June, 2017 | Chris Aldrich

👓 Micro.blog, JSON Feed, and Evergreen Give Me Hope for the Open Web | Jonathan LaCour

Read Micro.blog, JSON Feed, and Evergreen Give Me Hope for the Open Web by

I've long been a believer in the power of the open web, but my passion for saving it has been ignited by the IndieWeb movement, as of late. More and more people are discovering their distaste for creepy, ad-driven content silos like Facebook. Today's post by Dave Winer on the evils of Facebook, and...

📺 Paris Agreement: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Watched Paris Agreement: Last Week Tonight from HBO

Donald Trump plans to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change. That's bad news for anyone who happens to live on this planet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5scez5dqtAc

📺 Marijuana: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Watched Marijuana: Last Week Tonight from HBO

Under federal law, even legal marijuana is illegal. John Oliver explains why conflicting drug laws pose serious problems.

Our government should spend a bit more time worrying less about flashy headlines and spend more time working on things that will help and improve the lives of the most people. Getting the hundreds of thousands of low-lying marijuana offenders out of the criminal justice system and helping them be productive members of society would certainly help. If we’re going to penalize marijuana users like this we should also do it with alcoholics too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcR_Wg42dv8

📺 Federal Budget: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Watched Federal Budget: Last Week Tonight from HBO

Donald Trump's federal budget plan proposes large funding cuts with largely negative consequences. John Oliver examines the troubling priorities of the new administration.

It’s amazing how much civics lesson one can sneak into a comedy show.

📺 Food Waste: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Watched Food Waste: Last Week Tonight from HBO

Producers, sellers, and consumers waste tons of food. John Oliver discusses the shocking amount of food we don’t eat.

This episode dispels a lot of common misconceptions about food and food donations in the United States.

Some of the potential legislation discussed here could be tremendously helpful not only to a lot of Americans, but to other countries as well. I find it difficult to believe that legislators work on a bunch of knucklehead things when “simple” things like this are left to fester away. Not only could it help out millions of people, but could create jobs, and drastically effect world efficiency as well as improve the economy.

If Jeremy Cherfas, hasn’t seen this, I highly recommend it. Perhaps a more in-dept episode of Eat This Podcast on the numbers, policy decisions and science?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=i8xwLWb0lLY

📺 Scientific Studies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Watched Scientific Studies: Last Week Tonight from HBO

John Oliver discusses how and why media outlets so often report untrue or incomplete information as science.

This episode reminds me a bit about a short snippet I wrote in 2015 about the Evolution of a Scientific Journal Article Title (from Nature to TMZ)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw

🎧 Containers Episode 7: The Lost Docks

Listened to Containers Episode 7: The Lost Docks from Containers

It’s 1979 and containerization is sweeping through the San Francisco waterfront, leaving the old docks in ruins. As global trade explodes, a group of longshoremen band together to try to preserve the culture of work that they knew. They take pictures, create a slide show, and make sound recordings. Those recordings languished in a basement for 40 years. In this episode, we hear those archival tapes as a way of exploring the human effects of automation.

A nice bit on the human side of shipping, and in particular how things have changed for longshoremen.

As I listen to this and some of the culture discussed in the episode, I can’t help but wonder about how things change for the modern-day versions of longshoremen. So for example, a lot of programmers have some of this type of culture. I’ll admit it’s early days right now, but what happens to the class of programmers now fifty years on? Could make an interesting plot for a sci-fi story?

https://soundcloud.com/containersfmg/episode-7-the-lost-docks