2024-12-06 19:27:55
This Bloomberg piece forgets one important fact: Donald Trump is not going to be on the ticket next time. He doesn’t have to deliver a dime for ordinary voters, and will act accordingly.
I don’t use Apple Passwords. It’s not that it’s not a good product (and if you aren’t using a password manager at all and you use Apple stuff, use it) but I simply hate putting all my eggs in one basket. Imagine losing access to your Apple account, and losing your cloud files, music, photos, and your passwords too. If you use it, the company has now released a Firefox extension so you can have access to passwords in that browser too… but only on Mac. I don’t really get this. Apple already has a pluging for Passwords which works in Edge, so why not Windows too? Why not Linux? Why not try and make a useful service usable everywhere?
Rachel Coldicutt has been doing some interesting work this year on many things, including working with non-technical organisations figuring out how to use AI. One of the points she makes – which I think is brilliant – is that at the moment, AI is about “personal efficiencies rather than organisational gains”. That tallies with my experience too: the way that generative AI is being used is similar to the first wave of search engines, when ordinary workers started the process by using search to do their jobs more efficiently without input from managers. And that usage isn’t just writing stuff: it’s brainstorming, playing with ideas, working out the right structure to create a document, and more.
Nick Heer, writing about Spencer Ackerman’s posts on Apple Intelligence, make a good point: while Spencer is wrong about the some of default settings for Apple Intelligence, it’s not surprising that he, and many others, just don’t trust any big tech company on this kind of stuff.
Efforts to improve diversity in business were, in my experience, mostly about… well, business. There is a tonne of research demonstrating that, even leaving aside the issue of ethics, DEI is good for business. When even the Harvard Business Review says you need to be doing it, it’s probably best to listen.
Of course now we’re in the second reign of King Donald, where facts are whatever the feelings of right wingers say they are. So it’s no surprise that some of the old white men who run companies like Boeing, Walmart and more are pulling back from diversity.
But surely the markets will correct this, I hear you free-marketers cry. Well, no. Capitalism isn’t about free markets (every society since the year dot has had markets). Capitalism is about the primacy of capital, and a power structure where the owners of capital have ultimate power. It doesn’t matter if companies are more efficient, when you have billionaires that will prop them up or monopolies which are “too big to fail, too important to jail”.
This is how it is: A post-factual world, where very rich men get to run things. And those very rich men happy to be white.
I would hate to interview Tim Cook, because the frustration of knowing how much he knows while also knowing you are not going to get a word of it out of him would drive me crazy. This interview is par for the course, although it contains some interesting points. One small point: when asked how artificial general intelligence (AGI) would affect Apple, Tim says “that’s a discussion we will continue to have”. Perhaps he should take a a look in the archives.
If you’re in the UK you may have noticed farmers protesting about the plans to change inheritance tax in a way which will make farms worth over £3m subject to some level of inheritance tax. Unsurprisingly the likes of James Dyson, the Brexit-supporting idiot who owns £550m of farming land, are not happy about being unable to capitalise on what’s been an excellent way of dodging tax. As this article points out, the likes of Dyson buying up vast swathes of farm land mainly to avoid tax has driven up the price of farming land to the point where it’s not worth buying if you actually want to farm somewhere and live off the income. This of course prevents real farmers – people who want to work the land in a way that produces crops and is profitable – from expanding their farms. On the other hand, it makes the land more valuable for children who just want to sell up and don’t give a damn about the provision of food. So excuse me if I raise an eyebrow at those “no farmers no food” banners.
I love Benedict Evans’ occasional long presentations, because they are always a great summary of what’s going on even when I don’t always agree with them. With that in mind it’s well worth watching his talk on AI and everything else, which posits that generative AI is a platform shift. I agree with that: I think, in particular, conversational interfaces are the most exciting and interesting development in computing since the GUI itself.
Humane wants to put the software from its failed AI pin into cars, phones and smart speakers. To a degree, this is what it should have been doing all along, but also: what, exactly, is the point? Why not simple integrate ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever in your existing products?
I love this piece on how “Trump’s Fans Are Suffering From Tony Soprano Syndrome” – or, to put it another way, they are mistaking villains for heroes and desiring distopias rather than utopias. It’s been said before that the number of Silicon Valley sorts who took one look at William Gibson’s Sprawl series and thought “I’d like to live there” is astounding, and I agree that this admiration of immorality in individuals is fascinating. But the really interesting area is why this has happened.
There is, of course a relation to the morals of the era of post-collective selfishness which we call either Reaganomics or Thatcherism depending on what side of the Atlantic you reside. But I think there is also a kind of boredom involved. By historical standards, we have “never had it so good”, but we don’t appreciate it. Or at least, we didn’t until we started to lose it – at which point we started blame the systems which had protected us, fed us and more. I want to read – and write – more about this.
2024-12-03 05:18:49
Technically this is eight blue links, because I spent the weekend in Bristol and we’re getting towards Christmas. Next week: five blue links and a bag of wine gums.
Odd as it sounds today, when I talk a lot about user privacy and avoiding cloud services, I used to use a lot of Google services and devices. In particular I was a pretty early Chromebook user, getting a Samsung Series 5 in June 2011.
Remember the Samsung Series 5? That was the OG Chromebook, a lightweight and affordable laptop that ran Google’s brand new Chrome OS. It was all about simplicity and ease of use, focusing on web browsing and cloud computing. But those early Chromebooks were a bit of a mixed bag. Some people loved how simple and affordable they were, while others weren’t so keen on their limited features and the whole "always-need-internet" thing. I was on the “love” side — I was terminally online at that point — but it took a while for Chromebooks to take off.
Chromebooks are now available in a variety of form factors, including classic laptops, convertibles, and tablets. They have also gained the ability to run Android and Linux applications, significantly expanding their capabilities. Chromebooks have become increasingly popular in educational and business settings due to their affordability, security, and ease of management. The latest models offer impressive performance and features that rival those of traditional laptops.
Now, finally, it seems Google is determined to pull out the roots of ChromeOS and rebuild it as part of Android. I think this is a shame. ChromeOS was quirky, but it was also fun seeing quite how far web applications could take you. And I miss those early, naive days of doing everything online.
One of the characteristics of new waves of computing is the tendency for dominant players to see the new wave through the lens of the previous one. This was Microsoft’s mistake in navigating the shift from desktop to mobile: Windows Mobile was thought to have an advantage because it was Windows, adopting the same interface and business paradigms.
In his article on generative AI and the bridge to the future, Ben Thompson draws out the comparison to VisionOS, which relies on the same app-based paradigm which has served mobile so well. But apps aren’t the future of wearables: interfaces based on generative AI are.
I think this is a pretty compelling argument, but I would go further: conversational interfaces based on generative AI, capable of tapping into both the context of your local device and the wider knowledge of the internet, are. Think Knowledge Navigator on steroids.
And, ironically given that it was focused on these interfaces 37 years ago, I think Apple is in a bad place to take any kind of leap forward. Their whole $383bn annual revenue and $93bn profit depends on the application model. Of course, this doesn’t mean “Apple is doomed” or any crap like that. But like Microsoft and IBM before that, there comes a time when the old king of the jungle becomes just another player. Can Apple “eat its own lunch”? I think there is too much to lose, and Tim Cook has never been a risk-taking leader.
What might the interface of the future look like? The Browser Company, who made a bit of a splash with the Arc browser, might be on to something with Dia. Sneakily revealed as part of a “recruiting video”, Dia reminds me a little of the “browser as operating system” approach of ChromeOS, but using a conversational generative AI interface. It’s hard to describe, so I recommend you watch the video.
Meanwhile, Pat Gelsinger is out of Intel. Didn’t see that one coming, but I’m not surprised. That said, Intel’s problems will not be addressed quickly by a change of leadership. This is a decade-long project — if it can be done at all.
Craft.do, the all-singing all-dancing document writing note-taking task managing calendar containing application has just released a major upgrade and – as happens every time I try it out – I’m more than a little baffled at what it’s actually for.
This is one of those applications which appeared in the wave of "personal knowledge management" apps alongside such things as Obsidian, Roam Research, and many others. But it’s an oddity, in that it sometimes feels more like Notion – you can add blocks to pages which include things like whiteboards, for example, which is very unlike what you can do out of the box with the others.
The biggest part of the update for me is the new task system, which lets you add tasks to any note or document, capture stray tasks in an inbox, and see them all in a unified task view. In theory, this should be a great way of organising tasks around a project, while also capturing tasks in a daily notes system and getting everything very quickly out of your head. I like the ability in the mobile app to rapid capture a task to the inbox.
But in practice, my brain just doesn’t work like this. Craft almost feels too versatile. It can be a notetaker, a document manager, or a task manager. I have even seen templates which help you write a novel. It feels like too much, but I’m willing to give it a go and see if there’s a place for it in my armoury of applications.
The absolutely brilliant documentary currently on iPlayer about Loaded magazine reminded me of Jack, which James Brown launched after he had been fired from GQ for including Rommel as one of the most fashionable men of the century. I was working at Dennis Publishing at the time, and I have a feeling that Felix might have bankrolled James a bit, as a box of copies of Jack duly turned up when it came out. One was placed on the desk of every editor, including me.
I flicked through it and just after the contents came the opening spread. Now in men’s mags at the time, the opening spread was reserved for one thing and one thing only: a girl. Usually, someone semi-famous, wearing far too little clothing for the time of year. Everyone did the same thing.
Except James. He had instead, put out a spread called "Mountains we love", which was a great big gorgeous picture of a mountain. And that is why James Brown was, and probably still is, an editorial genius.
I’ll say this for Apple: their engineers are really quite clever when it comes to security and privacy.
John Gruber’s story about Pat Gelsinger leaving Intel contains one of the most beautiful footnotes designed to throw shade on an entire publication I have ever seen. Bravo!
2024-11-25 01:07:09
Google changed its rules on what kind of behaviour it regards as “spam” and, of course, the impact on some companies will be pretty negative. The behaviour it is targeting is so-called “parasite SEO”, where a publisher allows a third party to create content for part of its website in return for a large amount of money. Typically, this might be a subdomain or subsection which has a lot of affiliate content, or a store, or something like that.
The example which everyone knows about is Forbes Marketplace, but there are many others. This move by Google is likely to destroy the companies that have built businesses on offering this as a service, as well as impacting publisher revenues.
But here’s the thing: I have heard none of the people who routinely decry antitrust action as “destroying companies” complain about Google doing the same thing using its market power. Maybe they believe Google has “earned” the right to decide which companies live or die. And sure, you can argue that this is ultimately to the benefit of consumers – but so is antitrust action.
The difference: one of the “destroyers” is an elected government. The other is an unelected company. Which do you think should set the rules about which companies live or die?
I don’t think many people will be all that surprised by this New York Times report on how Google deliberately set out to destroy evidence which might show abusive conduct. What is more surprising is the number of people I have seen saying “everyone does this, it’s no big deal”. As if multiple companies engaging in dubious conduct makes it right.
You might have seen something about Bluesky. It has been in the news primarily because it has seen enormous growth from people wanting a Twitter-like experience that isn’t (1) owned by Elon Musk, and (2) a nest of racism, Trump idiots, crypto weirdos, and billionaires who think they own the world.
But… despite the promise, as things stand Bluesky is not federated. There’s no realistic way to run your own server, to move off Bluesky’s main one, or anything like that. What the controllers of Bluesky want to happen is what happens. The promise is that one day you will be able to, but there’s a great technical analysis of why, realistically, this might not be possible for a long time – or even potentially ever.
Does it matter? To many of the people moving from Twitter to Bluesky, probably not. But it’s worth bearing in mind: unless a service is genuinely federated, what happened to Twitter could easily happen again.
The US, as I’m sure you know, has a few rules around what can be exported to China. When Google cut off support to Huawei for Android, it went out on its own and created HarmonyOS, which is not just for phones but also tablets and laptops. It’s now up to nearly 100,000 apps and if I were a betting man, I would put money on it being the future direction of Chinese technology.
There’s a lesson here for Europe, particularly in light of Trump’s election. Currently, all the foundational tech which we use every day is based on US technology (you can argue about ARM). But if that’s the case, then with an isolationist president, how long before that’s not used as a way of controlling and threatening other countries? What happened to China could happen to anyone.
One of the things which should have been obvious to everyone all along was that whatever the American right and their tech billionaire supports complained about was just flagging what they wanted to do. Remember the so-called “Twitter files” and how Musk complained about “collaboration” between the government and company? It was always nonsense: but it was just flagging what he wanted to do. And lo and behold…
Monopolistic app stores still have their defenders, but they are become thinner on the ground. Jason Snell makes a fantastic case that the correct model which Apple should pursue is more like the Mac than the current iOS, but I think it is probably too late for Apple to voluntarily do it. The profits are too good, the degree of control it gives them over the market too great, for them to willingly give it away.
However, notarisation – which Jason talks about in his post – can be exploited. And surprise surprise, it has been on the Mac! North Korean hackers have basically managed to create legitamitely-signed malware which steals money from Macs, and, of course because it’s notarised users are much more likely to trust it. Of course, it’s better than nothing, but the best starting point is always to protect yourself, rather than relying on a third party to do it for you.
Not content with losing 250,000 subscribers after Jeff Bezos forced the Washington Post to align with his desire to lick Trump’s arse, Bezos and his henchcritter Will Lewis – one of the most hated men in British journalism – want to “fix” the paper. This, of course, means turning into a billionaire’s mouthpiece. Having seen the fun that Musk has had with Twitter, Bezos clearly wants his own megaphone.
If you haven’t read Becky Chambers’ two “monk and robot” novellas, you really should. They are probably the best example of the solarpunk genre I’ve read, and just lovely, gentle storytelling. This post looks at their relationship to Luddism, a part of history which gets a bad rep mainly because the wrong people won that battle.
The reason that all movies end with a disclaimer about similarities between the film and people living or dead isn’t just legal caution.
2024-11-16 18:17:03
I’ve banged on about the parlous strategy of Reach plc before, but the departures from its senior editorial ranks will continue to make a bad strategy worse. What makes this situation more difficult for the company is its board, which is free of any experience in newsrooms or in audience development, the two key product areas which are intended to drive its growth.
This lack of experience at board level plus the exodus of senior editorial talent will mean that there is zero experience of what it’s like to go through as Google traffic declines. Reach is in a doubly difficult position than most publishers, as its brands are largely local, and local news benefited for a time from Google’s largesse to a degree that nationals didn’t. I doubt this message is filtering through to the boardroom, who don’t have the right experience to dig themselves out of the hole they’re in.
One of the great failings of American publishing is on full display currently, as publications struggle to describe the latest crop of appointments to the incoming Trump clown car as what they are: disastrous for America and the world. Benjamin Mazer at The Atlantic highlights some of the more egregious examples connected to Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a notorious spreader of conspiracy theories and lies about science who will now oversee public health. At least he’s not a sex trafficker.
You would think an incoming administration with a whacking great majority would have confidence, but Labour appears to be approaching all aspects of policymaking with the timidity of someone who squeaked an election. There is so much wrong with technology secretary Peter Kyle’s claim that companies like Facebook, Google, et al. need to be treated with the same approach as nation states rather than, you know, them having to be subject to law like everyone else.
It would be pathetic if it weren’t serious. Kyle appears to have read the section of Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism which looks at the power of these companies while ignoring the impact they will have on freedom and democracy.
This article from Timothy Snyder on Trump’s appointments is a good read, but the headline – “Decapitation Strike” – made me catch my breath. A decapitation strike is a military strategy aimed at removing or incapacitating the leadership or command structure of an enemy. This involves targeting high-ranking officials, such as political leaders, military commanders, or key decision-makers, with the aim of causing disarray, disrupting coordination, and undermining the enemy’s ability to organise and respond effectively.
Is there a better description of what Putin has achieved with his covert support for Trump? Trump’s ties to Putin were well known, but now the mask is off.
Everyone knows the role conspiracy theories spread by social media played in Trump’s election, but this isn’t stopping the left eschewing the reality-based community too. Honestly, there is enough wrong with the world without having to invent anything.
One of the challenges for us on the more radical wing of politics is to understand that the landscape has changed, and what it means for us. It’s no longer business as usual – we are finally getting to the point of the internet revolution where the new forms and norms which are native to the net emerge, rather than the period when a new medium apes the old forms.
One of those new forms – relating back to the point about technofeudalism – is the company which is too big to fail, and Cory Doctorow once again skewers an example of this in the shape of Lincare, the company which supplies almost every oxygen molecule used in US healthcare. Lincare practices illegal tactics with impunity.
And before those of us in the civilised world of socialised medicine get too pleased with ourselves: the main supplier of oxygen to the NHS is BOC. Linde Group own BOC. Guess who Linde Group also own?
I try not to use services from a single supplier, but the way Apple, Google and Microsoft set up their operating systems doesn’t make it easy. This is particularly true for storage on iOS, where Apple makes it effortless to use iCloud Drive while making it a little more difficult to use, say, Dropbox to the full extent it could. Thankfully, the venerable Which? magazine is taking Apple to court over it.
Agatha All Along didn’t grab me at first. I took my usual approach of watching three episodes then dumping it. But something got me watching it again, and I’m glad I did because the last two episodes were absolute hum dingers. Chuck Jordan wrote a great piece about it (contains big spoilers), and I agree with him: it managed to escape the curse of Marvel TV series, in that it felt like it was an interesting self-contained series full of good ideas, which wasn’t there simply to tee-up a movie.
At exactly the point where we need a tech company which is not some kind of play for absolute authoritarian power, Mozilla is all over the place. Please, people, pull out of this crazy tail spin.
Of course, it’s Howard, writing in detail about the history of Apple’s low speed ports, including ADB and USB. I had forgotten that ADB wasn’t supposed to be hot-swappable, possibly because I spent my entire life while working with it completely ignoring that and just plugging stuff in live.
2024-11-10 19:45:17
It’s been a while since I wrote a weeknote, although I’ve kept up with the other kinds of writing that I do. But: I work now. I’m working at a small B2B publisher helping them sort out a few things. This was originally going to be an in-and-out job which would take nine months, but I’ve extended my contract to the end of next year. Because there is much more to be done than I thought at the start.
That’s sometimes the way with contracts. I joined Redwood on a short-term gig for a couple of months and left eight years later. This job won’t last that long, I think. The hours are 8.30–4.30, which feels civilised but is different to the 10–6 that I had when I first started working, and that is probably my optimum working pattern. It does mean that on office days (two a week) I get home at a reasonable hour.
When I’m working on a job like this, the amount I can say about what I’m doing tends to be more limited. I can’t talk much about the details of strategy changes, structures, development, and all the other stuff that I do on a day-to-day basis. I can say that I’ve learned more about the pharmaceutical and food manufacturing industries, which has been interesting. I’ve been traveling a fair bit: Berlin, Milan, Amsterdam. This is business travel which usually means seeing (in order) an airport, a taxi, a hotel, a convention centre/meeting rooms, a hotel, a taxi, an airport.
Part of the deal is that I’m doing four days a week, although there have been times recently when I’ve needed to do five. What I’ve discovered doing this is that after a while a two day weekend feels incredibly short. How do people managed with two days off? How do you cope? There’s no time to do anything! It’s ridiculous.
(This is how it starts: the great long weekend of retirement. Is this how it feels? You suddenly realise that working isn’t interesting enough to fill the five days plus that you worked when young, and that lounging around is much more fun?)
Even when I work five days the busy-o-meter is pinging loudly and blowing out steam. My temptation is to dive into a bunch of things which are technically not in my remit, but which are very much in my wheelhouse – and that leads to me being spread far too thinly.
My curse is that I’m ridiculously experienced at a wide range of things. Want someone to create a content strategy? Do technical SEO? Lead and mentor a young team? Run a panel discussion? Develop product strategy? Coach people on how to pitch?
Done it all. Can do it all to a high degree of competence.
But does that look like a job to you? Is it one of those nice compact and well-defined roles which are beloved of the Harvard Business Review crowd? Nope. Not even close.
Things I have learned in this job:
A couple of weeks ago we found out from our postman that one of our neighbours had died. He wasn’t old – he was younger than me – and leaves behind a wife and four kids. Septicaemia. All of which makes me realise quite how little time I have left, and how much I need to make the most of it.
I’ve had a numbness in the front of my thigh for a while which has no developed into full blown occasional sciatica. Or at least I think that’s what it is: I’ll talk to the doctor next week. I was woken up one day by a shooting pain going down my thigh, like a stabbing electric shock, painful enough for me to make some real noise. Another reminder to do a few more things to keep myself healthier (as if any more reminders were needed, or less likely to be ignored).
I still have not fixed my bike.
I was greatly annoyed at the fact I have to pay for a month’s Discovery streaming to watch the rugby Autumn internationals on TNT Sport. On the plus side, TNT also has Australian football, which I find baffling and exciting in equal measure. There’s also a few Champions League and Premier League football matches to watch. But the last thing I need is yet more streaming, so I have to remember to cancel it at the end of the month.
On the tech front, I have been experimenting with using Readwise Reader as my feed reader (which is at least one two many uses of the word “read” in a sentence, but I will let it slip). I’m still in love with the MacBook Air M2.I still wish I had bought the one with more storage.
My friend Cory had cancer but he’s OK. It reminded me of my own health scares (a heart which needed checking out, and was perfectly fine; a “just in case” chest X-ray which might have revealed something a lot more serious). The key question: who do you tell? I told Kim of course, but no one else, and spent a few weeks worrying that I might be about to check out, and thinking about all the things I had left unfinished.
I have been playing around with using Nirvana, which is a really good GTD app, instead of Things, which is a really good GTD app which doesn’t quite work how I like. I still love Things because it just looks pretty, but Nirvana might actually be a better fit.
2024-11-10 00:20:58
For those of you not in the UK, the British system of university funding is a weird mash-mash of different stuff, cobbled together from the mistakes made by successive governments. When I was young, the government effectively paid all tuition fees, and students who qualified could get a grant to go. It was a system which worked, but wouldn’t work if the university sector expanded to give more access to students.
Over time, to finance expansion, governments introduced loans rather than grants, and then tuition fees paid for by students through the same loan system. It allowed the numbers of students to rise, but tuition fees were never allowed to rise even as costs to universities rose – because, of course, that would have meant students (particularly from poorer backgrounds) taking a look at the tens of thousands of pounds of debt and concluding it wasn’t worthwhile.
All this, plus moves to restrict foreign students (who pay larger fees) have left the universities in dire financial straights. What’s compounded that is they have been allowed to recruit as many students as they can, with no cap. This sounds like a good idea in theory – improving access to education – but in practice it’s just meant more students at “the best” universities (they’re not) and mid-tier places falling to bits.
So the incoming government is raising fees by 3.1%, which is both not enough to help universities and enough to make students – who already often work long hours in jobs while trying to study – unhappy. The whole system essentially needs taking apart and rebuilding from scratch with an eye to improving academic standards and focusing on making a degree worthwhile. But that won’t happen with our timid mouse of a government.
Wendy Grossman’s column this week covers a lot of interesting ground, but one line which really stood out was this: “platforms either start with or create billionaire owners”. And she’s absolutely right. It sounds obvious, and it’s almost certainly not unique, but platforms are capital – they are the “means of production” of a huge amount of content and value for both advertisers and the people that use them.
And in a capitalist society, capital has primacy. It’s more than simply owning a market place – which is what Apple does with the App Store – it’s owning the means of production itself.
Apple Intelligence is coming to the EU in April. Which of course means that there were technical means to comply with the law all along – Apple simply chose not to engage with regulators to work them out in time to launch the same product everywhere.
Short version: Cory very sensibly never wants to be caught on a platform where he can’t take his following with him if it turns to crap. Fool me once, etc. While Bluesky has made some strides towards the kind of federation where you can move from one server to another, it’s really got finished the work which lets you move your following. And that’s a big problem, because it’s how you end up trapped on platforms like Twitter.
Gut-punching way to start a blog post and doubly so when it’s also about the US presidential election. Me and John Gruber often spar, but I genuinely love the guy and he can write.
I promised myself I wasn’t going to write much/anything about the US election, but the other piece that’s well worth reading is Tom Nichols at the Atlantic (paywalled, but you can circumvent it easily enough). As Tom says, democracy will not fall overnight, but that is no reason to be complacent. As he says, “if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now—not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents”.
Isn’t it odd how often that features designed to stop thieves from accessing and reselling your phone while also protecting your data also stop cops doing something they claim is fine because they’re “the good guys”?
Back in the early 80s, computers were not as globally available as they are now. In fact in some places – such as Eastern Europe – there were limits on who could own one, who could use one, and who could build them. So what should someone do? Build it yourself, of course, and in a way that’s actually very, very cool.
Electric vehicles accounted for nearly a third of new car registrations in the UK in October 2024. Petrol cars formed only just over half of the total.
Of course the mega rich don’t think any of this will apply to them, which is why they continue to use private planes as if they were taxis. Proof, of course, that pigs can fly.