So, Beijing now— the world's 3rd largest city proper. By one estimation:

"Over 5% of the population of entire world is currently under lockdown due to the #coronavirus. 400 million people in China are on lockdown now."

This is the Canadian guy who's leading the WHO team just arrived in Beijing to investigate 2019-nCoV.

But it took nearly two weeks to get the government’s green light on the team’s composition, which was not announced, other than to say Aylward was heading it.

PSA,

Don't use Google drive.

https://twitter.com/KaeEsrial/status/1225709827269091330

• So Chongqing (the world's biggest proper city) and Shanghai are locked down too, hence the 400m number listed above. "All four municipalities directly under the Central Government in China fell to Coronavirus."

The use of the word "fell" is a figure of speech.


• You were probably wondering how they were going to feed themselves anyway.


• Here's a puppy.

Can't live without Google docs, so I use this software to keep a local copy of everything, but Six is right.

As the saying goes, "'The Cloud' is just somebody else's computer."

Don't use Google drive. ~ Sixclaws at February 10, 2020 3:31 AM

We need to get over this idea that Google, Twitter, et al are gatekeepers of content and let them be the fora (forums) that they were meant to be.

I should be able to keep anything legal on my Google drive and say anything I want on Twitter, however objectionable.

Matt Vespa of Townhall.com admits Bernie's doing it the right way, building a national constituency and plugging his ideas. He still won't vote for him, but he notes the overlap in anger and frustration motivating both the Trump supporters and the Bernie supporters.

The cancer is spreading

https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1225934358948782080

"We need to get over this idea that Google, Twitter, et al are gatekeepers of content and let them be the fora (forums) that they were meant to be." ~Conan

Then you need to build your own. Google, Twitter, et al are not interested in that business.

News high schoolers can use.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-salaries-college-degrees/

Things that sound better in your head:

"No you haven’t. You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier."

https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1226577362562752513

Important things you store in the cloud should be encrypted. And as Crid does, a local copy kept. Or more than one. USB flash drives aren't particularly expensive.

"We need to get over this idea that Google, Twitter, et al are gatekeepers of content and let them be the fora (forums) that they were meant to be."

But they want, very much, to be gatekeepers. The existence of the Internet really pisses off people like that. They've realized that they can't kill it outright, so what they are doing now is trying to make moves to control who can publish. Turn it back into a 20th-century broadcast medium, where you have a small number of content creators and a large audience of passive consumers, in receive-only mode. If they ever get their way, you will need a license to publish or transmit anything.

As for Google Drive: They scan it for anything that they think is copyrighted content. Pretty much anything that sounds like music will be deleted without warning. It doesn't matter whose music it is; it can be music that you composed and performed yourself. It will still be deleted. My dance partner and I used to have a lot of trouble with some of our dance practice videos disappearing. We figured out the problem was that the ones that were disappearing had music (from other dancers practicing) audible in the background. So now, we make it a point to copy the videos to our computers as soon as we can, before Google's copyright nannies find it.

Corona virus roundup:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/357810/

As for Google Drive: They scan it

You can stop right there.

Yes, they're looking for copyright violations, pirated content, and other naughty things. But they scan everything so they can improve the delivery of advertising to items you might be of interest, instead of just random ads.

Just don't expect to keep your Great American Novel, movie script, or patent application secret.

Your child's education might be in the best of hands. Or not.

https://nypost.com/2020/02/09/florida-teacher-tried-to-get-8-ball-of-meth-delivered-at-school-cops/

Radical, indeed.

https://twitter.com/ChrisDerps/status/1226093088860508160

Louisiana Prosecutors Say They Can’t Be Sued Over the Fake Subpoenas They Used To Pressure Witnesses Into Testifying. And fake subpoenas should be grounds for disbarment at the very least.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/357535/

100-plus slides.

"Revolutionary inventions from the year you were born"

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/revolutionary-inventions-from-the-year-you-were-born/ss-BBUaAsr?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout#image=1

And I had no idea the polygraph came out THAT early...but as with most inventions, it took a couples of decades or more to become well known. (That was true even for TV.)

Feel the Bern?

https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/02/branco-cartoon-play-ball/

Important things you store in the cloud should be encrypted. And as Crid does, a local copy kept. Or more than one. USB flash drives aren't particularly expensive.

Google doesn't like it at all if you're storing encrypted files.

They keep on sending me messages filled with passive-aggressive panic messages about the dangers of storing zipped files locked down with a password.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if they use all that processing power in their HQs to brute force through them to see what you are hiding.

From Aeon:

"What Happened When I Made My Students Turn Off Their Phones"

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-happened-when-i-made-my-students-turn-off-their-phones?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Excerpt:

...My goal with this experiment was to get students thinking about their habits, rather than to necessarily change them. Students should question authority, including mine. It’s easy for me, and, I suspect, much of the older generation, to seek evidence to support the idea that life was better before smartphones. My students admit they can’t read maps, that they find reading and writing on paper antiquated, that they don’t memorise information they can google. Yet these are not confessions – these are realities. Some changes are simply changes. Not everything needs to be a value judgment, but students generally agree that phone use in the classroom is inappropriate – only 11 percent believe a class phone policy is unnecessary...

The Danger of Befriending Celebrities

Once upon a time, nightlife journalist Michael Musto didn’t set the strongest boundaries with the boldfaced names he covered.

https://longreads.com/2020/02/07/the-danger-of-befriending-celebrities/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Hot take about that Oscar-winning S. Korean movie Parasite:

https://media.giphy.com/media/RJOYRvEEeMlby/giphy.gif

> 100-plus slides.

(Seat belts, if you were curious.)

> I should be able to keep
> anything legal on my
> Google drive

"Can't live without Google docs" was glib wording. It's more honest to say that Gdocs' 6σ uptime, essentially planetary availability and zero-fee business model are ♫ irresistible. ♬

Without too much actual suffering or expense, we could each build 'our own' online repositories and mundane apps (spreadsheet, wordproc etc) running in inexpensive AWS instances for pennies per month. Storage is cheap too, as (indeed) are USB drives and software and the requisite education. After a month of weekends, all of us reading these words could be responsible for our own security, versioning, and backup schemes…

At which point, that word "irresistible" starts singing to us again, right?

> Just don't expect to keep
> your Great American Novel,
> movie script, or patent
> application secret.

It's amazing, just stunning that there haven't been a hundred famous cases* of data intrusion from these services over the years. Even with the understanding that encoding and weaving for this data must be supremely complicated and fractured, there must be hundreds of G employees who could start reading your personal information as easily as they'd load a web page. How have they been able to resist seeing the bargain you were about to make for that beach house, or that point in your correspondence when some other treasure was sitting out there in the open?

In Chinese terms, so to speak: Do they watch their own people so closely that they put out the fire before flames are visible to their users?

There are only two likely explanations.

1. The abstruse information harvesting to which we've all explicitly submitted is so incredibly profitable that it's worth their trouble to prevent the exploitation of our mundane vulnerabilities (e.g., closing on a piece of suburban real estate).

2. The information they glean from our data can be combed to reveal compelling truths about the future of the human project in ways that mere geniuses such as ourselves cannot comprehend: Financial trends, warfare, disease, all of it… Such that the corporation and its government enablers maintain their command of the future through our oblivious cooperation.

Some observers speculated that the project wasn't for indexing at all; they wanted the meaning of all that text, which could always be accessed and re-appraised by artificial intelligence algorithms under eternal refinement.

And for *that* purpose, extracting the meaning of the entirety of recorded human experience, reading 5% of the books was as useful as reading 90%... You're talking about numbers so large that you wouldn't need to include particularly darling titles.



People who use Google Docs aren't the cream of the intellectual crop, but we represent the financial and political stewards of the nation at an important tier. How many of us need to be (even abstractly) sampled to extrapolate important truths about the markets and opportunities of the future?

Don't trust anyone.



*There was a case of a Google engineer approaching a teenage girl through Google Circles (or whatever) about eight or ten years ago. It wasn't exactly customer support, but it wasn't rape either. IIRC, he was kind of boastful and smirk-y about it, and he wasn't fired.

"publisher" = published.

I hate that

This could be a fun thing to watch.

Still four days away. Anybuddy remember Yoko's five minutes?

When the pretty girl next door has a fetish for extreme body modification:

https://twitter.com/disgaea69/status/1226821760034779136

That's 7:00AM EST on Friday, so the morning news shows (and all the surreptitious internet sites) will probably have live video and audio.

> he notes the overlap in anger
> and frustration motivating both
> the Trump supporters and the
> Bernie supporters

And for both cases, the 'motive' is expression of butthurt rather than principled demands of government service (let alone conservative integrity).

It's a year old and Adams drifts into woowoo, but this interview has some interesting thoughts about Trumps talents and background. (Norman Vincent Peale, in the flesh, was part of his childhood church experience!)

I agree with him: Trump is here to disrupt, not to build things. And he's a one-off of Reaganite singularity… (It's remarkable to have seen both of them in a single lifetime.)

Compare and contrast with this podcast: Sam Harris, a brilliant and gifted man, is absolutely blind to Trump's powers, and completely unaware of his own bright-guy presumptions.

The dark night of respiratory fascism is always descending upon America, but somehow it always winds up landing on China. Amazing how that works.

" (It's remarkable to have seen both of them in a single lifetime.)"

Isn't it, though. I got to thinking about who was the last President before Reagan who was this disruptive to the established order. I guess it was Wilson. (Or FDR, but the circumstances there were already extraordinary.)

> Isn't it, though

Patterns— Ron's Dad (stepdad?) was alcoholic, as was Don's big brother.

And the replies from journalists to this guy is HOW DAER YUO NOT HAVE BLIND FAITH IN TEH GUDNESS OF URINALISTS

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1225862128168570887

And there seem to be even some Fox News people jumping in on the fun too.

"It's amazing, just stunning that there haven't been a hundred famous cases* of data intrusion from these services over the years."

Why would you count everyone exposed by one breach as just one case? I'm sure you recall the Apple iCloud breach, if only for Kate Upton's personal life being exposed... so she only counts as a fraction?

People are more interested by what they see in front of them than anything you can tell them.

A million deaths is a statistic.