The networks should put Trump on time delay and when he says you can legally murder babies in some states, that should be treated as if he said fuck or shit. Put up a screen that explains why he was cut off, then go to commercial, esp during the debate on Sep 10.

Dear NY Times, before we get rid of the penny, let’s open up your op-ed page to include criticism of the NYT. You can handle a little pushback, you need it desperately.

And for some companies, the founder of a company they acquire might make the best CEO when the founder of the original company isn't available. Again Apple is a great example. Steve Jobs ultimately replaced Gil Amelio, after Apple bought NeXT.

Wordle Kitty is watching TV along with 80 other convicted house pets serving life sentences at Attica high security prison. They’re watching a mushy political psycho drama starring Wordle Kitty herself, the cutest most adorable kitten known to mankind. The NYT headline reads “Cushy kitty crushes mushy melodrama in prison laugh riot.”

Graham uses Steve Jobs as an example. He knew what was and wasn't an Apple product. A hired CEO would have to have that explained to him. Sculley, who Graham cites, is a perfectly nice person in my experience, had no idea how to deal with Windows. Very different from a consumer product like fizzy water. Who but Steve Jobs would have thought that an iPod was a proper product for a company that made PCs. I think he himself wanted it, and that's what made something an Apple product. It's probably why post-Jobs Apple is pretty much stuck selling only the products Jobs created for them. He told Cook to innovate on his own vision and timetable, probably knowing full-well that nobody would be able to do it. 😄

Another rule for whoever runs a tech company, they must themselves be a fanatical user of the company's product. They must love it the way a founder loves it. They must think the users are the smartest people in the world because they love the best product in the world. As a founder, I could not visualize the day I left the company for the last time. In hindsight I felt that was the one factor most responsible for the success of the company.

Paul Graham wrote a very useful piece about "Founder Mode." As a founder myself, I think I can tell you why founders have a central role to play as the company grows. They're the only ones who know how the company was built, and what works and what doesn't and how to keep it ...

August is archived. Let's start September.

Why does JD Vance have so many opinions about women?

It's worth reflecting that the press took its best shot at Kamala Harris, and it was a big puff of smoke, she just cruised right through it.

Thread: Blogs and the social web will merge.

A feature I've wanted to add to the textcasting server app is a plug-in architecture so you can add a new platform driver without having to reconfigure or even reboot the server. There's a new folder at plugins/platforms. Each subfolder contains a driver for one platform. I...

Feature I really need: A way to search all of my conversations with ChatGPT. It's the one feature I'm most missing, and the most surprising. I'm sure there's a huge amount of utility locked up in that.

What if Trump had been killed in the assassination attempt. What would have happened next? Biden was still the Democratic candidate.

I was thinking about Wisconsin news orgs and remembered we called the two Madison papers the Crap Times and the Wisconsin State Urinal. I don't know why that's so funny. Everyone does it. We used to call our own company Living Videosex, and the company that bought us out was Cementech or Sementech. Still makes me laugh. And there are company names that are funny without changing them like Microsoft. Sorry.

It has come to my attention that "It's even worse than it appears" might not be the right overlay for Kamala Harris, whose picture is the current banner art for Scripting News. Of course she's still even better than she appears. I really mean that, and if you read this blog r...

Humor and putdowns in politics are great if you know how to do it and if the time is right. Trump was the only comedian on stage at the debates. And his act was fresh. The people who loved him loved that the other people hated him. It really was simple. Like a sports team or...

I use my blog in the earliest part of the day to warm up and procrastinate.

I can't read most of the stories I want to read. I have the money and am willing to spend it. But there is no system. On the other hand the distribution of video entertainment is somewhat functional, I spend an ungodly amount of mostly wasted money to get access to that. I...

In elections we get to say who we are, ie who comes closest to who we are. It's all made of imagery. Bernie Sanders is someone you either love or don't. He reminds me of people in my own family, who I would never want to be president of anything. But this ad, the best ever imho, says wait a minute, please reconsider. A campaign is a series of messages from candidate to electorate: "Is this who we are?" The great ads tap our optimism, imho. The Sanders ad says we're nice happy people who have jobs and help each other.

In the next scene, Wordle Kitty, lithe and slender, and fiercely cute, is doing an AMA on Reddit. One of the questions asks if Wordle Kitty knows anyone in the US Government. "I don't know anyone in the US Government," she said, "but I do know their kittens!" she concluded. This scene is shown on the front page of the NY Times along with the headline "Wordle Kitty is leading an insurrection in DC, other kittens are colluding!"

An idea for the Harris campaign. Let me buy some swag and have it sent to 10 of my best friends, esp ones who live in swing states. Plus you get the names and contact info for people at least one of your supporters thought would be a potential Harris voter. I'd send something less presumptuous like When We Fight We Win stickers. Another related idea, let me buy a whole set of promotional materials, kind of like the gift baskets they sell at Zabar's.

Today Automattic announced that they're converting Tumblr, which they acquired in 2019, to run on WordPress as its foundation. This could get a simple colorful user-friendly interface for WordPress, something it's needed for a long time. WordPress does everything in its UI, Tumblr has its UI better organized for writers and more casual users. If they can move in this direction, it seems that WordPress could be large part of the emerging social web.

Note to the Harris campaign: This Google search should return a complete list of your ads. Or a pointer to a site with a complete list of your ads. I want to make sure everyone who follows me sees every one of them! Let us help you help us.

Very insightful Greg Sargent interview with James Carville. Two take-aways for Democrats. 1. Avoid NPR politics. 2. Appeal to college-educated white men. Most of them vote Republican, but with Walz on the ticket, they have a special ambassador, he represents that straight-talking country folk are part of the Democratic coalition. It's still true that white voters are the majority. Get a small number to vote Democratic could be enough to win the election. It never is about policy. It's about whether you are like them. That's what it means to avoid NPR politics. And btw, imho -- getting the press to like you might not be good. I wonder if the Dems would ever have the courage to sever itself from the journos. Imagine Harris saying "If the press says we're bad you know that means we're good." She could say that in her big interview. 😀

The reason I asked if NYT reporters sign NDAs with the NYT, then when a reporter leaves the NYT they can write a book about WTF happened at the NYT, and it would be an instant best seller imho.

I know a kitten who'd like to be EIC of the NYT.

Do NYT reporters sign NDAs with their employer, the NYT?

I don't want to give Trump any ideas, but he's complaining that Harris is forcing him to run as an incumbent, so he might as well take credit for all the things Biden did.

I know it doesn't matter why the NYT are so fucked up about covering the election, but I can't stop thinking about it anyway. Then, Greg Sargent's podcast gave me an idea. The oppressor in a fascist state doesn't need you to love them, so long as you don't love anyone else. The NYT isn't trying to make us love Trump, that's impossible. But they are trying to make us not fall in love with Harris. I doubt they foresaw that possibility. But our feelings about Harris are very much love. The NYT is our only master, they must think. There's no room for us to love someone else, because we might listen to them. In a sense they respond like a first born child on the arrival of their little sister or brother. I don't know. As I said it doesn't matter why. That's their problem. Our problem is to get them out of the way.