The Offline Report

A letter to the editor in today's San Francisco Chronicle ( link-> ). This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

We have advanced technology but little trust. And widened inequality. A virus that can kill crowds who sing and laugh together is bringing the country that launched the Tesla Roadster to its knees. That's not exactly true, is it? It's only bringing some to their knees. So far. ------------------------- Further Reading: "Millions of ordinary psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future." "Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future… [It] is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated change in society."     om.co "Of plant workers confirmed to be infected, 2.2% have died, according to the county. That’s significantly higher than the fatality rate among people infected with the coronavirus in the general population of Merced County, which is 1.3%."    latimes.com "The news came from a colleague — not a doctor but someone who works in the eme...

"If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo ."   - George Orwell in "The Prevention of Literature". Full essay online at orwell.ru . This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

I flip-read the e-edition of the newspaper every day as my civic duty. I urge people to subscribe to newspapers as their civic duty. I cringe when I read of shrinking headcount at the regional newspapers across the country. BUT WHEN I SEARCH THE WEBSITE FOR AN ARTICLE I WANT TO SHARE, IT IS NOT THERE! The article, which I found in the e-edition (the paper edition, the "dead tree" edition, in pdf form) is in today's Business section. Its title is "Making technology do an about-face". Its author is Kashmir Hill. It's about scrambling facial recognition technology, a hot topic.  If I type the title in sfchronicle.com's search bar, I do not get the article. If I type the author in the sfchronicle.com's search bar, the site displays several articles by that reporter. But not the one I'm looking for. If I search the web for an article with that title, I 'll find it in a site called pressreader.com . At the sfchronicle.com website, if I click ...