2024.11.DisappearingMoment
If the world is ending, I want to be surrounded by kittens when it happens.
Welcome to November 2024’s Disappearing Moment, an inventory of my experiences. I hope you enjoy it.
Podcasts
Behind the Bastards: RFK, Jr. (Worth My Time): Grating hosts tell the tale of a degenerate boor.
Nerdy Software
I programmed my first beats at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exhibit. Now I get my kicks with Drum Machine by Tomas Eriksson.
Free Font
Inter is popular and deserves to be. Thanks, Rasmus Anderson, for creating an attractive, flexible, open source font.
Bougie Products
Beth has small hands; mine are large. She’s left-handed; I’m wrong-handed. We have the same favorite pen: Uniball Roller, blue, .5 mm.
Personal Finance and Investing
Parnassus Funds check my boxes. Beth and I use them for the managed, ESG portion of our retirement investments.
Reading
- Rachel Donald, “Cyber-Security Experts Warn Election Was Hacked” and “Election Fraud Debunked?” (I Liked It): I have more empathy for QAon impulses, and less for anyone with a Fox taint. Admitting you’re wrong is table stakes for redemption.
- Maurice Mitchell, “Building Resilient Organizations” (I Liked It): Admitting you’re wrong is table stakes for redemption. So is giving a fuck about not acting like a bigot.
- Maria Popova, “18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian” (I Liked It): More vulnerable, less cerebral. We remember our feelings better than we remember our thoughts.
- Sara Slattery and Molly Huddle, How She Did It (2022) (I Liked It): Elite women’s running athletes tell their stories. It’s oral history lite, a solid addition to the canon.
I Do Not Use
The are services that I avoid. Anything in bold is considered harmful. I keep this list updated on the Uses page on my website.
- Adobe, except Acrobat for iPadOS, the most accessible PDF reader I’ve found for iPads.
- AT&T
- Brave “runs cryptocurrency, has held payments to creators without disclosing that creators couldn’t receive rewards, has made dangerously misleading claims about fingerprinting resistance, is run by a CEO who spent thousands of dollars opposing gay marriage, and has rewritten typed URLs with affiliate links.” (Rohan Kumar’s entry on Brave Search in “A look at search engines with their own indexes”)
- ChatGPT, Claude, Cohere, etc. I’m fine with open source Large Language Models.
- Constant Contact
- Discord
- DraftKings
- DuckDuckGo performs privacy theater. Then it signs hostile agreements and tries to gaslight its users.
- Elsevier’s “economic model was inequitable and non-transparent” (MIT Libraries). In other words, Elsevier is “too greedy”.
- Evite
- FanDuel
- GoDaddy
- Google is capricious and untrustworthy. I look forward to migrating my workplace away from Google Workspace. I use Invidious when I can’t avoid YouTube.
- Hoopla
- Intuit (Credit Karma, Mailchimp, TurbTax). I can live with QuickBooks Online for nonprofits.
- JanitorAI
- Kagi “seems happy to use Brave’s commercial API (allowing blatant homophobia in the comments) and allow its results to recommend suicide methods without intervention.” (Rohan Kumar’s entry on Brave Search in “A look at search engines with their own indexes”)
- LastPass is clunky and untrustworthy.
- Live Nation puts boring performers in impersonal venues. I wouldn’t go to these shows if they were free.
- Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads, WhatsApp) is:
- Anxiety and Depression
- Sedition
- Self-Destruction
- Violence (e.g., Ethiopia, India, and
Myanmar). Happy Birthday!!!
- Nextdoor Knows Its Users Are Racist.
- Outlook can make Google products seem acceptable.
- Quora
- Robinhood
- “Slack: At least it’s not Teams!”
- SnapChat
- Spotify is an amoral dumpster fire.
- Strava. I run to escape social media’s impositions.
- Substack conspires with Nazis. See also, why Molly White and Casey Newton left Substack.
- Teams
- Telegram has iffy security, privacy, and veracity.
- Temu
- TikTok and all other services that are based in China.
- Uber. Lyft meets my needs. I’ll use a taxi, if necessary.
- Vanguard has become an embarrassment. Stick to the mutual funds started before 1996 (the year Bogle resigned).
- Webex is worse than Teams.
- X has no redeeming qualities and continues to get worse. “If your business case for Trump media was, ‘Truth Social is the place for tens of millions of Donald Trump fans to get their social media,’ then the fact that Donald Trump is back on X — and that X is clearly the right wing social network now — undermines that business case.” (Money Stuff: The Podcast, 2024-09-06)
- Yandex and all other services that are based in Russia
- Zelle. Venmo meets my needs. I’ll use PayPal, if necessary.
Thank you for spending a few moments with me. I appreciate you and look forward to corresponding again next month.
Brett
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No large language models were used in the production of the Disappearing Moment newsletter or website (inspired by RFC 9518 Appendix A ¶ 4 and Tantek Çelik).