Gongol.com Archives: October 2017
October 25, 2017
"Leadership does not knowingly encourage or feed ugly and debased appetites in us"
Senator Jeff Flake declares his political independence and his intention to leave after his term expires
Pew names eight "typologies" of American voters
It's a little too binary and probably too clever by half. Yes, a lot of people share common beliefs, and they could probably be grouped into something like a dozen clusters. But the pure left-to-right spectrum doesn't really make sense anymore, if it ever did.
Fake Facebook accounts -- and why you get friend requests from them
Once a new account gets past Facebook's initial screening process, it becomes a valuable commodity
Is Amazon coming next for the banking sector?
Amazon has already smashed a lot of the retail sector, and if it's driven to keep growing, it could very well start extending its reach into peripheral industries (including banking).
Information warfare and free elections
CNN says Cambridge Analytica (which played a major role in the Trump campaign) sought out data potentially hacked from the Clinton computer systems via Wikileaks. The more data-driven campaign targeting and dirty cyber-tricks start to overlap, the greater the risk that people may be driven to really bad decisions at the ballot box. Influence campaigns are nothing new -- the Founders worried about foreign influences on campaigns -- but the removal of mediating institutions (like edited publications) from the chain going from source to destination probably serves to amplify the effects.
