I have a facility in my web application to publish RSS feeds for the most “significant” events. I built it so that I wouldn’t have to build some way of integrating those events with lots of different mechanisms for lots of different users.

I demo’d it to the guy who’s taking over tech for the company I’ve been consulting to. Started by asking “do you know what RSS is?”. His response: “oh, yes, that’s really old tech” and made some analogy with a tape player in his old car.

So I fired up Zapier, and showed him how to take the feed and plug it into a Google Sheet, and into Slack so that his customer support people got pinged with new items. Oh. I could see his brain start to whir. I said something about “old tech, but still good tech”.

Thanks, @davewiner!

This morning after watching the debate, Shelley says “I’m going to send $25 to Amy Klobuchar”, and we have a discussion comparing her and Elizabeth Warren’s approach to governing.

Then I read Scripting News, as is my wont in the mornings, and lo and behold Dave has posted a message that he’s sent Klobuchar $25.

http://scripting.com/2019/10/17.html#a142939

The next blog entry he posts mentions that he had a bike accident a few weeks ago and broke a rib. I had a bike accident at the beginning of August and fractured two ribs, collapsed a lung, detached a nerve in my eye, broke a bone in my hand and separated my shoulder.

What’s going on? Am I living Dave’s life? Shelley accuses me of being the secret author of Scripting News.

Enough with the bland liberalism

Dan Conover has had it with liberal pablum with no content.

In the ’70s, I remember Gough Whitlam, PM in Australia, was summarily dismissed by the Crown in the person of the Australian Governor-General. I never knew why it happened and just attributed it to some sort of internal politics.

Today I read that it was because Whitlam wanted to close down Pine Gap, the 5-eyes listening station in Oz, because the US and the British had been spying on his cabinet. A few discussions between the CIA and MI6, and voila.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/04/after-us-senator-asks-public-imagine-cia-interfering-foreign-elections-historians

Wow. Was it really that simple? Anybody know more?

Ian expressed his alarm at the way the situation in Hong Kong is deteriorating. I think it’s just a matter of time before the Chinese government sends in troops, at which point most of the international business in HK will leave or go bankrupt.

The only pushback available is from the British government, who made the deal returning Hong Kong to the Chinese with some caveats. The only way they could credibly stand up would be with US backing. The US has already signaled directly to China that they won’t interfere (From the Independent, here), so the UK will at most splutter and at least stay silent, as they are now.

The perils of breaking alliances. Nobody now expects the US to back them up, so the biggest guy wins.