Bernie or Bust?!

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Bernie or Bust?!As you all can no doubt tell, I’m just not as plugged into politics as I used to be. I still follow big things. I’ve been reading a lot about the Panama Papers and I want to write about it. But things on the edge get past me. And one of those things that has gotten past me is the Bernie or Bust movement. It’s not that I didn’t know it existed. It’s that I didn’t know that people were actually serious about it. I’m shocked to find that they are.

As you all know, I’m a big Bernie Sanders supporter. I’ve not only been very vocal about that, but he’s the first presidential candidate that I’ve given money to since 1988. That’s right kiddos: almost 30 years! But there is no question that if Hillary Clinton is the nominee, that I will vote for her in the general election. Of course, I actually think far more highly of Clinton than a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters. So let’s make it really clear. Let’s take someone I absolute despise: Andrew Cuomo. It’s not just his policies, which are pretty bad on economic issues (though not always); it’s that I hate him in a visceral way. But despite what I’ve said in the past, if the choice were him and Trump, Cruz, or any of the Republicans, I would hold my nose and vote for Cuomo.

My question for the Bernie or Bust people is, “What do you think you will be accomplishing?” But I think I already know. I think they look at the Republican Party and think, “The hard right conservatives did the same thing to the Republicans and they won!” The problem with that idea is that it is totally wrong. The hard right didn’t take over the Republican Party by not voting for Nixon and Ford. They took over the party election by election at from the very lowest levels of the party. Not voting or voting for some third party candidate in the presidential race is not going to send any kind of message to the Democratic Party.

And what — Just what?! — do the Bernie or Bust people think this election was all about? To me, they sound like the silly Carey Wedler who thought that all we had to do is elect the right president and then all our dreams would come true. We aren’t living in a Disney animated feature. This isn’t about Bernie Sanders, even as much as I admire him. This is about a movement in the Democratic Party. And it is that movement that matters.

Polling indicates that Sanders is the preferred choice of about 40% of the Democratic Party. What that represents is the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. And that means we have more than enough power to take over the party. For one thing, a lot of people won’t vote for Sanders for a lot of non-ideological reasons (eg, the “S” word, the chance to elect the first woman president). The question is whether that movement will do something, rather than act like Carey Wedler, who groused for a couple of years and then burned her Obama t-shirt.

There are a lot of things you can do. Here are a few:

  • Get involved with your local Democratic Party (follow the links);
  • Find a local candidate and volunteer;
  • Start a group (it could even be a new chapter of Drinking Liberally);
  • Run for a local office.

I suppose I don’t really care if the Bernie or Bust people sit out this election. I think it is a mistake, but it’s their choice. But I suspect sitting out this election goes along with sitting out the next four years and complaining. We have already reached peak “burning political t-shirt” videos. If people are going to make a stand then they should really make a stand. Otherwise, they shouldn’t lazily help the Republicans replace Justice Scalia with an even worse person.

Morning Music: Last Kind Words

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Dream Shadows - Last Kind WordsToday is a little sad, because the sound quality is so bad. But what are you going to do? The song is “Last Kind Words” — the Geeshie Wiley classic. I’ve featured the song before, performed by Christine Pizzuti. She’s one of these people that always make me impressed with humanity — someone producing great art in a bedroom and sending it out to the world for free.

But today’s version is by Eric & Suzy Thompson. They are kind of legends in the roots music and bluegrass community. They’ve played with everyone but almost no one knows who they are. But I’ve seen them live once, and I own their album Dream Shadows. It has their version of “Last Kind Words.” In fact, I’m pretty certain that it was Suzy Thompson who introduced me to Geeshie Wiley in the first place. But I’ve used about 5 seconds of the introduction to the song to fade out my videos. See, for example, Luigi Galvani’s Experiment Done by Mr. Rzykruski in Frankenweenie.

Despite the poor sound quality, this performance is the same as the studio version. They are just that good. That’s something I think that everyone learns as they gain expertise in something — be it music or woodworking or writing: your greatest work early on is much inferior to your worst work later on. It isn’t a question of inspiration. When you get really good at something, the inspiration is built into your performance from years of hard work. (This is not to say that you can’t also be a total hack.)

Anyway, here is the song. It’s a beautiful version of it.

Image taken from Amazon most likely and licensed under Fair Use.

Attila the Hun and Monty Python’s Worst Sketch

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Attila the HunOn this day in 451, Attila the Hun sacked the town of Metz. This was part of an attack on the Western Roman Empire. Some day, I must set down and really get straight on all this history. But the truth is that I’m bad at it. This is why I’ve always liked math: you don’t have to remember anything. Generally, Attila the Hun is depicted today as a barbarian. But you know the definition of a barbarian: “not a Roman.” So that doesn’t actually mean that much. Regardless, I just don’t have the time to read up on the man for an anniversary post. I want to talk about something much closer to my heart: the worst Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch ever.

That sketch was, of course, “The Attila The Hun Show.” It has all the signs of being a Terry Jones and Michael Palin kind of thing. But then it quickly becomes nothing but a straight parody of old 1950s family situation comedies. The only humor in it is that there is no humor in it. It is a bunch of tired jokes that are supposed to be funny because old situation comedies weren’t funny. For example, Attila the Hun gives his children a severed human head as a present, saying, “I want you kids to get ahead.” It is filled with canned laughter that makes it all the more annoying.

In addition to this, we have Eric Idle doing a black-face servant — “Uncle Tom” — that is offensive even coming from England. I blame John Cleese for the whole thing, but they all to blame. Thankfully, it doesn’t last long and they quickly transition into what strikes me as a very Terry Jones kind of sketch where a bunch of perverts in trench-coats watch as Graham Chapman plays a doctor examining Carol Cleveland. Any sketch where “The Stripper” is played was probably written by Jones. And this transitions to Jones himself doing a striptease, something he seems to have rather enjoyed.

Eventually, the whole thing gets to the high point of the episode, which is the documentary about Village Idiots — which still makes me laugh. And it is blistering social satire, especially once it moves to the “city idiots,” where one says, “Father was Home Secretary, and mother won the derby.” And then it goes into this great bit on Masonic conspiracies. It is, in other words, a great episode. But I rarely watch it because I can’t get past “The Attila the Hun Show” and, “I want you kids to get ahead”!

The Computer Programme

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The Computer ProgrammeOne of the best things about my day job is that I come upon a lot of old computer lore — things like INTERCAL. And the other day, a request came in for a resource page on BBC BASIC. I’d never heard of it, and I figured that the “BBC” must be a coincidence. But no. It indeed stands for the British Broadcasting Corporation. It was a programming language developed especially for a television series on BBC2 called, The Computer Programme.

The BBC is a public institution and so it actually believes in educating the public as well as entertaining it. And back in 1979, someone at the broadcaster decided that they really ought to inform their viewers about this brave new world of computers. But they wanted to do it in a very hands-on way. The problem at that time was that there were a zillion computers. There were things like the Sinclair ZX80, which are hard to imagine as computers at all. But regardless of that, they were all different, and what the BBC needed for The Computer Programme was consistency.

So they had a computer built, the BBC Micro — built on an 8-bit 6502 chip, which was hugely popular until the 8086 family became dominant. It was created by Acorn Computers. (Acorn was later purchased by Broadcom, which was bought just last year by Avago Technologies to form Broadcom Limited. It’s the nature of the computer business.) It sold at the time for £235 (about a thousand dollars today.) The new machine needed an interface, and as old-timers like me remember, that almost always meant some form of Basic. So they had a very young Sophie Wilson lead the project to create BBC BASIC.

The Computer Programme Begins!

This was all put together, and on 11 January 1982, the first episode of The Computer Programme appeared. And as you will see if you watch the first episode embedded below, it’s really good. It starts off with a discussion of Stonehenge as an early computer that eventually had to be abandoned because it was so difficult to reprogram to accommodate changing astronomical variables (eg, precession). And then they move onto computer punch cards and how they relate to silicon chips. And before you know it, they are playing a break-out pong game on the BBC Micro.

What I most like about this episode is a short reported segment about a woman who owns a candy store. She had earlier bought a computer and started doing all her accounting and inventory on it. She says that it saves her hours of work every day. But the main thing is that you can see she loves computers. I remember feeling the same way. I bought my first computer to do music on, but almost immediately, I was creating programs to calculate the value of pi and the number of atoms in the universe. It’s very addictive.

It turns out that the candy store woman has branched out and is now doing computer work for other businesses. The reporter asks her if she hopes that the computer business takes off, and the woman is very keen on this. She explains that because of some change in the traffic flow of the area, the shop has not been doing too well. Given that the woman seems like she’s about 50 years old, she comes off as heroic.

By 1982, personal computers weren’t that new a thing. But it was still a heady time with all kinds of different machines. It’s fascinating to look back on it all. Today it isn’t computers that are interesting but the network itself. In those days, you were on a computer. Today, virtually everything I do is online. The computer is just a portal — more like a television than computational machine.

The Computer Programme logo by screen capture, licensed under Fair Use, via Wikipedia.

Morning Music: Ladies and Gentlemen

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Love Songs for Patriots - Ladies and GentlemenOn at least one of my videos, I used the first three words from the American Music Club song “Ladies and Gentlemen.” It’s off the album Love Songs for Patriots, which is perhaps the least known album in the band’s canon. That’s because the band broke up in 1994, after the commercial failure of San Franisco — an album I’m quite fond of but was generally seen as a disappointment. And they did nothing for almost a decade, and then got back together for this new album. What is so remarkable about it is that nothing had really changed.

I have a theory about success in pop music: it has to come early. If American Music Club was going to hit, it was going to be with “Firefly” off California. The problem is that while the writing only gets better, it also gets more adult. Now Mark Eitzel was never writing bubble gum, but at least “Firefly” had a a youthful yearning that appeals to kids, “You’re so pretty baby; you’re the prettiest thing I know; you’re so pretty baby; where did you go?” Of course, Eitzel was already pushing 30 when he wrote that; he was in his mid-40s by the time of “Ladies and Gentlemen.”

The music is typical of American Music Club: a deeply layered punk that feels like it is only in the assured hands of this band that it doesn’t explode. The lyrics are a call for all of us (ladies and gentlemen) to be ourselves. Given that Eitzel is gay and he lived in San Francisco in the 1980s and 1990s, it is easy enough to see the song in that context. But I don’t think it needs any context, “If you can’t live with the truth, go ahead, try and live with a lie.” To me, that’s the story of life — the story of growing up.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is time…

Album cover image licensed under Wikipedia.

Anniversary Post: Oscar Wilde’s Persecution

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Please forgive me for recycling last year’s anniversary post. It took me a lot of work to do the transfer of my sister’s old blog to here. Plus, I think what happened to Oscar Wilde was outrageous. But then, what else is new? It reminds me of an article I wrote almost exactly three years ago, Michelle Obama and Downton Abbey. In that, I wrote, “It allows people of today to look down on people of a hundred years ago. Yet people today have prejudices that are every bit as pernicious; they simply have different prejudices.” So today we don’t lock up men for the crime of sodomy. And that’s good! But it still drives me crazy that millions of American lives have been destroyed and continue to be destroyed by laws that the man currently in the White House violated.

The Picture of Oscar WildeOn this day in 1895, Oscar Wilde was arrested for the crime of sodomy. It’s an outrage, of course. Just the same, Wilde brought it on himself. The Marquess of Queensberry left a note for Wilde at his club, which read, “For Oscar Wilde, posing sodomite.” So Wilde sued him for criminal libel. Of course, Wilde was a sodomite. And the Marquess had no trouble finding male prostitutes who would testify to that fact. So Wilde lost the case.

Immediately after that, a warrant was issued for Wilde’s arrest. He went to court and lost. He was given two years in prison, although the judge believed that the acts were so vile that they deserved far more than that. After serving the full sentence, Wilde went to France, where he should have gone long before. He died about three years later, his health having certainly been compromised by his time in prison.

Pretty much everyone today sees the treatment of Wilde as ridiculous. I think it is interesting, because drug users are treated exactly the same way today. And what is the difference? In both cases it is private behavior. But things have reversed over time. In 1895, opium use was generally considered a bad habit — much like tobacco is today. But homosexuality was seen as a grave threat to society. Today it is drug use that will destroy society. There is really nothing but bigotry behind both positions.

We mark this day as the start of the persecution of Oscar Wilde. The only thing that has changed is which people the UK government persecutes.

Conservatives Are Liars: Ends Justify Means

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PinocchioLast week, Donald Trump announced that women who get (or try to get) abortions should be criminally charged. His campaign quickly walked back the claim. But Katha Pollitt made an excellent point about this in an article in The New York Times, Abortion and Punishment. Basically, she says, “Why not?” If conservatives really believe abortion of a zygote is murder — that a 2n diploid cell is a full human being with complete Constitutional rights — then shouldn’t any woman who attempts to get an abortion at least be guilty of attempted murder?

As Pollitt noted, the anti-choice movement gets around this problem by claiming that the women are victims. They don’t really want to get abortions, it is just all of us pro-choice advocates who push them into it. I would take this argument more seriously if these same anti-choice proponents were for a strong social welfare program. But in general, they want women to have no choice in when they have children and then to abandon them to a Dickensian life. But regardless of that, Pollitt said, “If you consider how determined a woman has to be to get an abortion in much of the country these days and how much energy states expend trying to dissuade her, it’s hard to see her as a frail flower.” Indeed.

So the anti-choice movement will use their “states’ rights” argument right up to the point that they get them. Once Alabama can outlaw abortion, the conservatives will turn on a dime and claim that states should have no right to allow women to have abortions.

But the truth of the matter is that the anti-choice people are just liars. What they want right now is to overturn Roe v Wade — either in the courts or through a Constitutional amendment. In other words, they want to allow the states to decide. But how does that make any sense? So abortion is murder in Alabama but not in California? The truth of the matter is that they don’t want to overturn Roe v Wade, they want the opposite of it; they want abortion to be considered murder everywhere.

It’s just like with the old (and still quite common) conservative complaint about liberal activist judges. Well, there pretty much are none of them. The activist judges are almost entirely conservative. But conservatives didn’t care about activist judges then and they don’t care about them now. They only care that the judges provide decisions that they agree with. And I’m not against that. I want the same thing! But I don’t go around claiming that I alone know what the Constitution means and therefore any decision I don’t like is the result of a conservative activist judge.

So the anti-choice movement will use their “states’ rights” argument right up to the point that they get them. Once Alabama can outlaw abortion, the conservatives will turn on a dime and claim that states should have no right to allow women to have abortions. This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy about conservatives: there is no consistency. The ends always justify the means. When it came to same sex marriage, they thought it shouldn’t be up to the states and we got the Defense of Marriage Act. But when it is about abortion, it is just the opposite — for right now.

As for me: I’m a federalist. One of the biggest problems with Scalia’s death is that it can end up with different federal law in different areas of the country. It has the potential to turn us into a confederacy. And we’ve tried that and it failed. When people talk about states’ rights and when libertarians claim that local control is always better, what they are really saying is that they want their own little preferred laws — usually really vile ones. My friends, the conservatives represent the most unpatriotic movement we have in this country.

Morning Music: Louis Armstrong

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Louis ArmstrongAs we continue on with songs that I’ve used fragments of in my videos, we come to Louis Armstrong’s version of “What a Wonderful World.” When I was younger, I loved the song. Now it kind of makes me sad. I do love his voice and there are times that I quite agree with the lyrics of the song. The world is wonderful in many ways and we need to remember that and be grateful.

Just the same, I don’t like the fact that even for people my age, Louis Armstrong is only “What a Wonderful World” and “Hello, Dolly!” Armstrong was, in fact, one of the most important figures in the development of jazz. I understand: that New Orleans jazz music can sound dated. But try to listen to it fresh. It sounds amazingly modern. And when they go crazy, you hear counterpoint that you won’t hear on Top 40 radio.

Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five

I want to highlight Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five. The band consisted of Kid Ory on trombone, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Johnny St Cyr on guitar/banjo, Lil Hardin Armstrong (Louis Armstong’s wife at the time) on piano. All of them are legends in their own right. One thing that comes across really well in all those Hot Five recordings is that it is a collaboration. Sure, Louis Armstrong is the star, but they are making music together that is incredibly pleasing, and so much more interesting than most popular music that came before.

There’s a curious structure to the arrangements too. The piano and the banjo work as a team, but interestingly, mostly it is the banjo that holds things down. Lil Armstrong gets to play a lot around what St Cyr is doing. Similarly, the horn players act as a unit. It’s lovely to listen to. Here’s Lil Armstrong’s song “Droppin’ Shucks.”

Anniversary Post: First Presidential Veto

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George Washington VetoOn this day in 1792, President George Washington issued the first veto in the history of the United States. And it’s a curious law. It had to do with how many voters were represented by each member in the House of Representatives. Congress was trying to figure out how to give out representatives, given that, you couldn’t just take the Constitution’s number of 30,000 (or more) per Representative given that none of the states had populations that were equally divisible by that number.

What they ended up with was a system that ended up giving northern states more seats in the House. And this was already a touchy issue because the south didn’t have many citizens in it because it remained agrarian with a large percentage of its population labeled as property rather than human. This brings to mind the 3/5ths compromise. If slaves really were property, there was absolutely no justification for giving the southern states any representation based on their slaves. But then, isn’t that just like conservatives: whatever is convenient to get their way.

Congress did finally work out a deal that the president signed, Apportionment Act of 1792. In fact, it was just 5 days after the veto. It’s interesting that the rest of life has gotten astonishingly faster, but Congress has gotten astonishingly slower over the last two centuries.

What I find interesting about it all is how now this problem of apportionment works to help the slave red states. For example, Wyoming gets one Representative. In 2014, it had a population of 584,000 people. The same year, my home state of California had a population of 38.8 million. We have 53 Representatives. So: we have one Representative for every 732,000 people. That means that each person in Wyoming gets 25% more representation in the House than each person in California. And don’t even get me started on the Senate. (Fun fact: it’s a 65-to-1 ratio.)

Now one could say that Washington made his historic veto because he was trying to protect his fellow vile slaveholders. But I suspect that it was actually the same issue that would be dealt with by every president through Lincoln: dancing around the south’s peculiar institution and not wanting to set them off. Have you noticed that most conservatives try to claim that the Union started the Civil War? The truth is that from the ratification of the Constitution, the south was itching for a way out. They knew their days were numbered. But oh, all the suffering that went on in the mean time.

But hey: first veto.

Old Fashioned and Repressed Sex

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Old FashionedBrandon Ambrosino over at Vox tried to get to the bottom of an interesting question, Why Are Christian Movies So Painfully Bad? But I think he made it over complicated. The reason that “Christian” movies are bad is that they are made for a particular distribution channel — one that depends upon churches. So part of the reason that these “Christian” movies are bad is the same reason that most of the drive-in movies of the 1950s were bad. The other is that the people who go to see these films just want to be assured that they are the right kind of people.

One great film that is explicitly Christian is John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary. But the point of the film is not to sell Christianity to people who have already bought it. And, in fact, you see lots of Catholicism in Irish films. But the religion is not the point; it is just part of the lives of the people. It isn’t surprising that that there is a Christian Film Industry in the United States. American Christians are the most insecure religious people I’ve ever see. This is why they get so upset about “Happy Holidays,” because they need constant assurance that everyone believes the same thing they do.

And then there is the Amway aspect of it. I’ve been talking to Jehovah’s Witnesses for decades. They are the most fake people one on the planet. I know all their tricks. And they are the exact same tricks of Amway salesmen or car dealers. They try to find out what you are interested in so they can form a bond, and then they go in with their high pressure sales pitch. In the end, it is all about selling their very specific form of Christianity to you. They have no interest in you at all. They are just “fishers of men.”

But I was really struck by Ambrosino’s prime example, a new Christian Film Industry monstrosity, Old Fashioned. It is supposed to be a response to Fifty Shades of Grey. In this new film, a young man who “Jesus found” during his senior year of college now has very old fashioned ideas about courtship. And he finds himself attracted to the nubile and feisty Elizabeth Ann Roberts. And I’m sure they work through their problems and have a good old fashioned courtship and, just like in every secular romance, it ends where the actual hard work of the relationship starts.

But check out this trailer. Really. I want to talk about it:

I find the trailer of Old Fashioned kind of sexy with all the “I’m an inch away from your face” and “I’m shoving roasted marshmallows in your face.” So really, it’s a movie that is all about sex. It’s just one with sexual mores that are based some kind of Victorian notion of sexual propriety. The thing you find if you read about the distant past — of Christians in the distant past — is that these ideas about sex were never real. They were always about power and contracts. There’s nothing religious about them.

But as usual with repressed Christians, the sex is just bursting at the seams. And I find it ironic. I’m a sexual liberal. I think it is great that people have sex whenever they want how ever they want. If people copulate in the streets, I wouldn’t care. But sex just isn’t that big a deal to me and if you doubt me, you can ask my two ex-wives. But for people like writer, director, and star of Old Fashioned, Rik Swartzwelder, sex is apparently very important — so important he has to make a whole film about it. He is, in fact, just the same as the makers of Fifty Shades of Grey. And I don’t imagine him that different from Osama bin Laden with all his pornography.

Religion makes people very creepy when it comes to sex. It’s like conservatives when it comes to policy: they start every discussion of fixing a problem with everything they can’t do. And that’s a recipe for disaster. The world is about possibilities, not arbitrary limits. And the young man in Old Fashioned is not even practicing his faith; he’s just another cultural Christian with major sexual hangups.

Old Fashioned poster licensed under Fair use, via Wikipedia.

Morning Music: What a Wonderful World

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Joey Ramone - What a Wonderful WorldToday, we listen to Joey Ramone’s version of “What A Wonderful World.” The reason is because I’m thinking of trying to make some videos. I had been working on this thing called “Good, Bad, and Uglies.” But it got overly complex. The big issue is that I can write the material, but I can’t really act it — at least not without a lot of work that I don’t have time for. In addition, I have a strong tendency to make little projects turn big. For example, the first screenplay I ever wrote was supposed to be a little 2 minute joke, but within a month it was two hours long. So my video dreams all got set aside.

But last night I was Skyping with my boss and we mentioned the GIF image format and I went on a tear. I noted that everyone pronounced it with a “ga” and not a “ja.” But then GIF inventor Steve Wilhite came out and said that he always pronounced it “jif.” Well, that made absolutely no sense, because GIF is an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, and unless Wilhite pronounces “graphics” as “jraphics,” he’s a complete loon. (Note: “giraffics” would be a wonderful word for images of giraffes.)

And then I mentioned “Linux,” which was always pronounced with a hard I. But then Linus Torvalds came out with a sound file with his Finnish accent and everyone thought, “Oh! It should be pronounced with a soft I!” But that wasn’t even true because the way he actually said it was “leenux.” Does anyone call it that? No! Should anyone call it that? Yes! People who speak Finnish should say it like that. But everyone in the English speaking world pronounces his first name “Linus” just like the Peanuts character. And that means that “Linux” should be pronounced with a hard I. But we don’t do that because people are just stupid.

I said all that in about 20 seconds. And I thought: I could just set up a camera and rant into it for hours on end about everything that I think is wrong in the universe. And then I could cut out little 20 second clips when I’m particularly “on.” Anyway, I generally started all the “Good, Bad, and Uglies” with Joey Ramone’s version of “What a Wonderful World” and then ended with the Louis Armstrong version. You can see what I mean in my video, These Are Not Very Bright Guys. Anyway, here’s the whole song:

Joey Ramone image by Yves Lorson, licensed under CC BY 2.0, via Wikipedia.

Anniversary Post: Microsoft Starts to Suck

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MicrosoftOn this day in 1975, Microsoft was formed by two computer mediocrities Paul Allen and Bill Gates. Thanks to them, the personal computer was held back for years. But they were successful as a company because they were ruthless. But let’s remember what these guys did. They wrote a BASIC interpreter in Intel 8080 assembly language. And I know that sounds impressive. But let me set you straight.

When I was in graduate school, I wrote my own text editor in 8086 assembly language. It didn’t take that long. And it was really fun to do. A BASIC interpreter is more work, but it isn’t that big a deal. But here’s the thing: I did that on my own, in addition to, you know, taking classes and trying to figure out how permafrost worked. But I had never taken a computer programming class. I didn’t and do not (despite having created huge and amazing software creations) think of myself as a computer programmer.

So I just don’t think much of people like Allen and Gates — or for that matter, Steve Wozniak, although being more of a hardware guy I give him some credit. And you know you don’t want to get me started on Steve Jobs. But the truth is that even most people who consider themselves technically minded get fooled about this kind of stuff. So what follows is the truth.

There are lots of brilliant programmers and computer scientists around and there have been since the 1950s. Even I could have been one if I had been so inclined (but I’m not ever interested in anything for that long). So the people who we hold up as masters of technology are almost always just technically oriented people who got rich. And that’s exclusively about ruthlessness and luck.

So what would have happened if Bill Gates and Paul Allen had never been born and there had not been a Microsoft? Well, IBM would have hired someone else to provide the operating system for their personal computer. (Note that I said “provide” given that Microsoft wrote almost none of it.) Would things have been better or worse? We can’t say, but I assume better, because I really think Microsoft held things back. Then again, maybe Apple would have been more successful and that would have been a similar catastrophe.

Image cropped from Microsoft, licensed under Fair Use, via Wikipedia.