Reveiw of Steven Levy's "FaceBook: The Inside Story"

If I had not already deleted my FaceBook profile and quit using the application a year or so ago, that would be the first thing I would do upon reading Steven Levy's excellent book. He must have been inside Mark Zuckerberg's back pocket for a decade. Levy apparently knows everyone in the tech world and uses his access to them to bring us the long history of FaceBook, placing it within the context of the tech world in general. The story reads like a good detective novel with pacing like a mystery thriller. It's truly a fun and exciting, though scary, reading experience. What FaceBook knows about you and what they do with that knowledge is terrifying.

There are some bobbles and a few weak spots where Levy tries my patience, but these are minor compared to the book as a whole which is a must read for anyone who uses FaceBook or knows someone currently on the service, which is nearly every man, woman and child in the world. Highly recommended. 

Thanks for the censorship

 In response to someone (who I assume is an employee of the Postal Service) covering up a mural in the local Post Office that's been in place since something like the 1930s, I'm writing this open letter to the editor of the local paper:

Dear Mr. Badie,

I want to applaud you for covering up the mural in the Greensboro Post Office and urge that you pay no attention to the whining complaints of people you no doubt consider to be mere Untermensch.  It's about time somebody started censoring our public artworks.  However, you didn't go far enough; there's a lot more you need to cover over. In particular, I want you to censor the following:

The Greene County Library - This will admittedly be a little difficult, since the library has been closed for months to keep Covid-19 away, but you need to cover up - or possibly burn - some of the books in there just in case the library might open up in the future.  There are too many outdated ideas on those sneaky shelves that people don't need to see.  Besides, as an aspiring author myself, if you get rid of somebody else's book, maybe I can sell a few copies of my own.

The Iron Horse - Erected against the wishes of all who love animals, this statue makes a mockery of horses everywhere, who just want to roam free.  The Iron Horse, in contrast, stands forever trapped in cement, surrounded by a cruel fence.  More to the point, the horse has nothing covering his nether regions.  You can see everything through there.  I know.  I've looked.  Nobody wants to see a horse's ass in Greene County.  I'm sure you can understand that.

The Old Gaol - Okay, this one should be obvious.  Those old settlers didn't even spell "jail" right.  If they can't spell any better than that, nobody needs to see their old building.  Having that thing around makes us all look like hicks who failed spelling in school.  

In closing, I want to thank you again for your outsider's viewpoint and your compassionate use of censorship, and I wish you well in your mission to wipe away the past that we might never learn from it again.

A speech isn't a speech

It's the raw material for the rest of the campaign.  I'm not sure that even veteran "journalists" (whatever that word means anymore) really understand politics and especially political ad making as served on the web as opposed to television.

Donald Trump's speech Thursday at the RNC was described, even by supposed allies in the press like Scott Jennings, this way: ”Really needed to be edited down and reorganized. A lot of stuff that could've been left on the cutting room floor diluted the powerful parts."

Doesn't Jennings realize that the editing he laments as missing is EXACTLY what will happen now?  We all know that politicians live to make sound bites, pithy sentences that get replayed over and over on tonight's news.  But good political managers do much more than write and place sound bites.  A large part of the ad campaign is made up of bits and pieces of live speeches like this, cut and diced into short video and spun out onto the web where they play and play and play.

Moreover, every ad is its own little experiment.  The ones that get lots of reaction - those are increased in placement.  The ones that bomb?  Those are quickly dropped in favor of others.

Donald Trump's long speech is going to be a gold mine of these nuggets.  You'll see that speech, in brief 10 second glimpses, for the next two months.  The Republican party is usually clueless and tone deaf, but the people who ran Trump's 2016 campaign were head and shoulders above the Democrats when it came to this type of ad, and they're going to be again.

One speech is easily and quickly forgotten - until the Trump team gets hold of it.  Look for it soon on a screen near you.

Call it what it is

I've been reading mostly economic news sites, since they have a more facts-based approach to informing me than the more mainstream writers.  However, one stock phrase irritates me because it's not accurate and implies that we're all victims of outside forces.  That phrase is "economic downturn."

This is not an economic downturn, an event that just sort of sneaked up on us.  This is economic suicide.  The American economy, prior to the rise of irrational fear of Covid-19, was healthy and booming.  Then the news readers managed to turn the herd towards the cliff and thundered over it, smashing to bits on the bottom.

Our economic suicide is completely and totally self-inflicted and once it became clear that suicide was a great anti-Trumpian weapon, the media reloaded and began shooting the survivors.  Trying to fix the causes of an economic downturn won't work on an economic suicide.  

Instead, we should take inspiration from that genius Third Eye Blind hit song, "Jumper" -

Put the past away.
I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend.
You could cut ties with all the lies that you've been living in.

We live in a media-manipulated set of lies that we should indeed put away.

Georgia's Covid death rate declines

Here's an explanation you're unlikely to get from the hand-wringing set on CNN or NBC or FOX or even WSB.  The news readers don't understand the news.  All numbers are from the Georgia Department of Public Health's website.

First, even though case numbers are bullshit for many reasons, let's set that aside and look at case numbers graphically over time:

 

Looks pretty scary where it begins to tail upwards in early June, doesn't it?

 

Okay, then let's graph Georgia's deaths over that same time period and see how those look:

We see the same trend near the end, with gross numbers rising after a long flat period earlier in the year, then a dip in June before climbing a lot near the end of July.

If you've seen any analysis at all on your TV news, that's about all you're getting - a simplistic trend analysis with an emphasis on the numbers at the end going up.  So we can say that both case numbers and deaths are up in Georgia, right?  Fair enough, but that's not the whole story.

What's the actual RATE of deaths?  Has anyone mentioned that lately?  Probably not, because it's going down, going down dramatically.  The simplest way to calculate that rate is the obvious one: divide the daily deaths reported by the daily case numbers.  That'll give you a daily death rate.  That graph looks like this:

 

Well, bless your heart!  The death rate is going down to nothing.  Why?  Because while deaths are indeed up, the case numbers are up a heck of a lot more.  The percentage of people dying from Covid in Georgia is a very, very small fraction of the number of people who get it. 

But deaths lag cases, right?  That is, people who die on March 10th aren't the same as the people who are reported sick on March 10th.  They're more likely to be part of the group reported in the case numbers back on March 1st.  So let's offset the deaths and cases by ten days to assume a lag time between the case report and the subsequent death.  That graph looks like this:

 

 

The actual percentages are different and probably more realistic, but the trend is the same - down, down, down.  

You aren't seeing this reported because it doesn't work to scare you, but it's the truth, because...math.