ReallyKinda

I definitely consume too much dystopian content to be a fair dystopian barometer, but the sheer amount of ads being pushed my way is starting to make me feel legitimately anxious. It feels like a techno-dystopia where all of the neat and artistic elements have been extracted and then ground into dust for our corporate overlords. Even the ‘regular’ people are just trying to sell themselves. The streamers, the funny videos, the pet videos, the porn, the reposts of all of those, so much of it is just monetizing my attention.

Do ads even influence people that much? Does anyone even eat Church’s Chicken?! Do people consider switching their car insurance? I though the postmoderns were jumping the gun a little with the pictures they painted of a future with corporate logos and other advertisements spread across every visible surface, but now I have to see 5 ads and a cookie consent pop up to look up a quick definition. Watching a friend’s youtube video? 30 seconds of rapidfire ads from 15 brands. It’s starting to feel absurd. Are we going to be okay?

I’m picturing the math as a very large set of bell curves where most people fall somewhere in the middle, but each person is likely to be an outlier on at least one.

Why YSK: In many places it can take years for a case to come to trial. Judges have to make a decision in such cases to determine whether an accused person should be jailed in the interim. In recent years many jurisdictions have adopted algorithmic tools that essentially create a “risk profile” which assigns a value. Threshold values are used to classify the scores (for example “High Risk”). Some models include iterative algorithms (machine learning) and some do not.

The use of these models in pretrial assessments can have some major consequences. As you might know—aggregate data cannot be used to make sound predictions about individuals. What aggregate data allows you to do is model trends, correlations, and averages across groups.

We often use these profiles to help us make predictions on behalf of individuals. This is what “risk factors” in the medical sciences are usually doing. If 80% of people who are vegetarian and weigh 120 lbs have bone density issues later in life I might want to look at interventions to reduce that risk even if I could potentially fall into the 20% who have no issue.

While this seems acceptable with the intent to protect my health, I would be quite unhappy if a similarly accurate model was used to determine whether or not the state considers me a risk prior to trial. Now if I fall in the 20% I may turn out to be innocent and held against my will. Courts use similar tools to decide whether a child should be removed from a home prior to CPS investigation.

Now add in the fact that these models are fed existing criminal justice data which is often flawed and almost always contains a racial bias.

One familiar example is that black people are arrested at higher rates than other groups due to well documented racial bias in both policing policies and police themselves. A pretrial risk assessment tool that takes prior arrests into account will obviously perpetuate this bias.

Someone from the ACLU recently gave a presentation on this topic and I had never heard of it! Thought others might be interested as well.

It’s constantly becoming unmapped (sometimes randomly in the middle of the day). File explorer pages close out by themselves somewhat frequently too. Just curious what might be going on in IT (they’re the ones who showed me how to re-map).

If I wait for my face to be completely dry before applying tretinoin (which is recommended practice afaik) my moisturizer (which is recommended to be applied on damp skin) will not be able to trap much moisture in. How do other tret users navigate this conundrum?

I have a cousin, 35, Male, who has always been susceptible to conspiracy. He listened to Rush and other right wing favs when we were younger, and after a mildly messy divorce, I’m afraid he’s pivoted to blaming women for everything (including, and especially, male urges).

Along with his heroes, he’s committed to anti-intellectualism. I almost miss the tea party days.

Recently he’s been reading self published books with titles like “Analyzing the ROI on Pursuing Women,” and “Why women deserve less.” They bizarrely juxtapose tidbits from economics onto ravings about value and gender that don’t make sense. Weird that he trusts random opinions and not researchers who at least provide rigorous reasoning for their theories, but I digress.

As a lady, it’s hard to care about the dude, but I do feel like I should say -something-. Does anyone have ideas?

ULPT: Post job ads in your area for jobs similar to the one you have(or are looking for) at your desired salary.

This way if your employer checks to see if your wage is competitive it will look like they should give you a raise in order to retain you.