What They Don't Tell You About Airtags

• The Find My page on icloud.com does not show AirTags.
• The FindMy app in MacOS (Monterey 12.6) does not reliably show you the locations of your AirTags. On one Monterey Mac, Find My took 24 hours before it started showing their location, while my other Monterey Mac still hasn't listed any AirTags after a week. All flavors of Find My can locate all my Macs and iPhones, so this is not an AppleID problem, but instead apparently an Apple policy. I suspect they are trying to discourage free-riding by people (like me) who don't use iOS. (I use an old SIM-less iPhone to register my AirTags, to find them if I ever need to.)
• Unlike with Tile, you cannot share your AirTags with anyone. So only my AppleID can see the locations of our pets.
• AirTags have anti-stalking privacy features that limit their usefulness as anti-theft trackers. (Admittedly, Apple advises not to use them to track stolen items.) Anti-stalking features kick in only when your AirTag is out of Bluetooth contact with any device on which your AppleID is signed in.
• If your AirTag is away from your devices for >N hours, then it will beep for about 10 seconds. N seems to be about 24, but Apple presumably can change this at any time. I've seen this happen for 2 AirTags, but haven't yet experienced a 2nd beep on either.
• If your AirTag is away from your devices but some other iOS device remains in Bluetooth range while the device is moving, then iOS warns you that you might be being stalked. If the unattended AirTag remains in range for >10 minutes, iOS will offer the option to make the the AirTag beep. You can even do this on Android, if you manually run Apple's tracker scanner app.
• These anti-stalking features mean that smart car thieves can find your AirTag in only 10 minutes, while dumber thieves might notice it when they drive the car a day later.
• There are YouTube videos explaining how to remove the speaker from your AirTag. Doing so made my AirTag barely audible to me only if I hold it against my ear, but inaudible a foot away.
• Of the 2 4-packs of AirTags I recently bought, one had no removable speaker, and yet still makes the full beeping noise. Has Apple changed their design to foil AirTag silencing?
• iPhone 11 and newer can use Ultra-Wide Band to pinpoint any AirTag's location to within inches. I don't know yet if this capability is restricted to the AirTag's owner, versus being available to potential stalking targets. If the latter, then smart car thieves with a modern iPhone will be able to find any AirTag you hide in your car.

There are so many iPhones here in the Bay Area that my AirTags got pinged every 5 minutes during a test drive -- even while sitting in a parking lot. By comparison, my Tile got pinged only twice in 30 minutes.

So I'll be hiding muted AirTags in our cars and e-bikes, and hoping that car thieves don't read my blog.

The Drug of Myth Arc

 Here are my favorite live-action sci-fi/fantasy/superhero dramas:

1. The Boys
2. Battlestar Galactica
3. Westworld
4. Heroes
5. Legion
6. Humans
7. The Expanse
8. Watchmen
9. The Umbrella Academy
10. Jessica Jones
11. The Man in the High Castle

Why do these shows all lean so heavily on Myth Arc?  Can't anyone do a riveting long-arc fantasy series that doesn't rely on glacial revelation of some secret plan that some of the characters have known from the beginning? 

You could argue that the alternative would just be a soap opera, but there have been great ones: Sopranos, Vikings, Rome, House of Cards. I suppose having a Myth Arc has since Babylon 5 been table stakes for a fantasy series. (Even more so now in the age of streaming, which doesn't worry about viewers starting in the middle). You could in theory write a fantasy series without a Myth Arc (or a comedy series without romantic tension), but it would be like opening a coffee/tea shop without any caffeine on the menu. Your prospective customers would just patronize somebody else willing to deal them the drug they demand.

My Million Dollar Pandemic Mistake

I moved my 401Ks from equities to bonds on 2020-03-09, the week before the market bottom. For various reasons, I did not move back into equities until May 2021. I finally admitted to myself that I shouldn't try to avoid a market peak if I obviously couldn't avoid a market trough.

But my fundamental mistake wasn't merely that I tried to time (i.e. outsmart) the market. My real mistake was rationalizing the pandemic as a one-time excuse to end my 25-year streak of following Less Antman's investment strategy. Less explains it better than I could, below. (And no, I can't claim that his "check the stores" test justifies my mistake. I work in e-commerce, and we were never closed.)

(1) The wealth of a society is in the goods and services produced, and not in the monetary system. Check the stores: they're still open, providing lots of goods and services, and owning shares of the world's most profitable businesses makes your wealth as safe as the continued provision of those goods and services (if they disappear, money is useless).

(2) SOMEBODY has to own stocks at all times: the so-called "flight to quality" actually represents some people panicking out of the true source of wealth and handing ownership of these sources at fire sale prices to other people in exchange for green pieces of paper with pictures of presidents on them that aren't guaranteed to be redeemable for anything.  Someone once described a bear market as "that time period during which stocks are returned to their rightful owners."

(3) Diversify, diversify, diversify.  Own lots of businesses in lots of industries in lots of countries.

(4) The much higher rewards of equities over the long term result primarily from the uncertainty of returns over the short term.  Thank the volatility: it is your best friend in the end. Here is why:

Stockholders are owners of businesses, and owners get paid last, after employees, contractors, suppliers, and creditors. So changes in available revenue affect owners first, and that is the source of a great deal of uncertainty and occasional outright panic. Point granted: stocks are much more volatile than bonds and cash, and employees have a much more predictable flow of wages than their bosses do of dividends and capital gains. Yet since owners are paid last, in the long run they can be expected to be paid most — not always and certainly not in all companies, but for someone who owns a globally diversified portfolio of the world’s productive businesses, it’s a pretty good guess. My purpose in life is to tell my clients this as often as necessary.

So might I suggest that you remind yourself during scary times, why you’re invested in stocks? You’re providing the service of accepting the short-term uncertainty that others want to avoid. You’re the rock, the stable source of capital for businesses, without which market economies cannot function. Be a rock and react like a rock to the non-news that human nature goes through periodic bouts of extreme fear.

My Dead Man's Switch

If my wife and I both die at the same time, we need our estate's trustees to be able to take over our financial and electronic accounts. (Our trustees are a select few chosen from among our siblings, friends, and adult children.) But as trusted as our trustees are, we don't trust them to have access to all our accounts while we're both still alive. We don't want to store our account credentials in on-site storage that could be taken by an intruder or destroyed by a disaster.  And we don't want to store our account credentials in an off-site service that is inconvenient to update and that itself has to be trusted not to use our stored credentials. What to do?

Our solution is to encrypt our account credentials with a special password known to our trustees, and then arrange that our trustees only get the encrypted credentials if we're incapacitated. For this we use Dead Man's Switch. It allows us to schedule an email to our trustees, that will only be sent if I fail to visit that web site for N consecutive days. The free default is 2, but I bought a $50 life membership that lets me set it to any value. I chose 10. That's long enough to let me be distracted by a vacation or health problem, but short enough to get our trustees going quickly if we actually die.

My dead man's email says:

Subject: Is Brian incapacitated?

This email is automatically sent if Brian goes 10 days without visiting deadmansswitch.net. The encrypted information below gives you access to Brian's financial and online accounts. When decrypted it is a list of Brian's passwords. Decrypt it using the following steps. ....

The email then includes instructions how to use infoencrypt.com. An InfoEncrypt ciphertext is encrypted using standard AES-128, and if InfoEncrypt ceases to exist then the ciphertext can still be decrypted on other web sites.

So my passwords are never stored anywhere, except in encrypted form. And the trustee password is never written down anywhere. It's a special password I've told only to my trustees. (I occasionally check that they still remember it. So far, so good.)

An extra level of security would be to divide the password among multiple trustees, so that no single one of them could immediately take our accounts if the Dead Man's email somehow was sent prematurely. But even if that happened, we'd still want to change our most sensitive passwords, in case our trustees colluded. (I had to do this once, because I turned on the gmail feature of inbox "categories", and didn't see my Dead Man reminder emails in the gmail Updates folder. My trustees were shocked to get the scary email announcing my possible incapacitation!)

Dead Man's Switch is a nifty service. It should be combined with an encryption service like InfoEncrypt to make the above setup simpler and more secure. Even so, the existence of this setup means that certain movie script scenarios are now off the table for characters who can be expected to understand this straightforward technology. It's kind of like how so many old movie plots would no longer make sense in a world of cell phones and GPS and mobile internet and satellite emergency location beacons.

P.S. My backup to all this is Google Inactive Account Manager. If I don't access my Google account for 3 months, then my trustees get control of it -- including the file they need to decrypt to see my other passwords. Unfortunately, 3 months is the minimum timeout Google allows.

Subconscious Mammalian Thermal Footprint Memory

When I return to a spot that I had recently occupied (on a chair, bed, etc.) I don't particularly notice that it's still warm. But if I settle onto a spot that is warm from some other mammal recently recently being there, it's keenly apparent. (The most palpable version of this is when you sit on recently-occupied toilet seat.)

I bet that humans have a subconscious memory of where they have recently left thermal footprints. So we subconsciously discount our own warm spots as uninteresting, but it bubbles up to our consciousness when our backside detects a potential interloper.

A redditor opines that it's because when you're sitting in your own spot you're in thermal equilibrium. But that doesn't explain the differential between self vs. other, because the feeling is quite different if the person who left the seat two minutes earlier was you vs. not you.

I noticed it again this morning when my dog and I both got up from bed at the same time. He'd been laying near my feet on top of my thick comforter. When I returned to bed after a few minutes, the spot recently warmed directly by a 230lb mammal felt unremarkable. But the spot recently warmed through a comforter by a 35lb mammal felt very warm.

Do other people notice this, or am I a mutant? My family thinks I'm crazy for "smelling" food after I remove it from the microwave, but I explain to them that my snout is a very sensitive heat detector, allowing me to check my food without burning a finger. And when raising three daughters I found that I could measure forehead temperature with my hand to ±1°F. 

My other superpower is recognizing voices, especially celebrity voiceovers. I'm constantly amazed that people watching a show with me don't immediately recognize many of the voices like I do. Alas, none of these superpowers are very good for crime-fighting...

Mark Clark: Libros Virumque Cano

Hi Dr. Clark, I was a student of yours in the University of Southern Mississippi Honors College starting in 1983, and I also took a second year of Latin from you.  You fortified my lifelong love of learning with the way you treated us undergraduates as peers in your intellectual journey.  You literally changed my life walking across campus one day with your casual question about what grad school I was going to attend.  It was only your assumption that I would continue my studies that prompted me to do so.  That resulted in a University of Michigan M.S. degree that launched my software engineering career here in Silicon Valley, where I met my wife and started a wonderful family.

Thank you!

Brian Holtz
Class of 1987

Kill Bob The Builder

Nobody in our house has watched "TV" -- i.e. televised programming straight from the tuner in real time -- since we got our first TiVo in early 2000. (The living room TiVo effectively killed the TV that we used to occasionally watch in the bedroom.) However, our kids watch their fair share of "shows" -- digital recordings of broadcast programming, or (since we switched to Media Center in 2004) Internet video downloads. Even now that we have a house with a couple of sound-isolatable non-bedroom TV rooms, we tend not to have the kids watch shows in a room with no parent. That makes it critical to get the kids to like shows that the parents can tolerate. Here's what I've learned in the six years since we lost our absolute control of what our big screen shows us.

1) Kids love animation. I don't know why. Our kids will watch effectively any kind of animation, no matter how bad. (I'm talking even 1960's vintage Iron Man and Fantastic Four cartoons -- ugh.) Whenever I think that the advice described in this posting has given our girls good taste in shows, some piece of animated garbage will inadvertently catch their eye and prove me wrong. And it's not just that they learned to association animation with kid-targeting. Their earliest exposure to animation was largely The Simpsons and Futurama, which I won't discuss further here because 1) they're not kids' shows and 2) I don't want Social Services to know how much role Matt Groening has played in raising our kids.

2) Justice League. As a kid I was a Marvel Comics snob, with utter disdain for the D.C. universe. My first glance at the ridiculous body shapes in the Justice League cartoon made me think this would be as bad as the Super Friends of my childhood, but within minutes I knew I was wrong. The 2001-2006 Justice League animated series was simply one of the best serials I've ever seen, period. I've now downloaded about half of the episodes from Gnutella networks, and selection effects cannot discount the fact that only a handful of the episodes weren't excellent. I gave copies last year to a buddy of mine for his boys, and many months later he called me immediately when he'd finally watched an episode. He was floored by how good it was. (Granted, he'd watched the best story of the whole series, the two-part "A Better World", but it's still fairly representative, and in fact began the best story arc of the whole series. In that arc, as is true for the entire heroic genre, moral ambiguity is the key to being serious drama.) The Marvel franchises have made far better feature films than the D.C. franchises have, but the JL animated series is the gold standard for bringing superheroes onto the screen. (Caveat: I haven't yet watched Heroes, in part because I can't watch it with the kids.) (Caveat 2: the Silver Surfer animated series somehow got 12 episodes on the air despite blatantly not trying to appeal to kids at all, and is an exception to the dismal Marvel animated efforts. The other notable exceptions have been the two recent Ultimate Avengers DVD movies, but they aren't quite kid-friendly.)

3) Powerpuff Girls & The Tick. These two animated series are incredibly intelligent and incredibly funny. It's amazing how Zoe will continually pause animated and live-action dramas (as well as live-action comedies) to demand explanations about plot, but she almost never did so for these two comedic series. That tells you just how subtly the adult-targeted humor is woven into the dialog. (As good as the animated Tick was, the 8-episode live-action Tick series was even better. I've never seen any sitcom paint characters so well right from the pilot, with the only exception being The Office.) SpongeBob Square Pants deserves honorable mention here, but we never watched enough to know how consistently good it is. Rollie Pollie Ollie is definitely tolerable too, but doesn't try as hard to make adults laugh.

4) Tom and Jerry & The Pink Panther. Dialog is very distracting. If you need to pacify kids in the same room as you, put on some vintage Tom and Jerry or Pink Panther. The musical scores are quite good, and the shows are easy to ignore while still classically entertaining if you care to watch.

5) Veto Dora, Diego, and Bob. Dora The Explorer got through my filter because I was a sucker for how it taught a little bit of Spanish. The kids got hooked on Dora (which escalated to include Go, Diego, Go), and so I had to endure Dora's repetitive inanity for countless cumulative hours. By the time I had the idea of having them watch the all-Spanish version of Dora, they were old enough to object and demand English. Bob the Builder got through my filter because I was a sucker for its claymation and its theme song. But Bob simply sucks. He doesn't even fit inside the cabs of the vehicles, and has to dangerously hang onto the door! I would love to see Bob and his politically-correct gang sectioned with a pizza-cutting wheel.

6) "Holtzes Don't Watch Commercials". To try to inoculate them against future TV experiences outside our exclusively DVR household, I trained Zoe to exclaim "Holtzes don't watch commercials" (really) and demand they be skipped. The first button she learned on the remote was the commercial-skip button. Shannon was following in Zoe's footsteps up until about two months ago. All of a sudden, Shannon (4) started demanding to watch the "Barbie" commercials, and soon all the toy commercials. This is not good. She also keeps hoping Christmas is tomorrow, and at the toy store explains that we need at least one of any toy we don't have. This is not good.

Knowing Humans 2.0

This is my last Knowing Humans posting on Yahoo 360 and my first posting on Knowing Humans 2.0, hosted by blogger.com through http://knowinghumans.net. Subscribe there now.

With the public announcement of Mosh and Yahoo's embarrassing lack of blog search capability, I can no longer use laziness and company loyalty as an excuse for not migrating off of 360. (When Personals was re-org'd into the Search subdivision a couple years ago, I asked when Yahoo was going to have solutions for searching blogs and our own intranet. We still lack good answers for either.) I've recently resolved to do more of my online political activism through blogs and wikis and less through email-based forums, and so this week I started looking for an alternative to 360.

I picked blogger.com because it met my minimal requirements in being totally free and able to 1) backup my blog, 2) manually import and back-date my 360 postings, and 3) operate through my own domain. I've imported my 360 postings of the last year and soon will all 200 of them up. I've also set my SiteMeter count of the new blog based on the 151K pageviews currently registered on the 360 blog. (Its technorati rank was 2,124,856, oddly up 400K from 2.5M in September despite relative quiescence. The rank of knowinghumans.net was 2.9M, as it was just a page of links to my 360 posts.)

I've indulged this week in customizing my blogger.com template, adding features such as:

• The title area is centered over an up-to-date image of the current shading of the Earth, and adjusts nicely on window resizings.
• A table of contents hack borrowed from Beautiful Beta.
• A borrowed hack to suppress the Blogger nav bar.
  
• My blogroll imported from Bloglines.
• My recent bookmarks imported from Yahoo My Web.
• My recent email correspondence imported from my Yahoo Group.

Next I want to add better search facility to replace the one that was in the nav bar. I also want to try out the AdSense integration, if only to see what sort of ads Google would place here. I have no financial need to try to monetize my blog, so the only ads I foresee posting here are for causes I endorse. In fact, I have a scheme in mind to de-monetize my blog by giving money to other bloggers. More about that later. :-)

6-yr-old Libertarian Challenges City Council

Six-year-old Zoe Holtz seems to have inherited the libertarian principles of her dad Brian (a Libertarian Party state leader) and the entrepreneurial instincts of her mom Melisse (a Stanford Business School grad). After beta-testing her commerce skills several times with pretend lemonade and cookie stands in her family living room, Zoe was shocked to hear that in her new hometown of Los Altos Hills, lemonade stands are forbidden. So she accompanied Brian to a City Council meeting in April, resolved to ask the city leaders why she can't sell lemonade. On the short minivan ride to City Hall she rehearsed her case, arguing "something shouldn't be against the rules just because it annoys some people, or else everything would be against the rules."

However, she lost her nerve at the podium looking up at the imposing rostrum of the town (pop. 8000), and her dad had to ask her question for her. The Council members didn't seem to know that lemonade stands weren't allowed, and the Mayor inadvertently hinted at the dangers of such regulations when he joked that her lemonade stand would be OK as long as he got free lemonade. When the town staff sheepishly pointed out that the town code prohibits vending, the Council members virtually tripped over each other in assuring Zoe that the authorities would look the other way if her stand were safely off the road and only during daylight hours. The Council minutes report the episode this way:

Zoe Holtz, resident, with the assistance of her father, asked the Council if it was "ok" for her to have a lemonade stand in her neighborhood. City Attorney Steve Mattas explained that with the exception of the sale of agricultural products produced on resident’s property; sale of merchandise/goods was prohibited by the Town’s Codes. Mattas offered that there were concerns about traffic and safety. He noted that historically, the Town did not enforce the code with respect to lemonade stands. Council consensus was to support her request with the stipulation that it be done in a safe manner.

However, the City Attorney is wrong about his town history. A 2004 article in the Los Altos Town Crier reported that a deputy sheriff shut down a child's lemonade stand in Los Altos Hills even though no complaints had been received.

The following Saturday, Zoe set about to exercise her newly-won freedom. She set up a lemonade stand on the quiet street in front of her house, and staffed it with the assistance of her sister Shannon and her best friend Cassie. (She's said before she wants "employees".) Most of their sales were to their parents and immediate neighbors, so it's clear that she has a bit to learn about location and pricing (as the photo shows).

But she has time -- and now, a little more freedom to use it.

Brian Holtz For LPCA ExCom

Purpose: Unite voters who want more liberty behind the electoral choices that will most move public policy in a libertarian direction Strategy: Make LPCA a scalable/viral voter-outreach machine as we attack institutional/legal barriers to 3rd-party influence Tactic: Build email contact DB of members & RegLibs; motivate their use of LPCA-provided self-service Internet outreach tools Theme: Avoid overreach, work smart not hard Issues: School choice; environment; tax revolt; medical marijuana; civil unions 2006 CA rep to LP Platform Committee Author of Libertarian Reform Caucus "Greatest Hits" draft LP platform Libertarian blogger and frequent contributor to California Freedom 2005/2006 member of LPCA Platform Committee 2004/6 LP candidate for Congress, CA14 (Silicon Valley) San Mateo County LP Newsletter chair 2004-2005 LP Life member since 1999 Software engineer at Yahoo (2002-), Sun Microsystems (1990-2001)

Some Possible Reasons To Vote For Me	Some Possible Reasons Not To Vote For Me
Clear strategic and tactical priorities	My priorities might not be yours
Willing to finance important LPCA projects	Won't raise funds from anyone but himself
Communicative and transparent	Too damn communicative and transparent
Reformer	You think the LP and LPCA are (or were) doing just fine
Technologically savvy	Silicon Valley nerd
Independent	Not aligned with your faction
Intellectually principled economics-oriented minarchist	Not an anarchist, thus an unprincipled socialist
Intellectually rigorous	Always tries to get the last word
You've found a fresh perspective in something I've written	You've disagreed with something I've written
Advocates big tent on abortion, immigration, libervention	Advocates big tent on abortion, immigration, libervention
Won't back down from public threats of being "beaten to a bloody pulp"	Scared shitless of being satired on Angela Keaton's Liberated Space
Makes lists of reasons not to vote for him	Makes lists of reasons not to vote for him