I had prepared everything for my absentee ballot. Filled out the forms, stamped by the embassy, a month in advance. Receipts everywhere.
My dad wasn’t able to vote for me. Of course.
I’m in front of my computer for our Sunday call at 8pm/11am for me, when the election results come out.
They tell me that the far-right is in the second round, just as I refresh the page online and can see it myself.
No surprise. Pain, though.
I’m finishing my naturalization paperwork this week.
Heavy in the mind.
It’s a great book. Makes you think, appreciate.
Speaking of numbers, about that pandemic.
Things are looking better in America, thanks to not having data anymore. We can see some stabilization happening in Asia and Europe. Except for something weird.
In the last two months, deaths per week in Germany have almost doubled. It’s not a little peak it’s a slow, steady increase. Germany has the highest ICU/person ratio in the world, remember. So people should recover better than anywhere else. They are not.
Also to note that its neighbors France and the UK’s weekly deaths are slightly going up recently.
New, deadlier variant? I sure hope not.
Adriano Ferreira da Silva Filho, a 19-year-old fan from Ilhabela, a beach town in the state of São Paulo, told Rest of World that he wanted to boost “Envolver”’s popularity as a means of paying back an artist who was influential in his life. So, Filho created a series of different playlists to play the song over 2,000 times a day using his laptop and two cellphones to be able to have them all playing simultaneously from different usernames.
“If you only play the track on repeat, Spotify doesn’t count it as a stream,” Filho explained. “They think it’s a bot. So, you have to create a playlist with different tracks and alternate them with the one you want to boost.”
All numbers on platforms are fake or fake-ish. Number of followers, likes, plays, views? All fake. Database 0s and 1s that can be edited however one is pleased. All those numbers are gamed.
I’ve seen someone with half a million followers on Twitter get 3 RTs in four hours. For something about her business. That makes no sense.
Those numbers have zero value, are constantly manipulated and far too many people OBSESS about them.
You’re obsessing about the void, a black box designed for retention, dear. No status here. Focus.
Reading a conversation about ads and how much we all dislike them, that we tolerate them until we can’t. How advertising is psychological warfare, etc.
Then I realized that Facebook/Meta in 2020 made $32.6 billion in profit, off ads.
2 years of Facebook profit would pay for the six next-generation nuclear plants that France is planning on building.
Let me rephrase that.
A couple years of one single COMPANY’s profit is enough to pay for one COUNTRY to stay energy-wise, independent. That’s incredible. Staggering.
Ads work way too well. Which is why they suck. Which is why they are still here. Because they work so well.
It must be fascinating/disturbing these days. I can’t wait for the upcoming Netflix Real Reels or whatever.
“Meditation is an incredible tool (even if my own report says otherwise) to connect with this world on an entirely different wavelength.”
I have never meditated in my life. But I play my bass daily since the mid 90s.
I wouldn’t be able to stop ever, I think.
It does make me connect to this world on an entirely different wavelength. In the deepest moments of concentration when improvising, when my eyes are closed and my fingers know three to five steps in advance what to do?
It’s indescribable. It feels like I am One with Everything.
I’d always laugh reading musicians speak about that type of thing. A stereotype, indeed. But then you reach that level of expertise and you can only be quiet about it. Because it’s that overwhelming and intense and so serene.
Fun fact: brainwaves are going from 1 to 150Hz and bass guitar is about 40 to 400Hz. I wonder if they synchronize and/or harmonize.
Anyway I always, always need a good ten minutes to get my brain back to being able to activate speech.
Because playing a musical instrument makes me feel like jumping from stars the size of atoms to the size of actual stars, with a grappling hook. I told you, it’s indescribable.
What in the FFFF???? This is an actual picture of Liz Cambage:
I know what the email tried to do; it’s true that the WNBA advertises its league with white women —Stewart, EDD, Taurasi— despite the fact that the WNBA is 75% black.
So the email is trying hard to project the “see??? We LOVE black women in the WNBA!! We celebrate them!!”
By doing the worst Photoshop job I’ve seen in ages, to one of its best player, gotcha. *thumbs up*
It’s the main pattern online these days: how to moderate a wild or getting wilder, crowd. From any online game, to all the video-based websites to social media, the need to moderate is unprecedented.
Yet, it is almost impossible to do a great job.
Few and weak moderation tools allow abuse. A lot of powerful moderation tools allow abuse as well.
I fail to see how this is going to play outside of a totalitarian solution, which we should probably avoid?
This is intense. There’s so much at stake.
“Resources are not limited. Only human knowledge is limited.”
I see where it’s coming from: human beings have been pushing so hard for so long. Sometimes it does seem that we do not have any limit. Who would have thought WiFi would be a thing –wireless computer network when you need one cable to be connected?- AND be so ubiquitous in the early stages of the internet mid 90s? Not a single soul. Wireless data transfer sounded like goddamn science-fiction. We’re amazing.
Yet, our world is finite. There’s something, at some point, that just blocks us. Earth’s gravity. Oil supply. Radio frequency. I know, humans are absolutely fabulous at squeezing shit out. Moore’s law is kind of dead but we’re still hitting the 2nm process by uh, squeezing again. And lying (the process is not really 2nm).
That’s the whole point this article ignores: humanity has been squeezing everything for the past few decades. The squeezing has become harder and harder if not totally impossible by now. We’re squeezing so much, we have to lie now. Fracking is good! Slavery in Congo or China to make batteries for our devices doesn’t exist!
That’s not a good sign for the next twenty years, at all.
People just don’t get how much bigger our global economy is compared to twenty years ago, and how exponential our resources digging has gone. We’re gargantuans eating this planet and ourselves alive.
Now grown folks seriously talking about “it’s fine, we’ll mine the rest of the galaxy then” when space is the most hostile environment ever? I mean. Sure, go ahead.
The "fuck it we’ll figure it out later (when I’m dead)" argument from very smart people makes me think that they’re not very smart people. Frustrating because they’re running us into the ground.
Earth demands that we consume less and redistribute better. The end.