Interesting reads
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1992 Secondary schools team - those who didn't become ABs. From the sounds of it, we missed Todd Miller's best.
The greatest rugby team you never saw the nearly men – NZ Herald
A rugby team only diehard rugby fans ever saw play but had All Black legends Jonah Lomu and Jeff Wilson. 25 years on, its legacy is poignant and enduring – NZ Herald exclusive feature.
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Long read w/ several reviews from recent London Review of Books...
You are the product
Excerpt:
[...]
Facebook already had a huge amount of information about people and their social networks and their professed likes and dislikes. After waking up to the importance of monetisation, they added to their own data a huge new store of data about offline, real-world behaviour, acquired through partnerships with big companies such as Experian, which have been monitoring consumer purchases for decades via their relationships with direct marketing firms, credit card companies, and retailers. There doesn’t seem to be a one-word description of these firms: ‘consumer credit agencies’ or something similar about sums it up. Their reach is much broader than that makes it sound, though. Experian says its data is based on more than 850 million records and claims to have information on 49.7 million UK adults living in 25.2 million households in 1.73 million postcodes. These firms know all there is to know about your name and address, your income and level of education, your relationship status, plus everywhere you’ve ever paid for anything with a card. Facebook could now put your identity together with the unique device identifier on your phone.
That was crucial to Facebook’s new profitability. On mobiles, people tend to prefer the internet to apps, which corral the information they gather and don’t share it with other companies. A game app on your phone is unlikely to know anything about you except the level you’ve got to on that particular game. But because everyone in the world is on Facebook, the company knows everyone’s phone identifier. It was now able to set up an ad server delivering far better targeted mobile ads than anyone else could manage, and it did so in a more elegant and well-integrated form than anyone else had managed.
So Facebook knows your phone ID and can add it to your Facebook ID. It puts that together with the rest of your online activity: not just every site you’ve ever visited, but every click you’ve ever made – the Facebook button tracks every Facebook user, whether they click on it or not. Since the Facebook button is pretty much ubiquitous on the net, this means that Facebook sees you, everywhere. Now, thanks to its partnerships with the old-school credit firms, Facebook knew who everybody was, where they lived, and everything they’d ever bought with plastic in a real-world offline shop. All this information is used for a purpose which is, in the final analysis, profoundly bathetic. It is to sell you things via online ads.
[...]
John Lanchester · You Are the Product: It Zucks!
I am scared of Facebook. The company’s ambition, its ruthlessness, and its lack of a moral compass scare me...
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@Salacious-Crumb said in Interesting reads:
Long read w/ several reviews from recent London Review of Books...
John Lanchester · You Are the Product: It Zucks!
I am scared of Facebook. The company’s ambition, its ruthlessness, and its lack of a moral compass scare me...
"...What this means is that even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. It’s amazing that people haven’t really understood this about the company. ..."
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@Salacious-Crumb That's an excellent read. Thanks for sharing.
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@Salacious-Crumb Yep - that took up a decent chunk of the work day.
Cheers. -
What Does an Innocent Man Have to Do to Go Free? Plead Guilty.
A case in Baltimore — in which two men were convicted of the same murder and cleared by DNA 20 years later — shows how far prosecutors will go to preserve a conviction.
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@pakman said in Interesting reads:
Tough to read a video. And since I'm not bilingual and can't understand Espanol, doubly-tough.
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@Salacious-Crumb said in Interesting reads:
@pakman said in Interesting reads:
Tough to read a video. And since I'm not bilingual and can't understand Espanol, doubly-tough.
I'll give you the video point, but if you had the patience to watch for 15 seconds you'd find it is in Anglais!!!
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Newsweek cover story feature this weeK, filed under TECH & SCIENCE
MALE INFERTILITY CRISIS IN U.S. HAS EXPERTS BAFFLED
Who's Killing America's Sperm?
The sudden rise in male infertility is a scary national crisis, and we can't blame it on Trump—or can we?
It's not just the United States. It's the western world.
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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS:
"Everything you want to know about America can be learned in a McDonald’s.”
McDonald’s as America: A Conversation with Chris Arnade | Los Angeles Review of Books
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Photographer Chris Arnade discusses his use of McDonald’s as a point of entry into the communities he documents.
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@Salacious-Crumb said in Interesting reads:
Newsweek cover story feature this weeK, filed under TECH & SCIENCE
MALE INFERTILITY CRISIS IN U.S. HAS EXPERTS BAFFLED
Who's Killing America's Sperm?
The sudden rise in male infertility is a scary national crisis, and we can't blame it on Trump—or can we?
It's not just the United States. It's the western world.
Too much bike riding?
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Remembering William S Burroughs
http://www.gadflyonline.com/home/archive/August99/archive-burroughs.html
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As part of the bankruptcy filing, Rathburn provided a list of assets. The inventory included 14 chairs, 10 file cabinets, 91 heads, 18 spines, six hips and a copy of the Hippocratic Oath. He put the total market value of the body parts at $160,900.
In a warehouse of horrors, body broker allegedly stacked human heads
Arthur Rathburn allegedly cut up bodies with a chainsaw and rented infected parts. But for years, authorities let him do business despite his bizarre practices
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A monumentally good data driven rant about the state of Australia's economy. And it's not a good picture.
Australia's Economy is a House of Cards
The largest four companies by market capitalisation globally as of the end of Q2 2017 globally were Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon. Facebook is eight. Together, these five companies generate over half a trillion dollars in revenue per annum. That's equivalent to about half of Australia's entire GDP. And many of these companies are still growing revenue at rates of 30% or more per annum.
These are exactly the sorts of companies that we need to be building.
With our population of 24 million and labour force of 12 million, there’s no other industry that can deliver long term productivity and wealth multipliers like technology. Today Australia's economy is in the stone age. Literally.
By comparison, Australia's top 10 companies are a bank, a bank, a bank, a mine, a bank, a biotechnology company (yay!), a conglomerate of mines and supermarkets, a monopoly telephone company, a supermarket and a bank.
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The Outlaw
The extraordinary life of William S. Burroughs.The Extraordinary Life of William S. Burroughs
Peter Schjeldahl on the unorthodox life and work of the Beat Generation writer: “He had no voice of his own, but a fantastic ear and verbal recall.”
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@antipodean said in Interesting reads:
A monumentally good data driven rant about the state of Australia's economy. And it's not a good picture.
Australia's Economy is a House of Cards
The largest four companies by market capitalisation globally as of the end of Q2 2017 globally were Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon. Facebook is eight. Together, these five companies generate over half a trillion dollars in revenue per annum. That's equivalent to about half of Australia's entire GDP. And many of these companies are still growing revenue at rates of 30% or more per annum.
These are exactly the sorts of companies that we need to be building.
With our population of 24 million and labour force of 12 million, there’s no other industry that can deliver long term productivity and wealth multipliers like technology. Today Australia's economy is in the stone age. Literally.
By comparison, Australia's top 10 companies are a bank, a bank, a bank, a mine, a bank, a biotechnology company (yay!), a conglomerate of mines and supermarkets, a monopoly telephone company, a supermarket and a bank.
This was a fantastic read, have shared it amongst a few Aussie/kiwi mates. Thanks a lot.
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Fantastic rant! Just got better and better.
Had always thought the Aus economy is a house of cards, over-dependence on mining, very inefficient federal/state/local government levels, massively over-taxed, the NSW state government payroll tax I just couldn't believe when I found out we were paying that, just a naked tax grab over and above PAYE, unbelievable.
Hope the Federal government might have the balls to try some of these things to promote growth but seems unlikely currently.
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Are you a jerk?
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Mealamu: "Los mejores jugadores que enfrenté fueron Ledesma y Creevy" - ESPN Video
