some more random links

31 December 2017

This one is timely, considering that an investment in "innovation" comes with a built-in short position in Bay Area real estate, and the short squeeze is on: Collaboration in 2018: Trends We’re Watching by Rowan Trollope

In 2018, we’ll see the rapid decline of “place-ism,” the discrimination against people who aren’t in a central office. Technology is making it easier not just to communicate with distant colleagues about work, but to have the personal interactions with them that are the foundation of trust, teamwork, and friendship.

Really, "place-ism" only works if you can afford to overpay the workers who are themselves overpaying for housing. And management can only afford to overpay the workers by giving in to the temptations of rent-seeking and deception. So the landlord makes the nerd pay too much, the manager has to pay the nerd too much, and you end up with, like the man said, "debts that no honest man can pay"?

File under "good examples to illustrate Betteridge's law of headlines": Now That The FCC Is Doing Away With Title II For Broadband, Will Verizon Give Back The Taxpayer Subsidies It Got Under Title II?

Open source business news: Docker, Inc is Dead. Easy to see this as a run-of-the-mill open source business failure story. But at another level, it's the story of how the existing open source incumbents used open practices to avoid having to bid against each other for an overfunded startup.

If "data is the new oil" where is the resource curse for data? Google Maps’s Moat, by Justin O’Beirne (related topic: once Google has the 3d models of buildings, they can build cool projects: Project Sunroof)

Have police departments even heard of Caller ID Spoofing or Swatting? Kansas Man Killed In ‘SWATting’ Attack

Next time I hear someone from a social site talking about how much they're doing about extremists and misinformation and such, I have to remember to ask: have you adjusted your revenue targets for political advertising down in order to reflect the bad shit you're not doing any more? How Facebook’s Political Unit Enables the Dark Art of Digital Propaganda

Or are you just encouraging the "dark social" users to hide it better?

ICYMI, great performance optimization: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

Boring: you're operating a 4500-pound death machine. Exciting: three Slack notifications and a new AR game! Yes, Smartphone Use Is Probably Behind the Spike in Driving Deaths. So Why Isn’t More Being Done to Curb It?

I love "nopoly controls entire industry so there is no point in it any more" stories: The Digital Advertising Duopoly Good news on advertising. The Millennials are burned out on advertising—most of what they're exposed to now is just another variant of "creepy annoying shit on the Internet"—but the generation after the Millennials are going to have hella mega opportunities building the next Creative Revolution.

Another must-read for the diversity and inclusion department. 2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White Privilege by Max Boot.