Great Depression II

From a N.Y. Times commenter:

I'm... an independent who could not bring myself to vote for any of these republican candidates. In fact, I believe they would totally destroy this great country. I've not heard a single word that shows me any real leadership ability or any new ideas to bring this country out of this recession. All I hear are the same old lower taxes for the rich and get rid of regulations. These are the very policies that caused this great recession. They are also the same policies that caused the " Great Depression

Lemmings Live!

Who knew? Lemmings do not commit suicide:

The lemmings earn the top spot on the myth list because the misconceptions about these critters are both legendary and long-standing, starting back in the 1530s when a geographer proposed that they fell from the skies during storms. These days, the most popular rumor is that lemmings commit mass suicide when they migrate, but the truth is much less dramatic. Every three or four years, their population drops to near extinction only to skyrocket again, but the ebb and flow is a result of migration in large groups, which can include jumping off cliffs into the water and swimming great distances to the point of exhaustion and even death. The myth was also fueled by the 1958 Academy Award-winning documentary that showed the lemmings leaping to their deaths, but the scene was later busted for being staged

MYTH VERDICT: FALSE

This is one lemming who doesn't plan to commit suicide.

Facebook: Social Tyranny?

Facebook addicts, beware! Here are some quotes from the New York Times The Death of the Cyberflâneur. And, yes, the entire article is a sobering caution on the

“We want everything to be social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said on “Charlie Rose” a few months ago.

[...]

The implications are clear: Facebook wants to build an Internet where watching films, listening to music, reading books and even browsing is done not just openly but socially and collaboratively. Through clever partnerships with companies like Spotify and Netflix, Facebook will create powerful (but latent) incentives that would make users eagerly embrace the tyranny of the “social,” to the point where pursuing any of those activities on their own would become impossible...isn’t it obvious that consuming great art alone is qualitatively different from consuming it socially? And why this fear of solitude in the first place?

[...]

It’s one thing to find an interesting article and choose to share it with friends. It’s quite another to inundate your friends with everything that passes through your browser or your app, hoping that they will pick something interesting along the way.

[...]

IT’S this idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective that underpins Facebook’s recent embrace of “frictionless sharing,” the idea that, from now on, we have to worry only about things we don’t want to share; everything else will be shared automatically. To that end, Facebook is encouraging its partners to build applications that automatically share everything we do: articles we read, music we listen to, videos we watch. It goes without saying that frictionless sharing also makes it easier for Facebook to sell us to advertisers, and for advertisers to sell their wares back to us.

Why do people act like sheep? According to a response on Yahoo, There's safety in numbers. If you don't *really* stand out, people don't really notice you as much (unless you want them to). If your style, opinions or choices are too individual, you are subjected to closer scrutiny from others.

How many sheep are on Facebook? Let me count the ways.

Great Depression II

From a N.Y. Times commenter:

I'm... an independent who could not bring myself to vote for any of these republican candidates. In fact, I believe they would totally destroy this great country. I've not heard a single word that shows me any real leadership ability or any new ideas to bring this country out of this recession. All I hear are the same old lower taxes for the rich and get rid of regulations. These are the very policies that caused this great recession. They are also the same policies that caused the Great Depression.

Swiftspeech returns...

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