I have known quite a few of my contemporaries who are contemplating the next phase of their lives. In April, 4M people quit their jobs.  This used to be called retirement but now we need a better word to indicate more of a transition rather than a choice.  I now think of this differently. No longer is this the time to relax, to travel, to see the grandkids, to take up new hobbies or volunteer work.

This isn’t exactly a new idea. Pablo Casals once famously said that he was motivated to continue to practice the cello in his 90s because he was making progress.

One friend of mine is hyper-organized: he has five volunteer jobs — one for each day of the week to keep himself busy. Others have a part-time job that gives them some flexibility. As to travel — well, we have the virus to change those plans.

Gary Bolles in his first book, called The Next Rules of Work, plots out a new vision for how we relate to work, to jobs, to bosses, and to our lives. You can click here for my full review of his book. My takeaway for this blog post is the changing way we need to approach retirement — no matter what is your age.

For many years now you didn’t have to be receiving Social Security payouts to retire. I know plenty of teachers and military members who began working at age 20, and were able to retire with full benefits when they turned 40, often starting new careers.

When friends ask me if I am planning on retirement, I say no. And this is because I am completely aligned with Bolles’ Next Rules. I consider myself a lifelong learner, and designed my freelance business to ensure that I would always be learning something new about the tech fields that I write about. It wasn’t too hard: I imagine if I was writing about the sporting goods or home appliances businesses I would have a lot less learning to do year-on-year. (Maybe not, but you get my point.)

No matter where you are in your life, you have to figure out how to continue to learn new stuff. When we are working every weekday, we tend to have someone else force us into this learning-as-part-of-the-normal work process. But as more of us become gig workers, we have to create these situations on our own, and that is the manual that Bolles has constructed.

You could build it in, as “if it is Tuesday I volunteer at X” how my friend does. Or you could have other mechanisms that force the learning, such as a book club (where the group actually does read the assigned books), or a travel schedule (if we can ever get back to that again), or something else that forces you out of the house so you aren’t locked into daydrinking/Netflix bingeing cycles. Of course, for some of us that just may be an intermediate goal, which is fine.

So if you aren’t happy in your current job, think about making this transition to becoming a life-long learner. Don’t wait until you reach your 60s.

When I last checked in with Megan Squire, a computer science professor who specializes in tracking online hate trends, she was looking at the the far-right users of various messaging services. Last month she presented this paper about how this group has taken advantage of the DLive streaming video service to solicit donations and spread their horrible videos. Some of the Jan 6 Capitol rioters used DLive to broadcast their attack and exploits.

Unfortunately for these users, DLive also has a very robust and public API that allows researchers to track the flow of funds through their platform. Squire was able to examine the accounts of more than 100 different users, half of them active streamers and the other half either large-ticket donors or others of interest to her work. Some of these streamers can make $10k in a typical month in donations, providing a way to obtain regular income to these political extremists. While most of these funds comes from these donors, there is also funds that originate from lots of followers. These donations usually happen during the live broadcasts when the viewers purchase “lemons” (the built-in platform currency).

She mapped the community into this network graph shown below. You can see the pink nodes that are the streamers, and the graph shows a very fragmented audience. The streamers mostly have their own and separate fan clubs (if you analyze their donors who give them at least $120). The cluster marked B in the diagram is an affiliated Proud Boys account and the C cluster represents the activist Peter Santilli. Both Santilli and members of the B cluster are facing various criminal charges.

Now, Squire admits that finding these alt-right streamers wasn’t easy, and by no means representative of the larger DLive community, most of whom are focused on online gaming. Since the January riot, the platform has taken steps to remove these streamers and to cooperate with law enforcement on subsequent illegal usage.

Still, while they were allowed on DLive, many of her streamer subjects have made substantial incomes from their narrowcast supporters. I am sure they have found other online platforms to spew their messages of hate.

If you don’t have time to review Squire’s paper, you can watch a short 10 min. video where she walks you through her research. She hopes that by shining a light on these activities, other researchers will be encouraged to examine other online platforms that have public data.

I recently spent two weeks in Israel visiting my daughter’s family. Making the arrangements was an interesting exercise and exposed how broken our mutual trust relationships have become in the Covid era. There are several weak points, especially under the strain of crossing international borders:

— Crossing borders (customs and immigration procedures). Before the pandemic, there were fairly well-defined rules on how one could enter another country. Some places, such as the EU, had complete trust and no actual physical barrier between countries: it was more a line drawn on a map. But that trust has broken down, and now the rules are in flux, seemingly with daily changes.

In my previous visits to Israel, I didn’t need a visa as an American citizen. But I was interrogated by a customs official as to my purpose. That in-person conversation was replaced by a pre-flight application process that was maddening. I had to provide all sorts of documents to the Israeli embassy (in Miami, which covers my part of the US). My application was questioned several times before getting approval. Once I arrived at the Tel Aviv airport, I was able to gain entry to the country by just scanning my passport, and a quick conversation with a health ministry representative that wanted to see the documentation about my negative Covid PCR test. The passport scan had previously only been available to those holding Israeli passports, and is similar to our Global Entry process.

— Proof of vaccination. The issue for any American traveling abroad is that our cardboard proof of vaccination isn’t trustworthy. I had to get a blood test in Israel that proved it: the locals have an app that is tied to their HMO’s system that used to be a condition for entering public places like shopping malls and sports stadiums. While I was there the restrictions were removed: that is what happens when sufficient folks have gotten vaccinated. But without the blood test, I would have had to stay in isolation at my daughter’s home during my entire visit.

— Passenger behavior (inflight). The news media is filled with stories about misbehaving passengers who have been arrested and removed from flights. The vast majority of these cases were from domestic US flights. The international flights that I was on saw no trouble. And when I interviewed my flight attendants, they also said that the cases were overstated by the media.

— Passenger behavior (on the ground). The five airports that I was in (St. Louis, Houston, Frankfurt, Tel Aviv and Newark) all had vastly different experiences. The most crowded airport was Houston and most of the passengers were masked and the airport shops were open and busy. In Tel Aviv’s airport, few people wore masks and donned them just before boarding their flights. Frankfurt was a ghost town and few shops and airport lounges were open, although I did find one where I could take a shower. Newark was busy, and had frequent PA announcements that any passengers without masks would be subject to a $50 fine.

I am glad that I got an opportunity to see my family. The bottom line for those of you that want to travel internationally in 2021: plan ahead and be prepared to roll with sudden and inexplicable changes.

I wrote about vaccine passwords for Avast’s blog back at the beginning of the year. Since then, we have some more clarity over where and how they will be used, and a lot more questions too. Here is a brief summary on their progress.

First, the passports have now entered the political arena. Several states (including Missouri and Florida) have actually issued rulings preventing them from being used by state agencies or by local businesses. Pennsylvania, Montana and Arkansas are close to passing similar prohibitions. The White House has stated that there will be no federal mandate for any vax credentials. This pretty much guarantees that Americans will be stuck with those postcards that are handed out when we got the Covid shots. Coming from the opposite direction is NY which has their own passport app. As Shelly Palmer documents, this has been a fiasco — even calling the app the NYS Wallet to confound usability and destroy what little trust users might have about this passport.

The politics of the passport go something like this: we don’t want to create a centralized health database, because chances are the gummint will screw that up and we would have a massive data privacy issue on our hands. (Perhaps almost as bad as what just happened recently with Facebook.) Yet the local health departments have been issuing paper vaccination records for decades without any controversy (for the most part), and schools and military use these paper documents to prove that you have gotten vaccinated.

Covid it seems requires something new and a more digital approach. And with a new system comes the challenges of being able to preserve privacy and yet allow people to have their individual freedom. The ACLU has weighed in with their opinion here. They warn, “we could see a rush to impose a COVID credential system built on an architecture that is not good for transparency, privacy, or user control. The devil is in the details.”

But there are some pretty significant efforts being done by open source folks, such as this one that is trying to work out these details to keep the vax record on an individual’s smartphone. We shall see whether these will pass muster and have the right controls when they are finally implemented. There are some pretty smart people working on this, but then because of politics anything could go awry. (I wrote about the anti-vax movement earlier this year here.) In the meantime, when we get our Covid vaccinations, we get a small postcard. But will that be sufficient proof?

Second, the pilot programs have begun but have very limited use. One series of trials has been happening at more than 20 different airlines that are using the IATA travel pass. These trials are typically on a couple of city pairs and a small number of flights, where passengers are notified they will either have to download an app or print out the certificate to prove they have been vaccinated. None of these are US-flag carriers, and probably the furthest along is Singapore Airlines, which is planning on rolling out this pass by summer.

Probably, the furthest along is the Israel Green Passport smartphone app. Israel has done the best job of almost any nation at getting vaccines distributed to people over 16. The app is required for numerous large social gatherings, although as this NYTimes article documents, it isn’t uniformly enforced. One interesting side note: another digital passport is being contemplated to be used by airlines and nearby-countries to allow Israelis passage and entry if they want to travel. It isn’t clear how this will work. One problem: given that children haven’t yet been vaccinated, families who want to eat or attend these activities together can’t, unless the kids get a Covid test ahead of time.

The enforcement issue brings up another point: who is going to authenticate the passport holder? Right now when we can actual cross an international border, there are trained professionals who look at your regular passport and any paper and digital visa stamps and approve your passage. Do we really want to have bar bouncers, part-time ticket takers and other assorted folks determining whether we can enter a concert venue, shopping mall, restaurant or whatever?

Israel has addressed this problem of controlled access a long time ago. If you want to attend university, go to a shopping mall, ride a train or go to a concert, you have to pass through the barrier that most Americans just associate with airport TSA checks. Granted, these checks were mainly for weapons, and to that effect similar controls were recently placed around the Capitol. Yet many members of Congress pay them no heed. That doesn’t bode well for US-based enforcement.

There are a lot of other issues about how to implement the vax passport apps, and solving these isn’t going to be easy. But at least getting your shots is getting better: we are approaching delivering 4M shots a day now.

I have a confession to make: I have never fired a gun. I don’t own any firearms, and the closest I came to having a gun was when I was growing up my brother was a member of the high school rifle team and we had some old thing. But a friend of mine, whom I will call Harry, is a gun owner. Indeed, he now owns nine different ones: a mixture of rifles and handguns, revolvers and semi-automatics. Given that he lives in New Jersey, he can’t easily carry them — either concealed or openly — and has to carefully transport them from his home to the various ranges that he shoots competitively.  Yes, he is a real gun advocate now.

And did I mention that he is your stereotypical Jewish liberal from the northeast? “For 50 years, I didn’t think anyone needed guns. But now I feel differently.” Harry is your typical suburbanite: has two adult children. Neither of whom — nor his wife– are very interested in using his guns, although his daughter has shot one of his weapons to impress her boyfriend, who is looking for a career in law enforcement.

Harry bought his first gun, a HK 9 mm, back in 2016, just after Trump started winning various primaries. “I figured if he got elected, he could set the country back 50 years. And with all his turmoil and racist language, I wanted to be able to defend my own home. I was afraid that my family would be one of the first targeted, since we are Jewish.” His first gun had a magazine for 15 rounds, but he had to give that up because New Jersey changed their law to restrict magazines to just 10 rounds. “There is a lot to know legally,” he told me. “And our state has a lot of restrictions, so the liberals who say we need more regulations don’t understand the wide variation in different states.” Exactly: here in Missouri, we have more liberal gun laws. He does have concealed carry permits for Virginia and Florida, and has a variety of reasons for obtaining those permits in these places.

The other issue for Harry is the amount of time it takes him to actually get a gun. “It took me a long time to register and obtain a permit — it was supposedly to be less than 30 days but now it takes longer because so many people want guns,” he told me. “And when I actually walk into a store and buy my gun, it used to take just a few minutes to do the background check, but now it takes as long as a week.” There are millions of new gun owners as a result of Biden’s election, interestingly. And if he were to go to an out-of-state gun show, many of the sellers don’t want to bother selling him anything, since it has to be shipped to a licensed gun dealer in New Jersey.

Harry has spent nearly $9000 over the years, on all of his weapons and on a stockpile of more than 15,000 rounds of various ammunition. You might think he is part Doomsday prepper, but he tells me that when he shoots at the range, he could easily go through 300 or so rounds, and because he is Jewish, he buys in bulk. (Sorry, just had to put that in there.) He has met plenty of other Jews on the range.

He is also an NRA member, but he doesn’t fully support their political positions. He became a licensed instructor. “I wish they would stick to their training — which is excellent — and did less of their political BS,” he told me.”But not all of us gun owners are planning to revolt against the government either.”

Harry is also a lifelong Democrat, and has never voted for a Republican presidential candidate. But he also decries the left-wingers that populate his party, and thinks they are off base. “I absolutely hate Trump, and can’t stand him as a person or as a candidate. I actually find him nauseating. But many of the press stories are just not true,” he told me.

Yes, we have more guns than people here in the US. And Harry is certainly an example of how that is possible. But you can’t paint every gun owner on the same canvas.