I couldn’t agree more about how to take control of your digital consumption from, “The Center for Humane Technology”. Here’s the link and a snippet from the web site:
https://www.humanetech.com/take-control
I thought I understood the general concepts and algorithms that companies like google, Facebook, twitter, etc. use but I was astounded about how much it impacts us as a society. The documentary, “The Social Dilemma”, on Netflix, is filled with conversations with many of the original architects of these systems and how monetization though ad targeting is driving behavior modification of billions of people worldwide.
The Social Dilemma also goes on to explain how our younger populations are being affected and correlates the dramatic increase in many conditions like anxiety are due the nature of keeping someone always engaged in a platform for monetary gain.
I already started getting off a number of social platforms, Facebook and Instagram being the latest – but now I’m really concerned about how being online is effecting my daughters.
What’s the answer? I don’t know but I can tell you that I am more willing than ever to pay for services that are not ad driven. I already have a pi-hole for ad blocking, and use cleanbrowsing.org for DNS filtering. But what do you do that when you use gmail? Use a iPhone or Google Android phone? Is it flip phone time again? I don’t know what to think really. And that’s a good thing.
What I can say is I would highly recommend the documentary.
See the world in a new light… http://www.gapminder.org/
Why is it that every time I purchase something with a credit card at most stores I end up having to do the credit card swipe dance. And how did this ever replace the good ol’ “cashier single swipes the card and here’s the receipt” days? Technology sucks sometimes…
Me: Swipe now? oh not yet. ok now? YES ok…
Cashier: “Press the yellow button, and… wait – need to add your special member discount to the amount. Canceling the transaction.”
Me: So… Now swipe again? oh not yet…. ok now? YES. ok…
Cashier: “Press the yellow button and it should say credit or debit, press 7 for credit… It’s not saying anything?”
Me: It says – “wait for cashier”.
Cashier: “Ok – now it should say credit, …”
Me: Ok, pressing credit. whoops, pressed cancel.
Cashier: “Um… ok I’ll restart the process. Press the yellow button….”
Call me crazy but this whole process just seems stupid. Stores should never trust that I could do something better than their own staff.
If you ever get a chance to kick back at a java joint with John Common take it.
I highly recommend reading the blogs, “The Not-To-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now” and “How to Check E-mail Twice a Day… or Once Every 10 Days“, by Tim Ferris. Great recommendations for all of us who don’t seem to ever have enough time for anything these days.
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So Oracle is in the final stages of buying Sun Microsystems Inc, a company I adored for years. It’s too bad to see Sun go, and with all other Oracle buyouts I’m sure not much will be left of the original idea of Sun. It’s sad to see, but after seeing Sun as the premier UNIX envorinment in the late 90’s go through it’s demise in early 2000’s the writing was on the wall.
I remember distinctly being at a good friends house discussing a plan we had to get in the car, drive to Merlo Park CA, and tell the then CEO exactly how to get back on track:
Sun deserves their fate. I hope Solaris is nurtured into a bigger and better product, with fewer bugs, and ZFS can deliver on the promises it made 5 years ago and has yet to achieve it’s greatness. Xen virtualization is nice, but lacks the nice migration and recovery options VMWare has. Project Blackbox I’m sure will morph into a “Database in a Box” concept.
Oracle hopefully will take the CoolThreads sun4v technology to the next level. The old powerhouse SPARC sun4u procs should rest in peace like the Z80’s and 68k series procs. Great procs, but power hungry and without the market share it’s too costly to keep up.
Best of luck Oracle. I wish you the best. Be gentle with one’s you buy.
I was in Texas last week and was able to see a number of “Tea Party” protests that are generally against big government, and are fed up with the currently elected government and the recent bailout monies allocated for these large banks. Since I fancy myself as a person who agrees with these ideals, I started researching into what really is going on with the recent bailouts. I’ve learned about how republican hardcore conservative political bodies suddenly were asking congress to pony up billions of dollars to shore up companies like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and AIG due to this newly discovered economic nightmare called, “Systemic Risk“.
Republicans…. Asking for money? Seriously? So while the “Tea Baggers” have valid points, why is there such difference in handling the current economic crisis from the typical repulican platform?
People generally thought that huge corporations are less likely to go belly up simply because their portfolios are so large no one event could cause total failure. With the housing market we all know and love these days, the US found out the hard way that not only are these extremely large corporations suseptable in their own right, they’re so interconnected in the markets now that when one goes down like Lehman Brothers, it causes a whole cascade effect. Example: Lehman has all these assets and bonds that go to hell because of the housing bubble popping. The government doesn’t intervene because of fears from “Moral Hazard“, so Lehman goes to bankruptcy. So why does AIG suddenly fail? So if you are AIG, and you’ve been selling insurance on Bonds and such where if a bond goes to crap and AIG will insure you against the risk – AIG is now required to honor all these insurance policies for bonds in the tank. AIG’s assets are also hurt by the market in general, and now with the prospect of having to pay all these insurance claims on bonds from companies like Lehmans, AIG is now in dire straits…. The trend goes on and on to the point now where there are entire countries like Iceland who are completely bankrupt!
The best program by far I’ve seen regarding this whole deal is the Frontline episode, “Inside the Meltdown”. While this is a PBS show, I’m a firm believer that every American needs to watch this at least once. Agree or Disagree with the details, but watch the program and educate yourself – Please!
This is a frontline episode that talks about the national debt and how the country’s deficit is exploding. It also talks about how both political parties are at fault, and how the US needs to come to terms on the problem to start working on fixing it.
