Teens and social media

There has been considerable discussion recently about the damaging effects of social media on young people, giving many feelings of inadequacy as they compare themselves unfavorably with their alleged peers, even though some of those peers may be presenting a false image of themselves as having it all together and living the good life. This is especially the case with so-called ‘influencers’, those who go to great lengths to market themselves in the best possible light, almost making it a full-time job. The people who have something positive to say about their lives will usually talk more about it than those who are not having it so good, and so it would be easy to fall into the trap of feeling that everyone is having a better time that you

Kevin Drum has an thought-provoking post about the role of the internet in creating this problem. At least, it provoked my thinking enough to feel the need to comment on it.
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Book review: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022)

This novel by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka won the prestigious Booker Prize for 2022. He is the second Sri Lankan to win the prize, after Michael Ondaatje. The story is set in 1990 and deals with the carnage that engulfed that country in the decades leading up to that time, with thousands of people, mostly ordinary civilians, dying in the conflicts with suicide-bomb explosions in crowded places, people disappearing, mysterious death squads operating with impunity (‘mysterious’ only in the sense that people were fearful of publicly and openly saying what everyone knew, that these were plain-clothes government forces in unmarked vehicles carrying out extrajudicial kidnappings and executions), and dead and mutilated bodies found floating in rivers, lakes, and canals. As far as I am aware, to this day no one among the senior police, military, and political figures who ordered and executed these atrocities has been held accountable for their actions.

The story begins with narrator Maali Almeida waking up in a waiting room in the afterlife where he is told that he has seven days (‘moons’) to try and figure out how and why he died before he moves on to the next realm. This book falls into the category of magic realism so we are in a world where the spirits of dead people are the main characters as they move around not sensed by the living and are able to go anywhere and listen and watch, though they cannot communicate with the living, except for a very few spirits and that too in very limited ways.
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John Oliver on the state of AI

He uses the current buzz around the use of AI in ChatGPT and Google and Bing search engines to look more broadly at the current state of AI and where it might be headed.

I had a list of four things that always seemed to be ten years away: AI, fully self-driving cars, sustainable fusion energy, and quantum computers. It is not that there have been no advances in these areas. Each field has advanced considerably but the delivery date for the fulfillment of all they promised keeps moving back as new difficulties aree encountered.

Recently I have been wondering whether AI has advanced far enough to be removed from the list. This judgment depends of course on what criteria one uses. The highest criterion for AI, that it achieves sentience (similar to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey) hasn’t been reached yet though it is getting close to where we might not be sure if it has reached it (by passing some version of the Turing test) or not.

I think I will keep it on the list for now.

The Havana Syndrome is still a mystery

The Havana Syndrome is the name given to the set of symptoms first reported by American diplomats in Havana that then spread to those working in other countries around the world, and even affecting Canadian diplomats. The symptoms included dizziness, headaches, and painful sounds in their ears. There were two questions. What was causing it? Was it due to the actions of a foreign governments? This issue was studied extensively by the US government and scientific researchers.

The US government has now released a report that says that they do not think it was caused by a hostile act by a foreign government.
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Wanda Sykes on the abuse of speeding tickets

Sykes is one of the rotating hosts of The Daily Show and she had a good segment about how some local communities use speeding tickets as a source of revenue, by adding all manner of other fees to the fine itself. They even put poor people in jail for inability to pay the fines, and then add on more costs to pay for their incarceration.

She says that these fines are hardly a deterrent for rich people and recommends the model of some countries like Finland where the penalty is proportional to a person’s income, and where a Nokia executive got hit with a $103,000 speeding ticket.

The Roald Dahl books controversy revisited

There have been some interesting followups to the controversy over the decision of the Roald Dahl’s estate and publishers to revise his books to remove some language and ideas that are now seen as offensive.

One item that emerged was that Dahl in his own lifetime was willing to change his books in response to opposition and to accommodate the changing cultural ethos so that his books would continue to sell and be adapted to other media.

Amid the outcry over Dahl’s books being edited, many seem to have forgotten that the author previously edited his work himself to make it less offensive. He edited his book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 1973, just shy of a decade after its initial publication. Meanwhile, the edits took place just two years after the film adaption, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, was released. In his initial book, the Oompa Loompas were depicted as African Pygmy people who were snuck out of Africa in crates by Willy Wonka and basically forced into servitude in his factory.
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Hasan Minhaj on the lab leak and Dilbert stories

Minhaj returns as this week’s rotating host of The Daily Show where he was a correspondent for five years.

He argues that rich people like Scott Adams end up saying awful things because they are bored with their lives.

Minhaj said Adams is a prime example of “a certain type of rich person.” They have no problems of their own, so they invent new ones just to make their own lives interesting.

“I can guarantee you: J.K. Rowling had zero opinions about trans people when she was on welfare,” he said. He suggested a wealth tax would solve the problem.

“Rich people, this is for your own good,” he said. “The wealth tax is actually a shut-the-fuck-up tax.”

“Spend more time working, kissing your loved ones, getting groceries ― y’know, being a normal person,” he said. “Because normal people don’t hate Black people. We’re all too busy hating that one squeaky wheel on the shopping cart.”

The myth of the free market and the rising popularity of The Communist Manifesto

The radio program On The Media had an excellent show where host Brooke Gladstone talked with two authors about their recent books.

The first interview was with Naomi Oreskes about “The History of Free Market Fundamentalism in the US”.

For decades the so-called “free market” has been seen as a fundamental part of American society, often lauded in debates about the success of capitalism. But with wealth inequality in the U.S. at an all-time high, debates about capitalism have ramped up.  This week, Brooke sits down with Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University and the co-author with Erik M. Conway of “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market,” to trace the evolution of what Oreskes calls “free-market fundamentalism” back to a century-old public relations campaign that still impacts American politics.

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Dilbert comic being canceled all across the country

Dilbert creator Scott Adams has long been known to have racist and homophobic views but his recent tirade about Black people was even more extreme than in the past. As a result, newspapers across the country have decided to stop publishing the daily and Sunday strip.

Its creator, Scott Adams, recently denigrated Black people as a “hate group”, advising white people to “just get the hell away” from them.
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The strip was founded in 1989, and at its peak about 2,000 newspapers across 70 countries carried it. Adams lit a fuse under the success of his own work in a recent episode of his YouTube show Real Coffee with Scott Adams.

In the course of the show, Adams misinterpreted a Rasmussen poll that asked people whether they disagreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white”. As the Anti-Defamation League has pointed out, the phrase originated with the extremist online forum 4chan as a trolling campaign and was then seized upon by white supremacists – but Adams took it literally.

On the back of it, he declared Black people “a hate group” and expressed his relief that he had managed to flee them by living in a neighborhood with a “very low” African American population.

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Encouraging increase in wind and solar power generation

It is encouraging that energy from wind and solar sources are increasing at a rapid rate in the US.

National wind and solar capacity grew 16% compared to 2021. All told, renewables generated enough electricity to power 64m American households. The report comes as the Biden administration starts to make billions of dollars available for renewable energy projects. The administration has committed to decarbonizing the grid completely by 2030 and getting the US to net zero emissions by mid-century.
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In the past five years, the share of wind energy more than doubled from 15% to 34%. Over that same time, gas production has fallen from 49% to 34%.
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The US generated 683,130 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity from solar and wind last year, according to Climate Central’s findings, up from 588,471 GWh in 2021. The report shows that solar generation is understandably highest in the summer, while wind energy peaks in spring and fall.

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