[I posted this on LinkedIn on 23 March and it was quickly shadow-banned by Microsoft’s LinkedIn, in a demonstration of what they consider relevant or of their political allegiance. Perhaps I should have started the post off with “I’m thrilled to announce…”]
Silence is complicity.
Trump, Vance, Musk, and now we have Witkoff, who insults the UK, denies Ukraine sovereignty, thinks Putin is not a bad guy, wants the world to recognize the occupied eastern territories of Ukraine as part of Russia, and generally acts as a mouthpiece for the Russian propaganda machine.
Meanwhile, the democratic Party is paralyzed and unable or unwilling to act. The Democrats and Americans of conscience need to do the necessary.
There must be a change, and the 2028 election is much too late. Too much hangs in the balance, for Americans, and for people in numerous other countries, one of them in Asia.
It is awash with phoniness, including that of coaches preying on desperate LinkedIn users searching for “LinkedIn” success.
And I’m tired of the delusions that in general proliferate on LinkedIn.
I am tired of people who are addicted to LinkedIn and are believers in the myth that posting on LinkedIn will somehow bring them something good. Only their own efforts will bring them good, and they need to make those efforts in places other than LinkedIn.
LinkedIn itself is a delusion, and the disturbing reality is that the delusion called LinkedIn has been bought into by a frightening number of people.
I guess people want to “believe” in something. LinkedIn is sort of a religion that gives them something to believe in without having to ask for evidence. If you need that, go for it. I prefer the evidence-based real world beyond my computer screen.
I encountered a conversation on LinkedIn yesterday where the original post was clearly written in ChatGPTese or a dialect thereof, and every single comment was responded to in the same ChatGPTese.
When I questioned whether the original post and the responses to numerous apparently human-created comments were being written by a carbon-based entity or something else, I received a quick response, also in ChatGPTese. It didn’t at all read like there was a human behind it.
Authenticity is becoming rare, both on LinkedIn and on other social media platforms. The only input needed from a carbon-based participant is a prompt to a silicon-based assistant, then you just post the result.
Who could tell the difference? Well, just about anyone more intelligent than a starfish and who has not been blinded by the AI hype.
And now, a moment of silence in memory of our dear departed friend, Authenticity.
It was a lazy Sunday yesterday, and we decided to take a short trip to the Honmoku Fishing Pier, just a few minutes by bus from our place, walkable with a bit of effort, but I didn’t have that bit in me yesterday.
We weren’t going to fish. I haven’t been fishing since I was about 16, and all of my fishing trips were on fishing boats in the Long Island Sound or off the South shore of Long Island with my dad. I have never fished from a pier.
The fishing pier was packed, including couples out on a fishing date, so to speak, and parents with children. We spent about two hours watching people catch fish of various sizes, mostly disappointingly small and probably requiring their release.
While we were relaxing watching other people fish, we got to see a number of largish cargo ships pass to the East from Yokohama. None were close enough to be identified, but technology came to the rescue, in the form of the Vessel Finder website.
This website provides a map with all ships with the required equipment turned on. Ships involved in arms shipments to and fuel shipments from a certain aggressor state apparently switch off that equipment. But I digress.
One of the ships was the Oberon, a vehicle carrier headed to Kobe (as indicated by the VF website).
The availability of this information on ships reminds me of the time some years ago when I was left with not much to do on an interpreting assignment in Evansville, Indiana. The witness in a patent case I was supposed to be interpreting for was never called, and I spent a week there with not much to do (during the daytime, anyway) but look out my hotel window at the barges moving slowly up and down the Ohio River, on which the hotel was situated.
I was fully paid for all days, and, while I was cooling my heels in my hotel room waiting for the call that never came, I discovered a service similar to VF that indicated the departure times, destinations and arrival times of barges carrying exciting things like coal up and down the Ohio River. Such is the exciting life of a litigation interpreter. But I digress.
[This was posted originally on LinkedIn on March 21, 2025, but I have since decided to stop uploading significant posts to a platform controlled by Microsoft, preferring rather to place them here, on a venue that I control.]
Microsoft’s LinkedIn sends me ads for Japan Tobacco. I am attempting to stop them, but don’t know if it will work. Japan Tobacco sells carcinogens.
While Meta is totally criminal and partners with criminals on its several platforms, I never got a Japan Tobacco ad on Facebook when I was a user of that criminal platform.
Partnering with JT is simply sleazy and doesn’t reflect well on Microsoft.
JT cannot advertise on broadcast media, and I suppose it is using what it can get, which is a complicit company like Microsoft.
Seeing this kind of literally toxic garbage thrown at me gives me new encouragement to post just anything I want to LinkedIn. Screw Microsoft’s cover story of LinkedIn being a business networking platform. It’s nothing of the sort.
I’ll need to see if telling Microsoft that the JT ads are “annoying or not interesting” works. If not, something else might be in the works from here in Curmudgeonville.
