“I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage,” she says, “and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You’re lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it,…
In September 2000, I was blogging about The nerdy, 3-person 1990 play PICK UP AX The full text of Edward Bellamy’s Utopian fantasy Looking Backward (written in 1888, set in September 2000) The papers of William Butler Yeats (donated by his son to the National Library of Ireland) An elitist press release from Jupiter Communications…
A good response to the myth that the labor of an online instructor is less valuable than the labor of an in-person instructor. Most of a college’s budget is labor. When a physical campus moves to online teaching, it doesn’t save much labor at all. Grading an online student’s paper takes the same amount of…
Jerz > Writing > Technical Writing Tips
I’m interested in the way the “Thin Blue Line” design remixes the American Flag. I’m amused by the quirky way the “Thin Bread Crust” meme remixes the remix. As I was fact-checking (as I habitually do before sharing) I found a 2018 USA Today article reporting that “drivers/sales workers and truck drivers” suffered 135.9…
Hard-hitting column from Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post. Baseball is facing a new crisis not even a week into its pandemic-delayed season. It’s an axiom in sports: Your results speak for themselves. The scoreboard says more than a dozen major league baseball players are sick after just five days of play, and the only…
Configuring socially distanced seating and maintaining sanitation protocols in the rough-hewn, Civil War-era barn that houses the theater would be difficult, [executive artistic director Pat Beyer] said.
“I cannot see this structure being brought up to speed in today’s climate. They still haven’t worked out yet how theaters will operate,” she said. “If they can’t figure out what to do at Heinz Hall and the Benedum, how do they expect me to figure it out?”
Wednesday morning my resourceful brother-in-law called me to say he found a great deal 3.5 hours from where I live. Our local dealer could not match the price. I hopped into a rental car, and drove home that night in a 2020 Hyundai Kona.
Front page of the Miami Herald newspaper, with two headlines circled: “Florida schools ordered to reopen in August” and “Miami-Dade restaurants, gyms closing to fight COVID surge”
It started as a murmur of dissent, but over the weekend the campaign to persuade brands to boycott Facebook ads for the month of July turned into a major crisis for the social media giant. It began badly on Friday when Unilever, one of the world’s biggest advertisers, announced it was joining the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, which had already been backed by Verizon, Patagonia, and Ben and Jerry’s.
Shortly after my region ended their lockdown, I went to my local Walmart to return something I had purchased online. I was shocked that more than half of the people there weren’t wearing masks. I got in and out quickly, wondering all the while whether the chance to get infected was really worth the $22…
In June, 2000, I was blogging about Poems inspired by anagrams (T.S. Eliot = Toilets; Emily Dickinson = Skinny Domicile) Where to go if you wanted to know what was happening In 1750 Paris The Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations A patent lawsuit that claimed ownership of the concept of hyperlinks Reading posture (how do…
Since new technical skills are always in high demand, young college graduates who have them earn a short-run salary premium. Yet when the job changes, these now experienced workers must learn new technical skills to keep up with fresh college graduates and a constant stream of talent from abroad. The result is slower salary growth…
Microsoft is laying off dozens of journalists and editorial workers at its Microsoft News and MSN organizations. The layoffs are part of a bigger push by Microsoft to rely on artificial intelligence to pick news and content that’s presented on MSN.com, inside Microsoft’s Edge browser, and in the company’s various Microsoft News apps. Many of the affected workers are part of Microsoft’s SANE (search, ads, News, Edge) division, and are contracted as human editors to help pick stories. Robots will now pick news stories for MSN and Microsoft News.
I just found a post on economics in early computer games, tucked away as a “Draft” in my WordPress database, dated Jan 2011. I’m not sure why I never published it. The web page I was responding to has disappeared from the Internet, so I’ve linked to the Wayback Archive instead.
About a dozen local TV news stations aired a video segment produced by Amazon. Some identified the source, but most just let TV viewers assume the video was a news story, rather than a PR piece hosted by an Amazon employee. Journalism matters. See Forbes for details on the story.
Thoughtful essay from Julio Vincent Gambuto. Get ready, my friends. What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from…
According to an article in Medium, toilet paper isn’t selling out because the supply chain is collapsing, or because people are hoarding. We’re using more toilet paper at home. Yes, some people are hoarding, but we’re all spending a lot more time at home. All the toilet paper we would have used at work, in…