The Twitter Dev account:

Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead.

At least they gave some notice this time, but it’s emblematic of how seat-of-Musk’s-pants the whole company is now that they can’t even say yet what that pricing will be.

You might asking, “Wait a second, didn’t Twitter shut down all the APIs for developers a few weeks ago?” But those were just the APIs for full-fledged Twitter clients. Today’s announcement covers all the other ways Twitter APIs could heretofore be used for free. E.g. the bot I wrote back in 2010 to auto-tweet links to each new post on Daring Fireball — that bot will stop working next week unless I pay. I’ll wait to see what the prices are, but I doubt I’ll pay. (Update: Elon Musk, on Twitter, says “~$100/month”.)

There are zillions of tools and bots that use these APIs. Molly White posted a few examples. For example, Alt Text Reader is an automated account that sends back the alt text description for any image on Twitter (that has alt text). There are umpteen weather services, traffic alerts, and just plain fun goofy accounts that send automated tweets. Many of them are run for free and can’t pay; others just won’t pay. This will also break the ability to follow a Twitter account’s posts via RSS — a very cool feature in some feed readers like NetNewsWire.

I don’t know what Musk is thinking, but he obviously has the value proposition backwards. These accounts freely produce content Twitter users enjoy. If anything, Twitter should be paying them, not the other way around. It’s like if YouTube started charging creators to post their videos.

And, of course, another use case for these APIs are tools like Movetodon, that allow people new to Mastodon to find and follow the Mastodon accounts of people they follow on Twitter. Use it now, before it breaks. (And if you’ve already started using Mastodon and used Movetodon, remember that you can re-run it to find people who’ve started Mastodon accounts after the last time you checked.)

Racism and misogyny are on the ballot this year. Even white men can now feel the effects. I think that's what the last twelve years in the US have been about. Here's the story. George W. Bush was so awful, we needed an antidote, and we liked Obama. We liked how sassy he was, and smart, and how well he spoke, his confidence and ambition. The whole package. It was his moment. Trump is the reaction because there were a lot of Americans who felt tremendous fear and resentment in having a young sassy (they'd probably say uppity) black man as president, no matter that he brought the economy back from the wreck that the Repubs left us. Remember how they drove it into a ditch.

So in 2016 it was Trump vs HRC. But before that it was Sanders vs HRC. That's where I, a white man, learned how men keep women down. In the debates I was so angry that Sanders interrupted and screamed over HRC, his arms waved into her space. She had to take it. Could she respond in kind? No way. Not sure what the women's equivalent of uppity is, but it's a real thing. And because she was my candidate, I felt it, felt it in a way I had never felt it before. I was enraged by it. But it seems most people couldn't even see it.

The people who hated that a black man was president sure as hell weren't going to follow him with a woman president. No matter that she's smart as a whip, would have been a great president, and look who she was running against. What a slap in the face for women as equals -- that so many people chose a huckster, buffoon, Putin surrogate, man-child, tax evader, draft dodger, rich kid, criminal, instead of HRC. It really says something.

This morning while getting ready to write it hit me. The last four years have been a symbolic lynching of Barack Obama. Anyone who still approves of Trump, if they have a mind, must be driven by rage, the kind of rage that results in a young confident black man being strung up on a tree. They're willing to let a virus decimate the country in order to express their rage. Anyone who votes for Trump this time, imho, should lose the right to call themselves an American.

It was something of a puzzle to me why racism became the big issue this summer, as the virus was raging through our population. But it would have been even if there had been no virus. Maybe we don't realize it at a conscious level, but the humiliation of the last four years, even for white men in the US, has been that the hatred of blacks and women in our fellow Americans has been exposed, they can't hide from it now. It's out there for everyone to see.

It took a fully competent African-American president and a fully competent woman candidate for white men to really see it. Some of us liked the idea of putting racism and misogyny behind us, and others hated it. But it's fully out there now.

MLB should shut down, as should the NBA and NFL. Of all the leagues, the NBA has the most realistic approach to keeping the virus out of the game, but even that approach won't work. The disease is highly communicable. The tests are imperfect enough that the virus can get into the bubble, as it did with the Florida Marlins. The NFL, the craziest of the leagues, even wants to allow fans to attend their games. Major commercial sporting events are over until the virus is done. Same with schools, office buildings, mass transit, airlines, the White House.

Ben Schlappig, writing at One Mile at a Time:

Delta has been requiring passengers to wear masks on flights since early May. Initially enforcement was perhaps lax, given the vague wording of the rules, allowing exceptions for “people unable to keep a face covering in place, including children.”

However, as the use of face masks has become more political, Delta has also stepped up its enforcement. Bastian claims that Delta has placed 100 people on its “no fly list” over mask issues, and says that if you insist on not wearing a mask, he insists on you not flying Delta. As he explains:

“We’ve been steadily and rather aggressively stepping up our enforcement of the mask policy. You cannot board a Delta plane unless you have a mask on. If you board the plane and insist on not wearing a mask, we insist that you do not fly Delta into the future. We already have 100 people put onto that list.”

Even better:

On top of that, anyone who has a condition preventing them from wearing a mask should show up at the airport early to complete a “Clearance-to-Fly” process, which could take over an hour. This process includes a virtual consultation with a healthcare professional, who will consider circumstances, and could make exceptions on a case-by-case basis.

Delta is no longer using the “honor system” for wearing masks. Any passenger found to be making false claims about a disability or health condition in order to obtain an exemption can have travel privileges on all Delta flights suspended for as long as the airline is requiring passengers to wear face masks.

Bravo to Delta — every other airline should immediately adopt this same policy.