How to Avoid Billionaire Trolls

Argument analysis flowchart
Figure 1 from Cook, Ellerton, and Kinkead 2018. CC BY 3.0

The biggest trolls in the world are also the richest. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp fame and Elon Musk of Tesla fame are trolling us online and we shouldn’t let them get away with it. Zuckerberg trolls us by censoring what we see and selecting what propaganda enters our screens, other tech giants do the same. Musk, on the other hand, trolls us by getting leagues of fanboys to defend his union-busting, tax avoiding, and questionable health practices. Let’s be clear: the billionaires who are troll like this are doing it for their own profit at our expense.

Don’t feed the trolls, feed your mind. Here are some tips to eliminate billionaire trolls from your news.

Thankfully some tools are still leaving you in control:

  1. Blogs are still out there. I had 50,000 visitors last month. You can still use RSS readers. You can subscribe to blogs like mine by email.

  2. I have recently discovered the fantastic substack community.

  3. Telegram is pretty decent as a secured news aggregator. My blog has a telegram channel. Nobody needs to know what you are reading.

  4. Twitter has a hidden feature (twitter list) which lets you subscribe to specific individuals and only see content from these individuals.

  5. DuckDuckGo is a fantastic search engine which mostly gives me what I am looking for instead of what it thinks I should find.

Read more.

New FIlter for Oil Spills

You most likely know about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that is seemingly never-ending and assumed you’d never see it mentioned on a website about good news. Well, it turns out enterprising people from the University of Pittsburgh have used the spill to test out their new polymer-based filter that successfully cleans water.

Don’t forget that one way to prevent oil spills is to use less oil in your own life.

Here’s a video (might want to turn down you speakers):

And here’s a press release from the university:

Gao’s filter hinges on a polymer that is both hydrophilic-it bonds with the hydrogen molecules in water-and oleophobic, meaning that it repels oil. When the polymer is applied to an ordinary cotton filter, it allows water to pass through but not oil. The filter is produced by submerging the cotton in a liquid solution containing the polymer then drying it in an oven or in open air, Gao explained.

For the massive slick off the U.S. Gulf Coast, Gao envisions large, trough-shaped filters that could be dragged through the water to capture surface oil. The oil could be recovered and stored and the filter reused. Current cleanup methods range from giant containment booms and absorbent skimmers to controlled fires and chemical dispersants with questionable effects on human health and the environment.

Read more.

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