👓 Ten Historical Anniversaries of Note in 2018 | CFR

Read Ten Historical Anniversaries of Note in 2018 by James M. Lindsay (Council on Foreign Relations)
Anniversaries mark the passage of time, recall our triumphs, and honor our losses. Two thousand seventeen witnessed many significant historically anniversaries: the centennial of the U.S. entry into World War I, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Six-Day War, to name a few. Two thousand eighteen will also see anniversaries of many significant events in world history. Here are ten to note:
Some great reminders of history hiding in this article.

👓 Broadcom launches 11-nominee slate for Qualcomm board | Reuters

Read Broadcom launches 11-nominee slate for Qualcomm board by Aishwarya Venugopal (Reuters)
Chipmaker Broadcom Ltd (AVGO.O) made its first formal move toward a hostile bid to take over Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) on Monday, laying out a slate of 11 nominees it wants to put on the board of the U.S. semiconductor firm.

👓 Who Owns L.A. Weekly? | L.A. Weekly

Read Who Owns L.A. Weekly? by Keith Plocek (L.A. Weekly)
Who owns the publication you’re reading right now? It’s a question you should ask no matter what you’re reading. In Latin there’s a phrase cui bono, which roughly translates as “who is benefiting?” It’s a good idea to know who is profiting in any situation. Why? So you can make educated decisions.
If things are as potentially as nefarious as they sound here, I’m archiving a copy of this article to the Internet Archive now, just in case the new owners notice and it disappears.

👓 My company is pushing me to give up my car, which I need — Ask a Manager

Read my company is pushing me to give up my car, which I need (Ask a Manager)
The company I work for encourages environmentalism and recycling. They started an initiative where they want everyone who works here to live environmentally friendly lifestyles. Every single person I work for has given up car ownership, as part of this initiative, except for me. I’m getting pressure because I’m the only one not participating and I’m keeping the company from a 100 percent participation rate.

🎧 This Week in Google: #432 Life of Pai | TWiT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #432 Life of Pai from TWiT.TV
Pixel Buds are "like spiders clawing in your ears." Net Neutrality will die on December 14th, no matter what you do to protest. DOJ blocks AT&T/Time Warner merger. Peter Thiel sells most of his Facebook stock, splits with Y Combinator, might buy Gawker.com assets. Google tracks Android locations. Tesla's big new truck. Stacey's Thing: CleverPet Jeff's Number: 9 Ways Twitter can punish miscreants, but usually doesn't. Leo's Tool: Radio3.io

This episode has a great discussion of net neutrality. (28m52s to roughly 1h06m00s) While it does cut a few corners for this particular audience, it has some useful and interesting history surrounding the topic. The three participants are all well versed in the issue and give it some excellent coverage.

There is also an interesting section talking about Facebook and discrimination. While they talk about dark ads and the targeting Russia did during the 2016 election as well as racist targeting, they don’t take into account data that is often used as a proxy for race. While many may be looking at the proximal problem, they’re missing the longer term problems that will ultimately surface at a later date. If not designed properly, the data is highly likely to be misused in the future, just in more subtle and harder to detect ways.

👓 Zen and the Art of Blog Maintenance | Aaron Davis

Read Zen and the Art of Blog Maintenance by Aaron Davis (Read Write Respond)
This is a reflection on my recent challenges associated with maintaining a blog and an explanation of why I persist in doing it.

🎧 This Week in Tech 641 The Tesla Zamboni | TWiT.TV

Listened to This Week in Tech 641 The Tesla Zamboni by Leo Laporte, Lisa Schmeiser, Iain Thomson, Phil Libin from TWiT.tv
Tesla unveils a semi and a $200,000 Roadster. The first church of artificial intelligence. Apple delays the HomePod until 2018. Amazon is close to launching their cashierless store, and just paid a quarter of a million dollars for the rights to produce Lord of the Rings TV shows. Who is tracking you this Thanksgiving? TechShop goes Bankrupt.

https://youtu.be/0ApfgceQv9c

🎧 This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • November 18th – 24th, 2017 | Marty McGuire

Listened to This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • November 18th - 24th, 2017 by Marty McGuireMarty McGuire from martymcgui.re
Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for November 18th - 24th, 2017. You can find all of my audio editions and subscribe with your favorite podcast app here: martymcgui.re/podcasts/indieweb/. Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 4...

Great as always Marty! Now that you’re done with all the interviews, if it’s not too much trouble, it might be interesting/worthwhile to bundle them all up in to one big “Interview” podcast.

Hopefully you’ll get a brand new batch of interviews coming up in Austin!

🎧 Pull Up A Chair #1 – Jay Rosen & David Fahrenthold | The Correspondent

Listened to Pull Up A Chair #1 - David Fahrenthold meets Jay Rosen by Jay Rosen from The Correspondent on SoundCloud
David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post won a Pulitzer for his Trump coverage, but he couldn’t have done it without help from his readers. In the first episode of our new podcast, Pull up a Chair, David talks with NYU’s Jay Rosen about the power of putting readers at the heart of journalism.



An awesome little start of a podcast. I’d definitely come back to this.

🎧 A cheese place | Eat This Podcast

Listened to A cheese place: One of the pioneers who made West Cork a centre of fine cheeses by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast
Durrus is a village at the head of Dunmanus bay, south of the Sheep’s Head peninsula in the southwest of Ireland. Durrus is also the name of an award-winning, semi-soft cheese, while Dunmanus is a harder cheese, aged a lot longer. Both were created by Jeffa Gill and are hand made by Jeffa and her small team up above the village and the bay.

Jeffa is one of the pioneers who turned West Cork into a heaven and a haven for cheese-lovers. One of the special characteristics of Durrus and many West Cork farmhouse cheeses is that they are washed rind cheeses. The young cheese is inoculated with specific bacteria (some cheeses pick their surface moulds up from the atmosphere) and is then frequently washed or moistened with a brine solution, which gives those bacteria a boost and keeps other micro-organisms at bay. The result is what many people call a stinky cheese, although the actual flavour of these cheeses is often mild, sweet and creamy.

The really remarkable thing about West Cork is how an entire food ecosystem has grown up there in the past 50 years or so, each part depending on and encouraging the others. The fact that there are so many outstanding farmhouse cheesemakers is no accident; they all gathered originally and shared their ups and downs, from which each developed their own unique cheeses. They were supported by local shops and restaurants, who created demand not just for fine cheeses but for so many other foods too. Surely someone must have documented it; so where is it?

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I could go on listening to this for ages… though I wish I could have done it with some of the cheeses discussed.

I often wish I could subscribe to this Eat This Podcast along with a delivery service that would include samples of the food items discussed. Hmmm….

🎧 Rethinking the folk history of American agriculture: Earl Butz is not the central villain of the piece | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Rethinking the folk history of American agriculture: Earl Butz is not the central villain of the piece by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast
Remember Farm Aid, which launched in 1985? A lot of people do, and they tend to date the farm crisis in America to the 1980s, triggered by Earl Butz and his crazy love for fencerow to fencerow, get big or get out, industrial agriculture. And of course, land consolidation is inevitable, because if you’re going to invest in all that capital equipment to make your farm more efficient, you’re bound to buy up the smaller farmers who weren’t so savvy. Those “facts,” however, are anything but. They’re myths, on which much of the current criticism of American farm policy is built. There are others, too, and they’re all skillfully eviscerated by Nate Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki in a recent paper.


One villain or two?

And here’s another thing. That first Farm Aid concert apparently raised $9 million. You could presumably help a lot of poor old dirt farmers with that kind of cash. But Farm Aid wasn’t actually about poor old dirt farmers, it was about people like Willie Nelson. He lost $800,000 the year before Farm Aid. Nine million dollars doesn’t go too far when individual people are losing that kind of money.

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Support this podcast: on Patreon

An interesting often untold story of agriculture, race, and economics in the United States.

👓 I’m on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality | LA Times

Read I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality (Los Angeles Times)
The FCC's plan to gut net neutrality deserves a heated response from the millions of Americans who work and create online every day.
Other than the simple “it will spur investment”, what exactly is Ajit Pai’s argument for getting rid of net neutrality? Where is it? I suspect that the only reason there’s no coverage of it anywhere amidst all the turmoil is that it doesn’t exist.

Most communities, even in major cities, only have one provider at best, so there’s absolutely no competition to begin with. Why not start with fixing that first?! In fact, that necessarily needs to be dealt with first before a bone-headed idea like killing net-neutrality.

👓 WordPress is a Typewriter by Jack Baty

Read WordPress is a Typewriter by Jack Baty (baty.net)
Using WordPress makes me feel like that boy at the Type-In. I feel like the words are going right onto the paper. Sure, the metaphor is a little thin, but the point is that when writing with WordPress (or any CMS, really), the distance between what I’m typing and what I’m publishing is very short. The only thing closer is editing HTML directly on a live page, but that’s something only crazy people do. On the other hand, publishing a static site is like sending a document to a printer. I have to make sure everything is connected, that there’s paper in the machine, and then wait for the job to finish before seeing the output. If something needs editing, and something always needs editing, the whole process starts over.
I’ve never thought of it in these terms, but there is a nice immediacy and satisfaction to WordPress for this reason. (Though naturally one shouldn’t compose in their CMS in any case.)

I might submit that his issue is a deeper one about on which platform and where to publish though given that he’s got almost as many personal websites as I do social silos. The tougher part for him is making a decision where to publish and why in addition to all the overhead of maintaining so many sites. However, I’m not one to point fingers here since I’ve got enough sites of my own, so I know his affliction.

👓 A GoFundMe Campaign Is Not Health Insurance | The Nib

Read A GoFundMe Campaign Is Not Health Insurance (The Nib)
My friend died $50 short. It doesn’t have to be that way.
This is just a heartbreaking cartoon. I hope everyone will read it in full.

This is one of the most subtly poigniant panels:

“We eulogize [the fact that Americans help each other] in literature and art instead of political theory.”

👓 Diplomats Sound the Alarm as They Are Pushed Out in Droves | New York Times

Read Diplomats Sound the Alarm as They Are Pushed Out in Droves by Gardiner Harris (New York Times)
A State Department exodus marks a new stage in the broken and increasingly contentious relationship between Rex W. Tillerson and much of his work force.