Author: William Lise

Long-term (49-plus years) resident of Japan. Former electrical engineer and have been translating and interpreting for over four decades.

Don’t expect any change.

It is seriously mistaken to think that even having to pay billions of dollars in fines because of harming children is going to substantially change Meta’s business model of surveillance, manipulation, and promotion of addiction.

What will happen is that it will look like Meta will do something, but they will do nothing effective to protect children—it’s difficult, workarounds are already available, Meta will resist and lie about it, and doing anything effective would trash their business model, and you can be assured that is not going to happen.

And since this legal action was with regard to what Meta does to children, it will act as an effective distraction from Meta’s harmful effects on billions of adults.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but I don’t think there’s much chance of it effecting any real changed.

Diddlysquat

Some words mean nothing, others can mean anything, and some can mean either.

Comments I saw somewhere recently about double negatives—it was evidently aimed at people who don’t know nothing—made me think of some convenient words that can mean and replace both anything and nothing.

Some people might not know diddlysquat about such words, in which case they would also know diddlysquat about such words.

The function of diddlysquat can, of course, be performed by things such as jackshit (or just shit, without the jacking) and bubkis, both of which also being able to replace both anything and nothing, depending upon whether the sense of the expression is negative or positive, respectively.

Care is required in the extended application of such expressions, as knowing your ass from a hole in the ground is not the same as not knowing your ass from a hole in the ground.

And now back to our regular programming.