One Interpretation of Facebook's Loss of $150B in Two Hours

Facebook lost 150 Billion $US in two hours on Wall Street which, we are told, is the single largest loss of a company on Wall Street in history.  Whether or not that is true, it is natural to speculate what was going on in the minds of investors.  Obviously, they were responding in part to the loss of users, and other issues involving privacy which would result in lower revenues from advertising. But what does it really mean?

Well, one thought is that Wall Street had responded well in the past to Facebook's strategy of exploiting its users in the most crude and vulgar ways, working hand in hand with foreign powers to destroy democracy by emphasizing contradictions, spreading right wing propaganda, and assisting polarization.  When, unfortunately, Facebook was identified as a primary agent of Russian destabilization and had to start toning back its worst and most shallow exploitation in order to keep users and avoid regulation, Wall Street naturally and regretfully had to downgrade FB's value. It just wont be like the good old days, at least not for a while. Still Facebook will try to find more subtle ways to exploit the people who have, in the past, trusted them, so all is not lost and Facebook still retains tremendous value.

[Shel Kaplan reminds me that this apparent loss in value is actually just appearance, that FB's long term value has been monotonically increasing for years. So this apparent setback may be nothing more than a tempest in a teapot and a headline created by shallow analysis. So what else is new?]

A Friend of a Friend

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So I look at the wreckage of this country, our humiliation, the perversion of justice, the endless religious stupidity, and then a friend of a friend starts comparing Bill Clinton to Donald “Shithole” Trump and I let loose. I tell that friend of a friend that he is a MSFB (moron shit for brains) but I do not do that to insult him, no. I do that because I am in touch with my feelings and I want him to know honestly what I think so that he can become a better person.

Its for his own good.

Thank you.

What Goes Around Comes Around or It Should

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Interested in annoying your friends on Facebook? Its not too hard and I have one technique that works pretty darn well. You just take some controversial political issue and insist that whatever is being advocated for one group also be applied to them. This not only annoys the advocates of whatever it is we are talking about, it seems to annoy everyone. Its easy.

For example, although I have very few friends who admit to being a supporter of Trump, my friends have friends who are. It might seem impossible that this could be true even 120 or so days into the Trump disaster, but it is a fact of our times that most of Trump's base is standing by their man.

So a friend of a friend, a woman whom I dont know, made it very clear that not only does she support Trump as president, she thinks that he has been *wonderful*.

So I simply suggested that I hoped that she would experience what she is advocating for other people. That she be the victim of sexual abuse, that she lose her health care, that her children (if she has any) are forced to drink polluted water, that someone she knows is shot by a mentally ill maniac with an assault weapon, and most of all, that she be impoverished and get to know what it is to be poor in America.

I was accused of being “as bad as a right winger” and so I gleefully blocked those people.

When you try to harm other people, how could you possibly be upset if you are subjected to the same treatment?

I, of course, will work as hard as I can to see that no one is treated that way, but in the case of those who are working to destroy America it would only be just, it seems to me, for them to experience their own policies.

The Need for Reciprocity When Insulting Someone With Social Media

One of the great aspects of Social Media is the ability to offend people at a deeper level and with more oomph than mere email or online forums. In the past, using receding media technology, such as writing on paper or the printed word, one needed a little time for the insult to become clear. But now with the bold new technology of Social Media and the power of the Internet we can mortally offend someone with the click of a mouse.

And we do, we do insult people, we insult people all the time with Facebook.

But since this is a totally new approach, some mechanisms may need refinement until it settles down into a truly democratic method of punching someone in the ego.

Such refinement is probably necessary in the case of the Facebook method of blocking and unblocking. As it stands now, one can block someone without their knowledge, but also unblock them without their knowledge as well. Blocking keeps either party from seeing anything about each other, even to know that the other person exists on Facebook. So far so good.

But there are issues.  The first problem is that the blocked individual has to find out on their own nickle that they have been blocked, which is always a demeaning thing to have to do. One wonders what happened to the other person, one searches, one does not find, then one discovers that one has been blocked. I have noticed that by the time this happens that the feeling is usually, but not always, mutual. In my case, the two times I have been blocked it is because I tried to build bridges to someone who I have damaged relationships with. In both cases their blocking me is a rebuff.

But you see, having been rebuffed in my effort to open communications, that is pretty much the end of the matter from my point of view. But Facebook does not give me the ability to implement that. The other party can unblock me and see what I am doing whenever they want, and I don't want that. I want any unblocking to be mutual, they have to ask, and I have to agree.

Because, frankly, I really don't want to see or hear from them again.

Do Not Leave Those Naked Pictures of Yourself on Github

One of the not-so-entertaining results of our civilization's obsession with computing and cash is the "fuck our customers we don't care" approach taken by the consumer electronics and computing industry towards such things as systems administration, backup administration and security administration and its impact on our lives.  Now we are all forced to take on these dreary sub-specialties or face one of many horrible fates that this technology mania has brought down upon us: the wiped disk, the non-working backup, the zombie computer used by Chinese or Russian spies, or worse, the "hactivist" holier-than-thou swine ready to exploit your assets to mine Bitcoin or some other juvenile and anti-social goal for their self-appointed crusade.   We are all now responsible for these and many other tasks and woe unto those of you who think you are above such things for then your sins as documented by your iPhone will appear on social media and there you will be, in full color, engaging in some drunken bisexual orgy as an undergraduate for everyone to see just as you are running for your first political office or other responsible position.

Be warned, if you wish to avoid this or some other horrible fate, there are a few hundred things you need to pay attention to at any one time, although that list is a moving target. You have to know enough to keep yourself out of trouble.  No one else will do this for you. 

Many of us use Github as a repository for source code for our projects and collaborations. In the past I have used it off and on, but these days I use it more or less 7/24. As part of your repository, one could keep security strings that give access to various other resources that exist out there, such as the Amazon cloud. A friend did just that and forgot about it. Although he certainly knew better a few years later he made that repository public (it was either that or delete it, he wasn't working on that particular idea anymore).

Well his repository contained security information for his cloud account on Amazon which he also wasn't actively using and some hackers grabbed it and ran up a bill in the many 10s of thousands of dollars per day. Amazon.com caught it nearly immediately and my friend will not be liable for most of this bill, hopefully not any of it.

My friend is beating himself up because of course he knew better. He does know better, by the way. Don't let this happen to you. He suggests reading the following discussion on these issues to learn how to keep passwords out of your Git repository.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/163506/how-does-one-handle-sensitive-data-when-using-github-and-heroku

Never forget it's a jungle out there and that, generally speaking, people are scum.