Tag: technology
Elon Musk

Did Elon Musk Wreck Twitter Because He's So Lonesome?

Why does Elon Musk have to be the center of everyone's attention every day? Has he no hobbies? Is running an industrial empire less than a full-time job? Perhaps he's just lonely. Perhaps social media is not filling the need for human companionship — as many a depressed adolescent can explain.

At times the richest man on the planet, Musk certainly has options. He's already done remarkable things, such as supercharge the age of the electric vehicle and send rockets into space. Yet he chooses to pick public fights that offend his customers, while having negligible effect on public policy.

There was no business reason for his buying Twitter other than wanting to control a galactic megaphone. OK. But then he destroys its usefulness by letting a sewer of disinformation mix in with the good stuff. And he attacks the valuable creators who were filling up his feed for free.

Makes no sense unless the Twitter thing is a massively expensive form of psychotherapy to treat a lonely man's need for connection.

Musk seemed to be operating under the illusion that the children could never find another place to post their short messages. Mark Zuckerberg over at Meta, home of Facebook, is showing him otherwise.

Zuck's new social media site, Threads, is now trucking Twitter's user base to its feed. Meanwhile, Twitter ad revenue in the second quarter was down about 40 percent from a year ago, and that was before the Threads launch.

As an exhausting exhibitionist, Musk has company among the Silicon Valley CEOs and tech bros in playing the contrarian game. That means uttering controversial hooey meant, it seems, to set them apart from lesser beings plodding through reality.

Not only did Musk make Twitter worthless as a source of actionable information, he turned off users and advertisers alike by shooting off his mouth. He went so far as to traffic in an antisemitic-flavored reference to George Soros. It's pathetic how unoriginal that was.

The last straw was limiting the number of posts users could read each day. "If you think about it," Ashley Mayer, a venture capitalist, tweeted, "Elon Musk is the greatest PR person of all time. He has us rooting for Meta!?!'

Unlike the other challenges to Twitter that didn't get far, Meta has managed to create an easy-to-use site, many of whose features are familiar to Twitter users. And Meta could plug Threads into its enormous Instagram following. Musk is suing Meta for allegedly stealing Twitter employees and trade secrets. Meta says that's not the case.

Psychiatrists are seeing a surge in drug addiction among financial hotshots, in part to fight off loneliness. A good number, The Wall Street Journal reports, "turn to addiction to mask the reality that achieving their goals — like launching their own fund or making $100 million — can still leave them feeling empty."

Even if they want to develop genuine friendships, the billionaires can't be sure who really likes them, who is only after their money. As for intimate relationships, Musk has had two wives, one of them twice. Now he has none.

One would expect Musk to have better things to do than pursue grudge matches with a tech writer. Sure, Kara Swisher is the dean of tech writers, but is Musk so thin-skinned as to send her an email calling her an "a—-hole"? Apparently, yes.

Funny, but Swisher used to be one of his confidants. Now even she seems to be off Musk's "friend" list, though she's getting great mileage out of his attacks on her. As for Zuckerberg's Twitter replacement, all Threads needs to do now is pick up the tweeters left shipwrecked by an evidently troubled man.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Tesla Sued By Employee Over Sexual Harassment Allegations

Tesla Sued By Employee Over Sexual Harassment Allegations

Former production associate Jessica Barraza filed a lawsuit against Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) over sexual harassment she allegedly was subjected to at the automaker’s Fremont factory in California. She claims that the toxic working atmosphere led her to take a medical leave due to anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Q3 2021 hedge fund letters, conferences and more AllegationsAs reported by The Washington Post, Barraza, 38, says she was the target of catcalling and aggressive physical touching. She claims that “co-workers would describe her as having a ‘Coke bottle figure,’ an ‘onion boot...

Five Tech-Related Ways To Cut Back On Your Energy Consumption

Five Tech-Related Ways To Cut Back On Your Energy Consumption

Many of us already know how to cut back on our energy usage to help the environment. But unnecessarily high energy usage can also be a problem for your utility bills. On average, the annual electricity consumption for a U.S. customer was 10,9772 kWh, or 914 kWh per month. That's a lot of energy you may not actually be using.

From energy vampires to inconsistent tech habits, there are plenty of reasons why your energy usage may be higher than usual. To help you fight back against your energy bills and shrink down your carbon footprint a little more, here are a few simple ways you can cut back on your electricity with a little help from your tech devices.

Unplug Your Electronics

When it comes to using your electronics, it's understandable to want to keep your battery as high as possible. You don't want to lose important work, after all. But keeping your devices plugged in once the battery is at 100 percent isn't the best idea. In fact, it might actually be doing your devices more harm than good. When you keep your tech plugged in, you can overfill the battery. Because power is still connected to your device, once the battery has reached 100 percent, the power is redirected to the rest of your device, which can damage it. You're essentially damaging your devices while also wasting power you don't need.

Unplug Your Cords

Now that you've unplugged your charged devices, it's just as important to unplug the cords from the wall. While it might seem more convenient to leave your laptop's cord plugged into the wall so you can simply plug in your device when you need to, the disconnected cord can actually create an energy vampire in your home. Your cords don't need to be connected to anything to draw power from the wall. In fact, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, idle cords and electronics pull the same amount of power as 12 power plants in a single year.

Stay Connected To Your WiFi Network

When it comes to the Internet, you typically want to stay connected without any interruptions. That's why infrastructure like GroupCast exists to provide connectivity without a single point of failure. However, it's actually better to stay connected to your own WiFi network as much as possible rather than making the switch over to your LTE network while you're on your smartphone. The reason for this is that phones and other devices actually consume less battery power when they're connected to WiFi compared to 4G/LTE.

Turn Off Devices When Not In Use

Many of us will put our devices in sleep mode rather than completely turning them off. While sleep mode doesn't use very much energy (approximately two watts of electricity for a laptop and five watts for a desktop), it can still drain your tech to keep your devices on all the time. As you use your computer, for instance, you're collecting cached copies of attachments, cookies, and running several applications. It's recommended to turn your computer off at least once a week to give your tech some rest.

Turn Off Background Apps

While some phones need to be charged more often than others, it might actually be your applications that are causing your phone to lose its battery. The average smartphone draws about 3.68 watts of power from your outlet while it's charging. Even when it's fully charged, your phone will still pull 2.24 watts from the outlet (see our point above about unplugging your devices). To keep your phone charged for longer and to save on energy usage, consider powering down your apps. Games like Minecraft, which sold over 200 million copies, and Animal Crossing, which sold over 31 million copies, can be closed out while not in use.

When it comes to saving on energy costs, many of us tend to focus on turning off the light and lowering our thermostat. However, our tech devices and how we maintain them can also be a major player in how we're wasting energy. By following the tips above, you can help to keep your energy usage down while keeping your tech devices in great shape, too.

New Federal Money Will Lock In Next Wave Of Voting Technology

New Federal Money Will Lock In Next Wave Of Voting Technology

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

A bill awaiting the president’s signature with $425 million in new funding for voting machine and infrastructure upgrades has drawn mixed responses in elections circles—victory claims, tempered praise, and renewed worry.

The federal funds build on $380 million allocated in 2018 for cybersecurity, which included training state and local election staff, modernizing state voter registration systems, and joining a federal program that constantly monitors election system computers for attacks that could disrupt or corrupt voting.

Election administrators welcome any new funds to upgrade their systems, as congressional appropriations are a historic rarity. But the appropriations bill omits new security requirements, even as the new funds will be spent on voting machines and systems to be used for many years.

“Let’s be very clear about this. More money for election security is good, but it is *not* a substitute for passing election security reform legislation that Senate GOP leadership has been blocking all year,” tweeted Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat and Intelligence Committee vice chair.

Election transparency activists are particularly skeptical—not because many states and counties need new and better voting systems, but because federal funds will be helping to buy expensive and problematic systems where computer-generated ballot summary cards replace hand-marked paper ballots.

“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” wrote lawyer-turned-activist Jennifer Cohn in the New York Review of Books. “Voting machines that make it difficult or impossible to detect hacking can leave voters susceptible not only to stolen elections, but also to false claims of election-rigging. That is a high price to pay for unnecessary electronic pens.”

What concerns her and like-minded activists is not just that new ballot-casting processes may lead to ballot-counting controversies, but also that the new voting machines—called ballot-marking devices—take longer for people to vote. Many states and counties will debut these systems in 2020’s presidential primaries and use them again in November’s state and federal elections.

“All of the BMDs [ballot-marking devices] have led to much longer lines,” said Susan Pynchon, Florida Fair Elections Coalition executive director, citing delays in recent elections in Georgia and Pennsylvania. “It’s a civil rights issue. People waiting for a voting machine instead of a [marking a ballot in a voting booth]… I don’t know how many people will leave.”

When Michigan debuted BMDs in its 2018 primaries, up to 25 percent of the machines in some precincts jammed during the first hours of voting, the Michigan Election Reform Alliance’s Jan BenDor recalled.

In other 2019 debuts and test runs, other issues surfaced, Voting Booth has reported. Computer touch screens recorded wrong votes. There were sudden voting machine shutdowns. In one Pennsylvania county, the vote-counting software omitted most of one candidate’s votes at the tabulation stage.

The new federal appropriation allows states and counties to spend funds on new voting systems as long as they create a paper record of the votes cast. However, the legislation ducks the question over what constitutes a paper record: a hand-marked ballot or ballot summary card that’s printed out.

A Case Study: North Carolina

Thus the debate over what’s the best record of a voter’s intent continues. In voting, there are many stages in the process and debate about the fairness of those steps. But the controversy over what constitutes the best record of a voter’s intent directly affects how the most disputed results are resolved.

With the president’s impeachment pending, as well as an incumbent president who routinely says that votes have been stolen unless he wins, introducing problematic ballots could increase the risks of a post-November crisis.

However, decisions on what new voting machines to buy are often made at the local level—far below the national political landscape or evidence trail debates. There, sales representatives for a handful of voting system manufacturers, or their subcontractors, have been pushing local officials to buy their wares.

In North Carolina, where a third of the state’s counties are poised to install new voting systems before the March 3 presidential primary, the nation’s biggest voting machine vendor, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), recently told statewide election officials that it could not deliver enough BMDs (its ExpressVote model) to satisfy some big counties’ orders.

ES&S suggested that those counties buy a more expensive model—one that combines the ballot-marking device with a vote-count tabulator—and sought approval from the state Board of Elections (BOE). The approval was needed because the board’s rules require it to evaluate and certify new systems.

The substitute has a different computer operating system, modified software, nearly 90,000 additional lines of computer code and stacked ballot summary cards in chronological order—which could identify the voter, noted Kevin Skoglund, chief technologist for Citizens for Better Elections, in a letter to one state BOE member who later voted against the change.

It is substantively different and embodied what activists who oppose BMDs contend: that there are too many layers of opaque software between a voter’s fingers and the record of their vote—layers that can be altered by hackers or political insiders. They were upset that North Carolina’s state BOE was poised to subvert its rules to accommodate a major vendor.

“Administratively approving a new system with different hardware, software and functionality would negate the entire certification process,” said Lynn Bernstein, an aerospace engineer who founded Transparent Elections North Carolina. “Legislators wisely put into place strict certification laws that help protect our votes, and circumventing this process damages the integrity of our elections.”

But the BOE—with a chair appointed by a Democratic governor in a state with a recent record of GOP-led voter suppression—sided with ES&S, even though it heard from other activists that acquiring hand-marked ballot systems could save counties millions. (Managing volumes of paper ballots poses other challenges, but it is indisputably linked to human actions—and is less costly because far fewer computerized voting stations are needed.)

“We have projected that in the 26 counties that were mainly using the iVotronic DREs [the current system], about $30 million could be saved if these counties were to go with hand-marked paper ballots counted on the ES&S DS200 Digital Scanner and the ADA-compliant AutoMark,” wrote John Brakey, director of Audit-USA, in a letter to the BOE.

Brakey’s analysis was not speculative, but supported by a remarkable and unexpected development in a county with a deep civil rights history—one where lunch-counter protests in 1960 helped spark a national movement.

In Guilford County, where the state’s NAACP chapter president sits on its election board, commissioners approved the system referenced in Brakey’s letter and found that they had more than $5.8 million left in their budget. Those funds were then used to raise the wages of county workers to $15 an hour—including 500 school bus drivers—and to replace public school heating and cooling systems.

“It is practical and it is reasonable,” said Rev. Dr. T. Anthony Spearman, the Guilford BOE member and state NAACP president. “When vendors are given oversight of elections, the cost will always be prohibitive. When the people have oversight, they will be more secure.”

2020 and Beyond

The infusion of $425 million in new federal funds will still not be sufficient to update voting systems across the country. The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School estimates that cost at $2.15 billion over the next five years. But the new federal subsidies will undoubtedly help local officials who are still trying to pay for costly new voting systems.

In Alamance County, North Carolina, county commissioners recently held a hearing and approved borrowing $1.1 million to buy BMDs from ES&S. It is too early to tell if counties like Alamance would see local costs shrink as the new federal funds are disbursed through election agencies.

But Alamance County was not inclined to return to hand-marked ballots, its elections director, Kathy Holland, had told local reporters. She worried that voters would be unfamiliar with marking paper ballots after using touch-screen voting machines for many years. She also said that poll workers would watch for any voters who walked with the ballot summary cards instead of putting them in a scanner. (That happened in Travis County, Texas—home to the state capital of Austin—this past November, delaying the vote count.)

Holland told Voting Booth that ES&S had assured her that there were sufficient BMD machines to fill her county’s order, when asked if the supply issues elsewhere in the state would affect Alamance County.

These rationales and decisions frustrated activists like North Carolina’s Bernstein and Audit-USA’s Brakey, who are posing new arguments to persuade officials to buy voting systems that use hand-marked ballots—and are more secure.

“They could have saved $1.1 million by going with HMPBs [hand-marked paper ballots],” Brakey said in an email, referring to Alamance County.

Nonetheless, local decisions like these will determine what voting looks like across many states for years to come, as voting machinery historically gets replaced every 15 or so years. That’s why the latest infusion of $425 million in federal funds has drawn mixed reactions.

On one hand, officials and allies in policy and vendor circles welcome any new appropriation. On the other hand, activists and others seeking better ways to safeguard the process and resolve vote-counting disputes are seeing missed opportunities.

“When will we learn?” tweeted Ion Sancho, in response to these trends.

Sancho was supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida, for 28 years, was named technical adviser to the 2000 Florida presidential recount by the state’s Supreme Court and found flaws in electronic voting machines in 2005.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.