2020
IBM’s outgoing boss Rometty awarded $20m+ in 2019 for growing revenue 0.1% Nice work if you can get it.
IBM Food Trust: Who’s using blockchain to track supply chain?
IBM has pushed blockchain hard for tracking customer supply chains, and touted marquee customers such as Walmart and Nestle. But it’s a big, hairy problem and uptake is slow.
I came into my office at about 4 am. Minnie had been closed up in here for six hours.
It’s now after 7 am. Minnie still hasn’t gone out to relieve herself.
I’m kind of in awe.
VMware is looking to rejuvenate again with a Kubernetes injection:
VMware today rolls out an aggressive plan to integrate Kubernetes with traditional applications (running on VMware vSphere, natch). I go in-depth on the news at The Next Platform.
“The power of Frenchmen in your intestines” (1919) via
Back of the famous 1 Hacker Way Facebook sign via
The back side of Hollywood Squares, 1976 via
Can You Really Hire a Hit Man on the Dark Web?
The dark web is swarming with hitman-for-hire sites, with colorful names like Azerbaijani Eagles and Sicilian Hitmen International Network. They charge tens of thousands of dollars in bitcoin – but they are frauds. They don’t actually kill people.
What Bernie Sanders Gets Right About the Media:
much of the U.S. media still covers elections as if they’re sporting events and that the affluent New Yorkers who run and appear on television networks are not inclined to like him.
Corporate media sees Sanders and Trump as the same, which is wrong.
Trump is “a star of the corporate media who hacked its commercial incentives to his advantage, delivering free lively entertainment to cable networks desperate for programming. … Mr. Sanders wants to remake the media in a new model.”
California’s Gig Economy Is Under Attack.
AB5 is limiting freelancers' ability to work, going far beyond the Uber drivers it was intended to protect.
AB5 is a disaster. Terrible legislation.
Like Cambridge Analytica, “but more nefariously, arguably:" Banjo, an artificial intelligence firm that works with police, used a shadow company to create Android and iOS apps that looked innocuous but were specifically designed to secretly scrape social media.
Cory Doctorow: Europe looks like it may be getting the courage to take on Apple, mandating that consumers have a right to repair their phones
That would be a big threat to Apple’s revenue, as the company depends on customers replacing worn out phones when Apple deems the pocket-fondles are beyond repair.
The Last Alternative: A 1978 Soviet TV adaptation of Isaac Asimov's "The Naked Sun"
Cheesy even by 1978 standards, according to this fellow on Reddit.
On YouTube: here and here and here
I gave it a quick peek and can confirm its cheesiness. It’s in Russian, no subtitles, so I didn’t watch. I don’t speak Russian.
Old age is very different today, when the average lifespan is 79, than at the turn of the 20th century, when it was 49. It’s a new stage of life, like adolescence emerged 70 or so years ago.
An interview with Louise Aronson, author of the book “Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life." From the book description on Amazon:
For more than 5,000 years, “old” has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we’ve made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied.
In the words of Doc Holliday: “I’m in my prime.”