Create the problem, sell the solution.

Budget analyst

When you start a new language, you learn “The Rules” first, and wonder why your first language doesn’t have such immutable “Rules.”

Then when you get fluent, you realize there are just as many exceptions as your first language.

That was a big talking point a few years ago. Polling companies stubbornly held on to calling landlines for too long, but the only people who had landlines were not representative of the voting population.

They try to correct for things like age, income, race, etc, by weighting the answers to match the wider population, but it’s hard to correct for things like “stubbornly old-fashioned regardless of physical age.”

Requiring a login would probably cut off a significant portion of their audience and ad revenue. Only Google analysts know for sure, but if the eyeballs lost to cutting off casual visitors (sent to YT from links or embeds, etc) are greater than the losses due to, frankly, a small portion of users who would just end up blocking ads in other ways, it’s a net loss for Google.

I work from home and often go weeks at a time only communicating with coworkers over IM.

It’s pretty nice for an introvert, but also real easy to feel completely out of the loop.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/us/politics/russia-disinformation-election.html

It’s starting, for sure. Assuming it ever really stopped, that is.

There are certain talking heads on TV that can only be explained by the theory that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. He gets people talking, even if it’s usually only about how bad he is.

Outrage media works. Sports commentary especially seems to depend on it.

In your case, I’m guessing lots of people have heard the horror stories of shitty, scammy repair techs in various fields (automobiles being one prominent example). The good ones have to deal with the occupational reputation driven by the worst of them.

For me, I don’t consider myself a real expert in any specific subject, but I’m adjacent to a number of financial areas. I try not to delve into the weeds of those internet discussions too often (like I said, not an ironclad expert), and even when I do, it’s only to address the most egregious errors. Money can be an emotional topic, and many of those opinions are based on the way people want the world to be rather than the way it is, so show up with facts and references and they tend to understand.

For anyone who misses it.

https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-von-shitzinpantz-has-formally-been-entered-into-the-record-2024-5

The Imperial March for the in-laws. (Years ago, we’re good now)

Joke’s on all you skinny folks. I carry a month of calories on me 24/7.

The Consciousness of Theseus.

Not exactly social media as one would typically define it, but I like Techdirt’s system. Insightful, Funny, or Report (for Troll/Spam), at least as a framework.

More sites should use more granular voting systems so that people can indicate why they like/dislike content. A downvote for “I disagree with this person’s opinion” shouldn’t count the same as “This is a spam account.” And “This content is factually correct information provided by an expert in the field” shouldn’t count the same as “hur hur, he said ‘boobies’.”

Or nine months after the summer of '79. But start there in great detail.

I still have a couple drives and a bunch of disks. I keep telling myself I’ll resurrect my college homework for a laugh one day. Unfortunately it’s hard to find a reasonably modern motherboard to hook them up (let alone finding drivers), so in the closet they sit.

Procrastinating

Samsung did have a major problem early last year, but it seems to be limited to a run of products with a specific firmware.

I was a teenager and I thought RadX sounded cool (this was a full year before Fallout 1 came out, so I don’t think it had any other inspiration). A few years later, I wanted a little continuity, but also something not quite so cringe-worthy. A single “i” fixed it.

Does waiting on the phone count? If so, six hours to get someone at the IRS, so they could fix the mistake in 2 minutes.