Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1475
I am back home. Google antitrust. The pope and our favorite former popes. More KSUA love. Buttondown outages.
Hello hello hello. Boy it sure is good to be back home. It is 70 degrees and sunny out oh my god it is so nice. Not a giant dirty melting snow pile in site. I have unpacked my suitcase and unpacked all of the mom memories therein, and placed them throughout the house. I mailed all the boxes ground from Alaska so they won’t be here for a week or so, so I Have a couple days free from grief. That is nice. There is more to life than grief. My daughter is awesome it is so good to see her. Though it is 8:30 in the morning and she did not wake me up today I do not know what is up with that. She is off from school today. One of those convenient “teacher days” that always seem to coincidentally fall right around Christian holidays.
Ugh I should go check on her I will be right back.
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She was up. She wanted breakfast. I took her to breakfast. Now it is 9:48 and my meetings start in 12 minutes and I will never finish this. One more day until we are fully back on schedule, folks. Daily writing is a difficult business.
And while I was gone I learned that the pope died. Very sad. Dude gave an amazing speech, snubbed JD Vance and peaced out. Pretty solid way to go. Can we all just quote the pope and call the situation in Gaza “dramatic and deplorable” without being accused of being antisemitic? Or will they accuse the pope, too, of being antisemitic?
Farewell, pope. You did not have a lot to do with my life, but there have been worse popes. Of course, there have been better popes, including the official pope of GMHHAY, Celestine V. Though I am just learning now of Benedict the ninth. He doesn’t sound so bad:
Placed on the papal throne by his father, Count Alberic of Tusculum, Teofilatto Tusculani was 19 or 20 when he became Pope Benedict IX. Clearly not suited for a career in the clergy, Benedict enjoyed a life of licentiousness and debauchery for more than a decade.
Right on, other Benedict. No one knows what happened to him. He sold the papacy (bad ass!) and disappeared. Sweet.
Got home Saturday after a long, shitty series of flights: FAI —> ANC —> SEA —> RDU. “Slept,” but got maybe 4 hours total. Remember when the TSA was the only government thing we had to complain about? Miss those days. And my god, I know I already said this but fuck airplane seats. Just atrocious. My butt still hurts.
Drove straight from the airport to meet Emma and Jane for dinner, that was lovely. Forced myself to stay up till 10 to minimize jetlag. Didn’t work. Woke up at 3AM. Couldn’t get back to sleep till 5:30 AM. Jane woke me up again at 8.
Yesterday I did a shit ton of gardening, it was great. Most of my seedlings failed while I am gone. So I replanted a ton of them. I will be be behind, but so be it. You do what you can. I am still trying to learn to use the greenhouse. Last year I sort of took guesses, planted some things in the greenhouse and some things outside, just sort of guessed. And a lot of it worked, but a lot of it did not. So this year I am being more methodical about things, planting the same crops in the greenhouse and outside, in a sunny bed and a less sunny bed. Trying to be more diligent about my garden journal this year. Also planting a few things directly into the ground to see how that works. I replanted the seedlings for the peppers and the basils, I planted my tomato starts (they didn’t die on me, because they were in larger seed start pots so they retained more moisture while I was away), and planted sunflowers, lettuces, onions, spinaches, radishes, beans, cucumbers. Moved my aloe from a bed to a pot, same with my thyme and oregano. Cut my potatoes and set em out to try for next week’s planting. I have a bunch more seeds coming in the mail — some shallots, bok choi, a few more exotic peppers. Will get those in next week. We’re probably behind three four weeks but I will live. It is still a time of greenhouse learning, at least for another year. I learned a lot this winter - carrots and celery and lettuce kill it in the greenhouse. Broccoli too. But I am still a bit iffy about what can grow in there in the heat of the summer. Also I am considering just leaving the door open for the summer. Pollinators aren’t getting in there, or didn’t last summer, so fruiting crops like tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers don’t work in there. That’s a whole thing I need to tackle. Do, I like, learn how to pollinate things manually? Is that a thing I want to get into? I do not know. I do not know.
I’m sure you’re all dying for my take on the Google Antitrust findings. This, to be clear, is the second time in the last year that Google has been found to be a monopolist. The first time was about, like Safari and Search and shit. That was last year. This one is in my wheelhouse: programmatic advertising. Well, sort of. It is exclusively about desktop programmatic advertising world, so a) none of the exact infractions have anything to do with my job, b) maybe we’ll get another antitrust suit in a couple years (though I doubt it, cuz Applovin’). But it is still a very solid primer of the ecosystem and history. It even starts with a history of advertising, going all the way back to prehistoric times! Cites Stephen Fox’s 1980’s seminal history of advertising Mirror Makers! Legit. After that it descends into citations from assorted industry studies cuz, you know. No one has written a decent ad industry book in, like, thirty years.
I really should finish that book.
I am particularly impressed with the way the judge handled the Admeld and DoubleClick acquisitions, which were previously approved by the FTC, so how can they be monopolist? And his analysis of the assorted markets, and the antitrust laws around defining markets, and their application to two-sided markets was very interesting. One weird thing is the judge makes his flowcharts of the ad ecosystem go right-to-left instead of left-to-right and that was real weird to me.
All in all, though, the judge’s decision doesn’t really, like, explain exactly how and why they were a monopolist. That is kind of a shame. Becuase I guess you don’t really get a single document like that out of a court case. You get the arguments of the plaintiffs and defense, and you get the judgement, and none of them are a single comprehensive document. His judgement says “this is what I found” and “this is why this argument or that argument was persuasive and/or unpersuasive.” SO you gotta go back and refer to the older documents. SAD.
Anyway read the whole thing if you like.
So, we await remedies. Now that the judge has declared them a monopolist, they will decide what to do about it. Will the judge force Google to divest themselves of Doubleclick, now known as GAM? That would be so insane and an utter transformation of the digital advertising ecosystem. Utterly disruptive, utterly bonkers. But also pretty clearly the right thing to do. But daring AF. To be continued.
Ugh Buttondown, my email service for this newsletter, has been going up and down for the last hour, so I haven’t been able to send this out. I have re-written this paragraph three times. This is exhausting. I love indie, though. I love that they don’t platform Nazis, so I guess that just means I have to endure it. Alas. I was going to end this with a lovely Jane story but we are now pretty far into Monday and I am descending into Monday crankiness so I better just get this out ASAP before I start complaining about fascism or something.
I am not really ready to get back into the swing of things with playlists again yet. So I leave you with one more great tune I learned about from my week listening to KSUA, the UAF radio station I helped (re) found in 1993. I would shazam and screenshot any time I heard a good tune on KSUA while I was driving. Some of them arent’ even on Spotify! Like this one!
What a great station.
Okay, well, hopefully Buttondown now has their shit figured out. Been about two hours. Hopefully this sends out. But either way, I think we will FINALLY be back to normal tomorrow. Fingers crossed.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.