Posts

This year, like many people it seems, we took the plunge and subscribed to a summer CSA. CSA stands for community supported agriculture and the idea behind it is simple. You pay for a subscription and in return you get a weekly delivery of locally produced food. There are a lot of variations on the model. Some CSAs let you pick what goes into your box, others choose for you. Some include food produced at a single farm while others gather food from multiple local producers and create the boxes. Around here there are CSAs that include vegetables, fruit, bread, eggs, and meat. There’s even a seafood CSA. ...

Felix Salmon on today’s job report, which showed a gain of 64,000 private sector jobs and a loss of 159,000 government jobs: The U.S. does not have the luxury of waiting indefinitely for job growth to resume. Already we’re at the absolute limit: any longer, and most of the unemployed will be long-term unemployed and, to a first approximation, unemployable. This country simply can’t afford an unemployable underclass of the long-term unemployed — not morally, not economically, and not fiscally, either. ...

A representative of the W3C says it’s too early to start using HTML5. Scott Gilbertson of WebMonkey argues to the contrary. Given the pace at which Internet Explorer users upgrade, if you are opposed to using HTML5 now, you’ll probably still be opposed to it a decade from now: The fact is HTML5 is here and you can use it today, you just need to use shims, fallbacks and workarounds for older browsers. Yes, that’s unfortunate, but that situation isn’t going to change any time soon. If IE8 — which lacks support for most of HTML5’s features — has even half the longevity of IE6, we’ll still need fallbacks even when 2022 rolls around and HTML5 is, in the W3C’s opinion, finally ready. ...

I’ve been transfixed by the Stuxnet worm since I heard about it. If you’re not up on all things Stuxnet, check out Bruce Schneier’s blog post explaining what we do and don’t know about Stuxnet and how it works. Here’s why people think Stuxnet was created by a government agency: Stuxnet doesn’t act like a criminal worm. It doesn’t spread indiscriminately. It doesn’t steal credit card information or account login credentials. It doesn’t herd infected computers into a botnet. It uses multiple zero-day vulnerabilities. A criminal group would be smarter to create different worm variants and use one in each. Stuxnet performs sabotage. It doesn’t threaten sabotage, like a criminal organization intent on extortion might. ...

I loved Dave Winer’s take on angel investors: A bunch of guys (they’re almost all men) play at entrepreneurship the way other men play ponies. They’re not going to live the life of the 20-something. They couldn’t, it’s too much stress, and they have lives, and more important they have cash. It’s hard to push that hard when you aren’t betting it all. The young guy (he’s almost always a guy, too) is like a racehorse. The angels all get to hang around the stables, and watch the game closeup. ...

Content management remains an unsolved problem. Untold billions of dollars (and hours) have been spent building commercial, open source, and custom content management systems since the first Web page was pushed to a Web server using FTP, and yet they all still suck. Former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg ruminates on the fact that TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington lists frustration with technology as one of the reasons he’s happy to be selling TechCrunch to AOL. That doesn’t surprise me. ...

The other day al3x on Twitter linked to a Seth Godin blog post about structural unemployment. Godin talks about the effects of the changing economy in blunt terms: The networked revolution is creating huge profits, significant opportunities and a lot of change. What it’s not doing is providing millions of brain-dead, corner office, follow-the-manual middle class jobs. And it’s not going to. And here’s his prescription: The sad irony is that everything we do to prop up the last economy (more obedience, more compliance, cheaper yet average) gets in the way of profiting from this one. ...

Last week I read this essay by Anthony Bourdain for aspiring chefs. In it, he lists all the reasons why going to cooking school is a bad idea. Being a chef may have a more extreme list of downsides than some other careers, but you could make such a list for any profession. But what I found more interesting was his advice to people who do go to cooking school and want to be great chefs. And that advice is that it’s far more important to work in great kitchens than it is to get paid a living wage. Jobs in the great kitchens of the world are in high demand, and the best way to get them, above and beyond being brilliant, is to be willing to work for nothing or next to nothing. He lists as his great regret that he got a decent paying job right out of cooking school, and that once he’d adjusted his lifestyle to that wage, it was impossible to even consider sacrificing that wage for the opportunity to learn from great chefs. ...

Kwame Anthony Appiah lists three criteria for evaluating whether a current practice will be condemned by future generations: First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries. Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, ‘We’ve always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?’) ...

In a post discussing the value of liberal arts education, Tyler Cowen talks about why he’s interested in food: I am interested in food (among other topics), not only because of the food itself. I also view it as an investment in understanding symbolic meaning, cultural codes of excellence, the transmission of ideas, and also how the details of an area fit together to form a coherent whole. I believe this knowledge makes me smarter and wiser, although I am not sure which mass-produced formal test would pick up any effects. I view this interest as continuing my liberal arts education, albeit through self-education. ...