating workflows and automations between a whole host of different services. I have a number of automations (IFTTT calls them applets) that use Tumblr as a destination and a “fedified” Tumblr would have let me automate a lot of posting without having to change a thing. Flipboard simply isn’t set up for that–not without workarounds or hacks (though IFTTT appears to have one that uses Pocket as an intermediary that I plan to try).
If this post has piqued your curiosity about Flipboard’s foray into the fediverse, I encourage you to check out Flipboard for yourself. Follow me there, comment on pieces I’ve flipped, create your own magazine(s), get the Flipboard mobile app and flip good pieces into Mastodon.
