The utter garbage going around social media

I do not follow social media so am not directly aware of all the garbage that is spread through it. I do see examples when credulous people ask for my opinion on various stories they read. I have written about one highly credulous person from Sri Lanka who seems to spend his life on social media and gets alarmed by the rubbish that circulates there. He sent me yet another item and asked me if it was true. It was such a doozy, that I thought worth sharing. Here it is.
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The story behind a viral photograph

I am not a fan of the horror film genre and so give a wide berth to those that feature zombies or vampires or otherwise promise gruesome scenes of blood, death, and dismemberment. But I am a fan of comedies and this poses a dilemma for me about whether to watch comedies that are based on the zombie and vampire genre. So far I have seen just three such comedies: Shaun of the Dead, What We Do In The Shadows, and the much older Love at First Bite.

When I first saw this now viral photograph of people, responding to Trump’s instigations, protesting against state governments and demanding that the social distancing rules that have crippled businesses be relaxed, it immediately reminded me of the scene from Shaun of the Dead where people have barricaded themselves inside a pub and the zombies are at the window demanding to be let in. I am not the only one to see such a similarity.
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The coronavirus will create many natural experiments

There are many theories about society and human behavior that cannot be experimentally tested because of ethical reasons or impracticality. On occasion, there will occur conditions that allow for what are called natural experiments, where social conditions or governmental actions create situations that are suitable for large scale experimental studies that could not have been created by the researchers.

One such case I recall is where a state did not have the funds to expand Medicaid health insurance to everyone in the state who qualified so that they doled it out randomly. This enabled researchers later to study what benefits, if any, access to heath insurance provided, since they now had a large scale test group and a control group. I recall another study that looked into whether raising taxes encouraged people to move to a lower tax state, something rich people often threaten to do when their state is thinking of raising taxes. Researchers were able to study this when one state raised its taxes. They studied a large metropolitan area that was very close to that state’s boundary with a lower tax state to see if people moved a short distance to avoid paying the taxes.
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The role of YouTube in spreading coronavirus and other hoaxes

I received a text from a friend in Sri Lanka who forwarded a link to a YouTube video and asked for my ‘professional opinion’ on whether it was credible, even though I am not a professional when it comes to analyzing such things. Even without looking at it I suspected that it was not credible because like many people, my friend is pretty credulous about things that are passed around on Facebook, and other social media, and gets easily alarmed. His last query to me a year ago was about the miracle of fish falling from the sky which consisted of a doctored video that was obviously fake. (He is also very religious.)
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Why does this job still exist?

Stephanie Grisham has been replaced as White House press secretary by Kayleigh McEnany. You may not have heard of Grisham. That is because since the time she was appointed to that post in June of last year, she has not had a single press conference which, you know, used to be considered one of the main parts of that job. She apparently first learned of her ousting from the media.
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Trump fires inspector general who passed whistleblower complaint on to Congress

Late on Friday night, Donald Trump fired Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community, whom he chose for the post in 2017. The inspector general’s position is supposed to be to act as a kind of ombudsman and guardian to ensure that the government agency that they monitor is being true to its mission. Atkinson, a 15-year veteran of the justice department, was the person who received the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s extortion phone call to the Ukrainian president and thought it merited being passed on to Congress. All this was standard procedure.
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Zoom bombing: Another example of why we cannot have nice things

The use of Zoom videoconferencing technology has exploded now that people have to stay at home but still need to communicate with people as part of their work or to stay connected with friends and family. Educational institutions especially have begun to use Zoom extensively to teach online. But along with that new popularity, Zoom has also become the target of hackers who are exploiting its security flaws and taken up the practice now being called ‘Zoom bombing’.
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