The Christmas tree was escorted to the curb today, the lingering scent of pine slowly dissipating from my living room. It’s the final shred of acceptance for me of the closing of the season. Christmas these last years has been hard, with all of the loss compounding that feeling of growing up and growing more and more alone. And yet, we continue ever forward, through the approaching year, aimed forward, with another Christmas at its end. We’ve got 344 days to Christmas. Ho ho ho.
Inputs
1: WOOOOOO!!!! Big win out of the Buccaneers, looking the better team in all three phases. Tackled harder, and as a team. Broke through tackles that the Eagles didn’t seem to have the fortitude (or, towards the conclusion, the heart) to make. Even a solid kicking performance!
Overall, a big effort out of the team, repeatedly demonstrating a superior will to win. And now, on to Detroit, in a matchup that would have seemed bizarre for most of the last 30 years. Two long-maligned underdog franchises face off for the right to participate in the NFC Championship game. 2024, continuing to be wild.
2: The big story of the day on social media is this one (NYTimes Gift Article), regarding the use of courtesy cards by people to get out of traffic tickets in New York, and the insane amount of pressure being put on one officer not to go along blindly with an obviously corrupt system of patronage. The whole thing is gobsmacking, but this quote stood out:
“Quotas are officially barred, but Bianchi said he was required to issue six tickets daily.”
Just another example of unofficial official rules that drives me absolutely insane (and something we all suspect to be true, even through the vehement denials such a construction allows for). For an organization ostensibly created to enforce the law (though which it is clear has a different remit entirely), rules that aren’t rules but are enforced with the weight of them is a practice that symbolizes the inherent struggle to exist and to know what is expected vs what is right.
Oh, and the kicker: “Bianchi stopped one teenager about a dozen times; he got so familiar with the family that the kid’s father began sending him holiday greetings. (The kid is now a police officer.)” FFS.
3: Via 404 Media, “Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find,” which, duh. However! The author goes in depth on a study done in Germany on overall search quality across search engines, including Google’s and finds overall that results at the top-end of search queries are more stuffed with nonsense than before, including this insight: “(W)e find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do.” Meaning, though the rest of the web is rather normally distributed with affiliate marketers, those reliant on the practice are gaming their way regularly to the top of results, polluting those being shown to organic searchers.
The gaming of search results and “Search Engine Optimization” as a field of study and business have been an issue since the advent of PageRank displaced Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and the dozen other purely collative search engines. As an arms race, consumers are losing, to the point that paid subscription search is beginning to be a viable business model to replace what had been the commoditized compliment of serving ads. Entropy, as always.
Projects In Progress
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