Tag: kool aid

Dear Facebook (by Michael Aguilar)

Michael Aguilar - From PoorlyPlannedSafari.com

Guys, this is a letter one of my friends wrote in Facebook (to Facebook) that really needs to be more public than the silly public settings on Facebook itself. While this letter doesnt touch on some of the more questionable actions by Facebook we’ve learned of in the past, it does address a common dissatisfaction within the environment that most people do find in their experience with the service.

Michael is very much like me, he’s very savvy in the tech arena and often cracking some awesome one-liners that sometimes you’ll even find me quoting on the blog. He’s currently forgone the tech arena, and is currently taking a journey camping from Texas all the way to Alaska..no really, he’s actually doing it. I am featuring him here mainly because he’s a pretty cool cat and he posts rants like these that just make people want to hug him.



You can find him and his campy camping experiences at PoorlyPlannedSafari.com

Dear Facebook,

I think it’s time I explained something to you. It’s about what you are. Yes, I’m sure you’ve drunk enough of your own Kool-Aid to believe you are something new, cool, and different.

You’re not.

What you are is blogging for the masses. Nothing more. There isn’t anything happening here that hasn’t happened for years on other platforms. You just made it easy enough for anyone to get into it.

That’s great! Setting up and filling a blog used to be really hard. If you wanted to say something to the world, you had to jump through a lot of high hoops. HTML & CSS was enough to scare people away. If you wanted to manage access in any way, you had to convince people to sign up for it. You had to give out your URL, or urge people to subscribe to your RSS feed. You had to pester them to read the thing.

It was part tech, part marketing, and then only what you had to say.

That sucked, and you fixed it. Thank you.

So why even bring this up? Well, it seems that you’ve gotten a little too big-headed lately. You’re so fixated on being cool that you haven’t figured out that you’re not. You were just the next step in something that has been going on for almost 20 years.

So, now you’re running around buying and building things that nobody even asked for. Timeline? Really? Show me a successful blog laid out that way, I dare you. Nobody reads like that.

Instagram? Face.com? Sure, lots of people were using them, and I’m sure they will make fine additions. They’re cool, right?

What about the basics, though? Instead of listening to what your closed circle of people are telling you, why don’t you just look at the things WordPress does, and make it even simpler?

How about nested groups, or at least permitting more than one group access to a post, picture, or album? Managing access is still a complete pain. This is something that Google+ does much better.

What about (you knew I was going to say it) better photo management? Moving a picture from one album to another should be a no-brainer. It isn’t possible at all. Instead of automatically tagging faces, an automatic watermark would be nice.

And wow – these long-form posts really hammer the browser. I didn’t know that until just now. Take a look at it, would you?

Most importantly, quit trying to be so sneaky. This is our stuff. We want to talk to each other, not you. I’m sure most people understand that we’re giving away data to advertisers, and that’s not so bad. You gotta make a buck or two. That’s fine. Setting things so that we’re unknowingly sharing has got to stop. Take us more seriously.

“Cool”, by it’s nature, only lasts so long. You’re not lame, yet. You sure are working on it, though.

I’m not going anywhere just yet. This is where the people are. For now. I’ll go back to posting pictures of my cats.

Sincerely,

Michael Aguilar (but you already knew that)




I’ll walk away from Facebook for supporting CISPA.

You all know I am incredibly big on freedom of information and the U.S. government really seems to be drinking some cybercrackpot’s kool-aid again. Because here we are again and it hasnt even been a year.

As it happens, the next incarnation of SOPA, called CISPA (the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) is slowly creeping up on Capitol Hill.

…and once again, only a fraction of the proposed legislation has the interests of the American people behind it.

The rest of that legislation is geared toward holding companies blameless and granting them permission to submit personal data to the government without court order. This includes texts, email, private messages via social media…essentially most of the communications mediums we use privately are now suddenly available to the big business to use.

The Young Turks presented a very good explanation of the legislation and point out some incredibly important details that you should be aware of.

http://cyberspying.eff.org/

If you want to read an overabundance of views and peoples’ reactions and opinions on the matter, I STRONGLY suggest you check out The Debate Club because of the raw amount of information present. I will also point out that for some inexplicable reason the only people promoting this are those representing big business.

Essentially it comes down to this. Facebook doesn’t want to get in trouble for giving the government carte blanc to their information. Neither does Twitter. Now any other corporation. However that’s apparently where that sense of importance ends. As long as they arent held liable for invading our privacy, they simply stop considering it an invasion of privacy.

And thus we come to this little tidbit…

Nothing you say or do online should ever be considered secure, safe, or private. You can take all the precautions you want, but the bottom line is that the government will never back down from making online activity fully trackable and accessible. A worse turn will be it impact this has on free speech. Too many people have been conditioned to fear first and question freedoms after their lost. This legislation will allow companies to attempt to silence individuals without proof or due process.

Lame.

So, that’s basically where I draw the line. I will publish 100% from my blog and own my own information and only promote forums where privacy is respected, not just alluded to.

Here’s my idea. Omit the 60% of the bill that allows private companies to be privy to our information and remove the guarantees of non-liability. I bet these companies work one hell of a lot harder to clean up their content rather than simply saying “not my fault!”

-Tony




Politicians, Debates and Schrödinger’s Cat

I just thought of something, if politicians were prohibited from alluding to a scenario involving Schrödinger’s Cat -metaphorically or otherwise- it might actually save the world economy a ton of money and time spent in syndication, thus disallowing them to pander fears and ideas that exist only by those same politicians’ own descriptions.
Schrödinger's CatIf you didn’t understand what I said:

    1.Please go find out about Schrödinger’s Cat.
    2.Understand the application of this theory to modern political asshattery in the media.
    3.Watch the debates again.

or as an alternative you can:

Drink more Kool-Aid.

Anyhow, it occurred to me tonight, that buried within most of the rhetoric and banter between candidates in the GOP debates, these guys directly allude to Schrödinger’s Cat in one form or another.

…My example is as follows:

…Pandering to the idea that the cat is dead and might still bite and scratch you…or maybe…the cat’s alive and out to steal your freedom as soon as it’s released. Worse still, the idea that someone actually KNEW there was a cat in the box AND gave it poison. Is that person criminal? How do we charge them?

…you have to remember…no one knows if the poison even affected the cat. Yet…we’re going to allow ourselves to be guided on a crazy journey of how beautiful this poor little cat was and how we wish it were still alive…

…then we’ll be guided into how we’ll hold responsible the horrible man that put that poor cat through such a horrible ordeal.

…then the media will make it worse by sensationalizing the state of the box that poor poor cat was imprisoned in.

…then we find out that some country that we have a some strategic or financial interest in supplied the poison.

…by the time the politicians are finished inspiring us and protecting our national interest in the cat…billions of dollars are allocated and we’re going to stop that country from ever poisoning cats again. Because that’s what they are. Cat killers.

…it gets worse. we are informed that an small extremist group of fanatics (who it so happens don’t even know what a cat is but believe the U.S. to be responsible for all the problems that arose from poison boxes) intend to place cats in boxes across the U.S. and poison them. With a fervor that shakes the world economy and eventually accounts for a truly scary portion of the national deficit, we eliminate and destabilize those horrible cat killers.

In the last ten years since things have become REALLY crazy and scary, the loss of innocent life in the last decade makes me saddens me to the bone, the effect of profiteering at the expense of our economy has sliced my income in half and even then, there are a lot of people here far worse off than I am, and yet the politicians got their salary increase and kept their benefits while the people they likely misrepresent to satisfy special interests and lobbies start to become a little more aware of the practice.

…and now comes the time where we have the opportunity to decide on which leader will be most capable in making sure the box is never opened again, the poison is never produced again, and the cats never die.

After repeatedly making laws that serve the big business and the financial block, we begin to realize that we have far more to fear and distrust in those who represent us in the government. All the candidates are either viewed as proven failures, proven liars, proven crooks, proven loons, even worse…proven inexperience.

…debates rage between potential leaders regarding the dead cat, the unclean box, and looming threat of yet another poison.

…we are told we have to remember what’s happened historically with cats, boxes, and poisons, and that the party that wants to make antidotes for the poison just in case isn’t a priority because the cats all of a sudden are jumping into boxes. Worse still, we’ve found out that a nation that hasn’t attacked another nation in hundreds of years suddenly hates Geiger counters.

And so the debates are still going now. They are getting more and more poignant and the candidates are fighting already, the tasteless commercials depicting candidates as faithless lunatic crooks are in full swing. Again, we begin to loose faith as we realize that the current electoral, media coverage, and campaign system will not allow the US to rally behind a single leader ever again…even if they deserve it.

The worst thing of all. For the last umpteen years, we’ve had to listen to politicians earning a living and invariably stressing information about a cat that never existed, a box that we never owned, a poison that actually was never created, and lastly a Geiger counter that was never really necessary.

Maybe you’ll get it. This isn’t about which GOP candidate can beat Obama in an election (if that’s even possible coming election time). This isn’t about all the dirt you see in commercials and advertizements. It’s not about who’s got some truly radical ideas (in every sense of the word).

I think it’s more about your own priorities after you’ve managed to filter out all the crap they’ve been feeding you about the idea of Schrödinger’s Cat.

Thus ends my rant for the evening.

For everyone returning to my site after everyone on the internet got a 12-24 hour taste of what kind of effect SOPA/PIPA will have on the US-based netizens, you can find a VERY clear and descriptive article on what SOPA and PIPA are on Wikipedia. So far the very best (and maybe the most objective) description of what the bill is about.

Take care and good night.

-Tony

PS – Ignoring the lines starting with … will serve as a shining example of what I was trying to point out.