Blog - PAGE 50

How “Nice White People” Benefit from Charlottesville and White Supremacy

Jason Tate

Lauren Duca, writing for Teen Vogue:

For white people who don’t self-identify as disciples of Richard Spencer, David Duke, and/or the ancient demon Beelzebub, there is extreme anxiety around the accusation of racism. We see this fear of blame in Trump’s statement. “Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama” seems to say, ‘Hey, there’s been a tense racial climate in this country forever. It’s not anyone’s fault!’ Except the opposite is true. American white supremacy has been a problem forever, and it is all of our fault, fellow white people.

White people benefit from white supremacy. Period. Peggy McIntosh spelled this out for us in 1989, but apparently we’re still not quite getting it. Her famous piece, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” lays out undeniable ways that it is simply easier to be white in this country, like always having a boss who is a fellow white person, or, you know, being able to eat Skittles at night without getting shot. Most white people didn’t ask for this privilege. Actually, that’s the whole idea. White privilege is an inherent advantage that easily goes unnoticed and unacknowledged. Rather than stuffing down the sense of shame associated with this obvious unfairness, why not work to even the playing field?

Lauren Duca’s column has become a must read for me.

Is Social Media Making You Miserable?

Facebook
Jason Tate

Markham Heid, writing at Time:

One recent study examined the links between Facebook use and wellbeing. “We found that the more you use Facebook over time, the more likely you are to experience negative physical health, negative mental health and negative life satisfaction,” says study author Holly Shakya, assistant professor and social media researcher at the University of California, San Diego.

Haha! I posted about this hot sauce brand that teamed up with Andrew McMahon’s Dear Jack Foundation and they sent me some special “chorus” hot sauce. Excited to try it out on a burrito.

Jason Tate Photo Blog

Scott Belsky Interview on Startups

Jason Tate

Business Insider:

Scott Belsky is an early investor in startups such as Uber, Pinterest, and Warby Parker who began his career at Goldman Sachs.

He realized quickly that Goldman wasn’t for him, so he spent the next four years saving $18,000. He used the money and some help from those close to him to quit and bootstrap a startup called Behance. Belsky didn’t take a paycheck for the next two years.

In the end, the hard work paid off. Adobe purchased Behance for a reported $150 million, and Belsky went out of his way to turn half of his employees into millionaires from the sale.

This was a really good interview.

Cool App: Streaks

Apps
Jason Tate

After reading the MacStories review of the Streaks app, I decided to give it a shot:

Streaks helps you set personal goals and stick to them using a combination of reminders and tracking. One of the hallmarks of the app, and what undoubtedly won it an Apple Design Award in 2016, is its obsessive attention to ease-of-use. By the very nature of its mission, Streaks is an app in which you shouldn’t spend a lot of time. Whether it’s in the main app, widget, or Apple Watch app, Streaks is designed to remove the friction of turning goals into habits by tracking tasks in a way that doesn’t become tedious, which makes it important to be able to mark items as completed quickly and easily.

I’ve only been using it for three days so far, but I think this will be something I stick with for a while. I like the idea of having a few (currently only four) streaks set up to help form some habits I’ve been having trouble with.

The new album from @manchesterorchestra is out today and it’s a great one. (Review and podcast about the album up on chorus.fm.)

Jason Tate Photo Blog

Transmit 5 Released

Apps
Jason Tate

Panic at have released a great update to my favorite file transfer app:

Seven years after the first release of Transmit 4, our well-loved and widely-used macOS file transfer app, we sat down with an incredibly exhaustive list of ideas, and — this’ll sound like I’m exaggerating but I’m mostly sure I’m not — we did it all.

With one massive update we’ve brought everyone’s favorite file-transferring truck into the future with more speed, more servers, more features, more fixes, a better UI, and even Panic Sync. Everything from the core file transfer engine to the “Get Info” experience was rethought, overhauled, and improved.

It’s ten bucks off this week only.

MarsEdit 4 Beta

Jason Tate

Daniel Jalkut has announced the beta for MarsEdit 4:

It’s been over 7 years since MarsEdit 3 was released. Typically I would like to maintain a schedule of releasing major upgrades every two to three years. This time, a variety of unexpected challenges led to a longer and longer delay.

The good news? MarsEdit 4 is finally shaping up. I plan to release the update later this year.

I’ve used MarsEdit for quite a while and I used to use it to publish to my original Chorus.fm Tumblr blog. Once I moved to WordPress for Chorus, I’d made so many minor tweaks to the system and my workflow that it didn’t quite do all I needed to anymore. However, this update looks like it’ll be adding in a bunch of features that may let me use it again for posting. That’d be exciting.