Monday, November 23, 2009: Fill & Download for Free

Monday, November 23, 2009 in the US, UK, and Canada.Source: iTunes http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-fame-monster/id340028092

I started my Facebook account on Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 4:05pm CDT. I deactivated it on Tuesday, November 25, 2014 at 4:03pm CST.When I deactivated it a little over two months ago, it was something I had been considering for several months, maybe a year, before that. I had read all the articles about the reasons why one should disconnect from Facebook. They were good, solid reasons for disconnecting, but they weren't my reasons.Frankly, my reasons were perhaps trivial in comparison to the reasons those articles gave, but they are indeed what drove me to quit.A curated experienceOne of the greatest sources of frustration for me was the way I wanted to experience Facebook, versus the way I actually did. All I wanted out of Facebook was for them to provide me the posts of all my friends and liked pages, in the order that their posts occurred. One would not think this would be a difficult thing to achieve. But for a long time, I was fighting to keep "Most Recent" as my default viewing method instead of "Top Stories".Even once this was fixed, and I no longer had to check to make sure my default choice had spontaneously switched again, I still encountered the problem of Facebook not showing me every status. I don't even recall how many times I would see a status from two or three days ago that I hadn't seen when it was new, and the only reason I was seeing it now was because a second friend had commented on it and brought it to the top of the list.This is because Facebook automatically curates all the posts, meaning it shows you only what their software believes you will find important. Or sometimes, they're just performing an experiment on you - http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-689003-users-emotions-for-science/InvisibilityThe flip side of your feed being curated is, if you don't update your status very often (for instance, because you tend not to do anything exciting), you might get curated out of your friends' feed too. If you don't write a lot of status updates, you could turn invisible; and it turns into a spiraling problem.A lot of work for introvertsAll in all, I figured out that managing a Facebook account felt like a lot of effort to me, for not a lot of payoff. I was sort of envious of those people for whom social media comes naturally (For example, George Takei had, and I assume still has, an excellent feed). They automatically knew what to say to put the best spin on their lives. They knew how to say things that drew likes and comments to their status updates. People wanted to follow their pages.But to me, a natural introvert, it just seemed like a lot of work. I never knew if anything I had to say was going to be of any interest to anyone. As it is, I don't watch a lot of TV or share a lot interest in things in the media that most people do, apparently. And especially in the last couple of years, it has also seemed like Facebook was becoming more about photos than text-filled status updates. I'm no photographer to begin with anyway, and half the time I forget my phone has a camera. So even when I'm doing something interesting, I never think to get a picture, because I'm always too involved in whatever it is I'm doing.Seeing the dark sideI discovered that there were a lot of people I liked in real life, that had pretty shocking beliefs that I would have had no idea about without Facebook. Some of them I fully believed to be good people (and still do, mostly), but discovered they supported crazy ideas and horrible political candidates.And if there was a major event going on that brought out polarizing ideas, my friends were often the most polarized of them all. You know all those people who yell on the internet in comment sections like at Yahoo and YouTube and Reddit, and generally make the internet a sad place to be from time to time? News flash: Apparently, all those trolls also have Facebook accounts, and if the story is emotional enough, those trolls will yell on your Facebook page, too.The final strawThe day before I quit Facebook for good, the story of whatever was going on in Ferguson, Missouri was all over the place. I logged in and discovered that virtually every status update had something about it. And since it was such a polarizing story, everyone was yelling at everyone else about it. It so happened that there was something going on that day I wanted to talk about that was positive news in my life, but all I saw was yelling about the events in Arnold, Missouri. I knew that if I posted what I wanted to post, I was going to get drowned out. No one was going to pay the least attention to what I was saying.This was my last status update on Facebook, from Monday, November 24, 2014 at 11:02pm CST:I think I'm done with FB for a few days until y'all calm down. If you need to reach me, PM me. As long as you don't insist on talking about that. #YouKnowWhatIMeanThe next day, at 4:03pm CST, I pulled the plug.Looking back on itWhen I signed up in 2009, I had no idea what being on Facebook would be like. I had avoided signing up for Friendster or MySpace prior to Facebook's debut on the social media scene, despite the nagging of friends and coworkers. It was only when my wife (who had never broached the subject of social media to me before) told me I just had to sign up for Facebook, that I actually broke down and did so.I was naive. I had no idea what I was getting into. And even once I signed up, I didn't understand why anyone felt it was so important. It turned out to be five-plus years of digital social awkwardness that I held onto out of habit, and the unspoken belief that this was the way to keep in touch with everyone.Would I sign up for Facebook again?This may sound strange, but I have considered it. If I did, I would start from scratch, doing things completely differently.I would be much more careful with how I populated my friends list. 95+% of the high school classmates would not be there - I realized that I didn't like them back in high school, so why would I include them in my goings-on 30 years later?Likewise with about 95% of my current friends. They are still my friends, but I don't want to know what they think politically. I am apparently cut from a different cloth than they are in that regard, so everyone will have to settle for seeing me around town in person if they want to talk to me.I would add more pages of topics I like. I used to stay away from them, knowing what a diverse audience would be seeing what I clicked "like" on and so forth; but I think I would stop caring quite so much once I trimmed the list.I would friend/follow more people that I don't actually know in person. In addition to my reasons above, what is the point of adding someone you already know in person as a friend? If you know them, can't you just go visit them or send them an email? People you don't know in person, but whose statuses you like, friending/following them is the only way to find out what is going on with them. And if you decide later you don't like them after all, there are no in-person awkward consequences if you unfriend them later.My profile would have as little personal information on it as I could possibly get away with. It sort of did anyway, for the most part, but I would get it down to the bare minimum.

How intelligent is Xi Jinping? Let’s ask a real genius: “People say ‘you don’t like China’. No, I love them, but their leaders are much smarter than our leaders and we can’t sustain ourselves like that. It’s like having the New England Patriots and Tom Brady play your high school football team. President Donald J. Trump.Henry Kissinger said, “The Chinese are smarter than us so it’s best to tell them the truth at the outset because they’ll figure it out anyway” and Xi is smart enough to run China. But let’s see if we can zoom in closer.Let’s ask the US Embassy in Beijing, who talked to one of his boyhood friends:U.S. EMBASSY C O N F I D E N T I A LSECTION 01 OF 06 BEIJING 003128SIPDIS. 2009 November 16, 12:20 (Monday)SUBJECT: PORTRAIT OF VICE PRESIDENT XI JINPING: ‘AMBITIOUS SURVIVOR’ OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION .Unlike those in the social circles the professor ran in, Xi Jinping could not talk about women and movies and did not drink or do drugs. Xi was considered of only average intelligence, the professor said, and not as smart as the professor's peer group. Women thought Xi was ‘boring’.Xi knows how very corrupt China is and is repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveau riche, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution, the professor stated. The professor speculated that if Xi were to become the Party General Secretary, he would likely aggressively attempt to address these evils, perhaps at the expense of the new moneyed class.Let’s try stats. As the Embassy report says, Xi’s not as smart as the professor’s peer group, but a full professor at Peking University needs an IQ of 140–160. How common are such people? Steve Hsu reckons there are 300,000 Chinese with an IQ of 160 (there are 10,000 Americans) and ninety percent of them will join the civil service. IQ is an excellent predictor of administrative success and I’m guessing that the Steering Committee average IQ is 140+ (enough for a STEM PhD) and Xi holds his own with them.Psychologically: Government service, not money, has been the sole entree to China’s elite since the time of Christ and class blind Confucian examinations have transferred political power to the brightest men for millennia because, as James Thompson observes, “Cognitive ability seems to have the strongest causal effect on the honesty of a society”. Smart people tend to be honest and Xi has such reputation for honesty and sincerity that Lee Kwan Yew said, “I would put him in the Nelson Mandela’s class of persons”. His honesty doesn’t prove his intelligence but it correlates well with it.Genetically, given his father’s precocious intelligence (general at 19, governor at 23) and his own track record (several of his provincial innovations were adopted nationwide during his climb to the top), his PhD in Developmental Economics, the company he keeps and the smart moves he’s made since his election, he’s almost certainly in the top 1% of intelligent people and no lower than IQ 125–the requisite for an MD degree.Morally? Lee Kwan Yew, Founder of Singapore, who knew him and his father well, “I would put him in the Nelson Mandela’s class of persons. A person with enormous emotional stability who does not allow his personal misfortunes or sufferings affect his judgment. In other words, he is impressive.” China’s Nelson Mandela | TIME.com.Popularly. How well has Xi understood what people want?