Tuesday 11 May, 2021
Our new neighbours
Amazingly how quickly the fluffballs grow.
Quote of the Day
”If I were the Archangel Gabriel, madam, I’m afraid you would not be in my constituency.”
Robert Menzies, sometime Australian Prime Minister, in reply to a female heckler who had shouted “I wouldn’t vote for you if you were the Archangel Gabriel.”
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Keith Jarrett Solo Concert | Encore
So reminiscent of his wonderful Köln Concert. (Which reminds me — James Kline performed an extraordinary adaptation of part of that concert on what looks like an 11-string guitar.)
Long Read of the Day
The Big Lie Is A Big Deal
Really good essay by Dan Rather and his colleagues.
Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. It wasn’t particularly close. He won the total national vote overwhelmingly and won decisively in the Electoral College. There is no credible suggestion to the contrary. Election officials confirmed it. The courts confirmed it. It is apparent to everyone who doesn’t live in an alternate reality, who doesn’t harbor seditionist impulses, who isn’t a craven opportunist, or who doesn’t marinate in the cesspool of these forces, otherwise known as Fox News. For those who suggest otherwise (who say that Biden is not the legitimately elected President of the United States), many have been deceived and others are willfully deceiving them for their own cynical, and dangerous, ends.
And yet that’s where a majority of Republicans find themselves today, if you believe the polls. And it is certainly where a majority of elected officials are if you just listen to what they say, or more importantly don’t say. Now the origin of this lie-laden authoritarianism is the former president, who couldn’t fall back on his usual playbook of suing, sulking, and skedaddling to get himself out of the loser spotlight. So he decided to do what he does best, the tool he used to propel himself to the presidency. He lied. Not a small half-truth. Not a wee fib. Not even a bald-faced lie. A lie so big it deserves to be written as a proper noun — the Big Lie.
Good piece, which forces one to contemplate the full import of what is happening to the US. It used to be two-party system in which the parties argued about policy. And now: the gap between Republicans and Democrats is over a belief in democracy itself and not things like taxes or foreign policy.
En passant, it’s interesting also that Trump first came to political attention with his evangelising for the ‘birther’ conspiracy theory — which was also about the legitimacy of an election.
Apple’s ad-blocking opt-in seems to be working
From BusinessInsider:
About 96% of iOS 14.5 users in the US who have been presented with the privacy pop-ups opted out of ad tracking, according to the mobile-analytics service Flurry’s daily tracker on May 7. Worldwide, that figure was a little lower, at 88%. Social apps have seen the lowest opt-in rates, with utilities, weather, and gaming apps having some of the highest, Ben Holmes, the senior vice president of performance and exchange at the mobile-ad firm AdColony, said during a panel on the Clubhouse app Thursday. (Some users’ settings prevent them from being served the pop-ups at all.)
It’s early days, but ad prices for iPhone users are also dropping, which could reflect a diminished trackable audience, though ad prices can often fluctuate over any given day or week. The location-focused adtech company Blis said the cost to reach 1,000 iOS 14.5 users — CPMs, in ad industry parlance — were 14% lower than the rates to reach users on the earlier version of iOS over the past week. Verve, a fellow location-focused mobile-ad platform, said CPMs across all versions of iOS had fallen 3% on average between the App Tracking Transparency rollout and May 6.
This is just a very early and partial survey — and so far it seems that only 8% of iOS users have updated to version 14.5 (the one with the opt-in requirement). But it suggests that the change is working as expected. What will be interesting to learn is which categories of apps have the highest (and lowest) opt-in rates. One guy from a mobile-ad firm said on a Clubhouse conversation the other day that social apps have seen the lowest opt-in rates, with utilities, weather, and gaming apps having some of the highest.
Stay tuned. This is going to be interesting.
Blackbird pie
Lovely meditation by David Maugham Brown on his difficulties with a male blackbird who was determined to build a nest in his soon-to-be-demolished garden shed.
Ever since a blackbird first overheard a child gleefully reciting a nursery rhyme celebrating the demise of four and twenty of its kindred ‘baked in a pie’, blackbirds have had good cause to be extremely wary of people and to regard the ‘kind’ bit in ‘mankind’ as somewhat ironic. It is bad enough having twenty four of one’s kith and kin massacred for culinary purposes, but for people to then go around boasting about it is beyond the pale.
I now find myself reluctantly contributing to this long history of inter-species conflict. This year, of all years, a very determined and persistent blackbird has decided that a shelf attached to the side of our shed between the shed and the fruit cage would be the ideal place to build its nest. The shed with the shelf has been there for well over twenty years, the cage with the Saskatoon bush has been there for seven or eight, and nobody has ever previously decided that the shelf is the absolutely perfect place to set up house and bring up the children. Any other year we would have been delighted and felt warmly protective in an appropriately grand-parental kind of way; this year the shed is scheduled to be demolished in precisely three weeks time and all the arrangements have been irrevocably put in place. The shed is past its sell-by date, the creeper is gradually overwhelming it from the outside and sending triffid-like tentacles through cracks in the sides deep into the darkness within. Three weeks won’t allow even the most hyper-active blackbird couple to complete the nest, lay and hatch the eggs, and bring the chicks to maturity. So, regardless of the crisis of conscience involved, a halt had to be called to the nest building activity.
I mention the ‘blackbird couple’ by way of a gesture towards gender equality, but in this instance, contrary to Royal Society for the Protection of Birds information, the female has very seldom been putting in much of an appearance, and it is the obviously very woke male that appears to have been doing most of the building…
It goes on and is delightful. And there’s a kind-of happy ending, or at least a sort of armed truce.