How Ideologues Poison Wikipedia

Posted on 23 Sep 2015 by Frank Moraes

Bill McBride wrote a very interesting article that I want to expand on, Using Nomimal GDP to Mislead: a Bogus Reagan Wikipedia Sentence. Here’s the sentence, “[Reagan’s] economic policies saw a reduction of inflation from 12.5% to 4.4%, and an average annual growth of GDP of 7.91%; while Reagan did enact cuts in domestic spending, military spending increased federal outlays overall, even after adjustment for inflation.” I’m not that up on this kind of stuff, but I bristled at this bit of propaganda. Two things are clearly wrong with it: (1) Reagan should not be given credit for the reduction in inflation; (2) the GDP growth rate is just wrong — not that I knew what it was, but the US has never seen that kind of growth in my lifetime — no advanced economy does.

McBride pointed out three things. First, the decrease in inflation was due to Paul Volcker at the Fed. It it important to remember that Volcker’s work at the Fed is also probably the reason that Carter didn’t get a second term as president, since his policies really hurt the economy in the second half of Carter’s term. Second, the GDP growth rate is given in nominal terms — not adjusted for inflation. The real growth rate was 3.4%, which happens to have been the same as Carter’s growth rate. Reagan was no magician.

And third, the whole end of the sentence is wrong. Reagan did indeed raise domestic spending even after adjustment for inflation. This has been one of the most annoying things of the Obama era. Always before, during recessions, the federal government increased spending. But the Republicans have stopped Obama from doing this. So last year, we saw 2.4% GDP growth — which looks bad until you consider the drastic decline in government spending, because the Republicans know that their only way to power is to destroy the economy.

McBride is a pretty well known guy, so I was curious to see what happened to Wikipedia. His article was published on Tuesday in the afternoon. By late that night, the passage had been change. It was then technically accurate, while still providing the same basic impression, “During Jimmy Carter’s last year in office (1980), inflation averaged 12.5%, compared with 4.4% during Reagan’s last year in office (1988)… and unadjusted GDP growth averaged 7.4% with a high of 12.2% growth in 1982.” They’ve actually made it worse by adding a deceptive and unnecessary comparison: Carter bad, Reagan good. And it left the largely meaningless unadjusted GDP growth rate, but at least it labeled it.

By this morning, the information was better, but not good, “During Jimmy Carter’s last year in office (1980), inflation averaged 12.5%, compared with 4.4% during Reagan’s last year in office (1988)… and real GDP growth averaged 3.44% with a high of 8.55% in 1983, while nominal GDP growth averaged 7.4%, and peaked at 12.2% in 1982.” So they left in the deceptive comparison to Carter and the nominal garbage data, but at least added the data on the real growth rate.

Notice how there is a reference to Carter regarding inflation, because it makes him look bad. But there is no reason to include Carter in this at all. It could just say, as McBride does, that inflation was 11.8% at the start of Reagan’s term and 4.5% at the end — still deceptive in that it gives Reagan credit for something that he didn’t do, but not too bad. Notice also that when mentioning Reagan’s GDP growth, the writers appear to have not thought it worth comparing to Carter — for obvious (very partisan) reasons.

I like Wikipedia a lot, but it is very prone to this kind of nonsense. Wikipedia provides a way for true believers to literally rewrite history. And they do. You may remember back in 2011, Sarah Palin said that Paul Revere “rang bells” while he was “warning the British” — apparently they were unaware that they were attacking. As a result, Palin fans went to the Paul Revere page and added the necessary new postmodern Sarah Palin history about the bells and who Revere was warning. A change would be made, the editors would take it out. And on and on. Eventually, the editors had to stop changes to the page for a while to let the “controversy” settle down.

That’s all we are seeing with the Reagan Wikipedia page. There are people who have deified Reagan. If they see that Wikipedia is saying that economic growth under Reagan was no better than under Carter, and that Reagan shouldn’t get much if any credit for decreased inflation, these people are going to change it. As much as I like Wikipedia, when it comes to people and issues like this, you really have to be careful.

Seven Common Blogging Mistakes?!

Posted on 14 Sep 2015 by Frank Moraes

Seven Mistakes I was crawling around KeriLynn Engel’s website, looking for something to work on. She’s a far more serious freelance writer than I am. And I’m trying to learn some things from her. But I am much older and much more cynical. So there is only so much that I’m willing to learn. In fact, as a result of reading the site, I was looking at downloading the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. But I watched the video on it and I thought, “Do I really want to take time away from my frenetic writing to deal with this?” I still don’t know. It will probably take me a week to say, “Yes.”

But Engel recently worked on an infographic, Seven Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid. And it has some very good advice. But I thought I might punch back against it just a bit. Note, however, that I don’t think Engel wrote the infographic; I assume that she simply edited it. And I know from experience that you work with what you’ve got. My common reaction in these situations is never accepted, “Let’s start from scratch!” I may have developed my own fallacy: anti-sunk costs. But it is nonetheless true that it is easiest to start over. Few people who manage the money ever thinks that’s true.[1]

That’s not to say that this infographic is bad. I rather like it. But if you think it sucks, you shouldn’t blame Engel. Anyway, let’s go through these blogging mistakes and see what I think of them.

Blog Every Day

This one annoys me. It isn’t that I disagree with it. But I have a problem with the “Do This Instead.” And that is, “Post regularly: that might be 2-3 times a week or once a week.” Clearly! When people tell you to blog every day, it is like telling a writer to throw out the first three pages of her novel. The point is not to throw out pages of writing; the point is to get on with the story right away. And telling a writer to blog every day is the same as telling her to post regularly.

Clearly, I post six things every day. Why? Because I’m insane. It’s also because I’m addicted to writing. I enjoy it. But I didn’t start out this way. And it isn’t necessarily a good thing to do. But ultimately, everyone needs to decide what it is they are blogging for. And I am blogging so I can figure out what I’m blogging for. Also, I’m doing research on a new book, “Make $10 a Month Blogging (Before Expenses)!”

Search Engine (Over) Optimization

My only real quibble with this is the word “over.” The truth of the matter is that if you use a good platform (like WordPress), a lot of your major SEO mistakes will be avoided automatically. If you really want the search engines to get to know you, let other website owners and bloggers know you. And that depends upon your having content that is worth while. What I think people should remember is that search engines will only get better. Any effort to specially tailor your content to search engines will only be helpful for a while.

If You Write It, They Will Come

I don’t especially buy this one. The truth is that if you write enough, people will start to notice you. But again, I come back to the need for interacting with other writers. I know most people think that social media is really great, but if no one is reading your blog, then no one is following you on Facebook. In my early years, I spent a lot of time commenting on other blogs and adding links to my own articles. But it’s like anything else: you can’t try to scam it. If you add thoughtful comments on other blogs, people are more likely to check out what you are writing.

Blogging Is an Easy Way to Make Money

I’ve been wanting to introduce pull-quotes. But admittedly, all of that is a lot of work.

Does anyone believe that? Again, I come back to my new book, “Make $10 a Month Blogging (Before Expenses)!” Blogging is no way to make money directly. But taken seriously, it can lead to other kinds of (paying) writing and even speaking. But I’m serious about just how bad blogging is for making money. This blog now gets over 500 unique visitors per day and it brings in about $10 per month — before expenses like hosting. How much does hosting cost? About $10 per month.

No One Uses Email Lists

I used to use email lists on the old platform. I don’t now because I need to figure out a way to put out a digest or a newsletter. Yeah, I know it’s easy. But I’m very busy making money and writing stuff like this for $10 per month (before expenses)!

Only Write Short Posts (Or Long Ones)

Ah yes, variety is the spice of life. But I think this “mistake” is overstated. People want to know what a blog is all about. So they don’t really like sites that have one sentence “articles” followed by 20,000 word discussions of the Battle of Marathon. Much of the appeal of Frankly Curious is knowing that I provide articles that are long enough to get a good idea of what’s going on, but not so long that readers have to waste a bunch of time. I think the main thing is that a blog should be whatever its character dictates.

Words Are the Only Part of a Post That Matters

Well, this is one I’ve been complaining about for a long time. Most blogs are very boring to look at. Unless your words are really in demand, break things up. I continue to increase my use of graphics. And I’ve been wanting to introduce pull-quotes. But admittedly, all of that is a lot of work.

And that’s really what’s more important: blogs are generally things done by single people. They don’t have editors and designers. And there’s a catch-22: if you don’t have many readers, you can’t afford to make your blog great. A lot of bad blogging is the result of ignorance. But I suspect that most of it is the result of lack of resources.

[1] I used to deal with this when I did programming work. People would come to me with websites they had sunk a bunch of money into that needed to be fixed. “Can we start all over?” They didn’t have the money. “Can we at least get a new logo?” They not only didn’t have the money for it, they loved the old logo. Ugh.

A Word From Our Tired Writer

Posted on 04 Sep 2015 by Frank Moraes

Frank Moraes I hope you don’t mind if I waste a post by explaining to you why I don’t feel like writing anything. It’s funny. When I was out of town the other day, I was following the news on my phone. So I wrote up a whole schedule of articles for the next day in my notebook. Now, that’s notebook as in the thing that people from the 1950s would recognize. I still do a lot of writing by hand. But the point is that I wrote down what I was going to write once I got back home with all my standard tools like the keyboard I like, the trackball, and the computer set up the way that I like it.

And here’s the thing: I got those articles written fast. The hardest thing about writing articles is coming up with what to write about. But that isn’t exactly true. I have about fifty tabs open right now with things that I would like to write about. But I just don’t care to do it right now. Part of it is just that I don’t feel good. And that may have something to do with not eating enough today. So I’m cooking dinner — which I’m also not very excited about.

But I’ll tell you: I have been feeling tired a lot recently. It hasn’t stopped me from writing like a madman. But I constantly have to fight the urge to crawl into bed with a book. And God knows, that would be good for me! What is the point of all this writing? That’s especially true of the writing here. I understand the point of the other writing: money. And I’m very keen on money right now. In fact, let’s talk about money — as it relates to the writer.

Here’s the thing: you can be a really good writer — even a great writer. You can work really hard as a writer. And by that, I don’t mean it in the sense of, “Well, I’m thinking about my novel as a drink a beer and shoot pool over at the local pub.” In fact, the people around you can even be aware that you are a good and hard working writer. But if you aren’t making money, you are still pretty much a joke to them. It’s nothing personal. It is just people don’t know enough about writing (or almost anything) to judge what you do. So they go with commerce.

For example, I’ll bet I could find two generic paragraphs: one each from Stephen King and John Steinbeck. They are good examples because they are both great writers and popular. (Fun fact: it has not been cool to show disdain for King since 1981.) And I could show both of these paragraphs to a group of people, and they would not be able to identify which writer is which, even though they have pretty distinctive styles. So people don’t much get writing. I don’t blame them for it. But that’s the reason they fall back on every writer’s most hated question, “Yeah, but are you making any money?”

But that’s one great thing about these other paying gigs. The fact that Frankly Curious brings in about ten bucks in Amazon referrals each month, doesn’t really matter anymore. Now people have to accept that what I do here has value because other people are paying me to write the same kind of stuff elsewhere. And really, it isn’t that different — except in one way: those who pay me tell me what to write about. Which means writing here is a whole lot harder. I hope you appreciate it!

Afterword

Having written this, I feel so much more energetic. And dinner’s almost done.

Copyright, Community, and Collaboration

Posted on 24 Aug 2015 by Frank Moraes

Perhaps my only disappointment with Frankly Curious is that not enough other websites link to my articles. I do get some. Certainly, a lot of people Tweet out my articles, I get a certain amount of love from Facebook and Reddit, and of course, Crooks & Liars links to me. Also, Google sends a lot of people and that results in normal and very pleasant links from more established blogs like Lion of the Blogosphere. This is all for the good and I really like it. My disappointment is that I don’t get enough of it.

There is, however, a certain kind of linking that I do get that really annoys me. There are websites that do nothing but print other people’s content. They are often of high quality and they no doubt see themselves as news aggregators. The problem is that they don’t publish a couple of paragraphs and provide a link. They publish the entire article with a note at the bottom, “This article, [whatever], first appeared on [wherever].” One such website is First News Alert. Well, this website did this to me yesterday and I was not pleased. But let me back up a bit.

I am not that keen on our copyright system. And I don’t mind all that much if people want to use my content. But this outfit was added nothing. It was just using me as an unpaid writer. Even the statement at the bottom of the article saying that it was from Frankly Curious wasn’t highlighted — it just looked like the last paragraph of the article. The entire website is designed to look like it has a staff of writers, which it clearly does not. And it has all kinds of ads so the owners are clearly making some money off it. I have a problem with that.

But it is even worse than this. At the bottom of the page was printed, “© 2015 First News Alert… All rights reserved.” So there was a page that consisted of 99% my own content and they were claiming copyright! But hell, if it was a big website, it might have provided some people clicking over. But no. Frankly Curious is huge compared to First News Alert. And I checked my site statistics this morning, and sure enough: not a single person clicked from that article over to Frankly Curious. So I got nothing in terms of traffic and even the name “Frankly Curious” wasn’t highlighted, so I didn’t even get any name recognition.

But I’m a liberal guy. I might have just dropped the whole thing. But then I looked at the code for the page. And I noticed that the link to my page had the attribute rel="nofollow." That is a way to tell search engines not to follow (crawl) the link. But more important, it tells search engines to disregard the link when it comes to the ranking of the page. I almost never use them, but I used it in the link above to First News Alert out of spite — but also just because I want the search engines to know that I’m writing about the site in a negative way. They shouldn’t think that I’m linking to the site because it has content that I’m discussing.

So let’s review: a tiny website stole my content; it did little to highlight where the content came from; it did not ask my permission; it claimed copyright; and it didn’t even do me the favor of linking to my page to give it proper search engine credit. But even still, I wasn’t too angry. I just wrote them a short note pointing out the problems and asked that they at least remove the rel="nofollow" or take the page down. Within an hour, the page was down.

I must admit to being amazed by all this. What I do — both here and in my paying work — is create content. I understand that not all people are good at this. I’m not good at working on cars. This is why I pay people to work on my car (when I have one). If you want to have a website, you either create your own content or you find someone who will do it for you. First News Alert looks like a competent website. But its philosophy seems to be, “We don’t need no stinkin’ original content.” And so they just steal it from other sites. But that really isn’t the way that the internet works. There are writers all over the world who are looking for an audience. The last thing they need is a website like First News Alert diluting their efforts and taking their credit.

Working Hard for a Vaction

Posted on 22 Aug 2015 by Frank Moraes

Well isn’t this nice! Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog wrote, Gone for a While. He then proceeded to take the next week off. He had his blogger friends cross post things to his blog so it wasn’t dead for the week. And here I am (it is 14 August as I write this), having spent the last two weeks writing more and more ahead just so that I could keep this blog going. But the big boys, well, they are just “gone for a while.” It must be nice. I wish I had such a cushy unpaid job!

The problem seems to be that I don’t play well with others. I know other bloggers. But I’ve come to the conclusion that if I get too close to them, they will find (Just like my wives!) that they don’t like me that much. I do tend to have a bit on the difficult side. Of course, I think the problem is mutual. Blogging is not something you are good at if you are calm and steady. It selects for the volatile and opinionated. But clearly, other people manage to get along better than I do.

I’m well aware that I can front load articles. Steve M is a news cycle blogger. He stays up to date on what’s going on in a way that is remarkable. It is one of the reasons that I keep him in my RSS feed. Just the same, there is a reason that I am not a news cycle blogger. I’m not that interested. Both No More Mister Nice Blog and P M Carpenter’s Commentary — two blogs that I’ve greatly admired for years — have been so filled with Donald Trump news the last month that it makes me want to scream!

But even for me, writing a week in advance has been hard. Normally, I try to arrange things — slot topical articles in early and move more evergreen articles later. But I haven’t been doing that recently. I think this is the 44th scheduled article. It’s far too complicated right now. I don’t even know what I’ve written at this point. But most of it is pretty general, because I’m not that interested in election news. The truth is that I’m one of those killjoys who likes to remind everyone that the presidential election is all about the economy anyway.

Still, it would be nice to get away from all of this. I’d love to have some blogging chums who would step up and pinch hit for me. Then again, maybe the real reason I don’t do that is because I fear if I stop grinding out content, I will never return to it. I am a man of habits. But I even wonder now, will there be new material up on Sunday?! As it is, I’m so exhausted, I can’t even remember the theme I was going to use for the week’s Morning Music — and I had about ten ideas. God, I need a vacation just from preparing for this vacation! I wish I were Steve M…

H-1B Visas Are a Scam to Keep Wages Low

Posted on 05 Aug 2015 by Frank Moraes

Visa H-1B visas allow high tech companies to hire foreign workers when they just can’t find “qualified workers.” And I’ve been writing about this for a very long time, because it is a total scam. But in saying this, I don’t mean to put down the people who work under H-1B visas. I’ve worked with many of them and they are generally quite competent and I’ve considered a number of them friends. But H-1B visas are a scam for the high tech industry. They hurt high tech workers in America. And above all, they hurt the people working under them because they end up being limited kinds of slaves.

Michael Hiltzik wrote a great article over the weekend, Tech Industry’s Persistent Claim of Worker Shortage May Be Phony. He’s far to careful to come right out and say it, thus we get “may be” instead of “is.” Because there is no doubt. But I only say that because I’ve worked in the field and I’ve seen it firsthand. But it isn’t hard to understand. There are incentives in this situation. And it is a hell of a lot easier to push the government to allow a flood of high tech talent into the country than it is to raise wages.

You may remember the big conspiracy to keep down wages in Silicon Valley. It was headed by every idiot’s idea of an entrepreneur, Steve Jobs. He didn’t like that other companies like Google were stealing his employees. So rather than do what one would in an actual free market, he went to Google and other companies, and made a secret deal that they wouldn’t hire each other’s employees. Problem solved! But that shows you that high tech is no kind of bastion of liberality. Those guys are just as cut-throat and anti-competition as George Pullman.

Hiltzik highlighted a great example of just how disingenuous these people are:

Alice Tornquist, a Washington lobbyist for the high-tech firm Qualcomm, took the stage at a recent Qualcomm-underwritten conference to remind her audience that companies like hers face a dire shortage of university graduates in engineering. The urgent remedy she advocated was to raise the cap on visas for foreign-born engineers.

“Although our industry and other high-tech industries have grown exponentially,” Tornquist said, “our immigration system has failed to keep pace.” The nation’s outdated limits and “convoluted green-card process,” she said, had left firms like hers “hampered in hiring the talent that they need.”

What Tornquist didn’t mention was that Qualcomm may then have had more engineers than it needed: Only a few weeks after her June 2 talk, the San Diego company announced that it would cut its workforce, of whom two-thirds are engineers, by 15%, or nearly 5,000 people.

Even after this was pointed out, Qualcomm claims that it really does need those H-1B visas, because it “continues to have open positions in specific areas.” I have no doubt that is true. Because pretty much every business in the world has certain employees that they really, really want. For example, right now I would love to have access to a top quality researcher who I could pay a dollar an hour to. And that’s the thing with Qualcomm. Is it setting up programs to encourage people to go into these high demand areas? Of course not. It just wants to use it as an excuse — a way to keep wages down here at home.

Hiltzik interviewed Michael Teitelbaum, author of, Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent. It argues that our need for STEM employees (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) is just a myth. And of course it is. When have businesses ever not complained that the workers were not good enough and that they were paid too much? Never. That’s why most rich people today earned their money off the back of the government.

Now the high tech industry is lobbying to more than double the number of H-1B visas — from 85,000 to 195,000. And it will probably get them. After all, there is no high tech union around that is going to lobby on the other side. Congress always talks about creating jobs, but here is an idea that will do something like destroy 100,000 jobs. That’s because the companies will replace existing jobs that clearly have Americans who can do them. But it isn’t hard to manipulate the law. But it will increase profits and income inequality. So hooray?

Frankly Curious in Top Million Websites

Posted on 01 Aug 2015 by Frank Moraes

Knight on Horseback - Don Quixote I am three days of posts ahead as I write this. Normally, I would have moved this one to the Wednesday 5:05 pm post. But as you may have noticed, we’ve been having some server problems around here. Mostly they don’t stop pages from displaying. But they cause the categories to go away and, I assume, no one can post comments. At least I know that I can’t write anything online. The database can only be read — not written to. But nonetheless, today is a very big day: Frankly Curious dropped into the top one million most visited websites.

Now I know that this probably doesn’t sound like that big a deal. Top million?! But you have to look at this in context. There are roughly a billion websites on the internet. And yes, I would say that most of them are pretty boring and not active. But there are a lot of people toiling away out there. There are currently about 75 million WordPress installations up and running. And that’s just one content management system (CMS). So I don’t think it is unreasonable to assume that there are at least a hundred million notable websites in the world. So being in the top million is being in the top one percent. And I’ve never really hoped for more.

You may be wondering how I know that Frankly Curious in the top one million websites. Well, I don’t. I’m going on its Alexa rating, and it is certainly not perfect. It is basically a poll. And when a website isn’t that popular, the polling is noisy. Just the same, I’ve been watching it for years. It was parked out at about five million for a long time. And then it went through a period in the two million rang. But the main thing is that the Alexa rating has gone up along with my known Google Analytics numbers.

The current rank is: 914,051 (day); 932,292 (week); 1,158,662 (month); and 990,068 (three month). It’s this last number that I always look at. The daily number fluctuates wildly. The other day (because Bruce Bartlett was kind enough to link to me), the daily number was up at 200,000. But I’m not that interested in that kind of thing. Every website has good days now and then. As with most things, I’m interested in what Frankly Curious is as a kind of Platonic ideal — what would happen if I didn’t post anything.

There are other aspects of the traffic that aren’t as impressive. For one thing, Frankly Curious gets a lot of search engine traffic because of odd things I’ve written about. For example: Bugs: Rabbit or Hare? and College of Architecture and Planning Sign Is a Joke both get a tremendous amount of traffic. But people don’t hang around. They just want to know the truth (as I see it) about these very important topics. And then they move along.

On the other hand, the number of people who go straight to our home page without referral continues to go up. So that’s nice. And there are a half dozen regular commenters, which is even nicer. But the main thing is the idea of building something. I can’t say what it is. It’s great to have something tangible to represent what is, in fact, nothing but an addiction to writing.

The Great Website Unknown: Who’s Out There?

Posted on 16 Jul 2015 by Frank Moraes

Website Traffic Sam Dean over at Five Thirty Eight pointed out a curious aspect of modern computing, It’s 2015 — You’d Think We’d Have Figured Out How to Measure Web Traffic By Now. It deals with a strange issue in website metrics: the unique visitor. In the old days, people talked about “hits” and then later “total visitors.” But today, the metric that everyone cares about is “unique visitors” — it is seen as more authentic. The problem is that the companies who determine how many unique people visit a website always indicate that there are a lot fewer than the websites’ own access logs indicate. So what’s up with that and should we care?

I must admit that I’ve always focused on unique visitors — even when people were talking about “hits.” The problem with hits was always obvious. If a website has a page with 9 images in it, that represents 10 hits. Thus, a website with a lot of images would have more hits than one that didn’t — even if they had the same number of visitors. But total visitors can be a problem because the same person can come back again and again. Take, for example, a visitor who has left a comment and refreshes it throughout the day to see if anyone has responded. In my case, I’m more worried about my own use. I used Frankly Curious far more than anyone and I don’t want that to skew my statistics.

There are various ways that a website can seem to get more unique visitors than it actually does. The most obvious is the time period. Frankly Curious gets about 1,500 unique visitors per day; but only about 25,000 per month — not the 45,000 the daily number would imply. But the bigger issue is that the whole counting thing is done with cookies. So if you visit the same site from a different browser or computer (or phone), the web server counts you twice. And people delete cookies. And so on.

Another issue that is huge — at least for little websites — is spamming. As I said, Frankly Curious gets 1,500 unique visitors per day. But we don’t actually get that many people visiting the site. According to Google Analytics, we get about 300 actual individuals. The reason for this is that the spammers are going fast. They do not waste their resources by running the JavaScript that is necessary for these statistics to be tracked. So we’ve got 300 real visitors and 12,000 spammers per day. It really is outrageous.

But I’m not certain that unique visitors really mean that much. A whole lot of visitors come to a page, and back right out a few seconds later. I suppose in an industry that sees advertising revenue as its product, maybe that’s fine: people came onto the page long enough to get an opportunity to click on your Ben & Jerry’s ad — mission accomplished! But for personal websites, people normally think of others actually reading their content as an important aspect of what they do. So if one person comes onto the site, gets involved, and reads thirty articles, that’s a big deal that is clearly not represented with the unique visitors metric.

Just the same, big websites need some way to compare themselves, and unique visitors is as good as any. Personally, I don’t much care about absolute numbers. Even Google Analytics messes up from time to time. What I care about is the trend. Roughly twice as many people visit Frankly Curious today than they did last year. But interestingly, according to my access logs, my unique monthly visitors hasn’t really changed since early 2013. That’s because it is swamped by spam. I wonder if that isn’t a problem at Huffington Post as well? Actually, I don’t care.

Publishing Schedules and Lonely RSS Feeds

Posted on 02 Jul 2015 by Frank Moraes

I’ve gotten into a kind of a work routine around here. In the morning, I get my tea and read through all my standard websites. Then I spend most of the day on my paying work — with plenty of breaks for tea drinking and the occasional food. Then I take a break, cook dinner, and spend the rest of the evening writing for Frankly Curious. It works pretty well, because it gives my subconscious the whole day to think about what I’m going to write. The old way could be frustrating with me thrashing around looking for something to write about.

But I’ve noticed something strange. I have an RSS feed with about a dozen blogs that I follow. Yet through most of the day, all that’s going on is Frankly Curious. I’ll look up and see something has come in, and then be let down, “Oh, it’s only me.” There just aren’t that many people around who are as crazy as I am. But there are some. Ted McLaughlin at Job’s Anger, for example. He generally pumps out six articles per day. He’s a good complement to me. He’s more free-wheeling and more graphics oriented. More and more, I’m just bitter and very wordy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Our nation could use a few more thoughtful scolds.

I’ve added him to my RSS feed, but it won’t help my feelings of screaming alone into the ether. He seems to do a dump of the day’s posts right around midnight each day. I’m not sure why. I used to be pretty constrained myself when I used Nucleus as the CMS here. If I scheduled a post, for example, the automatic twitter alert would go out before the article was up. Thankfully, with WordPress, everything works as it should. And that has allowed me to distribute my wisdom on an orderly schedule.

There are, of course, writers I read regularly, but who I don’t RSS with. One of them is Ed Kilgore at Political Animal. He grinds out 12 posts per day — most of surprisingly high quality. I’d love to get alerts from him throughout the day. But my system requires me to load pages, and his site (Washington Monthly) is such a pig because of the overabundance of advertising. A single page is about 3 megabytes and can take several minutes to load. I don’t think people realize just how much traffic they lose for the sake of squeezing a couple of extra pennies out advertisers. It’s better for me to just wait until the end of the day and check what Kilgore had to say all at once.

Similar to Kilgore is Steve Benen at Maddow Blog. But MSNBC only allows one to sign up for their “latest headlines.” Like I want to be inundated with MSNBC garbage all day long. But I have found some RSS feeds worth adding. P M Carpenter’s Commentary keeps up a good schedule, and posts throughout the day. The same is true of No More Mister Nice Blog. And how about I finish it out with Lawyers, Guns, & Money — even though a lot of people write for it. These should all make me feel less alone. Although they may get in the way of my other work…

The Death of Threaded Comments

Posted on 28 Jun 2015 by Frank Moraes

Knight on Horseback - Don Quixote Currently, on Frankly Curious, comments are “threaded.” That means that people can respond to the article as a whole or they can respond to a specific comment. If they respond to a specific comment, then the new comment is positioned below, and indented from, what it is responding to. This has been a nice change from our previous blogging platform — Nucleus — where we were limited to comments that were “flat” — just one after another with no relationship to each other.

But recently, I wrote an article for my paying job about forum software and I was surprised to find that the most popular forum — phpBB — doesn’t even offer threading. That seemed odd to me. I would have thought that threading should at least be an option. But the truth is that it really has gone out of style. Even forums that have had it are getting rid of it. I remember when threaded news readers first showed up and they were cool:

Commenter1: This is a stupid article!
- Commenter2: You just think that because you’re a doody-head!!
  - Commenter1: No, you’re the doody-head!!!
  - Commenter4: Don’t feed the doody-heads.
- Commenter4: I agree. Because I am a doody-head.

It seems logical and works very well on forums were there isn’t a great deal of discussion. That’s why I’ve decided to keep it on Frankly Curious for the time being; there isn’t enough commenting for it to be a problem. When there is a lot of discussion, however, it can be very distracting and user-unfriendly. What’s more, commenters can use it to get their comments placed higher by “responding” to the first comment.

How Conversations Really Work

The biggest objection to threaded forums is not practical, however; it’s philosophical. Real conversations are not threaded. People talk one after the other. People may respond to something said long before, but it is in the context of everything that was said since. If two people want to talk about some sub-topic, they usually do it alone, while the main conversation continues on without them.

If I had Eschaton Blog, with hundreds of comments on every one word post, I might change over to a flat mode. But that will never happen here. So I think we are fine. Just the same, most long conversations tend to go on between just two people, so a flat model wouldn’t really change anything.

“Sharing Economy” and a Nation of Contractors

Posted on 24 Jun 2015 by Frank Moraes

Uber I remember several years ago, Paul Krugman was in the UK debating a couple of conservatives on a television show there. At one point, Krugman said, “Well not everyone is going to start their own business.” And a female PM said, “Why not?” Krugman didn’t even respond because it was such a ridiculously stupid thing to say. But I noted at the time that if everyone went into business for themselves, there would be no businesses — just contractors everywhere. One can hardly imagine a more inefficient system. There would be no way to improve productivity by scaling up. But of course, conservatives like the idea of everyone starting their own business so they can label workers as less worthy than business owners.

But among a lot of younger computer types, this idea sounds great. A nation of contractors, that’s the ideal! But the laws of economics have not changed. Business management has not changed. But the public intellectual space has changed to allow the myth of contractors to be used by big businesses to take on none of the traditional responsibilities of having employees while at the same time not having to pay the large cost premium of actual contractors.

This, of course, is what is going on with companies like Uber and Lyft. The drivers are just small business people, not employees! As Michael Hiltzik put it last week, “That concept is so alluring, on the surface, that it has spread to house cleaners, launderers, delivery persons — you name it.” The California office of the labor commissioner found that Uber drivers are actually employees and not “independent contractors.”

This case has a special relevance to me. Right now, I’m working for a company out of London. I’ve never met the owner or my main contact. I get paid for work done, which I do on my own time frame using my own tools, working in my own office. I am, in other words, the very definition of an independent contractor. And I’m very happy with that. But I’ve had employers in the past who wanted to claim that I was an independent contractor. There are lots of reasons for this, but one of the biggest is to avoid costs like payroll tax contributions. But at the same time, they wanted to dictate how I dressed, when I worked, where I worked, and generally wanted to micromanage me. I was not an independent contractor in those cases, although I was often so desperate for work that I went along with it.

The commissioner’s office found that Uber was far too controlling of what its drivers did for them to be considered independent contractors. What’s more, it noted that Uber is wrong to say that it is just a technology company. If it weren’t for the drivers, it would have no business. But consider this: Uber requires that drivers pass a background check. How does that make any sense if all that Uber is doing is hooking up drivers and fairs? Well, of course, it doesn’t.

In another case, US District Judge Edward Chen noted, “Uber does not simply sell software; it sells rides. Uber is no more a ‘technology company’ than Yellow Cab is a ‘technology company’ because it uses CB radios to dispatch taxi cabs.” And that really does reveal the whole game. The only reason that Uber has been allowed to get away with its shenanigans is because the technology that it uses is newer than other technologies. But there is nothing new about what Uber is doing to maximize its profits.

Amazon was created just shy of 20 years ago. For most of that time, it did not collect any state sales tax. It still doesn’t collect sales taxes in 19 states that have them. And the one thing we all know is that Amazon’s profit margins are razor thin. So it has used this illegal subsidy for many years, destroying local book stores who could not get away without paying sales tax. In California, the sales tax is at least 7.5% and where I live it is 9.25%! How many local bookstores now gone would still be in business if they had been able to grab almost as much as 10% in profits off the top?

All this nonsense of the “sharing economy” and the “new economy” has to stop. We are not a nation of contractors. We are not a nation of people who only want to buy stuff online. We are pretty much the same as we’ve always been. It’s just that the rich and powerful are using new technologies to trick us into taking even more away from us.

Frank Gets a Job — Learns Valuable Lessons

Posted on 22 Jun 2015 by Frank Moraes

Technical Writer Well, dear readers, I have started a new job of sorts. It is freelance writing — technical stuff with no byline. And it seems like it is going to be consistent work. But it has been getting in the way of my constant stream of frankly curious wisdom. Not that you would notice, because I haven’t missed any scheduled articles yet. But right now it is 5:30 pm on Saturday and I am just starting to write the last article for tomorrow. [Update: this was originally scheduled for Sunday evening, but got pushed back. -FM] Normally, I’m a bit further ahead than that. In fact, I prefer to stay two days ahead. And I hope to get another half a day’s writing in by the time I go to sleep. I can do that because I have nothing that anyone would mistake for a life.

None of this means that anything is going to change on Frankly Curious. I like the current publishing schedule, and I’m going to try to stay with it. What else am I going to do? What would I pull out? As it is, I’d rather be publishing eight articles per day — every two hours from 5 am to 7 pm. But if I publish some short articles or miss scheduled article, just assume all is well and I am just making money. (It is my current wish to get enough money ahead so I don’t have to pay for my checking account. Such are the simple pleasures of my life!)

It’s been interesting to do this kind of technical writing. In one way, it isn’t different from what I write here (especially in the Computer/Meta category) or over on Dirt Cheap Computers. But I have to play it straight there. Here I have what is charitably called “Style!” I can be cheeky and opinionated. For example, I’m likely to just authoritatively tell you what to do. If I wrote an article about CMS, I would just tell you to use WordPress because it works really well and there is such a huge base of users that problems are fixed quickly and there are always people around to help you. But in this work, I would have to write something like, 10 Most Popular Content Management Systems Online. (Note: I didn’t write that and it is not from the company I am working for.) That is an excellent and useful article, but not a lot of fun to read or write.

One nice thing about doing this kind of work is that it brings me back to the days when I first was starting on the commercial internet. I created my first website in 1993 — but that was when I had my very own IBM RS/6000 right on the internet and so I ran httpd and created some pages. In early 2000, I was no longer at a college and so I had to sift through endless options in terms of hosting companies and various bits of software to run on it. It was very confusing and it would have been helpful to have some guidance. Today, the technology available is so much greater. But so is the help. It’s nice to be part of that, even though I wish I could write things like, “You’re thinking of serving your own videos?! Are you crazy? Why don’t you just go buy a ball-peen hammer and see how many whacks it takes to crack your skull?” Like I said: “Style!”

Another good thing about this work is that it is very educational. Even when it comes to stuff I already know well, there is nothing like having to explain it to others for making it clear to yourself. Also: I’m being asked to write about things that I don’t know much about. Who knows? It may end up changing the kind of stuff we do here, because most of the work that I am currently doing is for people who have websites like Frankly Curious — with or without the “Style!”

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