Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1047
Taylor Swift and TikTok, TikTok and China, Taylor Swift and her worst line and its revisions, Caroline's clever comment about politics, Love Night nostalgia, COVID deaths 2023
Good morning. Hello. Happy Friday how are you? I am good. Stressed, but not unduly. I have no time to write this today — gotta get to the orthopedic.. orthopoedist? I don’t know. Orthopedic doctor. But I am going to write this anyway, even if it’s short. Because I am that kind of man. I am a man who will fight for your honor. I’ll be the hero, you’ve been dreaming of.
Man. Love Night. What a boon. Do you know what a gift it was to have a night where once a week you could go slow dance with beautiful women to Peter Cetera, in the 21st century? Just amazing. Hi Bonnie, Hi Liz, miss you.
In the United States, only six states/territories/etc. still maintain their open APIs for reporting COVID deaths to other platforms. In the United States, just in those six states, there were 29 COVID deaths yesterday. These are not the biggest states. One is Puerto Rico. One is the VA. Yesterday was not a particularly noteworthy day. There are that many pretty much every day of late. I figure if you prorate it for population, you’re looking at 200 or so, probably a bit more, deaths from COVID in the US per day right now. Seventy thousand a year or so.
Seventy thousand a year or so.
I will remind you of a stat you spent a lot of time with in 2020 but have probably forgotten, as I have: the flu kills 12,000 to 50,000 people in the US each year.
Four years in, when we pretend it’s gone, COVID is still killing more people than the flu, I’d wager.
But who cares? Game's over!
Let's go get wasted, man!
To the 7-11, to the liquor store!
Let's party all night and party some more!
My old New York friend Caroline McCarthy said something very wise last night on one of the social Twitters, I think it was Threads, but I’m not sure, it’ll take me like an hour to find it so I can’t link to it ( insert think piece here on continuing link rot). She said something along the lines of:
Many people have spent the last decade or two trying to live their lives insulated from those with political views different than theirs, and the events in the Middle East right now are showing a whole lot of people that is impossible.
And I haven’t been trying to completely insulate my life from people with different political views, but I sure have been trying to, shall we say, soften the edges. Anti vaxxers, Q anon conspiracy people etc. at the very least. But Caroline is right, this issue is a whole other ball of wax. The numbers are much larger, the closeness of friends is much larger. It’s the first issue in quite a long time you can’t just look at the crowd you’re sitting with at work or the bar and assume you’re all broadly aligned politically and crack a joke or make a comment. On this one? Who knows!
Crazy times, crazy times.
Really got me thinking, Caroline. Haven’t seen her in ages. Still sharp as a tack.
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Two Taylor Swift-related items for you. First, I have posted my fourth TikTok ever, the fourth in a series of TikToks regarding Taylor Swift’s e-commerce packing predilections involving small tissue paper shapes of assorted colors. It performed absolutely the worst of all of them, garnering just 850 views, less than half of the previous worst performer. Whether this is an indication of the decline of our nation’s Swifitan fever, or evidence of TikTok slowly tweaking their algorithm to give fewer views to rare-performers as part of their efforts to hook you in to TikTok, I cannot say. Though I strongly suspect the former, since, you know, on any other social platform a new/rare creator posting about a hot topic might get 5, 10 interactions if they are lucky. Eight hundred is more than enough to give em that free hit. We didn’t need 1,600. Eight hundred views is still astonishing for no work.
Also, their advertising is still dirt cheap it really is insane. That company is going to make so much money.
As an aside, no it is not silly or Republican or dumb to say that we should not be letting China own TikTok and yes, they can absolutely tweak that algorithm to have an impact on the political discourse in the United States. I understand how this seems paranoid and inconceivable to a lot of people, and I understand the whataboutism saying that Facebook can do this already, but they are both untrue and misguided. Facebook cannot hope to tweak their algorithm the way TikTok can, Facebook’s algorithm is an absolute dinosaur compared to TikTok and in any case no one uses Facebook anymore. Maybe they could pull it off on Instagram Stories, but it’s smaller and, most relevantly, Mark Zuckerberg is a human and not a government and an American one and that and also we all got really mad about the election and how Facebook handled it.
Look it’s okay if you haven’t read all your Khaneman and Sharp n shit and know that for issues where the populace is divided, you only need to move sentiment 1-2% to make a huge difference, but it’s true. Let me ask you this: can you tell when your own mind has shifted its opinion on a topic 1-2%? Because that’s all it takes.
And no one knows jack shit about TikTok’s algorithm.
And China is an authoritarian regime! Are we perfect, no, of course not, but c’mon man.
Ugh you know what that is a much longer conversation for another time but let me assure you, as a subject matter expert in both sentiment changing and tech platforms, it is 100% a real, valid, possible thing.
In other Swiftian news I have to say that “Karma is a guy on the Chiefs coming straight home to me” is a small bit of an improvement upon Taylor’s absolute worst, most cringe-worthy line ever, “Karma is a man on the screen coming straight home to me,” god I have always hated that line how on earth can the most famous woman in the world endorse such starf**king it really is a bummer. Plus.. the ego. How is that Karma??? Gawd. I hate that line.
Mixed Mommy Daddy bedtime last night, shower, bed party, no dance party, Cardboard World, long bout of Rick operating as a surgeon’s assistant finding specific LEGO pieces for Jane’s MOC as she would call them out: “one by two, any color! one by three, green!”
“Yes doctor.”
Okay I gotta go byeeee.
Drone playlist for you. It’s great. You’ll love it. I promise. Boy I am going to be late for this appointment. Whoops two Les Big Byrd songs sorry there’s no time man I really love that band.
Have a lovely weekend hopefully I have some substantial greenhouse progress for you on Monday.