On December 18, 2019, my Internet web hosting provider announced they are shutting down in February 2020. I am now in process of relocating my 5 web sites to a new web host (and once this is done, a 6th site located elsewhere will also be relocated).
This post you are reading right now is on the new web host, however, the final appearance of this page and some other key items still need to be updated. These final fixes will occur over the next week or so.
An appalling sick individual sent a flashing GIF pattern to a person with epilepsy, causing an epileptic brain seizure with long term after effects. The true weaponization of social media. The perpetrator is expected to plead guilty to aggravated assault. Sadly, others have used this method to target even more victims. Absolutely disgusting, appalling and sick.
I never knew – according to journalists we are expected to argue about inequality and victimization at the Thanksgiving holiday. Journalists have even prepared a handy guide detailing how to support the journalists’ own agenda! Who knew (besides journalists) that we are supposed to turn Thanksgiving into an opportunity for propaganda messaging?
Updated: Apparently this entire genre is a coordinated pseudo-news event intended to be shared on social media and get around Facebook’s algorithms that try to limit some news article distribution. It’s based on the pseudo-news event approach of creating a fake “us versus them” narrative. It is, in fact, 21st century click-bait and nothing more.
Accessing everyone’s detailed health data is not enough for Google. Now they want to offer a checking account service so they can monitor your financial records.
Recycling an old opinion column by an author who focuses on persuading you that life is miserable, not fair and getting worse – is an interesting twist on propaganda. The date – its old -is not presented until a footnote at the very end of the very long column; the column was written during the recovery from The Great Recession, immediately after significant economic turmoil. This is the media’s usual focus on negativity by an author who makes his living on negativity.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman after the November 2016 election: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.” Today, all three major stock indices reached record levels.
On the anxiety inducements of social media and smart phones: “We must be cursed, one would think, to spend so much of our day walking around with our eyes glued to a device that provokes bad feelings.” Ironically, the essay writer ends with two lengthy paragraphs of doom, gloom and negativity and wonders why everyone is gloomy?
In 2017, without warning or recourse, Google shut down all services associated with Salil Mehta, a professor of statistics, editor of a statistics journal, author of a best selling book on statistics, a former Obama administration official and later, a polling statistics adviser to the Trump campaign. His offense? He ran a blog about mathematics! Google, Facebook and Twitter have become the totalitarian governments of the 21st century, stifling speech their algorithms choose to flag. Unlike us peons, Mehta is well connected and a huge outcry caused Google to reinstate his account.
Some one thought this was profound: “About one-fifth (21%) of millennials say that student debt is holding them back from saving for their future. This is a much more common answer among young people: Only 12% of Gen Xers and 5% of boomers feel this way.”
In other words, people just out of college are more likely to have student debt than those who did not go to college (almost 40% more millennials have a college degree than the baby boom generation) or who went to college decades ago.
That is profound, isn’t it? /sarcasm
This illustrates how statistical reporting devoid of context leads you to an incorrect conclusion.
Nice illustration of how easy we can be fooled by numbers: to save gas, do you upgrade your 36 mpg car to a newer 46 mpg car, or do you upgrade your pickup truck from 15 mpg to 18 mpg? You drive both the same amount per year. Most people will select the 10 mpg fuel improvement – but they’ll save twice as much gas if they updated the pick up truck.