We lost our first child coming up on 33 years ago.

From that experience and others, I have learned that often the most important things that happen to us in life cannot be changed or avoided.

We can only learn from these experiences. I learned a greater appreciation for blessings that I may have otherwise taken for granted.

I learned greater compassion for people, knowing that everyone I meet is suffering or has suffered in ways that I cannot comprehend.

What have you learned?

Consider for a moment the following headlines.

Now read Twitter's official policy position.

If the hypocrisy and cruel irony escapes you, it may be wise to check the news more often.

Facebook and Twitter have recently banned a variety of voices, including that of President Donald I. Trump, from their platforms. They claim falsely that the President actually invited the violence that occurred at the Capitol last Wednesday. He certainly did not help, but it's a major leap to accuse him of giving the criminal trespassers on the Capitol actual marching orders. To arrive at that level of blame, we must also hold a variety of politicians to blame for the riots in a variety of cities throughout the year 2020.

Then as a result, Apple, Google, and Amazon decided to pile onto the virtue signaling censorship movement and shut down Parler, the open social media competition. The violence at the Capitol gave all these players the pretense to silence their political enemies, and the results in Georgia assured them that nobody in Washington would hold them accountable. All impediments to their fascist rage against the right being removed, they acted swiftly.

But apparently the global policy boys at Twitter object to the same thing happening to their users as a consequence of the actions taken by a totalitarian regime in Uganda. How ironic. The Twitter pot seem to be calling the Twitter kettle black. 

I'll copy a comment I made in reply to a comment made on another post:

If we can't tolerate speech with which we disagree, we can't have freedom of speech. In high school, at the height of the cold war, our American Studies teacher asked if we were willing to allow the Communist Party to operate as a political party in the U.S. I was the only one who raised my hand. My classmates booed. My teacher chided them and gave me a guaranteed A.

If we begin to stifle speech because we fear it, rather than countering it with persuasion, we will produce a violent and unpredictable response from radicals who have been shut up rather than simply beaten on a fair and open playing field of ideas.

Will the rash actions of social media and other big tech players have unintended consequences? I think that is certain. Have they signed their own roadmap to decline and failure? Time will tell. Freedom will ring. Freedom will prosper. History is clear. Those who suppress the voices of millions are doomed to eventual failure. 

Google, Apple, and Amazon AWS are not your friends. You may be applauding their actions against Parler, but let's think it through.

Setting aside the politics of Parler, the actions of these three vendors (and others) over the last few days should give everyone pause.

If you lock in your technology offering and make your business dependent on the goodwill of a cloud vendor or an app store, you are surrendering your business to their control under terms of service that can easily be interpreted in their favor at their whim.

The only way to mitigate this risk is to be sure you are not locked in and that no one single vendor controls your data and technology.

Again, setting aside the politics, what is your organization's strategy if your cloud vendor suddenly gives you a 24 hour shutdown notice on the weekend when your employees are off?

Could you survive such an action from your cloud vendor or an app store? If your users suddenly cannot access their data or interact with you, what will the consequences be?

Comments welcome but I hope you will limit your comments to vendor lock rather than the politics involved in this one case.

Before you comment, consider this quote from CS Lewis:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Here's a few things I do. They are not fool proof and I don't always follow my own advice, so take them for whatever value you find in them.

1. Find at least two sources from left leaning media and two from right leaning media. I have my favorites on both sides. 

2. Try to find original content rather than a simple duplicate copy of an AP story or two sources with nearly identical copy. There is a lot of intellectual plagiarism out there.

3. Ignore the headlines and pull quotes (the enlarged quotes of the article). These are designed only to get clicks and lead you to a biased conclusion.

4. Ignore opinions and conclusions. Anything that characterizes the facts or statements of people quoted in the story is not journalism; it's activism, designed to mislead.

5. Look for details that are common between the ideologically opposed sources. These are often truths. 

6. Look for details included in one side and excluded in the other. You won't immediately know if these are true. Often they lack complete context and are included in the way that they are in order to support the characterizations being made by the writer or editorial staff.

7. Assume that there is always more to the story than meets the eye.

8. Take photographic and video evidence with a grain of salt. It is altogether too easy to edit these and remove context that contradicts the slanted narrative. I've been caught by this more than once. We want to believe what we see and hear. This is where we are all most easily manipulated.

9. Assume that all media sources have an angle, a narrative, that they are pushing. 

10. Watch for stories that are covered only by one side. Ask yourself why. Dig for multiple sources. Often when a story hurts the narrative, the story is still covered but it's buried under a bland headline designed to avoid clicks.

11. Use more than one search engine. Every search algorithm has bias built in. Mostly that bias leans left, so you may need to dig deep to find opposing coverage from the right, but you will find it.

12. Distrust bloggers, podcasters, straight up opinion talking heads, and so-called independent fact check sites. Listen to them but do not believe everything they say. Research whatever they say using the steps above.

Again, this is not foolproof, but it does help me.

Agile - The Most Meaningless Word in the Tech Lexicon

Has there ever been a more over-hyped word in the history of technology? A word that has been appropriated by everyone and assigned so many different definitions and book-length explanations and an army of consultants, each with their own medicine show, the word Agile has become meaningless pablum, a badge we all wear making it indistinguishable from any other technological accoutrement.

The word Agile has come to mean what any practitioner wants it to mean, used as a wrapper for the way they think things ought to be done. It has become a meaningless defense for management and delivery practices of all sorts. It has become the industry's magic safe word or imprimatur to sell a variety of process control systems and frameworks, giving rise to eager consultancies readily able to sell the miracle cure to eager executives in need of an enterprise cure that will hide their inability to manage the organization.

When we have exhausted these five simple letters, we will pick a new word and make it meaningless.

 #management #technology #business #agile #meaning #meaningless

I love Nephi. Especially his powerful words of reflection and prayer in 2 Nephi chapter 4. Here's just one gem for a thought today.

"O Lord, I have trusted in thee, and I will trust in thee forever. I will not put my trust in the arm of flesh; for I know that cursed is he that putteth his trust in the arm of flesh. Yea, cursed is he that putteth his trust in man or maketh flesh his arm." (verse 34)

I am reminded that we, as a people, altogether too often put our trust in men. They have names like Trump, Biden, Romney, Monsen, Nelson, and many others. This is not to say there is nothing good in these men. Indeed there may be much to be admired, but our trust, our faith, these we should reserve for the Lord, and Him alone. 

How are we cursed if we put our trust in man? Other words for cursed may be damned or doomed. I have wondered at these words. I have observed the pains we suffer when men we trusted have failed us. If we believe that a mere mortal is beyond the reach of weakness, failure, and sin, we will nearly always be disappointed. More dangerously, if we allow such trust to replace or stand in for our faith in God, then surely we walk on the razor's edge of doom.

It is upon that edge of doom that our own faith may be shattered when the men we trusted turn out to be just that, mere mortal men, subject to the buffetings of Satan, able to make mistakes, and equally in need of mercy as we are every day.

Let us harken to the words of Nephi and escape the fate of such a curse.