Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 18 August 2023…
Hey Y’all!
Good afternoon and happy Fast-Jet-Friday from Air2Ground Farms! The fast-jet pic today is the Mighty-Mighty F-15E Strike Eagle flying low in Wales this week. The top pic is Shelley and I sporting our Friday morale shirts, Shelley in a 334FS Friday shirt from when Hannah was in the squadron and me in a Secretary of the Air Force Special Programs Friday shirt from when I was the Director. This week, we exercised our freedom to wear these shirts in spite of the recently changed US Air Force uniform regulation that now prohibits Friday morale shirts. We discussed the possible reasons for this change and couldn’t decide which was the real reason. Maybe we’ll do a Facebook poll to see what you guys think. [Sarcasm follows] 1) The USAF has adopted the popular Pirate theme “Beatings will continue until morale improves.” 2) The USAF believes Lieutenants are bored and need to exercise their young brains figuring out how to make a morale shirt look like a regular shirt when worn under a uniform. 3) Chief Master Sergeants ran out of discrepancies to point out to young officers and needed another reason to “Chief” them. 4) The USAF believes this reduction in morale will assist in its recruiting problems. Personally, I think it is #4--what do you think? The animals are all doing great on the farm today with nothing significant to report. We will go pick up feed this afternoon as we are already out of hog feed and we need to get feed for the new piglets that will be arriving soon. The weather is supposed to be great tomorrow so we are hoping for an amazing market day to make up for getting rained out last weekend.
Freedom. We have chatted back and forth over the past few days about freedom of speech and thoughts surrounding it. I drew all of our attention to the First Amendment and the concept of Consent of the Governed. I now want to take this freedom discussion into the realm of “so what, what can we do?” I’m sure you are all aware of the new verb we have in American English, Bud-Lighted. The beer company took their marketing strategy into a realm that a large enough portion of their customer base was dissatisfied with to significantly impact their business. Other businesses seemed determined to follow Bud Light, possibly thinking they were immune to the treatment afforded the beer company, in pushing an agenda that was unsatisfying to their customer base. I am making no judgement regarding the strategies the companies took, but do want to highlight what can happen when a significant enough portion of people make up their minds to do something or, in the cases of these products, stop doing something. The freedom of speech discussion has centered around social media outlets censoring speech, in this case at the direction of the government. For almost a year, we have studied social media to determine how we can utilize the different platforms to build a community of like-minded folks. Probably the most impactful thing we learned is that time is the currency you pay to the sites. Time is what they are all after. The “algorithms” and “Artificial Intelligences” that decide what you see when you log in to your social media accounts all have one thing in common. In fact, it is their sole reason of existence and they will do anything they can to accomplish their task. That thing is to get you to scroll, click, read, watch, listen… to one more thing. They must get you to give their platform your time. Time is the social media currency. When you create an account, a model of you is created, an avatar of you, using the information you input. The AI then predicts what things will get that avatar to spend the most time on the platform. Then you actually place your currency into the platform by spending time, and the avatar is updated with your actual behavior. The AI then predicts what things will get that avatar to spend the most time on the platform given the new data. The cycle continues during each visit to the site. The thing that remains the same is that your time is the coveted currency and each site does everything it can to get you to spend it with them. Why does this matter? Just like with the physical product Bud Light being genuinely effected by a large number of people deciding to take their currency (in this case, dollars) to a different beer, we can similarly effect social media sites by where we decide to spend our currency (in this case, time). We the people can force our will on corporations without government involvement, if enough of us decide to do so. We have the freedom to deposit our currency where we choose. Truly, there is strength in numbers.
Episode 3 of the Dust’er Mud podcast is finally up on YouTube. The upload completed sometime in the middle of the night and was ready for viewing by this morning. Check it out and please share it on whatever social media site you are spending your currency.
Local Farm Report for 17 August 2023
Harvest:
28 Chicken eggs
9 Duck eggs
6 3/4 Gallons of milk
Cheers! Psycho & Shelley
That’s a lot to take in for a Friday night post🤣. The strength is in numbers but it will take a lot more to bud light the social media than switching to Yuengling Flight.( shameless plug)
Social media is way more of a drug than alcohol ever be. It’s a separate life , instant dopamine for many, emotional outlet, an escape from daily grind. It don’t matter if you take
your dollar somewhere else. The only difference is you will
get YOUR bias confirmation for your money. Better value for sure but its like saying that you will bankrupt a crack dealer by taking your money to a dealer one block down.That will teach em.
There used to be this…