Quotulatiousness

March 24, 2013

Humans are very good at spotting patterns … even when they aren’t really there

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Slate, George Johnson explains why the human ability to detect patterns can sometimes work against us:

Lay a chessboard on a table. Then grab a handful of rice and let the grains fall and scatter where they may. They won’t spread out uniformly with the same number occupying each square. Instead there will be clusters. Now suppose that the chessboard is a map of the United States and the grains are cases of cancer.

Each year about 1.6 million cases of cancer are diagnosed in the United States, and epidemiologists regularly hear from people worried that their town has been plagued with an unusually large visitation. Time after time, the clusters have turned out to be statistical illusions — artifacts of chance.

The Erin Brockovich incident, one of the most famous, is among the many that have been debunked. Hexavalent chromium in the water supply of a small California town was blamed for causing cancer, resulting in a $333 million legal settlement and a movie starring Julia Roberts. But an epidemiological study ultimately showed that the cancer rate was no greater than that of the general population. The rate was actually slightly less.

March 23, 2013

“Having it all” versus “being happy”

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

In the Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente talks about the tension many women feel in trying to lead full lives, both professionally and personally:

Sheryl Sandberg, the billionaire COO of Facebook, is everywhere these days. Her new book, Lean In, is a smart, strategic guide for women who want to succeed. Be more assertive, conquer your fear, manage your guilt, don’t sabotage yourself.

All good advice, in my view. But these days, a lot of smart, highly educated thirtysomething women are having an entirely different conversation. They’re not talking about leaning in. They’re talking about leaning back.

[. . .]

Given the realities of the modern workplace, the mystery isn’t why there aren’t more women at the top but why so many want to get there. “To reject a high-flying career … is not to reject aspiration,” Judith Shulevitz writes in The New Republic. “It is to refuse to succumb to a kind of madness.”

Most women, if they have the choice, are happy to trade long hours and money for flexibility and control. This explains why nearly a quarter of women who have MBAs and children have dropped out of the work force 15 years after graduation, according to a U.S. study. When these findings were released, they produced much hand-wringing about the failed promise of feminism and lingering discrimination in the workplace. But what they really reflect is women’s stronger preference for a balanced life.

High-achieving younger women don’t think this is going to happen to them. It takes them by surprise. They get an MBA or law degree, a demanding job and an equal-opportunity husband. And then they have a baby and – wham. As one young mother in her early 30s puts it, “I had no idea I’d be so crazy about my child.”

I suspect a lot of the frustration young women encounter is that they’ve been lead to expect that they can cope with both a full-time, active, fulfilling career and raising a child simultaneously. The reality is that for most women, it’s a binary choice: you get either the job or the family, but not both. When this realization hits home, it can feel like a betrayal.

March 22, 2013

Nick Gillespie on Libertarianism

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:24

Katy Bachelder interviews Reason‘s Nick Gillespie:

What do you see as the primary policy goal of libertarianism?

Things that move us toward decentralization of power. The way I used to talk about it when Windows was still a dominant operating system is that the way a computer operates, what you want is an operating system that allows as many different apps to run at the same time without crashing the system. That’s what classical liberalism really does.

How do you think libertarianism as a third party helps achieve those goals?

I’m not particularly interested in electoral politics. Where I think public choice economics is hugely important is what it asks is not simply what the rhetoric of people is, but what are the outcome of their actions. In that way, it gets to what actually matters as opposed to people sprinkling magic words. It’s amazing how much slack people will give if you say the right words as you’re repressing them.

Libertarianism is a pre-political attitude. It can inform you if you’re in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or the Libertarian Party. It can express itself in a lot of different ways, like through Jimmy Carter, who is the great deregulator of the American economy, not Ronald Reagan. He deregulated interstate railroads, trucking, airlines. That all happened under Jimmy Carter and he was abetted in it by people like Milton Friedman. Libertarianism is an impulse, not a set of beads on a string.

[. . .]

Hillary Clinton just endorsed gay marriage. What do you think is the future for that issue?

I think gay marriage is over as an issue. When you look at public opinion polls about gay issues, the moral approbation toward the issue has faded. The larger questions are: what is the connection between the state and individual choices? It’s as big of a deal as it is because the state is involved in bestowing certain benefits such as tax incentives. I think what we’re starting to see is that if you want to live in a society that is truly pluralistic and tolerant, and that doesn’t mean everyone agrees every lifestyle is morally valid, but just tolerant, then we have to start shrinking the scope and the size of the state. The state should recognize all people as equal.

QotD: Battening down the (free speech) hatches

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

I have to confess, as an ignorant inhabitant of North America, that I don’t really understand the current press scandal in the U.K., and I was hoping that perhaps someone could enlighten me.

As I understand it, a number of members of the press committed crimes in the course of gathering material for stories — that is, they committed acts that were already illegal, and which already carried substantial penalties.

It would therefore seem that preventing such acts in the future would require nothing more than diligently enforcing existing law.

I’m therefore curious as to what purpose is articulated for ending freedom of expression in the U.K.

Is it claimed that the laws were not being enforced before on the powerful? Then surely the new restrictions on freedom will be selectively enforced as well, with only the weak being stifled. (That is, of course, universal — the powerful never need permission to do anything. Freedom is a protection for the weak, the strong need no protection.)

Is it claimed that performing criminal acts was somehow insufficiently illegal? Is it claimed that the existing laws against criminal conspiracies are not already broad, vague and all-encompassing?

Perry Metzger, “Doubly-illegal acts”, Samizdata, 2013-03-21

Explaining the title of this post:

Daffy Duck: “Batten down the hatches!”
Bugs: “We did batten ’em down!”
Daffy: “Well, batten ’em down again, we’ll teach those hatches!”

March 20, 2013

The Profumo affair in context

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:06

In History Today, Richard Weight reviews An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo by Richard Davenport-Hines which is being published on the 50th anniversary of the Profumo affair:

Meticulous though he is in separating historical fact from tabloid fiction, Davenport-Hines does not unearth any new secrets about the Profumo Affair. The originality of the book lies in the way he places it in the context of mid-20th century social attitudes. This, as the author says, is ‘a study of milieux’. An accomplished biographer, he puts colour on the cheeks and sparkle in the eyes of the main protagonists in a series of beautifully written portraits. We get to know fully Stephen Ward, for example – the high society osteopath who became the scapegoat of the affair – as a closet homosexual and vain Walter Mitty character, whose social climbing stemmed partly from the fact that osteopathy was dismissed by the medical establishment as ‘a modish form of cosseting’. Ward helped introduce the 46-year-old secretary of state for war, Jack Profumo, to the 19-year-old showgirl, Christine Keeler, at a pool party in the grounds of Cliveden on a July weekend in 1961. Soon after they began the fateful affair that linked him, via pillow talk and paranoia, to a Soviet military attaché that Keeler knew.

[. . .]

Jack Profumo typified British male attitudes: he had forced his wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, to give up her career for the sake of his image, before taking the lover who was raised in a converted railway carriage near Staines. The author describes Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies as ‘good-time girls who refused to be doormats’ – a new breed of ambitious women less willing to shut up once they had served their purpose. In a sense, Keeler anticipated the glamorous defiance of ‘the People’s Princess’ in the 1990s. And, like Diana Spencer’s, this is a story about the vacuity of the British people as much as it is a story about the hypocrisy of their leaders.

Davenport-Hines also confronts race, the subject usually ignored by historians of the affair. It was the jealous fight between two of Keeler’s black boyfriends outside the Flamingo Club in 1962 that led to a shooting through which the press got hold of the Profumo story. Then a taboo in a predominantly racist country, inter-racial sex gave the cocktail of cross-class transgression an extra shot of liqueur for the public to enjoy. Yet, as the author observes, the Flamingo Club was a multiracial Soho jazz venue then favoured by the ‘hip white Mods’ of Britain’s first youth culture. In other words the Profumo Affair didn’t so much change Britain as reveal how much it was already changing underneath the cracked surface of prudery and prejudice.

QotD: The mad, mad, mad world of author royalty calculation

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Author/publisher contracts specify royalty rates in the craziest way imaginable. This is because they consist of archaeological strata of legal boilerplate, accumulated over decades and haggled over by publishers’ lawyers and authors’ agents. Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, “if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?”

And so we have constant re-use of legal boilerplate that’s decades old. “For sales under 10,000 copies, a royalty of 10% will be assigned based on the undiscounted suggested retail price. From 10,001 to 15,000 copies, a royalty of 12% will be allocated … from 15,001 up, a royalty of 15% will be allocated … for copies sold at less than 40% discount off SRP, the full royalty will be paid; for copies sold at discount of 41-50% 80% of royalties due will be paid: from 51%-65% 50% of royalties will be paid: above 65% 40% of royalties will be paid.” You can think of it as a stack of IF () THEN () ELSE () statements switched off the number of copies sold and the discount the wholesaler extorted for taking them off the publisher’s hands.

Charles Stross, “Things publishers can’t do (yet)”, Charlie’s Diary, 2013-03-19

March 19, 2013

New British press control rules to apply to the internet … the whole internet

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:37

In Forbes Tim Worstall explains why the British government’s new Ministry of Truth press censorship body will have effective reach across the entire internet:

This isn’t what they think they’ve done, this is true. And it’s also not what they intended to do (or at least I hope they didn’t mean to do this) but it is still what they’ve done. They’ve passed a law which effectively censors the entire world’s media. And they’ve done this simply because they are ignorant of the very laws they’re trying to change. Which is, I think you’ll agree, a little disturbing, that politicians would casually negate press freedom just because they don’t know what they’re doing.

[. . .]

It’s a standard Common Law assumption that publication does not take place where the printing presses (or servers etc) are. Publication takes place where something is made available to be read or seen. We’ve even had two recent cases that show this. Rachel Ehrenfeld published a book in the US and yet was still sued for libel in London. For a few copies of that book had made it over to England and thus it was deemed that publication had taken place where English libel law prevailed. Just in case you think that this is some English peculiarity there was a very similar case with Dow Jones in Australia. Something was published in New York. But it was read in Australia (remarkably, by the man the piece was about, he downloaded it) and this was sufficient for the Australian courts to agree that therefore the potential libel had occurred in Oz and should be tried under Oz law.

This is even clearer with reference to child pornography laws. “Production” of child pornography includes the act of downloading such. For before it was downloaded there was one copy, on the server. Once downloaded, there are two, one on the server, the other in the browser. Thus the downloading is in itself the production of that pornography. This very point is drawn from the standard Common Law principles about publication.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter where your servers are. For that’s not what defines publication. It also doesn’t matter who the material is aimed at: nor even what language it is in. Publication happens if someone in the UK downloads whatever it is. That, in itself, is the act of publication.

Punk Rock deemed harmful … to punks

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

In the Seattle Weekly, John Roderick explains why the punk social movement has been harmful to those who live the punk lifestyle:

For those of us who grew up in the shadow of the baby boom, force-fed the misremembered vainglory of Woodstock long after most hippies had become coked-out, craven yuppies on their way to becoming paranoid neo-cons, punk rock provided a corrective dose of hard truth. Punk was ugly and ugly was true, no matter how many new choruses the boomers added to their song of self-praise. It was this perceived honesty that we, the nascent Generation X, feared and worshipped. But over time punk swelled into a Stalinistic doctrine of self-denial that stunted us. The yuppies kept sucking, but by clinging to punk we started to suck too.

I have friends in their mid-40s who don’t even have a savings account because “saving money” never seemed punk rock. I can’t count the number of small businesses I’ve seen fail because worrying about inventory or actually charging customers didn’t seem very punk rock. I was once chastised for playing at a private Microsoft function by a guy who worked there, so disappointed was he that I would sell out by playing a corporate gig.

Punk taught us to rebel against authority until “authority” included everything: piano lessons, fire insurance, leather shoes, and, ultimately, growing up. Punk taught us to have contempt for every institution, except Fugazi, until contempt and suspicion were the first and only reactions we had to everything. Good news was embarrassing, success was shameful, and a happy childhood an unthinkable transgression. These personality disorders were just punk in practice.

It’s time we stopped disavowing happiness and measured pride, we punk survivors, wrapping ourselves in itchy thrift-store horse blankets thinking that only discomfort is honest. It’s time we stopped hating ourselves, our ambition, and our sincerity, guarding our integrity credentials in fear of interrogation by the secret punk police. It’s time to unmask punk rock, admit that it has done us no favors, and banish it from our minds. There is no one waiting for us at the gates of heaven with a big book of punk, ready to judge our souls and validate our credibility. Punk rock is bullshit, and was always bullshit. Say it with me.

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

Sifting through the 3D printing hype

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

At The Register, Professor James Woudhuysen looks at the gap between the breathless hype about 3D printing and the current and near-term technological, political, and legal limitations:

3D printing, otherwise known as additive manufacturing, is a subject that pumps out enthusiasts faster than any real-life 3D printer can churn out products.

In conventional machining, computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CADCAM) combine to make products or parts of products by cutting away at, drilling and otherwise manhandling materials. With 3D printing, CADCAM works with product scanners, other bits of IT and special plastics and metals to build products up, whether through the squirts of an inkjet-like device or the sintering of metal powder by lasers or electron beams.

Rather in the same way, America’s somewhat self-conscious Maker Movement — several thousand DIY fans out to revive manufacturing through the web and from the privacy of their own garages — promotes 3D printing with layer upon layer of hype.

It’s true that 3D printing has its good points. Without having to engage in expensive retooling, a 3D printer can easily be reprogrammed to make variations on a basic product — good for dental crowns, for example. 3D printing can also make intricate products with designs that cannot be emulated by conventional, “subtractive” techniques.

[. . .]

Despite all this, those who blithely proclaim that 3D printing brings a revolution to manufacturing make a mistake. 3D printing does not represent a pervasive, durable and penetrating transformation of the dynamics and status of manufacturing. Nor, as The Economist newspaper has proposed, is its emergence akin to the birth of the printing press (1450), the steam engine (1750) or the transistor (1950). There is much to celebrate about 3D printing, and even its too-fervent advocates at least represent a reasonable desire to produce new kinds of things in new kinds of ways. Yet what characterises 3D printing is how, as with other powerful technologies today, it need only barely arrive on the world economic stage for zealots to overrate it, and for others to turn it into an object of fear.

QotD: “It was clear that both the professor’s detractors and supporters were, overwhelmingly, nuts”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Free speech was alive and well at the University of Toronto last night, but in that moment I’d have welcomed its death with open arms.

It was clear that both the professor’s detractors and supporters were, overwhelmingly, nuts. And Dr. Fiamengo herself, was, standing at that podium, a buoy of relative reason in a sea of everything but. “Any movement can attract hysterical detraction and unsavoury allies,” she would tell me over the phone the next morning. “That is the risk one runs.” She’s right. Take this little Facebook diatribe from an active member of A Voice for Men, one of the men’s rights groups who support her.

    There has never been a great female composer. Throughout history there has been plenty of privileged woman, who have had access to pianos, and violins, yet somehow we are expected to believe that men have somehow stopped them for being composers? Woman have the big lovely eyes, big tits, but mean [I think he meant “men”] are far more beautiful, they are more beautiful where it counts. In their wonderful creative souls.

Unfortunately, though, the other side is no more intelligent. They just use bigger words.

Almost every pro-women’s studies person who approached the mic last night, spoke another language, a jargon you might misconstrue as scientific – only the words they used weren’t shortcuts meant to simplify or summarize complex concepts, they were used to make simple concepts sound complex: Hegemonic, racialized, problematic, intersectionality. It was pure obfuscation, 1984 with tattoos and septum piercings. Some of the students couldn’t even string together a single lucid sentence. All they had were these meaningless, monolithic words. I felt like I was on a game show, the exercise being how many times can you say patriarchal, phallocentric hegemony in 45 seconds or less. It was frankly, for a feminist, depressing.

Slogans don’t make scholarship and being self-righteous does not make you right.

Emma Teitel, “Why women’s studies needs an extreme makeover”, Maclean’s, 2013-03-11

March 18, 2013

James Lileks compares the new Oz to the original and finds it sorely lacking

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:14

Actually, just ignore all the stuff about the new film, because I think he’s really writing about the original Wizard of Oz:

I remember how hard the first part of the movie felt. The unsympathetic and careworn Auntie Em, the vicious Miss Gulch — we laugh now and say “dee-dee-dee-dee-deee deee” as a little joke for someone with a nasty personality, but when that dessicated = bitch showed up and took the dog, Dorothy’s misery broke your heart. I mean, she was taking the dog away to kill him. No one stood up to her. No one could.

The Kansas farmhouse was more ramshackle than my grandparent’s farm, but we had chickens and dirt roads, and every summer we feared the twister. The mindless twister scribbling destruction in the distance was our worst nightmare, because it could happen. It had happened. They tested sirens every month because they knew it would happen. When it came for Dorothy, she was alone; everyone else had taken shelter in the earth, leaving her to the winds.

[. . .]

It was the font of childhood terrors that were unstinting in their horrors, unmodulated for younger audiences: the implacable guards, the gibbering monkeys, the horrible moment when the witch upended the hourglass: that’s all you have longer to live, my pretty. Oz himself was terrifying, and he was supposed to be the guy who’d help them all.

There wasn’t anything else like this in the other things they let us see, and I’m not sure grown-ups realized how unreal and bizarre these things seemed. But they trusted us to process the morality of an extended song-and-dance sequence that celebrates the death of an oppressor. Not too many other shows we got to see had a coroner with a certificate who had good news, and the townsfolk shouting that the tyrant is in hell.

This was a good thing! Really. It was.

– The bittersweet and painful end, which was resolutely irresolute: the first time you see it as a kid you don’t know the farmhands are the characters from Oz, not really, and when they appear at the end at everything’s great because she’s home. But it’s not happily-ever-after, because no one but Dorothy knows what happened, or admits they knew; everyone’s face is a friend from the most wonderful dream she ever had, fading away before her eyes, replaced by the joy of being home in a world without color. A place she vows never to leave.

Britain’s left: they have to destroy press freedom to save it

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:46

In the Guardian, Nick Cohen explains why the rush to regulate the press is such a bad move for the left:

We are in the middle of a liberal berserker, one of those demented moments when “progressives” run riot and smash the liberties they are meant to defend. Inspired by Lord Justice Leveson, they are prepared in Parliament tomorrow to sacrifice freedom of speech, freedom of the press and fair trials. They are prepared to allow every oppressive dictatorship on the planet to say: “We’re only following the British example” when outsiders and their own wretched citizens protest.

Try warning them that one day they and this country will regret their hooliganism and they reply in the sing-song voice of a child in a playground: “Well, that’s what Murdoch and Dacre want you to say.” It’s no good pointing out that Murdoch and Dacre are tired old men from a dying newspaper industry and they will not be keeping us company for much longer. Nor can you quote Orwell’s words to the effect that just because a rightwing newspaper says something does not mean it is wrong. Nothing works.

The Labour and Liberal Democrat parties are custodians of the best of Britain’s radical traditions: the traditions not only of Orwell, but of John Milton, John Stuart Mill and the men and women who struggled against the Stamp Acts and the blasphemy and seditious libel laws. Their successors are not worthy to follow in their footsteps. For the sake of a brief partisan victory, for the chance to shout: “Yah boo sucks” at the hated tabloids, they are inviting political regulation of the press at a time when the web revolution allows not only newspapers but also large blogs and the websites of campaign groups to be “significant news publishers”, to use the ominously vague phrase Labour and the Liberal Democrats are offering to the Commons tomorrow.

Mark Lynas and his break with the anti-GMO activists

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Food, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:11

Mark Lynas was one of the most prominent activists working against the adoption of genetically modified crops. Over time, he realized he was fighting the wrong battle and publicly recanted his decades-long struggle. He talks about it in an interview with Charlie Gillis in Maclean’s:

Q: You’ve disavowed a cause you were identified with for decades. How are you feeling about your decision?

A: It’s been traumatic, but it’s also been something of a liberation. I’ve obviously been inconsistent in my life, but so are we all. In my view, it’s better to be inconsistent and half-right, than to be consistently wrong. Even the pope doesn’t claim these days to be infallible, yet that’s what most environmental groups do.

Q: Still, you’ve offended your former allies, a lot of whom are now trying to discredit you. Some say you exaggerated your part in founding the anti-GM movement to start with. What’s that been like on a personal level?

A: My whole social scene has been characterized by my environmentalism. I’m in a situation where I can go to a party and I don’t know who’s currently not speaking to me.

Q: On Twitter, Vandana Shiva, a prominent environmentalist in India, likened your calls for farmers to be able to plant GMOs to saying rapists should have the freedom to rape.

A: That was simply astonishing, and frankly, hurtful to people who have actually suffered the trauma of rape. Look, these attacks on me are obviously done in the interests of damage limitation. It’s sort of an emperor’s-new-clothes thing. I have helped expose the fact most people’s concerns about GM foods are based on mythology. Once you can get past the idea that there’s something inherently dangerous about GM foods, it’s a whole different conversation. We actually can tell whether GM foods are safe. They have been extensively tested hundreds and hundreds of times, using different techniques. Many of the tests were conducted independently. The jury is entirely in on this issue.

[. . .]

Q. You argue that opposing GMOs is actually anti-environmental.

A. That was the realization that changed my mind. That recombinant DNA is actually a potentially very powerful technology for designing crop plants that can help humanity tackle our food-supply shortages, and also reduce our environmental footprint. They can help us use less fertilizer, and dramatically reduce pesticide applications. We can reduce our exposure to climate change through drought and heat-tolerant crops. So the potential is enormous.

March 17, 2013

Proposed British press regulation will apply to bloggers as well

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:55

Guido Fawkes offers a warning to those bloggers cheerleading for the British government to impose controls on the tabloid press:

One thing that surprises Guido is that his comrades in the liberal, progressive blogosphere have seemingly not noticed that the proposed Royal Charter aims to control and regulate them as well as the tabloids.

Schedule 4, Point 1 of both the government and the opposition’s versions of the Royal Charter will bring blogs under the regulator’s control:

    “relevant publisher” means a person (other than a broadcaster) who publishes in the United Kingdom: a. a newspaper or magazine containing news-related material, or b. a website containing news-related material (whether or not related to a newspaper or magazine)”

[. . .]

To all those bloggers who support this press control Charter because they hate Murdoch and Dacre, Guido offers this cautionary counsel, remember that the new regulator will cover you as well. You will have all the expense and bureaucracy of compliance as Murdoch and Dacre face, without the means. Unless like Guido and the Spectator you plan to become media outlaws too…

March 15, 2013

Will the death of Google Reader also be the death of RSS?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Felix Salmon on the knock-on ramifications of Google’s announcement that it is killing Google Reader:

But whether or not Reader was ever going to be a good business for Google, it was from day one a fantastic public service for its users. Google started as a public service — a way to find what you were looking for on the internet — and didn’t stop there. Google would also do things like buy the entire Usenet archives, or scan millions of out-of-print books, or put thousands of people to work making maps, all in order to be able to get all sorts of information to anybody who wants it. [. . .]

The problem with the death of Reader is that it was the architecture underpinning lots of other services — the connective tissue of just about all RSS readers and services, from Summify to Reeder to Flipboard. You didn’t even need to use Google Reader; it was just the master central repository of your master OPML list, all the different feeds that you were subscribed to. Google spent real money to provide that public service, and it’s going to be sorely missed. As Marco Arment says, “every major iOS RSS client is still dependent on Google Reader for feed crawling and sync.”

Arment sees a silver lining in the cloud, saying that with Google gone, “we’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.” I’m less sanguine. Building an RSS sync platform is a hard and pretty thankless task, it costs real money, and it might not work at all — especially in a world where less and less content is actually available in RSS format. (You can subscribe to my Tumblr feed in RSS format, but there’s no such feed for my posts on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Path or even Google+.)

RSS has been dying for years — that’s why Google killed Reader. It was a lovely open format; it has sadly been replaced with proprietary feeds like the ones we get from Twitter and Facebook. That’s not an improvement, but it is reality. Google, with Reader, was really providing the life-support mechanism for RSS. Once Reader is gone, I fear that RSS won’t last much longer.

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