Linked List: December 19, 2020

Saturday, 19 December 2020

The Official Cyber Monday Mac Bundle, Featuring Parallels Pro and Luminar 4 ★

My thanks to Stack Social for sponsoring this week at DF to promote their Cyber Monday Mac Bundle — 12 great Mac apps at one low price. The bundle is headlined by Parallels Desktop Pro (a $100 value) and Luminar 4 (an $80 value), but the whole bundle costs just $69.99. You save money even if you’re just interested in Parallels or Luminar, and you get everything else in the bundle along with them, including lifetime subscriptions to Goose VPN (a $499 value) and uTalk Languages (an $84 value). The entire 12-app bundle is valued at over $1,200.

Here’s where it goes from a good deal to a great deal: DF readers can take an extra 40 percent off using the promo code FIRE40. The only catch is that this bundle is a limited time offer — check it out to see everything that’s included.

2020’s ‘The Dog Ate My Homework’ Universal Scapegoat: ‘The Algorithm’ ★

Lenny Bernstein, Lateshia Beachum, and Hannah Knowles, reporting for The Washington Post:

Stanford Health Care apologized Friday for a plan that left nearly all of its young front-line doctors out of the first round of coronavirus vaccinations. […] The “residents” — medical school graduates who staff the hospital for several years as they learn specialties such as emergency medicine, internal medicine and family medicine — were furious when it became clear that just seven of the more than 1,300 at the medical center were in the first round for vaccinations. Also affected were “fellows,” who work in the hospital as they train further in sub-specialties, nurses and other staff.

Residents across specialties had just been asked to volunteer for extra intensive care unit work in preparation for a surge in covid-19 patients.

An email to pediatrics residents and fellows obtained by The Washington Post said that “the Stanford vaccine algorithm failed to prioritize house staff,” as the early year doctors are known collectively.

Blaming this on “the algorithm” is such ridiculous bullshit. What is an algorithm? It’s a set of rules and heuristics, created and decided by people. Blaming this on “the algorithm” is a shameless attempt to insinuate that they just put everyone into a system and the mean old computer decided to put front-line residents at the end of the list, when in fact, what they mean is, the people at Stanford who created the rules decided to put them at the end of the list. That’s their algorithm.

(Via Jim Ray, who’s angrier about this than I am.)

Twitter Updates Election Misinformation Labels ★

A nice change (if weeks overdue). Now, when the president tweets kooky bullshit about the election, the tweets have a label attached that reads, “Election officials have certified Joe Biden as the winner of the U.S. Presidential election.” Trump’s helping to spread the word.

Time: ‘Facebook Shopping Scams Have Skyrocketed During the Pandemic’ ★

Andrew R. Chow, reporting for Time:

Further reassured by photos that showed the trees with their creator Kristi Pimentel in her Florida home studio, Hopper ordered three. But there was one problem: Pimentel wasn’t involved at all. Someone was swiping photos from her Etsy and putting them on websites and social media ad campaigns. People would see those pictures and order her trees, and then only receive dollar store flotsam. Edmonson says he got dinky plastic cones, while Hopper says she received a wooden gnome that was “the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.” Pimentel, meanwhile, was deluged with dozens of confused or angry customers every day demanding their money back, despite the fact she hadn’t processed any of their orders. […]

These stories aren’t isolated incidents. An almost-identical scene is unfolding over and over in homes across the country and world. Facebook or Instagram users see an ad on their feed for a discounted product. They purchase the item through PayPal, and then a knick-knack of no value arrives.

Facebook, champion of the small business owner.