Of my friends, about eight or nine voted for President Trump. Two voted for Brexit. These are my friends, who I vouch for, who I like. Other than a difference of opinion on these topics, we remain friends. I still think incredibly highly of them.
Since I know them well, I know a little bit about why they voted their way.
Of the Americans, some wanted an end to the neoliberal order and hoped Trump would deliver. Others saw Clinton as corrupt and that Trump would actually be better. Of the Brits, their reasons were more complex, but among them were the thought of an unwieldly EU bureaucracy, and the belief that a customs’ union would be sufficient to keep trade going with the Continent.
None of these people are racists or xenophobes—the opposite, in fact. None of them are hillbillies or gun-loving, NRA-donating hicks, or whatever narrative the mainstream media would like to spin. Most of them would be regarded by any measure in society as decent, intelligent and compassionate.
I have found little reason to dislike someone, or not vote for someone, over one relatively minor disagreement. If their hearts are in the right place, it is not for me to condemn them for their choices. Indeed, when it comes to these issues, I find that while our actions differ (hypothetically, in my case, since I cannot vote in countries other than my own), our core views are actually quite similar.
In the US, strip away the hatred that vocal fringe elements stoke, and you’ll find that most people have common enemies in big business, tax evaders, and censorship. In 2018 we have seen Big Tech silence people on both the left and the right for voicing opinions outside the mainstream. My two Brexit-voting friends share some concerns with Remainers.
Therefore, in August, when one of these American friends wrote a Tweet in support of her president, it was horrible to watch Tweeters, total strangers, pile on her.
I’m not saying I like Trump (quite the contrary, actually), but I will give him props when he does things that I happened to agree with. If I’ve Tweeted for years that I disagreed with US military involvement in Syria, for instance, which at least one US veteran friend says lacks an objective, then I’m not going to attack the man when he pulls his country’s troops out. However, it was interesting to see some viewpoints suddenly change on the day. Those who opposed the war suddenly supported it.
I can’t say that I praise him very often, but I like to think I’m consistent. I was also complimentary about his withdrawal of the US from TPPA, something I have marched against.
And this friend is consistent, too.
In fact, her Tweet wasn’t even one of actual support. Someone called Trump a ‘loon’ and she simply said, ‘You don’t have to like my president,’ and added a few other points in response.
The piling began.
It seems almost fashionable to adopt one prevailing view peddled by the mainstream (media or otherwise) but there was no attempt to dissect these opposing views. My friend was measured and calm. What came afterwards did not reciprocate her courtesy.
Since I was included in the Tweet, I saw plenty of attacks on her that day. I was included in one, by a black South African Tweeting something racist to me.
When the mob goes this unruly, and it’s “liked” or deemed OK by so many, then something is very wrong. These people did not know my friend. They didn’t know why she supported Trump. They were just happy to group her in to what they had been told about Trump supporters being ill-educated hicks, and attacked accordingly.
Call me naïve, but social media were meant to be platforms where we could exchange views and get a better understanding of someone else, and make the world a little better than how we found it. The reverse is now true, with Google, Facebook et al “bubbling†data so people only see what they want to see, to reinforce their prejudices, and having been convinced of their “rightness”, those espousing a contrary view must be inhuman.
I don’t like dominant viewpoints unless it’s something like ‘Intolerance is bad’ or a scientific fact that is entirely provable, though you could probably take issue with where I draw the line. Generally, I like a bit of debate. No position is perfect and we need to respect those with whom we disagree. That day, Twitter was a medium where there was no such respect, that it was OK to pile on someone who fell outside the standard narrative. To me, that’s as unhealthy was a socialist being piled upon by conservatives if the latter group’s view happened to prevail. It doesn’t take much imagination to extend this scenario to being a Chinese republican in the early 20th century in the face of the Ching Dynasty. I’m always mindful of how things like this look if the shoe were on the other foot, hence I was equally upset when Facebook and Twitter shut down political websites’ presences on both the left and the right wings. We should advance by expanding our knowledge and experiences.
It encouraged me to head more to Mastodon in 2018, where you can still have conversations with human beings with some degree of civility.
And, frankly, if you disagree with someone over something relatively trivial, then there is such a feature as scrolling.
Twitter became less savoury in 2018, and it has well and truly jumped the shark.
On this Pope Gregory Arbitrary Calendar Start Day, I wrote to a contact of mine at Renault New Zealand.
In mid-2018, I joked that, since Renault had no dealers in Wellington (never mind what’s listed on their website—the only people who can see a dealer there are psychic mediums), I could sell them out of my house.
Today, I may well have gone some way toward doing that, as someone I know would like a test drive of a first-gen Captur after I put it into her consideration set. After all, I put my money where my mouth is with Renault, so when I recommend one, I do so with some authority.
In the same note, I detailed some observations about Renault New Zealand’s marketing. I have since forwarded it to their top man in the country.
I concluded all that with, ‘And I reckon Hiroto Saikawa is dodgy and he was trying to cover up his own incompetence by framing his old boss and mentor. But that’s another story.’
Even if I sold one car, I might become the city’s top Renault seller. ‘If you find a better car, buy it.’
Avira informs me that Ccleaner 5.51 is infected with a virus, called TR/Swrort.ofrgv.
I haven’t come across anything online about this threat, except for reports in 2017 when Ccleaner was distributed with malware, eventually found to be the work of hackers who compromised the servers of the company behind Ccleaner. The Hacker News said that hackers got in there five months before replacing the legitimate Ccleaner with their own.
I’ve no idea where the blame should go this time, or even if my own computer has been compromised somewhere, but I’ve now downgraded to v. 5.50 and there have been no further alerts.
Anyone else had trouble with their Ccleaners?
Above: Dad and I wait for his psychogeriatric ‘re-evaluation’ on November 30, or, treading a path of bullshit.
Even in the rest home, Dad remained very protective of the other residents, so much so that there was an incident involving a day care resident in late November that saw the home insist that he be re-evaluated.
I said to the head nurse, ‘I just want him to be given a fair go. What are the chances he will be allowed back there?’
‘It depends on what the psychogeriatrician says.’ I sensed the insincerity in her voice.
For when the psychogeriatrician from Wellington Hospital called (actually, he told me he was a ‘psychiatrist’ and to this day I remain unsure if a psychogeriatrician or psychogeriatric nurse has seen him), he told me that he was told that they didn’t want him back.
Lie number one, then.
This is despite a course of medication that has actually helped Dad with his alertness.
Of course, during this whole evaluation, Dad contracted pneumonia, for which he had to be on a course of Augmentin.
The ‘psychiatrist’ also told me that he would prescribe Risperidone to Dad as the original course of medication that I had discussed with our GP, Donepezil, was, in his opinion, ineffective.
When speaking to the nurses and health care assistants at Ward 6, I was always informed that Dad was taking Augmentin and Risperidone.
He was still having balance issues and a severe cough but deemed ‘medically fit’ and had to leave the hospital.
The social worker worked extremely hard to find a dementia care unit for him. I have him on a waiting list at one home, but till that place is free, the closest is Bupa in Whitby.
I’m now reading his discharge sheet, to discover that he is ‘Best suited for dementia level care or high dependency care if BPSD cannot be treated successfully.’ Note the word if.
Frankly, they haven’t had a chance to see if any course of medication has helped his BPSD. I have witnessed it, to my knowledge, they haven’t.
Everyone seems dead keen to get Dad into dementia-level care that he’s being pigeonholed.
So he was, in my non-medical opinion, prematurely discharged and shipped off to Bupa.
And the discharge sheet doesn’t mention anything about Risperidone other than that it is PRN—prescribed only when needed. It doesn’t appear to be a regular medicine.
So, was I lied to at Wellington Hospital or is the discharge sheet bullshit?
Lie number two, then.
I’m not saying that Dad won’t eventually have to go into dementia-level care but it doesn’t seem necessary, and the Bupa staff agree.
Today I discovered him agitated because he was hungry.
The staff said he hadn’t been eating.
He was brought his dinner but I noticed that his dentures were missing.
No shit, you took his dentures so he couldn’t eat.
But no one put two and two together.
Seeing I was there he made a valiant effort to try to eat some cold meat they had served him and choked horribly on it. I had to stop him and said I would enquire what was going on.
The carers made a good effort looking in his room to no avail.
No one was at reception but fortunately there were some cellphone numbers posted on a notice there. I texted one of the RNs, who, despite not working today, made a massive effort to find out what had happened. God bless this man for digging.
Turns out they took Dad’s dentures for cleaning last night and no one thought to return them. They were in the office, locked away.
All of this has me deeply angry that they think they can treat elderly people like this. And how poor the communications are because they aren’t treating them as human beings.
If I wasn’t a daily visitor—and driving from Rongotai to Whitby is no easy task—then would Dad have just starved?
He has aphasia so he can only point and show if he’s upset.
One RN told me he was agitated earlier today. Again, no shit.
I’ve texted the social worker my concerns. Discharging a patient prematurely is one thing but taking him to a facility where they have effectively starved him for a day is cruel and negligent.
All this sprung because of the clinical and inhuman way he was marginalized in late November.
It set off a chain of events that give you very little confidence in the treatment of Alzheimer’s and dementia sufferers.
Despite the kindness of the HCAs and the staff at Wellington Hospital, there are clear gaps here which I wonder whether others might question.
I will advise the GP tonight as he and the social worker have batted in our corner consistently.
He needs to be out of the clutches of a clumsy multinational corporation and put somewhere actually consistent with his level of dementia.
And if I don’t get some satisfactory answers for once, then things will get … interesting.
I thought downgrading to an earlier Instagram would have solved the frame-rate problem, but I was wrong. Here are two videos using the same file. The first was uploaded using my new phone, but running v. 43 from April 2018, given that using the latest Instagram produced very stuttered video. However, it was the same story, so we can conclude there’s something wrong with using newer phones with Instagram. I’m not alone: others reported this bug earlier this year and the one solution appears to be upgrading the OS to Android 8. The conclusion I have to draw is that there is a fault with Android 7, or how Instagram works with Android 7.
The second was uploaded using my old phone, running probably the same version from April 2018, since that was the last time I performed an Instagram update. The frame rate is now normal.
The first took four attempts to upload. The second took nine attempts, meaning that I have uploaded this file 13 times on two phones, only to have Instagram show two. There is a problem with Instagram making videos publicly visible, a bug I first reported here earlier this year.
I’m going to have to pray my old phone holds up despite its damaged screen. Looks like all video uploads will have to be done using it, at least till Instagram fixes the frame-rate issue.
Failed uploads Above: Finally, the video uploaded after nine attempts on the old phone. One attempt never made it to the wall. Instagram refused to show eight of the uploads.
It’s been nearly one week with the new Meizu M6 Note.
It’s the “international” model, which means it’s not Chinese-spec, and there was no way to turn it into a Chinese one.
One observation is that the international one is far buggier than the Chinese one. Either that, or Android 7 is far buggier than Android 5.
For instance, if I leave my old phone as a USB media device, it would stay on that mode. The new one will always change by itself to ‘charge only’, meaning each time I plug it into USB, I now have to waste time doing an extra step.
Secondly, there’s no drive assistant on the new phone, which may have been a Chinese-only feature. I guess they don’t know we have cars outside China.
I’ve mentioned the app shortcomings in an earlier post.
But here’s one that I doubt is related to the Chineseness of my phone: Instagram simply performs better on the old phone than on the new. A Meizu M2 Note on an old Flyme (on top of Android 5) running a version of Instagram that dates back seven or eight months uploads smoother videos than a Meizu M6 Note on the latest Flyme (atop Android 7) running the latest Instagram.
The issue then is: is it the phone, the OS, or the app that’s to blame?
My first clue was my attempts at uploading a haka performed at my primary school. It took nine attempts before Instagram made one publicly visible, a bug going back some time.
When it did upload, I noticed it was clunky as it advanced.
I uploaded it again today on the old phone and there were no issues. It worked first time.
Now, the two are on different aspect ratios so you might think you’re not comparing apples with apples. How about these two videos? Again, Android 7 required repeated attempts before Instagram would make the video public. Things worked fine with the older phone.
Anyone know why it’s far, far worse as the technology gets newer? Like servers, which are much harder to manage now, or banks, where cheques take five to seven times longer to clear than in the 1970s, technology seems to be going backwards at the moment.
Of course YouTube lies. Say you’ve paused your search and watch history on YouTube. And you block all youtube.com cookies. YouTube won’t track you, right? You’ve made it quite clear you don’t want a record of what you’ve done, so YouTube shouldn’t keep one.
Wrong.
As with Big Tech, what you expect given what you’ve told them, and what they actually do, are two different things.
There’s just enough ambiguity in Google’s terms and conditions for YouTube to get away with this.
It’s exactly like Facebook, which says you can opt out of certain categories of advertising (e.g. alcohol), then serve you advertising for exactly those categories you object to.
It’s exactly like Google, which in 2009 said you could opt out of ad customization, then it began tracking you again within 24 hours of that opt-out.
This is part of the same deal, and since US authorities are generally too gutless to go after Big Tech, they’ll keep doing this.
Say you watched, as I did, a video on a toy collector restoring a model.
You don’t expect any tracking given all the settings you made earlier on.
YouTube ignores all that and has a way of determining who you are, even without cookies. Google has a series of cookies that it plants, and it can probably get you through those. Or it’s recognizing your IP address.
I may block a lot of Google cookies but even I don’t block them all, since one of the schools I’m involved with is heavily into Google’s tools.
After writing this I may download another browser just for their stuff and block all google.com cookies. It’s not as though Google News, the last of their services I used, is particularly useful any more, after they got rid of the customized news home pages.
When I watched a completely unrelated video, there was a link on the side to one of the same YouTube user’s videos.
You then have to clear your watch and search history, even though you don’t have a YouTube account, block all YouTube cookies, and you aren’t signed in to Google in any way.
You might say that the paused history only works when you’re signed in, and that’s a fair call. But I don’t expect a user who isn’t signed in to be snooped on more than someone who is. Maybe I’m just weird that way, and the default position for Big Tech is to track everyone unless you tell them otherwise (again, their T&Cs probably allow them to get away with this).
Consequently, YouTube says we have a ‘signed-out YouTube search history’ and a ‘signed-out YouTube watch history’ on each device.
While I know you can use a private- or incognito-mode tab, you should be asking yourself: why on earth should I, given how I expect their website to work?
It’s only after clearing all of that that you get a truer list of recommended videos.
As I have said before, I really still don’t get why people want to keep using these unethical firms’ services. If Google disappeared overnight, it’d take us a week to find replacements.
Above: If phones were sentient beings, it probably is a bit mean to have the old phone take a photo of its successor.
After a drop to the ground (and by that I mean the hard floor at the local Pak ’n’ Save) produced lines on the screen of my old Meizu M2 Note, I decided to upgrade to the M6 Note. The familiarity of the Flyme interface was one big reason, though it’s only now, after 12 hours of fiddling, that I’m only slightly happy with how it all went.
The experience was quite unlike the previous purchase, which went incredibly smoothly. The trouble seems to stem from Meizu offering a New Zealand-specific version of the M6 Note, model M721L.
Why didn’t I buy it from a Chinese vendor like last time (when there were no New Zealand retailers)? It seems that all the Ebay vendors were selling global editions of the phone, too, so for the sake of a few dollars, I wanted the support of a local vendor. If there wasn’t much difference between a global phone and a Kiwi one, should it matter? After all, this phone is on Flyme 6·1·4·1G (G for global), and according to one page on the Meizu forums, all I needed to do was download a Chinese Flyme OS patch and it should upgrade and change accordingly.
Problem no. 1: it doesn’t work. It might have worked for one user, but every patch I tried (and they take nearly two hours to download from Meizu’s website) ended with a ‘Firmware corrupt’ (if you were lucky to even get an error message) despite the ZIP files all verifying correctly.
Resigned with the fact I could not turn the M6 Note into a Chinese one, I had to root it to remove the Google bollocks.
Problem no. 2: Meizu has taken away the easy access to rooting the phone. This method does not work, either, at least not this model. After about six hours, I stumbled on the solution: you can follow the above method but switch your phone to Easy Mode first.
Once rooted, I began removing anything Google, for reasons followers of this blog know well.
After downloading the familiar apps, I did encounter some issues. First, the Chinese app store and the global one have different software. Weibo is an international version, for instance. The default music and video apps are much crappier for export, missing the Chinese content (which sometimes included international TV series), and going straight to the local directories.
We do live in an age where the Chinese versions of software can be better than the western ones. Indeed, it was during my experimenting with my previous Meizu phone that I discovered that Chinese designers were creating more visually pleasing and user-friendly apps than their occidental counterparts, at least among the programs I needed.
While there’s obviously a jump up in terms of speed (I bought the 64 Gbyte version) images seem to render duller on the screen.
Then there were the usual problems of photo and music directories from the transferred SD card not appearing in order, which isn’t uncommon.
While I’ve yet to give the phone the acid test (daily use, taking photos and videos), I haven’t really been wowed by the experience of setting up. It was far easier in 2016, with better results. It’s going to be a useful phone, and I thank Charlotte at PB Technologies Wellington for her advice, but if I had the time, I would have waited till a friend went to China and asked them to bring a Google-free one back.
PS., December 4: Solution to getting the Chinese version of Weibo: since my old phone wasn’t completely dead (and will remain in service as long as the screen holds up), I went to its App Store, which is Chinese, got the URL for Weibo there (through sharing it), visited it on a browser on my new phone, and installed from there.
