Deception, Obfuscation & Misdirection

This is a concatenation of posts I originally made in 2016-2017--even more relevant today...

Most are familiar with the concept of #FUD—short for #Fear, #Uncertainty & #Doubt. It summarizes a strategy often used in marketing and political propaganda. Its effects are pernicious, divisive and lead to exploitation. Examples abound. Fear is a strong motivator! To resist FUD one must understand how it is practiced using the principles of #Deception, #Obfuscation and #Misdirection.

https://mdpaths.com/rrr/commentary/deception_obfuscation_misdirection/index.html

DO NOT BELIEVE #PierrePoilievre #LIES! #canada #election2025 Mark Carney #Liberals #cpc #NDP #BQ #cdnpoli

Terence Eden on the oddly narrow definition of family

I was recently browsing some blogs and came upon Terence Eden’s Blog and a post titled Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Families. I have no doubt that much of the oddly limited definition of family comes from oddly narrow ideas. I think some of it comes from not thinking about the users who use your system.

For example, I’ve seen family tickets which cover two adults and two children. That’d be no good for us growing up. I had three siblings; two of us would be left out under this limited definition.

The thing about people is that we rarely fit into the neatly defined boxes that executives and marketing agencies try to put us in.

The same limitation applies to names. I have a friend who had to invent a surname to make life easier because, without one of those, a lot of computer systems got very confused.

Programmers encounter similar limits for email validation, dates, time zones, leap years, and non-standard addresses. I think this is because programmers have yet to encounter all the many edge cases that make good data validation a truly horrible problem to solve well.

But, yeah, they also misunderstand what makes a family. We need should change the general awareness of what a family is. Starting with how many adults and minors make up any given family unit.