Quicken spending spam - alert "feature"

In my mail this morning…

During a machine transition I reinstalled Quicken 2015, so I at first thought we’d unwittingly enabled Quicken Mobile and put our finances into Intuit’s Cloud. We hadn’t, but there’s an alerting “feature” I didn’t know about that can be changed in preferences. I’ve now disabled all alerts. 

I’d prefer Intuit (current owner, but Quicken has been abandoned) not know anything about me at all. I suspect knowing about me is, unfortunately, a significant part of their failing business model.

If you don’t want this, then stay away from Intuit and Quicken.

Preventive care: what's new in the past 7 years

While studying for my 2009 American Family Medicine board exams I wrote up a summary of the American Academy of Family Practice’s preventive care recommendations. For this November’s exam I updated my old notes, so I got to see what’s changed with preventive care over the past 7 years.

There are more listings now, but most of the additions are recommendations not to do anything. HPV and cervical cancer screening recommendations still don’t consider immunization status. Screening for diabetes in pregnancy was removed in 2008 (though everyone would still do it) but it’s back in 2015. Hep C screening is recommended for at risk or born 1945-65; that’s because we have decent treatments now. I was a bit surprised that HIV screening is now recommended for everyone age 18-65 — though the screening interval is murky. Screening used to be limited to higher risk populations.

Lung cancer went from “don’t screen” to equivocal, but PSA (prostate specific antigen) went from equivocal to “don’t screen” (remember when every senior guy needed that?).

And … that’s about it. Based on the news this week mammogram screening will be further reduced but that’s not part of the official recommendations yet.

Not a lot of change.

London

This year has been a different year. By circumstance not of my choosing, but not displeasing, I’ve more personal time than usual, but also, for a time, income. So each of our children got to pick a trip with Dad. My 13yo daughter, #3, chose London. 

I was thinking Chicago, or perhaps Manhattan, but she was being mischievous, so London it was. We spent six days touring the city. By the city I don’t mean only “Zone 1”, the city of Old London and West London, but all the way out to Zone 3 and 4 — we stayed in an Airbnb in Mitcham, an utterly unremarkable bit of the megacity sprawl about 25 minutes of overground south of Blackfriars station. For my own reason I’m going to make a few notes about our experience, but these must be hasty notes. Life spins on. So they will be roughly sectioned, and made of bullets rather than paragraphs. There are two parts - impressions of the city and practicalities of modern travel.

Impressions of the City (mostly my surprises)

Emily and I spent a day or two in London about 30 years ago. That’s almost halfway to post-war London, though we didn’t think of it that way. I didn’t know much about the city, we basically visited a museum or two.

This time I was better prepared. I purchased a Great Courses (Teaching Company) audiobook course on the the History of London. It was superb; the device of replaying walks through London of various times guided our travel. My favorite travel book was Fromer’s London Free and Dirt Cheap, and my favorite map was an old map once published by London Transport, the “London Map”. It's now a secret but still available from Visit Britain. I had difficulty finding a good map of London, the era of paper maps is passing quickly. I think it is also true that the scope of London is a challenge to map makers.

It took me some time to grasp the scope of London. Guide books and most descriptions fail here. London is a mega-sprawl like Atlanta, but unlike Atlanta it has a central Core. The Core, better known as Zone 1, is morphing from a place where people live and work and visit to a place where people work and visit — but do not live. Zone 1 is a kind of urban singularity — bending light and threatening to fall out of the scope of normal human interaction. The expenses of operating there are pushing food and recreating prices out of the scope of most humans, but it still defies gravity. Last year was another record breaking visitor year. Older museums remain free — but that accessibility seems to be at risk. Newer museums, and even some older ones like the Monument (to the Great Fire) charge high fees. On the other hand perhaps part of London’s modern attraction is the opportunity to watch the wealthy at play, a kind of zoo for bankers and billionaires.

London has some attractive and charming areas — we visited many of those. I think it has less than many European cities though, probably less than Leeds. It is a city of power and commerce, thrusting and urgent. The 19th century swept away much of old London, rebuilding in a confusing array of faux-oldness that recalls the changes of modern Beijing. WW II destroyed a lot, and rebuilding was rough. A bit, as is often noted, like the rapid reconstruction after the Great Fire. For a city with a lot of history London has some of the ahistoric callousness of Los Angeles.

Happily, London is also a city of vanity and show. We only walked through the theater district, but we did visit most of the “great” museums. No irony in those quotes, they are everything they claim to be. (Note to British Museum — please get some local banker to cough up 50 million quid so you can affix an artist’s picture of what the artifacts would have looked like with paint and context. Also, London’s Chinatown rarely gets a mention, but it has great food in the midst of the theaters.)

I’d read that London real estate was emptying out — that empty rooms are traded by billionaire speculators who want a bolt hole or a spot to stay when doing business. That felt true, but also lazy. This is true of Zone 1, which is not so large, and, I suppose, bits of Zone 2. There’s a lot of London where billionaires don’t go. We stayed in one of those parts, and traveled far East to visit the Dr Who Shop in another. (Our itinerary was largely set by my daughter, with a focus on Dr Who and Harry Potter and a bit of Sherlock. And shops — especially museum shops.)

This wasn’t our original plan, but I wanted to stay in a quieter place where we could visit grocery stores and save money and sanity by making our own breakfast and dinner. That meant Airbnb, and thanks to a bit of a mixup of mine we ended up in an utterly generic and relatively distant part of the London of Ordinary People. A place of vast sprawls of narrow homes and many languages — our particular area seemed to specialize in blue collar English, Poles and other Slavs, and 3rd generation south Asian. A similar region out East was more Islamic. Learning our residential neighborhood was one of the more remarkable parts of the visit. I think by British standards these are somewhat scary neighborhoods, but we are urban Americans. They are benign by our standards.

Londoners smoke. This really surprised me. Americans don’t smoke, particularly after teenage years. I felt like I’d taken a Tardis back to my childhood — adults of all ages smoking in the streets, but at least not indoors. My daughter was shocked. I wondered if part of this came from migration from cultures were smoking is widely accepted, but I feel it’s also a part of local culture — much as cocaine use was part of 1970s America. The urban air quality is also poor by our standards. 

Other surprises — how car-centric London is. Capacity pricing works, so the cars do flow, but they flow at full capacity all the time. Which is, really, a triumph of the market. A market triumph with an unintended consequence; a city full of wealthy drivers who pay heavily to drive is a city that will be utterly dominated by the car. I’d gotten a hint of this from reading a London Bicycling blog, but it was still a surprise given London’s reputation as a walking city. We walked 8-12 miles every day, and the streets are very crowded with walkers even in the off-season, but all of us pedestrians are second class. There are no crosswalk laws (de jure or de facto) — one crosses if a car allows or between gaps in cars. The city is not friendly to the weak — walkers need to move quickly and be alert.

The transit system does it’s part to screen out the unfit — “mind the gap” is a serious warning. Getting on and off the tube is similar to boarding a bus or train — only a few places can handle a wheelchair. Many tube stations work on escalators or stairs alone. There is nothing like the American accommodations for disability, even the much weaker Canadian accommodations.

Despite all of this, there are many cyclists. They are, however, serious commuter cyclists. With the exception of a few suicidal tourists on Santander cycles they are fast and fit cyclists wearing high visibility clothing and moving, when possible, in coordinated packs. There is no room to pass, bicycle commuting in London is a blood sport. Aside from a dull path through Hyde Park we saw no protected bicycle lanes — nothing like our home town of St Paul, much less Minneapolis, much much less Munich. They ride, I presume, because there are many transit advantages to London bike commuting, and because traffic often moves at the speed of a fast and fit cyclist.

London is much less safety conscious than an American city (perhaps our safety fetish is a response to our violent culture?). We are used to doors that open outwards for fire exit, in London doors open in and out. Some tube stations would be death traps in an emergency. The cars move slowly but implacably. The infrastructure is a mix of expensive deluxe (Heathrow Express from Paddington is a touch of wealth) and less-expensive-but-still-not-affordable rickety. Google Maps was brilliant at rerouting around broken underground links — the London transit network needs its switching redundancy.

Incidentally, some of the core attractions in London are effectively unavailable to normal people. My daughter wanted to do High Tea at the Ritz — but those tickets appear to be entirely purchased 6 months out, presumably by hotels. Same thing with theater tickets — I think if you want do theater you need to queue at Leicester square for the last minute openings. We did our High Tea at Fortnum and Mason instead — which worked well. 

Practical and Geeky Things I learned (in bullet points, because geeky)

• Google Maps for iOS and web are magical. I knew that, but in London, particular given our remote Airbnb residence, we depended very much on Google maps and ThamesLink.app. From ThamesLink we reviewed “overground” trains from Tooting station to Blackfriars, then used Google to evaluate transit options at various times or on the fly. When creating walking tours we could add point-to-point direction and have Google pick interesting routing and show us geographically related transit options. It’s not quite perfect — I’d like to be able to mix transit and foot connections when plotting routes — but it is a kind of magic only the old can appreciate.
   
• I thought we’d put in a SIM card and connect to London’s GSM network. Our hosts picked up a set of SIM cards for us to try, but I discovered that we couldn’t activate online them with an American credit card. We’d have had to visit something like a Carphone Warehouse and buy a GB there, or perhaps pick up a card at Heathrow. Instead we used AT&T’s Passport option. At roughly 0.25/mb it’s not cheap, but that’s nothing compared to London transit costs — and we didn’t feel like spending an hour getting kitted out. I locked down cellular use and turned on Data Roaming only when needed - usually for a Google Maps consult. The museums often have quite good WiFi, in the end our data costs were modest. London has some sort of citywide WiFi but it never worked for us, it’s just a source of interference. I found i was getting low speed 3G data until I allowed a Carrier Profile update; after that I had LTE. (There’s more complexity with GSM swaps than most of us imagine. I see why smart people don’t swap GSM cards but instead purchase a mobile hotspot device and swap cards in that.)
• Google Drive kind of sucks if you don’t have a constant data connection. It’s very awkward to force documents to be locally stored on an iPhone. I’m migrating to Dropbox for a variety of reasons, but for this trip I’d plot out our walking plans on my laptop using our Airbnb host’s excellent data connection, then print with maps to PDF in Google Drive, then on my iPhone I’d migrate the PDF to iBooks. Awkward, but it worked.
• I mentioned listening to the Great Course on London history (hint: much cheaper to buy via iTunes from Audible than from Teaching Company). I wish I’d created a short reference outline of English history in Simplenote that I could hang things off of. A list of key London events, related rulers, etc.
• We traveled with my 2015 MacBook Air (non-Retina and I love it), two iPhones and one iPad. Instead of hassling with lots of chargers I brought a 5 device charger (Anker makes good ones), a single UK plug adapter, and a simple 3 outlet extension cord. Worked perfectly. (Of course voltage adapters are no longer needed, with a few exceptions modern devices switch between 110/200 automatically.)
• I’ve had my issues in the past with Airbnb, but this time it seems to have worked out well. Airbnb encourages use of their system for communication between host and guest, but I wasn’t getting much in the way of responses that way. Once I started using direct SMS/iMessage instead the problem resolved. Young folk don’t do email.
• London is a city of Apps. Apps for transit, Apps for museums, etc. Pick up a few. I wish I’d tried History Pin.app or Localscope.app (or the equivalent) but I more or less forgot I had them.

Managing the TBs of videos and photos the kids produce

The kids generate a lot of images and video. Some of it I want to keep, other material is of temporary interest (instagram shares mostly), a lot of it is accumulated because, for them, storage is free. Meanwhile we’re overflowing our backup capacity — I just bought an 8TB Synology to replace a defective Time Capsule (4TB RAID 1)

The new policy is I put the media into dated folders on the server share. I quickly review my daughter’s images for things to add to our family archive (in Aperture, and, yes, I hate Apple). The kids have until the date on the folders to review the images for anything they want to keep. After that date I delete them.

I wonder what others do with this torrent of media. I suspect it just gets lost. There is a reason Apple gave up on Aperture — the entire market for amateur photo (much less video) management seems to be dying. Reminds me of the passing of personal finance software.

The "Paperless billing was requested" (minor) scam -- AT&T edition

I got this AT&T text message the other day...

Except, of course, I never requested paperless billing. I suppose I should have for purely ecological reasons, but Emily prefers the paper copy. It’s her workflow — and modern email is unreliable for many people (flow control is the big issue).

I suspect this was a side-effect of some minor service agreement, like accepting AT&T’s recent (unexpected) increase in our mobile share data allowance. AT&T is showing a bit of its old dirty tricks here (they are generally much reformed), especially the requirement to correct this by (ugh) making an (ugh) phone call.

I will probably accept this one — it feels like a battle not worth fighting. AT&T isn’t alone in this sort of thing, corporations have become quite clever at tricking customers into accepting paperless billing — without, say, offering to share the savings.

The eBook is dying. I'm the only person on earth who blames the DRM.

My main workaround for eBook misery has been to buy from Google Play, strip the Adobe DRM, and store the ePub (really should be written EPUB but nobody does that) files in folders in Google Drive.

I do this because Apple is incompetent and, among other things, can’t produce a workable iOS eBook reader (Wait, audiobooks are now worse). A set of folders and descriptive file names is the most scalable solution we can manage across iOS and OS X. Yeah, I could leave Apple — if I cut off my right arm. Apple and Google live and breathe customer lock-in, and i’m well locked.

Since iOS 9 and some Google Drive update this no longer works. It still works for dropbox, so this is probably Google’s fault.

Nonetheless, it makes eBooks suck even more. 

Which brings me to those recent articles pointing out that people now buy paper books, not eBooks. I’ve read explanations ranging from mystical beauties of paper to the high cost of digital books. Nobody mentions the DRM (FairPlay, Adobe, etc) and the data lock, including proprietary file formats, that block development of decent cross-platform eBook solutions.

I feel like a raving loon. Or like the sighted man in the country of the blind ranting about the approaching lava flow.

Damnit Jim, it’s the DRM. 

How data lock destroys the customer experience - Apple edition.

But for FairPlay, I would not use iOS 9 audiobooks. I wouldn’t swear every time it loses its place. I wouldn’t be pissed at Apple.

But for proprietary data formats I would not use Apple Aperture. I wouldn’t be pissed at Apple.

And so on.

Rheumatic syndromes remind me of pre-quark particle physics

This mornings board review included looking at the evolution of “inflammatory osteoarthritis” from 1970 to 2015. What was once described as an acute “inflammatory” (suddenly red and painful) form of osteoarthritis was later reformulated as “erosive osteoarthritis”, “psoriatic arthritis” and some vaguely described disorder that gradually morphs from osteoarthritis to rheumatoid arthritis — not to be confused with seronegative arthritis.

Bah. Humbug. It’s as bad as our mushy and obsolete classifications of neuropsychiatric disorders.

Unlike the neuropsychiatric disorders (autism, schizophrenia, etc) though, the rheumatic syndromes remind me of pre-quark partial physics. Lots and lots of fermions (neutrons, protons, etc etc) with mysterious distinctions; understanding the composing quarks brought a sort of sense to the world. Perhaps one day we’ll learn that seemingly distinct rheumatic syndromes are combinations of underlying simpler pathologies that in different contexts (microbiome, immune system etc) seem to make up different disorders...

Ok, not a great analogy. Just a thought. Classifications are powerful though, and that means they can be misleading — and harmful.

Update: On a quick literature scan it looks like psoriatic arthritis treatments (TNF inhibitors) haven’t worked that well for erosive osteoarthritis, which does suggest that inflammatory arthritis split is clinically meaningful...

Fixing a painful wrist with high frequency weightlifting and wrist hyperextension. WTF.

In the spirit of my medical anecdotes, I present my left wrist.

Late Monday afternoon, while typing, I developed sharp pains in my left wrist. It hurt! I couldn’t type, though changing wrist position with a gel pad helped. Maybe, I thought, it was something with some recent mountain biking. Or maybe it was the high intensity CrossFit cleans I was doing. Whatever, it was obnoxious.

So I sort of splinted it with my weightlifting wrist wraps and then I waited to see what it would do.

It kept hurting, but another mountain bike ride didn't make it worse.

Maybe, I think, it’s an inflammatory arthritis of some kind. I’ve a family history and some intermittent personal history to worry about. Who knows.

I go to my morning CrossFit anyway. (Hmm. I wrote that one at 54. Now I’m 56…) Today the workout is muscle cleans and push press — about 180 of em. Great. That’s gonna hurt. I do the first 80-90 with a straight wrist, which is extra work. Then, between sets, I realize my wrist isn’t hurting any more. I do the next 90 with the usual wrist extension.

There’s some mild aching as the endorphins fade, but then nothing. Twelve hours later it’s slightly sore with unusual motions. [1]

If a patient came into my office with wrist pain back in the 90s I might have recommended ice, a splint at night, and some gentle range of motion exercises. Today somebody smarter might suggest something like the Dynaflex Pro. I don’t think anyone would recommend high intensity high repetition wrist extension weightlifting.

That’s what helped though.

I do not understand my increasingly aged body, and I don’t think I’m the only mystery. I suspect nobody really understands joints and backs. Once upon a time we recommended bed rest for sore backs, then we recommended activity and exercise;  I personally did well with relatively intense weight and flexibility training. More recently, mountain biking made my anterior knee syndrome slightly worse, but deep squats seemed to have no effect and conventional rehab seems to have helped. Today there’s the wrist.

Pity the poor physician who has to make a recommendation for someone’s sore wrist. It doesn’t work to say “I really have no idea”. It would be nice to know what’s going on though.

[1] I can make up a theory. I have reason to suspect I’m prone to dumping calcium into sore tendons and tissues — a counter-productive response that promotes inflammation. Bad genes I guess. Maybe the vigorous activity promoted clearance of some local calcium deposits. Maybe a stuck tendon sheath loosened up. Maybe the gods had mercy...

Update 5/1/2023: Almost 8 years later I can see this was probably the start of wrist involvement in my mixed-type arthritis. It became an on and off problem over the next 8 years. I'm on HCQ to slow progression and the symptoms seem to be dose responsive. It's annoying but not bad. When it's more bothersome I do "true pushups" or ring pushups or more reps at lower weights.

No, Apple News.app is not necessarily evil. Why do you ask?

[When first wrote this I chose an article, that, by chance, didn’t have a redirect to the original site. Which means I got things a wee bit wrong. Sirshannon gently corrected me. So now a bit of a rewrite …]

Viewing what I thought was a NYT article in News.app (turns out to be an Apple article that showed up on NYT page, which is kind of interesting) I can use Pinner.app 4.0 to create a Pinboard: Bookmark. That bookmark includes a URL like this:

https://apple.news/ABLDsKpUXSOafJmAr1FFtNg

From Pinboard app.net pourover and IFTTT (still around) share that link and my comment to app.net, twitter and my kateva.org/sh personal archive.

So far, so open. But what happens next?

If you access the particular link on an iOS device Apple launches News.app and you can view it there — both Safari.app and Chrome.app do the same thing.

If you access the link anywhere else you get this:

However, that’s not the end of the story (thought I thought it was). This link, opened in a web browser, redirects to a web page:

https://alpha.app.net/sirshannon/post/65149315#65148990

Apple does not redirect to the web version of the article. With NYT and other sources I chose one can open the News page in Safari.

This isn’t is surprising for two reasons. The first is that, even more than Google, Apple is all about Roach Motel class lock-in. The second is that, unlike the RSS of old, News.app has a viable ad-funded business model. Links to the open (perennially dying) web don’t fit that model.

So, despite my dire expectations, Apple, for now, is providing redirects to the web source. This doesn’t mean Apple will never interfere with the distribution of information that would hurt Apple’s business or offend its executives, and my confusion between NYT and Apple content is a bit weird (user error?), but for now News.app isn’t necessarily evil. I’ll be staying with Reeder and the lost mist-enshrouded all but forgotten Shangri La of RSS, Feedbin and Reeder until the last link dies  I’ll be experimenting with sharing News.app articles from it via RSS, Feedbin and Reeder ...

History: the printer has passed

First they came for the photo printer.

Then they came for the ink jet.

Now they’ve come for the rest.

Amazon return package label printing now includes ‘email to a friend’ and ‘request label by mail'

Yes, mail. Handled by people.

End an era, yes, but which era? 

Thirty years back — when we all had dot matrix printers?

One hundred and fifty years back, when typewriters became common?

Or do we go back to when paper became common in homes ...

Making of the modern pop song - fusion of the corporate and the anonymous individual

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band was the apex of my popular music connection. In a weird adventure of late childhood I attended Winterland's (San Francisco) last-but-one performance — featuring Springsteen.

These days my kids control the radio. So I hear a lot of country-pop and pop-pop. I assumed that music was made more or less the same way that Bruce did his work 30 years ago.

I couldn’t be more wrong. This month’s Atlantic Magazine included a short article that was the most surprising thing I’ve read in years [emphases mine]. It’s a review of John Seabrook’s book ‘The Song Machine’...

Karl Martin Sandberg, Mikkel Eriksen, Tor Hermansen and Other Songwriters Behind the Hits of Katy Perry and Taylor Swift - Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic

The biggest pop star in America today is a man named Karl Martin Sandberg. The lead singer of an obscure ’80s glam-metal band, Sandberg grew up in a remote suburb of Stockholm and is now 44. Sandberg is the George Lucas, the LeBron James, the Serena Williams of American pop. He is responsible for more hits than Phil Spector, Michael Jackson, or the Beatles.

After Sandberg come the bald Norwegians, Mikkel Eriksen and Tor Hermansen, 43 and 44; Lukasz Gottwald, 42, a Sandberg protégé and collaborator who spent a decade languishing in Saturday Night Live’s house band; and another Sandberg collaborator named Esther Dean, 33, a former nurse’s aide from Oklahoma who was discovered in the audience of a Gap Band concert, singing along to “Oops Upside Your Head.” They use pseudonyms professionally, but most Americans wouldn’t recognize those, either: Max Martin, Stargate, Dr. Luke, and Ester Dean.

Most Americans will recognize their songs, however. As I write this, at the height of summer, the No. 1 position on the Billboard pop chart is occupied by a Max Martin creation, “Bad Blood” (performed by Taylor Swift featuring Kendrick Lamar). No. 3, “Hey Mama” (David Guetta featuring Nicki Minaj), is an Ester Dean production; No. 5, “Worth It” (Fifth Harmony featuring Kid Ink), was written by Stargate; No. 7, “Can’t Feel My Face” (The Weeknd), is Martin again; No. 16, “The Night Is Still Young” (Minaj), is Dr. Luke and Ester Dean….

… The illusion of creative control is maintained by the fig leaf of a songwriting credit. The performer’s name will often appear in the list of songwriters, even if his or her contribution is negligible. (There’s a saying for this in the music industry: “Change a word, get a third.”) But almost no pop celebrities write their own hits. Too much is on the line for that, and being a global celebrity is a full-time job. It would be like Will Smith writing the next Independence Day.

… We have come to expect this type of consolidation from our banking, oil-and-gas, and health-care industries. But the same practices they rely on—ruthless digitization, outsourcing, focus-group brand testing, brute-force marketing—have been applied with tremendous success in pop, creating such profitable multinationals as Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift...

.... “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, a co-founder of Jay Z’s Roc Nation label, tells Seabrook. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge, too.”

Sonically, the template has remained remarkably consistent since the Backstreet Boys, whose sound was created by Max Martin and his mentor, Denniz PoP, at PoP’s Cheiron Studios, in Stockholm. It was at Cheiron in the late ’90s that they developed the modern hit formula, … Seabrook describes the pop sound this way: “ABBA’s pop chords and textures, Denniz PoP’s song structure and dynamics, ’80s arena rock’s big choruses, and early ’90s American R&B grooves.” ... music is manufactured to fill not headphones and home stereo systems but malls and football stadiums. … Session musicians have gone extinct, and studio mixing boards remain only as retro, semi-ironic furniture.

The songs are written industrially as well, often by committee and in bulk. Anything short of a likely hit is discarded. The constant iteration of tracks, all produced by the same formula, can result in accidental imitation—or, depending on the jury, purposeful replication….

… Hits are shopped like scripts in Hollywood, first to the A-list, then to the B-list, then to the aspirants. “. The most-successful songwriters, like Max Martin and Dr. Luke, occasionally employ a potentially more lucrative tactic: They prospect for unknowns whom they can turn into stars. This allows them to exert greater control over the recording of the songs and to take a bigger cut of royalties by securing production rights that a more established performer would not sign away...

… K-pop, a phenomenon that gives new meaning to the term song machine. Lee codified Pearlman’s tactics in a step-by-step manual that guides the creation of Asian pop groups, dictating “when to import foreign composers, producers, and choreographers; what chord progressions to use in particular countries; the precise color of eye shadow a performer should wear in different Asian regions, as well as the hand gestures he or she should make.”

In K-pop there is no pretension to creative independence. Performers unabashedly embrace the corporate strategy that stars in the United States are at great pains to disguise. Recruits are trained in label-run pop academies for as long as seven years before debuting in a new girl or boy group—though only one in 10 trainees makes it that far...

Of course it’s hardly surprising that pop songs have evolved to match the most common interests of the biggest audience. What fascinates here is the fusion of the modern corporate model with the peculiar talents of three Scandinavians and one American, and the purity of “star power” required of the modern pop performer.

I wonder when the nsAIs (non-sentient AIs) will displace those Scandinavians. Apple is famously vertical and AI-pop is the obvious next step after K-pop.

I’d love to read a Madonna essay on the topic, she seems now a bridge between the old world of Springsteen and the new world of Katy Perry. 

Vanguard voice biometric enrollment: the wrong way to do security

This showed up in my email. What’s wrong with it?

It tells me to click on a link to get started. How do I know this is really a Vanguard email? 

For something involving account security at this level it should give me instructions on how to proceed after I’ve logged in to my Vanguard account.

I believe this is a legitimate email, but I can’t trust it.

If you want to take a nonagenarian for a six hour flight to San Francisco...

If you want to take a mildly demented barely ambulatory nonagenarian out of his nursing home bed for a six hour flight to San Francisco you may be insane or murderous. Or perhaps your 93 yo WW II vet is in better shape than mine.

Or maybe you’re prepared.

I did this. Actually, my brother and I did this together, except for the plane flights where I went solo with Dad. We did it because my 93yo father had one request left in his life — to see his younger sister in San Francisco. And, thanks to an accident of Quebec’s healthcare and his disabled vet status, he had money to pay for the trip. 

Of course when I agreed to fulfill his wish he was 3 months younger than when we actually went — and significantly stronger. Old old age is like that.

Stil, we went. And because my brother joined us in San Francisco it went pretty well. Luck helped — we had perfect flights and transportation.

I don’t know anyone else who has done this, but I’m sure hundreds have. Somebody gets those old vets out for Normandy ceremonies.  On the other hand, I suspect those guys are in better shape than Dad (some of ‘em probably run foot races and jump hurdles).

If you want to do something like this, and before I dump all my trip memories (we aren’t doing this again), here’s what I learned:

• Airlines don’t make this super clear, but if you press a bit you can schedule wheelchair pickup from the front desk to the airplane seat. Do this. Do not do what I did, which was to make use of my father's transport wheelchair, walker, and my own strength. We might still be walking from the plane to the car rental office if a Montreal (YUL) security officer didn’t volunteer to push my father’s chair while i juggled luggage and walker. There’s no fee for checking a wheelchair or walker and you can also do plane side check with either. If you have the airlines doing wheelchair transport you’d check the transport chair and the walker in oversize baggage.
• During flights you want your 90+ yo in an aisle seat. They can’t necessarily get out of a window seat, especially when (in our case) the armrest divider was fixed. Inside passengers can typically squeeze buy ‘em - 90+ yo men tend to be small. Assume 2-3 bathroom trips a flight unless your guest has a catheter or is used to using a diaper. Bathroom trips require a physically strong companion — assuming your guest has some ambulatory ability. The seats need to be near the bathroom. We were in “business class seats” (not worth the money) and too far forward to use the assigned toilets, but the flight crew had us used first class which we could reach.
• You typically get to do special lines for customs and security. That helps. Carry food and snacks and water.
• You want two people for travel and care — at least one of whom should be strong (I’m strong, and my brother is stronger). At least one should be either a hospital or nursing home nurse (best) or a physician (not bad). If you’re using the airline wheelchair transport service you can make do with one person for that operation. Parenting experience is a plus.
• Get a “handicap” hotel room and an adjoining room with twin beds. My father needed an attendant for every bathroom visit — typically 2-5 a night. He slept in one of the twin beds and my brother and I took turns in the other. On our off night we slept in the handicapped room bed (king sized, one bed, which is weird hotel choice for a “handicapped” room but there you go). We used the handicapped bathroom with him.
• Whatever laxative routine is used at the care facility kick it up a notch. If warmed packed prunes are part of the routine bring those with you. Do not assume you’ll be able to buy them. Bring your dulcolax - both oral and suppository and glycerine suppository. Not ready to deal with poo? Don’t do the trip.
• Bring a waterproof bed sheet cover — as used with child travel.
• Wet wipes. Lots.
• Bibs - robust.
• Shirts: Purchase lightweight long sleeve travel shirts for summer travel. My father wears golf shirts at the Vets residence because he can take them on and off himself, but you need long sleeve shirts for sun protection and to reduce skin scrapes.
• Laundry: Assume you’ll do laundry 1-2 times, not least because you don’t want a lot of extra luggage. That still requires rolls of quarters at most hotels.
• If your nonagenarian uses pull-ups bring lots. If s/he doesn’t bring some.
• Assume most of the tourist stuff will be drive-by car touring. In our case I used Google and my own knowledge to construct a route made up of waypoints, then we used Google Maps on my iPhone to navigate from one waypoint to the next. Worked terribly well.  a handicapped parking card is a huge help (my aunt was with us and we could use hers) but with two people one can manage the 93yo and the other can drive around until pickup.
• Very limited alcohol - messes up sleep.
• Assume one social meal and 4 hours of drive by touring per day max. Every hour (at least) schedule a walkabout/transfer to keep bodies moving.
• Four days is a good visit length: one to travel/recover, one to prep/travel, two to visit and tour.
• Bring comfortable OTA headphones for your 90+ yo to listen to audio on long trips — something like Bose noise canceling headphones. But buy a set of the cheap airline phones in case he doesn’t like ‘em. (My Apple buds didn’t work with the airplane audio mini-jacks.)

There’s more but that’s enough for now — and probably the most I can remember since most of the traumatic memories are already fading. The good memories, because this trip actually, amazingly, worked, are getting stronger.

It could have gone quite badly though. This isn’t for the faint of heart.

American economy 2015: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Donald Trump lead to the same conclusion.

Donald Trump as the voice of the non-college 50%. TNC on the mass (black) incarceration society - and reparations. Hundreds of colleges produce no earnings boost (but lots of debt).

There is a common thread. America needs 40 million non-college jobs that pay $30 an hour.

That is our 21st century “Manhattan project” class challenge.

Get creative.