The Offline Report

Public comments submitted via email to the California DMV on the proposed autonomous vehicle regulations from March 10, 2017 until April 25, 2017, were made available to the public last Friday February 23, 2018.    ca.dmv.gov "On October 24, 2017, Chairman Pai led the FCC (on a party-line vote) in eliminating the broadcast main studio rule. Doing away with the rule, which was established in 1940, benefits the largest broadcasters, especially Sinclair who has made a pattern of reducing local investments in station studios and consolidating studio and newsgathering operations at its headquarters in Maryland."    cantwell.senate.gov

A history of media techonology scares, from the printing press to Facebook.    slate.com 6 Ways Driverless Cars Are Going To Kill Lots of People    cracked.com I Tried to Cure My Smartphone Addiction Using My Smartphone.    vice.com feb 27 2018 Why is the Obama administration opposing rights for immigrant detainees? Non-citizens are often locked up as they fight deportation proceedings, even if they're in the country legally or don't pose a flight risk.    theguardian.com The Attack That Almost Happened: Foiled School Bomber Rebuilds His Life    wbur 'here and now'

"Don't fall asleep. Don't meditate. Just sit there." Lets get real - few of us are ever going to meditate. We heard it's good for us, we accept it might help us think more clearly. But it sounds, low-energy. How about some substitutes? Here's Don Reed: "Say absolutely nothing. Say nothing. If you have to, write it on a little card 'Silent Treck,' as you're walking by people, just show it to 'em, they'll respect you and keep right on going. Go somewhere say nothing. Watch how much comes to you. I think it'll blow your mind...The other place where I get a lot of work done is in my car."  -- Don Reed, Going Three Feet Past youtube If we stop talking, and just listen and observe, the insight will come, right? Close. Don't say anything. Don't play music. And you know what, don't meditate either: "Don't do anything. Um...don't do anything. Go home, sit on the couch and stare at the wall. For a long ...

"We chose that description because no detailed plan to reverse warming has been proposed." drawdown.org/the-book "Five or ten years after the first fire, there was another. Back then, fire came often." baynature.org jan-march 2018 The Eureka Hunt newyorker.com "Farmers are professional adapters, and they respond to the challenge of adapting to difficultly." scientificamerican.com jan 2015

Just one more example of a tech-induced isolation unit in our culture: the supplantation of an "indoor voice" landline conversation within earshot of housemates, officemates people walking by... with a texting-only or "shouting voice" dropped call conversation. Sensory deprivation units lost. Asking your partner or coworker to keep their voice at an indoor level when fighting with their family is tricky - because it's hard to implement yourself. Other person talks loudly within earshot.  You think silently: ("How could [coworker/partner/teen] be so rude?") Minutes later you dial your own phone and the roles soon reversed:  You: "Jan, can you hear me? You said there was static, now can you hear me? We need to reschedule marriage counseling this week. Junior's teacher wants to have a conference with us over his [whisper]deviant[/whisper] behavior in class... Jan? Are you there? OK I think the call dropped, I'll text you. "...

We're going to give these microbehaviors names and get our civility back on track. Today on my walk a dad, teen son and their dog walked and chatted animatedly about five ten paces ahead. At a lull in their conversation I asked what kind of dog it was, and told them the same breed was in one of my favorite netflix shows where a dog is so cute and captivating its owner uses it to hypnotize victims and embezzle their money. The son broke eye contact and with me and dad followed his son's gaze. I got the hint ("go away stranger, I was enjoying this time with my dad/son.") Or so I thought. I pulled ahead of them to focus on my destination when I heard them mention "show" and realized they'd broken eye contact to google the name of the netflix show. These eye contact breaks are happening everywhere and WERE happening everywhere in the great communications changeover that began in 2007. They are misleading. The eye contact break coincides with a verba...

Syrian opposition activists say Russian warplanes are taking part in bombarding Damascus' eastern suburbs, also known as eastern Ghoita.    sfgate feb 24 2018 chicagotribune.com Over the next four months, though, he and dozens of other volunteers got a crash course in how hard it is to erect housing in California state.    pressreader.com sfchronicle.com feb 24 2018

A non-facebooker or a slowly one faces occasional pangs through the day, then more sparsely throughout the week, giving doubt to whether quitting "the Platform" is doable or even in one's best interest. In today's newspaper is a story of upcoming student marches for better gun control "Bay Area student organizers are in vanguard." Many passages in the above story imply this magic generation is so special because they know how to use social media and they're going to make change happen through social media. This is a myth. As the Orlando Sentinal reported today those students we saw on youtubed TV clips last week that spoke so eloquently and emphatically were largely students in the debate class and had been debating gun control through the fall and winter. And the New York Times today had a " Go ahead, brag a little " piece, made first of reader responses they'd gathered in Facebook. Good on the nyt, though, for continuing the reade...

Governors Kasich (R-OH) Hickenlooper (D-CO) have been working for more than a year on identifying common ground on healthcare immigration and other policy issues. They and Governors Walker (I-AK) Sandoval (R-NV) and Wolf (D-PA) presented a plan for improved healthcare affordability stability flexibility. "The governors urge the federal government to restore insurer subsidies that were stopped by President Trump, triggering sharp increases in premiums." https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/us/article/GOP-Dem-governors-push-national-health-care-12693534.php

Even women have testosterone in their bodies. It is human (radical word) to want to do something with our hands our bodies. To operate machinery preferably not an AR rifle or that "sensible shoe of assault rifles" the AK-47. Also cars, we learn as teenagers, are killing machines. Snap judgement storyteller of the year Don Reed who commutes from L.A. to the Bay Area says he gets a lot of his ideas in the car. When the mind is just enough engaged just enough distracted it has room for insight. Not to mention we've been disrupted to death by software. At least driverless cars obey the laws of the physical world and broken hardware requires a visit to the repair shop. Hey unemployed drivers can always work for a tech company like Snapchat. Reader or not ready, here they come : "Remote control cannot avert accidents, however. 'We are not the solution if you’re going 75 mph and a couch falls off the pickup truck in front of you,' [ Phantom Auto co-founde...

Media Literacy is about Where to Spend Trust. And you have to Spend it somewhere https://hapgood.us/2018/02/23/media-literacy-is-about-where-to-spend-your-trust-but-you-have-to-spend-it-somewhere/ Bruce Schneier signs letter supporting an elections act (paper is technology!!) https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/02/election_securi_2.html ad.com/seths_blog/2018/02/noticed-vs-missed.html to be cleaned up later. Seth Godin. Noticed vs Missed. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610278/why-even-a-moths-brain-is-smarter-than-an-ai/amp/ Technology Review even a moths brain is smarter than AI. https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Look-ma-no-driver-Cars-without-humans-coming-12704455.php

Day 3 blogging from smartphone. (Much of the world sees the internet only through their small smartphone screen. Hideous typos ahead, we thank you in advance for your forgiveness.) In exchange for an FCC license to broadcast news over the airwaves, broadcast companies since the 1930s had to prove they were obeying the Main Studio Rule. (Placeholder for quotes and links. I miss my laptop.)

Russians blame U.S. for curler's failed drug tests https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/article/Russians-blame-U-S-for-curler-s-failed-drug-12628603.php Propublica a nonprofit journalism outlet writes code to test algorithms of Facebook and Amazon. Read about their new journalist app the Facebook political ad collector ://amp.fastcodesign.com/90160486/how-propublica-became-big-techs-scariest-watchdog?__twitter_impression=true https://static.theintercept.com/amp/video-glenn-greenwald-and-james-risen-debate-the-trumprussia-investigation.html?__twitter_impression=true

Day 2 blogging from smartphone (Hideous typos ahead. Typos left in place to show how much of the world sees the interinternet, through their tiny phone screen sans laptop.) Stage 1 the reluctant Facebook join. I'll just see what it looks like inside. Stage 2 caught in the sheepdogging social storm. I'll keep my friend count to two digits. Oh my IRL friend can see that I've FB friended her friend, I'll just add one more. Stage I've lost count: in my effort to be polite and quit Facebook my friend count ballooned to . Deactivate and reactivate. Repeat. 2010 to 2013. Big hurdle: unfriend family members. Since you see them often. Brace for blowback or backlash. Big hurdle 2: unfriend the friends you see IRL at least annually. Explain that you still love them you're just pulling out of this particular platform. Explain angrily because they don't hear or believe you and continue using messenger as conduit. Block friend to force them off mess...

This is a test. Sometimes the most gloriuos gift in life is a broken laptop. For if you're of the reasonable resistance to convenience club, and have not installed social media apps on the phone, which you started using late 2007, have not enabled push notifications on the phone, insist on using the phone web browser, not the phone Google app (ooh that reference will sound dated quite soon, better change that to the phone search app) then you are rewarded occasionally with a repair shop-sequestered laptop. A glorious multiday interval of silence, a reprieve from the mental noise that whooshed upon us all ans has not let up since that singular year. A merciful inconvenience that is the broken laptop reacquaints you with the physical world, forced to buy your regional newspaper in hard copy. Dead tree medium. If youre lucky enough to experience this glorious burden, You may finally drag yourself to the bookstore, roll over the hardcoded serendipity of life, the first you've h...