Now that all the WWI veterans have gone to their final rest, maybe it’s time to find something else to commemorate on November 11. Of course, this year it’s not just 11/11, it’s 11/11/11…and it doesn’t even matter if you write your dates American style or European style. So there’s a group of Facebook pushing to make this November 11th Nigel Tufnel Day. Sounds good to me, though maybe these Scotsmen might have a complaint.
Twenty-eight percent of American homes are “underwater” in value, according to real estate website Zillow.com.
Even the crap they make in China isn’t going to be cheap for much longer as wages for Chinese workers begin to rise. How long before the capitalists abandon China and move all their factories to Africa?
One of the most evocative explanations of wealth inequality I have ever read:
Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income.
The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America’s median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall.
The hypocrisy of Western foreign policy: Libya 2010 vs Libya 2011
Congress has authorized the President to go to war against anyone, anywhere, for any reason forever. Dennis Kucinich is one of the few members of Congress who opposes the measure. Oh, and the Senate is slated to re-authorize the PATRIOT Act today, with the only voice of opposition being Teabagger Rand Paul.
It’s not your imagination: Facebook is deliberately designed for morons.
Niemoller revisited:
First, they came for the manufacturing workers, but I didn’t speak out for them, cos jeez, I was, what, three years old at the time? Something to do with Reagan I heard, and those guys were unionised bums anyway, making America un-competitive, they deserved to lose their jobs.
Then they came for the call centre jobs, but I didn’t speak out for them because, hey, I was in high school, and sure it was irritating for my Mom and Dad when they were trying to get something done over the phone and the guy was following some jackass script, but hey – lower premiums!
Then they came for the service jobs, but I didn’t speak out for them because I was in college, I was studying hard and anyway it was pretty neat to be ab le to order at the drive-in around the corner from Yale and have my order taken by some guy in Buttfuck, Idaho who used to be a farmer or a machinist or some shit like that.
Then, they came for the software and publishing and insurance and project management jobs and I didn’t speak out because man, I’m so glad I went for a really high-value career like law, I mean, can you imagine if I’d done a liberal arts degree? These loans will be worth it in the end when all those sociology and English grads are serving me lattes.
Finally, they came for the law jobs and they used software and they moved everybody to Omaha to save on rent, and nobody spoke for me, because, y’know, everybody just wants to keep their jobs man, who’s going to cry for an Ivy League guy who can’t get a job?
— MetaFilter contributor “HappyDave”
I guess I never realized that William Shatner’s and Leonard Nimoy’s birthdays were only a couple of days apart. Nimoy’s birthday was Saturday, so we’re a couple of days late, but the sentiment remains.
Back in the day, it was definitely Leonard Nimoy who got the most fan attention, especially from the ladies. Which, in turn, made it harder for Nimoy to shake the character. So, while The Shat went on to ham it up in any number of crap made-for-TV movies and lame series, all the while building his own inimitable legend, Nimoy had to take it in the other direction and do anything BUT act (except, of course, when he was playing Spock again). And so Leonard Nimoy feels like part of the pop culture of the past, while William Shatner is almost too much a part of the modern-day tableau. You know, Shatner was a total whiny bitch about not being included in the Star Trek reboot movie, but in the end using Nimoy’s Spock to tie the movie back to canonical Trek was all the more effective.
I wonder if Leonard Nimoy ever took the hint and started eating more salsa?
And just in case you ever wondered what Spock was looking at in that viewer-thingy at his bridge station…he’s obsessing over Facebook, just like the rest of us:
On Friday, I decided to stop having Facebook scrape and post my blog feed. I just don’t feel like blog posts fit the very ephemeral vibe of FB, and, frankly, it irritates the living crap out of me when people post comments about the blog posts on FB instead of posting them here. I am also annoyed by people who feel the need to crosspost each and every thing they say on their blog on Facebook AND Twitter AND LinkedIn AND whatever other fad-of-the-week social site they just signed up for. Sorry, pals, you’re just not THAT fascinating. And I don’t want to be accused of the same shameless self-promotion.
Also, I don’t really like the idea that everything in the online world has to be seen through the filter of Facebook. It really defeats the sense of exploration that makes going online an interesting endeavor for me and reduces everything to just another commodity to be peddled. Monolithic entities like Facebook and Google and Microsoft are antithetical to the chaotic spirit of the Internet and lessen its real impact by overconcentrating.
I still think it’s a damn shame that Facebook killed personal blogging, but blogging was actually a very imperfect tool for people who were looking for a way to engage in personal interaction. Facebook is similarly very imperfect, but comes a lot closer, as long as you are satisfied with very superficial interaction. From the looks of things, it’s pretty clear that a vast majority of people are really only capable of that vapid communication in the first place. What gets lost on Facebook is the exchange that would happen when someone wrote a thoughtful or moving or infuriating blog post that could trigger comments and counterposts and e-mail and friendships and feuds. Absolutely none of that happens by clicking the “I Like This!” button. Last year around this time, I wrote that I thought there could be a renaissance of personal blogging once all the poseurs and wanna-bes had been sucked into the Facebook vortex, but I haven’t seen it happen. More’s the pity, because I think the people who really fit the blogger mold are still out there and might still have something to say.
He must have been there for the All-You-Can-Eat Friday Night Fish Fry.
If you have logged into Facebook any time in the last 24 hours or so, you’ve been informed about some of the changes to the privacy options the site lets you choose from, and you’ve also been given a chance to change some of those settings or just accept the default options.
This Fast Company blog post explains why you probably shouldn’t just accept the defaults without taking a moment to review what your current privacy settings are and whether or not you want them changed. The short version: Facebook’s new “default” setting not only lets everyone on Facebook see what you’ve posted, it also lets the entire Internet see it as part of Facebook’s gambit of trying to get a piece of the emerging real-time search business. So, your “candid photography” (nudge-nudge-wink-wink), dumb-ass quiz results, and other potentially embarrassing and possibly litigious statements will be there for anyone in the world to see rather than just the 300 million Facebook users who already had access to the undeniable proof of your stupidity.
If you’ve never gone through your privacy settings on Facebook, let me advise that RIGHT EFFING NOW is the perfect moment to do so. You’ll thank me later.
Related Links: Most People Use The Web To Talk To People Nearby
10 Things You Need To Stop Tweeting About
I caved in on my intended three-month hiatus from Facebook this morning. I lasted two months, which isn’t too shabby. It was a good break, and it spurred me to make a whole slew of changes in my online life: I canceled my Twitter account outright, I purged my RSS feeds and discovered a variety of other sites I hadn’t seen before, and my interest in this site was rejuvenated. I also had to come to terms with leaving a website I had been very involved with for a long time, which was painful but ultimately the right thing for me to do for my own good.
I still have some issues with the nature of the discourse on Facebook. As online communities have flourished and fallen over the years, it seems that the good ones are those that carefully balance substantive discussion and the tendency of online people to fall back on snark and fatuous quipping. There’s room for both, but the sites that try too hard to be earnest and sincere tend to become either sanctimonious or batshit-insane, and the sites that never get beyond quips and snark devolve into constant games of one-upsmanship that can be entertaining but ultimately pointless. Facebook suffers from the latter, along with a few other borderline tendencies. I do think, though, that as long as one is attuned to these tendencies, it’s possible to make use of the site; the trick is not succumbing to the temptation of playing the game.
Back at the beginning of October, I said that I believed that blogging would have to pretty much die out before it could begin again the way it was at the beginning — small clusters of people writing and commenting on one another’s writing — but it would appear that day is still far off. Getting back to the business of posting most days of the week has been a good exercise for me, but blogging is still busy dying rather than waiting to be reborn. My decision to start participating on Facebook again despite its many drawbacks is a solid acknowledgment of that fact. What has to change in the meanwhile, I think, is how I make use of this website to get beyond the blog model that has propelled it for almost a decade.
1. Denying that the Holocaust ever happened is perfectly okay, as long as you say it in Latin.
2. Being a drug smuggler, on the other hand, will get you kicked out on your ass. But, don’t worry, because our secret tribunal really isn’t a torture chamber…any more…
3. Only His Holiness will determine which pieces of toast REALLY have pictures of Jesus on them, and which ones are fake. Plus, we want a 5% finder’s fee on anything you sell on eBay that even remotely looks like anyone.
4. Facebook is bad…really, really bad. But YouTube is where the action is, kids, so come watch my videos and vote them up-up-UP!
In Nomine Patri et Fili et Spiritu Sanctu, Amen.
Remember Orkut? It’s Google’s social networking app that debuted in 2004 and became all the rage among the digerati for a while, especially since you had to be invited to be able to sign up for the service. Well, it wasn’t all that hard to get an invite, and so people descended on the thing like hungry locusts, tossing around invites like so much confetti, and for a while it seemd like Google had “done it again”. Except nobody had bothered to really think about what the hell they were supposed to do with it, and when it became readily apparent after about three months that there wasn’t anything to do with it except invite people and build buddy lists, everybody stopped using it. Except the Brazilians. Orkut transformed into the single most popular social networking application in Brazil, and is now mostly in Portuguese, catering to the interests of a much more specialized group.
That was my first exposure to social networking, and as such turned into the formative experience that led me to avoid the more recent fad for social networking websites. After all, how different could they be from Orkut when you got right down to it, and how long would it take for them to similarly collapse like neutron stars and become singularities?
About six months ago, though, I joined Twitter. Twitter seems to have reduced the concept down to the barest elements. The 7th-Grade cliquish crap of adding and deleting friends is still a large motivator for the whole thing, but the interaction has been reduced to tiny messages. It’s the bastard stepchild of social networking and instant messaging, and the appeal to people who wanted to blog but couldn’t come up with anything to say day after day was huge. It didn’t bowl me over, and I discovered that I really didn’t have anything to say that could be reduced to 140 characters, so I don’t use it all that much. When I do use it, I have to wade through a few people who either have to post every little thing they do all day (“Going to wipe my ass just as soon as the rest of this turd comes out”) or post vague and inscrutable statements that only mean something inside their own minds. I probably only check it once a week and find I am not missing all that much.
So yesterday, after much consideration, I joined Facebook (NOTE: you have to BE a Facebook member to visit that link), since it seems that over the past year it has gone completely mainstream. As somebody who usually gets in on the ground floor of a lot of aspects of digital life, it seemed like I was overdue to have this experience. That was completely confirmed for me as I went through the signup process and Facebook sucked up all my contact list data and started showing me how many of my very non-digital friends were long-time members. Other people have commented on discovering that their grandmother or their parents were on Facebook, and while that isn’t the case for me, I did find my youngest brother and a whole bevy of people that I would never have expected would be on board.
Quite frankly, that tells me that Facebook and MySpace and the other big-time social networking sites are about to turn into the next AOLs, if they haven’t already. Your hip, cool young person does not want to be associated with his or her grandma on a social website, and if it’s something that has gotten tame enough for grandma to use, there must be something cooler and edgier. For us middle-aged geezers, it’s clear that the whole appeal of the site is to look up old acquaintances and make fun of the ones that have gotten fatter/balder/saggier than you and burn with jealousy over the ones who are more successful/thinner/married-up than you. But once every 40-something in America has had a good chuckle at their senior class rival, they’re going to stop looking at the site and go find some more porn to watch online.
The other evening at the “career transition” support group I attend, one of the women, who was laid off from an executive secretarial job after 20 years and is having a hard time adjusting to modern job-seeking, said that she felt quite thwarted to see job listings where “ability to use social networking sites” was a job requirement. I can understand her flummoxedness (flummoxity? flummel?), but I found myself shaking my head to think of the pointy-headed bosses who somehow think this is the Next Big Thing and they’re going to score big if they can get X number of friends on their Facebook. Time to start learning Portuguese, fellas.
I did find one college friend I hadn’t heard from in six or seven years, but I was pretty sure I was going to see him there anyway. Honestly, I am pretty much in touch with anyone I want to be in touch with from high school or college, so I’m not likely to go seeking out long-lost childhood chums. Once the initial spurt of “friending” is done, I presume I’ll spend very little time with Facebook. I have plenty of other online distractions as it is.
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