The least fun part of working on Ghost is dealing with Github, which is really sad.
Everyone has their pet issue, whether design or accessibility or security or internationalisation or performance or SEO or or or… the list goes on. Everyone thinks theirs is most important and that we should work on right now and they can’t believe that we would ignore it. It’s always absolutely outrageous.
How open source works is: If you want something, you can build it.
That’s the freedom which open source gives you. We build a base product which you can adapt, extend or integrate however you want. You can’t do that with closed source platforms. Open source code = the freedom for you to do things with it. But that’s not how many people understand it.
Developers regularly show up on Github, rage at us for something like not supporting Postgres – and then we say “ok so are you going to write and maintain Postgres support for Ghost?” and they say “of course not, I don’t have time for that!” – and then occasionally they’ll go on Twitter and tell all their followers to give us hell. As if organising a mob and shouting louder is the best way to get a bunch of people writing free code to do what you want.
Unfortunately I think Github itself has a lot to do with this. The product has become too transactional – more support tool than collaboration. And Github themselves show remarkable disinterest in the open source community as a whole – they give us beta access to test new features every so often. That’s about it. There’s no wider involvement at all.
Our core team tends to do the “real work” in private issues nowadays. The signal to noise ratio is just too overwhelming.
The American Spirit Is Alive in Texas
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‘Hold the line,’ Jim Mattis exhorted soldiers. In the face of a disaster, civilians are doing just that.
Most Americans, including Texans, don’t have more than a few hundred dollars in available savings. Most live close to the edge, paycheck to paycheck. Most homeowners in Houston don’t have flood insurance. When they’re lucky enough to get out of the shelter, they’ll return to houses that are half-ruined—wet, moldy, dank, with no usable furniture—and with kids coming down with colds and stomach ailments from stress or from standing water that holds bacteria and viruses. It will be misery for months. When the trauma is over, there’ll be plenty of time for debate. Do we need to hold more in reserve for national disasters? Do local zoning laws need rethinking? All worthy questions—for later.
.. There is such a thing as tact. It has to do with a sense of touch—an ability to apprehend another’s position or circumstances, and doing or saying the right thing. There is, believe it or not, such a thing as political tact. It too involves knowing the positions of others, and knowing what time it is.
Politicians, don’t use this disaster to score points or rub your ideology in somebody’s face or make your donors smile by being small, not big.
.. “The only way this great big experiment you and I call America is gonna survive is if we’ve got tough hombres like you. . . . We don’t frickin’ scare, that’s the bottom line.
“You’re a great example for our country right now. It’s got some problems—you know it and I know it. It’s got problems that we don’t have in the military. And you just hold the line, my fine young soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines. You just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it, of being friendly to one another. That’s what Americans owe to one another—we’re so doggone lucky to be Americans.”
He ended: “I flunked retirement, OK? Only reason I came back was to serve alongside young people like you, who are so selfless and frankly so rambunctious.”
This was the voice of true moral authority, authority earned through personal sacrifice. Speeches like that come only from love.
Rio Games Highlight Problems With the Olympic Model
As we depart, Rio de Janeiro is left with stadiums for which it has little use and swimming pools far removed from the working class who could dearly use them. Tens of thousands of residents were displaced, a golf course sits atop a former nature preserve ..
.. The greatest honor we can pay to a nation is to take its maladies seriously. Brazil overthrew a dictatorship and remains a gloriously messy democracy.
.. Our Salt Lake 2002 Winter Olympics were a bacchanalia of bribes, doping and corruption.
.. he could recall no reporters poking around impoverished corners of London during its Summer Olympics. If that is so, that is our failure.
.. What if the I.O.C. instead had awarded Rio de Janeiro three cycles of Olympics: 2016, 2020 and 2024?
.. If city leaders did not offer measurable progress, the I.O.C. could withdraw the next two rounds of Games.
The Anxieties of Impotence
The Republican establishment thinks the grass roots have the power but the grass roots think the reverse. The unions think the corporations have the power but the corporations think the start-ups do. Regulators think Wall Street has the power but Wall Street thinks the regulators do. The Pew Research Center asked Americans, “Would you say your side has been winning or losing more?” Sixty-four percent of Americans, with majorities of both parties, believe their side has been losing more.
.. Americans are beset by complex, intractable problems that don’t have a clear villain: technological change displaces workers; globalization and the rapid movement of people destabilize communities; family structure dissolves; the political order in the Middle East teeters, the Chinese economy craters, inequality rises, the global order frays, etc.
.. Those institutions have been weakened of late. Parties have been rendered weak by both campaign finance laws and the Citizens United decision, which have cut off their funding streams and given power to polarized super-donors who work outside the party system.
.. The fact is, for all the problems we may have with Wall Street or Washington, our biggest problems are systemic — the disruptions caused by technological progress and globalization, mass migration, family breakdown and so on. There’s no all-controlling Wizard of Oz to slay.