Month: January 2020

A Crisis of Internet

The previous post made mention of how an overnight wind and snow storm brought down our residential internet connection.  Here, we see the repair team — a grizzled gray-hair and what appears to be a wet-behind-the-ears trainee — attack and resolve the problem, tracing the outage from our house to cabling extending across the street to a utility pole connection.

[rDay Seventeen-Hundred-Fifty-Eight]

Make Me Smart in 2020

The evening Marketplace report has long been a regular household tradition for us, in keeping with a belief that understanding business and finance and markets is an important key to understanding how just about everything else works in our society and world.

Marketplace is a nonprofit production of American Public Media, and presents several podcasts and newsletters in addition to the daily program we hear throughout the week. One of the weekly Marketplace podcasts we faithfully follow is “Make Me Smart With Kai and Molly”. Tonight’s episode is a must-hear, in my opinion, dealing with social media and the use of technology and data to influence minds. Here’s a quote from the site:

“Remember Cambridge Analytica? You probably wish you could forget. But 10 and a half months from the next presidential election, Brittany Kaiser says there’s still more we all need to know about Big Data and how companies like her former employer are using it to steer democracy. She used to work at CA, and after writing a book and appearing in a documentary about it, she’s publishing a bunch of internal documents showing how the company worked and its reach beyond the United States. For our first episode of the new year, we talk with Kaiser about election interference and her new Own Your Data Foundation. Plus, we’ll catch up on some of your emails and voice memos from the holiday break.”

Listen at here or here, or find and check out the podcast using your favorite app.

Learn more about all of Marketplace here.