HinesSight

My somewhat contrarian take on Paxlovid "rebound"

After getting some Covid symptoms and testing positive on a rapid test last Monday, this morning I completed the 5-day Paxlovid treatment regimen. 

My symptoms (nasal congestion and a cough) have been gone for a few days. The rapid test I took this afternoon was negative. So things are looking good. 

And I'm not all that worried about Paxlovid rebound, which doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

Nobody really knows how many people who take Paxlovid either get Covid symptoms after the 5-day treatment is over, or test positive after testing first positive, then negative, then positive again. A Scientific American story says:

The Pfizer clinical trial reported between 1 and 2 percent of those who received the drug tested positive for COVID after finishing the Paxlovid course; their illness rebounded. Those rebounds were not statistically different from rebounds experienced by people with COVID who received the placebo, however.

And a Los Angeles Times story strikes a cautionary tone.

This is a story about a COVID-19 medication, a nasty trick the coronavirus sometimes plays on its victims, and how the two became a pandemic couple called “Paxlovid rebound.”

It’s also a story about how looks can be deceiving.

Americans have been quick to embrace the idea that the antiviral drug is to blame for COVID-19 relapses in people just days after they’ve seemingly recovered. President Biden was said to have experienced Paxlovid rebound this summer, after White House doctors declared him coronavirus-free. The same thing happened to Dr. Anthony Fauci and Stephen Colbert, among others.

It’s tempting to presume a cause-and-effect relationship between two things that occur in quick succession. And even when events are completely random, we tend to see the patterns we expect to find.

But researchers are not so sure Paxlovid rebound is real. Relapses have occurred in COVID-19 patients who didn’t take the drug — they just didn’t get as much attention when there wasn’t a new medicine to blame.

Doctors fear some patients who could benefit from Paxlovid are skipping it in an effort to avoid a boomerang bout of COVID-19. That’s troubling because the medication has been found to powerfully reduce the risk of hospitalization or death in the unvaccinated, older people and those with compromised immunity. Preliminary research hints it may even reduce the risk of long COVID.

Today I shared some thoughts with a friend about the subject of Paxlovid rebound. She also took Paxlovid, but is still testing positive about a week after the treatment ended. She shared an email from her doctor, which I cited in my own message. 

The way I see it, your doctor and my pharmacist are saying the same thing. Paxlovid doesn’t cause any virus lingering in the body after the 5-day treatment regimen to somehow pop back up and reinfect the person. It’s the Covid virus that caused the initial infection and it’s the Covid virus that causes any negative test result at the end of treatment to turn into a positive test result later on.

As your doctor correctly noted, Paxlovid puts a brake on replication of the virus during the 5-day treatment period. If a person’s body/immune system wasn’t able to clear all of the virus during that period, or if the person for one reason or another didn’t respond properly to the Paxlovid treatment, then any residual virus can emerge after the Paxlovid brake is turned off after the 5-days.

So if a positive test result occurs after Paxlovid, as has happened with you, this doesn’t mean Paxlovid is responsible. Paxlovid did what it should. And the Covid virus is doing what it does so well, replicate if given the chance. 

I look at the situation this way. Without Paxlovid, you or I might well have spent several weeks suffering from moderate symptoms. That was the case with a woman I know, somewhat younger than me, who got Covid and emailed me, “I hope you get over it more quickly than I did.” I recall she was sick for a couple of weeks.

So we take Paxlovid. It puts a brake on the virus replicating in our bodies. We have mild symptoms. If after the brake is released, some residual virus causes a positive test result some days after the end of Paxlovid treatment, we’re still considerably better off than if we hadn’t taken Paxlovid at all, because of the 5-day brake period, which enabled our bodies to better fight the comparatively small amount of virus that the Paxlovid brake couldn’t stop.

Like you said, it seems to come down to word choices. The word “rebound” conjures up an image of something happening that shouldn’t, whereas actually a positive test result after the 5-day course of treatment isn’t surprising, if some residual virus remained in the body after the five days. Some people seem to view “rebound” as meaning that Paxlovid caused two Covid infections rather than just one, which makes them reluctant to take Paxlovid. Of course, there was just one Covid infection.

They don’t realize that if they qualify to get Paxlovid, they should take it, since whatever happens with the course of treatment, they’ll be better off than if they just let Covid run its course in their body without Paxlovid. I took another rapid test about an hour ago: negative. So that’s good news. Of course, I’ll re-test myself every few days to see if a positive test result emerges.

I couldn’t tell from your message whether you took a rapid test after the 5-day course of treatment. If so, I’m curious if it was negative. 

I test positive for Covid. And feel positive about Paxlovid.

Well, it was a good run without ever getting Covid -- about three years since the nasty virus came to the United States in early 2020. 

After I had trouble sleeping last Saturday night, feeling on edge for no discernible reason, I took a rapid Covid test Sunday morning, which came back negative, even though my voice was a bit hoarse.

But Monday morning I had some nasal congestion and increased hoarseness, so I tested again. Yikes! A positive result. 

That kicked off a flurry of phone calls. First, I called my Salem Health family physician's office. I talked with someone who described my treatment options after I told her that I'd like to get Paxlovid given my age (74) and understandable desire to avoid a serious case of Covid.

She explained that a complication was that Paxlovid interacted with several prescription medications that I was taking. OK, I told her, no problem. I just won't take the medications while on the five-day Paxlovid course of treatment.

I then was told that they use the Salem Health pharmacy and that I'd be getting a call from a pharmacist. Probably the same day. Around 2:30 in the afternoon I got that call.

The Salem Health pharmacist was wonderfully clear.

He had me repeat what the person in my doctor's office had told me (which probably was in my chart): stop taking all of my other prescription medications for the five-day Paxlovid treatment, plus three days afterward, waiting another two days to restart the most problematic medication, Lovastatin (10 mg).

Again I said, no problem. I told the pharmacist I wasn't going to suffer much, if at all, from not taking the other medications. I'd much rather shorter the course of my Covid infection and lower the risk of getting Long Covid, which a VA study indicates is about a 25% risk reduction. 

Laurel, my wife, picked up the no-cost Paxlovid prescription for me. I took my first dose of three pills late Monday afternoon on the same day I tested positive for Covid. So I felt good that it was possible to get going with Paxlovid so soon (Paxlovid needs to be started within five days of having Covid symptoms). 

Here's how Paxlovid works.

Paxlovid is an antiviral therapy that consists of two separate medications packaged together. When you take your three-pill dose, two of those pills will be nirmatrelvir, which inhibits a key enzyme that the COVID virus requires in order to make functional virus particles. After nirmatrelvir treatment, the COVID virus that is released from the cells is no longer able to enter uninfected cells in the body, which, in turn, stops the infection. The other is ritonavir, a drug that was once used to treat HIV/AIDS but is now used to boost levels of antiviral medicines. 

As a COVID-19 treatment, ritonavir essentially shuts down nirmatrelvir’s metabolism in the liver, so that it doesn’t move out of your body as quickly, which means it can work longer—giving it a boost to help fight the infection.

At the moment I'm 3 1/2 days into the 5-day treatment. Starting today, Thursday, I'm almost symptom free.

My nasal congestion is just about gone. I cough occasionally, but way less than before. The only annoying side effect is some diarrhea, along with a bit of a metallic taste in my mouth for several hours after taking a dose.

Regarding the oft-heard Paxlovid "rebound effect," where Covid symptoms recur after going away, the Salem Health Pharmacist told me that this isn't due to Paxlovid, but to Covid. I believe he's right, after some Googling of this subject. For example, see here and here.

Not everyone with Covid is eligible to get Paxlovid. Based on my experience, I recommend that if you have Covid, ask if you can be prescribed Paxlovid.

I didn't like "Everything Everywhere All at Once." I have company.

After learning that Everything Everywhere All at Once got eleven Oscar nominations, I wanted to see this movie.

Through the good graces of Apple TV, I found that I could watch it at no cost on the Showtime App, courtesy of our DirecTV subscription that includes Showtime.

After spending 132 minutes watching the movie over a span of several days and finishing it tonight, that was exactly how much the movie was worth to me. Nothing. Or at least, very little.

Though there were brief periods at the beginning and end of Everything where I felt connected to the characters and interested in the plot, I felt like turning off the TV numerous times while suffering through what I"m pretty sure was the least enjoyable Best Picture nominee I've ever seen.

A review in The New Yorker describes how I felt about the movie, albeit in much clearer and more sophisticated language. (Its subtitle is "There's no there there."

The movie world is awash in fantasy, and that’s a problem, because fantasy is the riskiest genre. There’s no middle ground with fantasy because there’s no ground at all. Even a middling work of realism inevitably rests on experience, observation, and knowledge, but a mediocre fantasy is a transparent emptiness, a contrivance of parts that aren’t held together by the atmosphere of social life.

It’s the triple axel of cinema: when successful, fantasies are glorious, seemingly expanding the very nature of experience by way of speculative imagination. Some of the best movies of recent years—“The Future,” “Us,” and “The French Dispatch”—are fantasies, and their artistic success is doubled by their very resistance to the corporatization of fantasy in the overproduction and overmanagement of superhero franchises.

But a failed fantasy is a wipeout, and that’s the simplest and clearest way to describe “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a new film (opening Friday) by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (a duo called Daniels). Were it not for the appealing and charismatic presence of its cast, it would leave nothing but a vapor puff that disperses when the lights go on.

Couldn't agree more.

For most of the film, there's a lot of cheesy Kung Fu'ish fighting scenes, interspersed with shots of people screaming loudly. The multiverse plot, such as it is, was confusing to follow, in part because I like to use subtitles, but when I asked Siri to turn on subtitles, the response was that they're already on.

Which was true as regards the subtitles shown when  Chinese was being spoken. But my problem was understanding the main characters when they spoke in English about what was going on in the fantasy world of the multiverse.

Of course, since it didn't take me long to realize that I really didn't care what the movie was all about, after a while the fact that the "failed fantasy" of Everywhere failed to interest me fit with the fact that I never got all that interested in the movie's realistic scenes either.

That said, I started off enjoying the portrait of a Chinese-American family trying to manage a laundromat while dealing with their intergenerational problems. But once the movie veered off into multiverse fantasies that seemed way too confusing to me, I realized how Everywhere could have been a better film with just a bit of fantasy and a much larger dose of realism.

A review in The Guardian says it well. (It also has a good subtitle: nothing nowhere over a long period of time. 

This hipster hypefest is an adventure in alternative existences and multiverse realities from writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – the “Daniels” – who in 2016 gave us the Jonzeian comedy Swiss Army Man.

Everything Everywhere All at Once has been critically swooned over in the US and pretty much everywhere else, so it’s disconcerting to find it frantically hyperactive and self-admiring and yet strangely laborious, dull and overdetermined, never letting up for a single second to let us care about, or indeed believe in, any of its characters.

There are some nice gags and sprightly Kubrickian touches, and one genuinely shocking scene when Evelyn fat-shames her daughter – an authentically upsetting moment of family dysfunction that seems to come from another film, one in a parallel universe.

But this mad succession of consequence-free events, trains of activity which get cancelled by a switch to another parallel world, means that nothing is actually at stake, and the film becomes a formless splurge of Nothing Nowhere Over a Long Period of Time. Again, this film is much admired and arrives adorned with saucer-eyed critical notices … I wish I liked it more.

Bill Maher has become an irritating purveyor of liberal myths

I've been watching Bill Maher ever since his Politically Incorrect days. When he turned up on HBO with his Real Time With Bill Maher, twenty seasons ago, I watched him there.


I still enjoy Maher. But the past few seasons, and maybe longer than that, Maher often acts like a caricature of a one-time liberal who now takes excessive pleasure in attacking what he believes are overly "woke" Democratic/progressive positions.

I've got no problem with Maher doing that, so long as he doesn't twist the truth to make his point. Which, he does with disturbing regularity.

Last Friday's Real Time show was a good example of this.

His guests were Bari Weiss and Tim Ryan. I guess you could call them centrists. Ryan, a Democrat, ran for Ohio Senator against JD Vance in the 2022 midterm election. Weiss was recruited by Elon Musk to make a big ado about not much in the recent Twitter Files saga.

A central theme of Friday's show was how the American people are fed up with the woke positions of Democrats. (This has been a theme of previous shows also.) 

So there was a lot of tut-tutting about how in many parts of Ohio, and rural areas generally, having a "D" after your name can be a death knell for your election chances. OK, an obvious point, but fair enough. But I keep waiting for Maher, Ryan, or Weiss to bring up an equally valid point.

In virtually every large big city in the United States, having a "R" after your name pretty much dooms your election chances.

So why doesn't Maher spend as much time asking what Republicans need to do to win back urban voters as he does asking what Democrats need to do to win back rural voters? I also couldn't understand why Maher and his guests didn't bring up the 2022 midterm results.

There sure wasn't much of a sign that voters were fed up with Democrats because of their excessive wokeness. The Dems picked up a seat in the Senate, maintaining control of that chamber. And the Dem losses in House races was hugely below expectations. They took control of some Governorships and state legislatures.

Rather than House Republicans having a 30-40 seat majority as many pundits predicted, the GOP just has a narrow four seat majority.

Thus it seems clear that the Democratic Party is alive and well in the United States, contrary to all the doom and gloom about Dem popularity expressed by Maher and his guests.

Another thing that irritates me whenever Maher brings it up is the notion that all across the country, young children are being indoctrinated by teachers in the supposed Liberal Commandment of gender fluidity.

Maher keeps claiming that rather than teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, and other core competencies, liberal elementary school teachers are spending much of their classroom time talking about how wonderful it is that some children have two mommy's or two daddy's.

Bill Maher loves to cite individual anecdotes as if this proves anything. Actually, it doesn't. If Maher presented solid data on how frequently teachers of young children are bringing up gender issues, and used an anecdote to back up those data, that'd be fine.

Instead, Maher likes to talk about a single anecdote that he or his staff dredged up, then uses that anecdote to draw broad-brush conclusions about how wokeness is destroying our educational system. 

That's a lousy way to make an argument. Maher should know better, but he appears to have entered a largely fact-free zone on his show. 

Lastly, I can't disagree with Maher's often-stated point that obesity is a big problem in our country. He's correct that obesity is a risk factor if someone gets Covid. But it's a bit simplistic for Maher to say that all it takes for someone to lose weight is will power. 

Meaning, just eat less and you'll lose weight. I've read about numerous scientific studies that show how some people have a natural, probably genetic, propensity to obesity. Sometimes a person's metabolism is out of whack, which makes it really tough for them to lose weight. Medication and surgery may be called for in some cases of obesity.

When Maher and his guests talked about the horrible food in the school meal program, they didn't mention that during the Trump years, it was Republicans who stood in the way of making school breakfasts and lunches more nutritious. 

On Friday, USDA Deputy Under Secretary Brandon Lipps proposed new rules for the Food and Nutrition Service that would allow schools to cut the amount of vegetables and fruits required at lunch and breakfasts while giving them license to sell more pizza, burgers and fries to students. The agency is responsible for administering nutritional programs that feed nearly 30 million students at 99,000 schools.

Arcimoto seems to be going out of business

I've been a long-time fan of Arcimoto, a company based in Eugene, fifty miles south of Salem, where I live.

Arcimoto makes the FUV (Fun Utility Vehicle), a three-wheeled semi-enclosed electric sort-of-motorcycle. In Oregon you don't have to wear a helmet while driving it, so it's a unique blend of a car and motorcycle.

I've been following the fortunes of Arcimoto for a long time. Heck, this blog even has an "Arcimoto" category with ten posts in it, including this one. As I said in my first post back in July 2018, I've got both Arcimoto anticipation and anxiety:

I've been following the saga of Arcimoto, a three-wheeled electric FUV (Fun Utility Vehicle) for a long time. So long, I can't remember when I plunked down $100 for a pre-order reservation. 

I must have been among the first to do this, since my reservation number is #129, and I believe they total more than 2,700 now.

Over the years I've come close to ordering a FUV, but I never did. Something always bothered me about Arcimoto. 

Lack of usable real-world driving range, since I live six miles from Salem in a rural area with some large hills between me and town, and the FUV range is 102 miles in the city and considerably less in non-city driving. Lack of local servicing. Lack of long-term reviews. Lack of free delivery (last I knew, I'd have to pay $1,000 to get a FUV delivered). And crucially, lack of evidence that Arcimoto was a viable company.

I wanted to see some solid evidence that Arcimoto was going to survive before plunking down around $20,000 for a FUV, a large increase from the $12,000 that the FUV originally was supposed to sell for. I had no interest in being one of the people who bought a FUV just before Arcimoto went out of business.

Which looks like it could happen fairly soon. 

On January 17, Arcimoto announced a $12 million public offering at $3 a share. Not surprisingly, since Arcimoto stock was trading around $6 at the time, the price of Arcimoto sank like a stone to well below $3. 

Now, maybe the $12 million will buy Arcimoto time to figure out how to make the company survive. But the offering prospectus said that production has halted at the newly constructed Eugene manufacturing facility, and lots of employees have been laid off. An Oregonian story tells the sorry tale.

Shares in electric vehicle manufacturer Arcimoto plunged Wednesday after the company announced it has shut down production at its Eugene factory because it is nearly out of money.

Arcimoto moved to sell $12 million in additional shares at $3 each – less than half of Tuesday’s closing price. The stock plunged nearly 60% in morning trading, to $2.51.

“We have halted our production of vehicles and will require substantial additional funding to resume production,” Arcimoto warned in a regulatory filing accompanying the stock offering. The company warned that financing may not be available on any terms, and if not, “we will be required to cease our operations and/or seek bankruptcy protection.”

Arcimoto makes a three-wheel electric motorcycle it calls the Fun Utility Vehicle, or FUV. It was briefly among Oregon’s most highly publicized young companies, with a market value that peaked above $1 billion in 2021. The company is now worth less than $7 million.

Arcimoto struggled against supply chain issues as its new factory opened last year, and it’s never been clear that its FUVs have mass-market appeal.

Arcimoto laid off 50 and furloughed another 66 employees last fall to cut costs. But that hasn’t been enough. Subsequent financial filings revealed the company’s bank account has frequently been close to empty and it’s had to sell additional shares to stay afloat, diluting existing investors’ stake. Arcimoto had 250 employees at the end of 2021, the last period for which it has reported workforce figures.

Among the tumult, the company abruptly replaced founder and CEO Mark Frohnmayer last year after his arrest for driving one of Arcimoto’s vehicles while intoxicated.

The company produced just 252 over the most recent six months for which Arcimoto reported results and delivered just 115 to customers.

For the third quarter, which ended in September, Arcimoto reported $2 million in revenue. The company lost $17 million during the period.

Arcimoto said in October it was seeking “strategic alternatives,” employing a euphemism companies use when they put their business up for sale. But no buyer has emerged for the rapidly dwindling business.

So $12 million isn't going to last very long when the company has been losing $17 million a quarter. I still like the looks of the FUV. If someone gave me one, I'd happily drive it around. But there's no way I'd buy a FUV when Arcimoto is on such a shaky financial footing.

I'm just glad that I wasn't one of the people who bought Arcimoto stock when the shares were flying high. Now they've come back to earth with a resounding thud. This is the one year price history.

Our dog's hip dysplasia diagnosis worries us

Pets are almost as important as children to those of us who no longer have children in the house. Or, in the case of my wife, have never had a child.

So when we got a phone call from our vet tonight, giving us the results of X-rays taken when we wanted to know why Mooka, our Husky mix, was limping at times, what she told us was really disturbing.

But not to Mooka. That's a plus side of being a dog. You don't know that you've been diagnosed with right hip dysplasia with degenerative joint disease. 

What shocked my wife, who has owned several purebred German Shepherds, a breed prone to hip dysplasia, is that a mixed breed dog who is only about five years old (she was adopted from a shelter, so we're not sure exactly how old Mooka is) would have hip dysplasia at such a relatively young age.

And not only that. Mooka also may have herniated discs in her spine, because she got a IVDD diagnosis too. That's Intervertebral Disc Disease. 

There's treatments for Mooka's problems. So we're hoping she still has quite a few years of happy running around in her future. At the moment we're just dealing with the unpleasant news that arrived this evening. 

Mooka is still the same dog she was before we got the report from our vet.

It's my wife and I who are changed, because we love Mooka and had been visualizing her being healthy for much longer, since mixed breeds/mutts tend to have fewer health problems than purebred dogs. But life is full of surprises, often unwelcome ones.

Apple Support hindered and helped my iPhone 14 setups

This tale of my three phone calls to Apple Support a few days ago has a happy ending. My wife and I are enjoying the iPhone 14 Pro Max devices that we decided to get after using iPhone 8's since 2017.

So we were six freaking iPhone generations old, something that hasn't come close to happening since we joined the iPhone cult way back when. (Too long ago for me to remember.)

When the new phones arrived in the mail after ordering them from Verizon, our cellular carrier, I waited a day before taking the plunge into setting them up. That had gone well the last time we got fresh phones, but like I said, this was over five years ago.

I decided to set up my iPhone 14 first. 

It didn't take long for a problem to pop up. All I'd done was choose English for my language and United States for my location. Then a message appeared that said, I'm pretty sure, "It may take a few minutes to activate your iPhone."

OK. No big deal. Except after fifteen minutes I began to get worried. After 45 minutes I was really worried and Googled the message. Various pieces of advice popped up, such as this one. 

I was reluctant to restart the iPhone 14, though, in part because while I thought the message meant that the phone was activating my Verizon account, I wasn't absolutely sure about this. Out of an abundance of caution I decided to phone Apple Support.

Having had Apple products since the Apple II+ computer debuted in the 1980s, I've had many encounters with Apple Support, almost always really positive. My wife and I buy AppleCare with every device we get -- computers, iPhones, iPads, AirPods -- because the technical support people solve our problems so easily.

That made what happened when I phoned Apple Support both surprising and disturbing. After I explained that my new iPhone 14 was stuck on the activation screen, the woman I was talking to asked how many apps I had.

"A lot," I told her, adding that I'd deleted quite a few apps before starting the Quick Start process of transferring data and settings from my old phone to the new one. "Well," she said, "that can take a few hours."

Not a great answer, but I assumed that she knew what she was talking about. So I went back to waiting and periodically staring at the message on the phone that activation could take several minutes. After several hours, and some additional Googling, I was convinced that more help was needed.

Calling Apple Support again, this time I got a woman who told me I should restart the iPhone 14. Since the iPhone came with zero instructions, I asked her how to do this. She told me to hold down the top left button while pressing the button on the right side.

That, of course, is not how iPhones restart, ever since the iPhone 10. Actually you hold down either volume button on the right side while pressing the right side button. In fact, the top left "button" isn't a button at all, but a little switch that silences the phone.

When I told the woman that the phone wouldn't restart, she put me on hold to research what every Apple Support person should know: how to restart an iPhone. That gave me time to do my own Googling, so by the time she returned with the correct approach I'd already restarted the phone.

Now it truly did take just a few minutes to activate my iPhone 14, and the rest of the setup process went smoothly.

That evening I decided to setup my wife's iPhone 14.

The activation went fine, but after apps had been transferred to the new phone, after a while I realized that none of them were downloading. That perplexed me, until I noticed that there was no wi-fi symbol at the top of the screen, just one bar showing our crappy Verizon signal strength, since we live in a rural area with no line of sight to a cell tower.

I restarted my wife's phone. I turned wi-fi off and on. Nothing worked to get our Starlink satellite broadband recognized by the iPhone 14. It showed up in Settings, but a spinning ball showed that even though the password was correct, the phone wasn't connecting to Starlink.

This time when I phoned Apple Support, perhaps because it was around 9 pm, I got a woman with an Indian accent, which I viewed as a positive omen. 

At first she had me do what I'd already done: restart the phone and turn wi-fi off and on. Then she asked if it would be OK to do the Screen Share thing. Sure, I said. Soon a red arrow appeared on the iPhone 14, but she said that she was unable to view the screen.

That caused her to ask if I could use the camera on my wife's iPhone 8 to show the screen on the iPhone 14. That took some doing, since I had to hold the old phone in one hand while doing things on the new iPhone with my other hand.

At one point I turned the front facing camera on, which briefly showed my face/head, causing the woman to say emphatically, "No, just show the screen on the new iPhone!" I got the impression that in Apple Support it is a no-no for a Screen Share to show the person asking for help, which makes sense, given the potential for weird customer behavior.

Anyway, she also needed to put me on hold and apparently seek help from a higher power in Apple Support. When she came back on the line, she told me to do something that I've forgotten, but am pretty sure was to reset the network settings. 

That got the Starlink wi-fi working. I was thrilled. I said, "Thanks so much for solving the problem. Well, thanks to you and whoever you talked with. And for Apple Support in general." So after a bad experience with Apple Support, I had a good experience. 

And our phones are a joy to use.

Another reason to hate what Elon Musk is doing to Twitter

It wasn't so long ago that I looked upon Elon Musk with admiration. Maybe even with a bit of adoration.

After all, his Space X Starlink satellite internet system had rescued me and my wife from the hell of 7Mbps CenturyLink DSL, bringing our rural south Salem home into broadband heaven. 

And I visualized owning one of his Tesla cars someday. Though they have their downsides (don't like relying so much on a touchscreen rather than normal controls), Tesla jumpstarted the electric car revolution that's bringing the internal combustion engine closer to a well-deserved global goodbye.

When he bought Twitter, I figured he wouldn't screw it up too much. After all, Space X and Tesla are successful companies, offering innovative products and services. 

But from what I've read, the difference between them and Twitter is that competent managers stood between Musk and goings-on at Space X and Tesla -- whereas so far Musk has been very hands-on with Twitter, making a string of questionable decisions that harm both Twitter and users of Twitter.

Like, me. I love Twitter. But I hate what Musk is doing to Twitter, the latest outrage occurring yesterday.

That's when third-party Twitter apps stopped working, including Tweetbot, which I've been using because it is hugely better than the official Twitter app and web site. Here's the disturbing message that now appears on Tweetbot when I try to use it on my iPhone to access my Twitter feed.

This is so typical of Elon Musk's crappy mismanagement approach. Tweetbot and the other third-party Twitter apps have been widely popular. They enable more people to use Twitter. Users of the apps generate content for Twitter.

If Musk knew what he was doing, he would have scheduled an online Zoom meeting with the people who head up the third-party Twitter apps, most or all of whom are running small businesses with just a handful of employees.

I'm sure they'd be willing to listen to whatever concerns Musk has with the third-party apps, including the fact that they don't share ads that appear on Twitter. I'd be willing to pay more for my monthly Tweetbot subscription if Musk demanded that some money go to Twitter to compensate for the lack of ads.

But no, it looks like Musk decided to just shut down the apps without notice, and so far without explanation.

Some of them are still working, including the Apple version of Fenix, which I'm using at the  moment because I found the "native" Twitter app to be so horrendous, I'd rather stop using Twitter if that was my only option.

I have company. 

I agree about the official Twitter app being a terrible experience. I gave it a try yesterday before I discovered Fenix. 

Lots of ads. Many tweets from people I don't follow and aren't interested in following. Really confusing layout. No way I could see to tell which tweets were new and which I'd already read. All in all, a vastly less enjoyable experience than what Tweetbot and the other third-party apps offer.

After forcing myself to use the official Twitter app for a while, I got fed up and felt that if this is the only way I could use Twitter, I'd give up on Twitter. Hard to see how that benefits Twitter, but maybe Elon Musk doesn't care if he turns many off from the company he bought.

Hopefully, though, Musk will realize that making it impossible for third-party apps to access user accounts, he's harming himself and Twitter. But I'm not counting on this.

Streaming shows I liked (but you may not)

We're all different. That's a truism. But this doesn't stop me from wanting to share streaming shows I've watched recently on Netflix, Apple TV+, and Hulu that appealed to me a lot, in hopes that maybe others would like them as much as I did.

Here they are.

Slow Horses - Apple TV+
This is a British spy series with an appealing twist. The MI5 agents who are the centerpiece of the show are castoffs sentenced to spy-world purgatory for misdeeds they committed. So they haven't been fired, just consigned to live out their days doing usually boring menial work in a dingy backwater building. 

Gary Oldman is terrific as the cynical leader of the group. He casts off humorous insults to his team in a marvelous fashion, though deep down (very deep down), his character loves them. Or at least likes them. Season 2 was better than Season 1, which was very good itself.

The Recruit - Netflix
Another fresh look at the world of spying, this time from the American side of the Atlantic. We follow the ups and downs of a young 20-something lawyer newly hired by the CIA. He quickly learns that in an organization dedicated to scheming, the people he works with can't be trusted because they're schemers.

Just as he is. Like Slow Horses, The Recruit is a pleasing blend of action, humor, and personal relationships. I don't know if it's a realistic reflection of what it's like to work at the CIA, but it rings true to me. I look forward to a Season 2, though I found the final episode of Season 1 to be unsatisfying.

Fleishman is in Trouble - Hulu
A doctor with marriage problems who lives in New York City. Seems like a familiar premise for a show. That's why my expectations for it weren't very high. But Fleishman is in Trouble was enjoyable viewing. Mostly.

I found the darker episodes of the series to be kind of difficult to watch, since they were such a contrast with the lighter, humorous episodes. Clair Danes plays Dr. Toby Fleishman's wife. I'm a big fan of Danes, having loved her in Homeland. Here she's another mentally disturbed character who's fascinating to watch as she emotes her struggles.

What I liked the most about this show was how skillfully it portrayed all the characters as both flawed and virtuous. Just when I thought I knew who the "good guys" and "bad guys" were, I was surprised to learn that the good were also bad, and the bad were also good.

Social media reform is needed, but the market mainly should decide

Today NBC's Meet the Press devoted its Sunday morning hour entirely to a discussion of social media: what's wrong with the way things are now on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and such, along with what needs to be done to fix those problems.

It's a complicated subject with no easy answers. Here's what stuck in my mind after watching the program.

Algorithms. Social media sites typically use computer algorithms to determine what gets shown to users. (Twitter is an exception, at least if a third party app is used to access Twitter, which I do. I only see tweets from the people and organizations I follow, and I see all of their tweets, in chronological order.)

This encourages anger and divisiveness, since negativity generally draws more views than positivity, cute animal videos notwithstanding. Several Meet the Press guests called for more transparency in how the algorithms work. But it's unclear what this means.

A Republican congressman, who made good sense, argued that government regulation of the algorithms could cause more problems that it solves. Who decides what is divisive or misinformation? Even hate speech, while easy to decry, is difficult to pin down. Stand-up comedians often make jokes about "sacred cows" in our culture. Are those jokes hate speech or free speech?

Maybe I have a libertarian side when it comes to social media, but I'm wary of regulations that tell social media companies what content to prioritize to their users. So what's the alternative?

Market forces. I agree with several people on this special Meet the Press program who said that if social media companies don't operate in a fashion that users like, many of those users will head elsewhere. To some extent this has happened with Twitter after Elon Musk took over and mostly dismantled company efforts aimed at curbing extreme hate speech and harmful disinformation.

The woman who was a Facebook whistleblower in 2021, I think it was, tried to make an analogy between government requiring seat belts and other safety equipment in cars and regulation of social media companies. 

However, it's a bit of a stretch to do this.

Cars are an essential part of life for most people. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter aren't. Sure, they're addictive, useful, fun, and entertaining. But social media doesn't kill tens of thousands of people a year. And many social media users enjoy them just the way they are.

If someone finds Facebook, or whatever, distasteful, they can stop using it. When enough people do this, the social media company will realize that the market has spoken and changes need to be made.

Section 230. This is the part of the Communications Decency Act that prevents social media providers from being responsible for content put up by users. Here's how the Electronic Frontier Foundation describes Section 230.

Section 230 says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230). In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do.

The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of "interactive computer service providers," including basically any online service that publishes third-party content. Though there are important exceptions for certain criminal and intellectual property-based claims, CDA 230 creates a broad protection that has allowed innovation and free speech online to flourish.

Most of the Meet the Press panel members seemed to think that keeping Section 230 is a good idea. I agree. It would be a nightmare if social media companies were legally responsible for all of the content uploaded by its users. This likely would lead to increased censorship of that content, since social media companies would want to be sure that they couldn't be sued by someone upset with user-generated content.

A better approach, someone said, is what happened with Alex Jones. He was successfully sued by parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre after Jones repeatedly and loudly claimed the children weren't really dead. And Fox News is being sued by Dominion voting machines after hosts on the network said that the machines produced fraudulent election results. 

So in egregious cases the legal system can be used to punish libel. There's no need to make social media companies watchdogs over everything users upload on their platforms. 

Section 230 is meaningful to me because I'm an extremely small social media platform, having three blogs, two of which date back to 2003 and 2004. I've always allowed comments on my blogs. I go back and forth on moderating comments. Mostly I haven't moderated them, though occasionally I'll delete a comment that doesn't fit with my comment policies.

Here's what the Electronic Frontier Foundation says about blogs and Section 230.

CDA 230 also offers its legal shield to bloggers who act as intermediaries by hosting comments on their blogs. Under the law, bloggers are not liable for comments left by readers, the work of guest bloggers, tips sent via email, or information received through RSS feeds. This legal protection can still hold even if a blogger is aware of the objectionable content or makes editorial judgments.

Thus I'm very much against Congress messing around with Section 230, unless the changes were minor and didn't alter its free speech provisions.