read | Chris Aldrich

🎧 ‘The Daily’: California vs. the E.P.A. | New York Times

Listened to ‘The Daily’: California vs. the E.P.A. by Michael Barbaro from nytimes.com

An auto emissions battle is brewing between the Environmental Protection Agency and the state of California. Separately, James Comey tore into the president on national TV.

👓 Jensen Harris tweetstorm about startup hiring on Twitter

Read When you're leaving a big company to interview at a startup, there are some hidden questions you might not know to ask. by Jensen Harris (Twitter)

When you're leaving a big company to interview at a startup, there are some hidden questions you might not know to ask. Not all startup jobs are created equal; without the right info, you could make a bad choice. Here are 4 questions you should ask in a startup interview loop:

1) How much money does the company have in the bank?

OK, yes: this sounds super crass... an embarrassingly direct question. But it is also incredibly crucial, because without this info, you have no idea what kind of situation you are potentially walking into. You would never ask this question at a megacorp because, well, the answer is usually "infinite money." The cash position of a public company is also usually freely available. Besides, you probably wouldn't be talking to someone who could give you a direct answer anyway!

But at a startup, everything is impacted by money. For example:
* How free is the company to build towards its vision?
* How likely is the leadership to make desperate/rash decisions?
* Will you have access to the resources you need to do a good job?

There are lots of less-gosh ways to ask this question, like: "how strong is the company's financial position?" And be prepared, the answer might sound more like "here's what % of our Series B is still in the bank" or "here's how many more months of runway we have." These are ok! But by not asking, you have no idea what you are signing up for. And if a founder/senior member of the team isn't willing to give you *some sort of answer here*, that is a big red flag. They may be hiding something you won't find out about until you start work.

2) Tell me about a time the founders disagreed. What happened?

In any startup with multiple founders (most of them!) the founder working relationship can make or break the company. If it is wonderful, the company may thrive whereas if it is toxic, nothing can save it. Notice the phrasing of the question. As a candidate, just like as an interviewer, you must practice behavioral interviewing. Don't ask "how do the founders handle disagreement?" Any smart person can answer that well: “They talk, hear each other's perspectives, and work it out!” Instead ask the question the behavioral way: "Tell me about a time..." This forces the answer to be specific and real. Founders always have some disagreement; if they own that and show they know how to handle it, it is a powerful positive signal about the company. Note: Be especially wary if you are interviewing with a founder and they repeatedly answer your specific questions about this by taking the topic back into the abstract. This could show that they are not transparent, not self-aware, deceitful, or all three.

3) What is the role of the company’s board of directors?

I'll be honest. During the 16 years I worked at Microsoft, I am not sure I could have named anyone on the board. Bill Gates? The Netflix guy? It just wasn't in any way germane to the day-to-day of working there. In a startup, however, the company's relationship with its board could have a huge impact on whether you want to work there. If you are talking to a founder or senior exec, look for words of alignment and respect. Not snark or # or "ugh, the board, don't get me started.” If interviewing with a more junior employee, a great answer might well be "No idea, I’ve only seen them in the office once.” A board that is out of the way operationally, helping behind-the-scenes but not interfering, is a good sign that there's a healthy relationship there. Fun story: I once interviewed for a senior job at a tech startup. I went with the CEO to meet the board for a last round of interviews. The first board member got me into a room and started with: "Hi! FYI. you can't tell him, but we are firing the CEO." AWKWARD. Um, kthxbye.

4) Tell me about the changes you’ve experienced at the company over the last year.

A big company is pretty much the same year after year. Working there in 2017 is the same as working there in 2018. The best startups, on the other hand, are growing, changing, strengthening. The single best way to predict the future is by analyzing the past. And so by asking your interviewer not "where do you expect to be in a year" but "what have you experienced in the last year", you get a window into what the actual the pace of growth is at the company. A great, thoughtful answer about the ways the company is growing is a huge plus. A positive is often: "wow, I can't believe how much we've done/grown/changed/built when I think about it."

A worrisome answer is "honestly, it's about the same." When startups stagnate, they die. Hear the stories about what the last 12 months were like, and use that to gauge whether it would be an exciting place to spend your next few years. Companies that are thoughtfully growing employ people with a strong growth mindset, creating an amazing place to learn and build. Last thing: Don't be afraid to ask these things. You have the right to ask direct questions in your interview. As a founder, I relish being able to share info about our company. If you get vague answers/hostility, especially from senior people, this is a bad sign. Run away!

Startup interviews require you to probe differently than megacorp interviews. This is a good thing! What you learn will help you find the place that's a strong match for you.

Be prepared to ask the right questions, and you'll be one step closer to landing your dream startup job.

via:

When you're leaving a big company to interview at a startup, there are some hidden questions you might not know to ask.

Not all startup jobs are created equal; without the right info, you could make a bad choice.

Here are 4 questions you should ask in a startup interview loop:

— Jensen Harris (@jensenharris) April 25, 2018

👓 H5P Test-Drive | Jo Kehoe

Read H5P Test-Drive by Jo Kehoe (jokehoe.ca)

I’m test-driving H5P – an open HTML5 content creator that promises many things! And for the most part, it delivers. I tried out a few of the 20 plus content types that they have available here. I’ll continue to add to this as time goes on. Since it’s currently October, there is a pumpkin-spice flavoured theme to these examples (love it or hate it!).

Some interesting edtech tools here. They remind me somewhat of the type of formats and layouts made possible by the Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress, but geared toward academia. I could see things like these being useful little blocks within the upcoming Gutenberg interface.

👓 How I Set Up My Indieweb WordPress Site – 2018 Edition | David Shanske

Read How I Set Up My Indieweb WordPress Site – 2018 Edition by

David Shanske (David Shanske)

This is an update to my 2014 article on how I set up my WordPress site. It was requested I update it.

Filed under: You can really learn a lot about someone by knowing what they’re using to run their website.
(P.S. David is definitely worth knowing.)

🎧 Barges and bread | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Barges and bread: A new book looks at London and the grain trade by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:48 — 22.7MB)

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Time was, not so long ago, when you could barely move on the Thames in London for ships and boats of all shapes and sizes. Goods flowed in from the Empire in tall-masted sailing ships and stocky steamers and were transferred to barges and lighters for moving on. The canals, too, were driven by, and served, the industrial revolution, bringing coal and other raw materials to factories and taking away the finished goods by water, the cheapest and quickest system for bulk transport. By the late 1960s, much of the waterborne traffic had gone. Ships unloaded in the docks and goods were transferred by road and rail. A bit of freight continued to move on the water, some of that in the hands of Tam and Di Murrell. Di Murrell’s new book, Barges & Bread: canals & grain to bread & baking traces the interwined development of the grain trade and bread as it played out in the Thames basin and beyond.

The importance of bread (and beer) to the people is encapsulated in the Assize of Bread and Ale, a statue of 1266 (though it appears to have codified earlier laws) and the first law in England to deal with food. Loaves were sold by size for a penny, a half-penny and, most commonly, a farthing (quarter of a penny). The finer the flour, the smaller the loaf you got at each price point. The price of grain naturally varied from year to year and from place to place, but the Assize fixed not the price but the weight of a penny loaf and also regulated in minute detail the baker’s profit and allowable expenses.

Very roughly, if the price of wheat was 12 pence a quarter (a quarter weighing 240 pounds) then the baker had to ensure that a farthing loaf of the best white bread, called Wastel bread, weighed 5.6 pounds. Wastel bread was not the most expensive. Simnel bread, “because it has been baked twice,” cost a bit more and so called French bread, enriched with milk and eggs, a bit more still. The coarsest “bread of common wheat” was less than half the cost of wastel bread.

From every quarter of wheat, the baker was permitted to sell 418 pounds of bread. Anything he could squeeze above that was called advantage bread, and was essentially pure profit. There was, naturally, every incentive for bakers and millers alike to add all sorts of things to increase the weight of flour and bread.

It is the connection between money and the weight of bread that is most intriguing. Weights, like money, were expressed as pounds. A pound in money was the pound-weight of silver, while the penny – the only coin in circulation – was a pennyweight of silver. But how much was a penny weight? 32 Wheat Corns in the midst of the Ear according to the Assize of Bread and Ale, which then explained that the 20 pence-weight made an ounce, and 12 ounces made one pound.

Notes

Di Murrell’s book Barges & Bread: canals & grain to bread & baking, is available from Amazon and elsewhere, including direct from the publisher, Prospect Books.

Di also has a website, Foodieafloat.

If you really want to get to grips with the Assize of Bread, you need to read Alan S. C. Ross. “The Assize of Bread.” The Economic History Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 1956, pp. 332–342. JSTOR.

Incidental music is the Impromptu from Zez Confrey’s Three Little Oddities, played by Rowan Belt

Sad that they managed to win their court case for shipping grain, but were still frozen out of the market.

🎧 Whatever happened to British veal? | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Whatever happened to British veal? Too cute to eat, or the only ethical response? by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:38 — 18.6MB)

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Dairy cows unavoidably produce male calves that are of no use to the dairy industry. They used to end up as veal, and in 1960, Britons ate more than 600,000 calves worth of the stuff. By the 1980s, that had dropped to less than 35,000. Ten years ago, a UK trade magazine said that “public opinion … generally regards veal as ethically somewhere between dodo omelettes and panda fritters”.
And yet, today there’s no shortage of veal and no surplus of dairy bullocks.

Time was when veal calves were kept in the dark. These days, it may be the shoppers who have helped to solve the problem of surplus male dairy calves. Behind the shift is a complicated story of moral outrage, utterly unpredictable disease outbreaks and the willingness of some strange bedfellows to work together to solve a difficult problem for the food supply system.

Notes

Gillian Hopkinson is a senior lecturer at Lancaster University School of Management.

Clips from BBC Radio 4 – You and Yours and BBC World Service – Witness, Mad cow disease – CJD.

Music by Podington Bear.

Banner photo of two Dutch dairy calves by Peter Nijenhuis and cover by debstreasures.

The realities of milk and beef production may not always square with our societal morality. Things are more complicated than they may seem and require second and third level thought and problem solving to come up with worthwhile solutions. I remember outcry when I was younger and knew that things had shifted, but haven’t heard any follow up stories until now. Glad to know that things seem to have reached some sort of equilibrium that seems generally acceptable.

🎧 Hoptopia | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Hoptopia How the Willamette valley conquered the world of tasty beer by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:56 — 22.6MB)

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Brewers have long appreciated the value of hops from the Pacific northwest, but it was Cascade, a variety practically synonymous with craft brewing, that made the area more generally famous among beer drinkers. Cascade was named for the Cascade Range, which runs down the west coast of North America. The home of the Cascade hop is the Willamette valley, roughly halfway between the mountains and the coast. Cascade was released in 1972, but the history of hops in the Willamette valley goes back to the 1830s. The industry has seen more than its fair share of ups and downs, all examined by historian Peter Kopp in his book Hoptopia.

The whole question of changing tastes in beer, and how that affects the fortunes of different hops, is fascinating. If you’ve been a listener forever, you may remember a very early Eat This Podcast, about the rediscovery of an English hop known prosaically as OZ97a. Deemed too hoppy and abandoned when first tried, the vogue for craft beers resurrected its fortunes. It’s a fun story, though I say so myself.

Notes

Peter Kopp’s book is Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

Cover photo is Ezra Meeker, the early grower of hops in the Willamette valley who pioneered the global marketing of Oregon hops. The booming hop business made him the territory’s first millionnaire, and perhaps also its biggest bust. Hop King: Ezra Meeker’s Boom Years chronicles that part of his long, rich life.

Banner photo of hops by Paul on Flickr.

I had a roommate in college from the Czech Republic who fondly remembered spending time on hops farms picking what he called the county’s “green gold”. It’s interesting to think about the economic and cultural differences and norms built up around such a product. I hadn’t known that the Pacific Northwest figured so prominently in production and find it amazing that the economic timing for the industry was so fortuitous.

What a fantastic episode on all fronts.

🎧 Episode 03 The Big Man Can’t Shoot | Revisionist History

Listened to Episode 03 The Big Man Can't Shoot by

Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History

The basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain had only one flaw: he couldn’t shoot free throws. In 1962, Chamberlain switched to making his foul shots underhanded—and fixed his only weakness.

But then he switched back.

“The Big Man Can’t Shoot” is a meditation on the puzzle of why smart people do dumb things—why excellence is such a difficult and elusive goal, even for the best-intentioned.

I’m really addicted to this podcast now.

Good ideas and why they have difficulty spreading. Somewhat related to the ideas in Made to Stick.

🎧 Episode 02 Saigon, 1965 | Revisionist History

Listened to Episode 02 Saigon, 1965 by

Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History

In the early 1960s, the Pentagon set up a top-secret research project in an old villa in downtown Saigon. The task? To interview captured North Vietnamese soldiers and guerrillas in order to measure their morale: Was the relentless U.S. bombing pushing them to the brink of capitulation?

Mai Elliott, working in the RAND villa on Rue Pasteur. The windows are taped to prevent the glass from shattering in case of an explosion from a mortar round. Saigon, 1965 is the story of three people who got caught up in that effort: a young Vietnamese woman, a refugee from Nazi Germany, and a brilliant Russian émigré. All saw the same things. All reached different conclusions. The Pentagon effort, run by the Rand Corporation, was one of the most ambitious studies of enemy combatants ever conducted—and no one could agree on what it meant.

VIETNAMESE TRANSLATION COURTESY OF RONNY CHIENG
"My father-in-law was a government scholar and later government official in South Vietnam during the Vietnam war. After listening to this compelling and well crafted episode of Revisionist History, I knew he too would find this perspective on the war fascinating. So I set about to produce a Vietnamese translation of the episode so he could fully understand all the nuances of the story in his native language. Thankfully I found the extremely capable professional translator Miss Died Ngoc Bui who not only created the written translation, but also went out of her way to create the audio translation below. I hope all Vietnamese speakers, including the elderly Vietnamese diaspora who lived through the events described in the story can listen to this episode and get as much out of it as I did."
- Ronny Chieng

The American RAND staff and Vietnamese interviewers on the front porch of the villa on Rue Pasteur. Courtesy of Hanh Easterbrook. A disclosure, in the fall of 2015, I was named to the Board of Directors of the RAND Corporation—the subject of this episode. It’s not a paid position (RAND is a non-profit). And I did the bulk of my reporting for this episode before taking the position. But you should know, that when I say that Rand is a incredibly fascinating place, I’m biased. And if you were on the RAND board, I daresay you’d think the same thing.

Some really great history and analysis here. It reminds me I need to go back the Vietnam doc on PBS.