Google's Schmidt the next Steve Jobs? Eh, not likely

I guess today's big technology CEOs are under a lot of pressure to be the next guru like Steve Jobs.  It's not enough to be smart, rich and powerful anymore.  I almost feel sorry for them; but not at all sorry for the fawning journalists who try to help them.

So here comes Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, who, according to CNN, "has been thinking a lot about our digital future."  Oh wow.

But I think Schmidt should stick to helping us search for cat videos and naked people instead, because he's obviously better at that.  Here's what I mean:

1) Online privacy classes will be taught alongside sex education in schools. 

Actually online privacy classes will be taught BEFORE sex education in schools, if we're talking about America or most of the developing world. We'd rather talk to our kids about anything but sex. We'd rather teach girls to shave and boys to braid hair. 

2) The rise of the mobile Web means the entire world will be online by 2020.

This is such a techie-naive, developed-world prediction. This may be hard for Schmidt to fathom, but there are billions of people in the world today who have no use for the Internet, no matter how cheap it gets.  

Only 31 percent of the developing world is online today; and only 16 percent in Africa.  About a billion homes have no Internet access.  And they're perfectly satisfied with their lives; or else, they can't afford, or relate to, anything that's on the Internet. They're barely getting used to sending text messages with their calloused, malnourished thumbs.  And smartphones, tablets?  Forget it!  Hundreds of millions of people alive today will die of natural causes without ever having googled anything and they won't regret it. That's my prediction, Eric Schmidt.

3) News organizations will find themselves out of the breaking-news business, as it becomes impossible to keep up with the real-time nature of information sources like Twitter.

Exactly. Because I trust Kim Kardashian over Wolf Blitzer to give me the latest breaking news. 

Seriously, first they predicted that the Internet would kill print news; now Schmidt is predicting that the Internet will kill Internet news.  Huh-what?

And what about every Republican over the age of 50 who gets most of his information from anonymous chain e-mails originating from 2003?  How is Twitter going to replicate that "real-time" experience for them?  

Here's my prediction: Internet news and journalism in general are going to move more towards the PolitiFact / Snopes model, because there are way too many lies out there nowadays and the fact-checkers can't possibly keep up.  

4) "Since information wants to be free, don't write anything down you don't want read back to you in court or printed on the front page of a newspaper, as the saying goes. In the future, this adage will broaden to include not just what you say and write, but the websites you visit, who you include in your online network, what you 'like,' and what others who are connected to you say and share."

This is a really shitty, self-serving prediction for Schmidt to make. Know why? Because we can regulate this with a so-called right-to-forget law that is coming soon in Europe.  And who stands the most to lose from such laws?  Google, Facebook, etc., because they make money selling our private data and Internet habits to businesses.  The Stanford Law Review estimated that they would stand to lose up to 2 percent of their global income just for refusing to delete our photos that we don't like.

5) As the Web expands, revolutions will begin springing up in nations with oppressive governments "more casually and more often than at any other time in history."

Ah yes, a casual revolution. That's one where an unacquainted group of dark-skinned, downtrodden lads in chinos and ironic plaid cowboy shirts sipping on Frappuccinos blog on their smartphones about their "lame" dictator and how they're "totally going to overthrow him this weekend"... sometime between the gym and Game of Thrones.

That's sarcasm, by the way.  The words "casual" and "revolution" do not belong in the same sentence, unless you also include the word "failed."

6) More people will use technology for terror. But a Web presence will make those terrorists easier to find, too.

I put this one in the category of, "Things will get a lot worse, but they'll get a lot better, too."  

Don't go too far out on a limb there with your prognosticating, Schmiddy!

Google chairman: 6 predictions for our digital future

By Doug Gross

April 24, 2013 | CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/23/tech/web/eric-schmidt-google-book/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1

Snopes founder: 'Truth doesn't stand a chance'

"When you're looking at truth versus gossip, truth doesn't stand a chance," said one of Snopes founders.

Alas, it's true. People want to believe these chain e-mails that support their political point of view. Then they forward them on to others. They spread ignorant lies and half-truths and reinforce like-minded friends' slanted beliefs.

The funny thing is how old some of these "news" items are. Often they are jokes or rumors recycled from 5, even 10, years ago and presented as current events.

And 99 percent of the time these e-mail forwards have an hysterical conservative bias. Actually, I can't really think of one liberally slanted hoax or rumor that I have received, but I won't say they don't exist. I just know I get several hoaxes a week bashing Obama, Democrats, liberals, and progressives.

In your half-hearted defense, I grant you it's harder than ever to be a news consumer. Talk radio, blogs, and paid scammers spend a great deal of their time generating and spreading rumors, hoaxes, lies, an half-truths. You don't know what to believe. And probably most of the people hitting Forward are over the age of 40, and grew up in a time when they could trust basically anything they heard in the news. Maybe they thought the news had a liberal slant, but they never doubted that the story referred to real facts and events.

So, you news consumers of the Information Age, please take the time to check some of this crapolla out before you click the Forward button. If you don't like Snopes, because they are in the tank for lib'ruls (an actual rumor spread in chain e-mails, claiming all sorts of bias in Snopes, but without one solid, verifiable example), then use PolitiFact.org, TruthorFiction.com, or UrbanLegends.com. The older false rumors will often appear on several sites.

Or, even better, if you have the time and want to be absolutely sure, be your own fact-checker. If the chain e-mail doesn't contain 1) the author's name, or 2) the source of the article (web site's name, or URL, and the date), then you must be extremely skeptical and regard it as bogus until proven otherwise. You can do this by googling a few key sentences to see if anything pops up. Google the author's name if one is included. If the story is only re-posted millions of times on blogs, then chances are it is a hoax or a rumor. If you choose to believe it anyway, then... you probably want to be deceived.



Snopes' fact-checking couple try to unravel Web of lies
By Brian Stelter
April 5, 2010 | New York Times

No, Kenya did not erect a sign welcoming people to the "birthplace of Barack Obama." No, Wal-Mart did not authorize raids to find illegal immigrants at its stores. No, Social Security numbers are not assigned by race.

David and Barbara Mikkelson investigate such claims — and hundreds of other rumors and legends — on Snopes, one of the most popular fact-checking destinations on the Web.

As the unassuming California couple know better than most, one of the paradoxes of the Internet is that the world's freest access to knowledge also comes with a staggering amount of untruth — from imagined threats of the health-care overhaul to too-easy-to-be-true ways to earn money by (naturally) forwarding an e-mail to 10 friends. Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, once memorably declared that the Web was "a cesspool."

The Mikkelsons for 13 years have acted as arbiters in the Age of Misinformation by answering the central question raised by every chain letter — is this true? — complete with links to further research.

The popularity of Snopes — it attracts 7 million to 8 million unique visitors in an average month — puts the couple in an unusual position to evaluate digital society's attitudes toward accuracy. They have concluded that people are rather cavalier about facts.

"Rumors are a great source of comfort for people," Barbara Mikkelson said.

Snopes is one of a small handful of sites in the fact-checking business. Brooks Jackson, director of one of the others, the politically oriented FactCheck.org, believes news organizations should be doing more of it.

"The 'news' that is not fit to print gets through to people anyway these days, through 24-hour cable gasbags, partisan talk-radio hosts and chain e-mails, blogs and Web sites such as WorldNetDaily or Daily Kos," Jackson said in an e-mail. "What readers need now, we find, are honest referees who can help ordinary readers sort out fact from fiction."

Even the White House now cites fact-checking sites: It has circulated links and explanations by PolitiFact.com, a St. Petersburg Times project that won a Pulitzer Prize last year for national reporting.

The Mikkelsons did not set out to fact-check the Web's political smears and screeds. The site was started in 1996 as an online encyclopedia of myths and urban legends, building off the couple's hobby. They had met years earlier on a discussion board about urban legends.

David Mikkelson was a dogged researcher of folklore. When he needed to mail letters requesting information, he would use the letterhead of the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society, an official-sounding organization he dreamed up. He would investigate origins of classic tall tales, such as the legend of the killer with a prosthetic hook who stalked Lovers' Lane, for a small but devoted online audience.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, users overwhelmed the Mikkelsons with forwarded e-mail claims and editorials about the culprits and the failures of the government to halt the plot, and the couple reluctantly accepted a larger role. They still maintain a thorough list of what they call "Rumors of War."

Snopes became the family's full-time job less than a year later. Advertisements sold by a third-party network cover the $3,000-a-month bandwidth bills, with enough left over for the Mikkelsons to make a living — "despite rumors that we're paid by, depending on your choice, the Democratic National Committee or the Republican National Committee," David Mikkelson said.

Much of the site's resources is spent on investigating political claims, even though the Mikkelsons say politics is the last subject they want to write about. (Barbara cannot even vote in U.S. elections; she is a Canadian citizen.) Claims relating to Obama are the top searches on the site, but "even when there were Republicans in the White House, the mail was still overwhelmingly anti-liberal," David Mikkelson said.

In late August, David Mikkelson studied an e-mail chain letter titled "The Last of the Kennedy Dynasty," purporting to explain why the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was unfit for acclaim. Some of its 10 bullet points were true (yes, Kennedy was cited for reckless driving while in college), but others were misleading assumptions (no, his accomplishments were not "scant").

Barbara Mikkelson rolled her eyes at her husband's plans to fact-check the chain letter. "That's ephemera," she said.

He agreed, but the Kennedy report wound up being the Web site's most-searched subject the next weekend.

The Mikkelsons employ two others full time to manage the enormous volume of e-mail to the site. Readers increasingly are sending videos and photos as well as e-mail, requiring even more investigation. On average, one new article is published each day.

The enduring articles are the ones about everyday fears: computer viruses, scams, missing children. Some e-mail chain letters, such as the one offering users $245 for forwarding the message, never fade away.

"People keep falling for the same kind of things over and over again," David Mikkelson said. Some readers always seem to believe, for instance, that the government is trying to poison them: Barbara Mikkelson said rumors about AIDS have been recycled into rumors about swine-flu vaccines.

For the Mikkelsons, the site affirms what cultural critics have bemoaned for years: the rejection of nuance and facts that run contrary to one's point of view.

"Especially in politics," David Mikkelson said, "most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false. In the larger sense, it's people wanting confirmation of their world view."

The couple say they regularly receive grateful messages from teachers, and an award from a media literacy association sits atop the TV set in David Mikkelson's home office.
It is not just the naiveté of Web users that worries the "Snopesters," a name for the Web site's community of fans and volunteers. It is also what David Mikkelson calls "a trend toward the opposite approach, hyper-skepticism."

"People get an e-mail or a photograph and they spot one little thing that doesn't look right, and they declare the whole thing fake," he said. "That's just as bad as being gullible in a lot of senses."

But even though Snopes pays the bills for the couple now, through advertising revenue, they doubt they are having much of an impact.

"It's not like, 'Well, we have to get out there and defend the truth,' " Barbara Mikkelson said. "When you're looking at truth versus gossip, truth doesn't stand a chance."

Ames: Polite libs like Krugman don't get it: Repubs like being Mean and Deceived

Judging by the great number of outright hoaxes aimed at Obama, Democrats, and liberals that are forwarded every week to my Inbox with a scarily long list of prior recipients, hoaxes which are easily debunked by Snopes, PolitiFact, UrbanLegends, TruthorFiction and other sites, I can only conclude that U.S. conservatives are unusually mean and want to be lied to.

Ames is right: debate and logical argument don't really matter. Conservatives want to live in their mean-spirited bizarro rabbitt hole; they just scream, kick you in the face, and burrow in deeper when you grab their ankles and try to pull them out of there.

We're So Doomed: Paul Krugman Briefly Demonstrates Why Liberals Are Stuck In General Custer's Army

By Mark Ames

February 27, 2010 | The Exiled

URL: http://exiledonline.com/were-so-doomed-paul-krugman-briefly-demonstrates-why-liberals-are-stuck-in-general-custers-army/