Will you panic or embrace the new reality?

COVID-19 represents an unparalleled challenge on a human and economic level. So, will you panic or embrace the new reality?

Panic named after those sheep that the ancient Greek god Pan loved to scare. Panic is a sudden sensation of fear, which is so strong as to dominate or prevent reason and logical thinking. Panic in social psychology is considered infectious since it can spread to a multitude of people and those affected are expected to act irrationally consequently.

Once panic takes over, it is too late to act; Your local store will have no more toilet paper, nor any tomato sauce…

2020 United States presidential election

So the future of the United States is going to come down to:

• A 73-year-old psychopath who rambles incoherently and lies constantly vs

• A 77-year-old who rambles and sometimes loses his place or

• A 78-year-old liberal who just had a heart attack

Well, the youth in USA must feel so inspired...

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The actual President Donald Trump will receive the Republican Party’s nomination for president, and his reelection campaign against his eventual Democratic challenger is already well underway. Here are the key priorities for Trump’s reelection campaign:

-Remind voters of achievements from first 10 years in office.
-Renew broadly popular campaign tactics like humiliating Ted Cruz and his family.
-Just the right amount of God.
-Expand electoral map beyond GOP’s usual voter-suppression strongholds.
-Appeal to immigrant communities by saying he was just kidding.
-Massive campaign of graft, nepotism, and conflicts of interest has worked so far.
-Check if anyone’s compiled credible evidence of corruption to use against Joe Biden.
-Maintain steady flow of marginally related words during speeches.
-Tout ability to work across aisle with Democrats on raising defense budgets, hurting American workers, and -confirming Supreme Court justices.
-Try not to take whole thing too seriously and just have fun with it.

The corona-virus & Milan

Milan is not controlled by the military police, nor repressed by some internet censorship or run by an orange bozo. Italians have a working and free health system, opposite USA and most other “superpowers”. The Milanese are obviously worried, but continues to love, eat and watch football. Of course, most major activities are currently cancelled to reduce the risk of virus spread. The authorities are dealing with it, yes in a Italian way.

However the corona-virus is very contagious, so is it smart to lock-down a region, a city or a cruise ship?

To assess the contagion, we speak of the “R Zero” of the virus. This means how many people get the virus if you put a sick person in a room of 100 people. The zero R:
- The flu is 1.3
- Corona-virus is 2.2
- Rubella is 6

The average incubation time for the corona-virus is 6 days, which means that if we place a sick individual in a room of 100 people, we will have:
- Day 6: 2.2 patients + the first patients = 3.2
- On day 12: the 2.2 will each infect 2.2 people => 3.2 + 2.2 + 2.2 = 7.6 patients
- On day 18: 24 patients = 24% of the population

In the example carried out by Dr Phippe Devos on the Belgium territory with existing Belgian hospitals. You would end-up with:

• 30,000 beds for 117,000 people to be hospitalized.

• 1,400 beds for 52,000 people to be admitted to intensive care.

The press and the Italian politicians managed to launch a snowball of hysterical deductions and overreactions that plunged the country into a coma. Don't worry, Italy is just taking a beauty-sleep, Italy will rise this spring in the sun with more love, football and fantastic culture.

Piazza del Duomo, Milan

S’aimer comme on se quitte

Deux jours dans la vie des amoureux. Le premier parce que tout s’y joue, le dernier parce que tout s’y perd. A chacun de deviner ce qui s’est passé entre-temps. Cette semaine, Sarah, 32 ans, témoigne.

Premier jour

Nos enfants font la même activité en dehors de l’école. On se croise souvent, et nos conjoints s’entendent bien. Je suis mariée depuis dix ans avec un homme dont je suis tombée amoureuse au cours d’un job d’été dans un parc d’attractions. On s’est suivis, on s’est mis en couple, et on a eu deux enfants. Notre mariage va bien, suffisamment pour que je m’autorise à aller voir ailleurs.

L’année d’avant, on en avait un peu parlé avec mon mari. A demi-mots, on avait évoqué ces désirs pour d’autres, et que si ça n’était que physique, ça n’était pas si grave. J’y avais vu un accord tacite, une autorisation à chercher chez quelqu’un d’autre ce que mon mari, déprimé, ne me donne plus sexuellement. Je le sollicite, il reste de marbre, et je me couche frustrée et fâchée.

Je cherche dans ma tête avec qui je pourrais vivre cette expérience. Je ne suis pas une aventurière de bars ni de sites de rencontres, alors je repense à ce père que je croise au cours de musique de mes enfants. Conservatoires, parcs, on se voit de temps en temps, et je sens dans son regard que je lui plais. Je sens cette petite marque d’envie, cette sur-attention qu’on n’accorde pas à ses amis, ou aux gens qui font simplement partie du paysage. Un soir, on dîne tous les quatre, sa femme, mon mari et nous. A la fin de la soirée, le manteau sur les épaules, planté au milieu de l’entrée, il s’exclame : « On a vraiment passé un bon moment ! » Cette spontanéité – c’est rare les gens qui disent sur le moment qu’ils sont contents – m’a touchée.

On avait parlé d’une chanson au cours de ce repas : il me l’envoie. Son intérêt se confirme ce jour où j’ai envie de le voir, de sortir, et je lui écris, et à sa femme aussi, pour savoir si l’un des deux est disponible pour aller boire un verre. « Où tu veux, fais-moi rêver », me répond-il instantanément alors que son épouse n’est pas libre. On se retrouve dans un bar où la soirée s’étire, 1 heure, 2 heures du matin, l’établissement va maintenant fermer. On est dehors, il fait bon, c’est la fin du printemps, je lui propose de « marcher un peu ensemble en vélo » – ce qui n’a aucun sens. Je me retrouve très loin de mon chemin pour rentrer chez moi, et au moment de faire demi-tour, on finit par s’arrêter sous un lampadaire.

« J’ai très envie de t’embrasser » m’a-t-il dit, le visage illuminé par le spot électrique. J’ai dit oui, on l’a fait, il s’est reculé : « Tu sais dans quel contexte on est tous les deux ? » « Oui je sais, on verra bien. » Sur le moment, je vis ça comme une libération, un soulagement, comme si j’avais fait exploser la bulle de monogamie dans laquell j’etais coincee.

Burning Man and Fly Ranch

Land Art Generator Initiative and Burning Man Project have partnered to launch a multi-disciplinary design challenge—LAGI 2020 Fly Ranch—that will create the foundational infrastructure of Fly Ranc

To host residencies, gatherings, and projects at Fly Ranch, the site will need infrastructure. We could bring generators, bottled water, packaged food, tents, and dispose of our waste off-site, but why would we do that when we have the opportunity to mobilize the desert-tested ingenuity of the Burning Man community and the inspiration of a greater creative culture to build scalable and sustainable solutions in one of the harshest climates in the world?

The tech industry doesn’t intoxicate us... or?

Though activists, academics, reporters, and regulators had sent up warning flares for years, it wasn’t until quite recently that the era of enchantment with Silicon Valley ended. The list of scandals—over user privacy and security, over corporate surveillance and data collection, over fraud and foreign propaganda and algorithmic bias, to name a few—was as unending as your Instagram feed. There were hearings, resignations, investigations, major new regulations in Europe, and calls for new laws.

Even though the Silicon Valley companies now regularly faces scandals in which it has violated its users’ or workers’ trust. Privacy people care a lot about misinformation, but misinformation people might not be so worried about privacy. Almost everyone distrusts Peter Thiel. And some people don’t have a problem with Amazon or Apple or even Facebook at all—which is why we included dissents for many of the top companies on our list.

Happy New Year folks!

The world never changes quite the way you expect, but soon this year and a decade have come to an end.

Disruption, streaming, recurrent payment… has become the overused and abused buzzword together with our loved smartphones following the cash-generating clicks, and ridiculous valuations for companies that were really good at hiding how little they actually had to offer.

We also experienced the arty shredding masterpieces and $185’000 bananas. Money still create such good taste. We faced all the different Ponzi schemes from Madoff to Fyre Festival. And this is the decade of fake: fake presidents, fake news, fake Burning Man and so many fake tits and fake that. Now we have political-immigration, economical-immigration and ecological-immigration, who cares about war & murder migration …

The “Free Tech” that everybody wants!

Back in 2010, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg caused a minor uproar by suggesting that “privacy was passé”, well today you don’t need a backup anymore. Just call your device producer, telco or government spy agency, and they know where your lost file is.

During this decade we saw the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and the Hong Kong movements and so many more beautiful dreams and democratic processes crushed. Then came President Trump by raping USA with “Make America Fake Again”, later with his new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who just killed Net-neutrality. Well tech wise don’t worry, you don’t have to do anything, just relax; Facebook will elect your new government. Alexa will educate your kids, while Google drives you to the nearest Saudi Embassy regarding your new book. In many ways, today’s politics are reflective of a world attempting to hide its problems from itself, with alternative facts and fake news.

And what about the new weather and Greta!

A year ago, she sat in front of my government and Klimatstrejkerna, making the headlines in the local news. Today Greta Thunberg is Time's “Person of the Year”, but one of the most powerful women is still a girl. Funny that Presidents and CEOs don’t remember histories like David and Goliath. Why do we call David an underdog? Well, we call him an underdog because he's a kid, a little kid, and Goliath is this big, strong giant. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Does any of this matter?

Naa, just revel in New Year’s Eve; cheer with good friends! Have a bottle of Champagne or two. And, this year, while ringing in a new decade, forget for a moment that we’re overpopulated, soon with no food, having Kim & Donald running the “mentally unstable man with nuclear weapon” competition, so let’s enjoy it while we can!

Me, I did spend most of 2019 at Fawlty Towers (I always felt sorry for Basil, no one believed him), and taking care of my dying dad, great occupation zigzagging on the European autobahns with an 84 year old, recently I did 29’700 km in 3 month.

Before 2019, I worked to live, not lived to work and traveled our blue planet playing Don Draper for 5 years besides running around in deserts as in Game of Thrones with a camera at different Burning Man, what a great occupation. Remember to start your day with a clean heart; end your day with a dirty mind.
More important, during 2019 I got to know my father, who he really was, where he came from and I got the chance to say goodbye to him. Basically, to understand who I am!

Happy New Year folks, 2020 will rock harder than ever.

PS - I promise there was no Russian interference in the processes of написать this txt.

deepfakes

Misinformation on the internet is an everyone problem. To combat it, publishers, social media and people need to find new ways of working together.

In a time of heightened political polarization and widespread social media use, the prevalence of misinformation online is a persistent problem, with increasingly serious effects on elections and the stability of governments around the world. I will put my Facebook account and most of my my social networks on hold. Moving the conversation to a safer platform such as “signal” for the moment, and being selective to what news to event, to read or look at.

There is a gap between the information news organizations possess and the subset of that information to which their users have access. That’s especially true when that media travels around the internet, largely stripped of its original context.

Especially on Facebook, where trolls and bad actors have established many tools for misleading people, generally using authentic photos and videos as source material. Some of the techniques are simple: recycling old images, selective cropping and editing, slowing down and speeding up videos, and so on. Other techniques are more sophisticated, involving the creation of “synthetic” media such as deepfakes.

Regardless of the complexity of these actions, they contribute to misinformation, extremist propaganda and undemocratic governmental changes, but in being designed to go viral, many people unwittingly spread it within their own Facebook networks.

If you believe in democracy one should see The Great Hack. It is about the Trump campaign, the Leave.EU campaign and many other reckless electoral adventures all over the world and their connection with Cambridge Analytica, the British data research company that cunningly harvested information from millions of Facebook users and their friends via an innocuous-seeming “personality” questionnaire.

I’m a father and I am a son!

I’m a father and I am a son!

Today it’s a dark day, my very dear friends lost their 18 year old son, and my dear friend in Italy lost her father. I have a father and I have a son!

These events consumed all the energy in my body and dropped me with a broken heart in the middle of a room for hours. And I realized that the past and future are real illusions, life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, which is what there is and all there is.

Today I know a mother, a father and a daughter who lost all there is.

Apollo 11 - 50 years later

Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon on July 20, 1969, at 20:18 UTC. Armstrong became the first human to step onto the lunar surface six hours after landing on July 21 at 02:56:15 UTC.

Today it was 50 years ago, I was 8 years old. I remember very well that night; it was the first time my mother let me watch TV all night long. Since then, I constantly look up to the stars ...

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