The Web as filtered (and hopefully enriched ;-) by Adrian McEwen
September 25, 2017
Interesting Things on the Internet: September 25th 2017
September 18, 2017
Interesting Things on the Internet: September 18th 2017
- Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch. The end-game of advertising-as-business-model. I see it more from Instagram than Facebook, although that's also owned by Facebook. Twitter does this too, but at least you can turn (most of) it off.
- Unemployment in the UK is now so low it's in danger of exposing the lie used to create the numbers. The graph of job rates by gender is particularly illuminating. The trend of both men/women to converge on the combined-genders line bodes well for equality, although the fact that it's at the cost of rising unemployment levels for men maybe explains some of the problems we're seeing in society. Either way, actually reducing the overall unemployment level is what we should be aiming for (universal basic services notwithstanding)
September 11, 2017
Interesting Things on the Internet: September 11th 2017
September 04, 2017
Interesting Things on the Internet: September 4th 2017
- Large Companies Considered Harmful. Lots to like here, and probably not just companies, I wonder if you can argue that part of the reason the unions were emasculated in the 80s was because they'd become too big and powerful. Still, today I think it's easy to see that it's companies who are the bigger threat.
- Grenfell Tower - How did it happen?. "Just before filing this article, I visited Grenfell Tower. [...] There, huge and devastated, is the physical presence, the physical consequence, of a thousand decisions made to get things done a bit more cheaply, to make a bit more money, to clinch that deal." I remember feeling as though this might bring down the Government when it happened, such was the level of shock and anger and dismay. Yet now, barely a few months on, it already feels as though it's slipping into history rather than galvanising us into making the country a better, safer place for us all. As if the only thing that matters is that everyone can pass the buck onto someone else and say "we did what we were supposed to" and omit pointing out how, if they'd bothered to look at the situation a bit more broadly and if other people's lives were allowed to—every now and then—come before money, they played a part in the death's of eighty people.
- Social.coop: A Cooperative Decentralized Social Network. Good interview with the founders of social.coop about that co-operative version of Twitter. The Mastodon (which is what social.coop runs) instance that I use - mastodon.me.uk is set up in similar fashion. (I'm @amcewen@mastodon.me.uk if you're a Mastodon user...)
- RFCs not IPOs (i.e. open standards not venture-capital funding). Amen to that.
- What should you think about when using Facebook?. Detailed yet readable dive into the lots of the information Facebook gathers about you.