It’s a nightmare already. Where do the hapless goobers among our citizenry get their bad ideas? Facebook. The whole damn company is an engine of disinformation, and it wants to grow, like some kind of cancerous tumor. The latest great idea to come out of Zuckerberg’s stinking maw is an implementation of the metaverse. Sounds like it could be fun, right? If you grew up on Snow Crash and Jennifer Government and Ready Player One and failed to notice that those are all horrific dystopias. Zuckerberg read them and saw his future dream. He’s been putting together his version of the metaverse, or zuckerverse, or suckerverse, and some have seen it.
First floated in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, the Metaverse is an idealised immersive successor of the internet – a virtual space where billions of users will move, interact, and operate across myriad different but interoperable worlds and situations, always retaining their avatar identities, virtual possessions, and digital currencies. It is hard to pin the Metaverse down (more on this later), but the shape one can make out amid the cyberpunk mist is some version of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One meets Fortnite, meets virtual reality, meets blockchain. A game-y galaxy that seamlessly fuses with the Meatspace. What matters is that Metaverse is now the buzzword du jour, and that Facebook wants a piece of it. The bad news is that Zuckerberg’s Metaverse ambitions sound boring as hell.
Time and again over the interview, Zuckerberg dropped language that seemed to have been cribbed straight out of some stuffy consultancy’s 40-page insights report. He waxed lyrical about the Metaverse’s ability to increase “focus time and individual productivity”. He coined the dreary formula “infinite office”, a supposedly desirable scenario in which Metaverse-dwellers conjure up multiple virtual screens on their Oculus VR headsets in order to multitask like pros. Zuck was “excit[ed]” (!) about the Metaverse’s potential for organising VR office meetings.
If anyone could make Zoom meetings worse, it’s Zuckerberg, the dead-eyed corporate zombie. It can’t be that bad, you might think, but then you just have recall the wasteland of ads and trolls and endless lies that he turned a social service to connect friends into. Or if you don’t believe that, see for yourself what the metaverse will look like if Facebook has its way.
NEW – Zuckerberg unveils Facebook's "revolutionary" virtual "metaverse," where humans turn into comic characters and interact with each other.pic.twitter.com/a4bAWA8t02
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) August 19, 2021
Oh hell no.
You know, while Facebook is working hard on the VR interface that Satan will love, a right wing terrorist drove up to Washington DC with a truckload of, he claims, potassium nitrate and detonators, and parked by the Library of Congress, demanding to speak to President Biden, or he was going to blow everything up. The Capitol has been evacuated. He has been live-streaming his threats and rants over Facebook.
It has taken Facebook three hours to notice and shut him down.
Facebook just locked the bomb threat guy's page after three hours of live streams
— Aaron Fritschner (@Fritschner) August 19, 2021
That’s a rapid response from the company that has allowed fascists, quacks, conspiracy theorists, and anti-vaxxers to thrive for over a decade. They will not get better. This is what they do: provide a profit-making forum for the very worst, most sensationalist ideas, so don’t wait for them to do anything that might harm the bottom line.
We’re going to have to do something. The good news is that the FTC has reopened their antitrust case against Facebook.
“Facebook lacked the business acumen and technical talent to survive the transition to mobile. After failing to compete with new innovators, Facebook illegally bought or buried them when their popularity became an existential threat,” said Holly Vedova, Acting Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition.
Facebook did not immediately respond to request for comment, but the company said on Twitter that it was reviewing the case.
The filing is also the most high-profile action to date under the agency’s new Democratic majority, helmed by Big Tech critic Lina Khan. Khan inherited the Facebook case from the previous Trump-appointed chair, but her ability to see it to a successful conclusion could define her legacy as an antitrust enforcer.
Burn them down, please. And then nationalize a simple communications service that allows me to chat to family and friends without having to wade through the offensive glop the kooks flood everyone with.
I thought Second Life went down the intertubes.
Wasn’t Second Life a previous stab at a “metaverse”. I never used it, but heard of it as a virtual space.
I thought this had already come (and gone?) — what — Wikipedia sez
18 years ago! (How time flies, etc.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life
Maybe Facebook has some secret sauce that will revitalize interest
in this sort of thing. Oh — VR headsets. All aboard the
vomit comet!
I’m not sure weather the weaponization of social media is the side-effect or the goal any more. Frankly, I’m not sure it matters, either. We used to have these fools separated by vast swathes of distance and, localized, they were nearly harmless or at least manageable. Now they congregate and proliferate and consume the absolute worst misinformation possible while cajoling each other to act. Back when I browsed 4chan I saw how easily manipulable people were with the right dose of confirmation bias and ego stroking and thought I could do the same, it’s practically child’s play when you have a huge enough audience. Couple that with the ability to provide insularity via groupthink, ridicule, and outright banning, and you get the horror du jour of today’s alt-right, white supremacy, and fascist bootlickers. From Elevatorgate to Gamergate to this the evolution of how well the worst of us manipulate the weakest of us could only have been enabled by the corporate greed of Facebook and other social media turning a blind eye to the abuse. What a travesty.
The tweet says that you’ll have more “opportunities to travel and to experience life and travel.” But, “life” is exactly what virtual reality is not. And travelling, by definition, also can’t be virtual. As Samuel Johnson wrote in the 18th century, “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” i.e., cannot occur in a simulation of reality.
And, I must point out that the tweet’s cartoon example of a virtual meeting demonstrates the exact flaw that Neil Stephenson pinpointed: the inability to sufficiently program facial expressions. So no, that sort of meeting or interaction won’t be adequate, as so much of human communication is not verbal. Even Zuckerberg, in that video, puts down the hand controllers so that he can express himself with gestures while talking, but then the “people” in the meeting won’t be able to see his gestures and what he’s expressing.
Another sign of impotence: flailing for some other-wordly solution to Facebook’s lack of ability to accomplish anything.
PZ: You can start by leaving. Be the change you want to see.
The Doc wrote “That’s a rapid response from the company that has allowed fascists, quacks, conspiracy theorists, and anti-vaxxers to thrive for over a decade”
Yet model makers and History buffs do not dare show a Swastika on any of their posts .
I used to think that the good bits of faceache outweighed all the wackaloons ,RNJ’S ,flat earthers ,anti-vaxxers and all the rest
that are on there .
Now i am not too sure .
I stuck my toe into Second Life a few years ago. It seemed like it could have been pretty cool when I was younger, before I had, well, an actual life. I was somewhat surprised that it didn’t catch on more than it did. It sounds as if it was better than what Zuckerberg’s planning, though.
I’ve also read that MMORPGs like World of Warcraft are declining in interest as well. It’s as if people don’t want to virtually congregate for anything except for sharing false information. Well, and killing each other virtually on Fortnight and Among Us, I suppose.
I’m 100% certain that the instant news broke on the D.C. matter, a million fascist chuds shrieked “FALSE FLAG!!!” in union, ala Donald Sutherland at the end of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake.
And of course he was taken into custody unharmed. It’s good to be a white, male, right-winger in America!
I’d say shut down all social networking sites. They’re all basically the same.
@1 and @2
Yep. Second Life was damn close, in many respects. A few problems ran it aground (its still around, but… not what it used to be and I haven’t been on there for “ever”). Basically though, 1) the technology to make it work, in terms of data bandwidth, ownership security, and other factors, was not, and still isn’t, up to managing it. Ironically, if we where a budding second world country, or even just a first world one that gave a damn about broadband access in any real sense, this would be half solved by everyone having true high speed internet. However, the servers are also an issue, and, ironically, they decided to switch to a “server side render” metric, which a) sort of adds extra security, b) makes sure the system doing the graphics actually can do the graphics, instead of trying to run it all client side, with possible shit hardware, but c) this caused the limits on how many people could be in a server at a time to drop from 50+ to about 15-20, average, before things sucked. 2) Their physics system was always bad, but its gotten worse, to the point where, 15+ years ago you could use physics based weapons, and only “once in a while” would things get “stuck”, due to the server losing track of them as low priority, to now everything using a “line of site ray trace” system, which.. works better, though it would be useless for some things. However, 3) they never did solve the issue with transitioning between servers, so long range cases for such physics is meaningless anyway, since nothing “works” crossing borders. This last issue meant that 4) while each “sim” is like 256×256 meters, if you want to build a city you need more than that, and those damn border transitions between linked servers…. 5) last but not least is the cost of “renting” the server. Unless you have a major user base, and they are donating constantly, or you have some other money avenue, like selling in-game content, when the economy tanked it took out huge swaths of the servers that existed, and SL never really recovered.
Case in point on this last issue, the roleplay area I used to log into all the time had.. Let me think.. something like 9 connected sims, from a china town area, to one with a broken bridge and waterfront, to at least 3 that where also shops and waterfront, with at least two piers, etc. Then, on the “opposite” side of the bridge was at least 5 more sims, run by someone else, who ran similar roleplay, and decided to hook their stuff into Lost Angels. So.. Figure something like 28 city blocks, give or take, or a combined city of 917504 square meters of freaking virtual unreal estate. As of the last time I connected, at all, this had fallen, first from 14 sims to 9, then 6, then 3, then most recently the owners of two of those decided they didn’t like some drama problem they had with rules, or the scripted combat system Lost Angels uses, and dropped out too, leaving… only the original sim.
There are still popular non-RP, not dance clubs around, like Mad Pea, who run game/escape room type things, annual charity stuff, stores for clothing, AVs, etc., art projects, and a scattering of other stuff, but.. the core “value” that SL had was a) creating worlds to play in, b) being able to link them into much larger ones, c) yeah, using the object scripting sucked, but being able to do some RP stuff, involving combat and other things, using it, so it had something “like” real game mechanics, and d) being able to make it what ever the F you wanted.
Linden Labs “solution” to all the problems with SL was to utterly miss why the F people liked SL in the first place, and they have recently started banning certain kinds of gift givers/prize machines (probably due to some legal BS, but who knows, I haven’t looked into why, but this screws up a lot of stuff on there, again), and to creation “Second Life 2” – “We solved all our server problems why making it cost more, places far more limits on what you can do, and not letting you link anything to anything else, so you can’t make large worlds/cities, etc. and cause us headaches by trying to move from place to place. Isn’t this great?!!”
To which I say, “Uh, no.. No, its not. You went from a freaking self made open world to a walled room. And, utterly missed the point.”
In any case, anything “Facebook” where to come up with would be.. like a damn shopping mall. A Second Life 3, or something – “Even more dissimilar from the original than the replacement. Don’t you just love it?” Sigh…
Shutting down Facebook would be nice. But do you ever plan on removing the completely unnecessary facebook.net garbage from your own blog? I mean, the one thing is a lot easier than the other. Baby steps.
But okay…. Why do you think that some agency in our government would be any “better” at censoring the offensive glop than the corporate governance provided by Facebook to its “users”? (Really the “products” which are for sale, but whatever.) What’s the reasoning behind that?
Is it that you think we need something even scarier and more powerful than Facebook, in order to really get the job done right? That doesn’t sound great to me.
If you’re looking for something more democratic, with better transparency and more accountability to the public, then unfortunately, our government (at least in its current state) is going to be a big disappointment in that respect. And if what you want is something like “agreement with science,” then it has a long history of failure at that too. Also, those very features depend quite a lot on first amendment protections, and that defeats the purpose of the whole censorship thing, no? I don’t get how you won’t just create a different monster, even if it’s one that you think you can control. Either that, or it seems like it will be something that simply wouldn’t do the things that you’re expecting it to do.
Anyway, you do have a telephone. That is relatively simple, as communications services go. You also have an email account, which isn’t too complicated either. You could already use those things to chat with family and friends, and it doesn’t even matter whether Facebook still exists. It shouldn’t, and we should work on that. There’s just no need for you to wait, because you can stop using it at any time.
You can shut down Farcebork in your own life in about a minute. Just stop going there except to delete all your info and eventually your account. Personally, I never saw the advantage of getting on the site in the first place.
If someone is threatening to detonate a load of potassium nitrate, then they are no danger whatsoever because they fail at chemistry, badly. Potassium nitrate is a component of some low explosives and rocket fuels, but it is not an explosive on its own, it is an oxidant and it needs a reducing agent to form an explosive. On its own, it is so safe that it can be melted and used in the molten state to store thermal energy.
Ammonium nitrate is a single component explosive. Perhaps there was a misprint/typo?
I’m amused at Khan making common cause with a Trump appointee in terms of slapping down Facebook.
I wonder if The Vicar will appreciate this, or whether he’s going to find a way to moan about the Democrats being so imperfect we’re better off with Trump.
FTB wants to access facebook.net. I don’t let it.
snarkrates @13, it’s futile; if you’ve ever had a FB account, you will be tracked across websites and apps when online. Their business model is to either use or sell that info to (for example) advertisers. Best one can do is to limit that a little bit.
You can’t eat or shit in the metaverse, or regulate your body temperature.
I don’t either.
However, a correction: not FTB as a whole but Pharyngula. I’m not seeing it with NoScript at Mano’s, Stderr, A Trivial Knot, Intransitive…. But unwittingly or not, this blog is pushing the facebook pills.
I bet they didn’t even use the “just say no” slogan in Australia. How did you ever learn?
Eh?
I looked earlier before I went out and nothing. Perhaps “developing news”, though there is usually a live rundown of things but not in this case. But now several hour later I check again and still nothing:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/all
Your link is behind a paywall, so I can’t check that.
So is this a major event or not? Is the graun ignoring it or is such an event just so normal in the US that it’s no longer worth reporting (I can’t see how that could be myself).
As for facebook blocking the livestream after 3 hours: I really can’t see how you could complain about that. They are not law enforcement, they are not the press. It probably took some time to get noticed at all, then to run up and down the hierarchy. Seriously, that’s about the shortest response time you could possibly expect. If you want less, you want a world you would seriously not enjoy living in. There are many reasons to dislike facebook – that is not one of them.
cr, just checked Mano’s, it has facebook.com; stderr, however, is much, much cleaner (no surprise there!). Yes, I too run NoScript and on Pharyngula I have 11 domains not enabled, whereas on stderr I only have 5 not enabled, and on Mano Singham I have 9 not enabled.
But yes, a bit rich that PZ fulminates against FB whilst enabling it on his blog.
(Mind you, it was a lot worse when the ads were rampant, back in the day)
Before there was FaceBook, there was MySpace. Before there was MySpace there were blogs. Before blogs there was GeoCities. Before that there was Usenet. That’s when I was introduced to the internet. FaceBook is just another evolution of a platform for user generated content. In the early 90s Usenet was out of control crazy. Zero moderation or regulation. Child porn, snuff, The Anarchist’s Cookbook (FYI I never cared for ANY of that), it was all there. I spent way to much time trying to find the weirdest sex stuff I could find. Alt.Sex.MarciaClark was severely underappreciated. Yes, there was someone out there who shipped Marcia Clark and Lance Ito. I’ll spare you some of the stranger more vulgar stuff I found back in those days.
I would even take it back further to the BBS days, and before that there were zines and slash fiction. Again teenage me was mostly into the sexy stuff not the hate/violence filth. These communities were forming long before The Zuck came along. FaceBook just provides lubricant to connect these people. It used to be a lot harder to find that particular kink, or that particular political or social view. You needed a computer with a dial up modem and a lot of patience. You can just click your way there these days.
So what do we do?
Only 3 hours to ban a right wing terrorist in the middle of his bomb threat. It took Fartbook 30 seconds to drop Suckaberg’s banhammer on me when I was mildly critical of the bone saw prince. Apparently describing a sociopath who gets his minions to butcher journalists he doesn’t like as scum is too bigoted for their “standards’. Speaking of which I’ve complained to Fartbook several times about hate filled posts from extreme right bigots but always get the response that their toxic slime doesn’t violate Fartbook’s (lack of) standards.
If Zuckerface made his “metaverse” look more like Minecraft or Roblox, he’d have the “Zillennials” in the palm of his hand.
He’d finally become the
godcult leadersocial influencer he wanted to be all along.Regarding the slowness to ban said FB account, I’m curious to know if FB had to talk with law enforcement first, as the streaming was certainly providing some information about the scene and constitutes evidence that can be used in court.
You make a good point. I tracked down the Facebook link to an item in my profile I set up 10 years ago, and never thought about. It’s deleted now.
If memory serves the innocent enough looking Facebook buttons on webpages were sufficient to establish an unwanted connection in your browser even without an account. I was learning about network security and I think it was the netstat command that opened my eyes to a dark underbelly of latent stuff.
I also recall looking at firewall logs and freaking out over what was innocent enough internal network chatter. Apple did have that creepy zeroconf Bonjour thingy that did network chattering.
OCD people shouldn’t look under the hood at firewall logs, netstat, whois etc.
You can get rid of facebook tracking, but it takes some technical knowledge.
I like to blacklist them at the DNS level.
Set up your own DNS server for your network. Preferably a UNIX-like OS like Linux. Could be a simple Raspberry Pi.
You need to pick a dns server that allows you to block entire domains. I like
dnsmasq.Instruct the DNS server to return
NXDOMAIN(domain does not exist) for the following domains:*
cdninstagram.com*
edgekey.net*
edgesuite.net*
facebook.com*
facebook.net*
fb.com*
fb.me*
fbcdn.com*
fbcdn.net*
fbsbx.com*
instagram.com*
tfbnw.net*
whatsapp.com*
whatsapp.net(For relevant domains, look at e.g.
https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporations/facebook/all)Any program running on any computer in your network trying to resolve a hostname in those domains then gets the message that the domain doesn’t exist. This includes the javascript running in your browser.
A graun article finally appeared 00:16 GMT.
(1) The OP is rather unsurprisingly ignorant of the history of “metaversish” predecessors. Ray Bradbury’s novelette “The Fireman,” later expanded to short-novel length as Fahrenheit 451, included all of the elements of a “metaverse” in various places. In 1951. And even that was four decades after E.M. Forster’s novella The Machine Stops (1909!).
(2) Windows users don’t need to go as far as rsmith proposes (@28) — all they need do is edit the hosts file (which lives in windows\system32\drivers\etc ). Just add that list of domains, one per line, then pop back to the beginning of the line and add 127.0.0.1 , so it looks like
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
and so on. (Of course, getting the computer’s permission to edit that file can be tricky depending on the way your system is set up.) This requires no investment in anything, no technical geekery other than editing a text file… and can be easily added to (or, if there’s a later need, subtracted from) at will. I have most of the major analytics servers blackholed in the same way. And it’s easy to port to another machine, or a new version of windows, just by copying that pure-text file.
Mac and Linux users can do something analogous, but I can’t necessarily point you to the right file location.
facebook has stated that my Oculus Rift will cease to function after the end of next year so no “we can sell up to 80%… of a individual’s visual field before inducing seizures” for me. I only need a new facebook account to continue using it. NOPE!
I hate to think how many hours I’ve racked up in VR, but I’m sure facebook knows actually to the microsecond. I’m holding out hope for the class action suit that is sure to be filed on Jan 2, 2023. That is some very expensive hardware, being bricked by an unnecessary and unilateral requirement change.
I’ve been worried about Facebook for a while now. The internet was supposed to help, but I guess the people who said that in the beginning overestimated human nature.
I’m worried enough that I think something should be done, but whenever I think about the something, I keep coming up short.
Sometimes, I’m reminded of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad theory, which roughly goes: normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad. Maybe the problem is the anonymity, and the solution might be to roll that back? Probably not. I’m just talking out loud now.
Sometimes, I wonder if we could make a targeted surgical strike, and pass a law that says willfully spreading false information of any kind is a criminal act, using the current “actual malice” standard of US defamation law for public individuals, aka the prosecution would have to prove that it was false, and also prove (beyond a reasonable doubt) that the accused knew it was false or acted with reckless disregard regarding the truth of the claim. One might say that it would be too hard to meet that burden, but I counter as follows: In order to run an operation as big as Fox News, there must be a paper trail of their lies. You can’t run a propaganda machine as large as that without a paper trail of the willful lies. In other words, I believe that freedom of speech is not about protecting lies, but the key is finding a legal policy that harms the liars without a slippery slope problem.
Whoo, my favourite author got a mention! Max Barry, he’s written a lot of great stuff after Jennifer Government too.
I tried facebook when it first arrived in the UK in 2005. I was actually the 14th person on the site in England. I was on there for a decade, pretty much, before I deleted it at the request of my best friend and unrequited love, who had got annoyed at me for posting about my ire at his boyfriend for taking him away from me. I don’t miss it much. I only really used it for sharing my rage, anxiety and depression with the void. None of my three friends was ever remotely interested in any of my thoughts on there, and I disabled everything on the news feed and advertising bars so Marcus of Zuckerberg wouldn’t keep trying to show me things.
These days I just write my frustrations in a journal file where nobody can see them, and use email or text messages to talk to my three friends. Not that they reply much. It’s ironic – we have a thousand ways of staying in touch, and yet people don’t. I spoke to them more when we had to pick up the landline phone.
“Snow Crash”….yeah, that was a fucked-up narrative universe. No wonder Zuckberg and the other assholes want to make some part of it reality.
@GerrardOfTitanServer:
Facebook itself actively demonstrates that anonymity isn’t the problem, since Facebook has (very badly) implemented a ‘no aliases’ rule and tries to (again, very badly) enforce using real names. Like just about everything else on Facebook, their rules usually get used as cudgels by the fuckwads rather than against them. There has been a long history of anti-vaxxers getting their critics thrown off Facebook by taunting the critics until the critic says something that can be reported to Facebook to get them blocked.
The core issue isn’t anonymity so much as lack of accountability. People are quite willing to say horrible things under their real names as long as they don’t think they’ll face any actual consequences for doing so. And Facebook has given horrible people lots of reason to believe they won’t ever be held accountable just by the history of their ‘moderation’ process. And, let’s be honest, Facebook is all about driving engagement and clicks, and horrible people being loud and wrong on the Internet drive engagement and clicks. Facebook’s entire business model leans towards letting people be wrong because that causes more people to talk about it, and their moderation history has always come down harder on the people who get upset at the misinformation than on the sources of misinformation.
Exactly. That doesn’t just apply to Facebook, of course. It can also be a lot more painful than a cudgel…. Twitter:
jenorafeuer
Very good points.
Also, I always wonder how much of this is can be blamed on religion. It’s not religion doctrine. Rather, it’s the erosion of critical thinking and the creation of tribes whose membership requires loyalty to the group above any consideration of critical thinking and the truth. I know it’s big part of the problem, but I don’t know how big.
I would guess that the root of the problem is money and how it is made. All of the incentives for making more money lean into all the faults of twitter. there are no consequences for users nor more importantly twitter for much of anything. It was set up to make money and is succeeding spectacularly as long as money is the purpose and goal it will continue. The target catch is the users the chum / bate is anything that attracts the catch. What holds us to it is our social nature.
what would it be like if it was a payed service some nominal subscription enough to pay for the operation plus a small profit .5% would still make the asshole rich enough to buy any thing he wants.
unclefroggy
Well said. That is a big part of it.
/etc/hostsI use:
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
Which is supposed to block trackers. I note that they use
0.0.0.0rather than127.0.0.1So the first line is:
0.0.0.0 fr.a2dfp.netBut that nonsense at the end … Why? It was going pretty well until then.
Something has gone wrong, when most don’t recognize the problem with adding “profit” on top of it all, as if there were some unquestionable need to make assholes rich for doing nothing. It’s as if that were a necessary ingredient in every recipe, and it’s one that’s seems so obvious to so many that it doesn’t even require explanation or justification. I don’t think they’d know where to even begin with giving you one, if you asked.
But look: that is being added to “paying for the operation,” or in other words paying all of the workers who actually produce the goods, perform the services, or in some way make the whole thing happen. The assholes say that they have some kind of a right to take money those earned by those workers, while of course dictating the prices and charging you the customer more than you should have to pay. But it’s not because of any actual work the assholes may or may not do, or else it already would’ve been a part of simply making the thing operate.
As long as some dude’s dreams will come true so that he can “buy any thing he wants,” and the rest of us have no choice but to live in the nightmare land the dude runs for us with all this extra power that we’ve handed to him, that is apparently reason enough to set things up this way. If that’s not a big problem with how money is made in our system, then nothing is.
@44
that .5% is a token for those in the investment class the owners like the Zuk. to sweeten the deal a little I think personality most things should be operated in a different manner without the need for outside none participatory investors save just loan suppliers who can only charge minimal rates and fees.
I doubt that anything like that will be accomplished without some transition to a system not based solely on money like we have now. the .5% is me thinking about that transition .