The Notion That Information Is Free Is A Dangerous One
There’s always been fake news but what’s different this time is that you can tailor the story to particular individuals, because you know the prejudice of this particular individual. The more people believe in free will, that their feelings represent some mystical spiritual capacity, the easier it is to manipulate them, because they won’t think that their feelings are being produced and manipulated by some external system. … Read More
Australian government takes Govpass hosting internal
Australian government takes Govpass hosting internal
'Tears running down my face': farmers turn to crowdfunding for support
Cybersecurity Role, Spend on the Rise for Corporate Legal
The fightback against the bitcoin energy guzzlers has begun Wired. Paul R “Upstate NY (cheap hydropower), Iceland (geothermal) and China are all pushing back against bitcoin miners, not a moment too soon.”
Airplane Maintenance is Offshored
Where are most airplanes fixed? In foreign countries where the price of skilled labor is lower than in the United States.
US Airways and Southwest fly planes to a maintenance facility in El Salvador. Delta sends planes to Mexico. United uses a shop in China. American still does much of its most intensive maintenance in-house in the U.S., but that is likely to change in the aftermath of the company’s merger with US Airways.
Vanity Fair had a piece on this “Disturbing Truth” a few years ago. The VF piece presents a few anecdotes of safety violations at foreign maintenance facilities to stoke up fear. Naturally, no comparison to safety violations at US maintenance facilities is given. More serious data doesn’t bear out the worries of Vanity Fair. Worldwide airline safety is at an all time-high. Consider this amusing bit:
Even engine repairs and overhaul—the highly skilled aircraft-maintenance work that has remained largely in the U.S. and Europe—may follow heavy maintenance to the developing world. Emirates, the airline owned by the Gulf states, is constructing a $120 million state-of-the-art engine-repair-and-overhaul facility in Dubai.
Amusing because the world’s safest airline according to the German JACDEC (Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre) is Emirates based in Dubai. Etihad the UAE’s second largest airline follows up closely. Chinese and South American airlines such as Sichuan Air score above most US airlines and Avianca, the El Salvador-Columbia airline, also scores highly. Of course, crashes are so rare that none of these rankings should be taken very seriously except in the sense that all of these airlines are very safe. Thus, I don’t worry much about where maintenance occurs. Indeed, if maintenance can be done for less we ought to buy more, so less expensive can mean safer.
Rather than fearing the offshoring of airplane maintenance we ought to ask how we can expand the concept. Medical tourism, for example, is growing. If foreign airplane maintenance is good enough for Delta then foreign human maintenance is good enough for me. Why don’t more US health insurance companies pay for medical procedures performed abroad? If a major medical insurer started to test and rate foreign providers and count some of them as in-service this could great alleviate fear increasing demand, lower costs, and put price pressure on US providers. Of course, we could also let in more foreign trained physiciansand airplane mechanics.
In 1998, author and media critic Neil Postman gave a talk he called Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. Here are the five ideas Postman shared that day, which are all still highly relevant today:
1. All technological change is a trade-off. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.
2. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.
3. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
4. Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable and largely irreversible.
5. Media tend to become mythic. Cars, planes, TV, movies, newspapers — they have achieved mythic status because they are perceived as gifts of nature, not as artifacts produced in a specific political and historical context.
Why 2 decided to delete: 'It's a repository of your stupidest days.'
He had a choice. How many tweets did he want to delete?
Journalist Joel Mathis went the whole way last week. “I
atom-bombed it,” said the Kansas-based freelancer, who contributes to The Week
and Public Radio International.
Mathis knocked out all his old tweets just before another
journalist, new New York Times editorial board member Sarah Jeong, saw her old
tweets examined by the world.
For journalists such as Mathis and The Washington Post’s Abby
Ohlheiser, whose article on deleting her tweets inspired
Mathis, the removal of their Twitter histories just makes sense.
Before he made the decision to delete, Mathis had tweeted on the
fate of two baseball players roasted on social media for tweets they made years
earlier. Mathis said any player represented by an agent should have had their
social media accounts combed and any immature posts tweeted.
Then he thought of his own situation. Nothing racist in his
Twitter history, but he was struck by one incongruity: Some of his best digital
journalism has been lost or hidden with site redesigns, “but that stupid joke I
made about Donald Trump five years ago still survives.”
Ohlheiser says deleting old tweets might be a job-saver as the
pro-Trump internet targets journalists and celebrities such as James Gunn,
Trevor Noah and Patton Oswalt. (She and Mathis used the free TweetDelete service; for other possibilities,
she suggests this guide from The Verge. She and Mathis also used
TweetDelete to pick a time when their new tweets disappear from view, say after
two months.)
Mathis says the hunt for ill-thought tweets could capture
journalists whose earlier workplaces may have encouraged a sassier
style than that of the more mainstream publications to which these
journalists gravitated.
Ohlheiser has cautioned that the move to delete may not erase
some tweets captured by spotty archives or saved screenshots. "Once you’ve
posted something online, you can’t un-post it," Ohlheiser says via email.
"But you can remove it from Twitter’s easily searchable and linkable
database."
Another option is deleting your Twitter account entirely or
deactivating it, which Mathis has done several times.
Mathis acknowledges his split feelings for the service, as did
Maggie Haberman, who went on a highly publicized Twitter diet. It’s a
necessary news-gathering tool, Mathis concedes. “On the other hand, it’s
too addictive and can prompt knee-jerk reactions rather than thoughtful
contemplation,” he says.
One thing Twitter never should have been is a gotcha machine for
partisan mobs, Mathis says.
“Twitter was designed to be ephemeral,” Mathis says, “and
instead it has become a repository of our stupidest days.”
Readers, have you systematically deleted your old social media
accounts or dropped Facebook or Twitter? If so, what prompted you to do it? Let
me know at dbeard@poynter.org.
Quick hits
NOT ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE: Former President
George H. W. Bush writes to retiring AP journalist Mike Graczyk that he always
has respected the reporter's professionalism and "the innate sense of
fairness" Graczyk showed. Here's Bush's letter: (h/t Chris Connell)
CONGRATULATIONS, INDIRA: Poynter’s Indira Lakshmanan is headed to the Washington-based Pulitzer Center
as executive editor of the nonprofit, which supports international reporting.
Lakshmanan, a veteran of The Boston Globe and Bloomberg, was the the Newmark
chair in journalism ethics at the Poynter Institute.
DON'T PLAY TRUMP'S GAME: Washington Post columnist Dana
Milbank says the media, by fighting back on Trump's "enemy of the
people" condemnations, is amplifying the president. Stick to
reporting on the policy and the misstatements, Milbank advises. "We’re
playing into Trump’s larger purpose, and his likely 2020 theme: Any news that
is unfavorable to him is fake," Milbank says.
HALF A LOAF: That's what American newspaper publishers got from the U.S.
government on their pleas to end a tariff on Canadian newsprint that is being
blamed for layoffs and losses. The Commerce Department reduced tariffs as high as 22 percent to a peak of 16
percent, but also made the tariffs permanent, Mark Weiner reports.
Publishers and Democratic leaders said they would lobby to reduce the tariffs
further.
DOWN AT UPWORTHY: The "do-good" site laid off 31 people and its
editor, Liz Heron, quit. So did CEO Charlie Wilkie. Its cofounder, Eli
Pariser, left the board. Nieman Labs asks why.
NO BRAINER: A high-level attendee at the NABJ's annual
convention in Detroit was new news publisher Chance The Rapper. He
attended sessions on solutions journalism and heard Tyler Perry talk about
entrepreneurship on Friday, reports the Knight Foundation's Karen Rundlet.
The rapper purchased the shuttered news site the Chicagoist last
month and promised a home for new voices in media.
WEEKEND PASSING: H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest died this weekend. He amassed a fortune
via cable TV, allowing he and his wife to become significant
philanthropists who supported an array of artistic, media and academic
endeavors. He was the recipient of Poynter's 2016 Distinguished Service to Journalism Award.
WHOA, PARDNER: Texas Monthly is running a test to stop people using ad-blockers. By Joseph
Lichterman.
What we’re reading
DON’T DEFINE YOURSELF BY YOUR JOB: That’s among
advice to people who’ve been laid off from people who’ve been there. One other
thought from Monica Torres’ story: Hit the gym each morning instead of sleeping
late and feeling sorry for yourself.
