TWIG 562: Taco Fixins

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

@Leo @JeffJarvis One big difference, I think, between conservatives and liberals: conservatives don’t believe in the zero-sum-game theory when it comes to society or economics. The extreme wealth of Bezos, Zuckerberg, Buffett, Gates, et al has no effect on me. They didn’t steal from me to earn that wealth. They created it. Likewise, I want to see those less well-off do better. It helps me too. Put another way; conservative believe in growing the pie, liberals think it’s a fixed size pie and the only way to help the lower tier is to take from the upper tier.

As a white, conservative, male I have no fear of blacks “gaining more power” (as Leo put it) or women or LGBTQ or Hispanics or Hmong (the list could on forever). I want a level playing field for all. Do I acknowledge there has not been a level playing field? ABSOLUTELY and it needs to be fixed. I want EVERYONE to experience the same level of prosperity and freedom that God has showered on me.

How about a little acknowledgement that prior to COVID black employment and income was trending in the right direction? You guys love conspiracies: Seems awfully convenient that an unprecedented response to a flu and now rioting (done mostly by white fascist punks) has really damaged that trend.

@JeffJarvis a little present for you, for your taco fixings, because your enjoying this recipe has no effect on my enjoying it. Homemade taco seasoning. Tastes a lot like Ortega tax mix without the crap in it.
1 Tbsp. chili powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper flakes (I don’t use that much, if any, not into lots of heat)
1/4 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp paprika
1 1/2 tsp ground cumin (I use 1/2 that, again not into lots of heat)
sea salt to taste
black pepper to taste

When making tacos with hamburger or chicken or whatever I cook the meat first. Drain if have crappy, fatty meat. Add the seasoning mix. Add about 3/4 cup of water. Simmer until the water is gone.

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In Regards to the Facebook discussion i got to say i really do think Jeff had some extremely insightful points about how Facebook may be getting a lot of blame for Spreading/influencing the news that is shown. I have been on Facebook since MySpace was big. I think the spread of news that leads to things like anti vaccine bubbles and trump being voted into office is not really a Facebook specific problem i think it more a result of the internet as a whole connecting people better while also making it much easier for us to see other peoples bubbles that we couldn’t see as easily before. I really do think Professor Jarvis is onto something when he just tries to open peoples mind to the fact that Facebook isn’t really pushing these things. I know most of the news i see on Facebook is someone sharing articles that support there beliefs that existed well before Facebook. I am not saying something shouldn’t be done but i Agree with Jeff Jarvis that maybe we shouldn’t be focusing the blame or fault on Facebook.

Regardless I really do think Jeff Jarvis was making some good points and im sure the way im saying things is not as well said as his way of saying it. My level of respect has gone up for Jeff Jarvis. @JeffJarvis keep up the good work i apreciate your the way you explain things and defend your points.

They might not be “pushing” these alternate agendas, but they are also doing little to ensure the spread of misinformation isn’t slowed down or at least flagged as such.

It is one of the things most governments around the world are critical of. Facebook is happy to make money off the misinformation and, unless they lose more money through fines than they make, they have little incentive to change things for the better. That is one of the reasons that all Facebook domains resolve to 0.0.0.0 on my network.

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I agree Facebook could and should probably try harder. I just think its often that the blame is tossed on Facebook so that people can be lazy and toss the blame on someone else instead of actually thinking about it and focusing on things that might have a bigger influence. For instance education.

I live in Florida and have a very conservative trump loving family that often times buys into false ideas or miss understand things like Covid and don’t for one second think Facebook can help them nearly as much as I can by just sitting with them and talking and explaining and educate them in a loving and understanding way. I would much rather have people be educated than just blown one way or another regardless of weather they are being blown in the right direction or not. @big_D

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I agree that education is a part of the puzzle, but there is so much conflicting information doing the rounds these days that it is often difficult to pick out the wheat from the chaff. Even well educated people can be duped, my daughter and her fiancé were both spouting on about the lying press and how COVID-19 was a fake, they are both doing their Masters at the moment, so should theoretically know better, but a YouTube video from a “professor of virology” caught them out, he made good arguments for his point of view, many of the things he presented were based in facts, but key parts weren’t and his conclusions were largely dangerous.

The problem with most of these platforms is that they ignored such issues until they were too big and had too many users and too much content being posted to realistically do anything about it. That is the biggest problem, they don’t tackle the problems when they could deal with them and scale them up, they ignore them until the fines and lawyer’s fees outweigh actually tackling the problems and by then what they can actually do is just a token gesture, unless they completely re-engineer the whole system from the ground up, or hire thousands of people just to monitor the content, which isn’t really financially doable - or at least the shareholders would flee like rats from a sinking ship, making a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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When i use the term Education i do not mean degrees or schooling by any means. I mean talking to people and just challenging there ideas in a respectful way.

Again though All i hear from that second part is how the platforms are the problem. A platform is a place for people to express there ideas and have discussions like here. I get that facebook has problems along with other platforms but i really think we are just making the situation worse by focusing on who is to blame instead of using the platforms to help spread our ideas and start discussions that can maybe help educate others. I would argue that by leaving facebook and other platforms might be hurting more than its helping. Maybe we should stopped focusing on blaming and punishing facebook and more on Spreading solid news and science on these platforms that alot of people are on. I think we just throw the blame on facebook and that is lazy. Instead we could be on there helping to spread and represent our points of view and help to educate others and maybe learn a thing or two ourselves about why people believe what they believe so we can better deal with it.

@JeffJarvis @gigastacey Jeff, Love you, but you are completely wrong about the influence of the algorithm’s on the information and influence platforms have in shaping peoples views. Your homework for the week is to listen to https://www.nytimes.com/column/rabbit-hole. Stacey is absolutely right. She practically said. “Down the Rabbit Hole”. You should correct the record and apologize to Stacey, on the next show

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@P_J please don’t post Donald Trump propaganda in here. Jesus dude. If you want to be delusional go post on Gab.

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I think the show was great. Jeff and I don’t always agree but that’s a good thing, like about Facebook algorithms and their influence on decisions you make both virtually and IRL. And to his point you got to hear things you don’t want to hear in order to grow and be able to think for yourself. As a black/african-american or whatever you wanna call me I appreciate how you guys are handling the current situation and look forward to more thoughtful conversations on TWITYCG (This week in things you could Google) :stuck_out_tongue:

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On a less serious note on the Egyptian Theater …
The Egyptian Theater was built by Sid Grauman. He also built the Chinese Theater and the El Capitan, which are two blocks west of the Egyptian. The The Oscars were held at the Chinese three times, but not at the Egyptian.

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What were the tools Loe mentioned in the episode?

There were two:

Online audio editing: https://audiomass.co/

Text-based video editing: https://www.descript.com/

Thanks for listening!

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Re: what3words

As alluded to quickly in the episode, it’s not open-source. Not only it’s proprietary, since it’s a “secret” algorithm, you basically need to get an API key and call their servers every time you want to encode or decode an address. It’s also very English-centric, and while there are “word pools” for other languages, it still makes it trickier to share.

Plus codes are based on a very simple algorithm for converting arbitrary precision coordinates into the codes. Not only can anyone encode/decode them in a few lines of code locally, these codes also show proximity.

For example, “winks.pizzas.quintet” and “remix.judge.smoothly” are two adjacent squares a few meters apart, whereas in plus.codes, they are “87Q8 GC2F+P9J” and “87Q8 GC2F+P9C”, notice they are identical until the last character. You can compute distance between two given plus.codes, since really they are just coordinates and calculating distance between coordinates is also a known algorithm. You cannot do that with what3words.

So while sharing 3 words with someone who speaks the same language is more convinient, on the long run, the simpler, open source, cleaner plus.codes is honestly better. If you know the city, you can generally skip the first 4 characters, and simply say “Montreal, CA, GC2F+P9”, so you end up with a 6 character code, which is similar to Postal Codes in Canada. Memorizing 6 characters isn’t so bad.

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thank you for your great network

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Agreed. @JeffJarvis handled that segment poorly, and is stunningly ignorant about how influential and manipulative Facebook’s algorithm can be. While I know he and @gigastacey do get along and have a healthy rapport, the mansplaining tone he took in this segment was unbecoming.

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Second dumpster fire in row…:thinking::face_with_raised_eyebrow:

@Leo That’s all the better you can do: “Trump Propaganda?” Point out one thing I said is that factually incorrect.

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I think Senor Wences (on Ed Sullivan Show) probably pre-dates Deputy Dawg in use of “S’awright!”.

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I remember Señor Wences’ hand puppet saying “S’alwight,” and I remember Deputy Dog, but I didn’t remember that word being on Deputy Dog. :grin: I must not have been such a Deputy Dog fan.

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