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geopolitical shambles
Tuesday, October 3 2017
At some point during my day in the remote workplace, I struck up a live chat with someone at Sparkfun.com to complain about the Onion Omega2 I'd bought through them. I'd had a little tech support from Onion itself, but after asking for a log from the serial port (which I produced), they'd just quit communicating with me. The guy at Sparkfun (his name was Chris) quickly suggested sending me a new one without asking that I return my non-working one. This was better service than I'd expected, but it made sense given the nature of the device. The Onion Omega2 is only $9, and the bother of shipping it back made it's uselessness seem almost not worth complaining about. But if people like me don't complain, then Onion won't do whatever they need to do to fix their quality control, and the market of such devices will suffer.
This evening Gretchen and I watched the two hour season premiere of Shark Tank, which Gretchen seemed more eager to watch than I was. It was clearly trying to be over-the-top, which seemingly-staged juvenile antics between billionaires (in this case, Mark Cuban and Richard Branson). The show ended with a soul-crushingly horrible defeat, as the sharks shat all over the makeshift business plans of a youthful developer who'd had made an app ("Trippie") to help with navigating airports. After his defeat, the camera lingered on the poor young man crying in the arms of his mother in the green room.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump was visiting storm-ravaged Puerto Rico and, naturally, said plenty of insensitive, narcissistic things that might have been shocking had he not first destroyed the norms of American leadership. Vladimir Putin may not have gotten everything he wanted from Donald Trump, but he's effectively rendered our country a geopolitical shambles and global punchline.
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