by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel
WE HAVE A tech-savvy 12yo in our home and he's facing restrictions on his use of a smartphone while on school grounds. Even though he doesn't bring a phone to school, he's watching with interest as the Irish Minister for Education Norma Foley writes a memo to Cabinet. The Minister wants a nationwide policy where parents are discouraged from buying smartphones for children of primary age.
Continue reading "Ireland's Ban on Smartphones for Pre-Teens" »
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by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel
I LISTEN TO BANTER about living in Ireland and during the past three months, the temperature has gone up with Ireland continuing to make generous offers for accommodation to refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine. This week, a heated row erupted between Irish Ministers. [1] Coincidentally, I was working with colleagues in the Netherlands and in Finland as we questioned the level of refugees that European countries should accept.
If the EU average of five immigrants per 1000 inhabitants was the level accommodated by Ireland, the pressures on social welfare and housing would dop significantly. According to Eurostat, Ireland is accepting 15 immigrants per 1000 inhabitants. [2] This is significantly higher than the immigration numbers from 2015.
Continue reading "Generous Irish Refugee Offers Coming Under Fire" »
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by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel.
Image from The Emotion Machine.
MOST OF MY WORK with Artificial Intelligence has been in the field of Machine Learning. I teach students how to improve their online profiles so they enhance their prospects of gaining good jobs. And last semester, I introduced generative AI into classrooms to increase the speed of creating responsive web sites.
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by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel
I WORK ON a small university campus in County Tipperary and have major concerns about the Clonmel Sports Hub. I walked around the new amenity with Councillor Michael Murphy in order to point out specific areas worth consideration.
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by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel
HIGH HEATING COSTS have knocked winter strawberries out of our shopping basket.
Keelings, the Irish fruit company, told the Sunday Times that "energy costs have resulted in a 30 per cent decresase in its raspberry production and are unsustainable for its strawberry crop". This means fewer Irish berries in our local supermarkets and it feels like smaller amounts of berries in the standard packages.
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by Bernie Goldbach after walking George's Dock
I'VE WALKED THE LANEWAYS between George's Dock and Custom House Quay and know the area where 49-year-old Mongolian Urantsetseg Tserendorj was murdered by a drunken, thieving young thug roaming the night on a bike. Urangsetseg had been walking home from the cleaning shift that was putting her two children through college. You can bet that the scumbag who killed her would never accept unskilled work for minimum wage during antisocial hours.
In Ireland, many Irish people simply won't accept work. I think the jobseeker's allowance for those aged under 25 is now €220 a week. You can earn 100 euro more than that by taking jobs that I see advertised in several takeaways and shops but you have to get on your bike before the sun comes up or you have to plan on walking home late at night like Urantsetseg did before she died.
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I'M ADDING CONTENT from today's Irish Times opinion column because the commentary by Fintan O'Toole helps explain the demise of Twitter, a social networking site I've used since 2006.
It used to be cocaine that was, as Robin Williams had it, God’s way of telling you that you have too much money. Now it’s buying Twitter for $44 billion and setting fire to it.
But perhaps there is some continuity here. Both drugs heighten the sense of invincibility you feel while you are making a complete fool of yourself.
Elon Musk has made himself the idiot savant of our times, half genius, all man-child. Yet he has, in the process, illuminated two important truths about contemporary culture.
The first is that there really is such a thing as having too much money. Right-wing economics is based on the belief that the super-rich will ultimately use their vast wealth for the common good. Musk seems to have set out to disprove this thesis by a spectacular demonstration of the wanton wastefulness of excessive riches.
We’re living in an age of grotesque inequality in which a tiny number of people have cornered a vast share of the wealth. We’re no longer even talking about the top 1 per cent, or the top 0.1 per cent. Or even the top 0.01 per cent.
Musk belongs, rather, to the top 0.001 per cent in the United States. That’s 2,400 people who had (in 2016, the latest year for which there are such detailed calculations) $1,631,821,000 between them.
The theory is that these are the “wealth-creators” whose accumulation of such astronomical riches somehow benefits all of humanity. They are the Medicis or the Carnegies of our time.
Agent Musk has set out, presumably on behalf of the worldwide communist conspiracy, to explode such notions. For he has shown – like a global version of our own Seán Quinn – that there is a level of accumulation beyond which “wealth-creators” become wealth-destroyers.
It may well be true that, up to a point, the profit motive drives innovation. But profit gets boring. Too much of it leads to satiety and saturation.
A much more potent and primitive force takes over: megalomania. Beyond the satisfaction of basic needs, beyond security and comfort, there is the search for status, the need to be number one.
And this drive is unbounded. The manic ego knows no limits. Its hunger for domination is insatiable. It eventually takes the shape of an ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a serpent eating its own tail.
It becomes, even by the very narrow measure of money, destructive. Musk has managed, not just to incinerate his own investment in Twitter, but has seen the value of its main enterprise, Tesla fall by half.
The top 10 investors in Tesla have alone lost $133 billion since Twitter’s board accepted Musk’s buyout in April. It must surely be dawning on them by now that, even for lovers of buccaneering capitalism, the madness induced by excessive wealth corrodes the very thing it seeks.
We also have to thank Musk for exposing the myth of libertarian devotion to free speech. His fairytale transformations from self-declared “free speech absolutist” to whiny little snowflake to authoritarian censor is this season’s premature Christmas panto in which the whole Twitter sphere gets to call out: “Oh no he isn’t.”
It has long been obvious that the libertarian commitment to free expression is mostly one-sided: I have absolute freedom to say what I like but if you answer back, you are oppressing me. For the over-privileged (and yes they are still nearly all rich white men) “free speech” really means “Shut up and listen to me.”
Yet no one has managed to make this point so clearly and memorably as Agent Musk. What he got for his $44 billion is a big red card to wave at his enemies and rivals and send them off the pitch.
Presumably he got jealous of Antonio Mateu Lahoz, the referee who issued 15 yellow cards in the Argentina-Netherlands match at the World Cup. Musk needed to prove he could be an even more ridiculous martinet. It does not seem to have occurred to him that if he keeps sending people off there will be no one left to play the game.
Musk banned an account that uses public information to track his private jet and those of Russian oligarchs. Then he banned journalists, some (like Donie O’Sullivan) more or less randomly, some (like Linette Lopez) because they have been reporting critically on his business practices. Then he banned links to the rival social media platform Mastodon.
This is tantrum capitalism. Any notion of making Twitter a profitable business comes a very distant second to the instant self-gratification of banishing the insolent and the impertinent from the perfect realm of Musk’s digital Freedonia.
Rampant egomania is not creation. It is not even, in the jargon of neoliberalism, creative destruction. It is merely destruction.
The (not unreasonable) criticism of Twitter used to be that it is an echo chamber. Yet, in the Greek myth, Echo was ultimately destroyed by Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection. At the end of the story, the echo and the narcissist both withered away and died.
Musk has provided 21st-century feral capitalism with its own moral tale of self-destruction. The narcissism that springs from excess wealth kills the thing it loves most: itself.
[Opinion column written by Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times, December 20, 2022. Links inserted by Bernie Goldbach to aid in classroom discussion with a class of students studying digital transformation. Paper copies of this opinion piece have been archived in the Clonmel library of the Technological University of the Shannon.]
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BECAUSE I TRY to understand people who have political viewpoints very different from mine, I let myself fall into rabbit holes where some of my family get their political values. I remember my grandfather at the kitchen table in the 1960s telling me that "some people want to have a government that gives them everything" and once that happens those people keep voting to keep the socialists in office. But as all gun-carrying Americans know, socialism runs counter to American values. In the minds of some people, an armed citizenry needs to rise up to protect American values.
So that's why military garb and assault rifles are in the crowd with veterans who defend the American constitution. That's why Open Carry is being normalised across a wide stretch of America. The backwoods training has moved to on-the-streets activism.
Continue reading "This socialist agenda needs to be reeled in" »
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EVEN AFTER THE IRISH government rolled out yet another plan to improve the prospects for getting on the property ladder, Ireland still lacks an adequate supply of family homes and the Central Bank still uses an unrealistic algorithm that stifles mortgage approvals.
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THERE IS A LOT of cross-talk among some of my friends, some in the word cloud above, when they're put into Facebook jail or when friends of theirs are deplatformed. I wonder if you've ever fallen into any of those spaces? This is something I've been considering since 2008. [1]
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