Since I’m just sitting here watching C-SPAN3, I thought I would write some thoughts about what I’m seeing. 10:30 AM - Meeting begins. 10:46 AM - These witnesses for the Blue Alerts are heart-breaking. I’m not sure I agree that Blue Alerts are a good idea (but I don’t know the full story of it), but I hope this passes for their sake. 10:55 AM - Oh I guess the Blue Alerts are being adopted. Sounds like this is something that began in the Obama administration. Jessica Rosenworcel delivered a harsh rebuke of the cost-benefit analysis.

Surprisingly few post-election tweets yesterday, but today is the FCC’s vote on “net neutrality,” and this appeared this morning: https://twitter.com/AGSchneiderman/status/941025240129441792 You just identified them yesterday, huh? I could have told you most of the comments were fake a long time ago. In fact, I think I did write that in one of my previous blog posts on net neutrality (it was to that same AG guy). Because obviously, when you open up “public comment” in the form of electronic submissions (Internet, texts, faxes, phone calls), you are just asking for a botnet assault. Only in-person comments from someone with a valid identification, and maybe even two forms of photo identification these days, can really be trusted. A handwritten letter is probably genuine, but could also be fake, given that you could pay someone on Fiver two cents an hour to sit around writing thousands of letters, gather them up, then drive around the country mailing them from various post offices with fake return addresses. It’s not like anyone is going to double-check that the sender actually sent the letter. I mean, it would be a lot of work, obviously, but people do crazy things to try to force their opinions down everyone’s throat. The point is that almost every form of communication is gameable by Russians, anarchists, hackers, or activists these days.

Just to followup, Patreon changed their mind. They will not change their fees as planned. (They still intend to address the “problem” though, so they will need to change something eventually.) But the damage was already done. Patreon destroyed their reputation with small creators overnight and I am seeing tweet after tweet today indicating they won’t be back. Perhaps a year from now people will forget, but right now, they are still angry (and rightly so).

Bracing for a lot of tweets like this today: https://twitter.com/leedrutman/status/940755313145339907 Soooooo. Yeah. There’s this thing, you know, called a Constitution? It describes this thing, you know, called a Senate? But wait for it, there’s this other thing, you know, called, like, a House of Representatives! They represent people in a way you might like. Perhaps you should read up on it. Suggesting that the Senate also be apportioned by population is literally advocating mob rule. Maybe you like the mob this morning, but you might not like it twenty or thirty years from now when your kids and grandkids start voting. Smart people already figured this out.

I drank too much hot chocolate tonight, so I can’t sleep. Therefore I’ll add a few post-election thoughts. Even though it’s none of my business what Alabamians do with their Senate seats, I was relieved to see that Doug Jones won, because it’s really disheartening to think that an accused pedophile could still win a seat in the Senate. If a story about feeling up 14-year-old girls comes out a few days before an election in The Enquirer, it makes sense to be suspicious about it. But this story came out months before the election in The Washington Post. It’s disheartening to think that we live in a culture where an accused pedophile can simply call a Washington Post story fabricated out of whole cloth and get away with it.

I’m going to write about election results from The Big Alabama Election. I’m starting about 7 PM EST, which is about an hour before the polls close. Just for the record, I don’t live in Alabama so technically this election is none of my business. But it’s the only election tonight so it’s getting a lot of national coverage. It’s like a Monday Night Football game… it’s the only one on.

Saw this retweeted: in modern capitalism, a business that merely brings in a steady profit is considered a failure, success is defined by continual unchecked growth in biology, we have a word for continual unchecked growth: cancer — Squidlarkin 🦑 System (@squidlarkin) December 10, 2017 This is an amusing analogy, but it breaks down because it’s not “modern capitalism” that defines a business’s success, it’s the modern investors, who vote with their dollars on a daily or hourly or even minute-by-minute basis.

I want to elaborate a little bit on a random tweet-thought I expressed this morning. …I think we are seeing recently that fame is actually more useful for changing the world than holding elected office My basic point was that it seems to me that popular, famous people are able to motivate the citizenry into action a lot more than any innate sense of civic duty. Recently (say, in the last 10-15 years, roughly the exact same time period of the rise of The Internet), I think we have seen a conflation of politics and popularity. What people remember about Obama is not his policies, but his likeableness. People presume he was a great president (especially now) because he was a cool guy with great comic timing, while completely forgetting that he authorized the bombing of hundreds of civilians with military drones.

A large percentage of my gaming and writing Twitter timelines are abuzz with civil unrest over a change that Patreon will be making to their fee structure on December 18th. I don’t use Patreon and I can’t really envision a scenario where I would use it prior to becoming famous, but a lot of people I follow do use it, and they aren’t happy. If you don’t know what Patreon is, it’s a site where you can donate money to a “creator” (artist, musician, writer, etc.) every month to support their work, somewhat akin to pledging money to PBS.

Another person on the Internet who needs to go back to Civics class (or is a Russian operative sowing dissent): Who here on twitter feels like they are not being represented in Congress and are still paying their taxes?#TaxationWithoutRepresentation I never ask for retweets but I am this one time. Retweet if you are not represented!#TheResistance — Rogue Wulf (@Wulfkat) December 10, 2017 Just because you don’t “feel like” you’re represented, doesn’t mean you’re not represented. “Representation” in this context has a very specific meaning that has nothing to do with your “feelings.”