November, 2018 archive
Your Private Vehicle Isn’t–Private, That Is 0
My local rag reports that Ford is considering mining customer data for fun and profit. Here’s a bit from the article:
Data mining is a highly lucrative revenue stream.
General Motors recently tracked the habits of 90,000 drivers in Chicago and Los Angeles who agreed to have their car-radio listening habits tracked to assess the potential relationship between what they listen to and what they buy.
Ford CEO Jim Hackett provided a glimpse into what sounds like a potentially massive data mining plan. His remarks were made during a Freakonomics Radio interview for a podcast released Nov. 8.
“We have 100 million people in vehicles today that are sitting in Ford blue-oval vehicles. That’s the case for monetizing opportunity versus an upstart who maybe has, I don’t know, what, they got 120, or 200,000 vehicles in place now. And so just compare the two stacks: Which one would you like to have the data from?” Hackett said, according to the podcast transcript.
“Values Voters” 0
Field looks at the Senatorial run-off in Mississippi (see the yesterday’s post of Mike Malloy’s comments about it) and cuts to the chase. An excerpt:
It’s an interesting question, but it misses the point of why they (poor white people) don’t vote for democratic candidates in the first place. There are a couple of reasons for that.
First, often times the democratic candidate is a person of color. —That happens to be the case in Mississippi now— Most of these people, regardless of what you hear from the main stream media, are just flat out racist, and there is no way in hell they are going to vote for a black man to be dog catcher let alone their senator. The Negro cannot represent them because he or she is not worthy. It must be someone who looks like they do, and who “shares their values”. It was racism not “economic anxiety” that drove all those poor white people to vote for trump.
Follow the link for the second reason.
Afterthought:
I may have told this story before, but it seems relevant.
When I was in college, my father told me a story told to him by the then-current Superintendent of Schools in my county (when I was in high school, he was a Phys. Ed. Teacher and coach, but he was the rare high school coach who could do more than coach). He was also a good and decent man who gave me my first baseball glove.
He and several other administrators had decided to drive to some school administrators’ convention of some sort in New Orleans. Note that this was at the height of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. He told my father that, when they got to Mississippi, the atmosphere was so poisonous that they felt obliged to fake their Southern accents to sound more Southern than their Virginia Southern accents.
And this was a carload of white Southerners.
If Mississippi was able to make actual white Southerners fearful, well, words fail me.
Pictures of the Fall 0
Some random pictures from our visit to the Norfolk Botanical Gardens yesterday:
Three trees in the Japanese Garden.
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
Mike comments on Cindy Hyde-Smith’s Confederate cosplay (warning: language).
“Appease in Our Time” 0
Tony Norman sees echoes of the past in Donald Trump’s decision to kowtow to Saudi Arabia and its murderous regime.
Russian Impulses 0
Shaun Mullen is ever an optimist.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Get an unload of all the politeness.
I am beginning to suspect that one of the qualifications for having a firearm is to fail an IQ test.
Guns and stupid, guns and stupid,
They go together like love and Cupid.
Let me tell you, Brother,
You can’t have one without the other.
