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A very good point. We are letting people into our minds in exchange for content. This is nothing new, and I was lucky enough to have parents, and one very good school teacher, who taught me to understand that ads were trying to influence us, and that we should look at them critically and judge them based on the behavior they were trying to instill in us. That has served me well in the years since, it's usually obvious what advertisers are trying to get me to do. The trade-off seems worth it for people who are aware of the influence advertisers have on them, not so much for the oblivious.

Impressive.

"I believe that we actually are living amidst another pandemic — a trauma pandemic," Foley Martinez said.

In a QAnon world, where those enforcing mask mandates are perceived as part of a movement that includes Satanic child sacrifices, that good-versus-evil narrative can provide a strange sort of comfort.

"This is what it's like to be an essential worker." Chavez said she and her colleagues are regularly berated by customers who refuse to wear masks

It is pretty unpleasant trying to enforce mask-wearing at my place of employment. I’m sick of being abused by anti-maskers, it’s a large part of why I gave my two-weeks notice last Friday.

A very good point. I did teach my son to code about 20 years ago, I'm not sure if I accidentally did it right or what, but he writes clear and useful programs. Of my six kids, he's the only one who's shown the slightest interest in the subject, I wouldn't even consider teaching coding to any of his younger siblings.

Interesting. Sales at the tool store I work at went way up during the shutdown and have stayed up, but not as far up, since we reopened a few months ago. Still, things are closer around here (North Central Indiana)to what they've always been than this article and others I've read report about other areas. Perhaps people around here were already more into DIY and thus haven't changed their habits as much? Could be. Or it could be that people around here don't seem nearly as worried about the pandemic as other areas? Latest records show that about 2% of the local population have had the virus, so you'd think people would take it more seriously, but they don't.

(1) Spying on you. (2) Manipulating your feeds to keep you engaged. (3) Deepening your biases and blind spots by pushing away everything else.

One and two make sense, but what do they gain by three? Separating people’s opinions wouldn’t help them would it? Instead, wouldn’t they want to push people in the same direction, to whatever corporate goal they have in mind? Profits likely? Perhaps it's a way to keep people coming back, sort of positive reinforcement, bigger consequences be damned?

as Tim Kendall [former president of Pinterest and former director of monetization at Facebook] says in the film, the natural conclusion to all of this is civil war

That’s where three would lead to, but to whose benefit? I don’t think that would help the tech companies...

Even if I want to leave Twitter, I feel like I can’t because it’s the town square, right? It’s the area where people gather. It’s where news circulates

I use Twitter a lot, but never as a primary news source, that just seems a bad idea…

Idiots on wheels. In the past I've had a great time at smaller motorcycle rallies, I get that it's fun, but in 2020? A bad idea, and it looks like it turned out badly.

I wonder what the chances of violence and chaos after the election really are? Articles like this are a bit unnerving...

Contempt for the less-educated may explain the push back against a living minimum wage.

"Eat the rich?"

This story is pretty much the inverse of Cyril M. Kornbluth's "Marching Morons" in some ways, but not entirely...

QAnon is now considered a "collective delusion" by some.

35 percent of Americans would not get a vaccine for the coronavirus if it were available

Of course they wouldn’t…

Idiots.

Right-wing politician, Sen. Joni Ernst, about Qanon theory that COVID deaths are deliberately being exaggerated:

These health-care providers and others are reimbursed at a higher rate if COVID is tied to it. So, what do you think they’re doing?”

A lot of people who come into my place of employment and want to talk COVID politics have told me this. I mentioned this to a co-worker and she said that her friend was a nurse, and that absolutely, if a death is reported to Medicare as being COVID-related, the hospital is indeed reimbursed at a much higher rate. I didn’t believe her, but fortunately I didn’t say so, since I looked it up on snopes.com (a great fact-checking site if you’ve never been there), and it’s true that hospitals make more money by reporting a death as COVID related even if they just suspect that COVID was involved, they just need a medical opinion, not a positive COVID test. I was floored that this right-wing crazy-sounding conspiracy theory had at least some truth behind it. I assume, that like usual, other insurance companies follow Medicare procedures in this regard, but didn’t look that up.

she didn’t go as far as QAnon, which is claiming that only 6% of the deaths being attributed to COVID-19 are actually coronavirus-related

Some sanity, at least.

while Ernst is “so skeptical” about those numbers, many medical experts believe that Hopkins’ figures undercount the number of coronavirus deaths.

I do suspect that this is true, but have not researched it:

In the U.S. and many other countries, the COVID-19-related deaths being reported are typically deaths in hospitals. But when someone dies from COVID-19 at home, that death might be reported as something else — for example, “cardiac arrest.”

I can't even imagine why anyone would think some of these products are a good idea...

a penchant for individualism and skepticism towards science may more directly correlate to one’s decision to don a mask

I spend a lot of time on Reddit and tend to forget how toxic some subreddits are. I spend most of my time on car, motorcycle, electronics, and such subs. Plus a healthy dose of cute cat pictures.

A sad state of affairs...

Wow these people are out of touch with reality. They all vote too.

Interesting. It seems obvious in retrospect, but who would have expected it before it was observed...

A very good analysis of something that happens all the time. These are the circumstances that lead a smart or normally intelligent person to "stupid" mistakes though, they have nothing to do with an individual actually being stupid, that makes the whole situation even worse unfortunately.

ringback tones (remember when some people had songs play when you called them?)

One of my daughters had the most annoying ringback tones…

I had no idea that ringtones produced that kind of revenue. I never bought a ringtone, I made them with Audacity and transferred them to phones in various ways. My biggest success was the Aflac Duck "quacking" for my wife who was an Aflac agent back when ringtones were a big thing. I still have the file. My worst failure was the intro to Come Together by the Beatles, even a new smartphone doesn't have the bass needed to make it sound even marginally OK.

The lurking killer...

Apple wanted them to pay 30% of nothing to allow them to keep the app up. Instead, they had to add paid features.

I didn't know there was aname for this! Over the years I've learned how to do this and it really works. It's especially helpful with nasty customers at work. If they can't get a rise from you, they eventually wander off.

I never would have guessed that chasing a red dot would be bad for a cat. they seem to love it.

The discovery of a large deposit of graphite in Cumbria, England was well suited for writing. Initially, people thought the substance was lead, thus giving it the name now used.

Well, that explains that. Now, how did anyone mistake light graphite for dense lead...

I first got on the internet in 1980 when I started college. My access was pretty sporadic until the early '90s about when the first web browsers thater getting popular. I was about 30 then. The only real difference has been that I spend more time reading about my hobbies now and less time doing them. Since they're hobbies, I suppose that doesn't matter. I was always reading in my spare time even before the internet became big, the big difference there was that I subscribed to magazines and papers and spent more time at the library, now that time is spent on the screen. One real positive improvement has been finding places like Readup and other online venues to discuss what I'm reading or doing with hobbies.

My Amazon experiences haven't been nearly this bad, overall, I'm pleased. What does other me is the two times I've left a negative review, they've been removed for "not meeting community standards" despite trying to be as polite and factual as possible. I don't leave reviews anymore if they'll only accept positive ones.

Ouch, I knew there were problems, but not how severe they are. I use Firefox and Chrome both, I'd miss either one of them badly.

I’m quite sure he’s learned his lesson without the entire world calling him an idiot.

I’ll certainly call him an idiot...

there are several groups online dedicated to posting pictures of gun owners pointing a loaded weapon at their dick

Unbelievable.

most people have the sense of self worth to not share getting so amazingly owned by their own stupidity

And some don’t...

Wow...

But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95% noise, 5% signal.

This is the crux of the issue. An example of this is when losing weight. If you look at the scale every day, the daily ups and downs totally hide the trend in weight. If you weigh a few pounds more than a day or two ago, you worry. But if you only check my weight once a month (which is approximately what I do) the actual trend is obvious, the noise is masked by the real data.

avoidance of too much hormonal rushes that come with the ingestion of food.

Interesting tie-in with my weight example. But total garbage. Nutrients are not information and this inclusion in the article seems sort of random to me. It does not invalidate the real point though, too many information points do indeed hamper the ability to analyze the actual data.

Evidence of fire being used about 2 million years ago.