5G Got me Fired
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I think we quickly need changes in the way we handle native advertising. It is hugely problematic and basically predatory.
I believe that there are ways to genuinely advertise if the advertisement is openly disclosed and the ad is informative, but native advertising is essentially just a sophisticated and insidious form of manipulation. It turns readers into non-consenting consumers and the purpose of journalism from informing truthfully to a sales pitch. I have trouble imagining that many people think this is tolerable if we'd be debating it openly and brought it to the forefront of the news (which ironically is not going to happen).
Let MSM die its slow death while new and better services make their debut.
> Mainstream media was shedding eyes
News has been “shedding” paid subscribers. Shedding eyes? Citation needed.
> and under scrutiny
By who?
In other words, using the same style as the adjacent content, and removing any boxes or rules that separate an ad.
It's pretty far down the slope into dishonesty territory w.r.t. separating content from editorial or advertising, and the FTC should investigate and regulate native ads.
I know the press will deny this motive, but how can it not be a factor, even slightly?
This is not to mention the constant good press it receives.
Some sentences or terms you use may be factually correct in some context or way, but you seem to be painting a pretty negative picture chaining them together.
Granted, the media also occasionally report on Tesla kicking ass, but the negative press coverage almost seems like a concerted effort to spread fud every chance the media gets. The media have a vested interest in selling drama and they blow shit out of proportion and created issue where there isn't any.
They misuse their responsibility of shaping public opinion when they for example go crazy on someone taking one puff of a blunt and ignoring almost 3 hours of meaningful conversation with a sentence.
If Tesla is in such a precarious financial state and a sorry ass company, why do investors and banks keep lending and pumping money? Because the fundamentals are solid and anyone actually following the numbers and their mission, as opposed to media fud, knows they are about to skyrocket.
Their valuation may have been inflated especially if you believe the value represented the here and now but the fundamentals haven't changed, in fact they may be even better than expected. Once Tesla hits profitability on the account sheet (they already make close to 20% on every Model 3 sold but are 'losing' money because of heavy investment as far as I can tell), they will shoot to the moon because the media will then report Tesla is suddenly a good company and the optics have changed, even though the fundamentals haven't.
They're betting big on at least mid range Trucking switching electric because according to them it'll be cheaper to operate electric fleets. They got a pickup, the model y, planned to begin production soonish. They can lower their unit prices once they hit massive scales due to multiple gigafactories. They operate their own charging network, no other car manufacturer comes anywhere close to what they have.
Granted, Elon is the hype machine behind companies he's running or involved in, but his cult of personality is not all vanity. Why does Elon take no (1 dollar) salary, still holds some 20% of the stock and works his ass off and drains himself to his detriment on Tesla? Because he seems to be for real, a believer, and he delivers even if it's delayed.
Tesla under his leadership has done a great service to humanity, igniting the transformation to moving away from fossil fuels. The other car makers are lagging behind and only now starting to invest billions into battery manufacturing when Tesla is showing them they're for real.
I thought helping with load balancing and storing more volatile non-fossil energy and the creation of smart local grids and allowing people to get off the grid with their home batteries could be a reasonable endeavor for Tesla's battery division.
"Manufacture of consent" is the Walter Lippman term they named the book after.
With a traditional newspaper your readers are footing at least part of the bill for the articles, so you are beholden to them to keep them informed. At least in theory. These days however the only payment is coming from advertisers, so they are the only ones you need to keep happy.
This is the same problem that TV and Radio news has always had, and why they were considered inferior to newspapers for factual reporting. Of course there are a few outlets that are listener/viewer funded, and they tend to be more highly regarded than their counterparts. Outlets like the BBC, NPR, and PBS.
Theoretically cable news shouldn't have this problem since part of the cost comes from people's cable bills, but other forces have conspired to poison that well.
When was that exactly?
Back when I used to pay for a physical newspaper thrown at my door, I remember it often said that the price covered printing and delivery and most of the newspaper's income came from advertising. Was this wrong? It doesn't seem like it... it was sub $1 per issue, which seems about an order of magnitude less than what Amazon would charge.
I don’t buy that the format is inherently any more dangerous than anything else. All ads need to be respectful of the reader regardless of form.
Self respecting marketers will often say that their goal is to inform, but without fail, that "information" is laced and inextricably woven with manipulative psychology, tangential to the product being sold.
Further, in any industry where it can be employed, it chokes out every other form of revenue. How can anyone compete with "free"? Then, inevitably, when ads enter a space, they quickly dominate and poison it.
Without advertising, the take up of new inventions (things like pressure cookers, microwaves, etc) would be significantly slower. There would be mass confusion about how to get access to uncommon services (legal, accounting and building for example). I wouldn't know what half of the companies out there did if they didn't run some advertising somewhere.
I mean, say there is a company called Stratco. They might sell something I'd buy if I knew about it. How do you propose I figure that out if they don't advertise? I'm not about to research them to find out what it is they sell; there are too many companies out there doing random business->business services I don't want to know about. It is a very neat solution for them to figure out what I do for leisure, subsidise it and pay for an ad or few.
I don't mean any disrespect for journalists and I'm deeply thankful for their work (I even considered becoming one, as a kid), but I don't care for their opinion. I did once, before the internet, because opinions were valuable, as the only ones you were exposed to were family's and friends'.
But today, the internet is a massive opinion building/sharing machine. The last thing we need is the press to do it as well, instead it must be the place where we can expect to find facts and fact checking. I don't have any problem with random people sharing their opinion either - it's cool we can do it - but now I expect more from the press.
Now, I'm well aware solving the native ad problem does not solve the real problem : press has hard time keeping afloat. My usual suggestion about that is for browsers to include means for micro-payment (be it using google pay, cryptocurrencies, apple pay, whatever pay, a new standard, I don't care). The main problem with paywalls to me is that they expect users to subscribe for monthly subscriptions, renewed until they're manually cancelled. This is not how people consume news anymore. They come to an article because of its content, they wish to see that content, they don't want to see other articles. We need to allow people to quickly pay a small fee to see a single article, without all the hassle of using a credit card.
So they linked his article about 5G to a different one. Why does that mean he was fired for writing the article? I feel like an application of Hanlon's Razor (not quite right, but I don't know of someone else's who fits the situation better) is called for. Is it more likely the editors thought his article sucked and used their editorial discretion to redirect his 5G article to a different one or that there was a conspiracy between his advertisers and the magazine's management to fire a guy who's been wrong on just about everything for the last 30 years because he hit the nail too close to the head?
I don't buy it.
I can totally believe that the magazine caved in to pressure from an advertiser to sack a journalist and pull a story. It happens every day. Luckily I never had to do it, but there were times I was very tempted.
I totally agree with his comment that the only way journalism is going to survive is if readers start paying for it. What we have now is mostly not-journalism.
As an example of where it has happened:
> Gerstmann revealed that his firing was in fact related to the low review score he had given to Kane & Lynch, though his explanation cited other similar events that led up to the termination, including a 7.5 (good) rating given to Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction by Aaron Thomas, then an employee under Gerstmann. Events such as these led to him being "called into a room" several times to discuss reviews posted on the site. Gerstmann went on to lay the blame on a new management team that was unable to properly handle tension between the marketing and editorial staff, laying additional blame on the marketing department, which he claimed was unprepared in how to handle publisher complaints and threats to withdraw advertising money over low review scores.
https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media
Search for Access:
That said, column seems more than a bit sensationalistic and one-sided --but not really all that different from many things that Dvorak has written over the years.
There is an impressive-looking group of credentials behind a petition[1] to halt 5G rollouts in the EU until more research can be done. The science just isn't settled yet, partly because doing a rigorous controlled trial in real world conditions is just about impossible.
Keep in mind it's not just about cancer, it's any health effect of any kind. The nature of the shorter wavelengths of 5G means that more transmit power and/or more transmitters to cover the same area will be required, so we can't necessarily take what we know about the current bands and assume these are equally safe. Too many confounding factors.
There's an excellent writeup from Vox on the state of the science. It's a mess, to put it lightly. [2]
[1]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B14R6QNkmaXuelFrNWRQcThNV0U...
[2]: https://www.vox.com/2018/7/16/17067214/cellphone-cancer-5g-e...
If you drill little bit into the background of people, the list is full of crackpots or confused old people. Last time it came up, I checked people from my country (Finland) and they were all crackpots.
In case you aren't aware, and it seems you are not, there is a mountain of research and evidence on the effects of electromagnetic fields on biology.
Or are you going to dismiss 26,813 publications and all of their writers as crackpots?
* Electromagnetic hypersensitivity theory has no scientific basis and double blind studies show that the symptoms are not dependent on electromagnetic field.
* Dowsing aka divining is medieval practice with no scientific basis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing
> mountain of research and evidence on the effects of electromagnetic fields on biology.
This is trivially true and too generic statement to be used as an argument. For example in vitro studies don't transfer into in vivo. Especially in high frequencies.https://www.emf-portal.org/en is good source f and as you can conclude from the wast volume of research, it is well researched subject. No significant negative effects has been established from cell phone or wi-fi radiation unless the energy is well above the safe levels.
Of course it has scientific basis. The scientific basis is that electromagnetic fields alter biological processes, thereby it is possible to produce effects in both animals and humans.
And if you deny that electromagnetic fields can alter biological processes, then you really completely deny science.
In addition, EHS is really a poor choice as a descriptive term for these symptoms. It is no different than saying that when someone punches you repeatedly, you develop human fist hypersensitivity.
It is a misunderstanding that people who suffer from EHS could somehow sense microwave radiation directly. This is impossible, because humans have no direct sensing apparatus for this type of radiation.
What happens is that they feel the secondary effects of the disruption in their biology. For example a change or disruption in the ATP production of the cell can lead to many secondary effects, as can can the effects on cell wall permeability, just as two examples.
Trying to do provocation tests on human subjects, only really shows a misunderstanding of what is happening.
This was known before the advent of cell phones by radar operators as radar sickness. The army has known about these problems for a long time.
You can read here an excerpt from 1973 from the WHO symposium in Warsaw on electromagnetic radiation. The Russians had studied this phenomenon for 20 years prior, and the conclusion is in the symposium papers:
https://twitter.com/ChronicExposure/status/10057668842167255...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181005111447.h...
That's not a basis, that's an assumption. An assumption that must be proved though double-blind trials. An assumption that has never held water through multiple studies.
> It is a misunderstanding that people who suffer from EHS could somehow sense microwave radiation directly.
It is a misunderstanding pushed by the very people who are now making outlandish claims about the safety of RF radiation.
> What happens is that they feel the secondary effects of the disruption in their biology.
Again, that has been disproven time and time again.
Dvorak's writing has always been about being contrarian and kicking up controversy.
https://patch.com/california/millvalley/mill-valley-parents-...
The claims simply don't make sense. Non-ionizing EM radiation has absolutely no documented effects on humans.
Here's 67 studies on the biological effects of microwaves, ranked by transmission power:
https://i.imgur.com/14uxRru.png
All of them crackpots?
Here's a study of EM fields on neonatal babies:
"Electrical Grounding Improves Vagal Tone in Preterm Infants"
https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/475744
There was also an article written on this publication:
https://www.futurity.org/grounding-nicu-babies-1507412/
I guess the babies were not informed of your crackpot theory?
Here's a website with a database of 26,819 publications on the effects of electromagnetic fields on biology, including human and animal studies:
More crackpots, I assume?
We have constantly accumulating evidence that EM radiation in fact IS harmful. The biggest reason the public is not aware of this, is simply because the wireless industry is making too much money from this technology.
The wireless industry employ some of the biggest lobbying groups in the world. With the amount of funds and leverage available to them, it becomes easier to influence legislation and decision makers.
That's all there is to it. No conspiracy, no crackpots. It's simply business
Then the dreaded "403 Not allowed".
Archived here: http://web.archive.org/web/20180913212959/https://in.pcmag.c...
Here's the critical bit...
<I'm not saying this because the technology does not work. It's a bad bet because so little is known about the effects of millimeter waves (30GHz-300GHz). While these frequencies only permeate a small fraction of the human epidermis (the skin), the effect on the cornea, in particular, needs serious research.
Because the industry is too cheap to study the health effects of the technology itself, it lets this sort of product out the door despite the fact that it has already been weaponized by the military
http://web.archive.org/web/20180930061356/https://jnlwp.defe...
These frequencies are so poor at travelling long distances, they need a transmitter on nearly every telephone pole and light pole to make 5G work.>
Edit: just realized I missed where the quote ended. My question remains, though I suppose patent isn't really who I meant to ask.
https://www.pcmag.com/article/345387/what-is-5gpcmag.com/com...
https://www.pcmag.com/article/345387/what-is-5gpcmag.com/com...
CMS problems aren't exactly uncommon. But he was apparently fired and, absent a big backstory of which people are unaware, it's bizarre at the least to fire someone with such a long tenure without any explanation. Regardless of the sorry state of so many long-established tech pubs.
Thanks for this! The in.pcmag.com link to Indian PC Mag shows a very suspicious 403 error now (not even a 404). But yours works. It's fascinating, two pcmag.com links back to back somehow confuses the CMS's router and shows the old article. Nice one.
Since this'll probably be "fixed", I fed the URL to archive.is: http://archive.is/KbsW8
[Also, for posterity, the view of the 403: http://archive.is/ggMat - thanks to whoever added this]
> When you do a search for "5G is Safe" on Google and Bing, you get a number of negative stories and a laundry list of why some people believe it's unsafe. Companies may as well begin to market a 5G mobile phone with a skull and crossbones on it.
Really, the entirety of his journalistic research is a Google search that somehow justifies him to reproduce conspiracy theories as facts? Technology similar to 5G "has been already weaponized"? Good riddance.
It's fine to observe that search results pop up a lot of pieces and discussions about 5G health concerns. And those may lead to adoption problems whether they're true or not. But if you're writing a good column, even though it is an opinion piece, you should probably then point out things like: XYZ studies dispute these health effects and that these sort of concerns have been brought up with pretty much every new radio technology.
If you just say there's a bunch of scary information out there (without even pointing to anything specific), you leave the impression that there's likely some truth in all of it.
Dvorak at least was a pretty high profile tech columnist. But he's tended toward a clickbait style even before there were links to click on.
The way modern writing works, I would expect he got paid very little for writing this. You’re kind of asked to push out X many blog posts a day, there’s not a huge amount of time for research... or even re-reading/thinking over the implications of your work.
Sometimes presenting both sides of the argument would require making up an other side of the argument or propping it up because it doesn't exist or is bad. In that case presenting both sides of the argument would be sensationalizing.
I read this as him saying that the industry is trying to make unstudied radiation ubiquitous in our lives. The industry is not used to this pushback. The PR that results is bad.
Critical reading does not mean reacting to your first impression on the article. Especially when discussing whether the work of a man who's been covering tech since 1980 was censored over it.
There are no US based mobile infrastructure companies competing for 4G or 5G installations. Qualcomm is lower level supplier providing components and competing with MediaTek, Samsung and Chinese.
There is only 5 major players left: Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE and Samsung. Two Chinese, Finnish, Swedish and South Korean.
If the "rushing to beat" is just figurative saying, then you are right.
This is in fact not true -- other columns have continued since then and some other columnists have had the title listed in their author bios changed while continuing to have articles published.
Is it disingenuous, especially with someone who has been working for you in some form for a very long time? Sure. But I've seen a number of online pubs that go through changes with their outside contributors and communication is mostly pretty poor.
Native ads are presented as stock market news, the NYT publishes it regularly, really what's the point... Figured I'd even start doing it on my blog (mostly a joke):
https://austingwalters.com/mainstream-news-is-awful/
Fact is, it's the new world we live in. Just like I may pay for cable and I get ads; I can pay for the NYT and their content is nothing more than an ad.
He is almost everything that's bad on "tech journalism" concentrated in one.
Specially regarding his brand of hate, Apple.
He mentioned that the "mouse" of the Macintosh was bad ("There is no evidence that people want to use these things."), he claimed that Apple was going to discontinue OS X and switch to Windows (according to his "sources"), he argued that Apple should cancel the iPhone even before the thing came out, etc. etc. etc. the thing only repeats after each Apple new product, and even claimed that the $1T company was dead because the iPhone 5 was going to flop (the iPhone 5 was Apple's biggest success until the date).
There is only one reason why companies hire him or fire him, he drives clicks and magazine purchases. He is the Alex Jones of tech.
Thing is that today, people can go to many other places to get their Apple hate validated, on top of that, he wrote a negative article about 5G, and the PC Magazine sponsors are waiting for that to sell more phones, so he had to go.
Ha! I hope he responds to that on No Agenda.
Yeah no. If you’re going to make claims like that you better source it. Source for the NY Times says the exact opposite: https://www.statista.com/statistics/192911/revenue-of-the-ne...
I thought something like that was on the table in NT days (remember it used to support PowerPC). That would have been pre Jobs return and pre OS X though.
In 2006, Mac OS X was glowing hot with Tiger release.
I am saying I read or heard that it was discussed in real life in the 90s. This is unrelated.
He was correct - there was no evidence, at the time, that people wanted to use a mouse.
Also, obligatory:
But it's the job of a journalist, specifically a columnist, to be above the average Joe.
I hope he gets hired quickly somewhere much nicer.
Really concerned about 5G now that I connected the dots. I don't mind 4G being branded as new 5G and being always connected.
Disclosure : based on my understanding of EM radiation as an EE and person who deploys microwave gear around my own house, I'm fine with anything non-ionizing. I'd like to see the general public more educated on this subject. Obfuscation is not in anyone's interest.
Marie Curie was also fine with working with Radium... until we found out that it wasn't good for you. The thing about stuff like cancers is that it's really difficult to say "this person's cancer was caused by X." The best we can do are wide spectrum studies about cancer rates, and try to use statistics to limit the variables.
Everything now needs to be neutered down without offending anyone, especially any groups with deep pockets.