Rocket Bomber - linking to other people's stuff

I didn’t personally unearth this gem, I found it at The Scholarly Kitchen:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/11/01/the-making-of-a-book-1925/

despite the name, The Scholarly Kitchen is not a food blog, or a cookbook blog:

“The mission of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is “[t]o advance scholarly publishing and communication, and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking.” SSP established The Scholarly Kitchen blog in February 2008 to keep SSP members and interested parties aware of new developments in publishing.”

Add them to your RSS feeds; I have.

Also, for those you you who must link and re-blog: please send your readers to the SSP blog rather than linking here.

All that said: I’m now about to steal their video, because it’s on YouTube and I can. ;)

“So far, the sharing economy’s impact has been largely unseen because we (and the Bureau of Labor Statistics) are used to counting employment in whole jobs, or part-time jobs, not something-I-do-on-the-side-while-I-freelance jobs. Currently, companies like Airbnb, and Etsy, and Sidecar enable tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are even further down the food chain than ‘small businesses.’ They’re micro-entrepreneurs doing something so nontraditional we don’t even know how to measure it.”

The Rise of Invisible Work : Emily Badger, 31 October 2013, The Atlantic Cities

[blockquote]
“Fairly or unfairly, recent events will serve as fodder for politicians who like to claim that government is not the solution to our problems and is more often the problem.

“And yet the government tends to get involved where real needs exist, usually due to market shortfalls. Lack of health insurance, unaffordable flood insurance, difficulties obtaining housing, lack of access to higher education, etc., are real problems, and American voters have repeatedly expressed their frustration over them and their support for candidates who offer solutions.

“Except … these needs run against a peculiar American ideological strain that rejects most (or even all) signs of federal power and equates even modest levels of taxation with tyranny or socialism. Thus has the American political system developed an unusual way of meeting citizens’ needs while attempting to hide the fact that it is doing so. This system has been dubbed ‘the submerged state’ by political scientist Suzanne Mettler and, relatedly, ‘the kludgeocracy’ by political scientist Steven Teles.”[/blockquote]

You Probably Rely on the Federal Government a Lot More Than You Think You Do : http://www.psmag.com/politics/government-need-long-invisible-69011/

“D.C.‘s economy has come a long way from its days as a sleepy government town. It has evolved a highly educated, highly skilled economy that is driven by knowledge, technology, and creativity. But its economy is also one where government plays an important role, both through direct employment and through more significant indirect multiplier effects. If great research universities are the hubs of other knowledge and tech regions, the government broadly can be considered the hub of D.C.‘s knowledge economy.”

The Truth About D.C.‘s Growing Knowledge-Based Economy : http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/10/truth-about-dcs-growing-knowledge-based-economy/7317/

##

The Atlantic blog post quoted and linked above seems to gloss over one point I felt should have been explored: How many of these ‘tech’ and ‘knowledge’ jobs exist because the firm either benefits directly from government contracts, or relied heavily on such contracts to when they were first getting started? Not a “multiplier effect” but a direct payment as a Fed contractor? The definition of government ‘employment’ should have been extended to include these.

[blockquote]
“Now the world has evolved further—we are even more integrated and mobile, suggesting we’d benefit from fewer, more stable time zones. Why stick with a system designed for commerce in 1883? In reality, America already functions on fewer than four time zones. I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8am instead of 9am, restaurants were packed at 6pm instead of 7pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. But for the last three years I lived in a state of constant confusion, I rarely knew the time and was perpetually an hour late or early. And for what purpose? If everyone functions an hour earlier anyway, in part to coordinate with other parts of the country, the different time zones lose meaning and are reduced to an arbitrary inconvenience. Research based on time use surveys found Americans’ schedules are determined by television more than daylight. That suggests in effect, Americans already live on two time zones.

“It’s true that larger time zones would seem to cheat many people out of daylight by removing them further from their true solar time. But the demands of global commerce already do that. Many people work in companies with remote offices or have clients in different parts of the country. It’s become routine to arrange schedules to coordinate people in multiple domestic time zones. Traders in California start their day at 5am to participate in New York markets. True, not all Californians work on East Coast time, but research by economists Daniel Hamermesh, Catlin Meyers, and Mark Peacock showed communities are more productive when there’s more time coordination.”[/blockquote]

The US needs to retire daylight savings and just have two time zones—one hour apart : http://qz.com/142199/the-us-needs-to-retire-daylight-savings-and-just-have-two-time-zones-one-hour-apart/
via The Verge

##

Daylight Savings is a nuisance for most, and I for one would not miss it. Can we get Congress on this, or are they too busy doing nothing this year?

I do use the occasion of Daylight Savings clock changes as a reminder to back up my computer data twice a year.

Filed under novel notes, to be used at some point.

[blockquote]
“Yesterday morning the phone stopped a bullet that would otherwise have hit him in the chest.

“It’s a scene right out of an old Western flick, except that the pocket-sized Bible has been replaced by a 4.3-inch Android smartphone. A look at the back of the Evo reveals that its most volatile components (the battery) played an important role in stopping the slug.

…

“This isn’t the first time an HTC phone has stopped a bullet, either. You may recall an eerily similar incident that occurred back in 2011, where an Atlanta nightclub valet’s life was saved by an Evo 4G.”[/blockquote]

photos at link:

HTC phones officially the best at stopping bullets : http://www.geek.com/mobile/htc-phones-officially-the-best-at-stopping-bullets-1575442/

“Third, I’m not sure it’s fair to compare retail to other kinds of architecture. Most of the cold, lifeless architecture I see is corporate or institutional. Retail establishments such as Starbucks are in the business of attracting customers and, if they have adequate resources and the location is right for business, I’d say they succeed at that more often than not. It may not be Great Architecture, but it works for people. Consider the amazing success of the enclosed suburban regional shopping mall, for example. The exterior architecture is generally hideous, as are the parking lots; but, on the inside, designers figured out exactly what people wanted. We now know that the results haven’t been so good for America, in my opinion, and the mall as an architectural form is now in significant decline. But it had quite a run over four decades or so.”

Has Architecture Lost Touch With the People? : http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2013/10/has-architecture-lost-touch-people/7388/

[blockquote]
Chiliheads are mostly American, British, and Australian guys. (There is also a valiant Scandinavian contingent.) Chili growing is to gardening as grilling is to cooking, allowing men to enter, and dominate, a domestic sphere without sacrificing their bluster. “I can’t remember eating anything spicy before the parrot came along,” Fowler, a big man with a brushy mustache, told me, in July. The chili world is full of garrulous, confiding, erratic narrators who say things like “before the parrot came along.”
[/blockquote]

Fire-Eaters : http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/11/04/131104fa_fact_collins : via The Feature

“We don’t talk much about ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ in public anymore, but the distinction between one place and another is implicitly understood and often explicitly specified. That location matters greatly for housing values, for example, is taken for granted. Less appreciated is the persistence of neighborhood inequality and its extensive reach into multiple aspects of everyday life. An increasing separation at the top has intensified the effect of spatial divisions on everyone else.”

Division Street, U.S.A. : http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/division-street-u-s-a/?ref=todayspaper&_r=0 : via Final Boss Form