Today I learned

TIL that the average Palm Springs golf course uses more water in a single day than a family of four does in about five years.

Desert residents have been saving a lot of water. Farms and golf courses, not so much. [Desert Sun]

Did you know that the first ever computer bug was discovered by Grace Hopper on September 9th, 1947?

First Instance of Actual Computer Bug Being Found [Computer History Museum]

I’ve known for a while that the production and use of concrete produces large amounts of CO². However, I was surprised to learn in the video below that if concrete was a country, it would be the 3rd largest emitter of CO² behind only the United States (2) and China (1).

Well, I didn’t actually learn this today or even this month. It’s been abundantly clear for years now that YouTube does not care about pedophiles using its platform. PayMoneyWubby has produced a couple videos exposing the problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M78rlxEMBxk

In fact, after PayMoneyWubby uploaded his video about kids on Musical.ly, YouTube deleted his video due to sexually explicit content, even though all of his source material came from videos uploaded to YouTube.

Based on YouTube’s actions, it is clear that the company does not care about pedophiles using YouTube to get off to videos which sexualize children. Instead, the company only appears to care about how many people spend time viewing videos. If they took action against the pedophiles on YouTube, it would hurt their numbers and the company does not want that to happen. In fact, this does not need to be assumed. YouTube itself has stated that view counts are the reason they do not take action:

“But YouTube has not put in place the one change that researchers say would prevent this from happening again: turning off its recommendation system on videos of children, though the platform can identify such videos automatically. The company said that because recommendations are the biggest traffic driver, removing them would hurt “creators” who rely on those clicks.”

NY Times

On YouTube’s Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles [NY Times]
On YouTube, a network of paedophiles is hiding in plain sight [Wired]
YouTube still can’t stop child predators in its comments [The Verge]

Also, it should be noted that videos which sexualize prepubescent children are not the only questionable content that YouTube supports and defends:

I would have thought Germany, Vietnam, Cambodia, or Afghanistan were the most heavily bombed per capita.

While around 200,000 Laotians were killed by U.S. bombs during the Vietnam war, over 20,000 Laotians have been killed by unexploded bombs since 1973.

Anything That Flies, On Anything That Moves [Parametric Press}