Tag: instagram

Early Headlines: Wind Farms Ravishing Nature, AI Debt Bubble, Self Driving Cars Crashing, China And Mexico Laundering US Dollars, Trump Welcomes Back Italians….and more

Climate

Green Energy’s High Price: Wind Farms Are Ravaging Nature, Biodiversity – Bird and Whale murderers

Artificial Intelligence

AI Is Now A Debt Bubble Too, Quietly Surpassing All Banks To Become The Largest Sector In The Market

EV’s

NHTSA Probing Tesla Full Self-Driving After Reports Of Red-Light Runs, Collisions – I’ll take the wheel for now. It used to be we only had to look out for drunk drivers, now this.

Social Media

15 Years Of Instagram – still causing teens to commit suicide after all these years

Investing

US Stock Ownership Is High But Unequally Distributed

Gold Is Saying The Fiat Currency Experiment Is Ending Globally; Rubino – Gold going up against Fiat Monies

Tech

America’s Growing Pushback Against Data Centers

International Crime

The Student Mule Economy: A Billion-Dollar Problem Hiding In Plain Sight – How China and Mexico are laundering drug money from the US

Elections

Former GOP Election Official Acquires Dominion Voting Systems, Affirms Commitment to Domestic Staffing and Paper Ballots

Italy

“We’re Back, Italians!”: Trump Signs Columbus Day Proclamation

Entertainment

Disney Jacks Up Its Prices on Tickets and Extras — Fed Up Americans REACT – I grew up next to Disney. It ruined our town and our lives. It’s not that great and certainly not worth the money. It’s also not the happiest place on earth as they claim. It’s hot, (used to have) long lines, expensive and not worth it. Occasionally, there is a Waffle House type fight. That’s the best attraction left.

Space

New study claims the giant impact that created the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin was oblique, from the south

Instagram And Meta Roll Out Friend Map, Taking Another Bite Out Of Your Privacy

If you support privacy, you probably aren’t using Instagram anyway, but if you have friends and family that still use it, you want to let them know about this new invasive feature Instagram is introducing.

Meta is rolling out three new Instagram updates, but one of them takes the platform into territory that should set off serious alarm bells for anyone who values privacy.

The first two changes are relatively harmless: a new option to repost public Reels and a “Friends” tab showing posts your contacts have liked or commented on.

The third is far more invasive: Instagram’s new “Friend Map,” a live-tracking system that lets you share your exact location with chosen contacts and see theirs in return.

Meta frames it as a way to “stay up-to-date with friends,” but its real value is to the company, not to you.

The feature mirrors Snapchat’s “Snap Map” and is being introduced first in the United States before a global release. Unlike meeting up for coffee, this kind of “connection” means giving Meta a constant feed of where you are, when you are there, and how often you go.

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Social Media And Mental Health For Females

Most of the time when we talk about social media being bad for us we mean for our mental health. These platforms make us anxious, depressed, and insecure, and for many reasons: the constant social comparison; the superficiality and inauthenticity of it all; being ranked and rated by strangers. All this seems to make us miserable.

But I don’t just think it makes us miserable. I’ve written before about how it makes us bitchy. And self-absorbed. And over time I’m becoming convinced that our most pressing concern isn’t that social media makes us feel worse about ourselves. It’s that social media makes us worse people.

Social comparison, for example. This is one of the main problems people mention when talking about the harms of social media. Constantly comparing our beauty, our success, our lifestyle, our popularity, to infinite streams of other people makes us feel anxious and inadequate, yes. But I also think it makes us resentful. Bitter. Competitive. Quietly wishing for others to fail. We talk constantly about what like, follow and comment metrics do to our self-esteem—but don’t they also make us so shallow? We hate when people judge us by numbers on a screen, but aren’t we doing it all the time, to everyone else, even subconsciously? We talk endlessly about how editing apps and filters give girls and young women anxiety and body dysmorphia, which is important, but never about how they make us competitive, envious, vain. Sometimes it’s not my self-esteem I’m worried about. It’s who I become when I obsess over my profile and image and what everyone else is doing. Sometimes I lock my screen and don’t like who is looking back at me in its black reflection.

more

FaceBook And Instagram Photo Filters, Also Known As Lying

Social media, where being fake about who you are for a hit on the like button, by people who probably don’t really like it. Adults acting like children and children learning to lie.

Stolen from Woosterman.

I’m Shocked, Social Media Causes Depression

Social Media, the place where you can make yourself look better to feel good about yourself when someone likes the tripe you post. Aside from being little more than a digital high school, a cesspool of hate (Twitter) and one of the biggest time wasters invented, it appears to causes depression.

In recent years, a number of studies have linked heavy social media use to an increased risk of depression.

“But then you have to ask the chicken-and-egg question,” said study author Dr. Brian Primack, a professor of public health at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville.

On one hand, he said, excessive time on Twitter or Facebook might fuel depression symptoms. On the other, people with depression might withdraw from face-to-face interactions and spend more time online.

So Primack and his colleagues decided to see whether social media use made a difference in young adults’ risk of future depression.

It did, according to their report, which was published online Dec. 10 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The study included nearly 1,000 adults aged 18 to 30 who were depression-free at the outset, based on a standard questionnaire. All reported on their usual social media time and were assessed for depression again six months later.

By that time, nearly 10% fit the criteria for depression.

Overall, depression risk rose in tandem with time spent on social media.

Full report here

Why the Apple Watch Is Not The Product That Will Save Apple

Apple has prided itself on cutting edge products.  Their mantra is to create great products that we didn’t know we needed.  It worked for the iPod, IPhone and iPad.  Now there are rumors about the iWatch.  Guess what, they are going to miss the boat on this as they have overlooked what we do and do not need.

Who are the biggest consumers of new technology?

First it is the early adopters, they’ll buy anything.  That is a small percentage of the population though, maybe 15% at the most and that is being generous. 

They will likely be the bulk of the iWatch consumers.  Here are the others:

Dilberts who need to have the most gadgets.

dilbert stuff

Some workout people who for while will think this is cool.  This groups purchasing power will wear off as you can tell by the proliferation of watch style monitoring devices being purchased, but then discarded.  It is not the killer app.

Who won’t by buying them?

Almost everyone else and the biggest problem is the group that has the largest digital footprint:

The generation of 18- to 34-year-olds, known as Millennials, are an increasingly influential group that impacts many aspects of the American lifestyle, including fashion, technology and entertainment, according to the upcoming 2013 Digital Marketer Report from Experian Marketing Services. The report looks at key segments of the consumer landscape, including millennials, who provide a major opportunity for marketers to reach consumers via mobile. Millennials spend 14 percent more time engaged with their mobile devices in an average week than their generational peers.

Guess what?  They don’t wear watches for the most part, they keep time on their phone.  They want a phone with a bigger screen, better input capabilities and easy access to social media.  An iWatch doesn’t fit this model.  This will continue for the rest of their lives (likely) and with the younger generation.

They also have to pick which device they are going to buy as student debt is at an all time high.  If you need an iPhone to work the watch, no money left for beer or video games.

Digital Currency

What is the biggest attraction for Facebook and most social media?  It is the sharing of pictures.  Why did Instagram get bought for 1 Billion dollars?  Why is snapchat gaining ground and Twitter adding video to their photo capabilities?  With the grandparents getting onto Facebook, the youngsters are using other apps like Instagram to share their lives with their friends.  While you can see a picture, it is small.

So why are they doing it?  Because they need the buzz or the next great thing.  Will they do it anyway?  Of course, Samsung already has one announced and Apple copies and tries to make it better

I’m not saying watches are dead, who doesn’t want a Rolex for example, it’s just that the impact of an Apple Watch isn’t going to be the $100 jump in the stock price that earlier products were.