Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1487
Reading Apple antitrust stuff with two hats, Phil Cook, steel arriving at the site, our brain just knowing how to pick things up, Amazon gets a kindle button in their iOS app
Good morning hi hello good morning again how are you? Happy birthday to me. Am not feeling suuuuper psyched about getting older. I mean I guess I feel okay? I can feel my age, more parts of me hurt now, it booze will do a much more rough number on me, etc. etc. But that stuff doesn’t bother me so much. Just… mortality, man. Don’t want to die. I like living. I still want to live forever. I would greatly prefer it if I could outlive my kid, with her living a nice, long life. Maybe she could make it to, like, 90 and I could make it to 130? That might be okay. If one of us has to feel a bunch of misery when the other dies, I would like to take that misery on and spare her from it. Huh that is kinda fucked up. What can I say. I do not have a healthy view of death. Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope.
We are listening to North Carolina native hometown hero Phil Cook’s latest work, Appalachia Borealis. He lives the next county over, in Orange County, but his setup sounds pretty similar: out in the woods. The album is a soundtrack to our nature. I dig it. Even if I don’t think we’re quite in Appalachia over here in the Piedmont.
In my playlist, this Phil Cook album is followed by Bruce Hornsby’s recent cover of Dinosaur Jr’s “Feel the Pain” and every time Appalacian Borealis ends and Bruce Hornsby comes on, I get confused and think it is Phil Cook covering Bruce Hornsby, because Phil Cook, like his former bandmate Justin Vernon aka Bon Iver, are unabashed Bruce Hornsby fans.
National treasure, Bruce Hornsby.
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The steel is arriving today at the Red’s Farm for our boat and RV storage facility. It was a race to the finish to get pad 6 ready for the delivery today, and Rocky and Bumper and the crew made it and it is very exciting. Steel. Now we’re gonna have two crews on site — the steel construction crew and the excavating crew. Hopefully they don’t, like, get into a war or something.
Also despite the torrential downpours this weekend, the crew didn’t just get the pad ready for the steel, they got the concrete poured for the pillars. Amazing.
Now we get one of these giant deliveries every week for the next, like, eight weeks or something. Insane.
Yesterday I once again was about to order some thing online and thought “oh yeah I can just print this.” I mean, yes, they were just shelf pins, but still. I can print shelf pins. Are they $0.05 each? Yes, but this pack of 30 plastic shelf pins in the same form factor is $6.99 on Amazon, working out to $0.23 each, so shit, man, I saved like almost a buck. Plus I only had to print the four I needed. So I am feeling very well-chuffed today, as the Scottish say. Do the Scottish hyphenate, I wonder.
So, now that it’s done, behold my new shelf. Can you tell which one of them is the new one that I made this week?
Amazon now has a button in the Kindle app on iOS to buy a Kindle book directly from the app, as a result of Judge YGR’s blistering take-down ruling against Apple. This is all very exciting. Took ‘em five or six days to do it, so not quite as on top of their game as Stripe or Epic, but solid nonetheless. I cannot tell you how often this stupid, petty arbitrary prohibition has caused me angst.
(Caused me angst just yesterday when I purchased The Book by Keith Houston on Kindle, on recommendation from Robin Sloan. Here is a copy of his newsletter, which includes A) a zine, and B) an absolutely mesmerizing treatise on and example of AI-proof art. Just great.)
Speaking of Apple, I read the 17-page DOJ submission on recommendations for remedies for Google being an adtech antitrust violator. I mentioned this document last week. And I made a mistake and got confused and thought this was a document in the search antitrust case, but it is not, it is a document in the adtechantitrust case, and that makes more sense. Because it is recommending the separate spin-offs of ADx and DFP, the two main components of Google’s AdTech stack for the open web. Sell ‘em off. Two two different parties. That the DOJ approves. I think that last part is an absolutely terrible idea, given the Trump administration’s predilection for kleptocracy, but the rest of it seems like a pretty solid solution. Very into it. Absolutely transformational. Fingers crossed.
And interesting thing was that while I was reading this case, I was essentially reading it with two hats on. First, I am reading this case as the CEO of an adtech company who is not directly impacted by this case, because it was nominally a desktop/browser case and we work in mobile app. But Google is such a behemoth in both spaces and the possible remedies are so profound and game-changing, that the case cannot but help impact my work. And the thing is, I can’t deny that once or twice, while reading it, I thought to myself “well, that can’t be super great for us” and I got a little scared. Mostly, though, the case is so utterly transformational and we are so far still from it actually happening, that the likely results are still mostly unpredictable. Like predicting where the billiard balls fly when you hit the setup with a machine gun.
BUT, I was also reading the case as a consumer, and as a consumer I am, like, 100% “shit yeah let’s do this this is so exciting.”
And it occurred to me that it is very hard to do both of these at the same time. I mean, I got off light, things are too clearly and just a tad removed from my company. But even then, I could feel the divergence in my opinions forming.
The point I’m making, the thing that struck me, is it is borderline impossible for a corporate leader to think about any proposed change to their world through both the eyes of their company and through the eyes of a consumer. It is very obvious to me how you end up with corporate stooges who fight common-sense court findings (ahem Apple) tooth and nail even when it is so obviously corrupt from the point of view of the layperson.
We get wrapped up in our shit. It is our destiny as human beings to become blinkered.
You know what’s awesome? One of the best feelings in the world? When you’re standing there, like, taking a bunch of shit out of the trunk of your car, or picking a ton of different things up off a table to move them to another room. And your conscious brain is, like, “okay, how am I going to do this? Which things am I looping onto my shoulder, which can I carry with just a finger? How many boxes can I fit in my left hand so I still have my right to open doors,” etc. etc. and you are sort of getting stumped by the logistics of picking all these things up…
And then your unconscious brain just does it. Picks all the stuff up, no problem, in the exact correct, most efficient way. Even while you are still trying to figure out how to do this.
Khaneman and Tversky talked about System 1 and System 2 in decision-making, but they were referring to risk assessment and statistics. This is a little different. Like System A and B or something. I wonder if there is some sort of hot four-quadrant action we could suss out between them. Does Khaneman’s System 2 interact with System A? Who knows!
The brain, man. Hell of a thing.
This morning Jane made me a HAPPY BIRTHDAY DADDY drawing, which was lovely. Then I asked her if she was going to brush her hair, like I do every morning. And she said “am I going to get no iPad if I don’t brush my hair?” And I said no, hair brushing is voluntary and if you wanna go to school with big knots in your hair you can. And she said “tell me that if I don’t brush it I will get no iPad.” She wanted the rule/threat!
“Okay Jane, no iPad tonight if you don’t brush your hair.”
She started brushing her har so fast. Least resistance I’ve gotten all year.
Mystery.
Country playlist today. Let’s see, we have Charlie Parr, associate of Alan Sparhawk from Low, thank you my old friend Stephanie for alerting me to him a decade or so ago. Willie Watson is in Old Crow Medicine Show. We are still listenign to Krist Kristofferson since his passing. New T Bone, new Josh Ritter, new Jason Isbell (who has been ranting about airlines and guitars all week on Bluesky it is great), Clem Snide. Michael Hurley RIP. Man this is pretty dude heavy. I guess we have iMadV, Mika Folick (love her), Samantha Crain, Julian and Torres and a new Kacey Musgraves single, return to form. Lost Highway records is coming back with her as their signature artist (she got her start on Lost Highway when she was still very country) and this is the kick-off tune and if you have missed country Kacey, well, here you go.
Have a lovely day I am going to spend it working all day, alas. Maybe tomorrow I will take a belated birthday.
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Thanks for reading.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.