Silicon Valley   
Searching for...ads?   

   Advertising began to appear along with search results and the news feed. There were $ billions to be made. The public hardly noticed, or didn't care, as the transformation happened quietly. 

   Computer use was always going to be confusing, the NY Times wrote, making it easy to exploit users. A computer-science pioneer says, "Program designers have a tendency to think of users as idiots who need to be controlled." 

   A professor at MIT years ago wrote about "bright young men of disheveled appearance, sitting at computer consoles ... as riveted as a gambler on the rolling dice. They exist ... only through and for the computers. These are compulsive programmers." 

   He was concerned that they lacked perspective about life. They were accustomed to total control of what appeared on their screens. "No emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such dutiful actors or troops," he wrote. 

   Welcome to Silicon Valley, 2017, says the Times. And... 

   Current tech leaders have discovered that people trust computers and the possibilities. Examples of manipulations: push notifications, surge pricing, recommended friends, suggested films, and people who bought this or that.

   Facebook realized the need to get people to stay logged on. Growth becomes the overriding motivation - something treasured for its own sake, not for anything it brings to the world. 

   Market domination (lack of competition) produces extreme concentration of wealth and power, the article says, with unaccountable companies and people becoming a threat to our democracy. 

Tomorrow: Greater regulation?

Quote of the Day 

Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.

- NY Times reporter Maggie Haberman, on reports in court that the

Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for "research" by Fusion GPS.

   

All Hail Silicon Valley...or else     

   Comically, we've been thinking that future U.S. presidents will answer to the CEOs of Amazon, Facebook and Google. Out of the blue comes a feature in the New York Times. 
  
   It begins with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and others making cool sites that connect billions of people to friends and endless global information. It ends with Silicon Valley disrupting our democracy. Really? 

   Facebook allowed Russians to mess with our 2016 election disinformation. Google played a similar role. Don't they know, we don't need anyone to help us smear each other?  

   Amazon, with online monopoly, now invades offline commerce - Whole Foods. We users, with the world at our finger tips, joyfully follow along. 

   Google was born to "organize the world's information, making it accessible and useful." Facebook promised to "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." Mark, maybe first we should learn to get "closer together" with our neighbors. Smirk! By the way, thanks for letting us post our blog on Facebook.   

   Amazon's Jeff Bezos, now the world's wealthiest man, introduced "the most customer-obsessed company to ever occupy planet Earth." Who in all history even dreamed of such power? 

   So, we just deal with inconvenient worms, viruses and trackers. 

   The Times asks, "...do we have regulatory tools and social cohesion to restrain the monopolists?" 

   At first, these programmer/entrepreneurs were indifferent to getting rich on their ideas. Eventually, Zuckerberg gave in to Silicon Valley venture capital. He and other founders understood that investors hadn't signed on for charity.

Tomorrow: Advertisers take charge

 Quote of the Day 

Oppression doesn't come from a conspiracy of whiteness.

It is the default mode of anyone in power.   - unknown

     Jimmy   

   Our Future Foretold   

Last Sunday, we wrote of the Lord's future reign on Earth, followed by disappearing Earth and sky (the heavens), judgment, and a new heaven and Earth. All this from the New Testament.

Today, we see God foretelling these events, about 700 B.C., through the prophet Isaiah, chapter 51. 

We include two of some 400 verses in the Bible that are closely related to the book of Revelation. Our Jewish friends should enjoy these promises. Israel may resemble the Garden of Eden during the Millennium. Wow! 

The Lord will surely comfort Zion (Israel) and will look with compassion 

on all her ruins; he will make her deserts like Eden, her wasteland like 

the garden of the Lord.  - Isaiah 51:3

Lift up your eyes to the heavens, look at the earth beneath;

the heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out

like a garment and its inhabitants die like flies.

But my salvation will last forever; my righteousness will never fail.

- verse 6

The ransomed of the Lord ... will enter Zion with singing;

everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them,

and sorrow and sighing will flee away.

- verse 11

For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd;

he will lead them to springs of living water.

And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

- Revelation 7:17

Awake, awake! Rise up, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk 

from the hand of the Lord and the cup of his wrath...

- verse 17

If anyone worships the beast ... he too will drink of the wine

of God's fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of wrath.

- Revelation 14:9-10

This is what the Sovereign Lord says, your God who defends his people.

See, I have taken out of your hand the cup that made you stagger;

from the cup, the goblet of my wrath, you will never drink again. 

- verse 22

Good Grief, Charlie Brown    

   Remember our blog about sorting out fact from fiction? How easy it is to be fooled.

   Someone wrote "Go home," followed by a racial slur, on message boards outside the dorm rooms of five black candidates for the Air Force Academy. The campus was distressed, supposedly.

   Their outraged superintendent made a speech about diversity and tolerance that more than a million people saw on the Internet. We believed a white, racist cadet did this.

   It occurred at a prep school for the AFA, not the real deal. After an investigation, we learn that one of the black candidates wrote this, even on his own message board - as a hoax. He is no longer enrolled. Or, was it a she? 

All About Streaks 
   We see how many months a singer has topped the charts, how many years a state has gone without a hurricane, and how many weeks a book has been a best-seller.

   Or, how many games in a row an athlete has scored, or played without error, or struck out 12 left-handed batters in August, during Tuesday away games, in stadiums with artificial turf, east of the Allegheny River...before 9 pm. After age 28. Married with children. And......runaway statistics! Boo!  

   Well, Jimmy Donut has some streaks of his own. It's been:
* two months since he left the stove burner on
* 10 weeks and three days since spilling coffee on the counter 
* 23 days since he tried using the TV remote to change a clock
* 12 days since he forgot to publish Views 

   You're laughing? Let him who never poured his cereal into a juice glass cast the first stone. 

      Jimmy




   

                       

                             Little Cottage by the Sea    

   Come with us and visit the place where Donald Trump wrote his inaugural speech. 
              
   Mar-a-Lago ("Sea to Lake" in Spanish) was built in the 1920s by Marjorie Merriweather Post. Her family's fortune was built on Postum, a coffee substitute. She envisioned a wintertime presidential retreat ... "a little cottage by the sea" she told her second husband. 

   Wealthy people were building their own getaways on Palm Beach. Post scouted out 17 acres of scrub between Lake Worth and the Atlantic. She was known for philanthropy, her mega-yacht, her grand balls and her jewels. 

   Mar-a-Lago - 110,000 square feet - had 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms with gold-plated fixtures, and an 1,800-square-foot living room with 42-foot ceilings. 
There was gold leaf, Spanish tiles, Italian marble and Venetian silks. 

   Post spent $7 million - at least $90 million today.   

   In 1929, she hired the circus to perform there for a charity fund-raiser, inviting underprivileged children to attend. In 1944, she offered the grounds to WWII vets who needed occupational therapy. 

   By the 1950s, most of the grand houses were considered "white elephants" and were razed. Not Mar-a-Lago. 

   Post tried to donate the mansion in the 1960s, but all prospects, including the Federal Government, declined due to maintenance costs. She died in 1973, with the property still in limbo.

   It went on the market in the 1980s. Three potential sales fell through before Trump bought it in 1985 for a reported $8 million. That was a deal! 

   Mrs. Post's original wish for her "little cottage" came true this year. 

Smithsonian 

         Jimmy

    

The Whole Facts and
Nothing But the Facts    

   Here at Views, we don't want your vote, and we don't charge you a penny for our thoughts. So, is our publication unbiased and totally reliable?  

   With misinformation littering the world, it's hard to trust our sources, whether we want to engage city hall, or just know the truth for truth's sake.

   Former U.S. senator and Florida governor Bob Graham offers help in his book, America, the Owner's Manual: You Can Fight City Hall - and Win.

   "Above all, be credible," Graham writes. "The biggest danger of the Information Age is the proliferation of unreliable or biased data, particularly data on the Internet." 

   "First, don't rely on outdated information. Work with the most recent data possible."

   "Second, don't confine your research to your local community. The world of ideas does not reside in your zip code."

   "Third, take care in your use of biased sources. Although many ... organizations ... attempt to be balanced and unbiased, some groups and think tanks produce information that reflects a particular political agenda or ideological viewpoint. Reinforce data with research from unimpeachable sources."  

   "Fourth, investigate the credentials of your data source." Graham says a state official or a professor with multiple degrees and years of experience may be far more reliable than a lay person. 

   "Fifth, don't limit your research to traditional, usually secondary, source information."

   "Sixth, don't try to bury information that is unfavorable to your cause. Since you have found it, (others) have done so as well. Proactively present the 'bad facts' and show how other information undermines their significance."

   "Seventh, keep up to date. In this era of rapid change, even the best-researched facts must be monitored to ensure they ... haven't been overtaken by events." 

Tampa Bay Times

   It is challenging to find good information, and to know it when we see it. In any case, the founders expected us to be informed if the government - at any level - is really by, for and of the people.

      Jimmy 

Wanted: Hoover Sweeper for Space    
                                                             
    We value satellite phone calls, Internet, Skype and the benefit of GPS satellites, while we litter space with junk that could end the fun.

    Even if we stopped launching satellites now, litter would increase. The 29,000 large bits of junk would become more than 200,000 in two centuries. Of 75,000 tons, only seven percent is operational. 

   The European Space Agency (ESA) estimates there are 166 million items, baseball-size and smaller - all moving at five miles per second. Collisions create more pieces. 

   GPS satellites at 22,000 miles are above most debris fields, but not totally out of harm's way. 

   ESA hopes to launch a robot in 2024, for $400 million, to deal with an eight-ton satellite now tumbling in orbit 480 miles above Earth. It will be extremely challenging.

   There are some 500 similar "dead" objects in orbit. (500 X $400 million?)
Something built to remove junk could also destroy enemy spy satellites, so diplomatic and legal issues arise.

   Leftover fuel and overcharged batteries can make third-stage rockets explode, creating clouds of shrapnel. Of 240 events over the years, 236 were explosions. The other four were collisions.

   In 1986, a European rocket exploded into 498 softball-sized pieces and smaller bits. Ten years later, a fragment of that wreckage damaged a French military satellite.

   In 2007, China's anti-satellite missile test blasted a 1,650-pound weather satellite, creating more than 3,000 trackable pieces of junk. In 2009, a private U.S. satellite collided with an inactive Russian military satellite at a relative speed of 26,000 mph. 

   Can't call 911. Can't call AAA. Can't call Mr. Clean.   

                                            AIR&SPACE, Smithsonian  

      Jimmy