Ordered new routers today. Replacing Google WiFi very soon. 🎉
Ordered new routers today. Replacing Google WiFi very soon. 🎉
As I mentioned in my previous review, my first encounter with the reality of nuclear weapons happened in high school. My AP World History teacher assigned the book, Hiroshima, for our summer reading.
I bought this book on a whim. While on the Apple Books store, I was drawn in by the unique cover art noted that the books was on sale. The description sold me. Apart from the well-publicized nuclear mistakes of the past decade, I had been almost completely unaware of the Titan II accident in Arkansas in 1980.
The book itself is 487 pages, written by an investigative journalist, Eric Schlosser. Schlosser’s work on chronicling the accidents and safety of the nuclear weapons fielded by the United States earned him a spot as a finalist for the Pulitzer Price. The thoroughness and attention to detail in this book stand out. Schlosser walks the reader through each era of America’s nuclear weapons, starting in 1945 with the original bomb.
For decades, Americans feared the Soviet nuclear threat, while oblivious to the even graver threat of a nuclear accident at home. These are the most powerful weapons of war ever created, and even now at 73 years old, we’re still trying to learn best practices for ensuring both safety and lethality. The book mainly focuses on nuclear accidents in the 1950s and 1960s, which were plentiful. More than a few times, we narrowly avoided full thermonuclear meltdown in the continental United States. While I believe that we have gotten better at handling and safeing our stockpile, the limits of this book seem to be connected to the US Government declassification schedule. The more time that has past since a classified event, the more likely it is to be declassified.
Another embarrassing thread running through this story is the pervasiveness of internecine conflict within the military and government. Agencies and branches of the military, envious of budgetary allocations and power, fought each other fiercely, to the detriment of the good of the American people. While all serving under the same flag, their pettiness put the nation at a greater risk of accident or nuclear war. These fights were at every rung of government, even at the highest levels. Strategy, research and development, and weapons deployment seemed to go to the toughest fighter, not the most appropriate branch or agency.
We’re certainly not out of the woods. Schlosser goes to great lengths in the concluding pages to note that this topic is as relevant today as it was in 1950. Within the last ten years, nuclear bombs have been accidentally flown across the United States, nuclear missile crews have been caught sleeping while on alert, a widespread cheating scandal was uncovered among missile crews, and illegal drug use by missile crews continues.
If nothing else, this book, through the lens of a single nuclear accident in 1980, brings to the forefront a sobering reality: our nuclear weapons may hurt us just as badly as we intended for them to hurt the enemy.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
ISBN: 9780143125785
iMessage image search is terrible.
Kids Clothes Shopping
Sizes always change,
Trying to fit in the store. Someone disrupt this.
Finished reading: Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser 📚
Dogs Running Together
What day is today?
Sunday? Friday? Saturday?
Never figured out.
I went to the Apple Store to look at the new Watches and iPads. That was a poor decision.
Math is Hard
Start next year tax work,
Trouble somewhere in numbers.
Fixed it, took too long.
Did anyone bother to watch House of Cards season 6?
Walmart is doing an excellent job earning my business. The best prices, free grocery shopping/pickup, automatic refunds for recalled items, free upgrades for out of stock items. The best!
We use data to make Google products like Search and Maps as useful as possible. We also use data to serve more relevant ads. While these ads help fund our services and make them free for everyone, it’s important to clarify that our users’ personal information is simply not for sale.
On Google’s privacy principles page, they make the bold and reassuring claim that they never sell your personal information. Except that’s not entirely true.
Their language is precise. They’re not going to take the massive amounts of data that they’ve scrapped about you from across the Internet and the data that you’ve given them, put it in a spreadsheet, and put it up for auction. They’ve got a better plan.
They take all of that information, build out your profile, and then leverage that profile to sell to advertisers and “partner websites.” Hard to find out just who those partners are, by the way.
The truth is, your personal information is for sale, just not in a spreadsheet. Google, Facebook & Instagram, Twitter, and every other company that runs a “free” service is in the business of selling your profile, which inherently includes your personal information. These guys stalk you across the Internet and in ways that are far from transparent. You’d have to inspect every website’s source code or install an ad blocker to show you just how many trackers are on every website.
They’re creeps. But we let them do it.
How can we make it stop? Stop using their products. Close your accounts. Use macOS Mojave and iOS 11+ and enable every privacy setting in Safari. Advertisers hate the technology, so consumers should love it.
Here’s the real pain point. If you value your privacy and want these losers to stop, you’re going to have to start paying for services. Email, RSS readers, blogs, apps, software. There’s a cost to privacy, it’s slight, but its enough to keep most people happily forking over their personal information so that they can have free stuff. Not me, not anymore.
Call of Duty 2
Surprised that it works,
on Mojave. Way to go,
game developer!
Microsoft Edge coming to Mac next year:
We also expect this work to enable us to bring Microsoft Edge to other platforms like macOS.
Don’t waste your time.
I wrote this back in March as I deleted my social media accounts:
There’s something very powerful about the concept of a social network… The problem comes when these networks have revenue targets to hit and shareholders to please.
I don’t go on BuzzFeed often, but when I do, I fail their quiz about “important” events that happened this year and I’m validated in my life choices.
Emoji + Things App = 👨🏻💻
The kids found some treats in their shoes this morning and have found the perfect song to enjoy while dancing.
Happy Feast of St. Nicholas!
Up Late
Should have been in bed,
Instead, up much too late now.
Will pay tomorrow.
I hate when big box hardware stores close entire aisles during business hours.
Got all of the leaves mulched before the heavy rains. Feels good to get the lawn back into shape.
One of the things that I miss about Twitter/Instagram are the digital friends that I made. I wish there was an easier way to keep in touch with them, but I’m not sure that I’m willing to recreate those accounts just to stay in touch.
Merry muggin’
Manton likes to talk about how owning your domain means that you own your own content. In fact, that’s the major selling point behind Micro.blog. I completely agree with him. When I post to a blog at a domain that I own, I control the content, and how it’s presented, from here forevermore.
I started a blog called Catholic Husband back in March of 2013. I launched the blog in the run-up to my transition out of the workforce and starting my new job as a stay-at-home dad. With just an infant to look after, I wanted to fill my time thinking and writing. It’s my longest running, and most consistently updated, blog. I’m coming up on my 800th post, almost all of which are over 500 words.
I care passionately about the design of Catholic Husband and how readers see the content, even posts that are nearly six years old. That’s why I’m working my way back, through every single post, and updating the blog photo to match a standardized format. I’m using Unsplash, and the visual upgrade that those premium photos bring to my posts cannot be understated. This process is tedious and multi-step, but that’s okay. I’m in the driver’s seat and I think that the effort is worth it.
My ability to reach back nearly six years and manipulate every single post is almost unheard of in today’s Internet silos. I don’t need to wait for the content host to decide to create a tool to make it easy, because I’m in control. I simply open my web development app, make the changes, and hit publish. Try doing that with a Facebook post from Summer 2013.
I don’t know what the Internet will be like in 20 years, but I can be confident that as long as I own my domain and control my content, it’ll be available, if I so choose.
RapidWeaver Heartbreak
An elusive bug,
Breaks my version 8 workflow.
Time to roll it back.