Cafe 42 Blog

The Cost of Convenience

by jcafesin, posted in saas, social media

It’s surprising how little I think of my daughter now that she’s living 2,000 miles away at school. We talk on the phone frequently, but since she’s not involved in my daily life anymore, she’s more of an abstraction (when we’re not directly talking), a pleasant thought when she crosses my mind.

I figured she was having the same experience I was when she went off to college. The thought of me made her feel glad (or angry, or… since I’m her mother and that comes with mixed feelings), but I didn’t consider she thought of me often in her busy life. So, when I recently had exploratory surgery looking for cancer, I did not realize she even remembered me mentioning the appointment on the phone a couple of weeks ago.

This morning I’m in my office going through my email. I find one from my husband letting me know he and our daughter signed me up for online notifications of my medical records, including test results, last night while I slept. They gave the MyChart app my husband’s phone number and his email because they both know how much I hate putting my data online, never stopping to consider that my husband would be notified of my test results likely before I would by snail mail.

I’ll be getting my test results by snail mail because I do not want my medical information online. I get that it already is, which my daughter reminded me when I came at her full bore with anger on the phone this morning for signing me up without my permission (after coming unglued on my husband).

It isn’t just my medical records that shouldn’t be online, sitting in a cloud, accessible to everyone from Walgreens to United Health Care [insurance]. It makes my skin crawl that almost every time I want to access anything on the net now, the site attaches ‘cookies’ to my machine that track my usage. Many sites require I fill out forms for entry, collecting, aggregating and categorizing even more of my personal data to sell and/or exploit with targeted marketing.

My daughter is on the medical track studying to become a physician. She works as a scribe in a medical practice, and is an intern at Palomar Medical Center and uses MyChart on the job. So do the patients of the practice and the hospital, she assured me. They all love the convenience of being able to look up their medications and/or test results as soon as they’re posted on their e-chart.

She was trying to sell me on the real world, the one she, and most everyone else lives in daily—perpetually attached to the net via cellphones, laptops and tablets. Banking to paying bills to shopping, my daughter uses these online ‘services’ (which is kind of an oxymoron since these apps make it self-serve), to ‘keep it simple’ while juggling two internships, a job, and a full course load every quarter, including this summer.

Do you understand there is a cost to convenience? I asked her on the phone, after she apologized for setting up the account without my permission and promised to delete it when we disconnected.

She did, she assured me. But she really doesn’t. She’s too young, too many generations removed from WWII.

“The Third Reich was a diagnosis regime, obsessed with sorting the population into categories, cataloging people by race, religion, politics, sexuality, criminality and purported biological, mental and behavioral defects. Nazi officials created massive population indexes that compiled individuals’ medical, financial, educational, criminal and welfare records — even sports club files. By 1942, approx. ten million Reich citizens had been indexed. These files, then, established the grounds for sterilization, deportation and extermination.” (https://lnkd.in/d9txaahS)

Nothing to hide? I rhetorically asked my daughter on the phone, still admonishing her for signing me up for an online account of my medical information and then giving access to her dad via email. She placated my perceived conspiracy theory with, I get it, Mom! I do. It’s likely dangerous to have all our personal information online, but it already is, Mom.

1942 may as well be 1642 to my daughter, and [ostensibly] most of her gen— too far back to remember or care.

I didn’t care about using internet-based services either until the ‘cloud.’ It was mid-2000s and we were all on the free and open information highway when Amazon introduced its cloud-based storage service, but I didn’t get its impact until my bank started offering SaaS [self] ‘services,’ like Direct Deposit and online payments ‘for our convenience.’ At first I didn’t care about that either, as I had no intention of banking online since putting my bank account numbers through unsecured servers didn’t, and still doesn’t seem wise to me. Banking security is another oxymoron, and my internet connection through Xfinity isn’t exactly an impenetrable firewall.

By the mid-2010s cloud computing had scaled, especially with the advent of the ‘smart’ phone. Bank of America started making it hard to come into their branches in-person, cutting its staff in half and forcing customers to wait in long lines to talk to a teller. Many young people adapted quickly to avoid the hassle the banks created, which left a lot of older folks, and holdouts with old tech cellphones like me, having to wait sometimes 45 minutes to deposit a check.

I had a red slide phone with a real [small] keyboard and no internet connection until 2021 when AT&T switched to 4G and forced me to “upgrade” to a ‘smart’ phone [like the rest of the known universe did a decade earlier]. I’ve yet to enable an internet connection on my new cellphone, and don’t use location SaaS apps, ever. I navigate using printed maps, or use my memory the second visit to anywhere I’ve been. With my phone offline and not accessing any location services, at least it stops communicating with nearby cell towers so Google and State Farm [car insurance] doesn’t know where I am on the planet (GPS), or how fast I’m driving. They also don’t know whether I’m in my car, or on a plane, through the accelormeter sensor now inside our ‘smart’ phones which detects motion—whether we’re still, walking, biking, driving, flying.

I used to be among the 2+ billion frequent users of Amazon’s marketplace until every bookstore, hardware store, curio, card and gift shop in my neighborhood closed. And while it’s ‘convenient’ to get things delivered to my front door, not so much when it’s snowing out and UPS won’t deliver to our house on the hill and I need a specific tool to fix my irrigation pipe that froze and busted open. I now drive 12 miles, instead of the 3 it used to be before the local hardware store closed. I’m back to buying my tools directly, in-person, as I do for most everything else I shop for now to support the survival of local businesses.

Intellectually, I know I am fighting Goliath with a slingshot trying to retain even a modicum of my privacy from the Content Monster we call the ‘cloud.’ Stalking us everywhere we go IRL, and visit online on our devices, to everything we buy, to our marital status and genetic offspring, corporations have created and continue to create—unobstructed by laws or ethics—“massive population indexes that compiles individuals’ medical, financial, educational, criminal and welfare records — even sports club files,” or lack thereof since most Americans don’t exercise. Insta, Google, FB, TicTok, ChatGPT and every other big data SaaS app out there is “sorting the population into categories, cataloging people by race, religion, politics, sexuality, criminality,” including biological and mental characteristics of behavioral and genetic health.

Many, in fact most large corps these days are marketing us into buying, and believing (religion, politics, social views and values) by targeting their messaging using the very data we give them with every click on a webpage, swipe on a screen, every text or IM, every form we fill out, every poll we take, questionnaire we answer, and every medical exam or procedure we have now is stored on a cloud, and not just one cloud, but many. Redundancy is key in data storage.

I feel like the Borg is trying to assimilate me into submission of my privacy for the convenience of becoming part of the hive—i.e. ‘cloud’[ed] mind, I tried to explain to my daughter on the phone this morning. And the convenience [of self-service] turns out to be for the corps, killing customer service, tying us up in phone loops, and making their mistakes our problems to fix while continually charging our credit cards their monthly fee. So much for the convenience of AutoPay.

Mother, my daughter proclaimed in all seriousness, all our information is already online and in the cloud, or separate clouds that are all connected, or whatever, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. I signed you up for MyChart last night because I want you to get your test results as soon as they’re posted and then share them with me so I can stop worrying, or, at least know what is going on with you. I love you, Mom, and I feel really scared about your biopsy results.

Heavy sigh. She played the Love card.

Assimilation is hard to resist when delivered by those you love most.

I apologized for making her worry, and again felt surprised that my daughter remembered and was concerned about my biopsy. I promised to tell her the test results as soon as I get them, which is likely a lie, unless they’re good. I’ll need to privately process bad results before making her worry even more.

Regardless of whom I choose to share my biopsy results with, they are mine alone to share, or they should be. The fact is, my insurance company will know if I have cancer before I will. If my doctor prescribes me drugs, Wallgreens will know what kind of cancer before I will by snail mail. Under the Affordable Care Act, my insurance can not charge me more, or exclude coverage for pre-existing conditions, but get another Republican president, and that can change. We’ll go back to leaving diabetics to the disabled uninsured.

My world growing up was much like my parents. In my day, corporations worked for their customers and clients. With the advent of SaaS and the ‘aide’ of apps, we are now all products of these corporations selling us on using technology with the lie of ‘convenience’ while hording our private information to maximize their profits.

Nothing to hide? Nazi Germany won’t ever happen here?

  • Trump, and his millions of minions.
  • Fox ‘News.’ Newsmax. Breitbart…etc.
  • Conservative Christians
  • Catholic Supreme Court (8 out of 9 justices)
  • Neo-Nazis
  • White Nationalists/Supremacists/Warriors
  • …etc.

Living with Hitler

by jcafesin, posted in parenting, parents

“They’re coming back. Make no mistake about it. Doesn’t matter what you think you are, they are coming back for you. You are a Jew,” my mother often told me.

I’m not. I’m an atheist. At 5, I told her so, thus creating a chasm between us that went unresolved, even with our last goodbye, when she died of lymphoma nearly 20 years ago.

My mother displayed her fears, though always quietly, through the years I was growing up with her continual barrage of warnings. As children, she insisted my sister and I go to Hebrew school, regardless of my protests as an atheist. In my teens, she insisted we join her in watching The Holocaust mini-series. She sat riveted through each episode, hand to mouth to stifle gasping in horror.

Regardless of her indoctrination, I didn’t feel afraid the Nazis would return because in my family then, and my own family now, the Nazis never left.

I will not deny my mother’s fears were warranted. She’d lived through WWII, saw the rise of fascism allow the murders of six million of her family and faith. She was old enough to witness Hitler’s speeches ignite the German underclass to hate, and blame everyone but themselves for their strife. She saw the world forever changed by our ability to destroy it, with the advent of the atomic bomb.

I tried often to dissuade my mother’s fears. I argued, “We’ve learned, Mom. That’s the best thing about us. When we’re standing on the precipice of disaster, we DO change!”

I was so confident in our uniquely human ability to ‘rise above’ our misfortunes, I married the son of a Holocaust survivor. My father-in-law was 13 when his family was forcibly removed from their suburban home in Łódź, Poland, and imprisoned in the ghetto northeast of the city. He was there for eight months when his father, mother, and two younger sisters were murdered in front of him, and he was put on a train to Flossenburg concentration camp in Bavaria, and eventually to Auschwitz. A prisoner for five years, his teens were spent as a slave, laboring in an Audi factory, watching people murdered and committing suicide daily, until Auschwitz was ‘liberated’ by the Russians in 1945.

My father-in-law came to the States as an immigrant several years later. He settled in New Jersey, started his own business, and then married. My husband was born a year later, and his sister — my sister-in-law — 3 years after that.

Growing up, the kids knew vaguely of their father’s plight. They’d awake, frightened by the “horrific screams” of their dad’s nightmares. As my husband described it: “My dad told us he was ‘in camp,’ and I had a problem with that. I’d gone to summer camp, and I knew this wasn’t the same thing, but it wasn’t clear to me why he’d had such a bad time.”

The Holocaust was not discussed in my husband’s household. He didn’t dare ask his dad for any details, though his father’s nightmares woke him often during his formative years. His father’s screaming frightened him as a child, but even more as he grew up and studied the Holocaust in school, and learned, even in the abstract, what may have happened to his dad. His parents had made it clear by their silence — in almost all things of intimate relevance — they were not open to discussing virtually anything beyond the day-to-day logistics of living.

My husband was in his last year of college when his sister gathered the family and recorded their father’s experience before, during, and after WWII for a history assignment. The ‘kids’ were young adults when they discovered the details of their father’s past during this singular interview. No one in the family ever spoke of it again.

My father-in-law learned young that the only way to survive was to avoid conflict at all costs. His wife, my mother-in-law, having experienced her own traumatic youth, had adopted the same position on the emotional safety of stoic silence, likely long before they met and married. My husband’s parents were married 50 years before my father-in-law passed. They did not discuss their life experiences with their children, or even with each other beyond the surface of these painful events. Neither went to counseling, ever. They ran a small business and raised their kids in their loving, yet separate way, never really letting anyone in, too afraid to get intimate.

Understandable, with where they came from. But, oh, so very costly.

Feelings don’t just GO AWAY when we don’t talk about them. More often than not, when buried , feelings of hurt, frustration, sadness, fear will resurface, and manifest as unwarranted aggression, especially towards the people we love, since it’s likely they’ll still love us, regardless of the slights.

These powerful feelings of anger and fear, buried deep in my husband’s parents, prevented them from validating their children’s feelings, forcing their kids to bury their own feelings under the suffocating weight of shame associated with having any. The 27 years I’ve known my sister-in-law, she won’t watch a sad movie, read a sad book, and has never admitted to feeling sad, even through her son’s ADHD hardships, or during her very contentious divorce. She never talks about feelings, hers or anyone’s, and refuses to even acknowledge emotional questions I ask her by ignoring that I’ve spoken to her at all. My husband’s sister has played the role of ‘good girl’ to avoid conflict, well known in the ‘survivor’ community, suppressing all negative feelings, never getting honest, and therefore intimate with anyone, even herself.

My husband has Asperger’s syndrome, commonly understood to be a mild form of Autism. Though never formally diagnosed, we’ve seen enough therapists together and most have identified specific autistic behaviors that fall within the Aspergers spectrum. Higher rates of Aspergers is well documented among Holocaust survivors’ offspring. He ‘floods’ with intense emotion, his or anyone’s directed at him. He shuts down completely, becomes calmly and coolly irrational, contentious and attacking when pushed to engage in dialog in this flooded state. He’s the victim in most of his narratives and refuses to be held accountable for the conflicts he creates when he’s flooding. And with any conflict, flooding can last anywhere from a few hours to months.

When my husband is with me, is present and open and unafraid, he is the love of my life — kind, smart, respectful, responsible, fun. He is my best friend in every measure when he’s all there and we’re connecting, but married 27 years, and I know not to trust this behavior will last. Conflict is a part of life. And whether I say something he doesn’t like, or a boss has, my husband begins the flooding process and cannot hear and does not remember what is said in the exchange. Since I’ve known him, he’s been fired or forced to quit 15+ full-time positions after pissing off his supervisors enough that my brilliant software developer husband held most jobs for less than 2 yrs.

The effects of the Holocaust are still powerful, present, and residing in our house. The hate Hitler ignited still reverberates almost a century — three generations later — embodied in my husband every time he shuts down to avoid conflict, dismisses or ignores his feelings, or mine, or our kids, or his bosses, as his parents taught him to do. The fear the Nazis instilled in so many has been passed through the generations like a genetic disease.

My mother carried this fear with her to her grave. As a matter of course, she made me afraid, of all people — our ability to abandon our humanity and turn our backs on neighbors we once held dear, in response to fear. I got lucky, though. My mom felt passionate about so much, and shamelessly displayed feelings of joy, anger, fear, and sadness at times, gifting me the opportunity to acknowledge and express my own.

My husband understands that he floods, and how destructive this is to establishing and maintaining trust in him, his parenting, and our partnership. During peaceful times free of conflict, he works to connect with me, and our kids, and open up his awareness to the effect he has on the world outside his own head. In moments, when he wins the war with himself, and he can see his own behavior clearly, share his vulnerability and acknowledge his culpability, we touch intimacy. And in those moments, we stop Hitler’s legacy at our doorstep.

Nothing to Hide?

by jcafesin, posted in Facebook, holocaust, marketing, police profiling, psychology, racism, Trump

NOTHING TO HIDE? You never know…
This IS what Insta, Google, FB, ChatGPT and every other big data SaaS app out there is doing with your personal information:

“The Third Reich was a diagnosis regime, obsessed with sorting the population into categories, cataloging people by race, religion, politics, sexuality, criminality and purported biological, mental and behavioral defects. Nazi officials created massive population indexes that compiled individuals’ medical, financial, educational, criminal and welfare records — even sports club files. (By 1942, approx. ten million Reich citizens had been indexed — 12% of the total population. These files, then, established the grounds for sterilization, deportation and extermination.” https://lnkd.in/d9txaahS)

Now our data is used to market us into buying, and believing (politics, social views and values) with recommendation systems.

#getaclue!

SaaS Apps that F**k You

by jcafesin, posted in saas
Saas Apps that Screw You
or
Why U Can’t Get that House, that Job, those Tickets…

I’ve been house hunting on REDFIN for over 5 yrs with no luck. The homes I want are either too expensive, a flat-out ripoff, or an offer is accepted within 24 hrs of listing. We’ve bid on 5 houses, and we’ve been ‘out bid’ every time.

I’ve defaulted to using Redfin.com almost exclusively, as they released MLS (Multiple Listing Service [of homes for sale]) data within minutes of the broker’s listing. ZILLOW, REALTOR.com, and their like often show new MLS listings hours later.

I assumed that Redfin was helping me find a home. But what this SaaS (Software as a Service) offering is really doing is screwing most potential home buyers like you and me. Making MLS listings available the moment a property is listed for sale to everyone online, globally, does NOT ‘level the playing field.’ Democratizing MLS listings introduces 50+ interested buyers at every doorstep, jacking up housing prices with fierce competition for the same property.

Real estate brokers love this software! They now give you access to their paid MLS subscription (Matrix), knowing we all get it from Redfin anyway. Promoting “competitive bidding” makes them richer with every sale.

Book a trip on HOTELS.com or EXPEDIA lately? Ever? If you use travel apps you are spending more than you need to. Guaranteed! You’ll get a better hotel rate if you call the places you’d like to stay, and talk directly to their front desk. I’ve booked family vacations for 21 yrs now, and every single time, without fail, from Victoria, Canada, to Venice, Italy, the rates are cheaper if you book directly by calling the places you plan to stay.

The original idea with travel apps was they’d buy in bulk and sell at a discount. But like Pets.com, these sites quickly learned the destinations were not very flexible on their rates, so they ‘pivoted’ their SaaS with marketing. They sold users on ‘Packaged Deals,’ but you’ll be locked in to their ‘deals,’ which often aren’t ideal, and your vacation will cost more booking through them, even though they advertise that they save you money. Travel apps offer you no real value, and often rip you off, adding charges to cover the cost of maintaining their business.

Same goes for most middlemen SaaS offerings. It cost money to run their platforms, and they pass that cost on to their paying customers.

Ever use ANGIE’S LIST, or HOME ADVISOR, or THUMBTACK to get recommendations for services from contractors to dentists? Most of their good ratings are LIES. Angi’s, and their like, are advertising platforms. They are like Phone Books in the olden days. The BUSINESS PAYS these SaaS apps to have their name appear in search results. Even on Angi, the listing may be free, but your business will be buried in their search returns if you do not pay their ‘premium’ rate. Few (if any) of the good ratings and reviews awarded the businesses are real. Either the business solicited friends and family to post good reviews, and/or they hired an outside marketing firm to create high ratings (usually from India or the Philippines doing click scams). Angi and their like bury the negative reviews (as does Google), as pissing off their paying clients would be bad for their SaaS business.

These SaaS recommendation sites say they do a standard background check, meaning criminal records to professional license, but that’s about it. A few say they reach out to the vendor’s customers by phone, which they may, but with contacts the business gives them. Maybe they get the wife of the vendor on the phone, and of course, she just loves his work! High ratings mean you’re more likely to hire them. And the business is more likely to keep paying Angi and Thumbtack to appear on their lists.

Developers and marketers of middlemen SaaS apps will argue they are “doing good” for the world, whatever that means. (Doing good for them?) They are ‘setting information free to form an egalitarian society,’ Silicon Valley types profess. But I’ve already established that these apps, and their like jack up the cost of goods and services, as IRL middlemen do. Creators of middlemen software will tell you they are offering you a ‘convenience.’ Bullshit. With a few clicks you too can book flights, hotels, car rentals, arrange appointments with contractors, find a [good] dentist. Do your research and go beyond Google to Bing, DuckDuckGo, Reddit, ChatGPT, Nextdoor…etc., and you can find all kinds of information about a company or vendor, including reviews across a broad spectrum, not just the paid ratings on Expedia or Angi.

Most SaaS apps today require you give them a ton of personal data to utilize their ‘service.’ Additionally, they put ‘cookies’ on your mobile and PC that track everywhere you go online, and IRL (through your phone). Not conspiracy theory. Cookies (sweet and inviting name, right), track and log your behavior to ‘improve your overall [online] experience,’ as well as more tightly target you with advertising the app believes you’re more likely to respond to.

Ever wonder why entertainment events have gotten so expensive? The only way to buy tickets these days is through a SaaS app like TICKET MASTER. And you better hope when you log on the broker site doesn’t crash, or sell you fake tickets, or sell out in the first 3 minutes with millions vying for the same show. And good luck getting a refund if you need to cancel, or the event is canceled. The software IS the service, which generally means little to no actual customer support.

Wanted to go see Barbie a week after it opened with my daughter on her short visit home from college. There were no tickets available at any theater within a 100 mile radius the 5 days she was home because they’d all been purchased in advance online. Before the ‘convenience’ of apps like FANDANGO, or AMC, or REGAL, we’d at least have had a chance to see the movie if we waited in line, even if it meant getting to the theater early to ensure we got tickets. It is neither convenient nor cost effective buying movie tickets with SaaS apps. In addition to the high costs of the tickets, these movie apps charge an additional fee for ‘online processing.’

Look for a job on LINKEDIN or INDEED lately? Find a job post that interests you, and even if the ad has been online less than 24 hrs it still has hundreds of applicants. You’d better have one hell of an amazing skill set, and a CV with all the right keywords that fit the exact niche of the job requirements to get noticed among your competition.

Democratization [a la Google]:

  • The introduction of a democratic system or democratic principles.
  • The action of making something accessible to everyone.

SaaS developers and marketers inject this buzzword into most pitches these days. They’re democratizing the web, upholding democracy, doing good, they’ll tell you. Not sure how many buy into this rhetoric to make themselves feel and appear philanthropic, or it’s all a big sales pitch while they’re dreaming of a billion dollar acquisition or going public and becoming instant millionaires.

Seriously, how convenient is it being robbed of our money and information every time we use software ‘services’?

Let’s get real. Democratizing MLS listings—making them accessible to everyone on the internet—is a BAD IDEA for home buyers, now forced to compete for a home against 20 other offers, a third of those offering cash by corporations that can afford to pay tens of thousands over asking. Democratizing movie tickets forces movie goers to buy tickets sometimes weeks before the film’s release without ever hearing if the movie is any good. Democratizing plane tickets to hotel reservations raises the cost of travel for everyone by exponentially increasing the demand.

Democracy [a la Google] “is a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.” As for upholding democracy, I had no representation to help me get back the over $300 AMAZON PRIME ripped off from me when they signed me up without my knowledge and then made it almost impossible for me to cancel the account.

We are not a democracy, as this country is run by big business, in particular FAAMG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google), the gatekeepers of our personal data run [a muck] by greedy, unregulated children.

Want to know why you can’t afford to buy a home today?

Is the cost of events and movie tickets keeping you home watching NETFLIX (yet another SaaS app that eats up your money, and worse your life’s time, but at least they deliver entertainment)?

Even ChatGPT could not give me an estimate on the number of SaaS applications online today. (It had no clue what ‘middlemen’ software is.) The consensus of search results from multiple sources agree the SaaS industry is growing so rapidly, virtually exponentially, estimates have to be based per industry. According to Statista, the SaaS industry is worth $197 billion U.S. dollars and estimated to reach $232 billion by 2024.

While many SaaS apps provide value, especially for running a business, from CRMs, to CMS, to ERP, most consumer-facing middlemen SaaS apps are not only valueless, they are dangerous. Sucking people in with lies about savings on movies or when booking travel through their app; democratizing information making it impossible for anyone but the uber-rich or cash-flushed corps to act on, and rising the cost of, well, everything, ultimately is neither convenient nor cost effective for 99% of us.

I See You

by jcafesin, posted in atheism, Creativity, depression, Emapthic, Emotional Intelligence, lonely, lonliness, marketing, non-believers, psychology

I am an Empath.

Wait! Before you roll your eyes and click off this post, I don’t have paranormal powers. It isn’t magic that I can read people. I’m not psychic. I can’t glean people’s “energy,” whatever that means, or any of that mystical crap. I am a devout atheist and use the word “devout” with purpose.

What I can do, is tell you what you’re thinking and feeling, generally before you know.

How?

If I’m in physical proximity to you, your body (posture, eye contact…etc.), and facial expressions give me tons of data about what you are experiencing inside your head. We all have this ability to read physicality, though most people hardly pay attention to one another, except on rare occasions.

Ever had a blind date? The first second you see your date in person, you can tell if they like how you look.

In-person, or not — over the phone, or web — I ask a LOT of questions. And I listen to your answers. My brain picks up inconsistencies in what you’re saying, telling me you are lying to yourself, and subsequently… me.

The first time my husband met my mother, she said to him, “My daughter (me) was born old.”

What she meant was, I was born plugged in outside myself. I don’t know why. A genetic anomaly? My senses feel hypercharged. Touch, taste, sound, even vision (clarity in peripheral sight) seems heightened compared to most (and not just by my reckoning). I live outside my own head while in the company of others. Watching. Questioning. Listening, my brain identifying and coalescing patterns of behavior. OCD? Bipolar? Maybe. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to process the massive amount of information I get from others, and it’s exhausting. And I wish I could shut it down, live like most everyone else.

Sort of…

I’ve picked up patterns in human behavior along the way. Lots! It’s another reason I can tell what you’re feeling, often before you know. I can now predict likely responses to an enormous array of specific stimuli. It’s a fantastic tool for writing believable characters. And understanding what motivates people is equally beneficial for developing marketing campaigns with great response rates.

Yet, I struggle with living plugged in outside myself. It’s emotionally costly. I lose myself while inside others, acutely feel their sadness, their fears, and hopes. I’ve tried to shut my senses down with drugs, prescription, and not. I had an allergic reaction to Prozac that almost killed me, and no reaction at all to weed over time.

I’ve become a recluse for the most part. I avoid crowds, and limit my intimate friendships to very few. I stay plugged into my two kids, my husband, our bratty, but cute Shepard pound-hound, which serves them well, though at times, probably not me so much. I disappear, absorbed in them, their feelings often muddling my own. (To be fair, the dog’s needs are simple. No hidden agendas, no unconscious complexities. She makes her feelings obvious. Thank you, Elly!)

I am grateful and humbled in the extreme by the immense and intense range of feelings we all get to experience being human. I am energized by celebrations like New Years Eve, or friends and family joys. Sometimes dark feelings overshadow all lightness, and it feels like the only way out of seeing so much, feeling so much, is to check out. I get that living is a choice we make, daily. While I’ll continue to choose living, be here for my friends and family as long as I can, I must admit, there is, and has always been a beckoning to shut it all down, kill the noise of others in my head, turn off the input. Unplug, for good. I’ll never check though, regardless of how weighted living feels sometimes. As an empath, and an atheist, feeling seems better than not, knowing I’ll eventually cease to exist and feel nothing at all. Forever.

The Upside of Dementia

by jcafesin, posted in aarp, ageism, aging, parents

She walked to the bank on the last Friday of every month to deposit her social security check. She’d been doing it on her own for a long time, since her husband of 49 years died of a brain tumor ten years back. She folded the check in half then put it in her wallet, in the zippered part, then clicked her wallet shut and put it in her pocketbook. After securing the purse strap on her shoulder, Grandma put her navy peacoat on, over her handbag to hide it, and left her one-bedroom apartment on Hobart Street in the heart of L.A.

Every so often if I was in town, I’d join Grandma on her monthly walk. We were never particularly close. She’d always been contentious, but she once had a quick wit and delivered it with sharp humor, both of which left her years ago, as did the radiant beauty she once possessed. Conversations were now limited to her endless list of complaints — physical, familial, and social. Visiting was always a chore, but she was all the extended family either of us had. And family is family.

Her bank was on the corner of Wilshire and Vermont, a particularly noisy, crowded intersection of two major thoroughfares, but Grandma was used to the hustle and bustle. She was a city girl — from Manhattan first, lived above a candy/soda fountain shop she ran with her husband. She and my granddad followed their daughter to California and rented the flat on Hobart Street, locally known as the Miracle Mile District. She’d lived there for the last 45 years, took no vacations, and never traveled beyond the L.A. area since arriving.

We walked down her quiet street of whitewashed art deco apartments at a hurried pace with purpose. And she was fast, especially for an 87-year-old woman who stood a mere 4 feet 9 inches tall. It was generally difficult to keep up with her. But on this particular Friday when we turned off her quiet corner onto Wilshire Blvd., Grandma startled, and stopped, clearly confused.

I practically ran into her. My intrusion into her space brought her back to the present. She scolded me for not paying attention and we were on our way again. Her pace was slower now, more cautious, and I knew something was wrong but couldn’t figure out what. I suggested we go back to her place to get my car and I’d drive her to the bank. By the tone of her refusal, it was clear she didn’t care for my implication she was unable to manage on her own.

She picked up her pace so I hurried alongside her in silence the rest of the way to the bank. Grandma opened the glass door, took a few steps inside and stopped dead. I stood panting beside her as she stared around the large, brightly lit space — at the tellers behind the long counter, and the desks of the managers and sales reps across the way. She took on this horrified expression, brought her hand to her mouth as if to stifle a scream, and her eyes filled with tears that slid down her face when she blinked.

I was taken aback. I’d never seen my grandmother cry, not even at her husband’s funeral. She was a hard woman.

“I have no idea where I am, or why I’m here,” she whispered, clearly shamed. “I know I’m losing my mind. I can feel it but I can’t stop it.” Then she looked away, out the wall of windows at the crowded intersection beyond.

My mom/her daughter had been telling me for months that Grandma was losing it. Her normally sharp tongue was telling tales of things that never happened, my mom warned. She was hospitalized twice for taking too much medication because she’d forgotten she’d taken it earlier. Lacking the space and knowledge to care for her mother through end-of-life, my mom still struggled with the notion of putting her mother in an elder care facility.

Grandma stood in the middle of the bank crying, and I stood there gaping without a clue what to do. People started staring so I took her by the arm and led her to a chair by an empty desk. I knelt in front of her, held her hands in mine, and told her to look at me. She did. Her gray eyes focused on me, and I saw the fear of old age in them. I spoke softly — told her where we were and why, and that we’d walked to the bank together.

Recognition filled her face, but her gloom remained. She retrieved a Kleenex from the small travel pack she kept in her purse, dabbed her face, and wiped her nose. She needed a minute before going to a teller window and depositing her check. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember how to do the math required for the cashback she needed.

“I’m going crazy. I just know it.” She looked at me, and I felt her begging me for salvation.

I gave her my pocket calculator, and while I taught her how to work it, I reassured her she no longer needed simple math skills. We filled out her deposit slip together and then checked the math with the machine at the teller window. Grandma slipped her $50 into the zippered part of her wallet then put it in her pocketbook and we were on our way.

Though I wanted to, I thought better of suggesting she stay at the bank and I go get my car. She seemed back to her old self, hustling along Wilshire Blvd. I paced her in silence back to her flat. Inside her own environment, she seemed at ease. We watched her favorite soap opera and then she made us scrambled eggs with onions for a late lunch. I helped her with the dishes and left, making light of her dementia with senior moment jokes of how we all forget stuff, and feeling confident Grandma was going to be just fine.

I did not accompany her to the bank on the Friday a month later. When she got to the teller window and realized she’d lost the calculator I gave her, she panicked and became disoriented again. The teller was kind enough to call my mom, who came from the Valley to pick her up and drive her the half mile home. That afternoon, an hour or two after my mom left her, Grandma took three doses of Valium in less than an hour and ended up in the hospital getting her stomach pumped from the overdose.

Not too long after that my mother got a court order for legal custody of her mother. At first, when my grandmother was still lucid, she resented the hell out of her daughter’s authority, and the Home she was forced to reside in. When I’d pick her up for family functions, she’d spend the entire ride slamming my mom. But within a few months, her anger gave way to wonder as dementia took hold. Memories of her limited life experience were replaced by complex fantasies of exotic places she’d traveled, gala events she never attended, and interactions with famous people she’d never met.

Less than a year after the second bank incident my grandmother did not recognize her family, did not know me, or her own daughter, and claimed she’d never had a child. Though my mother continued to visit her weekly for the next two years, Grandma never acknowledged she had a daughter. Pretending to be a visiting friend instead of her child took its toll on my mom, but my grandmother was none the wiser. She enjoyed the visits. Over just a few months she seemed lighter, brighter than she’d ever been. She seemed happier since crossing the line of reality all the way. Her flat gray eyes filled with excitement when she told of her fantastical adventures on Safari in the jungles of Africa, or the time she did the Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary.

Her fantasies shielded her from harsh realities present and looming. At 89, her body and mind were shutting down, her time running out. She was on the fringe of life now, and almost invisible. Surely she felt it too. Perhaps so many old people lose their mind because the reality of their marginal existence is just too heavy to bear. Dementia was her reprieve. Insanity served her. But getting there — watching herself lose her own mind must have been hellish.

A few years after grandma passed, my mom died of cancer. She never lost her mind, was sentient to the bitter end. But my father is 84, and his sharp mind is clearly going. He repeats the same sentence several times. He slurs words, jumbles them, can’t find the right ones. He is on scores of medications for his heart, blood pressure, liver, and other vital organs shutting down with age. Once an articulate pontificator, my dad talks mostly of his many ailments now. He tries to assure me he’s ‘accepted his lot,’ living in a private apartment in Building One of the retirement Home he recently moved to in Washington, far from the California sunshine he loved, but nice, and affordable.

On the phone with him last Saturday, I heard the fear, the raw terror in his voice as he spoke of the terminal patients in Building Three of the Home. I sought words of wisdom to lighten his load but could think of none. My heart ached for him, missing him while he is still here. I wanted to save him, but know I can not. As I hung up the phone, as harsh as it seems, even to me, I wished for my father a speedy journey into a pleasant dementia.

Do NOT take PAXLOVID

by jcafesin, posted in Covid, covid19

After over 60+ hr of the most current research, and taking it myself with very bad side-effects, I recommend you do NOT take PAXLOVID!

Please do NOT listen to your doctor, or Pfizer, who tells you to take PAXLOVID for Covid.

Pfizer is LYING TO YOU, especially if you are fully vaxed!

Your doctor is LYING TO YOU, when he prescribes PAXLOVID, as your doc DOES NOT DO THE MOST CURRENT RESEARCH, and most doctors simply quote Pfizer’s marketing material! DO NOT BELIEVE PFIZER, and/or your doctor quoting Pfizer’s literature.

FOLLOW THE MONEY…

Pfizer made $100 BILLION last year, $12.2 BILLION from PAXLOVID.
Don’t listen to drug-pushing doctors sold on the drug by some busty actress, offering the doc perks to push PAXLOVID.

Here is what the most current data (your doc doesn’t bother to research) says about PAXLOVID. Read it all carefully and DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH by limiting Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo search returns to 1 month out, and ignoring the shitload of bullshit ads and articles funded by Pfizer about how great PAXLOVID is because THEY ARE LYING TO YOU:
https://lnkd.in/ga-4Yc3v
https://lnkd.in/gWaCsARy

For the record, I am fully vaxed and have no political agenda in regard to Covid cures. I took PAXLOVID and had every side-effect listed, as many others reported, (and I still don’t know about long-term damage to my liver), and now have COVID REBOUND, a COMMON OCCURANCE (regardless of Pfizer’s denials) that comes from taking PAXLOVID.

On the Train to Auschwitz

by jcafesin, posted in democrats, republicans, Uncategorized, united states of greed

Electricity is shooting from my fingertips. My heart is racing. My breathing fast, too fast.

“I can’t understand your accent. I’d like to talk with a supervisor, NOW!” My fifth ask.

I’m on the phone with COMCAST, have been for the last 2 hrs today; 3 hrs on Tuesday, 2 more last Friday…etc.

“I sody mem for the inconvenents,” the COMCAST operator delivers his line politely, though I’m yelling at him.

I’m yelling at him because he’s the 17th Indian employee, talking to me from India, I’ve spoken with in the last year alone, and I’ve been trying to get my internet connection stabilize, i.e. consistently ON for FOUR YEARS NOW.

“I here do help you, mem. Wvat is you account numba?” He’s lying. He doesn’t want to help me. He wants me on the line so he has a job tomorrow, because he wants to feed his family. So do Americans, but he doesn’t care about that either.

“I want to speak with a supervisor NOW, dickhead. Do you fucking understand me?” I’m getting mean. I’ve learned not to care about him, as he doesn’t care about me, or even the problem I’m having with COMCAST. He does not deserve my respect. Past experience with COMCAST customer service has taught me that he is the enemy, making sure he takes care of himself, regardless that he’s screwing the very people he’s supposed to be working for—the COMCASTcustomer.

Germans drove trains, turned in their neighbors, sent millions to slave labor and gas chambers to protect their own asses. They didn’t stand up to Nazis (AMAZON, MICROSOFT, COMCAST, PG&E, VERIZON…etc). They let the German government tell them what to do, how to think, what to say, what not to, just like COMCAST teaches their employees, Indian or otherwise.

It is insanity that COMCAST delivers HALF THE SERVICE they claim to offer, but I have to pay ALL OF MY BILL monthly. Sure, I can go with AT&T, who were just fined $18.25M for STEALING FROM THEIR CUSTOMERS, cutting internet speeds to you and me, to give more bandwidth to whoever they liked. And do you REALLY believe that AT&T will stop stealing time and hurting productivity for small businesses like yours and mine after this fine? Seriously. They’ll do what they want, get sued again, then raise their rates to pay for the lawsuits. Just like PG&E, who MURDERED 8 people in San Bruno, destroyed an entire neighborhood, was fined the most EVER in a lawsuit of its kind, and simply raised their rates to cover the suit. We’re all paying to let them get away with murder.

Is this the society you all want? It makes my skin crawl every time my husband insists on paying a bill that is wrong because COMCAST and AT&T make it a 2 hr journey of frustration to talk to an operator in India or the Philippines who has little to no training, can barely speak English, and who DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOUR PROBLEM. They have to feed their families, on the backs of Americans, because their governments are so corrupt that only the wealthy thrive, while the rest of their people struggle to get by. Or flat out starve, like the begging children that surround foreigners in India.

Well, now our government is equally corrupt, placating to CORPORATIONS and big business lobbyists. And WE ALL LET THEM.

My father-in-law spent between the ages of 13-18 in Auschwitz after watching his entire family murdered by Nazis. His neighbors, their kids that he used to play soccer with, all turned a blind eye. AMERICANS ARE NOW DOING THE SAME THING. We’ve become complacent, as long as we have Netflix, and Amazon, and Uber for food delivery. He told me once that anything becomes acceptable to most people, that watching Nazis murder children daily, for sport, or seeing prisoners throw themselves against electric fences to commit suicide became the norm in Auschwitz. It is now the norm to accept bad behavior from big business. And regardless of our Supreme Courts twisted decision that “Corporations are people, too,” there are actual people working for them, greedy management making decisions that screw their customers, that are at the core of this issue.

The German train drivers, or the local store owners that stopped serving Jews and Gays and Gypsies, they were simply “following orders,” like the Indian rep working for COMCAST delivering the company’s lies with every line he spoke. 

Those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it. 

You can all plug into your devices and apps and ignore the news, and pretend the economy is stable for you, even though it’s a house of cards with Disney and other major employers firing U.S. workers and replacing them with H1Bs, and just bend over and pay every bill without protest. You can choose to be one of the Nazis, or the ‘good Germans’ who turned their heads while their neighbors were murdered.

Harsh? You bet. But again, is a society where the few rich thrive, and do whatever they want, whenever they want, with NO ACCOUNTABILITY, or real punishment, where you want to live?

DO THE RIGHT THING!!

Protest—tweet, update, share your stories when you are screwed by COMCAST, AT&T, PG&E. Take the time to tell the world that SAMSUNG put a ton of apps on the phone you just purchased that you don’t use, don’t want, and YOU ARE PAYING FOR in load time and battery life, while they exploit your personal data with recommendation engines to use against you. Sign petitions by people who give a shit enough to fight corruption and are looking for support to stop it, and not just causes that adversely effect you directly, but humanity, and the planet. Fight every bill that’s wrong. Don’t speak with respect to the CS reps who show you none! Their politeness is a facade, taught to them by greedy, ugly management who are happy to keep you on the line repeating the same information to the next rep who doesn’t take notes, maybe is even illiterate, and has no clue what your issue is. 

Show your outrage passionately!! Make their job hard, because they are willingly stealing your time, and your income, and most assuredly making you miserable not caring about your needs to guarantee their jobs. And if you think these reps are not aware of what is happening on the back end, that’s BULLSHIT—an excuse to remain ignorant, especially since almost every call they get is from beleaguered customers like me who take them to task on COMCAST FAILING TO DELIVER on their promises. If you make it miserable to work at COMCAST, perhaps they’ll look for real jobs that require thinking, literacy, and actually add value—benefit customers—instead of blindly obeying the Nazi leadership of the COMCAST (or pick your fav corp) regime.

[Spider’s] Web 1.0

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

I’ll never forget the first time I saw the World Wide Web. It was 1995. I was in my rented townhome in Alameda, a small island on the east bank of the San Francisco Bay. I already had a dial-up modem plugged into my Mac LC that I used to send graphic files and documents to my lithographers and commercial printers through FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

I don’t know where I heard about Netscape, probably from a business associate. But I remember the afternoon I logged on for the first time. The interface was full-color visual, the first I’d seen. FTP was only black text on a white screen and no images. The Netscape logo — the uppercase N sinking into a black globe against a starry aquamarine sky, was… beautiful.

Once I registered, the next screen had colorful, clickable illustrations to explore the Net. I was floored, drop-jawed. The interface gave me choices to go anywhere. Netscape was a portal to the world.

I called my roommate into my bedroom/office space to show her what I was seeing on my screen. “This changes everything,” I practically whispered, sure that this portal was the beginning of the connected world I only dreamt of as a kid.

As I sat there exploring each site the Netscape browser delivered, I recalled when I was 8 years old, sitting in the back seat of my mother’s huge Chevy while she drove me and my sister home from school.

“One wish,” my mom asked us spontaneously. “One wish. Right now. If you could have anything you want, what would it be?” She often came up with non-sequiturs like this to fill the void of silence after she’d asked about our day at school, and got, “Fine,” from both of us.

I answered instantly. “World peace,” and I meant it. My brother was in Vietnam. We watched the war on TV nightly. I was always afraid I’d spot him among the troops in the jungle, and then see him get shot. “I wish there was no war, and that we all took care of each other instead of fighting so much.”

“That’s a stupid wish,” my sister said, sitting up front in the passenger seat. I cowered in the back seat and shut up. “It’ll never happen. Humans are violent. It’s part of our nature. We can’t change who we are.” She was 2 yrs older than me. Surely, she must be right. She wished for a new purse.

“This changes everything,” I’d said to my roommate as I browsed the internet that first time back in 1995. And I believed it. A portal to the world would let us see how others lived, and let others see what was possible.

My roommate stood over my shoulder staring at my screen as I went from site to site through Netscape’s ‘portal.’ She seemed unmoved by what we were seeing, and in short order went back to her room.

I stayed online the rest of the night and into the early morning hours, amazed.

I pursued news sites and read articles from all over the world. We could never again pretend that holocausts weren’t happening. We’d find out about atrocities taking place anywhere, instantly, and the United Nations would have to stop them! The privileged would no longer be able to turn a blind eye to poverty or disease, even in the most remote places in Africa, or the Middle East, seeing it daily on their computers. We could talk to people around the block or in other countries we’d never meet, share ideas, and feelings. We’d see how similar we all are, how we all feel the same things: sad, or happy, or mad, at times. We could connect 24/7, and never feel isolated or lonely again. The internet was a window to the world, and the view would surely motivate all of us to care for each other like never before.

This is the argument I gave to my dad at Saul’s Deli while eating bagels and lox a few years after my first experience on the Netscape browser. As a lover of technology since childhood, he too was on the internet, one of the first adopters in his advanced age group. He shook his head and gave me his indulgent smile, pausing before taking another bite of his bagel.

“The internet changes nothing. It is a tool, like a screwdriver. It won’t change human nature. And it won’t save us,” he said. “We’re going to have to do that. Until we learn to care for each other beyond ourselves, we are doomed.” He took a bite of his bagel and savored the mix of salmon, red onions, cream cheese and bread, satisfied in the moment.

“You’re wrong, Dad,” I exclaimed with certainty. “The internet is connecting the planet. For the first time in human history, we are becoming one world.”

“One very small world, which everyone wants their piece of,” he said. “We’ve invented technology we can’t handle, from the Bomb to this internet. Getting bombarded with information isn’t going to change how we react to it. And the more technology we invent, the more likely we’ll implode with it.” He sighed and looked at me lovingly. “You can’t change the world, baby. Best just to focus on taking care of yourself, and your family.”

It was 1998 when I had this dialog with my dad at Saul’s. I had no idea what was coming, how the internet would evolve into the ugly, manipulative MARKETING PLATFORM it has become. I had no clue that seeing how others live would engender jealousy, promote hate, violence, ignorance, and threaten our democracy daily. But I left Saul’s Deli that morning sure my father was wrong.

As it’s turned out, he wasn’t. ■

The Fatal Flaw with AI

by jcafesin, posted in business, careers, christianity, christians, marketing, recommendation, Silicon Valley, startups, technology

Saw #60Minutes last night with Google’s CEO #SundarPichai on the current state of #AI.

The opening bar, the interviewer, #ScottPelley, asked #SissieHsiao, Google’s VP, what Google’s new chatbot, #Bard, is for.

“It’s really here to help you brainstorm ideas to generate content like a speech or a blog post or an email,” she said with confidence, that made my skin crawl.

So, she’s suggesting that we shut off our brains, and rely on more software to construct our personal content. Let’s all stop exercising our neural connectivity to do tasks like writing an email, or posting a blog, like this one, that requires disciplines in linear thinking, quantitative and qualitative reasoning, real news research, and engagement of my MIND to construct. Ms Hsiao is suggesting that doing these tasks that demand, and PROMOTE brain power are worthless wastes of our time, and that Google’s AI can not only do better, but quicker.

So, Ms. Hsiao, where does that leave human brain power, assuming we aren’t all paid the big bucks by Google to fuck up humanity even more than you already do? A hint, honey: STUPID. Do that research Google, and even your software will find recent data that humanity is getting dumber:

…etc.*

Next, Scott Pelley was “speechless” that Bard made up a story from Hemingway’s six-word flash piece.** Mr. Pelley was so overwhelmed, he said, “Bard appears to possess the sum of human knowledge.”

BULLSHIT.

Bard does not know what it FEELS LIKE to be humiliated, admired, disrespected, loved. It does not know what it FEELS LIKE about anything. It does not know compassion, or empathy, regardless of what words it spits out because these things are ACTIONS! Words, like, “Our hearts and prayers are with the victims,” of the latest mass shooting, are meaningless, like so much of AI.

Beyond Bard having no knowledge of FEELINGS, it also does NOT have the “sum of human knowledge,” because Google scraps the internet, and every email exchange, and text conversation you have.

I gave away all my albums when CDs came out, thinking I’d replace them with disks, except I like obscure alternative music, and most of my record collection never made it to CDs. Just like MOST of human knowledge is NOT on the internet, and in our texts. Sorry Google, even YOU don’t have access to MOST OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE, so your #MachineLearning data sets are woefully inaccurate. Which brings me to the pic for this post…

In the picture attached about the New Testament, Scott Pelley asked Google’s chatbot, Bard, to “summarize the New Testament.” In 5 seconds, Bard came back with “The New Testament is the story of God’s love for humanity, which was revealed through Jesus Christ.”

BULLSHIT.

The actual Bible is filled with a jealous, angry, vengeful god (Corinthians 10:22; 2 Corinthians 11:2), who murders millions of people at his whim. Jesus is hateful to Jews (John 8:44) and others. He tells parables in which beatings, and even killings, of household slaves are affirmed as ‘disciplinary measures’ (Luke 12:45-47). Revelations, the last chapter in the New Testament, tells of God, and Jesus inflicting the “punishment of eternal destruction,” (2 Thessalonians 1:5-10) on anyone who doesn’t agree with, or believe in them. Strip away blind faith, this is called TOTALITARIANISM.

So why did Google’s Bard call the New Testament a “story of God’s love for humanity?” My human interpretation of the New Testament is, “The New Testament is a collection of violent stories that center around two jealous, angry narcissists who inflicted hardships, loss, plagues, and other forms of gruesome violence on humans.”

Google’s AI engine is trained on ALL THE DATA ON THE INTERNET, and your texts, and your emails, and everything you do on your phones, and ‘smart’ devices. This includes digital marketing—all those annoying ads—but also what people are saying, via texts, and posts, and blogs…etc., about any given subject. At least 80+%† of the U.S. identify as religious, or spiritual. Christianity alone touts 64% of the U.S. as believers, and, by far, puts out the most advertising. Christian marketing is close to a trillion-dollar a year industry.

Bard is a combination of Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning…etc, algorithms. That’s it. Garbage scraped from the internet and into the AI software, like Christian advertising, and people chatting up their spiritual beliefs, leaders, and groups, led Bard to spew Garbage Out—i.e. its positive, loving spin on the New Testament—even though the book itself, well… isn’t.

Since 99.999%…etc. of all that data Google’s collecting confirms both Bibles are good, righteous, and loving, Bard LEARNS that these books are, in FACT, what most everyone says they are. Google’s AI WEIGHTS the importance of data by consensus, NOT TRUTH, or even FACTS. Truth by majority consensus, like Germans who became Nazis, or religious believers convinced their religion is the only ‘truth.’ If only 30% of data collected on Christianity, for example, were positive, Bart would likely not have come up with the nonsense it did. If Scott Pelley hadn’t been religious himself, and questioned Bard’s translation of the New Testament, or the CEO of Google had pointed out that their AI is a WEIGHTING SYSTEM, where it places more ‘value’ on the masses than the FACTS, perhaps those of you who’ve read this far will get how dangerous these continuing developments in AI really are.

Another question from Scott Pelley: “Is Bard safe for society?”

Sundar Pichai: “I THINK so…”

—

**Human Idiocracy:

  • How many of you remember (or ever learned) phone numbers, now that you have them on speed dial. (Why does it matter? Try calling your kid in an emergency without your contacts list).
  • Who remembers, without the help of Google Maps, how to get to a place you’ve only been to once? Or even 20 times? For that matter, which of you even knows how to read a real map?
  • How many of you even know that the “news,” and information you’re getting through Google (or any) Search is only a fraction of what is on the internet, and worse, it is a reflection of how YOU think, delivered to you via recommendation engines that reinforce your own perspective? Essentially rec engines make you THINK you’re smart, but only make you dumber by serving up no other perspective than your own.

**Bard’s AI story, prompted from the words of Hemingway’s 6-word tale: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn,” missed the subtext of Hemmingway’s words entirely. No one buys baby shoes for a child yet to be born, which Google’s AI story suggests. Hemingway’s story, (and the original he stole it from), is about the loss of a baby already born. Infants get booties. Baby’s get shoes. So, it’s likely the baby was a year or more in age. Bard missed all of this completely, and made up a story virtually unrelated to Heminway’s 6-word tale.

† People who identify as nonreligious, but claim to be spiritual, are known as “NONES”.