Technology
For the second episode of Season 2 extra-special US-based guest corespondent Courtney Mitchel joins Morris for a wide-ranging discussion of work and labor. Show NotesA clip of Ronald Reagan in Bedtime for Bonzo (1951)Some of the best episodes of Accidental Tech Podcast are when they (despite some initial reluctance) talk about gender and sexism in tech: Episode 57, Episode 58, Episode 116, Episode 117, etc.John Siracusa and Casey Liss talk about misspeaking on sensitive and charged subjects in Episode 57, a discussion followed quickly by Casey unintentionally misspeaking.Harajuku Data Lake Episode 2: Why do we work?Indiana’s anti-LGBT law, signed by then-Governor Mike PenceNo I don’t want to “be a man”: 15 Problems Only Butch Lesbians Understand (Cosmopolitan)A Schmierkase/“Cup Cheese” recipe. There are surprisingly few results for “Schmierkase” online, and most seem to be on personal blogs, forgotten forums, or minor recipe sites that appear to have last seen a redesign in the early 2000s.Incidentally, this is sort of how the web felt in the mid-90s: Many small independent sites, lots of quirky and amateur graphic design, search engine results where the most interesting link was just as likely to be on the fifth page as the first, and a sense of hope and excitement that came from knowing that you–yes you!!!–could make the #1 schemierkase site in the world in just a few hours on a weekend. (Being the 1990s, it would almost certainly be called “Schemierkase World,” have a rotating 3D globe on a beige background as the logo, and be hosted on GeoCities with a WebRing on the splash page.)The ACA (Affordable Care Act), also known as ‘ObamaCare’ (Wikipedia)‘Too big to fail’: Systemically important financial institution (Wikipedia)An excellent description of the post-World War II ‘lifetime employment’ system in Japan. While this system did begin to break down in the 1990s, even in 2017 many of its features (and particularly the practice of hiring new graduates en masse based on their perceived future potential rather than what they may or may not have studied in college) remain fully intact.Bachman Turner Overdrive - Lookin’ Out for No. 1 (YouTube)Converse closing Chuck Taylor All-Star plant [2001]Nike sweatshops (Wikipedia). Two decades after the peak of the anti-sweatshop movement of the mid-1990s, Michael Hobbes offers an excellent review of its legacy, successes, and failures: The Myth of the Ethical Shopper.Shit Out of Luck (SOL)(Wiktionary)Ben Thompson and James Allworth’s excellent podcast ExponentCron (Wikipedia)Basic income (Wikipedia)“Could ‘single-payer’ be Trump’s trump card?,” an incredibly optimistic opinion piece that appeared in the Baltimore Sun in January. At this point the answer is clearly ‘No.’“Can we cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime?”