ornoth

After eight years of reliable service, it was time to replace my primary laptop, a 2012 MacBook Pro. It had been my first non-work Mac, and I gave it a lengthy review after buying it.

Back then, I luckily bought the last model before Apple made numerous user-hostile changes to their laptops, such as their unreliable butterfly keyboard, sub-par graphics, eliminating all user-serviceable or upgradeable components, and many other revisions I’ll mention below.

So having avoided those pain points, I wasn’t predisposed against ordering another MBP when the old one wilted. And rather than go back to a Windows machine, I opted to replace like with like.

Let me start my review with the machine’s good points. They’re quickly enumerated:

A 16" screen in the same form factor as my old machine’s 15” display (smaller bezels). And my first Retina display.
After more than five years, but Apple begrudgingly reverted from that fragile butterfly keyboard back to their older scissor-switch keyboard.
Touch ID: a dedicated fingerprint reader as an option for user authentication.
Graphics performance has improved, which is good for Zwifting.

And that’s it. That’s all the improvements Apple made to their flagship laptop over the past eight years.

Now on to all the bad points. That'll take a lot more time to cover...

The machine has no external ports but the uncommon USB-C. No ethernet port, no standard USB-A, Mini USB, or Micro USB ports, no SD card or MicroSD card readers, no MiniDisplay port, no HDMI port. If you want to connect anything, you have to buy a separate adapter for each peripheral, all of which are obscenely overpriced.
I had a ton of problems setting up my external monitors. The first problem was that I got the wrong dongle, because although Thunderbolt and Mini DisplayPort are incompatible, they both use the exact same connector! Oh and Apple doesn’t sell a Mini DisplayPort dongle anyways. Once I purchased the right dongle from a third party, my other monitor still wouldn’t work until I replaced its previously-functional Mini DisplayPort cable with an HDMI cable.
On top of that, the MBP has a documented overheating problem when driving external monitors. That’s awesome!
No DVD reader or writer. Another separate expense… plus another dongle.
The power cord now comes in three pieces sold individually, and the machine only ships with two of them. The cord extension is another separate expense. With all three pieces, a spare power cord will now run you an extortionate $133. Plus it no longer uses the excellent MagSafe connector, so there’s no longer any light to visually indicate that the machine is connected to power and whether it’s fully charged or not.
Matte screens are no longer available. Glare, reflections, and fingerprints come standard, thanks to Apple’s “design” team.
Apple has removed the entire row of dedicated function keys and replaced them with a flat LCD with virtualized buttons. No, you can’t have them back. And although Apple says you can force virtual Fkeys to appear on an app-by-app basis, of course that doesn’t work with Zwift or VirtualBox: the two apps where I use Fkeys the most.
The laptop camera is still limited to a myopic 720p, no improvement over pre-2010 webcams.
Thanks to the timing rather than any fault of Apple, I’ll be missing out on several upcoming enhancements to the MBP, including the migration to Apple silicon, MiniLED displays, Wifi 6, 5G, Face ID, and touchscreens. On the other hand, that’s a lot of new features that Apple will probably completely fuck up. My previous laptop was also the model before major changes, and in the end that was a fortuitous thing.
Migration Assistant, which supposedly easily moves your old stuff onto your new machine simply doesn’t work. Twice I connected the two machines via wifi, and both times the process hung within the first few minutes. Then I tried running it from a USB hard drive containing my last Time Machine backup, and that hung. In fact, it hung so badly that the machine wouldn’t even boot afterward! I had to boot in emergency recovery mode, reformat the SSD drive, and waste several hours reinstalling the entire operating system from scratch! I eventually succeeded in transferring a few basic settings from the TM backup, but still had to move the overwhelming majority of my old data manually.
Similar story with moving my Time Machine backups from my old backup drive to the new one. Theoretically, you should just be able to copy the files over and resume backups. However, the MacOS file manager (the cutesy-named “Finder”) cannot handle large numbers of files, and aborted 8 hours into a copy operation. So I fell back to the commandline utility “rsync”, which similarly failed, this time after running for 14 hours. Like the Migration Assistant, these are dedicated programs that cannot do the one thing they exist to perform.

So much for the vaunted tagline “It’s Apple; it just works”. I could just have a apoplectic fit and die from the irony of that statement.

On the plus side, I’ve finally settled in and the machine is mostly working. But due to Apple’s unnecessarily lengthy order fulfillment, user-hostile hardware, and bug-ridden software it took me three weeks to get up and running on my new machine. That’s simply not acceptable.

I’m skeptical whether I’ll ever buy another Apple product. Their machines, which were once the best on the market, are handicapped by bug-ridden software and shortsighted, petty tactics to drive short-term sales at the cost of flexibility, maintainability, ease of use, overall cost, and (ultimately) user satisfaction.

As a young upstart back in 1984, Apple took on the faceless behemoth of IBM and eventually defeated them. But Apple became the exact thing they once denigrated so vociferously: a hard-to-use, bug-ridden, closed computing environment managed by a greedy, shortsighted, soulless company that exists solely to redistribute wealth from their unfortunate users to their shareholders.

Fuck Apple!

Now, with all that off my chest, there’s been a bunch of other technological developments over recent months that I’d like to mention. And all of them were more pleasant experiences than dealing with Apple!

Perhaps the most important one is getting a free license of Windows 10 running inside a VirtualBox VM on the new laptop. It seems like an excellent opportunity to begin migrating applications from MacOS back to Windows.

Along with the MacBook (plus four dongles, an additional power brick, a port expander, and two new cables), I also bought a new 10TB backup drive. TEN TERABYTES! In a device the size of a trade paperback (if you remember what those were)! Back in the day, I had to knock down office walls to create a machine room large enough to house eight refrigerator-sized IBM 3380Ds, just to get 20GB of storage: 1/500th the capacity of this little box I’m holding in one hand!

In addition to a couple free Alexa Dot voice assistants, I’ve added several voice-activated smart outlets around the house. The biggest win has been the ability to turn on (or off, I suppose) my big exercise fan without getting off the indoor bike. However, I ought to upgrade those soon, as they’re the only thing limiting our home wifi to 2.4GHz rather than 5GHz.

And although I’ve been tracking my weight, body composition, hydration, blood pressure, and resting heart rate for a decade, I’ve recently upgraded my health data collection. A new wifi-connected scale also collects BMI, bone and muscle mass, and should update my weight in Zwift automatically. And I’ve also purchased a thermometer and pulse oximeter to store temp and O2 saturation (a useful thing for an asthmatic).

So it’s been an interesting year on the tech front. I’m hesitant to jinx it, but hopefully the new laptop will last as long as my well-used old MacBook, which served me very well for eight long years.

As it spread across Asia and the rest of the globe, Buddhism changed and adapted to the local cultures it encountered; however, Buddhism’s core goal—freedom from suffering—and its core method—contemplative meditation—have perforce remained constant… until recently.

Thus it’s understandable that the 20th Century Westerners who went to Asia would come back with a unique version of Buddhist practice that ought to work better for those of us brought up in the West than the original article. The hybrid Buddhism that we inherited from them had been distilled down to the essentials that would most appeal to educated middle class White people like themselves.

That meant discarding inconvenient concepts and practices such as reincarnation, myths & deities, miracles & supernatural powers, ritual & chanting, merit-making, the more esoteric states of concentration practice, karma, renunciation, non-duality, and non-self. That’s how American Buddhism became divorced from Asian, and enabled a diminished “secular meditation” with all the uncomfortable bits filed off.

Triple productivity after 4 days of meditation!!!

That decision made some sense, as several parts of devotional Buddhism are at odds with our Christian heritage or directly contradict universally-accepted scientific laws. But the stylized meditation techniques that have gained such popularity in the American mainstream have also lost sight of the actual purpose and point of meditation practice.

The most facile example of the trendy “Mindfulness Movement” is Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. Obviously, learning tools to cope with stress is a Good Thing, but I can’t help but be saddened by how much got lost when the goal of meditation was reduced from the “eradication of the root cause of human suffering” to “just help me get through my day”.

It’s as if everyone in Asia had been inoculated with a one-time permanent cure for diabetes, but we Americans have shortsightedly continued carrying blood testing kits and syringes filled with insulin, only treating the symptoms of the chronic disease as they arise day after day.

Another painful example is how big business and professional sports have co-opted meditation as a cheap tactic for “guaranteed career success” and “enhancing peak performance”, promoted by well-heeled management consultants and wealthy athletes like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Derek Jeter.

I’ve participated in several sittings and talks run by prominent performance-oriented meditation gurus, and always felt deeply uncomfortable. Because at their core, these programs and prescriptions are diametrically opposed to what Buddhist meditation is all about. Whether it’s vanquishing your business or athletic rivals, these techniques are designed to promote selfish desires and goals which reinforce the ego.

In contrast, Buddhism guides the meditator toward the understanding that no worldly attainments can ever provide deep or lasting satisfaction; toward relinquishment of personal desires; and toward freedom from our unexamined enslavement to the insecure demands of the ego.

All too frequently, I hear proclamations from people publicly known as meditation experts that completely set my nerves on edge. In their own literal words, meditation can: lower stress levels, help you drop all distractions that may interfere with winning, enhance peak performance, aid in the reduction of how chronic pain affects the mind, help you cope with the aftermath of a disappointing performance, strengthen your drive, boost your belief in yourself and your ability, build your athletic identity, improve sleep patterns, speed recovery time, enhance endurance, aid in proper fueling, and help control oxygen.

I’m sorry George, but the Buddha had a far more important and fulfilling goal than “speeding recovery time”, “building his athletic identity”, and “controlling oxygen”.

Through tireless self-aggrandizement and promotion, many of these business and sports meditation gurus have grown rich and famous as a result of dispensing their advice. I’m going to leave that contradiction aside however, as it’s too obviously hypocritical to waste time discussing.

Attending these completely secularized meditative self-gratification programs is kind of like taking classes at a prestigious cooking school, but disregarding everything except how to microwave a frozen burrito. It’s such a waste! Buddhism has a larger mission and so much more to offer than empty self-affirmations and greed-reinforcing self-talk.

I’ve also observed that when teachers introduce meditation practices to naïve Westerners, most of the reported short-term benefit is due to peer pressure or the placebo effect. For the practitioners I’ve known, their initial months of meditation were uncomfortable and challenging before things settled down and the practice started producing its slow, gentle results. But Americans have been sold a persistent fable that meditation will produce immediate and noticeable relief; so that’s what people report, after just a few minutes alone with their unruly internal dialogue.

For all these reasons, the majority of Americans think of—and relate to—meditation as if it were just another self-improvement project: a way to be a far more powerful, unshakeable, invincible you.

While there are undeniable positive side effects of long-term meditation practice, it’s not about building up, improving, or perfecting the self; it’s about letting go of the self, and liberation from the tyranny of the ego.

And the ultimate goal of Buddhist meditation—which the Western mindfulness movement has completely forgotten—is the freedom and well-being that results from the eradication of suffering in our lives: something many self-proclaimed “meditation experts” have a vested interest in perpetuating and profiting from.

A bitter old man won the lottery;
his days of reckless living were gone.
Amassed the sum of fifty million dollars,
but he had nothing to spend it on.

He said:

I want a little girl to call my own;
don’t even care if she is ugly.
An ornament to brighten up my home:
someone to love me for my money.

All the cash I have don’t help my failing pride;
I’ve been pretty lonely ever since my wife died.
Now it’s time to find myself a brand new bride!

Having always been a creature of habit,
he turned to the classified page,
started browsing through the single ads
to find a gold-digger one third his age.

He said: Now some of these don’t look that bad,
but I know how to do this better.
Displayed his wishes in a full-page ad;
he got a couple hundred letters.

The ad said:

I’m retired, I’m bored to tears and filthy rich.
Marry me, I’ll give you all the money you want, bitch.
You love a life of luxury, so let’s get hitched.

I want someone to love
  (someone to love me for my money).
I want someone to love
  (someone to love me for my money).
I’m a rich man and I got a nice car,
  ’cos you know I won the Lotto yesterday.

He thought his prayers had all been answered;
the wedding day was drawing near.
A young (cut-rate?) material girl:
she kissed him softly, whispered in his ear:

I can’t describe to you the way I feel,
I guess that love is what you call it.
I can’t be certain that my love’s for real
until you open up your wallet.

He said:

Don’t pretend to love me, ’cos my heart won’t bleed.
All your stinkin’ sentiment: it ain’t what I need.
I don’t want affection; I just want your greed!

I want someone to love
  (someone to love me for my money).
I want someone to love
  (someone to love me for my money).
Let’s get hitched girl, ’cos I got a nice car
  and I wanna give my money all away.

Extravagance became a necessity;
he was always there to foot the bill.
But she really put her foot in her mouth
when she suggested that he write his will.

He bellowed: Up til now I’ve been so kind
and on my kindness you depended.
But I’m not gonna give you one thin dime
if I’m not there to watch you spend it!

Ain’t you learned that nothin’ ever comes for free?
So shut your mouth, ’cos when I die I’m taking it with me.
Sprinkle all the ashes ’round a shady tree…

Gangster Fun
Someone To Love Me (For My Money)

If you’re someone who votes Republican, before the primary season begins, let me tell you about my experience with Mitt Romney.

In 1989 I went to work for a little company called MediQual. It had been founded by an academic with a noble purpose: to gather objective data about hospital patients’ treatment and outcomes, and then apply statistical regression analysis to it. This enabled researchers and clinicians to identify—for any disease—which specific treatments were mathematically correlated with reduced costs and the best patient outcomes. In a word, armed with a huge nationwide database, MediQual could tell doctors—conclusively—what worked and what didn’t.

The problem was that our founder was an academic; he had no idea how to run a business or market this great idea. The company’s fortunes see-sawed through expansions and layoffs, but we never seemed able to grow much beyond a hundred people.

So in 1993 the founder stepped aside in favor of a new CEO with more of a business background. The new guy, Eric Kriss, had been a founder of the Boston investment firm Bain Capital, and had just finished a three-year stint as Assistant CFO for Massachusetts’ Republican governor Bill Weld. I guess it sounded promising at the time.

Like any money-hungry venture capitalist, Kriss wasted no time raping MediQual. Within three years he had pushed the founder off the board of directors, replaced all senior and most middle managers with his close friends, created glossy new packaging and marketing fluff for our main product, and sold the company for $35 million to a huge drug conglomerate. His resume lists that as a successful “turnaround”.

During that time, one of Kriss’ henchmen gently suggested I find a new job: by advertising an opening for my current position. It appeared in the Boston Globe’s jobs section on the middle Sunday of a two-week road trip I’d taken. Needless to say, that was when I moved on to something (much) better.

Back at the company formerly known as MediQual, the pharmaceutical company used our data and analysis tools to find new ways to market their drugs, and abandoned the mission of reducing the cost and advancing the overall state of healthcare. So much for making the world a better place.

Then, having lined his pockets and those of his chosen friends, Eric Kriss immediately flipped everyone the bird and went back to work in state government. He was chosen for the top finance position in Massachusetts by a new governor: an old friend of his by the name of Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney and Eric Kriss are two rotten apples from the same tree. They comprised two of the three partners who had founded Bain Capital in 1984. Currently managing companies worth no less than $65 billion, the company’s Wikipedia article states, “Bain Capital turns a profit on floundering corporations by buying them at low cost, stripping away any projects that aren’t profiting or that lack potential, and laying off any excess workers.”

They realize that profit by quickly flipping those companies and getting the hell out, lining their pockets and leaving chaos and devastation in their wake.

Mitt Romney has a net worth of a quarter billion dollars and has never had any connection to the working (and non-working) class that represents the overwhelming majority of America… Other than laying them off in droves, of course.

But beyond that, what’s truly appalling is that he amassed that immense fortune not through his own merits, but by taking over vulnerable companies, gutting them, slapping a fresh coat of paint on them, and flipping them before anyone figures it out, in the largest bait-and-switch game in history.

Maybe that’s your idea of the American dream, but it’s obvious to me that Romney’s trademark slash-and-burn management style makes him wholly unsuited for the office of the President of the United States. The man in charge of the public trust needs to be worthy of that trust, and Mitt Romney is not.

So the DuBarry mural has finally come down.

The mural was one of the most famous and popular fixtures of Newbury Street, Boston’s trendy shopping district. It featured a trompe d’oeil facade of a Parisien cafe, filled with dozens of prominent Bostonians. Every day, dozens of tourists would stop and photograph it. The Boston Duck Tours’ ensured their route went by it, and they called it out as they passed. Large buses disgorged Japanese tourists, who staggered obliviously into the working parking lot to admire the sight.

It was erected in 1991 on a wall overlooking a parking lot on the corner of Newbury and Dartmouth Streets. That wall used to divide the building with the DuBarry French restaurant from a second building, now demolished and turned into a parking lot.

My apartment looks out over that parking lot, and the mural formed part of the skyline outside my living room. When I moved into my condo back in 2001, the DuBarry building was vacant and dilapidated, but in 2004 it was bought by local restaurant magnate Charles Sarkis, who had plans to renovate it and open (surprise) yet another new eatery.

In the meantime, the mural was falling apart. I wrote about it last year in this journal entry. The weather brought large chunks of it down, and what the elements didn’t remove, vandals worked on. And the question was raised: whose responsibility is that thing, and does anyone care if it rots?

Kevin Fitzgerald, the wealthy owner of the parking lot, and Sarkis, the wealthy restaurateur, spent years arguing publicly about who owned the party wall, with neither willing to adopt the orphaned artwork. Threats were made to tear it down. Counter-threats were made to restore or replace it. Meanwhile, the mural continued to disintegrate.

Eventually, everyone agreed: there was nothing to it but to tear the fucker down. Despite its popularity, it became such an eyesore that even the arch-conservative Back Bay Architectural Commission and the self-important Back Bay Neighborhood Association both backed its immediate destruction.

And so it goes. For the past few months, men on a portable scaffold have erased all evidence of the mural’s existence, then cleaned and re-pointed the original brick wall. My apartment, and Boston’s fashionable Back Bay, are so easily rendered more mundane, less unique, and less delightful by another victory by two exemplars of narrow selfishness and crass greed.

And all I can think of is the image of two stuffy old Dickensian businessmen scolding a child and taking away her toys as being too frivolous and lacking sufficient import.

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Entries tagged with greed

One Bad Apple

Meditation's Fake News

Can Anybody Find Me... Somebody to Love?

Drop Those Mittens, Jumbo!

Tear Down the Wall!

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