As a Canadian, I think “Americans are crazy” followed by “Americans are crazy”.

No way!

The existence of “echo chambers” is debated by scientists. It really doesn’t matter who you hang around with, you’re going to disagree with people.

The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media.

Tweeting from left to right: Is online political communication more than an echo chamber?

Echo chamber? What echo chamber? Reviewing the evidence

Yes, except bail bonds don’t exist, bail bondsmen don’t exist, and there isn’t a bail bond system.

In Canada, our Charter of Rights and Freedoms says anyone accused of a crime is innocent until found guilty and therefore cannot be held in custody unless the state can convince the court that releasing them would be a danger to the public.

Which sounds great, but bail is often denied because courts are easily convinced someone is a danger to the public. There is also a surety system but that’s to ensure someone follows bail conditions. If the court agrees to grant a conditional bail, the accused needs someone to act as their surety. If the accused breaks conditions, and the surety doesn’t immediately report it, the surety will be required to pay the court a very large fine. Not being able to find a surety is a common reason for bail being denied.

The action would have been done as vice-president, not president. Vice-presidents are held accountable. This is why Trump got in trouble for defamation of E. Jean Carroll.

He defamed her as president and called it an official act. The case was put on indefinite hold. Then he said the same things while he wasn’t president. A new case was brought against him and he was found liable. Then, Carroll’s lawyer asked the original case to be resumed arguing that Trump’s statements couldn’t be an official act of the president since he performed the same action while he wasn’t president. The courts agreed and resumed the case and he was found liable again.

I summon Pot of Greed which allows me to draw 3 additional candies!

People in China have pets.

So many strange cultural traditions over there!

There was a jogging app known as Strava that posted an image on their Twitter that was a heatmap of all the jogging activities of all of their users. Their idea was just to show how popular their app was by showing the entire world lit up. Twitter users were able to locate secret US military bases on that data alone. Turns out nobody jogs in circles in the middle of the desert except GIs.

Recently a group of Harvard students did a demo where they used Meta’s camera glasses and a chain of commercial programs and products to find out people’s names, address, workplaces, and family based only on their facial data.

These are just two examples off the top of my head. Essentially, the more data someone can accumulate, the more info can be analyzed from it. With things like AI tools, that analysis is incredibly fast even with huge datasets.

Here are the worst offenders.

Paper towels and toilet paper, Breakfast cereals, Candy, snack foods like chips and cheetos

yeah, you might not agree with his business practices

The state of New York certainly hasn’t when courts punished him for stealing from a charity he ran, or when they punished him for running a university that wasn’t actually a university, or when they punished him for lying about the worth of his assets to obtain loans he wouldn’t have qualified for.

It’s honestly impressive how we went from “only nerds know tech” in gen x to “everyone knows tech” in millennials to “only nerds know tech” in gen z.

I also had the pleasure of working for Service Corporation International. Thankfully solicitation of funeral services is banned in Ontario, Canada. So no cold calling or bugging people at cemeteries. Their way around it was to hold seminars about Last Wills at places like retirement homes. If someone had a funeral related question the staff would get them to sign a form agreeing to a phone call or visit from a sales person.

The pre-arrangement sales people were all on commission and it made them very pushy. The pitches were so manipulative I couldn’t listen to them. Our government is throwing around the idea of banning commissioned sales in funeral services as well because of it. Some other Canadian provinces have already banned it.

I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.

The biggest “secret” is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell “famous people funerals at a reasonable price”. You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I’ve found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.