A few weeks ago, in a post primarily complaining about Google’s disingenuous claims about their Messages app’s support for encryption (they suggest, heavily, that it encrypts every message or most messages, but in fact only supports encryption for RCS message sent between users of Google Messages on Android devices), I also complained about the fact that Google’s own Google Voice doesn’t support RCS at all.

Turns out Google Fi doesn’t support RCS fully either. Google Fi is Google’s cellular phone service. I actually use it to provide service to my Android burner phone. The prices are excellent and the service is fine for my minimal needs for a phone I barely use. But Google Fi offers something called “call and voicemail sync” that lets Fi users make and answer voice calls through the web. If you enable this, you lose RCS. See Reddit threads here and here with Fi fans complaining about it.

It’s just wild to me that Google would spend years waging a campaign urging Apple to support RCS, yet Google itself doesn’t support RCS in its own products.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple has introduced Share Item Location, a new iOS feature that helps users locate and recover misplaced items by easily and securely sharing the location of an AirTag or Find My network accessory with third parties such as airlines. Share Item Location is available now in most regions worldwide as part of the public beta of iOS 18.2, which will soon be available to all users as a free software update for iPhone Xs and later. Find My is built with privacy and safety at its core. The shared location will be disabled as soon as a user is reunited with their item, can be stopped by the owner at any time, and will automatically expire after seven days. [...]

Users can generate a Share Item Location link in the Find My app on their iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Recipients of a link will be able to view a website that shows a location of the item on an interactive map. The website will automatically update when a new location is available and will show a timestamp of the most recent update.

In the coming months, more than 15 airlines serving millions of people globally — including Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Air New Zealand, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Brussels Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Eurowings, Iberia, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Lufthansa, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, Turkish Airlines, United, Virgin Atlantic, and Vueling — will begin accepting Find My item locations as part of their customer service process for locating mishandled or delayed bags. More airlines will be added over time.

What a cool feature. Feels closer and closer to a no-brainer to keep an AirTag in each of your checked bags now.

Hello. Hi. It’s me. Hey. Howya doing?

Yeah, ME, TOO. (Sobs turn into maniacal laughing.) (Slowly transforms into The Joker.)

It was a tough year before this past Tuesday, to be honest. If someone had asked me, I would have easily marked it one of the most difficult ones of my personal and professional life.

My aunt died earlier this year. Her death was shocking in that particular way of those who have spent decades cheating their mortality. In her constant illness she seemed somehow interminable. Her husband, my uncle, often joked that she’d outlive us all.

Instead we buried her in early March.

This woman, who yelled at her neighbors when they tried to tell her homosexuality was a sin, who watched Fox News because she “wanted to know what her enemies were thinking,” was a wisp when she died.

“She’d wrung every ounce of life out of her body,” my cousin had said. It had nothing left to give. And so, stubbornly fighting death every step of the way, she went.

I still love her so much. That’s the part that gets me. She’s gone, and I love her, and it just keeps piling up in my chest, like that episode of I Love Lucy at the chocolate factory, until it finally overflows, and I find myself in the middle of someplace extremely public and inconvenient, sobbing under fluorescent lights. (A naked display of grief and devotion that, honestly, she would have loved.)

By the end of the month, Rand’s father would be gone as well, so suddenly that I find myself terrified anyone could go at any moment. My father-in-law died on Easter Sunday.

“He might come back,” Rand jokes. “There’s a precedent for Jews doing that.”

In the middle of all of this, my mother broke her back, my book came out, and The New York Times decapitated me. (No, really.) This was the image they used, alongside my author picture, which they seem to have modeled it after:

The author of the piece (a woman and a fellow blogger, apparently, which feels like a particular kind of betrayal) called me “loud and irrational”, criticized my reasons for not having children, and questioned why Rand loved me. (What this has to do with the quality of my writing, I am still unclear.)

In the summer, I went to Toronto for an author event, and met up with my friend Sarah. She’d had her own hell of a year, and we commiserated over dumplings. She has been, by her own admission, in something she described as “cockroach mode.”

“Just trying to survive,” she explained, “by whatever means possible.”

To be unkillable. Like the noble trash lobster.

The first time Trump was elected, my father was gravely ill. He died not long after, and I spent the next few weeks, months, hell, maybe it was several years (who, really, was counting, aside from Rand?) staring at my computer and doing … nothing. I just remember staring at the void of Twitter and cannot recall a single other thing I did. I know that other things happened. Life chugged on, in ways big and small. My youngest nephew was born during those strange, sad years; a chaotic cannonball of a human who jettisons himself off of furniture and straight into your heart. I met people who would become some of my closest friends. Also, I probably showered at least twice. Mostly, I was just trying to get through it.

But the beauty was there, even when I couldn’t see it. It’s so pervasive, so stubborn. Even after the biggest catastrophes, the sun still rises. We just don’t notice right away, because we are too tired to lift our heads.

Now Trump is going to be President again, something which is so absurd it would be laughable if it wasn’t so awful. An actual rapist whose own Chief of Staff warned that he lionized Hitler. A man who hates women, and people with disabilities, and the LGBTQIA+ community, and People of Color, who has no respect for the rule of law, and who is about to be the most powerful man on the planet. It is truly a terrifying thing.

In the wake of all of that, and in anticipation of what is to come, it is okay to be tired and terrified and utterly ruined right now. If you need to go back to bed with an entire deep dish pizza, I will not judge you.

I simply have one request of all of you: survive.

It is time to be in cockroach mode. To keep going, by whatever means possible. When someone tries to stamp you out, avoid them with a swiftness and a scurry that will haunt their dreams. They think your existence is a scourge? Then the best way to spite them is to keep existing. People will tell you “You just need to get through four more years.” This is laughable, and incorrect. Fascism doesn’t last four years. But also: cockroaches have existed for 300 million years. They do not put a time limit on how long they need to survive, nor should you. If asked, the answer should be “As long as possible” and “Up to two weeks without my head.”

For some of us, survival may be easier. If you fall into that privileged group, consider using your energy to remind others that they are precious, and beautiful, and so, so loved. That if they left the earth, grief would drown those of us left scurrying across the wreckage without them.

Stay whole. Protect yourself, however you can. I do not care what you do. If you need to avoid the news and live in a cave, have at it. Be selfish. Be angry. Buy yourself things. Stop shaving. Eat a doughnut on the toilet. Scream in to the void. Stay hydrated. Take up yoga. Give up yoga. Watch videos of animals who are up for adoption. Go adopt all of those animals. I cannot say what it will take you get through. I don’t even know what it will take to get me through. But I know that you being here, you, whole and beautiful and alive and angry, helps. Get up everyday, feed yourself, tenderly care for the vessel that carries the inexplicable combination of biology and magic that makes you you. You do not need to be happy about it, but if you can find happiness in this absolute shit timeline, fucking revel in it.

This is no small task. It is an enormous thing to stay alive when your very government is actively trying to kill you. There will be days when you will feel like it is an impossible thing. When so much will be out of your control. It will feel insurmountable. We live in a world where simply being a different race, or being trans or queer or having a non-viable pregnancy means you could die. For a lot of people, surviving in this timeline is becoming increasingly difficult.

Truthfully, not everyone will.

In light of all of this, you are completely entitled to scream “FUCK EVERYTHING,” to throw your hands up in sheer exasperation because how the fuck are we here again, but worse. The person I love most in the world just told me he’s done with hope. You can’t be mired in grief unless you loved in the first place. This is the price we’re all paying. It absolutely sucks. Get angry. Be miserable. Roam around under a dumpster. Disappear into the floorboards when someone turns on a light. Maybe try Pilates.

I’m fairly certain cockroaches have seen some shit in the 300 megaanna they’ve existed. And they keep going, as interminable as time. They’ve outlasted kingdoms and empires. They will witness the heat death of the universe (now scheduled for sometime next spring). My request is a selfish one, and I guess that’s what I’m doing to get by: telling you how badly I need you here, with me. That I need you to survive, by any means possible because I would be so, so fucking lost without you. That you make the world better by your presence. That your mere existence is an act of defiance. That you, my sweet beautiful, broken-hearted weirdo, are a goddamn triumph.

It is time, my loves, to be in cockroach mode.

The post It is Time For Our Cockroach Era appeared first on The Everywhereist.

Taegan Goddard, Political Wire:

After last night, it became clear it was a mistake to dismiss Trump’s true political strength. He will win the 2024 election with at least 51% of the popular vote.

His win will not be the result of a constitutional quirk. It was not even the result of a bad campaign by Kamala Harris. His victory was so broad based I’m not sure any Democrat could have beaten him last night.

There’s a brutal clarity in this result.

The majority of Americans are not concerned with Trump’s blatant racism or sexism. They are not concerned with his vows of retribution on his political enemies. They are not concerned with warnings of “fascism” by his former top aides. They are not concerned with his extensive criminal and fraudulent behavior.

If there’s a takeaway from this election, it’s that this is who we are.

Not all of us, to be sure. But it makes clear what the rest of us are up against.

I take some small solace at the moment in Trump’s victory being the clear democratic result. Republicans just fucking won. No mistakes on Harris’s side. There’s no Comey letter. No hanging chads. No margin within the range of woulda-coulda-shoulda recriminations. Just a clear electoral result.

I realized this year — or perhaps over the last four years — that for me, belief in the merits of democracy is quasi-religious. It’s more than a philosophy. It’s a fundamental belief. I have faith in democracy, and part of that is accepting the results of any fair and free election as the will of the electorate — similar, I think, to how actually religious people have faith that unspeakable tragedies can somehow be the will of a just and righteous deity. Through that prism, and with the genuine shock of 2016 giving me a brace, I can accept this. But because of that prism, I will never forgive or forget Trump’s shameful desecration of our democratic ideals in 2020. His winning in 2016 and again now are awful events. But his attempt to overturn the 2020 election — ham-fisted, idiotic, and failed though it thankfully was — was and will always be worse.

Sewell Chan, writing for Columbia Journalism Review on Wednesday, “Los Angeles Times Editorials Editor Resigns After Owner Blocks Presidential Endorsement”:

Mariel Garza, the editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times, resigned on Wednesday after the newspaper’s owner blocked the editorial board’s plans to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza told me in a phone conversation. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

On October 11, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the newspaper for $500 million in 2018, informed the paper’s editorial board that the Times would not be making an endorsement for president.

Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, was like, “Hold my beer...” Here’s William Lewis, CEO and publisher of the Post, which Bezos wholly owns:

The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.

The only rational explanation for this decision is cowardice on Bezos’s part in the face of Donald Trump’s vindictiveness. Lewis tries, haplessly, to couch this as a return to the Post’s “roots”, hand-wavingly justifying the decision by pointing out that, prior to 1976, the newspaper declined to issue endorsements:

That was strong reasoning, but in 1976 for understandable reasons at the time, we changed this long-standing policy and endorsed Jimmy Carter as president. But we had it right before that, and this is what we are going back to.

We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility.

It’s that last one.

The “understandable reasons” for The Washington Fucking Post to endorse Carter in 1976, not delineated by Lewis, were — you know — the crimes of Republican Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, as reported by the Post’s own legendary reporting duo, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein are having none of Lewis’s and Bezos’s bullshit, issuing a clear condemnation of the decision (which, conspicuously, the Post’s own news desk published):

“We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 12 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.”

Marty Baron, recently-retired executive editor of the Post, on X, minced even fewer words:

This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. @realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.

A joint column signed by 17 current Washington Post columnists:

The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake. It represents an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love. This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them — the precise points The Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020. [...] An independent newspaper might someday choose to back away from making presidential endorsements. But this isn’t the right moment, when one candidate is advocating positions that directly threaten freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution.

Alexandra Petri — one of those 17 columnists — in a solo column, mocking the absurdity of Lewis’s justification for the decision:

We as a newspaper suddenly remembered, less than two weeks before the election, that we had a robust tradition 50 years ago of not telling anyone what to do with their vote for president. It is time we got back to those “roots,” I’m told!

Roots are important, of course. As recently as the 1970s, The Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! Go even further back, and the entire continent of North America was totally uninhabitable, and we were all spineless creatures who lived in the ocean, and certainly there were no Post subscribers.

Garza, the editor who resigned in protest from the LA Times, made clear in her interview with CJR that the point of newspaper endorsements is not based on the premise that they sway elections:

“I didn’t think we were going to change our readers’ minds — our readers, for the most part, are Harris supporters,” Garza told me. “We’re a very liberal paper. I didn’t think we were going to change the outcome of the election in California. But two things concern me: This is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what. And an endorsement was the logical next step after a series of editorials we’ve been writing about how dangerous Trump is to democracy, about his unfitness to be president, about his threats to jail his enemies. We have made the case in editorial after editorial that he shouldn’t be reelected. [...]”

“And it’s perplexing to readers, and possibly suspicious, that we didn’t endorse her this time.”

Chan, the CJR writer Garza spoke to, continues:

Indeed, hours after Semafor reported on Tuesday that Soon-Shiong had blocked the endorsement, former president Donald Trump’s rapid-response team sent out an email calling the newspaper’s decision “the latest blow” for Harris.

“In Kamala’s own home state, the Los Angeles Times — the state’s largest newspaper — has declined to endorse the Harris-Walz ticket, despite endorsing the Democrat nominees in every election for decades,” the campaign said. “Even her fellow Californians know she’s not up for the job. The Times previously endorsed Kamala in her 2010 and 2014 races for California attorney general, as well as her 2016 race for US Senate — but not this time.”

What’s so maddeningly disingenuous about this is that it’s not “the newspapers” that refused to endorse Harris. It was their cowardly owners. Both newspapers had already written their Harris endorsements. Liberal newspapers breaking tradition to not endorse anyone is worse than if their owners had forced them to endorse Trump instead. A Trump endorsement from the LA Times or Washington Post would be absurd. No one, not even the derpiest of MAGA trolls, would believe that. It would be like a steakhouse endorsing veganism. But refusing to endorse Harris? That, on the surface, is plausibly suspicious.

Before this week, I’d never heard of Patrick Soon-Shiong, the LA Times’s owner. I just assume now he’s a self-interested idiot. But Jeff Bezos turning coward surprises me. I didn’t have Bezos pegged as a chickenshit. When he bought the Post, I sincerely thought he was saving it, not destroying it. What’s the point of having so much “fuck you” money if you’re afraid to tell a petty tyrant like Donald Trump to pound sand? And Bezos is smart, really smart, which makes it baffling that he thinks Trump, if elected, might remember this craven gesture of abject subservience, and decline to lash out against Amazon, Blue Origin, or Bezos personally, after a single negative news story in The Washington Post. Transactions work only one way with Donald Trump. Toward him. Only going on stage with Trump and dancing like a dipshit might actually gain derp Führer’s favor.

Jonathan Last, writing at The Bulwark, “The Guardrails Are Already Crumpling”:

These guys can hear the music. They’ve seen the sides being chosen: Elon Musk and Peter Theil assembling with Trump’s gangster government in waiting. They see Mark Zuckerberg praising Trump as a “badass.” And now they see Bezos getting in line, too.

What’s remarkable is that Trump didn’t have to arrest Bezos to secure his compliance. Trump didn’t even have to win the election. Just the fact that he has an even-money chance to become president was threat enough.

Or maybe that’s not remarkable. One of Timothy Snyder’s rules for resisting authoritarians is that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” People surrender preemptively much more often than you might expect.

Two weeks ago, Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter wrote what might be the most prophetic essay of the year. They warned about “anticipatory obedience” in the media.

Seventeen days later, Bezos made his demonstration.

In case you needed reminding: The “guardrails” aren’t guardrails. They’re people.

And they’re already collapsing. Before a single state has been called.

This is no time to get squishy. I have never once unsubscribed from a newspaper in protest, and I certainly haven’t encouraged you to. But there’s a line for everything, and this abject cowardice, in the face of the greatest threat to our democracy itself since the Civil War, crossed that line. I’ve been a paying subscriber to The Washington Post for many years. Not anymore. I recommend you do the same.