Covid-19... the upsides

[spacesailor]

When they brought in Compusary motorcycle crash hats. I didn,t comply and gave away the pleasure of motorcycling.

It was 50 years later I was forced into a Full faced helmet to have, maybe my last bike ride.

If you don,t comply and enough people agree, then the law Is an ASS !.

I have been chatting overseas ever since they Invented the telephone, expensive at first but getting cheaper, now FB is the go.

spacesailor

[Old Koreelah]

Great news! 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-02/beer-turned-into-whisky-due-to-excess-beer-supply-due-to-covid19/12410850

[old man emu]

OK. Businesses are failing because of COVID. But one man's muck is another man's gold. Here's one smart lass who has managed to kill two birds with one stone.

 

Do you have a Smart Phone with facial recognition used to access it? How do you do that when you are wearing a mask?

 

Artist Danielle Baskin has set up Resting Risk Face, a company that will print user's faces on masks so they can use facial recognition technology while wearing them. Baskin, who is based in San Francisco, got the idea for the facial-recognition masks after seeing people using masks to try and protect against coronavirus.

"I was discussing whether or not N95 masks were effective as a protective measure against the coronavirus and someone brought up the fact that you couldn't unlock your phone while wearing one. My immediate thought was to put a face on the mask."

 

https://www.dezeen.com/2020/02/27/face-recognition-masks-resting-risk-face/

 

Some enterprising soul could get advertising slogans printed on masks that could be handed out to customers. Or the mask could create amusing situations such as this:

 

 

[onetrack]

One of the more interesting upsides to the COVID-19 virus has been revealed in U.K. smoking figures. The BBC reports that a survey has shown that over 1M Britons have given up smoking, since the pandemic began.

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53403610

[old man emu]

[facthunter]

Run out of good ones have you OME?  WE NEED good ones. My kids reckon mine are too old, even the originals. Clear evidence of bias on their part. Nev

[old man emu]

5 hours ago, facthunter said:

Run out of good ones have you OME?

Ya cain't lose what y'all never had, Bubba.

[facthunter]

My kids aren't kids any more. That magnifies my problem. Nev

[spacesailor]

My Grand kids are not kids anymore, with kids of their own !.

The big secret !

When you get" great grand kids", you don,t see your children as they are now Baby-sitting Their grandkids.

No wonder Oldies go nuts with only the TV to keep us sane, 

And this forum.

Many thanks to everyone 

spacesailor

[pmccarthy]

Once you discover YouTube you are never alone.

[Old Koreelah]

42 minutes ago, pmccarthy said:

Once you discover YouTube you are never alone.

You mean You Tube University?

[spacesailor]

The only time I try Utube is from this forum, and it's full of ads that block the content, so I never finish the video.

spacesailor 

[onetrack]

There's a free programme called AdBlock. It works just great to stop the large majority of annoying ads.

Another good free programme is Ghostery - it shows you how many bots are tracking your internet activities, as well as who those bots names (companies) are.

You have never heard of just about all of them, but they collect all your personal data, and on-sell it to other companies for millions, and give you nothing for your information.

Welcome to the 21st century, where you're just a dumb "product" to be milked.

Edited January 3, 2021 by onetrack

[octave]

Although adds can be annoying it is important that content providers get paid for their work.  The same goes for podcasts.  You can pay for YouTube premium and eliminate the adds altogether.  In terms of selling our data and we get nothing for it, we do get to use the service they are providing. Social media sites are not free services, somewhere along the line they have to make money otherwise why would they bother.  

[red750]

I use Brave browser which blocks most ads and trackers, except a few who advertise with Brave directly. It annoys the hell out of Yahoo. In the spaces on a Yahoo page reserved for ads, all I see is a dogeared page emoji with a glum face. When I open my inbox, I get a message saying "Please remove your ad blocker. We rely on ads to provide you with your email service." If I log in through Chrome, I get the ads but not the message. Brave claims, on it's Home Page, to have blocked over 12,000 ads and trackers since I loaded it on Boxing Day, and saved 295 Mb of bandwidth.

[onetrack]

Octave, I can cope with ads that are discreet, that don't fly up in your face and take over virtually the whole page - and which don't try to sell me snake oil, or divert me to useless webpages full of badly-written crap, that is just more come-ons to more ads.

 

Garbage ads such as "Police say you need this", "Seniors are missing out on these Govt handouts", and ads for cannabis oil and other rubbish.

I get enough crap spam emails already, for Bitcoin, "Kochies investment tricks", "Andrew Forrest says these shares are what made him a billionaire", Viagra, and 50 other equally useless subjects that are all information-seeking scams, anyway.

 

Google and its subsidiaries, FaceBook and its subsidiaries, and numerous other internet "biggies" have all turned into multi-billion dollar companies within 20 years or less.

Google is worth $600B. They have been "creaming it in" as regards income for years, and they pay us nothing for our information, yet they still want us to pay for "premium" services.

 

Yes, Google gives me free maps, but they want me to provide my time for free to supply reviews and business information to them, for free - 50 times a day.

In exchange for that, I get Google Street View in rural W.A. which is barely relevant any more, as it was all videoed once in 2008, and they have never been back.

In addition, that 2008 footage is extremely poor resolution. Google have enough cash in the bank to supply us a lot more for free, in high-resolution video.

 

I can't believe the number of people who believe that global corporate giants are genuinely interested in supplying us good value, and that we are obliged to pay them more to get "better services".

These global corporate giants are the robber barons of the 20th and 21st century, intent on "unjust enrichment", at our expense.

Sort of like the John D Rockefeller telling us how he will supply cheap fuel for our motor vehicles - all the while he eliminated any energy competition, and ensured we were enslaved to ruthless oil companies for over 100 years.

 

[octave]

Companies like google are like any company, they are there to maximize their profit.  Having said that we do sometimes take for granted the things that are free, the list is endless.  Just like everyone I would rather not be exposed to most adverts (some though that are well targeted are useful). Also just like everybody else I feel a momentary rush of resentment when a news story is behind a paywall but of course in the past you either had to buy the paper, you weren't really supposed to have a read and then put in back on the shelf.   I would argue though that there has never been a time in history when news was delivered free.    The old model of television news with intrusive adverts that are not necessarily well targeted or the ABC SBS which we pay for through taxes.  I think in the age of the internet we have come to believe most things should be free.     In previous times you payed your money for your Gregory's street directory, now you just use your phone, we have come to expect it.    Want to translate something, you don't need to buy a book or take a trip to the library.  Google does give you free maps and yes you might by asked for a review but you are not required to do that.

 

In terms of you tube good quality material costs to produce and you can pay for it by being subject to ads (which for the most part you can by pass) or by subscribing to YouTube or by being donating to producers of content that you enjoy (through patreon etc.}  Whilst I agree that poorly targeted ads are annoying (just like on TV) I see it as a trade off.     

 

In terms of social media, yes they sell the information about my interests, the suggestion that we get nothing for it I think is not quite correct.   Take FB, every couple of days I have a video messenger call with my mother interstate or my son overseas.  This service alone used to be quite expensive when we had to pay Telstra for it.  In the end I guess we decide whether it is worth it or not.   The services we use could be subscription only with no ads.

 

I do agree though that some advertising is annoying and just way too intrusive or irrelevant. When possible, such as on FB I do take the couple of seconds to press the hide this advert button and the next button saying why, such as irrelevant, inappropriate, misleading or intrusive. This then feeds into what ads are put before me in the future.   You cant do that on TV. 

 

 

Edited January 4, 2021 by octave

[willedoo]

It would be nice for all Google street view images to be up to date but it's a massive job driving the backroads of the world. A lot are still 10 years old, but they are still updating all the time with a lot of 2018, 2019 images around. They travel a lot of country. This screen grab is at Port Kavkaz on a narrow spit that projects into the Kerch straight and handles shipping from the Russian mainland to the Crimean Republic. You can see an armed guard about to confront the Google crew, so in light of everything, I think they do a pretty good job.

 

 

 

 

[octave]

This google street view has been updated, yep that is me in 2012  with a couple takeaway coffees