Of sandwiches and cultural exclusion – scatterplot
[T]oday’s highbrow signifier is tomorrow’s Beanie Baby.
And vice versa, of course.
Why the Price of Food has Nothing to do with the Price of Food – and why science has been corrupted, by Colin Tudge
My old mucker in fine form. To whit:
For in truth, the reasons why so many people in Britain cannot afford food that’s good and fresh has almost nothing to do with the cost of production; and the reasons farmers go bust has almost nothing to do with their supposed “inefficiency”; and the current obsession in high places with robots and GMOs and industrial chemistry is a horrible perversion of science and a huge waste of money which, in the end, is public money. Food is too expensive for more and more people in well-heeled Britain for three main reasons, none of which has anything directly to do with the cost of production, and none of which is alleviated by attempts to make production more “efficient” by sacking people, joining big farms into big estates, or festooning the whole exercize with high-tech. Attempts to mitigate rising prices in the short term by buying more from the world at large will only transfer misery elsewhere, as indigenous agricultures everywhere that evolved to serve the needs of their people are replaced by industrialized monocultures owned by corporates, to provide commodity crops for export.
Not that anyone who needs to is listening.
Calling Bullshit — Syllabus
I know this is all over the place. I want it here, for reference.
The Lake District’s world heritage site status is a betrayal of the living world | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian
George Monbiot in scathing good form. The Lake District is a fantasy that would be much better off with a lot fewer sheep.
🎉 I'm now a proud supporter of IndieWeb. You should support them too! https://opencollective.com/indieweb #opencollective
Thanks Chris. I'm using 0.9.9 The likes with stars are from Quill, those without are bookmarks from Known directly.
So, farewell then, Clammr. And SoundCloud?
3 min read
Clammr was a service that enabled you to tweet little bits of audio. I signed up in the hope that I could use it to market my podcasts. In the end, I barely used it, because its audience didn’t seem to include people who wanted to listen to my stuff.
A couple of weeks ago I got an email
Dear Clammr Users:
It’s time for our team to move on to new adventures. We write to inform you that we will be shutting down the Clammr service at 11:59pm ET on 2 July 2017.
Thank you for all of the creativity and joy that you have shared with the world using Clammr. We’ve been inspired by the community every day and cherish having had the opportunity to get to know so many amazing and talented people.
We realize that some of you may wish to keep the Clammr clips you created. We have posted instructions with a hack on how to do that in Section XIX of the User Guide. In short, you need to take three steps (1) share the clip to twitter using the Clammr app; (2) go to twitter and copy the url of the tweet; (3) enter the url on a tweet-to-MP4 conversion site to generate an MP4 video file that you can download.
On the same day I saw a link to an item on Hacker News from someone at SoundCloud who was concerned that the company was in financial trouble, and wanted advice.
Once is coincidence
The HN article dated to a couple of weeks before the Clammr email, and I made a note to maybe write about it here, but I was in catch-up mode and the HN piece wasn’t signed. So, it slipped. Then to a piece in the New York Times announcing layoffs at SoundCloud. That offers a cloak of respectability to cover my schadenfreude.
I can see why people found SoundCloud attractive: in return for an easy audio life, you put your stuff behind bars, bars that prevented other people, like me, sharing it without jumping through an absurd number of hoops. Some of those people did the smart thing, and syndicated to SoundCloud from sites they controlled, but many, many did not. Too bad. I hope some of them are now thinking about securing the availability of their work.
Dash-dash it all! Apple’s bad beta decision on em and en dashes
Lovely explanation of ems and ens and other arcana. Not surprisingly, though, no mention of ells.
Scrabblers of the world, unite!