It's time to radically scale back the postal service, by banning the mailing, on paper, of computer files.

The US Postal Service delivers 44% of the mail in the world. 127B total pieces of mail, plus packages, and 46B pieces of first class mail (down from 103B at the peak) of which 13B are "single piece" first class mail with a stamp. That's a lot of trees and a lot of energy.

Musk himself was surprised to see how controversial he had become when he got a lot of booing on stage with Dave Chappelle in San Francisco last night.

Musk has always been somebody who refused to give a crap what other people think, because he can afford it. But now that his personal brand is so tied to the success of both Tesla and Twitter, he has to deal with the fact that personal brand is largely what other people think.

Analysis of this problem, and how it affects the success and stock price of Tesla, is in this new article on the Forbes site:

A recent Tweet had Elon Musk declare that if Apple and Google removed Twitter from their app stores (something I doubt will happen) that he might make his own phone to compete with them. Generally it's been doom for those that have tried to enter the smartphone market and fight this duopoly.

Comcast has been having a lot of outages this month. Since, like many, internet is vital to work and many things in the home, I would like to be able to have two internet providers, and fail over to the 2nd one when the first is out. I don't want to just have to pay double to have this -- I want to pay the backup provider much less because I am almost never using them. I want to pay them if I use them a lot, and better still I want my 1st provider to pay them if the 1st provider goes out.

You've seen Wordle, the game sweeping the web. I built a tool to examine all the choices and pick the best starting word, and then help you pick your 2nd word after you get the result.

I predict and propose many things online. It's nice to note when they become real. In this article from 2006, I describe the value of a robot that could crawl along power lines laying fiber and TIL that Facebook has indeed built such a robot. This week they have released it with the odd name of Bombyx.

The instinct of many transportation planners is to make "smart infrastructure," and to try to make plans for it going out 30 years. That's impossible, nobody knows what smart will mean in 5 years. The internet solve this problem, and grew by making the infrastructure as stupid as possible, and it revolutionized the world. The internet teaches lessons for how all infrastructure planning must go in the future -- keep the physical as simple as possible, do everything in the virtual, software layer.

There are many tools now being used to replace physical conferences and meetings -- not just Zoom. And no one system is complete, or even best-of-breed in all the various functions it provides. It's time for these tools to develop a way to interoperate, so people can build an event mixing and matching tools, but allowing attendees to flow smoothly between the tools without needing to create different accounts, re-authenticate or have a large learning curve.

People are doing huge amounts of videoconferencing during the Covid crisis. The tools keep improving, but there's a great deal that individual participants can do to make the meetings better. They take some effort but it's worth it.

Nick Denton was a sleazebag. I knew that within one minute of meeting him, as he described the new web site he was planning, called "Valleywag." He was proud he had learned the name of Larry Page's girlfriend and he could break that story, as if who Larry was dating was worthy news of some kind.

A new service called Red Carpet was announced, which will offer first-run movies in the homes of the very wealthy. You need a $15,000 DRM box and movie rentals are $1,500 to $3,000 per rental. That price is not a typo.

So I wrote an article pondering why that is, and why this could not be done at a price that ordinary people could afford, similar to the price of going to the movies.

I've ranted a few times about the flood of customer satisfaction surveys we get. It seems you can't buy a tube of toothpaste without being pushed to fill out a survey on it.

Most of the world was wowed by the Google Duplex demo, where their system was able to cold-call a hairdresser and make an appointment with her, with the hairdresser unaware she was talking to an AI. The system included human speech mannerisms and the ability to respond to the random phrases the hairdresser through back.