Staying apart keeps us together

lying government propaganda

Lets do the maths and see if this is correct. Here is a simple calculation based on figures that are widely available and making assumptions that allow for the worst case possible.

Here are the facts, I´ll base my calculation on, they are all based on the worst possible outcomes anywhere in the world:

1. In the worst effected cities in the world COVID-19 has killed so far 1 in every 600 people. Note this is at a city level. The worst country (Peru) is actually 1 in more than 1000.
2. The median age of death of coronavirus in Australia 82.5 years. I can´t find a wordlwide figure but figures in other countries are similar. So lets assume a mean age of death from COVID of 80 years.
3. A that age the average person (who has lived to 80) can expect to live anoter 10 years .

Lets crunch the numbers

365 days in the year * 10 years / 600 people = 6 days per person

So the maximum possible benefit per head for lockdown is an extra 6 days of life per person. I need to reiterate here this is the extreme upper bound of the benefit. If I rejigged these figures to account for the fact that the average covid death is an 82 year who is LESS healthy than average and that the worst country has a death rate better than 1 in 1000, then this figure is less than 1 day. If I rejigged it to allow for an average outcome worldwide the figure would less than 6 hours per person

So we have decimated the world economy and compromised personal liberty everywhere in the world for this. Obviously not everything in life is about crunching numbers but I don´t know about you but quality of life is a thing and I’d happily sacrifice 6 days of my life to live the last 6 months in a normal way.

We can all come to different conclusions on these decisions but these sort of figures reresent the real collective risk that covid poses to our society and to me it is sad that no one is talking about them.

Dont get me wrong, I love javscript, and I think the rest api is one of the best things to happen to WordPress but every time I read about someone usea front end framework to build a theme I shake my head.

A wise man once said,

just because you can doesn’t mean you should

This applies to so many things, especially JavaScript when used to output content.  In order to explain we all need to be reminded of the way the web is traditionally designed namely:

• HTML for con­tent
• Css for pre­sen­ta­tion
• Javascript for func­tion­al­ity

This combination might seem old hat but it was created by smart people with good reasons.

When done properly it has three major strengths

1. It conveys meaning
2. It is robust
3. It has a clear separation of concerns

However it can be slow so today many advocate using JavaScript to interract with apis to replace this traditional paradigm. This has  major advantage in that can be substantially faster as the client side javascript can request only the information that it needs. However it also means that javascript is now the creating the content as well as the providing the functionality

However lets just compare how this compares to the traditional approach. Namely:

Conveying meaning.  Yes javascript can convey an experience that may be indistunguishable to the eye BUT the web is not just a visual medium for humans. Machine like search engines, and screen readers are important and in most cases a javascript front end is invisible to these agents

Being robust. Javascript is a not a fully standardized lanaguage and is notorious for conflicts and errors, and being browser depe3ndent. So an error on a javascript front end usually means the whole site falls over. In contrast a traditional semantic html front end degrades gracefully

Separating concerns. In a JavaScript front end you are tightly coupling functionality with content and potentially presentation as well. This actually if you change the api or you change your javascript the whole thing falls over. In contrast html is html and if the JavaScript stops working you still have the html.

Javascript is important but its not a replacement for html. Its future is in rproviing functionality, both in enhancing the reading experience and in making the eually important area of creating, updating and deleting content on the web.

Finally I’d like to urge you that is you need speed work on the basics like http caching, or look to modern technologies like http/2 and service workers.

Instead I think the area where Worpress has dropped the ball is that sensible projects that could make its so much better are not being tackled, instead development seems to be based on UI improvements and quick wins. These are great but a better WordPress platform would make these sort of improvements easier. Indeed a better platform would enable people to build their own UI. Thus rendering the rolling MP6 (and similar initiatives) into the core moot (because developers would be rolling their own version of the dashboard through plugins).

Things like backpress, post to post relationships in core, or cleaning up the ridiculous wp db schema are not being tackled. These projects would make wp a better cms AND a better blogging engine. But they are not on the roadmap.

You can bet wp’s competitors are tacklings these sort of issues

However due to its blogging background it has one very substantial weakness. Namely there is no way of easily relating one post to another and detailing its realationship. Of course taxonomies can be used to group posts and provide some form of relationship. However this is not an elegant solution.

This issue has been raised before by the WordPress development team here. Some use cases are outlined, however, I think the discussion (which is now closed) misses the elephant in the room, semantics. WordPress claims to be a semantic personal publishing platform but until it has the ability to seamlessly and elegantly relate one post to another it will be nothing more than a publishing platform, and until it then exposes those relationships in an unabiguous machine (and human) readable format it will never be truly part of the semantic web.

Frustrated at this weakness I am releasing a series of plugins that will truly RDF enable WordPress.

The first is LH RDF. LH-RDF is a wordpress plugin that automatically creates a SIOC compliant RDF feed of wordpress posts, categories, tags, and author ojects. It comes with embedded content negotiation thus properly exposing WordPress’s existing linked data to the semantic web.

However I also pointed out to the domain name broker that given I have been using the name LocalHero in the area of local news are services for longer than 3 years I also have a common law trademark on the name in that category. She assured me she had passed this information on to her client.

A week ago I discovered that a Californian company LocalHero Inc offering local services are now trading under the name LocalHero (the same capitalization as my organization). This behaviour is likely illegal, being in contravention of my common law trademark to the term LocalHero in this category. More importantly this behaviour is definitely unethical and high hypocritical for a company for company dedicated to “helping people”.

It is likely i will be taking legal action however I have already started to prosecute this in the court of public opinion and therefore will be putting together a shame file of the people responsible. Stay tuned.