Inchiestona di Pro Publica su una delle aziende che svuotano i cassonetti di New York (il servizio è appaltato ad aziende private). Non soltanto perché è interessante leggerlo, ma perché vi dà anche la misura di come sia fatta un'inchiesta.

Money quote: "An investigation by Voice of America and ProPublica, drawing on thousands of pages of public documents and interviews with more than a dozen current and former workers, depicts a workplace environment in which concerns about safety, as well as workers’ rights and compensation, are flouted despite years of complaints from workers to regulators.

Records show that more than three-quarters of Sanitation Salvage trucks have been ordered off the road after federal safety checks. Yet the company has paid lobbyists to fight local legislation that backers say would compel haulers to improve on working conditions and safety.

The Department of Labor several years ago found that Sanitation Salvage had cheated workers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages. Today, the New York State Insurance Fund is suing the company for $780,000 in unpaid workers’ compensation insurance obligations for on-the-job injuries."

https://features.propublica.org/sanitation-salvage/sanitation-salvage-accidents-new-york-city-commercial-carting-garbage/

 I benefici del roaming europeo: quintuplicato il traffico dati - Il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/i-benefici-del-roaming-europeo-quintuplicato-il-traffico-dati/

Cos'è la globalizzazione? Un fatto reale e analogico che cerchiamo di definire in maniera digitale, on-off, bianco-nero. Però un segnale di discontinuità esiste: è la "nave cinese". L'infografica del South China Morning Post è quasi un romanzo interattivo. Bastava poco più e ci facevi un'app a pagamento...

Money quote: "Globalisation is thought to have its beginnings in the 16th century when the Spanish silver dollar went transcontinental. Its acceptance as common currency arose when Spanish navigators in the Philippines established a circular shipping route, known as the tornaviaje, between Asia and the Americas. More than 250 years of uninterrupted trade ensued between Asia and the rest of the world. And the ships playing this route were known as China Ships"

https://multimedia.scmp.com/culture/article/spanish-galleon/chapter_01.html

Ps: per gli appassionati, c'è anche questo sul clima di Hong Kong che si sta devastando...

https://multimedia.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/extreme-weather/index.html

Il giorno in cui l’Internet Archive smise di salvare il web - il mio articolo per La Stampa (a pagamento)

https://www.lastampa.it/2018/12/18/tecnologia/il-giorno-in-cui-linternet-archive-smise-di-salvare-il-web-nmcaGEt2f8uT4Q0QcUb1TM/premium.html

È quasi Natale: siete pronti per le feste?

Gli scrittori sono una razza strana. Pare non ce ne sia uno con tutte le rotelle a posto. Questo è un bell'articolo sulla depressione, ad esempio. Però, mamma mia quanto è sfasciato 'sto tizio.

Money quote: "If you want to be super popular on social media just tell people a bunch of bullshit that sounds great but really does absolutely nothing to make you healthy and happy. It’s also the key to getting on every best seller list and getting quoted on Oprah and tweeted by mega-celebrities who sell products they don’t use because they’re pretty to look at and have a few million followers on Instagram.

It’s all a lie."

https://medium.com/the-mission/mastering-depression-and-living-the-life-you-were-meant-to-live-a9b4e357ddd9

Se volete la carbonara...

The first time I ordered carbonara in America, I had to politely refuse to eat it and ordered something else. When the waitress asked why, I explained that Italian carbonara does not have cream in it. I was less than politely told that if I wanted “Italian carbonara”, I should have stayed in Italy.

Siamo alla fine dell'anno: tempo di investimenti. Se volete l'American Express, usate il mio link e ne trarremo entrambi benefici. La uso da una vita e ha molti vantaggi utili: la gold vale come assicurazione medica per i viaggi all'estero. Per me solo questo è un bel risparmio.

www.americanexpress.it/amico/antondEgGx?CPID=100332058

Per noi, almeno per adesso, è marginale. Però questo ritratto di Ted Cruz è fichissimo.

Money quote: “His pitch for votes was still an off-the-rack Tea Party platform, complete with warnings about the menace of creeping progressivism, delivered at a slightly mechanical pace but with lots of punch. The woman next to me remarked, “This is the fire in the gut! Like he had the first time!” referring to Cruz’s successful long-shot run in the 2011 Texas Republican Senate primary. And it’s true—the speech was exactly like one Cruz would have delivered in 2011, right down to one specific detail: he never mentioned Donald Trump by name.”

https://harpers.org/archive/2018/11/the-tragedy-of-ted-cruz/

Cose che, secondo alcuni amici americani, stanno scomparendo

Money quotes:

Music CD’s - it was announced recently that a couple of big box stores are dropping them from their shelves.

The word “TWICE”. No, really! Just start listening out for it and you’ll notice that almost every TV advert that should be using the word will say “TWO TIMES” instead…and it’s spreading, I hear this ugly replacement for a perfectly good word in news stories too. Why? It’s a total mystery! (Of course “THRICE” already went the way of the Dodo…so…)

Stick-shift cars. Most new cars no longer come with the option to drive stick.

The grammatical rule that disallows “split infinitives” (Like “To boldly go where no man has gone before!”…which should strictly be “To go boldly…”)

In the USA - extending tape measures with inches on one edge of the tape and centimeters on the other. I broke mine a few months ago and neither of the local DIY stores have anything other than “Easy Read” tape measures with only inches. I had to hunt around online to find one that I could still order.

Cash. Already, several countries are considering completely abolishing cash…and a while back, I needed cash for something (I forget what) - and realized that I’ve had no cash in my wallet for more than two years!

Philips screw heads. (The ones like a plus sign) The replacement is the six-sided “torx” head screws (like a star sign) - and in some cases the Allen head - which is a regular hexagon. With the improvement in design of electric screwdrivers, the old philips screws (which are DESIGNED to strip under high torque to protect the tool from damage) are overdue for replacement.

"Aquaman", grandi effetti speciali per una storia non irresistibile - la mia recensione per Fumettologica

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/12/aquaman-recensione-film/

TLDR: siamo in guerra e non lo sapevamo. Non sembra che finirà bene.

Money quote: "The Information World War has already been going on for several years. We called the opening skirmishes “media manipulation” and “hoaxes”, assuming that we were dealing with ideological pranksters doing it for the lulz (and that lulz were harmless).

In reality, the combatants are professional, state-employed cyberwarriors and seasoned amateur guerrillas pursuing very well-defined objectives with military precision and specialized tools. Each type of combatant brings a different mental model to the conflict, but uses the same set of tools."

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/11/28/the-digital-maginot-line/

JustWrite, quando la carta diventa digitale - Il mio articolo per La Stampa (a pagamento)

https://www.lastampa.it/2018/12/21/tecnologia/justwrite-quando-la-carta-diventa-digitale-BBFLE3vOe9uIaMwDPATz1L/premium.html

Cinque anni fa arrivava l’ultimo Mac Pro. A quando il prossimo? - Il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/cinque-anni-fa-arrivava-lultimo-mac-pro-a-quando-il-prossimo/

Mentre molti siti e canali Telegram si affannano a segnalare sconti e promozioni online (per massimizzare gli incassi con la percentuale prevista dai siti di ecommerce) c’è anche chi immagina un Natale differente. Questa è la stagione dell’anno in cui mi viene da pensare alla decrescita felice...

Tu ce l’hai una storia così da raccontare? https://www.internazionale.it/notizie/joe-pinsker/2018/12/20/niente-regali-a-natale 🎄🎅🏻

Strani mix: vegetarianesimo e femminismo delle origini, con il movimento delle suffragette. Ma pensa.

Money quote: “At the time, home cooking was considered to be almost exclusively a feminine task. So some suffragettes thought that cooking the likes of beans and grains, instead of meat, would make it less time-consuming. Others empathized with the subservient roles of animals in human society. One suffragette speaker, quoted by Leneman, argued that feminism and vegetarianism were entwined: so much so, that if a woman was unable to help the movement outside the home, even cooking vegetarian food for her family was a step towards empowerment. “Vegetarianism aims so directly, as we women aim, at the abolition of the unregenerate doctrine of physical force,” she said.”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-did-british-suffragettes-eat

Altra proposta: backup sicuro con BackBlaze: lo utilizzo da alcuni anni. Le verifiche che ho fatto sono ottime. Usando il mio codice avremo, sia io che voi, tre mesi gratuiti di utilizzo sottoscrivendo un abbonamento (equivale al 25% di sconto sul prosieguo del l’abbonamento). https://secure.backblaze.com/r/01ti3i

Criticando l’idea che le teorie in fisica debbano essere anche belle.

Money quote: “This has been going on for about 40 years. In these 40 years, aesthetic arguments have flourished into research programmes – such as supersymmetry, the multiverse and grand unification – that now occupy thousands of scientists. In these 40 years, society spent billions of dollars on experiments that found no evidence to support the beautiful ideas. And in these 40 years, there has not been a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics.

My colleagues argue that criteria of beauty are experience-based. The most fundamental theories we currently have – the standard model of particle physics and Albert Einstein’s general relativity – are beautiful in specific ways. I agree it was worth a try to assume that more fundamental theories are beautiful in similar ways. But, well, we tried, and it didn’t work. Nevertheless, physicists continue to select theories based on the same three criteria of beauty: simplicity, naturalness, and elegance.”

https://aeon.co/ideas/beauty-is-truth-truth-is-beauty-and-other-lies-of-physics

La diversità culturale è una cosa seria. E anche un problema, per le grandi narrazioni globali. Ragione del malessere crescente nei confronti del “politicamente corretto”, probabilmente. Qui comunque si parla di Moana, cioè del film Disney Oceania (da noi, causa impraticabilità in un film Disney del nome di una notoria pornostar nostrana: altro problema sulla globalità dei concetti).

Money quote: “And I learned a lot. I learned that some people were upset about the presentation of Māui, a hero of Māori mythology, as vain and pretentious. Others were upset about the mixing together of importantly different traditions into one homogenous pan-Polynesian culture set on the fictional island of ‘Motunui’. Yet others, concerned about offensive cultural stereotypes, complained about the portrayal of Polynesian people as heavyset or overweight. And some complained about the ‘Kakamora’, an antagonist group in the film who look like coconuts with limbs, literally embodying a racial slur.

So I found out that some people were upset. But did I learn anything about the attitudes of Polynesians? Who gets to speak on behalf of such a diverse group as the indigenous people of more than 1,000 different islands, totalling nearly 700,000 people?”

https://aeon.co/essays/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-speak-on-the-behalf-of