Self-assembly? I waited, but it didn’t assemble itself. I finally did all the work. Instructions were easy and didn’t require any tools. I wonder if the Ikea help line gets any calls about this one?

The ads I get on line are usually accurate, sometimes to a scary degree. Recently I’ve had some that were way off target. Always a bit amusing. Had multiple ads for a “pipe cleaner”. Be ready for inspection! I had to click. Must have me confused with someone else.

I have tended to look at crypto from technical and maybe societal angles. This is a very good article about the personal side. Who is involved in crypto and why. I consider it a sort of Ponzi scheme, but after reading this article I think it is more of a sort of lottery. From N+1.

Walk Away Like a Boss

A good read about what major cities in the southwest are doing to conserve water.

A Quiet Revolution: Southwest Cities Learn to Thrive Amid Drought

A good read from The Guardian (UK).

The Lost Jews of Nigeria

Lots being written about this, most of it missing the point. In the short term, a single, very wealthy person controls one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. What can you do with this sort of platform? In the short term, promote your brand(s). Get people to buy more Tesla’s. But perhaps he has political ambitions. Can Twitter sway any election, anywhere in the world? Probably. So imagine your favorite (of least favorite) politician owning Twitter. Afraid yet?

And this talk of opening up the algorithm is a distraction. What I would want to see is the data. Who is getting what postings, and who is paying for special access (advertisements pretending to be postings).

What can be done? I dunno. Someone built a bomb, now you have to defuse it. Get rid of all anonymous and robot accounts? Flag paid content as advertisements? Apply laws for libel, slander, terroristic threats, etc. to postings. Basically arrest people who make threats to other people on line, as would happen in real life, on the phone or through the mails. Provide data on content accuracy. Flat earth people won’t get their message out, but is that really a problem? It will cut into Twitter traffic and revenues, though. Lastly, treat it like we have treated other public communication infrastructures, i.e. telephones, television, and regulate it. Make them do some or all of the things above.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is planning large scale solar on federal lands. For scale, the US had about a million megaWatts of generation capacity, or about 1,000 gigaWatts (GW), so this is significant.

US rolls out plan to green-light close to 30GW of solar plant on federal lands

This is just off the cuff, based on lots of ongoing misrepresentations I keep seeing in various forums and organs.

Freedom of the Press: this is your right to publish anything, supported by your government. Nobody else, especially your government can prevent you from publishing. If someone does try to stop you, your government should step in and protect your right to publish.

Freedom of Speech: this is your right, supported by the government to make personal statement without fear of reprisal. This doesn’t mean you can be a nuisance (use a megaphone outside of someone’s house at 4am), it just means you can’t be barred from saying something someone else doesn’t like. Again, your government should defend your right to speak and not be silenced.

Not Freedom of the Press: nobody has an obligation to print your stuff. If the New York Times won’t print your article, this isn’t censorship. If the government tells the New York Times they can’t print your article, that IS censorship.

Not Freedom of Speech: people also have the right to ignore you. People ignoring your speech is not censorship. It’s not trampling on their freedom. Forcing them to listen to you IS infringing on their freedom.

What about Social Media? First Social Media companies are private entities, like the New York Times. They don’t have to publish what you type into their app. And they do refuse to publish lots of things. This is for their own business purposes, or perhaps personal reasons of the ownership. In fact, as a rule, everything you post to social Media won’t be made available to everyone who wants to read it. This is important. This isn’t a traditional “broadcast” media. You won’t have access to everything, even the things you may want to have access to, and that other users have access to. This is what the “algorithm” does.

The Social Media Algorithm: there are some problems here. The biggest is transparency. Nobody knows what is getting pushed forward and nobody knows what is being held back. This is true for the producer of the content, the consumer of the content and outside observers. There also seems to be an exception in most platforms. Paying the platform can get your message spread more widely. This completely obscures what is paid advertisement and what isn’t. This isn’t illegal, but most users of the platform probably don’t understand this.

Maximizing Eyeballs: so what criteria is being used to determine what subset of things you will be shown on Social Media? Nobody really knows for sure, except it will almost certainly try to maximize corporate profits. This means keeping you on their platform reading content for as long as possible. Not content that will educate and inform you. Just whatever hooks you in the most and keeps you looking at their paid content (advertisements) The best part: the content doesn’t even have to be remotely factual. The next best part: nobody even knows what you are looking at and can’t correct falsehoods or even just show a different perspective. In fact, those corrections and different perspectives, not matter how right or wrong, could also be blocked, often based on who pays and who doesnt.

This opens up these platforms for all sorts of abuse, mostly by those with money. I think everyone needs to think about the implications of this.

When i was younger I ran across something by Noam Chomsky. I don’t even remember the details. I suspect it was some sort of magazine interview. Since then I’ve read just about everything of his I’ve come across. Today I was looking for an old quote that I thought was his. Something along the lines of “the media can’t tell you what the think, but they can tell you what to think about”. I couldn’t find the quote but I found lots more. Here is a good collection.

Noam Chomsky Quotes from the Father of Linguistics

Wow. I saw this article in my feed a few times and skipped it. Figured it was another story about Texas being hostile to anything not oil and gas. Well, it is that and more. There seems to be no accountability in Texas these days.

Texas Slaps Down Tesla Fast Charger Plan