Personal Thoughts Of Rando

I woke up this morning to this Reddit thread here over bizarre videos being put up on YouTube targeting kids which links to a Verge article here which in turn links to a New York Times article here and a Medium.com blog post here over the matter. I decided to write 60 Minutes to see if they would do a story on this. Below is what I wrote: ---- To 60 Minutes, I was wondering if you would produce a story on inappropriate videos being targeted toward children on social media sites, specifically on YouTube. There was a recent The Verge article here that gives links to other articles here (Medium.com) and here (New York Times) that give an overview over this phenomenon. Given this, it stills seems that while YouTube claims that they will be working on improving this problem, it seems that simply just flagging the videos still does no good or re-writing algorithms. There was a recent Reddit thread here that discusses the problem, and a few of the commenters have pointe...

Overview The GOP has been trying to push a major legislative agenda for the President sometime this year, and after the failure of the health care reform the next major issue is tax reform. This post is a roll up of information on the tax reform. There are two versions, the House version and the Senate version. The Senate version isn't officially a bill yet. Rollup and Points I wanted to do a quick roll up of the current GOP tax bills, of which there are two versions, the House and the Senate version. The latter link gives a nice comparison of the differences between the two bills. The NPR article on the Senate only version is here . We should note that the Senate's version isn't officially a bill yet. The CBO has done a score  on the House version which would add $1.7 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. The Hill has an article on that here . The House version also makes the corporate tax cuts permanent and reduces the corporate tax rate to 20% f...

Yesterday I was listening to the Adam Ruins Everything podcast, specifically this episode here , and it somewhat reminded me of this post I'd seen on reddit from the University of Indiana  here . The podcast referred to the " backfire effect ", which I believe really does happen when people's views are challenged. In addition to discussing the phenomenon, both Adam and his guest talk about ways online to try and combat the effect and to provide context to ideas shared online - basically to lessen the effect of trolls and such. For example, one method pointed out by the guest on the podcast was that a Norwegian news site will ask people to take a short quiz over the article that they just read before allowing them to comment. In a way, it's sort of a short test of reading comprehension. It limits people from just randomly seeing a headline and then commenting/reacting to the headline rather than reading the article. I thought it was kind of brilliant, but may not...

(Note: I did this as a Facebook post; I'm just re-posting here for historical reasons.) I’m going to go ahead and note right off that you and I are probably not going to see eye to eye on this issue. That’s okay; I’ve no intention of trying to “win” a discussion or anything; only to share concerns and thoughts. Civilized discussion I feel has really taken a turn for the worst lately, and I’d like to try and make effort and be civilized especially given the strong emotions both sides have on the issue. To my actual concerns: I empathize with the feeling that people have about the National Anthem; the actions of sacrifice. I do. I don’t think anyone who is protesting and kneeling has any intent of trivializing the men and women who’ve served. I’ve shared an article on my wall that gives the side of Kaep and Reid on why they started what they started. Here’s the thing about protesting: the intent is to cause people to take notice. People protest in all sorts of ways and in all s...

I did a post here  on my other blog over my thoughts on what America's role in space should be for the next decade.