Covered this week; Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ named most-streamed song from the 20th Century… Your Apps know where you were last night, and they’re not keeping it secret… Citizens react strongly to self-driving cars… Rideshare companies have a compensation issue… Wisconsin’s Scott Walker signs Bills stripping powers from incoming Governor Tony Evers… Russia continues its attempts to sow discord amongst the American electorate… Would human extinction be a tragedy?
December 10, 2018
To talk about the song Bohemian Rhapsody is perhaps complicated by the fact that it’s a song that’s been heard by pretty much everyone, so many times… but maybe that’s what makes it great? Emblematic of music’s ability to unite all. One way or another, and no doubt due in part to the enormous success of the recent Queen biopic, this is an amazing feat.
Universal Music Group today announced that “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the iconic single by British rock legends Queen, officially became the world’s most-streamed song from the 20th Century, as well as the most-streamed Classic Rock song of all time. Today (Dec. 10), the original song and official video for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” taken from the group’s 1975 album “A Night at the Opera,” surpassed 1.6 billion streams globally across all major streaming services.
December 11, 2018
Let me put a special star next to this post as one that everyone should read… Sure, we all know that our phones are tracking our movements. We operate under the assumption that this is to give us the luxuries that provides; localized weather, driving directions, near-by businesses we’re trying to find… but what are we truly giving up in this exchange? It’s all laid out in the hundreds of ‘privacy policies’ we’ve mindlessly agreed to online without actually reading what they say. This long-form piece in the New York Times is a must read. This is one helluva slippery slope most of us don’t even realize we’re on.
Yet another leaves a house in upstate New York at 7 a.m. and travels to a middle school 14 miles away, staying until late afternoon each school day. Only one person makes that trip: Lisa Magrin, a 46-year-old math teacher. Her smartphone goes with her.
An app on the device gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds, according to a database of more than a million phones in the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times. While Ms. Magrin’s identity was not disclosed in those records, The Times was able to easily connect her to that dot.
December 12, 2018
This is sort of funny to me… I mean, driving Uber to great effect has me hoping that self-driving cars are as much into the future as possible… even from the standpoint of having always enjoyed being a “driver”… I hate the idea of a society being driven around by their cars, regardless of how that fact may affect safety… it just feels like driving should be an unalienable right… anyway, in self-driving car testing States, the reaction people are having to the Waymo cars in their neighborhoods is interesting… give this one a read.
People have thrown rocks at Waymos. The tire on one was slashed while it was stopped in traffic. The vehicles have been yelled at, chased and one Jeep was responsible for forcing the vans off roads six times.
Many of the people harassing the van drivers appear to hold a grudge against the company, a division of Mountain View, California-based Alphabet Inc., which has tested self-driving technology in the area since 2016.
December 13, 2018
Uber, a company that’s literally hemorrhaging money currently, has a problem to figure out. They’re concerned about keeping drivers driving for them, yet the money on the mean as well as the low-end of the spectrum just doesn’t warrant any sort of driver loyalty. It’s also most likely the reason why many try driving out, but then don’t stick with it. Ride share companies would be golden if all the cars on the road were self-driving, but they’re not, and seemingly won’t be for quite a while yet. How do they bridge this gap? Only time will tell.
Uber in particular has a reputation for… let’s call it optimistic advertising. So we’re going to ditch the theatrics. Rideshare drivers do not rake in the bucks as highway roaming, scarf-wearing, loft-partying Manhattanites. Uber’s promise that you can “earn as much as you want” holds about as much water as those Disqus commenters who make $70,000 a year “working from home.”
December 14, 2018
All I care to say is… Scott Walker is a piece of shit.
Scott Walker, the outgoing Republican governor of Wisconsin, on Friday signed into law measures that diminish the power of his Democratic successor and expand the authority of Republican lawmakers who teamed up with him over the last eight years to move the state firmly to the right.
December 15, 2018
It feels like we’re living through a period of time, digitally speaking, where the bad guys are able to infiltrate faster than the good guys can stop them… let’s hope this gets sorted out sooner than later. A piece from the NY Times that provides five key takeaways from a recently completed report… and sadly, Robert Mueller is specifically targeted in ongoing efforts by Russia’s Internet Research Agency to sow discord amongst the American electorate.
The Senate Intelligence Committee released on Monday two new reports that it commissioned about the Russian campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms during the 2016 election and beyond. The reports, by teams led by experts at the cybersecurity company New Knowledge and Oxford University, fill out a portrait of the impressive operations by the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg.
December 16, 2018
A think piece for a Sunday afternoon. The question posed by author Todd May; would the planet be better off if humans were to go extinct?
In many dramatic tragedies, the suffering of the protagonist is brought about through his or her own actions. It is Oedipus’s killing of his father that starts the train of events that leads to his tragic realization; and it is Lear’s highhandedness toward his daughter Cordelia that leads to his demise. It may also turn out that it is through our own actions that we human beings bring about our extinction, or at least something near it, contributing through our practices to our own tragic end.
