California Today: Housing Fight Hits San Diego:

The fight for more housing has a new war room in San Diego.

Increasingly, even well-off professionals are finding they can no longer afford to live in the San Diego area. In October, the county’s median home price was the highest in a decade — $507,500 — according to CoreLogic, a data analysis company.

Part of the problem, housing experts say, is simply a shortage of units that is driving demand. As the number of San Diegans has risen, new housing construction has failed to keep pace.

And one reason for the lack of construction? The residents of San Diego.

In many cases, housing proposals fail because residents pressure officials to reject them on the grounds that they would spoil neighborhood character.

Man, we humans are some selfish bastards.

As George Carlin said, NIMBY.

Basecamp CEO Jason Fried on the response a potential hire gave after working on a paid ‘homework assignment’ to test her skills:

It takes real confidence and self-awareness to talk to someone who’s considering hiring you and telling them that you aren’t sure you like what you did. We dug into it. It wasn’t the idea at large — she was very happy with that — it was a specific flow, a specific part of the design. She did it, but she wasn’t thrilled with it.

That’s how I feel about a lot of my work too. Especially in the early phases. I designed something, or I wrote something, but I’m not sure I really like it yet. While it’s easy to tell yourself that, it’s hard to tell someone else that — especially if they’re evaluating your work.

First off, it’s great Basecamp pays designers for design tests they’re given during the interview process. I’ve done many for potential employers where I’ve never been paid.

Secondly, Jason touches on a topic I’ve talked about with junior designers before which is the ability to be critical of yourself and understanding you and your work are not one and the same.

Part of being a great designer is being able to take criticism: from yourself and from others. You have to know how to listen.

Canada Bill Jones

There’s some new emoji in iOS 10.2.

via DF

For the next sixty minutes a few drunken, droopy-feathered Native Americans fail to catch the Warner Bros. rabbit, much less assimilate. A Mexican mouse tries to outwit the gringo pussycat, so he can sneak across the border and steal the queso. A seemingly endless lineup of African-American cats, crows, bullfrogs, maids, crap shooters, cotton pickers, and cannibals act a gravelly-voiced Looney Tunes fool to the strains of “Swanee River” and Duke Ellington’s “Jungle Nights in Harlem.” Sometimes a shotgun blast or dynamite explosion turns a nominally white character like Porky Pig into a gunpowder-colored minstrel. Bestowing upon him honorary-nigger status, which allows him to sing merry melodies like “Camptown Races” over the closing credits with impunity. The program ends with Popeye and Bugs Bunny taking turns single-handedly winning World War II by flummoxing bucktoothed, four-eyed, gibberish-speaking Japanese soldiers with giant mallets and geisha subterfuge. Finally, after Superman, supported by gongs and a cheering audience, pulverizes the Imperial Navy into complete submission, the lights come back on. After two hours of sitting in the dark laughing at unmitigated racism, in the brightness the guilt sets in. Everyone can see your face, and you feel like your mother caught you masturbating.

—an excerpt from The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Apple Watch sales to consumers set record in holiday week, says Apple’s Cook:

Sales of the Apple Watch to consumers set a record during the first week of holiday shopping, and the current quarter is on track to be the best ever for the product, Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook told Reuters.

Responding to an email from Reuters, Cook said the gadget’s sell-through – a measure of how many units are sold to consumers, rather than simply stocked on retailers’ shelves – reached a new high.

Cook’s comments followed a report on Monday from technology research firm IDC estimating that the tech giant sold 1.1 million units of the Apple Watch during the third quarter of 2016, down 71 percent from the year-ago quarter. The comments offer a glimpse of the gadget’s performance during the holiday quarter, which is typically Apple’s strongest.

Cook is doing that shady thing Amazon does when it reports the number of Kindles it has sold: it doesn’t give numbers (go ahead and try to find anywhere on the Internet where Amazon mentions how many devices they’ve sold).

The Apple Watch is probably selling well, considering what’s happening with their compeition: Moto is taking a break from making new watches, the Microsoft Band is dead, and who knows whats going on with Samsung. Then again, maybe they’re not selling well.

One problem may be that the growth of the Apple Watch is slow and steady, and not at the enormous the iPhone is at, and thus looks shitty by comparison.

I like my Apple Watch and I think it’s a good device, but you can’t expect everyone to drop over $350 on an Apple Watch right after they dropped $800 on an iPhone.

The Apple Watch is a parasitic device, meaning it needs an iPhone to function. The iPhone used to be the same, where you couldn’t use it unless you had a Mac or PC to sync it with. Now, of course, you can buy an iPhone, back it up to iCloud, and never sync it with another computer. I bet the Apple Watch will eventually get to that point too.

Back to my main point: MONEY. These devices: iPads, iPhones, MacBooks, Watches, they all cost money and unless the price point comes way down on these things (which I don’t see happening), people aren’t going to be rushing out to get new ones every year.

An Alt-Right Makeover Shrouds the Swastikas:

A small but determined political organization in Detroit began to worry that its official symbol was a bit off-putting. With the group’s central philosophy suddenly finding traction in the daily discourse, appearances mattered.

So in November, as the country’s divisive presidential campaign became ever more jagged, the National Socialist Movement, a leading neo-Nazi group, did away with its swastika. In its stead, the group chose a symbol from a pre-Roman alphabet that was also adopted by the Nazis.

This alt-right shit still boggles my mind.

I didn’t grow up with hate and racism like this in New Jersey and my parents didn’t raise me with racist ideals. When I attended Rutgers, it was at the inner city campus in Newark, NJ. I loved the diversity in Newark and had no problem that white kids were the minority there.

But I digress.

Back to the story:

The movement is also acutely image-conscious, seeing the burning crosses, swastikas and language of yesteryear as impediments to recruitment. Its adherents talk of “getting red-pilled,” a reference to the movie “The Matrix,” in which the protagonist ingests a tablet that melts away artifice to reveal the truth. New, coded slurs have emerged. Fewer pointed hoods, more khaki pants.

I love that the alt-right dislikes burning crosses and swastikas not because they represent hate and racism, but because they impede recruitment efforts.

Un-fucking-believable.

Mr. Martin, the retired teacher, who attended the conference, also didn’t care for the Nazi-like salutes, calling them “very foolish.” But he suggested that most of those raising their arms were using the salute as “their version of the middle finger” — a defiant gesture “to the media, to the Trump haters, to everybody they feel alienated from.”

Why is the middle finger not sufficient enough of a “fuck you” to the media? Oh right, Mike, because the middle finger isn’t racist enough.

These are truly charming people.

This year, Time Magazine named Donald Trump ‘Person of the Year.’

It sounds pretty congradulatory until you spot the clever placement of Donald Trump’s Cheetoh head so the negative spaces around the ‘M’ in ‘TIME’ look like horns on his head:

This isn’t the first time this has been done.

Nope, Time gave Bill Clinton the horn treatment when they named him ‘Man of the Year’ in 1993:

Note that in 1993 it was ‘Man’ of the Year, but now it’s ‘Person’ of the Year.

Donald Trump Is Said to Intend to Keep a Stake in His Business:

President-elect Donald J. Trump is considering formally turning over the operational responsibility for his real estate company to his two adult sons, but he intends to keep a stake in the business and resist calls to divest, according to several people briefed on the discussions.

Under a plan now being considered by the Trump family and its lawyers, Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s elder daughter, would also take a leave of absence from the Trump Organization, in the surest sign that she is exploring a potential move to Washington with her husband, Jared Kushner. Mr. Kushner is discussing an as-yet undetermined role advising his father-in-law, and Ms. Trump plans on being an advocate on issues in which she has a personal interest, like child care.

I’m confused. I thought when a person assumes the role of POTUS, they have to put their investments in a blind trust and divest their business dealings?

Apparently this is all optional. Just like it’s apparently optional to disclose your tax returns when you go into office, something most GOP candidates since the 70s have done.

Now that I understand these things to be customs, not laws, people need to shut the fuck about them until they are actual laws, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Facebook’s 2016 Year in Review

Om Malik thinks Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum:

Otto, a Bay Area startup that was recently acquired by Uber, wants to automate trucking—and recently wrapped up a hundred-and-twenty-mile driverless delivery of fifty thousand cans of beer between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs. From a technological standpoint it was a jaw-dropping achievement, accompanied by predictions of improved highway safety. From the point of view of a truck driver with a mortgage and a kid in college, it was a devastating “oh, shit” moment. That one technical breakthrough puts nearly two million long-haul trucking jobs at risk. Truck driving is one of the few decent-paying jobs that doesn’t require a college diploma. Eliminating the need for truck drivers doesn’t just affect those millions of drivers; it has a ripple effect on ancillary services like gas stations, motels, and retail outlets; an entire economic ecosystem could break down.

Whenever you abstract things from real, physical life, they become less real to you.

‘Technological innovation’ seems to supersede ‘societal impact’ in Silly Valley.

Fucking genius survey conducted by the godfather of CSS, Eric Meyer:

The GIF Survey is complete. In just under a week, 1,457 people gave their answers on how they pronounce the acronym, and their perceptions of the rightness of that pronunciation. I thought that, today of all days, it made some sense to share the results of a far less momentous poll.

For those who missed, it, how this survey worked was that the first question was: “How do you pronounce GIF?” To this, the choices were:

• The obviously correct way
• The clearly incorrect way

Upon answering this, respondents moved on to a section that asked three optional demographic questions: age, gender, and race/ethnicity, all as open text fields. These had about a 16% skip rate, and about a 4% ‘faithless’ response rate; that is, answers that were clearly jokes, insults, or other explicit refusals to answer the question as intended.

Once the demographic questions were answered or skipped, there was a final question: “How do you pronounce GIF?”, exactly the same as the first question of the survey. Only this time, the options were:

• Hard G (like “gift”)
• Soft G (like “gin”)

For both pronunciation questions, the answer order was randomized so as to avoid any first-choice advantage. The demographic questions, being open entries, didn’t have options to randomize.

Spoiler: The obviously correct way to pronounce ‘GIF’ is with a Hard G.

Case closed, softies.

It might make you Limp-G people sleep better at night if you think of yourselves as ‘underdogs’, but deep down, you know you’re wrong.

Microsoft Surface Studio review: a beautiful invader of Apple’s base:

It’s an engineering marvel of a monitor, but I really wish Microsoft sold it separately. I want to dock my Surface Book to it, or transform any laptop into a full Surface Studio. If I’m investing in a desktop PC at this kind of price then I also really want to be able to upgrade it and use it for gaming and more powerful work. I can’t do either of those things with the Surface Studio. If this was a monitor with a powerful GPU in it designed to complement Microsoft’s existing Surface devices and “upgrade” them, I’d probably be throwing my wallet at my screen right now. It’s hard to do so knowing that I’m not getting the latest and greatest specs for that $2,999, and that’s before you even consider the top model I’ve been testing is $4,199.

I’m both amused and happy about Microsoft’s newfound — and seemingly geniune — love for integrating software and hardware themselves. Up until they introduced Surface tablets in 2012, ‘controlling the whole widget’ was something only Apple did.

So what’s Microsoft’s endgame here? They’re going to market with a very niche product that uses last year’s hardware. Are they going to move back down the market with what they learned and develop more affordable desktops that can complete with iMacs?

I almost get the sense that they don’t care if it sells. The goal was to create a beautiful and very functional desktop computer. Even if the Surface Studio ends up being a dud, I still think what Microsoft did is impressive.

A Dose of a Hallucinogen From a ‘Magic Mushroom,’ and Then Lasting Peace:

None of those possibilities fit Kevin, who had a bone-marrow transplant for acute myeloid leukemia. It sent his cancer into remission, but left him with graft-versus-host disease.

Suffering from chronic pain and fatigue, Kevin, 57, who lives in central Michigan and asked that his last name be withheld because he had been in law enforcement, had to retire. Four years after the transplant, he despaired.

“Going through a near-death illness is similar to returning from combat,” he said. “It damages who you are, to the core of what it is to be human.”

“I was hoping to get out of this funk of waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he added. “You’re looking up to the heavens, saying ‘What else can I try?’ ”

In 2013, Kevin entered the Johns Hopkins trial. During his session, he saw spirals of iridescent spheres that folded in on themselves.

The experience did not restore him to his former life, he said, “but I have a greater sense of peace of what might come. I’m very grateful, beyond words, for this trial. But you have to approach the session with the right intentions of why you’re doing it. Because you’re going to meet yourself.”

This is incredible news for people who suffer from anxiety and depression.

The last time I ate ‘magic’ mushrooms (aka ‘shrooms’) was over 16 years ago in college. It was truly a mind-opening experience.

Even Steve Jobs raved about the profound effect LSD had on him:

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

To be clear: shrooms and LSD, while both hallucinogens, have widely varying effects on different people.