I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
And so the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through

Monday, October 2, 2017

Linkee-poo thoughts and prayers

58 and counting. Can we have that discussion on our society's sick addiction to firearms now or are our elected representatives too busy offering their thoughts and prayers to get a committee together?

A run down of the hoaxes that were spread on social media about the Las Vegas shooting. Hmm, why would the conservative and alt-right want to spread rumors and muddy the waters around this even. It's so strange (no, it's not). (Grokked from Dan)

Crowd Sourced Steering. XKCD on exactly how a lot of the social media AI works (hint, it's not AI at all). (Grokked from Dan)

"Multiple studies show that economic prosperity is much more strongly correlated with the circumstances of one's birth -- for example, being raised around a lot of rich people -- than it is with your education. A Stanford study included education as just one of five factors that correlate with economic mobility: 'segregation, family structure, income inequality, local school quality, and social capital.'"

"Daniel Parfitt thought he'd found the perfect drone for a two-day mapping job in a remote patch of the Australian Outback. The roughly $80,000 machine had a wingspan of 7 feet and resembled a stealth bomber. There was just one problem. His machine raised the hackles of one prominent local resident: a wedge-tailed eagle." (Grokked from Dan)

"Scenes of chaos and violence unfolded in Catalonia as an independence referendum deemed illegal by Madrid devolved quickly on Sunday… As police followed orders from the central government to put a stop to the vote, they fired rubber bullets at unarmed protesters and smashed through the glass at polling places, reports The Associated Press. Three hundred and thirty-seven people were injured, some seriously, according to Catalonia's government spokesman." While horrible for Spain, it somehow feels like foreshadowing for here.

"Egyptian business executives ordered $23 million worth of rockets from North Korea for the Egyptian army in a complex and illicit arrangement that was thwarted by U.S. intelligence services, The Washington Post reported on Monday." While it says "business executives" understand that the Egyptian military has a huge industrial component (and commercial stores) and they control about a third (IIRC) of the Egyptian GDP. (Grokked from Dan)

"Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert sent a memo around the White House urging staff to focus on the positive aspects of the recovery efforts in Puerto Rico while President Donald Trump took to Twitter to address the problem in his own way." How do you manage the message correctly? By doing the damn work and letting it speak for itself. Or you can do what this White house is trying to do by setting the spin cycle to high and hoping to skate over the thin ice quickly enough to get to the next disaster so people stop focusing on the immediate disaster in front of them. This is otherwise known as the "half-assed job" strategy.

So is Tillerson playing the "good cop" to Trump's "bad cop" or is this administration even more dysfunctional that I imagined (and I can imaging a lot)?

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