Tag: nature

Unprecedented Times: Don’t Underestimate the Impact of the Pandemic

UPDATE 12/22/2021: Unbeknownst to me at the time I first wrote this,
Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, stated that the impact of COVID-19 would be so great that the world requires “a Great Reset.” He makes many arguments similar to mine here. I didn’t know this existed when I wrote this post in July 2021.

In my freelance blogging business, I deal with mostly online entrepreneurs who have a website-driven business model. Ever since the pandemic hit, all my clients have been taken off-guard by the fallout. It’s not just that all the numbers in online business go down; some numbers go up too. The one consistent pattern is that nobody can predict what’s going on, and everybody wants answers.

For those of you in eCommerce who are also wondering what’s going on, I can provide some clues. I can’t provide definitive answers, and part of the clues will point out why. My purpose here is to lay out the mind-boggling scope of the pandemic’s impact on business.

The bottom line is that the economy is largely a chaos system. Chaos systems are huge, complex systems where small changes can cause huge ripple effects. The mark of chaos systems is that it is very difficult to predict what effect a given stimulus would have. Meanwhile, a global pandemic is also a chaos system, as natural phenomena with worldwide reach are wont to be. The result: The economy interacting with the pandemic is the front between two chaos systems, not just one!

But in the first place, there are not only people missing from the work force, but people missing from the mall. They are not shopping, or what shopping they are doing is bare necessities, not discretionary spending. They are not traveling, they are not buying tickets to anything, they are not being busy. So they are not stimulating business.

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Gen Z Parents : Help Us, You’re Our Only Hope!

The editorial powers that be asked me to throw together a resource for parents facing “back to school” in the post-COVID-19 world. This is a post on home-schooling and remote education resources for parents raising mostly K-12 kids. It’s not much, but it’s what little I can do.

Parents should take education into their own hands, even before COVID-19

Even though we sent our kids through public school, we homeschooled them as if they weren’t attending. That’s because the public school system in the US is so gutted, so hostile to intelligence, such a Babylon of pseudo-learning idolatry, that I have to wonder if it does more harm than good.

MAPS_highest_paid_public_professions_US

I dunno, it’s like US schools had some other focus besides learning. I can’t quite put my finger on it though. It’s on the tip of my tongue.

life_support_for_football

Maybe I’ll recall what it is…

In case you missed it (because who even checks by this dead blog to begin with?), I also covered freelance writing in a post-COVID-19 world. So there, you have your school covered and your work covered, all off-grid. Call us when we get a government that’s interested in doing anything for people again.

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Fingerprint Readers : History’s Oldest Biometric

Disclaimer: This post originally appeared on a tech blog. It is reused with permission.

In the world of technology, biometric identification has been slowly creeping from the world of science fiction to fact. On the most far-fetched front, we have iris scanners, predicted by movies such as Minority Report. On the less fantastic front, voice recognition systems have become a more common technology, though we’re still working out the kinks. Facial recognition is also getting good enough to prompt Jamie Zawinski into being fascinated by “dazzle” methods to defeat facial scanning. But the most reliable form of biometric identification has actually been the fingerprint reader.

Scotland_yard-fingerprint

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The Zombie Apocalypse Is Over : The Zombies Won

All of us nerds made zombie apocalypse jokes at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m not so sure we’re joking any more. I’m sure as hell not.

Whenever I have braved the Outside World to forage for supplies lately, I get closer and closer to getting into a fight myself. I grew up in the mean ‘hoods of south L.A. so I’m no stranger to rumbles. I’m not scared for myself, but I had hoped for a more peaceful coast to retirement in a tranquil suburb by now.

Corona_virus_plans

You can clearly distinguish Team Human from Team Zombie

Team Human are the people who believe in science and reason. They wear their masks and gloves, use sanitary wipes and disinfectant, and keep their distance. They respect the store employees. All of us are out to go about our business quickly and efficiently with the least amount of drama.

Team Zombie isn’t buying any of that. They don’t wear protective gear, and make it a point to get into everybody’s face around every corner. They’re hostile and confronting. They scoff at our “imaginary” pandemic and vaccines and all of our “so-called” science. They’re out to pick a fight at every opportunity.

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Try To Understand This: There Are Evil People

UPDATE 04/19/20: Readers have uncovered a massive, coordinated asstroturf campaign to spread fake news and rally a denialist uprising about the CoronaVirus. Buzzfeed concurs, noting ties to a special interest group.

See, I told you it was deliberate, not ignorance! Listen to your prophet next time.

As I write, 04/04/20 (or 04/04/20 for you Europeans), the world is in the grips of – wait for it – the CoronaVirus / COVID-19 pandemic. Worldwide cases: 1.1M, worldwide deaths: 64K, US cases: 300K, US deaths, 8K. Compare those numbers as you read this to see how we did.

The US is currently the most-infected country in the world. At a rate of one thousand people dying per day, we will soon match and surpass the countries where the virus has taken its deadliest toll. Currently that’s Italy, at 15K deaths. The US can catch up to that number by next week at this rate.

In the middle of all this, we still have a shockingly high denial factor.

We could go on all day of course, but that’s enough examples for now. At this point, either the reader has turned away, or else I’m preaching to the choir. Because reality is politicized. So it’s time we looked at how it got that way.

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eCommerce Marketing For Dopamine Addicts

Recently one of my freelance clients got me onto their SEMRush account. It’s a nice tool, it has its place in Search Engine Marketing. But it’s also important to remember, behind those numbers and algorithms, that there are people behind those screens. I try to always look behind the SEO to figure out what motivates the users in the first place.

Hot new acronym to play with: E-A-T

SEMRush has its own blog to help with content marketing. In their obligatory end-of-year post looking ahead into 2020, they bring up E-A-T a lot. E-A-T stands for “Expertise, Authority, and Trust,” and it’s the latest Google indexing bugaboo which everybody is struggling to ascertain. What everybody forgets is that behind the numbers and algorithms, Google cares about what motivates people too.

Turning to SearchEngineJournal, E-A-T is a human-driven link quality control method, where Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines is “used by humans to assign quality scores to search results for specified queries… In other words, pages that would receive high-quality ratings from raters applying these guidelines are the kinds of pages Google wants to rank well.”

More to good Google hygiene than SEO

And then those pages, in turn, get stamped with the “Expertise Authority Trustworthiness” seal of approval. That doesn’t change the algorithms directly; instead it guides the engineers in adjusting those algorithms to bring up those pages more often.

The bottom line: Users – the humans behind those queries – want to see results that are actually helpful, engaging, and informative. That’s as opposed to mechanical SEO content churned out to appease the algorithm gods. Now that I’ve humanized the mechanical search process, watch as I mechanize the human angle all over again:

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Let’s Talk About Terpenes…

Let me give you one word for your future career, young people. (*Leans in with portentous whisper*): Terpenes.

Terpenes are going to be huge, folks. Have you accepted terpenes into your heart as your lord and savior? Over at my DabConnection gig, I’ve been talkin’ some serious terpene turkey. I started out trying to illuminate this curious corner of cannabis chemistry because I see a lot of questions about them, and not much answers. I ended up falling into a research rabbit hole and starting writing up encyclopedia-type entries on the top terpenes in cannabis. Meet some of nature’s most whimsical organic compounds, after the jump.

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On the Beauty of Questions

Once a year over at my 366 Weird Movies reviewing gig, I turn in one philosophical rant about the nature of weirdness in art. The new one is a little bit of Zen navel-picking speculation I call “Questions Are Beautiful.” It was provoked by a comment somebody made on my review of Cube (1997), saying an analysis of the ontological mystery would make good meat for an essay, so I green-lighted myself to accept the challenge.

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New at 123ish: The Mediterranean Diet, and why It’s the opposite of American eating

Big whoopie, I’m a food blogger now! Well, OK, we’ve gotta fill categories somehow, so it’s been food a couple times. I am far from the only blogger online to rave about the Mediterranean Diet, but it’s the only sensible diet there is to find with real research to back it up.

Naturally, sticking to the Mediterranean Diet is just about the most anti-American thing you can do. Walk home from the store with a bottle of actual olive oil (easier said than done) and a bag of kale and pick-ups like these:

will follow you down the street yelling “FAGGIT!” So I go into how American food culture is one big conspiracy to keep you tubby as a hippo. This brings us to a very topical subject…

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The Las Vegas Grasshopper Invasion 2019

Pardon me for sounding so… preachy… but as a prophet I am obligated to share my testimony. The Las Vegas grasshopper invasion is God’s punishment for not believing me when I said this exact same thing happened in Bullhead City, Arizona, back in the 1990s. Bullhead being a tiny town and the 1990s being what they were (I swear we were the only household at the time to discover Internet), there weren’t many to witness it, so now I finally have a back-up confirmed sighting.

Yes, folks, Old testament locust plagues happen!

I love how all the news reports have to reassure panicky people over and over: They’re harmless. They don’t bite. There is nothing to be scared of, don’t panic. What, are people running around screaming in fear of being devoured?

Having braved a plague like this (BELIEVE ME NOW???), I’m afraid I have to point out that they’re not entirely harmless…

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