All posts by jasonian

Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race   ◆

ProPublica:

The ubiquitous social network not only allows advertisers to target users by their interests or background, it also gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls “Ethnic Affinities.”

And

Facebook assigns members an “Ethnic Affinity” based on pages and posts they have liked or engaged with on Facebook.

I should be surprised by this, but I’m not. This is what happens when your leadership team is missing the diversity of voices to say “wait a minute….”

What’s worse is that while you can exclude Black, Asian and Latinx users, you can’t exclude White users.

Worse still is that users are mapped to an affinity based on their likes. How are they mapping any given “like” to “Black” or “Asian”? Opportunities to stereotype abound.

Cubs win! Cubs win! Cubs win!   ◆

Chicago Tribune:

After 108 years of waiting, the Cubs won the 2016 World Series with a wild 8-7, 10-inning Game 7 victory over the Indians on Wednesday night at Progressive Field. The triumph completed their climb back from a 3-1 Series deficit to claim their first championship since 1908.

Five hours, ten innings, a blown Cubs lead, and a rain delay.

Leave it to the Cubbies to add even more heart-wrenching excitement to a Game 7.

The billy goat is gone, and the black cat too. And what was the name of the foul-ball dude? No matter. It was never really his fault, and now he’s just a footnote in Cubs history.

The curse is broken. I can now say “I watched the Cubs will the World Series”.

Congratulations Cub fans.

“He deducted somebody else’s losses”   ◆

New York Times, in a well-researched piece on Trump’s “mathematical sleight of hand” that helped him report a $916 billion loss in the early ’90s:

But Mr. Trump’s audacious tax-avoidance maneuver gave him a way to simply avoid reporting any of that canceled debt to the I.R.S. “He’s getting something for absolutely nothing,” John L. Buckley, who served as the chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation in 1993 and 1994, said in an interview.

[…]

“He deducted somebody else’s losses,” Mr. Buckley said. By that, Mr. Buckley meant that only the bondholders who forgave Mr. Trump’s unpaid casino debts should have been allowed to use those losses to offset future income and reduce their taxes. That Mr. Trump used the same losses to reduce his taxes ultimately increases the tax burden on everyone else, Mr. Buckley explained. “He is double dipping big time.”

Donald Trump, Aaron Burr and ‘the lesser of two evils’   ◆

Robert Smith, in an opinion piece for NY Daily News, on Aaron Burr:

Burr decided to get a small army together and start a war with Spain, take over what is now Mexico, peel off several western states from the United States, and combine the results into a brand new country with himself as emperor.

And on Donald Trump:

It’s not even hard to imagine him trying to make himself emperor of another country, and screwing the United States in the process. He’d probably worry only about whether the new country would be big enough for him, and how many Trump hotels he could build there.

I had a similar thought a week or two ago: I can totally see Trump trying to pull together his supporters to form a new… something…. No way to pull off a new country I think, but a new political party? Absolutely.

Scott Walker Fails On Twitter, Bigly

Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin, in an attempt to tie Hillary Clinton to President Obama, tweeted this earlier today:

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go quite as he expected:

A lot of his replies are along these lines. It’s hilarious. Unintentionally.

Walker tried to “fix” it, doubling down on the image with a new tweet:

Again, not quite the response he may have been expecting:

Not sensing when it’s time to stop, Walker then tripled down (wait, is that a thing? Let’s say it’s a thing) and tweeted with yet another attempt:

With predictable results:

You’d think by now Walker would just step away from Twitter. Instead he quadrupled down (That’s gotta be a thing! Just go with me here!) and came up with this one:

By now, you know how this story goes:

Sometimes you just need to know when to quit while you’re behind.

Dilbert creator suggests FBI Director willfully broke law

You may have seen that FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to members of Congress that the FBI found email that may be related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server during her stint as Secretary of State.

You probably also saw that sending that letter broke with precedent, and some say broke the law.

Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator who has been trumpeting Donald Trump’s “master persuader” techniques the last 18 months, now suggests that Director Comey did so on purpose:

What I’m taking from this comment is that Adams thinks the Director is attempting to sway the election, which means Adams thinks Director Comey willfully broke the law.

That’s mind boggling.

Adams, of course, will call this cognitive dissonance on my part, and that my interpretation and shock are the “tells” for it. This is all just ways of Adams dismissing arguments he doesn’t like.

(Adams himself suffers from massive cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, which he (by definition) doesn’t realize.)

First of all, Comey didn’t announce “a criminal investigation”, he indicated that a case that was already under investigation might (stress might) have new information to consider. And there was nothing in the letter about it being “criminal”, especially since Comey has already determined that “no reasonable prosecutor would” prosecute this case and “that no charges are appropriate in this case.”

But putting the specific wording aside, to suggest that an FBI Director would actively choose to sway an election and in doing so possibly break the law is irresponsible on Adams’ part.

I don’t normally choose to keep track of Adams’ predictions, because most of them are silly and inconsequential, like “Trump will win in a landslide”. Either he’s right, and he looks like a genius, or he’s wrong and he looks foolish (and spins it as “something changed like I said it might”). Either way, his “prediction” doesn’t have any impact in any meaningful way, nor does it say anything about anyone.

I’m recording this here because I’m certain he will delete or otherwise try to say he didn’t say this, and I want a record of it for the future. I want to be able to say to Adams “you’re an idiot with a grudge and a terrible predictive ability”.

Update: Scott Adams writes a blog post expanding his statement, but makes a couple of factual errors that he conveniently ignores. For example,

Comey learns that the Weiner laptop had emails that were so damning it would be a crime against the public to allow them to vote without first seeing a big red flag.

and later

He alerted the public to the fact that the FBI found DISQUALIFYING information on the Weiner laptop.

The problem is, Director Comey did not yet know what was in the emails at the time he wrote to Congress. He said so in his letter to Congress:

The FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this new material may be significant

Only after two days did the FBI finally get a warrant to search the email.

So how could Comey alert

the public to the fact that the FBI found DISQUALIFYING information

if he didn’t know what what was in the email?

Adams is very good at crafting stories that make sense in his world, but which don’t stand up to basic analysis.

The power of sound and selling   ◆

I bet you know almost all these audio logos. Sound may give even stronger branding than visual logos.

I still remember the old HBO “featured presentation” opening. Definitely says “movie night” to me.

Trump voters affected by race   ◆

Washington Post:

We show that white Trump supporters were more opposed to a mortgage assistance policy when they were experimentally induced to think of black rather than white Americans. Combined with the existing observational findings, this is strong evidence that racial animosity is indeed a key factor motivating Trump voters.

I’m not surprised that Trump voters are negatively affected by race.

What does surprise me is how many of them were straight up opposed to a mortgage relief program that would likely have helped them.