Doc Searls's Blog, page 10

Whether Weather

Screen grabs from Windy, Lightning Maps, and Storm Radar

NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) is the alpha US source for weather forecasting, ocean science, climate research, and much more. So, as a weather geek, it concerns me when Wired says Dismantling NOAA Threatens the World’s Ability to Monitor Carbon Dioxide Levels: The agency maintains the global backbone of measurements of CO2 and other gases, but these are at risk of being curtailed if the foreshadowed cuts to NOAA are realized.

So I dug a bit. Here are five threats:

Massive Budget CutsProposed 27% cut to NOAA’s overall budget, reducing it from $6.1 billion to approximately $4.5 billion.Complete elimination of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), NOAA’s central hub for climate science.Threats to halt programs that underpin climate forecasting, weather modeling, and long-term environmental monitoring.Threats to federal support for NOAA’s 16 cooperative research institutes, typically housed at major universities.Sources: Washington Post, NPR, AxiosStaff Reductions and Operational Disruptions880 NOAA employees laid off, so far, with 1,029 more departing through early retirement or buyouts.Shuttering of regional climate centers.Halted weather balloon launches, degrading forecast accuracy.Reduced dependent local emergency planning and storm readiness.Sources: Wikipedia, Vox, NewsweekData Shutdowns and Transparency RollbacksShutdowns of multiple publicly accessible datasets, including the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database (here’s Texas), on which insurance companies, city planners, climate researchers, emergency folk, and geeks like me all depend.Source: Yahoo, Houston ChronicleStructural Realignment and Privatization Push Project 2025 , recommendations of which the Trump administration predictably follows, calls for privatization of NOAA services , including the NWS.There are plans to move NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center to the Department of Homeland Security.Sources: Washington Post, Wikipedia, The HillLong-Term Risks to Public Safety and ScienceDegrading NOAA’s capabilities will also degrade forecasting of extreme weather events.Agriculture, shipping, aviation, and emergency services will all suffer major setbacks.Source: The Guardian

When I look at my weather sites and apps—

WindyWeatherbugMyRadarAccuweatherLightning Maps

—I wonder what will happen to them.

Will NASA’s FIRMS and its fire detection and mapping satellite services (MODIS, VIIRS) go away, when stuff like that gets jobbed out to SpaceX, BlueOcean, or whatever? Every time I report on a wildfire, I depend on those. Examples.

News about all this seems to be quieter lately. Did the cuts happen? If so, did they do what DOGE promised, and just cut fat and costs? Are they done with it?

If you have answers, love to hear them.

Mittwoch

More lost privacy. 404 reports that Flock Safety, an automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company, “is building a product that will use people lookup tools, data brokers, and data breaches to ‘jump from LPR [license plate reader] to person,’ allowing police to much more easily identify and track the movements of specific people around the country without a warrant or court order, according to internal Flock presentation slides, Slack chats, and meeting audio obtained by 404 Media.” I wonder if Flock is downstream from the kind of surveillance that 404 allows through its participation in surveillance-based adtech. Look here. (Not as bad as some, but still a spreading delta of personal data leakage.)

A small catch. Software Update for my Apple Watch requires entering a passcode on the watch which the watch does not provide a way to enter while it’s on its charger. The app says it’s “verifying…,” suggesting that something is updating, but it will fail. Clues?

I love Edit All Categories in Wordland, which I’m writing in now. My blog on WordPress has been around since ’07, so I’ve accumulated a lot of categories, but I just added one more: Questions, for the post below.

A question for those who know: How can one tell which of their posts on Medium are, or are not, behind paywalls?

Final Four. Except for watching Jayson Tatum go down with one of the worst wounds in sports, I’ve enjoyed the NBA playoffs so far. Last night’s game between the Denver Nuggets and the Oklahoma City Thunder was brilliant. So was watching the Indiana Pacers eliminate the highly favored Cleveland Cavaliers in just five games. And so will be watching the New York Knicks finish off the equally favored Boston Celtics tonight (though I kinda hope this Celtics team wins a final one for the home crowd tonight, so the Knicks can win the final game of the series in front of their home crowd this weekend). Meanwhile, I expect the Minnesota Timberwolves to finish off the Curry-less Golden State Warriors. Wolves vs. Thunder and Pacers vs. Knicks should be games for the ages. By the way, while I’m a lifelong Knicks fan, I was a season ticket holder for the Warriors in the Run TMC era, and began digging the Celtics as well, starting when I came to Boston in ’07. And now I’m living in Indiana, where basketball, Pacers, and Fever fever all run high.

I took three years of German in high school and gave them all back when I was done. But I do remember that Mitwoch is Wednesday, auf Deutsch.

Mitwoch

I took three years of German in high school and gave them all back when I was done. But I do remember that Mitwoch is Wednesday, _auf Deutsc_h.

Unrealities

Developing the uncanny valley. HT to John Naughton (whom God preserve*) for pointage to Mistral's Le Chat, an AI image-generatng chatbot. It's a good answer to the challenge of making AI art that doesn't look like AI art. *This is an HT as well, toward one of John's warm conventions. And subscribe to his 'stack. It's terrific.

I didn't. Got a phishing email from (not) Mark Pincus. It said "I’m backing a new AI fund that I think is really compelling. The team’s strong, and they're focused on applied AI with near-term upside — not just moonshot." If you get one, don't open it.

Looking forward to Knicks-Pacers. The Knicks were unbeatable yesterday. They weren't (and aren't) just a collection of great players. They're a great team. It did suck, however, for Jayson Tatum to go down with a ruptured Achilles tendon, after keeping his team in the game almost single-handedly. He's now gone for up to a year and a half. When he returns, the Celtics will be a different team. The current roster costs too much.

Inflation

This is at Costco. In Indiana:

Just a fact.

Motherings

Trump will be flying Qatar One instead of (or as) Air Force One:

Aaaand,,,,

Call your mother, if she’s still around. If she’s not, remember her anyway. I did that here.

I’m pointing to A look at broadcast history happening because it came up in a conversation about archives. Also because that history (especially concerning the decline and not-yet-fall of AM radio) is happening faster than ever.

Make that 89 light years. My answer four years ago to “How far has our first radio broadcast spread into space?“—

The earliest broadcasts were on what we now call longwave (LW) and mediumwave (MW) frequencies. Later, shortwave (SW) was also used. Frequencies on these bands are either absorbed or reflected by layers of the ionosphere. Those are handy for broadcasts over long distances on the planet; but they suck for communications out into space. For that you need frequencies that weren’t used until VHF, UHF, and higher frequency bands became practicable, starting in the 1940s. FM was first demonstrated by its inventor, Edwin W. Armstrong, in June 1936, on a low VHF frequency. So, whatever is left of that transmission, if it escaped into space (not a certainty), would now be two months short of 85 light years away.

Yes, there is one, and we’ll be digging it. The 13th USA International Harp Competition – 2025 will be happening here in Bloomington, Indiana, at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. There are twelve prizes totaling about $90k in value.

How to Make Customers Hate You

Exhibit A:

Soak ’em when they don’t know they’re being soaked.

Wecome to negative option billing at work. Other labels include “sludge,” “dark patterns,” “gotcha pricing,” “subscription trapping,” and “bait-and-default.” Works like this: offer a service a discount that jumps up to a high “regular” price after the discount runs out, and count on the customer forgetting when the jump happens. It’s a hugely common practice. In One example of how subscriptions suck, I described how The New Yorker does it. Every year, I call them to renew by not renewing. Instead I get the promotional price for new customers, rather than the higher price reserved for suckers who don’t bother to get the discount (which you can only get by calling them).

SiriusXM is a special case, however, because the “regular” price is more than 5x the promotional price, as we see above.

Let me explain that billing list, briefly.

$10.91 is the promotional monthly price I got in December 2023. It was due to run out a year later, but I didn’t get an email notice, because I had opted out of marketing emails, which had been a deluge. But I should have set my own reminder and didn’t, because I’m not very organized.$28.19 is a renewal fee.The customer service person at SiriusXM couldn’t explain exactly what the $40.03 or the $54.95 were for, but I suspect the first was the charge for having one car’s SiriusXM service activated, and the second was for having two cars activated, because I get the second car in March of 2024. Note that the $10.91 price was for two cars. When I added the second car, they told me there would be no additional charge with the promotional plan I was on.

Here is the page on the SiriusXM website explaining various plans. It doesn’t include the “deal” (if that’s what it was) that I got by calling customer support on the phone.

I have been a SiriusXM subscriber since 2005, when the company was just Sirius. And I have been calling them every year to get the lowest possible rate, which they always say is for new customers. There are no rewards for being a long-time customer. Instead, there are punishments.

I was so infuriated by all this today (when I learned about it) that I came very close to just saying “screw it,” and canceling. But I didn’t because I wanted to listen to the Knicks-Celtics game, which is going on right now. I also like the huge selection of SiriusXM  “stations” on the car radios and on the app. In number, variety, and quality, they far exceed what we ever had on the old-fashioned radio dial.

Sound from the app is better than sound from the satellite. On the app you can also easily pause, go back and forward through a show’s timeline, and enjoy other conveniences. But the user interface is annoying. It opens to “Discover,” which has stuff “based on your afternoon listening,” or whatever. Where in the past your selection of “Favorite” channels was displayed on a nice stable vertical grid that looked the same every time you opened the app, they are now sidelined to a list called “Library.” The list is different every time you open the app, also based on some algorithm. The whole thing is full of guesswork like that. It’s not textbook enshittification, but close enough.

Anyway, here is my new deal:

Now the discount promotional new customer monthly fee is $10.99. It doesn’t say what it will be after the Renewal Charges hit, which (it also doesn’t say) will come a year from now. But you can bet it will be more than $54.95. And not worth it. SiriusXM knows that, but they also know a lot of us are suckers. They rely on us being suckers, rather than just coming up with a good flat-price deal (like, as I recall, they had in the first place)—one that signals what the service is worth, and anyone can respect.

Naturally, there are moves afoot to fight sucker-baiting. For one, check out the FTC’s Negative Option Rule page. It’s proposed, of course. Will it ever happen? Not holding my breath.

In the meantime, SiriusXM is earning my hate.

I still like some of the channels and shows (especially Howard Stern’s and the NBA shows). But it’s hard not to hate the service.

This kind of shit won’t be fixed from the inside, and not by any of the many services selling subscription systems to companies. (Even advice on playing nice recognizes that negative option pricing is still a form of baiting and switching.)

We have to fix it from the outside. From our side: the customers’ side.

That’s what we’ve been working on for nearly nineteen years with ProjectVRM. I also have more faith than ever that we’ll succeed, through personal AI and related work.

If you want to help, let me know.

 

 

Future Tabs

Stay Calm and Check it out. Pure libertarians are neither right nor left, nor where the extremes of both meet. Mostly they come from a sensibility outside both redstream and mainstream: one that PJ O'Roarke put perfectly in Parliament of Whores: "The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work — and then they get elected and prove it." PJ is gone, and Reason isn't funny, but it comes from a sane place that neither side of the dem/rep duopoly dwells these days. So its take on many things is worth reading. Examples: Billy Binion's Is This Constitutional? Here's How Due Process Works and Virginia Postrel's Abundance Makes the Case for 'Supply-Side Progressivism'. Mainly, it makes thought-out arguments, rather than polemics—the kind of stuff that makes you nod along or shake your head without feeling the need to tweet it from the rooftops.

I still don't like the plane. Crew vs. View on United's Boeing 787 now has had 3000 visits since it went up in 2017, Medium tells me. Most of those visits were from back when Medium was more of a happening thing. I put a fresher version of the post here on the blog, with the title A dark review for United’s Boeing 787.

Too many? Probably. I'm losing count of how many links I'd like to share lead to paywalls or teasewalls (walls teasing a subscription that show up part way through a full read).

Overhearings

Strange but true enough. Why I've been farting less in 1996.

From the Undersecretaries of Overstate. My phone bings with notifications from my weather apps saying there is a Dense Fog Advisory in effect—just as the clouds part and vanish, opening a clear blue sky and a bright new day. Where weather forecasts used to say (on radio and TV, back when those still mattered) there would be "afternoon and evening thundershowers," we now get "SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING" sent to our phones. But maybe that will end after NOAA (and hell, the rest of Commerce) gets thrown into the wood chipper.

Not too oldie but still goodie.I was just reminded that I guested on Joseph Jaffe's podcast three years ago yesterday.  Starts about eleven minutes in at that link.

The Offing of What’s On

Parody of a page from TV Guide, circa 1978

For the final seven decades of the last millennium, most people in the developed world scheduled their evenings by answering a simple question: What’s on? For the first two of those decades, the question was “What’s on the radio?” For the next five, it was “What’s on TV?”

Guidance toward answers were provided on newspaper pages covering entertainment, and in weekly magazines. The biggest of those was TV Giude, at its peak the most popular magazine in the U.S. *with 20 million customers, plus some multiple of pass-along readers.

In the guide were stations (such as those above), which belonged to networks. The biggest of those—CBS, NBC, and ABC—migrated over from radio. PBS and Fox came later.

To get TV stations, you needed an antenna. Rabbit ears worked if you had strong signals, but the picture looked best only if you had a roof antenna. The best of those looked like the skeleton of a 10-foot tuna on a spike:

A dead TV antenna I spotted recently in Oden, Indiana. The flat feed line says it dates from the 1970s or earlier. The tower was next to a house, and the antenna was about 40 feet above the ground. Back in the Analog Age, it probably got stations from Indianapolis, Louisville, Evansville, Terra Haute, and maybe even St. Louis. Here in the Digital Age, it would get a handful of signals from stations within about 50 miles, but nothing from the bigger markets.

In rural areas, you needed a big one, ideally high above the ground, on a tower of its own or strapped to a chimney, with a rotator so you could spin it around. The one I used in Chapel Hill, back in the ’70s and early ’80s, could get every station within two hundred miles. I got channel 7s from Washington, NC, and Roanoke, VA. On channel 3, I got Charlotte and Wilmington, both in NC.

Cable began as CATV—Community Antenna Television. When I lived in far northern New Jersey in the early ’70s, we were shadowed by terrain from New York City and Philadelphia signals, but our CATV provider gave us the 12 VHF channels of both cities. Gradually, cable companies added lots of channels that were cable-only. That gave folks a lot more answers to “What’s On?” and kept that era going.

But that era is mostly over, because optionality vergest on absolute. This happened because, as Clay Shirky put it,

Now you can produce a show on your phone almost as easily as you consume one on a TV. You can share it with the world on YouTube, Vimeo, your blog, or wherever. This is why there are more than fourteen billion videos on YouTube alone. There are also four and a half million podcasts, and countless millions of musical selections available over streaming services. Against all of this, broadcast radio and TV are dead technologies walking.

Interesting fact: What makes a TV a TV is its antenna connection:

Without that and the tuner inside, it’s just a monitor.

So let’s compare:

And that bottom line is where we’re at. “What’s on?” has become an archaic expression, like “prithee” and “forsooth.”

And we’re changed by that. As Marshall McLuhan is said to have said (yes, he meant it, but didn’t say it—see that last link), we shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.

So, what’s our shape now? Are we becoming phono sapiens?

I think it’s more like… where are we now?

Clearly, we are in a state of massive optionality, but the mass itself is not optimized, and won’t be until we get much better control over our lives, and our personal data, than we have now.

For that we need personal AI. We don’t have it yet. Not the collective we, including all the Muggles.

The wizards are having fun with MCP, for example. Just learned oday about BrowserMCP. I’m eager to get going on KwaaiNet.

Anyway, it’s important to note in passing that What’s On is mostly Off.