Good point and great link. However, should mention it did list the dude's opinion as the first popular theory making the link even more relevant.

While younger people feel impervious to the virus from this information which emboldens some with a Spring Break like hubris, the flip side is that they will not only lose elder relatives (and peers) in the near future, but will also be most affected in the aftermath; not just from disrupted education now, but in the potentially long drawn out economic depression -- the length and severity very much dependent on how efficiently we can stop the virus now.

So get off my lawn and wash your hands!

As nice as this sounds, most stolen art is destroyed. The destruction starts as soon as the painting leaves the building because most thieves have little understanding of the care and feeding of delicate objects that when in the museum often are more like patients in the ICU stored in care to curb the ravages of time.

Once out in the world, their value is negligible at best. Sure they get traded on the black market. Often as markers on debts leaving the holder with something they discover is unable to fetch a price anywhere near it's value.

Art theft isn't rich or glamorous, it's a crime against humanity and we are all poorer for the loss.

https://www.theguardian.com/ar...

Fortunately there is a new test which should be available soon which is able to identify infection before symptomatic and it'll cost only 2 pounds sterling! Quite a savings over the current quote of $2000 USD for the test if uninsured.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-en...

And their boots are still the best darn rubber boot.

Particularly apt considering, aside from scribbling about sea birds and opium induced dreams, Coleridge was a spy.

maybe we need to start reminding people that AI is fueled by statistics. at least that's what my computer screen is saying. its gotta be right. ;-)

or maybe cutting all those humanities classes that teach critical thinking skills in order to exclusively focus previously on business degrees and now, STEM might not be the best idea.

The art you're looking at obviously is having a very visceral response in you, so maybe it's working?

Not familiar with this piece you describe,"Projection No 37". Who is the artist or gallery where you encountered it? Do you have similar objection to abstract art by previous masters such as Mark Rothko? I know I have, but one day waiting for friends to go for lunch I was sitting in front of one of his pieces and it hit me. Since then, I've made it a rule to skip a meal before hitting the galleries in order to make sure my eyes are hungry to see.

Meanwhile, there's plenty of great artists today whom are likely not glued to their phones such as Bo Bartlett and Jamie Wyeth if you prefer realism over abstract. Also quite a few artists such as Banksy, Jenny Holzer, and queen of the selfie -- Cindy Sherman who likely do look at their phone fairly regularly, or at least are able to speak loud and clear to those who do.

If they don't do it for you, might I suggest Cy Twombly, a rather brilliant abstract artist who was previously employed as a cryptographer for the NSA. An odd bit of trivia with which art critics have hardly concerned themselves. No one's really identified any clues, puzzles, or secrets hidden in his work that I am aware, but I've long sensed they are there.

To be fair, the Okay Burma generation has optimized genocide, slave-trading, and all sorts of crimes via Facebook leveraging those people who look at their phones every 15 minutes.

Believe it or not, Greed has not always been viewed as good. Adam Smith never preached such vain foolishness. The father of Capitalism proclaimed quite the opposite;

"The rich...are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species."

Concepts such as workers benefits were introduced by industrialists such as Krups to improve their workers were charitable, but also motivated because it added value to society and by extension added value to Krups bottom line. Industrialist Seebohm Rowntree book, Poverty, A Study of Town Life was identifed by Winston Churchill as a primary reason he introduced welfare programs to Britain - it was a very conservative move. American industrialist Andrew Carnegie saw the wealthy had a responsibility to be an "agent and trustee for his poorer brethren." Economist John Maynard Keynes famously opined, "The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease."

Keynes predicted we'd be beyond the disease of greed by 2030. Ten years out and we are unfortunately living in a time still guided by the impulsive and short sighted demands of greed junkies addicted to the junk bond mentality of going all Ivan Boesky and "Greed is Good" to cannibalize everything for the bottom-line. I mean why do people still worship Jack Welch? He certainly didn't set up GE for long-term success. But there are plenty of contrarian examples such as Reebok, McKesson, Sainsbury, Levis, Patagonia, and Trek come to mind.

It's rather telling that Facebook's go to excuse when confronted with their wrongs is to cling to the story that "it's difficult to scale." Come on! You're a data company: that's your business! it's all about scale! Didn't you pay attention in school!? Obviously this is a lie. They just can't scale when it doesn't suit their greed. They can cut operating costs through efficient server scaling. They can improve their targeted advertising algorithms by scaling their analysis of massive data stores. They just can scale if it means missing out on the clicks generated from child porn, slave trading, hate mongering, bullying, or mass murder.

In the early days of FB, it was their calling card and biggest brag. I bought it and rooted for Zuckerberg when he and his physician wife Priscilla Chan would compete to see who can do the most good in the world. He seemed to be on to something with his abilities to scale when his initiative to promote people to sign up to be organ donors realized unprecedented gains in registered donor cards. Gains compared to the increase in library card holders influenced by the Happy Days episode in which the Fonz himself became a card holder and reader.

Those heady days came to a screeching halt when Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook were identified by U.N. human rights experts for their role in spreading hate speech through the same advertising machine used to motivate people to become organ donors was now seen as a contributing factor in the genocide in Myanmar.

That Facebook profited by selling their advertising technology to genocidal maniacs to enable them to leverage the platform to influence Buddhist monks to engage in homicidal killing sprees really underscores what they mean by targeted advertising. That they refused to stop despite warnings and pleas from various governmental and expert NGO's illustrates that greed is not good. In a few short years, Mark scaled from killing a pig for his dinner guests to stacking up tens of thousands of corpses just to impress his investors proving once and for all that in comparison, Hannibal Lecter was an amateur.

And yet, the punchline is that the only person who has spoken out against this publicly and received any press is comic actor Sacha Baron Cohen who suggested unironically (I think), that should you (Facebook) " do it again and you go to jail.”

No. No, that's not what Elie Wiesel meant by "Never Again." It means it stops now. Zuckerberg, Sandberg, et.al. should stand trial for genocide before they do it again. Because they will. They clearly have a taste for blood and need to be locked up for crimes against humanity to advance the interests of society over the cruel greed of these sociopaths.

Capitalism is not cancer. It's unchecked greed that is the cancer. Greed has destroyed more enduring institutions of capitalism and democracy than any hammer and sickle. It is greed that encourages voters to disable the checks and balances democracy has put in place to prevent and halt societal cancer. It will not be capitalism, but greedy humans who realize they can manipulate democracy for their own ends in order vote themselves money that will be the end of democracy -- something Facebook is particularly good at scaling. Something that must be stopped.

Growth for growth's sake is the biological definition of cancer: Facebook is cancer infecting at a human level rather than cellular level; the genocide it drove in Myanmar (formally Burma), that was just a beta version of the metastasis in progress now.