social media — Page 9

→ February 17, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/17/18.

My one new piece for Insiders this week covered the top 30 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft, in advance of yesterday’s opening night in Division 1. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday. Unfortunately I did not recover enough from whatever ailment I had this week to make the trip to Myrtle Beach, but hope to be on the road next weekend.

I reviewed the board game Seikatsu, one of my daughter’s new favorites, here this week, with another review hitting Paste‘s site next week. Also, I never tweeted this link at all, but reviewed the Romanian-language film Graduation, from Oscar-nominated director Cristian Mungiu, on Wednesday.

Smart Baseball comes out in paperback on March 13th! Some readers have reported difficulty finding the hardcover version in stores, but it is still available on amazon at the moment.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Outline looks at Delaware’s opioid crisis, mentioning a high school in the district where we live (which has a local reputation for such things). Does any state not have an opioid crisis? And is there anything states can do to stop it without support from the federal government?
WIRED looks inside the last two years at Facebook as the company faces criticism from multiple sides for its part in promulgating fake news and, in the words of one former executive, “ripping apart the social fabric.”
Lawfareblog breaks down what the latest indictment from Robert Mueller’s office means — and what it doesn’t.
Buzzfeed talks to Aviv Ovadya, Chief Technologist at UMSI’s Center for Social Media Responsibility, about the imminent potential for technologies that can quickly create and disseminate new levels of fake news, including forged audio and video that could make it appear that world leaders said things they never said or did things they never did.
This November post from Rantt Media looks at how backpropagation, often mislabeled as “AI,” threatens millions of jobs, and what policy prescriptions we might enact to mitigate its effects. The idea that this is happening no matter what, so we should change our funding priorities, is very different from the “how do we stop this?” conversation that dominates instead.
An Indonesian province on the island of New Guinea that is home to the world’s biggest gold mine is home to a measles outbreak and widespread starvation among natives whose traditional environment and way of life has been destroyed by the mining companies with the full compliance of the Indonesian government.
Nigeria’s massive oil industry has long benefited foreign investors and a tiny local elite rather than enriching the country as a whole, which is the most populous country in Africa. The son of one of the country’s billionaires opened a window on how little the industry helps the Nigerian population when he tried to invest in European oil and gas assets, exposing how difficult it is for most Africans to participate in the wealth generated by natural resources. He’s no hero, but he inadvertently showed how badly the west takes advantage of former African colonies to this day.
EPA head Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier who is thoroughly unqualified to head the agency, has wasted tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on first-class travel … because taxpayers accost him over his disastrous policy decisions when he flies coach.
Have you seen tweets or reports that the Stoneman Douglas High School massacre was the 18th school shooting in the U.S. this year? It wasn’t. That number comes from a gun-control advocacy group that counts any gun-related incident on a school campus as a “school shooting,” even if there wasn’t a threat to students.
Of course, deaths by firearm are still one major reason the U.S. is the most dangerous of wealthy nations for a child to be born in.
This Paste op ed is from November but could run weekly without ever seeming out of date: Ban Assault Weapons, Idiots.
If you live in California, be aware that a group of cranks and pseudoscience advocates are pushing a ballot initiative to overturn the state’s mandatory vaccination law, remove fluoride from water, and more under the innocuous-sounding name “California Clean Environment.” All this would do is damage public health, especially for children, to satisfy a few charlatans who profit off the ignorant.
I know you’re shocked, but former Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria has been accused of hiding profits from Miami-Dade County, claiming a paper loss on the sale of the team (for $1.2 billion) that let him avoid paying a portion of the proceeds to the county.
Cobb County ripped off its taxpayers to fund a stadium for the privately-owned Atlanta Braves … and now the county can’t even fund its existing libraries. The county also opened a new $10 million “cultural center” despite lacking a sustainable operating budget for the facility.
West Virginia is run by industries busy destroying its environment, including the oil & gas industry. A Democratic candidate in the state’s 7th District tried to read the names of sitting state legislators with how much money they received from oil & gas companies and was physically dragged from the floor, especially since she dared point out that committee chairman John Shott (GOP) took $40K from First Energy. How crooked is West Virginia’s government? The governor hired a gas company board member for an undefined role in the state house that gives him 24-hour access to the Governor’s Office.
Marie Newman is a Democrat running in Illinois for a seat held by another Democrat, Dan Lipinski, because Lipinski has supported so many right-wing positions, including voting for a 20-week abortion ban, voting to extend the government’s right to warrantless spying, voting for a permanent ban on the use of federal funds for abortions, voting against a minimum wage hike, and voting to expand the death penalty. Lipinski has long enjoyed the support of labor unions in his gerrymandered district, but several broke with him in the last three weeks to support Newman.
The songwriters behind the 2000 3LW song “Playas Gon’ Play” sued Taylor Swift over the lyrics to her song “Shake It Off.” She won … because the judge ruled that the lyrics in question were too unoriginal to warrant copyright protection. I think this adequately burns both sides.
The Washington Post hired Koch Brothers mouthpiece Meghan McArdle to write for its editorial page, even though she got caught fabricating data to support an argument against the Affordable Care Act.
That wasn’t even the worst editorial page move of the week; the New York Times seems determined to drive itself into a ditch with recent hires and columns, including the hiring-and-immediate-firing of neo-Nazi apologist Quinn Norton. Justin Charity wrote for the Ringer about the paper’s seeming desire for self-immolation. I cancelled my digital subscription on Monday over the paper’s decision to run a column from climate change denier Bret Stephens that claimed the world is “smearing” Woody Allen, whose stepdaughter says he molested her.
Researchers at Rockefeller University may have discovered a new class of antibiotic compounds by sifting through dirt. Malacidins were effective in laboratories against many multi-drug resistant Gram-positive bacteria, including MRSA, by binding to calcium compounds that would eventually go into bacterial cell walls.
You can retain new material you learn more effectively if you take a short break of doing absolutely nothing after studying it.
Board game news: Calliope Games announced the long-delayed arrival of its three new Titan Series titles, including Ancestree, on retail shelves. Ancestree was among the best light games I played at Gen Con last year; it’s from designer Eric M. Lang, best known for heavier games like Blood Rage and the forthcoming Rising Sun.
Bezier Games released Palace of Mad King Ludwig to retail about three weeks ago; it’s a standalone sequel to Castles of Mad King Ludwig, but dispenses with the earlier game’s odd shapes and now has all players working on the same building with square tiles of differing values. Bezier’s site still says “pre-order” but it’s on amazon for $43.
Gen Con ticket sales are already outpacing sales from last year, with the event, held August 2-5 in Indianapolis, on course for its second straight sellout. I intend to be there the whole time, as I was last year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, board games, guns, links, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ January 27, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/27/18.

My annual prospects package began this week, with about half of it running already and the rest to come next week:

• The top 100 prospects in baseball, split into two parts: numbers 1 through 50 and numbers 51 through 100
• A list of ten guys who just missed the top 100
• My ranking of all 30 farm systems (prior to the Yelich trade)
• My thoughts on the Christian Yelich trade, focusing on the prospects the Marlins got back

I also held a prospect-focused Klawchat on Thursday, answering about 150 questions. The team-by-team org reports will start to run on Monday, beginning with the NL East.

Over at Paste I reviewed Wasteland Express Delivery Service, which made my top ten games of 2017 list but hadn’t gotten the full breakdown.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Think Progress looks at Louise Mensch, Eric Garland, Seth Abramson, and other anti-Trump conspiracy theorists whose claims and prognostications have repeatedly been proven wrong.
ProPublica found that the Red Cross fired an exec for sexual harassment but helped him land a job at Save the Children. Do not give your money to the Red Cross the next time there’s a disaster, even if it’s as easy as texting a word. They won’t account for how they use funds, and this is just more icing on that cake.
Cambodian dictator Hun Sen is using Facebook to push fake news while he jails critics, including an extensive effort to game Facebook’s algorithms so sites favorable to him dominate the news feed.
The Guardian examines new technologies to help those who lose the ability to speak, including one Boston-based firm that records a person’s voice (such as prior to surgery that affects speech) to help recreate it digitally. So much of our identities are tied up things we think about every day – your hair color, your complexion, your height and weight – but your voice is probably not something you’ve considered because you expect to always have it.
Vanity Fair weighs in on the potential regulatory disaster facing Facebook as its power continues to grow … and some people opt out of one or more social media services. The Economist looks at the question from the regulators’ side, arguing that Facebook and Google resemble trusts and the law must adapt to this new environment (subscription required).
A proposed HHS regulation would allow doctors to hide behind religious beliefs when declining to treat patients because they’re transgender or need an abortion or any other cockamamie reason. You have a right to worship as you please; you do not have the right to refuse to serve a customer on that basis. This should be even more true for first responders, doctors, and nurses.
WIRED looks at Google’s internal battle over diversity, including attacks on trans & queer employees, as well as attempts to harm the careers of people who speak out in favor of diversity and/or against the kind of insidious bigotry in fired engineer James Damore’s memo.
The neo-Nazi behind the Daily Stormer site is trying to skate on charges of organizing threats against a Jewish woman in Monday by using Holocaust denialism as his defense.
David French writes in the National Review how Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. has beclowned himself with his tortuous, hypocritical defenses of Trump’s behavior.
Why is ICE asking people to prove their citizenship at a Bangor, Maine, bus station? Because they’re allowed to do so within 100 miles of any of our national borders. The ACLU is investigating. If you’re not at a border crossing, you do not have to disclose your citizenship or immigration status.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is defying state law by refusing to call for special elections to fill vacant seats in the state’s legislature. The people in these districts should be out in the streets demanding such elections, as they will otherwise be without representation until January 2019.
That’s not all Wisconsin Republicans are doing to try to cling to power; they’ve gerrymandered the state and passed laws to restrict voting rights, part of what Rolling Stone‘s Ari Berman calls a nationwide party attempt to rig elections (another longread). And ThinkProgress also uses the r-word in describing Trump & the GOP’s plan to make Congress whiter even as the population becomes less so.
Common Cause has filed a complaint alleging that hush money paid to Stormy Daniels violated campaign finance laws.
Northampton County, Pennsylvania, flipped to red in the 2016 Presidential election, and despite job losses in the area and no evidence of economic growth, most voters there still seem to support him, according to this Guardian piece.
Arizona voters in Trent Franks’ district will get one of these winners as the Republican candidate to replace him (video). The very first candidate to speak opens his remarks by bragging about his A+ rating from the Russian-funded NRA and saying teachers should carry weapons in schools, even though the question had nothing to do with school shootings; around 5:42, all five candidates say they don’t believe in human-caused climate change, with one dingbat blaming the sun and another moron saying the cold winter in the east (BTW, it’s 55 here today) disproves it. The primary for the special election will take place on February 27th, and the special election itself will occur on April 24th.
Despite a growing body of evidence that marijuana, or at least something in marijuana, may be useful in treating symptoms of PTSD, the VA is refusing to study any of this because of some reefer madness bullshit.
Missouri Senate candidate Courtland Sykes said women’s rights were nothing this week in a rant about how feminists have “snake-filled heads” and that he expects his girlfriend to have dinner ready for him every night. Did I forget to include his party affiliation?
Scientists from around the world collaborated on a paper that proposes redefining how research papers measure statistical significance, a response to another paper that argued for lowering the P-value required to use that term.
Jon Heyman wrote about how the Expos found the prospect Vlad Guerrero, talking to the scout who signed him off a brief tryout for a bonus of less than $10,000.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, first amendment, links, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ January 7, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/7/17.

I’ve been working on the top 100 prospects package, which begins a three-week rollout on January 18th, since New Year’s, so I didn’t write anything for Insider this week. My boardgame reviews continue, with a review of the Celtic-themed game Inis for Paste and a review of the boardgame and new iOS app for Colt Express here on the dish. I did hold my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Several former Justice Department lawyers penned an op ed claiming that Jeff Sessions is lying about his involvement in civil rights cases. They say, “Sessions knows that his real record on race and civil rights is harmful to his chances for confirmation. So he has made up a fake one.” In a rational world, that would end his nomination for Attorney General.
Venezuela’s ongoing political and economic meltdown may lead to a recall of president/dictator Nicolas Maduro, but he appointed a successor this week in new Vice President Tarek el Aissami, who is (or was) under investigating by U.S. authorities for drug trafficking.
Author Ryan Holiday wrote an insightful, somewhat angry piece on the ‘online diversity police’, folks who immediately decry the lack of diversity on any list or grouping (often inaccurately, as it turns out).
Lindy West wrote one of the week’s best, most important essays, on why she left Twitter after six years on the service, citing the endless abuse and the rise of neo-Naziism.
The Daily Beast exposed the long con of 55-year-old “millennial” comedian Dan Nainan, who tries to pass himself off as 35 and has fooled several media outlets as such.
Esquire has a longread on former Deadspin and Gawker EIC A.J. Daulerio, whose career was derailed by the Hulk Hogan sex tape lawsuit.
Grierson & Leitch each posted their top ten films of 2016, along with a 100-minute podcast where they reveal their lists to each other and discuss them. As usual, Leitch’s list comprises fairly well-known films, while Grierson’s has several films I’ve heard of and three that may not actually exist.
The eight-year-old transgender boy kicked out of a New Jersey Cub Scouts group after other parents complained talked to the Jersey Journal, as did his mother, about what happened, in a piece that also explores the psychiatric community’s evolving understanding of “gender dysphoria.”
Jill Saward’s death didn’t garner much coverage here either, but she was an important figure in the movement for sexual assault victims’ rights, as the first British rape victim to waive her right to anonymity and publicly discuss her case.
Will Trump’s election mark the return of civil disobedience? So far it has, but can the various movements opposed to the Republicans’ reactionary agenda keep it up for four or more years?
Let’s talk about the Russian hacking operation, which a US intelligence report says Putin ‘ordered’ to get Trump elected. David Remnick weighed in as well.
The Seattle Times called out Trump’s “reckless linkage” of vaccines to autism, desperate overwhelming evidence that there is no link.
Lauren Duca of Teen Vogue has quickly become one of the most important voices in political journalism, thanks to pieces like this one about the family selling access to the President-Elect at a party at Trumo’s Mar-a-Lago resort that made over $420K.
Republican Christine Todd Whitman headed up the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush, but she said she fears for the planet under a Trump regime for many reasons, including his denial of climate change.
The Washington Post‘s Dave Weigel outlines the Republican Party’s plan for a “sweeping conservative agenda” now that they control the White House and both houses of Congress. I’d dispute the word “conservative” here, though; this is very much an agenda written by and for white Americans, especially Christians, but doesn’t bear much resemblance to the traditional economic and libertarian-minded conservatism of Reagan or Buckley.
The political crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo hasn’t gotten much attention here amidst our own, but President Kabila hasn’t signed the agreement to end his rule, which has been marked primarily by his looting of the country’s coffers of millions of dollars.
Finally, the Huffington Post made news of nothing with a piece on Mark Zuckerberg apparently becoming an ex-atheist. I’m linking this for one major reason – my disdain for the need to classify people by their religious beliefs, something I first encountered on Wikipedia maybe a decade ago, where articles on people can be categorized by the subject’s religion. You can change your religious beliefs on a dime; you can lie about them (in many countries, you may have to); you can fail to fit in any neat bucket of beliefs. As a general rule, I don’t think your religion is any of my business unless you wish to make it so, so I particularly dislike the idea that you need to know what someone believes or, as in this case, that a possible change in the beliefs of a famous person are somehow newsworthy. I’ll be happier when Zuckerberg’s beliefs include extirpating fake news sites from Facebook.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, frauds, links, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

Stick to baseball, 2/17/18.

Stick to baseball, 1/27/18.

Stick to baseball, 1/7/17.

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