Twitter II

 

I Won’t Dance

I know that music leads the way to romance
So if I hold you in my arms, I won't dance
I won't dance, don't ask me
I won't dance, don't ask me
I won't dance, madame with you
My heart won't let my feet do things that they want to do 

I won’t Tweet, don’t ask me!

It is very amusing to watch the panic of the Twitter users that are trying to find a new home now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter and enacted policies that some users find distasteful. My favorite line was from Tom Bergeron who said “Hello, I Musk be going.” This was a Groucho Marx reference for the Gen Z-er’s in the crowd. Leaving Twitter has become the new moving to Canada. Because Elon Musk has taken Twitter private,  even those controls of a publicly traded corporation such as shareholder votes are not available.

Social media companies such as Twitter are an interesting economic class. They are not private goods which are rival, i.e. priced; and exclusive, can not be used by anyone else while they are being used. Twitter posts seem to be free, unpriced, and the whole point of Twitter posts is that they are the opposite of exclusive.  They can be read by anyone who is following the Twitter user. From the perspective of the user it is free, but from the perspective of Twitter it is not free. The information of those users is sold by Twitter to advertisers. To the users, buyers, they are a common resource, like clean water, while to Twitter, the seller, it is a private monopoly, like cable TV. However the value to the advertisers is the number of users. If the users vanish, the value to those advertisers also vanishes. Elon Musk may eventually discover that he paid $44 billion for a company that has no Tweeters and thus no value.

I was not a Twitter shareholder and I was not a Twitter user. While I may be dismayed by the demise of print newspapers, you young Padawans do not despair. Just as there was Usenet, before MySpace, before Twitter, somewhere there will be a new home. Follow away.

Facebook

 

I Won’t Grow Up

Cause growing up is awfuler
Than all the awful things that ever were!
I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up
No sir
Not I!
Not me!
So there!

I won’t Facebook

When I was a college freshman in 1969, there were still women’s colleges associated with Ivy League universities:  Columbia and Barnard; Harvard and Radcliffe; and in my case, Brown and Pembroke.  The freshman class had a book with head shots and names.  The Brown freshman book was informally known as the Beast Book, the Pembroke book as the Pig Book. Harvard had a similar thing. In 2003 Mark Zuckerberg developed a computerized version of the books called Facemash. The site used photos from the face books of the nine houses at Harvard, placing two photos next to each other and asking users to choose the "hotter" person. Sadly, this computerized version was a resounding success, the name was changed to Facebook and, as they say, the rest was history. It made a billionaire of Mark Zuckerberg and his early investor, Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is arguably the most disgusting person on the earth and of course a self hater like Thiel would think that rating a person’s hotness was a great investment.

Facebook, and social media sites like it, have been used for good, but they are also have been used to spread hate and lies. Peter Thiel has used the wealth earned from this investment, to spread hate, bigotry and of course, the Big Lie. And as Paul Harvey once said, “Now you know the rest of the story.”  Post, if you must, to Facebook, but realize that by doing so, you are complicit.

Polling

                                                                     Family Feud

Yeah, I'll fuck up a good thing if you let me

Let me alone, Becky

A man that don't take care his family can't be rich

I'll watch Godfather, I miss that whole shit

My consciousness was Michael's common sense

I missed the karma, that came as a consequence

Niggas bustin' off through the curtains 'cause she hurtin'

Can't losin' the babies 'cause their future's uncertain

Nobody wins when the family feuds

Survey says!

One of my favorite podcasts, Planet Money, most recent episode was on polling.   As the episode highlighted, the mistakes in the Alf Landon and Tom Dewey polls were the problems of NOT being a representative sample.  Ironically, the Supreme Court will hear cases on representative samples which are being called  Affirmative Action.  https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/08/affirmative-action.html

The golden age of polling was in 2012 was because not only was robo calling in polling still allowed, and caller ID was not yet ubiquitous, but also because land line phones defined geography.  Today, a cell phone's area code means nothing.  My household cut the phone cord shortly after 2012. Now not only do we have cellphones with caller ID, this has been compounded by keeping your cellphone number when you move such that the area code NO LONGER means geography.  My colleague, who has lived in Tallahassee for almost 20 years,  has a (617) Area code because he obtained the cellphone when he worked in Massachusetts.  My cell phone has my work Area Code (617), not my suburban home Area Code, (508).  My son in LA cellphone has our suburban home in Massachusetts Area Code.  He got my wife her cell phone and thus she has a LA (310) Area Code.

Phone polling was not all that is cracked up to be anyway.  Phone ownership is highly correlated with income.  Lower incomes might not have a land line.  So phone polls have always been biased against low incomes.  And replacing phone polls with internet polls?!?  Don't get me started!

And even if it did work, there is this thing called spurious correlation.  As pointed out in https://www.amazon.com/Spurious-Correlations-Tyler-Vigen/dp/0316339431, despite the fact that pool drowning deaths are well correlated with the release of Nick Cage movies, Nick Cage did not cause pool deaths.  As we say in my profession, Correlation is NOT causation.

Personally, I hope that the wisdom of crowds is wrong in the vote.  What is in your heart is not always what you show or tell the world. Sometime you are pretending. https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/10/passing.html

And anyway,  polling for elections is wanting to know what  the future will be.  Push a pollster hard enough and you will find that they always wanted to be Hari Sheldon and discover psychohisotry.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4QYV5GTz7c But the future is not ours to see, Que Sera, Sera. That is why we vote, even though we poll.  

But when you vote, do so for the nation. As Jay-Z said in the song, "Nobody wins when the family feuds".

Vote II

 

When I Was Young

My faith was so much stronger then
I believed in fellow man
And I was so much older then
When I was young

If you want to grow old, you first have to grow up.

In 1963, comedian Alan Sherman’s song “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah (A Letter From Camp)” reached number 2 on the Billboard charts.  It won the 1964 Grammy for best Comedy Performance.  The song is a parody written to the tune of the Dance of the Hours .  Alan Sherman wrote the song because his son kept coming up with excuses as to why he did not want to be at summer camp.  In the song, the son invents fantastical lies to achieve his goal, leaving Camp Granada.  Those lies involve playing on the fears of his parents.  Joe Spivey did NOT have poison ivy, Leonard Skinner did NOTget Ptomaine poisoning.  His bunkmate did NOT have malaria, etc.  He also makes promises that he can NOT keep.  He of course will make noise and mess the house.  He will complain when Aunt Bertha hugs and kisses him. The song ends when the son sees other campers swimming, sailing and playing baseball. And the song ends with the line  “Muddah, Faddah kindly disregard this letter.”

When you don’t get your own way, telling lies and making false promises are NOT a grown up response.  Your own way may not even be what is best for you.  You may find out that another thing is actually better for you.

Remember this when you vote.  Don’t make up, or believe, lies, or believe false promises.  Grow up. 

Democracy

 

Democracy

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
That time cannot decay
I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the USA
To the USA

Elections are not the only indication of a democracy.

The late Leonard Cohen, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, not only wrote such classics as Hallelujah and Suzanne. He also wrote the song. above. To those of us who think that the USA IS already a democracy, it might seem strange to hear that “Democracy is coming to the USA.”  But democracy is NOT just about elections. It is about free and fair elections that mean something.

The Holy Roman Empire, long before the Hapsburgs, was a monarchy that used elections to select its Emperors, so clearly elections alone do not mean a democracy. The recent “elections” at gunpoint by Russian soldiers approving the annexation of Ukraine provinces into the Russian Federation were hardly fair and free. Votes in the Senate to end debate and move votes to the floor, popularly known as the “filibuster”, which are not secret, and where the losing Party may punish that vote, are not free. If the loser of an election refuses to leave office, then the election, was to that loser just another contest of domination and the election itself meant nothing.

Democracy assumes that the will of the people will be expressed and accepted. Let us hope that on October 30^th democracy comes to Brazil. And that on November 8^th democracy will come to the USA.

Vote

 

Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy

Straight ahead
Knock 'em dead
Pack your kit
Choose your hypocrite

You don't have to go to off-Broadway
To see something plain absurd
Everybody's crying mercy
When they don't know the meaning of the word
Nobody knows the meaning of the word

Vote

In less than two weeks I, like millions of others, will be exercising my vote. I do NOT plan on voting for any Republicans because I am afraid that those Republicans are “rINOs,” "republicans In Name Only.”  I realize that I will be voting for Democrats, but their brand has not been tainted so much that I do not believe that those candidates are “dINOs", "democrats In Name Only". I will be voting only for candidates who believe in democracy, including the representative form that is the US republic.

Democracy is the political system where all decisions are decided by the group. Representative Democracy, a republic, recognizes that each voter may not have the flexibility in time, expense, knowledge, or interest, etc. and the infrastructure may not all of them to participate in each and every decision. As such, the voters may choose a representative to make those decisions for them. That candidate is only a representative, whether that candidate is for town council, state legislature, governor, federal congress, or, while not in this election cycle, President. They may “win” an election, but they are still only a representative. This contrasts with those who believe that the decisions of the group leader ARE the decision of the group. Such a system is called authoritarianism, whether that “leader” is chosen by election, birth, or an act of domination, such as a revolution or a coup. I believe that all voters, whether deplorable or not, have a vote, and the decisions of those voters in a democracy is vital. I will not vote for dINOs or rINOS. They are hypocrites, since they believe in neither a democracy nor a republic, and do NOT deserve my vote.

Tolerance

 

Crown  of Creation 

In loyalty to their kind
They cannot tolerate our minds
In loyalty to our kind
We cannot tolerate their obstruction 

You should never respond to intolerance with intolerance. 

One on my favorite podcasts, Stuff You Should Know, recently did an episode on Fundamentalism.  While I agree with everything that was said, (like that was a surprise), the best outcome to me is that I got a word to use in place of standard deviation. 

I am a semi-retired engineer and one of the things I have been struggling with is the branding problems created in mathematics, especially statistics, which uses the term standard deviation.  IMHO, standard deviation should be rebranded as the degree of tolerance, which IMHO sounds much better.  The synonyms of deviation are perversion, anomaly, error, aberration, abnormality.  However in statistics what is meant is the only the difference from the mean.  If you are confident that the mean is without error, then having no difference from that mean, truth, is good. 

However having a standard deviation of zero, means that you are absolutely certain that the mean IS the truth.  In this instance statistics has a term that IMHO does NOT need to be rebranded.  If the truth is not yet known, then statistics says that distribution of truth is NORMAL.  Tolerance is normal, it is intolerance that is not.  I wrote a blog post previously on the problem of decreasing the standard deviation.  https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/01/resiliency.html

BTW statistics also shows that for the mean to increase, grow, standard deviation...errr tolerance, has to increase.