Covered this week; 2019 Grammy winners compiled… Apocalyptic Dad, stories from the front line… Apple pitches a 50% share on revenue from their upcoming premium News App… Celebrity then and now photos with a twist… 4th Annual Six Colors Apple report card… How the super rich pay for things… Thoughts on how sex abusers get away with it for so long…
February 11, 2019
As is my custom… first I’ll make note of how little the Grammy’s represents music as a whole… but then I’ll give you the complete listing of all the winners as it remains a thing that happens every February.
February 12, 2019
This bit segues into my conviction that the world is transitioning from one state to another… at the root of this I’ve always understood, is the ongoing transference of wealth from the many to the few… but until now, I had no term for it, now I do… Post-Capitalist. It’s sad that this is where we’ve gotten… but as I’ll increasingly focus space to this as time goes by, I would suggest that you do to… even if it joyously ended up not happening like it looks like it’s going to… better to be prepared than to not be.
A few weeks ago I read a new book by Peter Fleming called The Worst Is Yet To Come. Billed as a “post-capitalist survival guide,” the book’s most interesting suggestion is that, despite what you might think, capitalism is already basically dead. The problem is that we’re transitioning, not to something better (with the inexorable logic of, for instance, Marx’s dialectic) — but to something worse. “The post-capitalist future we should prepare for,” Fleming writes, “will be no classless utopia. The worst features of capitalism will be amplified and applied reductio ad absurdum, coalescing around the return of preindustrial norms of authority and an incredible polarisation of wealth.”
February 13, 2019
A really interesting behind-the-scenes here from Recode into Apple’s upcoming premium version of its news aggregator app… turns out their ask is 50% of any publishers royalties… pretty wild. What they say is don’t think about the percentage, rather, consider the amount of money you’ll be making every day. Gonna be interesting seeing how this all shakes out… one point the article makes rings really true to me… which is, magazines are going to be much more cooperative than newspapers, especially the big boys. I’ve been a subscriber to the New York Times for a couple years now and they already have a pretty slick (and affordable) subscription service… can’t really see them or the Washington Post giving up their rights to Apple along with 50%, regardless of how many subscribers Apple manages to sign up.
You could argue that since the-thing-formerly-known-as-Texture will be an Apple-owned service, it’s fair for Apple to treat it differently than stuff owned by Apple’s App Store partners. But that’s not terribly convincing, given that the service can’t exist without the content. Also, Apple pays out more than 70 percent of its revenue to the music owners that power its Apple Music service. The more compelling argument, I’m told by publishers that have agreed to work with Apple, is that Apple is going to spend a lot of time and money promoting the new service and thinks it can generate many millions of subscribers.
February 14, 2019
Sort of fun for Valentine’s Day. Apparently from the Netherlands, photographer Ard Gelinck photoshops then and now shots for hundreds of celebrities which is actually pretty interesting to look at… You’ve probably seen a couple of these floating around… here’s a chance to see them all compiled in one place.
February 15, 2019
So, the state of Apple is always a topic of interest around here… which makes it always a good read when Jason Snell & Dan Moren’s Six Colors Apple report comes out… this is the 4th annual report and it’s a nice recap of what Apple did and did not accomplish in 2018 compiling the opinions of quite a few hardcore Apple people.
My panelists included Shahid Kamal Ahmad, Steven Aquino, Marco Arment, Charles Arthur, Leah Becerra, Shawn Blanc, Jeff Carlson, Josh Centers, Michael E. Cohen, Peter Cohen, Alex Cox, Jim Dalrymple, Matt Deatherage, Jessica Dennis, Dr. Drang, Adam Engst, Glenn Fleishman, Lex Friedman, Rob Griffiths, John Gruber, Stephen Hackett, Myke Hurley, Andy Ihnatko, Joe Kissell, Andrew Laurence, Rick LePage, Casey Liss, Roman Loyola, Jean MacDonald, Joe Macirowski, Merlin Mann, Kirk McElhearn, Scholle McFarland, Philip Michaels, Carolina Milanesi, Rich Mogull, John Moltz, Dan Moren, Rene Ritchie, Lisa Schmeiser, Brent Simmons, Aleen Simms, John Siracusa, David Smith, David Sparks, Fraser Speirs, Brett Terpstra, Ben Thompson, James Thomson, James T. Green, Michael Tsai, Khoi Vinh, Federico Viticci, Christina Warren, and Gabe Weatherhead.
February 16, 2019
Today’s link isn’t meant to make your poor-ass sad… but posted instead in the spirit of curiosity… this is a bit of a long read but there were a lot of interesting anecdotes in here with stories I had never heard… plus, how the uber rich pay for things is an interesting thing to know… and then you can fantasize for a couple minutes about winning the lottery.
On that note, for anyone curious, the largest known personal check ever written was for $974,790,317.77 in 2014 by one Harold Hamm to pay his ex-wife a court mandated settlement after a divorce. Amazingly, Hamm’s ex-wife originally refused to cash the check, feeling the amount was too small given Hamm’s then net worth of $18 billion. However, she abruptly changed her mind the next day and cashed it anyway. According to Forbes, the process of cashing the check went ahead mostly like any other, with the exception of the bank calling Hamm to make sure the check was genuine before depositing the money into his ex-wife’s account.
February 17, 2019
The Bill Cosby’s, the Harvey Weinstein’s, the Kevin Spacey’s… the argument is made that they get along doing what they’re doing for so long because at a certain level people aren’t willing to give up what these people give us in exchange for shining a light on their misdeeds… Dan Reed’s controversial documentary on Michael Jackson reaches HBO next month and by all accounts, it’s a scary deal… here’s a Maureen Dowd opinion piece for the Times on the topic.
“He flies you first class, you have a limo waiting for you at the airport, amazing, you know, it’s a life of the rich and famous,” Mrs. Safechuck gushes in the film, adding: “I got to meet Sean Connery. That was big for me. It was like, ‘Oh my God, Sean Connery!’” She also loved Neverland: “He had a beautiful wine cellar, really good wines, champagne, that was just something I enjoyed — it was a fairy tale every night.” After all, as she says, he was a genius and they were “just nobodies.” Jackson bought them a house after James testified on the singer’s behalf in a trial involving another boy.
