Okay, Buzzfeed. Please find me one single person who bought sham campaign merchandise from Kid Rock and is now upset that the profits from those sales aren’t headed to some voter registration nonprofit.

Mock outrage over a mock musician’s mock campaign.

Matthew Yglesias nails it for Vox:

Republicans are mostly a party of cultural grievance-mongers, not ambitious legislators. That’s why Donald Trump is their president. That’s why they don’t seem to notice or care that Paul Ryan is a total fraud.

…

As far as policy goes, passing unpopular bills is not a great way to be popular. More to the point, every single House Republicans knows perfectly well that they didn’t campaign in 2016 on the promise of some wonky tax reform plan. The campaign was about how Hillary Clinton was a she-devil whose email server was going to get us all killed by Barack Obama’s buddies from ISIS. The chant at the rallies was “lock her up!” not “allow multinational companies to repatriate foreign profits tax free!”

Trump’s there in the West Wing, day after day, talking about how troops and cops are good and Black Lives Don’t Matter and immigrants are terrible (except the good ones) and we’re gonna say Merry Christmas and not be such sensitive snowflakes and celebrate our Confederate generals like all good patriots do. That’s what the party’s all about.

Governing is like thinking. It’s hard. And as the GOP keeps showing us, it’s way easier not to do it.

Paul Canetti on the implications of augmented reality era, ushered in by the release of the iPhone X:

Besides all the awesome implications… it’s also easy to imagine doing all this for malicious purposes. You could make a politician or a celebrity do and say things that they never did, in a way that to a layperson is indistinguishable from a real video of them. You could make it seem like they were in a place that they never were with someone that they’ve never met.

When people talk about the high price of iPhone X, it must be understood that the price tag of $999 for this technology is literally thousands of times cheaper than it was only a few years ago, and that price will continue to go down over time until every smartphone on earth has this technology, with the cost driven to essentially zero. There will be a proliferation of falsified content, created by everyone all the time. And all along the technology itself will be improved, making it harder and harder to parse out what’s real and what’s not.

This is scary, yeah okay. But we also live in an era in which a presidential candidate could be heard on tape bragging about grabbing “pussy” and subsequently very few of his supporters seem to have changed their minds about voting for him. So when we see a ginned up sex act between a politician and a dead girl or live boy, I’m not sure that will move the needle any either.

I don’t say that to absolve tech and the culture of innovation, which is all too often incredibly callous, but to remind about how desensitized we’ve already become to new information before having been confronted with the tragicomedy of AR memes.

Michael Tsai quotes Mark Gurman who says:

Voice apps don’t run on the HomePod, HomePod serves as a speaker to the iPhone. Only works with SiriKit for messaging, notes, and list apps.

So, no apps like Uber/Lyft (would have been perfect for the HomePod), no new Siri functionality for apps like Spotify (obvious-ish).

I’ll admit, I don’t see the expansive vision or even much of the current appeal some folks seem to have for so-called smart speakers.¹

So can anyone explain why “apps like Uber/Lyft (would have been perfect for the HomePod)?”

The percent of times a person will want to hail a cab without their phone on or at least near their person as they are readying to walk out the door is approximately zero?

The “second act” of This American Life episode #630, features a short but great interview of Jeff Flake by Zoe Chase – the week before his Senate retirement speech.

The “second act” of This American Life episode #630, features a short but great interview of Jeff Flake by Zoe Chase – the week before his Senate retirement speech.