In a previous job, I did the math for shipping goods from Melbourne to Perth here in Australia via freight train. It worked out to be 1 litre of fuel per ton moved 500km. In imperial, that is 1 ton at 930MPG! That efficiency is mind blowing but it does rely on a lot of goods to be moved to gain that scale efficiency.
It was actually common in Franklin's time for poor people with limited diets (mainly a single grain crop) to suffer from nutritional deficiencies despite getting adequate calories. Think of conditions like pellagra, goiter, anemia, etc. Of course they didn't fully understand the root causes.
The dietary problem in the US is overconsumption of macronutrients, particularly carbohydrates, not underconsumption of micronutrients, and certainly not underconsumption (of all nutrients) as could be seen in Franklin's time.
Franklin would be amazed at how little of household budgets could go to food now.
There are a few acquaintance over the years that have been involved in various sectors of social media and various 3 letter government agencies. The one thing they have always said is, just assume they doing to most morally questionable things to get data - they just won't public admit until it is absolutely vital to do so.
Slightly off topic but I did like one of them being so frank about Linux and open source. They worked for a while with the NSA, all they said was "Linux has 100 million lines of code. You have to fooling your self to think we didn't slip in hundreds of backdoors onto that thing". The same can be said of almost any other system though.
I have long suspected that the gaslighting thing of "it is just subconscious coincidence" is just a very neat cover for these things. There might be a slight influence but it is nowhere near as powerful an effect as they would like you to think. With advertising swaying people, they can move a few percent of people a few percent in one direction but it doesn't really target individuals effectively in guaranteeing results. Only as an aggregate.
Yep, did the same thing with "Smoked Salmon". I went a step further and decided on this without speaking it about 2 months in advance so that I can get a clear baseline on ads I was getting.
On talking lovingly about smoked salmon, it took 2 days for it to turn up.
I have also seen it happen with folks talking about Jeep for instance.
This is one of those things that I agree with the ideas behind it. Free Libre software and all of that BUT in trying to deal with this via a web addon considering the scale of, the internet, It feels like there is no way this could ever achieve its goals. I mean how much JS out there doesn't even have a license explicitly defined on run time?
And when you run it that is exactly what happens. It assumes the worst and the vast majority of things do not work. All it really does is slow your browser down to an absolute crawl as it tries to do its thing. I just ended up with Noscript and making a few exceptions where needed. It is a much better middle ground than this.
I would consider myself a Stallmanite, I guess. I use a fully 100% Libre software stack/OS/Firmware where possible - but Libre JS was just a little too unusable too me. When you are running a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo - it runs SLOW!
I wonder if they would have gone down the path of many bands in the late 60s and have those long spoken word poetry stretches. That said, thanks to things like that I do love how often you see Michael Moorecocks name popping up.
I ask myself the same thing almost everyday and then that one really cool thing comes along. Yep pretty much mental gambling in the same way other social media is. I got rid of all of that, HN is my last hold out for now.
When you see numbers it does make you wonder if the premise the Subprime Attention Crisis (Tim Hwang) is much more realistic than we think.
But when you think about the amount of industries advertising covers, it might still be tame. Hard to tell from the outside and even the inside on this until it is in the rear view mirror.
