Kelly Rowland couldn't have used the =HYPERLINK() function to message Nelly

Good argument

Consider that the relationship works both ways, the celebrity's own brand is tarnished by involvement with a product hit by scandal. See the celebrities that promoted FTX as an example. It is in their own interest to do some due diligence.

Conversely, the ads would be dropped if the celebrity actor became toxic. If Kelly Rowland made Kanye-style comments about Nazis or Jews, the ad would be buried. Are Kevin Spacey ads still airing?

The entire celebrity/influencer marketing system intentionally exploits a failure mode of human cognitive bias for profit. Transactional endorsements are morally bankrupt. A family member or friend that blindly recommended a product or service for pay would lose respect for that breach of trust. Celebrities that people respect should be held to the same or higher standards.

Consider this, if John Carmack regularly did ads playing a generic software engineer at BigCo and it turned out he didn't even know what the products were, would this community hold him in the same high regard?

Now, Nokia could have been paying her to use their phone during the music video - product placement is a thing, and you can see the brand logo in the shot. But I suspect if they were, Nokia's brand reps probably wouldn't have wanted a shot of a popular R&B singer trying to text from a spreadsheet and would have made sure the shot looked better to protect their brand.

If it's not Nokia she's "endorsing", then presumably it's Excel. That fails on the basis that she probably wouldn't have been using Excel on the phone. As noted in jgc's blog post, it's likely the built-in spreadsheet software in Symbian. Either way, it isn't distinctly Excel - it's a generic spreadsheet app with no particular visual distinctiveness that would pick it out as Excel. People only say it's Excel because that's the spreadsheet they're most familiar with.

(Incidentally, I'm all for ensuring celebrities who do paid endorsements are doing so responsibly. There ought to be some consequences for the public figures who used their fame to push cryptoscams including Tom Brady, Matt Damon, Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian etc. if only so it prompts their agents to think twice and do some due diligence in the future.)

Heck, I just did a CI/CD proof of concept where the company was using Java Docker containers. I don’t know Java at all and haven’t done anything in Java in two decades (I’m a .Net, Python, JavaScript guy)

I used ChatGPT to help me create a simple Java Spring Boot app in a Docker container with JUnit tests. I freely admitted I don’t know Java and that I used ChatGPT to do Java parts. That’s not what I was brought in for just like she wasn’t brought in to do Excel.

ChatGPT propped me up just like her producers propped her up and brought her in to do a role.

If I found out that my little dummy POC HelloWorld Java/Springboot Docker container “did something wrong”, do you think I would give two fucks? Do you think I would care enough to learn Java? My job to be done was not to write a Java app, it was to teach them how to implement a CI/CD process to deliver their apps to production.

It seems like you're getting some kind of racial McGurk effect here? Kelly Rowland does not talk anything like this in the linked video. Here is what she actually says:

"Here's the sitch. I don't know what that is. I don't know what Microsoft Excel is. I don't know. I don't have a clue. So when I saw all these memes, I was like 'I don't care'."

Apart from 'sitch' and 'like' (which are both very common usages in informal conversation) this is all fully standard American English. You're getting worked up about someone saying that (i) they don't know what Microsoft Excel is and (ii) that they don't care about some memes. The "performative idiocy" exists only in your imagination.

The irony is that you're doing your own version of performative idiocy in your attempt to (I guess?) imitate Black American English.

i'm a c programmer, lowercase is beautiful and saves some pinky effort

the celebration and glorification of ignorance and simultaneously the persecution of intellect is a common facet of nearly all fascist, authoritarian, and communist regimes.

my counter-culture capitalization is harmless, but i'm amused that it got your goat.

doesn't imply that ignoring the Kardashians is as bad as pride in ignorance of math/science. (direct quote from you)

> There are probably 100s of millions of people who care about what celebrity X is up to

But if those celebrities died together at the same time, very few of those 100 millions people would actually suffer any consequence.

So they are basically useless to society, math and science are provably not.

> Knowing celebrity news allows for instant connection with millions of people who also know about this news

I'll pass om that, thank you.

Millions of people watch soccer in my country, never cared for a second.

Guess what?

I have tons of connections with people I share common interests with.

Who would have thought that was possible?

> Guess what? You likely don't have this knowledge. And you probably are glad you don't, and are maybe even proud that your don't.

Have you ever considered that people simply don't care and their life is just as good as anybody else?

I honestly don't understand what drives your thought process, but if you are thinking that I need to excuse myself for not caring about most famous people, sorry to break the news for you, you don't know how wrong you are.

> while blaming others for feeling the same about a topic your care about.

That's just you assuming bad faith.

I don't care what other people care about or not, it doesn't affect me at all, I simply replied to pride in ignorance of social happenings is just as bad as pride in ignorance of math/science. It is simply not.

Who did dismiss socializing?

We are talking about (quote) social happenings (unquote) among famous people who happen to be famous just because they exploited marketing strategies to become famous for the sake of being famous, with no other talent than being born rich.

In that contest the content doesn't make any sense, there is no reason why this year you should wear green and the next one yellow (but it applies only to Hollywood for some reason...[1] do we know what's trendy now in Myanmar? I don't think so), it's a completely random thing, that also has no impact on anybody's life, nothing bad happens if you do not do it and since most of us will never end up on the cover of fashion magazines and tabloids, why should we care about it?

Nobody said that you shouldn't have a BBQ with your friends and family and participate in a proper social gathering.

[1] the most simple explanation is that these people live basically in a confined space and only associate with other people who happen to live like they do, so if one of them wears a fedora at a party in one of their villas, probably someone else will wear it too, photographers find 3 of them and invent the narrative around "this is the year of the fedora"

It's Black Mirror's Mazey Day basically, but if one thinks about it, apart from greed, exploitation and lack of better things to publish, there's not much to gain by studying it, except maybe become one of them or more probably look like a poorer less glamorous cosplayer of one of them.

You do know that there are tons of jobs that don't ever require interacting with spreadsheets, let alone a computer, right? This is exactly what I was talking about regarding how many HN users view the rest of the world.

>... or been to any kind of school.

"When am I going to need to use this?" is a common refrain for more than just attitudes towards math. I have met many people in professional environments who have no experience with it and don't even know what it is until you explicitly remind them what it is/does.

I met someone younger than me (~23 or so) who's a very bright intern, whom never used Microsoft Excel (after seeing this thread, I had to ask). They know what Google Sheets is, but know nothing of Excel.

Good for her, she’s not a computer nerd like you, basing a large part of their worth in Internet forum comments. Has some other things going on in her life.

Touch grass, seriously.

It doesn't impact her life at all, it's just noise on the internet to her, so why should she care?

I mean, that's actually a great question for you - why do you think she has to care about what Excel is, and why do you find her not caring about it so egregious that you would call her an idiot? And further, is it not OK to be OK with being ignorant to some things you just don't give a damn about?

Edit: Can people also not be flippant when an otherwise throwaway moment in their life is suddenly seized upon by hordes of people, some who call them an idiot for it? I don't think I'd fault someone for that reaction, myself.

What I am defending is someone saying that they don't know what Microsoft Excel is and don't care and having other people refer to that as prideful ignorance.

Exactly yesterday,I was helping a friend at the end of a workshop on accounting for entrepreneurs in social sectors.

To wrap up the two days class, he asked them what they had learned.

To my surprise a good number of them said they had learned making a simple formula in excel cells. ( white , 20-something , males, just in case you were wondering ).

There is a big world out there full of normal people that don't have the faintest idea about things you consider basic skills.