More on erratic behavior of online newspapers

I’m sitting in a coffee shop, using a MacBook Air, early 2015, macOS Sierra, version 10.12.6.
I was able to access and sign in to startribune.com.  I then clicked on e Access or whatever and asked to log in.  I didn’t keep track of the details but was told my account didn’t have access to that version.  I went back to the web version and clicked on eEdition.  Voila! and no intrusive overlay ads.  And I have access to the “Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee”.

Now the question is would I get the same result using my iPhone as a hot spot to my AT&T account.

I don’t feel like checking right now.  I would rather read the funnies.

And I read the Star Tribune and after that I accessed the Duluth News Tribune.  I forget the details on what I did, but I am almost done reading the opinion page.  Strange that I couldn’t access the DNT at all from home but I can from a coffee shop.

Erratic behavior of online newspapers

I sent the following email to the publishers and editors of the Star Tribune and the Duluth News Tribune.

Good afternoon,

If this email is upsetting the end of your day, I’m sorry.  But the erratic behavior of the online versions of your newspapers has been upsetting my month and many months before.

In the case of the Star Tribune, it has unwanted pop-up ads that are difficult, if not impossible to delete. Several days earlier in the week it occurred almost every day and I was ready to cancel my subscription.  The telephone chain to do so was ridiculous.  Yesterday, the eEdition worked fine, and I relented on cancelling my subscription.  Today the pop-up ads were back.

Jon of Feedback was very patient and supportive, but one piece of advice I should never have followed: resetting my iPad.  That wound up clearing all my saved passwords.  Now I have to look these up for my next visit to any of a number of password-protected sites.  And the problem of unwanted pop-ups is back.

In the case of the Duluth News Tribune, it may or may not come up with the eEdition.  On my iPad it was going in a circle of getting halfway to the eEdition and then wanting me to put in my password again.

At the moment, the eEditions are working on my MacBook Air, but I would rather eat breakfast with an iPad by my side: it takes up much less space on the table.

See my blog entry: "A newspaper’s takeover of subscribers’ computers"

http://magree.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-newspapers-takeover-of-subscribers.html

I am not alone in enduring these, but I wonder how many of your users have the knowledge and patience to work through this annoyance.  I know my wife who has over twenty years of computer experience wouldn’t and she is growing very impatient with my repeated complaints.  I know that I no longer wish to be an unpaid debugger of your software.

So, please cancel my subscriptions to the Star Tribune and the Duluth News Tribune.  I’ll renew them when you have fixed this problem.

Oh, yes!  I will post this email to my blog.

Hard-working Americans?

The following was inspired by “Washington clichés, fake news and ‘poiticianese’ by Jim Heffernan.

Oops!  That old newspaper guy let a typo get through!  At least he did better than many newspapers do: he used a diacritical mark in the right place.

Politicians of all stripes appeal to all Americans as “hard-working”.  How do they know that all that they appeal to are really hard-working?  Some have jobs that are almost fun.  Some have jobs that the only hard-working part is boredom.  Some have jobs that seem to be one crisis after another.  Some have jobs that not only are hard but dangerous (and interestingly some of these politicians think reducing the danger is “over-regulation”.

I think I’ve had jobs that have had one or more of these features: programmer, consultant, presenter, Santa Claus, line painter, grocery bagger, stocker, and cashier, and many others.

I’ll mention one that had many of these features: bus driver.

I had the stress of being on time. I had the stress of unruly students.  I had the stress of non-working buses. And I had the joy of attending events on the clock.  I had the joy of napping while my riders toured their site.  I had the joy of reading a book while waiting.  I met lots of really nice people and a few that weren’t so nice.  In short, it was a job that I was glad I did that I am glad that I’m not doing now.

Raucous Caucus and Other Ruckuses

The Party of One held its caucus in front of my fireplace.  Mysteriously, it issued the following results:  None of the above, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton.  The Party of One caucus called on all of its members to not vote for any Republican except Arne Carlson or Bill Frenzel.  Unfortunately, Bill Frenzel died two years ago, but Arne Carlson is alive and writing.  See governorcarlson.blogspot.com for what he thinks of Trump, Fox, and MSNBC.

Trump's plurality is not the lock on the nomination that so many news stories imply.  Cruz and Rubio could unite as President/VP and have the majority of delegates.  Either of the two could run as President but Rubio running as President may have a benefit.  This choice defuses the issue of Cruz's birthplace.  But if such a duo is finalized, Cruz will more than likely be the Presidential candidate because as of this writing he has more delegates than Rubio.  Do you think the same “birthers” that tried to make an issue of Obama’s birth will make an issue of Cruz’s birth?

There is a campaign by Credo Action to get CBS to stop giving so much coverage to Donald Trump.  An email from Credo Action quotes CBS CEO Les Moonves: Trump’s campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”  The email also quotes CBS’s diversity and tolerance policy: “CBS Corporation, and its divisions are committed to building an environment that values diversity throughout the corporation and in its business practices.”

Personally, I think watching televised debates or even TV news is a waste of time.

I last watched Presidential debates in 2004.  I got so sick of John Kerry repeating “in my plan” that I almost didn’t vote for him.  I only voted for him because he was better than the alternative.  Bush was an angel compared to the angry clowns trying to outdo each other in shouting matches.  And Bush as a former governor and a sitting president had far more credibility and experience than an erratic businessman who has made a career of putting people down.  Remember “You’re fired!”

Watching TV news is unproductive time.  I can read more news items in a half-hour in a newspaper than I can get in a half-hour TV news broadcast.  Plus, I can skip ads in the newspaper but it’s hard to skip the twelve minutes of ads in a TV newscast.

My Party of One caucus was a lot less crowded than my wife’s DFL caucus.  She spent a lot of time driving around looking for a parking place, then she had to stand in line to even enter the building, and then she couldn’t get into the room for her precinct.  The best she could do was write her choice for president on a little slip of paper.  She had wanted to submit a couple of resolutions.  This is democracy?

I keep wondering why so many states have partisan primaries or caucuses that are open to the public.  I think it was Robert La Follette of Wisconsin over a century ago who thought that primaries would make elections more democratic.  I think it has had two downsides.  People who don’t give time or a dime to a party get to decide its candidates.  Second, it makes for much longer campaigns.

Many point to Canada and Britain as examples of “six-week campaigns”, but both of these are parliamentary systems.  My deadline precludes doing further research on this, but I think two factors are at work here.

First, elections are not held on a regular cycle.  Often, a prime minister may decide to call elections to try to get more support for his positions.  These irregular elections have to take place in a relatively short time.  If a government does sit for its whole term, people are just in the habit of holding elections in a short period of time.

Second, even though voting for a member of parliament may be a proxy for the prime minister, the members are possibly only willing to campaign for a short period of time.  Few are the times that we have two-year-long all-out campaigns for local and state governments.

I do wish our so-called “debates” were debates in the classical sense: rather than moderators posing questions to each of the “debaters”, one of the candidates would speak for a certain amount of time on whatever topic he or she chose.  The other candidate (or candidates) could either rebut the first candidate’s remarks or go on to another subject.  Assuming only two candidates, the first would have a shorter period of time to rebut the second.  This is more or less how the Lincoln-Douglas debates were held.  Unfortunately, few people today would be willing to stand the hour-plus time of a single debate, or even sit that long.

It is ironic that the party that thought the federal government should work to abolish slavery is now the party that promotes segregation.  “Because we think it a wrong, we propose a course of policy that shall deal with it as a wrong.”  - Abraham Lincoln, Quincy, Illinois, 13 October 1858.

Whatever your choices are in November, be sure to vote.  Your vote always counts.  You only throw your vote away if you stay away.

Also posted in the Reader Weekly of 2016-03-10 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2016/03/10/6854_raucous_caucus_and_other_ruckuses.

Paper covers net, a readership comparison

Many of my acquaintances in Duluth ask me if I still write for the Reader Weekly.  Other than an occasional letter to editor, I haven't written any column since 2008.

After an article about some of the proposed mining in the region and the promises of no damage to the environment, I submitted my blog entry "The Invisible Adam Smith".  After all, the Reader often reprints material from the Christian Science Monitor and from Jim Hightower's web site.

With my using a wrong email address and the delay of having an open spot, the Reader Weekly published "The Invisible Adam Smith" in the 2013-04-25 issue.

Considering that hundreds of people in the region read most articles in the Reader Weekly, I assume more people have read my article in the Reader than have read my article on the web.  The latter count is 57!!  Since October when I posted it!

So, if you're an obscure blogger like me, you might have more readers if you write for some local print media than if you write a regular blog entry.  That is, paper can still be a more powerful medium than the internet.

Recycling – What are the tradeoffs?

We recycle just about everything there is to be recycled, including almost all of our food waste.  Is there a point where more resources are used to recycle than there are resources saved?

I think of this every time I rinse a tomato juice bottle.  How much water should I use to get all the dried juice off the lip of the bottle?  Do I use quarts and quarts of running water to get a tenth-ounce of dried juice off?  Do I spend five minutes to do so?  I just make a good effort and assume the recycling process will take care of the residue.  Same with olive containers.  It takes lots of soap and water to get all the olive oil off.

I just thought of this again when recycling a shampoo bottle.  Even with it stored upside down, I wasn't getting any more shampoo out.  The bottle has a fancy snap-lid that I used a letter opener to get off.  Then I saw there was probably a teaspoon of thick shampoo at the bottom that didn't flow very quickly.  How much water do I use to get that residue out before I put it in the recycling bin?  With lots and lots of foam coming out on the sixth try, I said this is ridiculous.  I put the bottle in the waste basket.

Even on food waste, it is almost impossible to recycle it all.  See olive oil above.  We have oatmeal most mornings.  We do our best to put all the oatmeal into the bowls.  We can lick the serving spoon to get some of what's left, but how do you get off all that is still stuck to the pan?  We have to get the residue off before putting the pan in the dishwasher, or it will eventually clog the dishwasher screen.  So, we have to use more water than we cooked the oats in to soak the residue and then run that water through the sink disposer.  Oops!  More energy just to clean up.

Now if we can think of some way to buy newspapers without more advertising inserts than newsprint we actually read.  Inserts and the sports pages go right to the recycle pile (unless the comics or weather are in the sports section).