Yesterday a thread appeared for a while having to do with whether Toyota is owed an apology from the US government or not.
It mysteriously disappeared.
Last night I opened a thread in General Discussion about flagging and such asking whether anyone had any insights/knowledge about that thread and why it disappeared.
Now this morning (2/11) the question I posted about that is gone. Poof. Furthermore I have no email saying that my post was moved to a moderation queue (which has always happened in the past if I’ve been flagged).
So its all just creepy. There is nothing in the original thread that was flaggable. Nor did my question contain anything out of bounds (or so I thought).
Any thoughts on the policing of the boards. I’d love to hear from a web lackey in addition to the regulars.
Weird–like Big Brother is watching us.
By the way, I was NOT surprised in the least that Toyota’s issue was a case of mechanical and driver error and mass hysteria due to media scare tactics and sensationalized “journalism”. Shame.
Remember all the media hype eleven years ago about how computers couldn’t cope with the new millenium. There was prediction with the coming of Y2K that automobile engines that were microprocessor controlled would quit running. All our power would go off and the telephone system would go down because of this computer glitch. Emergency generators sold like hotcakes. I even bought into the media hype and purchased two six packs instead of one for new year’s eve 2000.
The university where I am employed ordered a big generator powered by a Caterpiller diesel engine to keep the computer equipment going through this “emergency”. Unfortunately, the generator didn’t get installed by 12:00 a.m. January 1, 2000–the installation was finally completed by mid-March of 2000. I asked the adminstrator responsible for the generator and why the order wasn’t canceled when the generator wasn’t installed by the crisis data. He told me that we have to plan ahead for Y3K.
Ah–media hype can do wonderous things.
Remember the movie? Planes falling out of the sky, etc. How stupid.
A guy a few doors down from me bought a generator, and then filled probably twenty 55-gallon drums full of gas for it, which he stored in his walk-out basement. Brilliant. He had the rest of the basement stocked with enough canned goods and bottled water/sodas to last at least a year. Then he installed bars on all his windows and removed the walkout door to the basement, bricking over the hole, and bought a bunch of guns to keep all the “dumbasses who aren’t prepared” from raiding his supplies.
The rest of the neighborhood took to calling his place “Fort Moron.”
Just because the government came out with this assessment doesn’t make it absolute truth.
Remember all the media hype eleven years ago about how computers couldn’t cope with the new millenium. There was prediction with the coming of Y2K that automobile engines that were microprocessor controlled would quit running.
The cars stop working and airplanes falling out of the sky was bogus…
But there was an actual concern with many companies payroll systems, and accounting systems failing because of the y2k. Also some manufacturing plants with automated control systems might stop working. I had 3 different software contracts from 1998 through 2000 to address different y2k problems…And they WERE REAL. One company was their Process control system for package delivery. If we didn’t fix the problem before y2k…the warehouse would have shut down. And the company probably would have gone out of business. One estimate I heard was companies around the world spend over 2 billion dollars fixing their y2k problems before 2000. And there WERE problems when y2k hit. Not catastrophic…but some companies (the ones that weren’t proactive) had some issues.
Who says Egyptians have all the fun?
I suppose that our benefactors are concerned about a law suit. Are we not America? And there may have been a disturbing response or two in the middle of the night that only The Lackeys saw.
I thought of the legal angle - but as far as I can tell there is often much more intense stuff up here than what was in that thread. And I know that the original Apology to Toyota thread didn’t have anything insane in it up to the time it disappeared. I typed up a reply in there, hit submit and the thread was pulled sometime during that time. There were only about 10 replies at the time - and nothing even close to controversial by the standards of this discussion board.
On the subject of the original thread, the recent announcement of testing results tells me nothing. I do find it humorous, though, that people are trusting “government” test results to try to say “see, I told you, you can’t trust the government” - something a little self-contradictory in the logic.
One big reason so little actually went wrong on Jan 1, 2000 was because of the enormous investment that industry did to guard against it. I worked in an operating system group during that time frame and I couldn’t believe how many customers we were working with for the year leading up to Y2K. A lot of Y2K problems were fixed beforehand.
The policing here is boooogus. I posted a simple question " If my oil still looks good…clean ect. do i still need to change it after 6 months or year whatever" The question just disappeared. I was looking forward to an answer to that
Don’t forget they did have floor mat & “sticky accelerator” issues. Both admitted to by Toyota & fined for not reporting. NASA only investigated the electronic interference issue.
I still feel a little foolish for having bought a generator when we had an ice storm in my area 6 years ago. The power was knocked out and after one night, we went to my wife’s office with our sleeping bags. Her office had heat and electrical power. My wife’s boss came in with her family. My wife’s boss called her brother about 120 miles away in another state and asked if generators were available in his area. He went out to check and called back and said that there were plenty of generators at some big box store and how many did she want? My wife’s boss asked my wife if my wife and I would like a generator. My wife said yes, so we watched the children while her boss and husband drove up and back to get the generators. They returned about midnight with the generators. I woke up about 4 a.m. and tried calling my house. The answering machine came on so I knew at that point we had electric power. I’ve used the generator very little–once to run sump pumps at my church when the power was off so that the basement wouldn’t flood and once to power a welder so we could repair a basketball goal on an outdoor court. I now have one more piece of equipment that I have to maintain.
Remember all the media hype eleven years ago about how computers couldn’t cope with the new millenium.
Tell me about it. I spent many hours at the keyboard on that night and the following days.
I am not at all sure it is intentional. I suspect some of it nothing more than computer errors, or human errors. Frankly this last week seems to have had more than the usual error problems.
mmmmmmm…I always leave open the possibility of coincidence and random stuff. But to have that specific post and then my post questioning its disappearance? A little too weird for me. Obviously there are lots of posts all of the time, so no one can keep track of it all. But if they were prone to disappearing by random error once in a while I would have noticed by now.
Self contradictory? Yes, and that’s what makes us human.
Let’s reconstruct the original thread’s posts! Well, mine, anyway. I found it strange that anyone would criticize a process that worked. There were problems noted, brainstorming took place to find possible reasons, they were tested, and two seemed to fit the bill. Our government at work, and earning their wages. But I find that government employees around me earn their pay far more often than not.
I wondered why one of mine was removed but I managed to figure out that I flagged it myself when I tried to correct the punctuation. Maybe I improved it.
I have done that as well. Perhaps the flag shouldn’t be right next to the editing pencil? But since you can’t edit the initial posting I doubt it was this kind of error - although, the flag is right under the reply button.
I do think that when you flag something it is removed until its reviewed. I’ve seen posts get flagged and then reappear - I suppose if they’re deemed un-flag worthy. These threads have not reappeared.
Censorship on the CarTalk boards. That’s what I figure. I just can’t figure out why.
Many forums like this are auto-moderated. If a post or thread gets a certain number of flags, it’s deleted without any human oversight. Knowing this a small group of flaggers can virtually control a forum by flagging posts and eventually getting people banned all without any actual human moderation…Way back, this forum was actively moderated. You never see anyone being “corrected” any more. They just disappear if they get flagged enough times…
Was he laughing when he said that? Anything that fixed the y2k problem would take care of y3k too.
2038 seems to be the next date to worry about.