April M Short: Could Tech Startups Become Community-Owned Co-Ops? Nathan Schneider, assistant professor of media studies and director of University of Colorado Boulder’s Media Enterprise Design Lab—a think tank for community ownership and governance in media organizations—spoke on the Laura Flanders Show about the drawbacks of the “conventional” startup model, and the necessity for alternatives. (more)

Eugene Wei: How to read broadly and synthesize information using the Kindle. I tend to read multiple non-fiction e-books in parallel (more)

Nathan Schneider: Startups Need a New Option: Exit to Community. Founders create startups for all sorts of reasons. Often, the motivation is a mix between the founders’ desires to do well for themselves and to do something worthwhile for others. Dreams of greatness might figure in there too. Rarely, however, is the overriding reason to build a company people want to get rid of. But that is what the startup pipeline is designed to produce. (built to flip) (more)

Esther Derby: Shaping Patterns. How do you create an environment for great work? Where healthy self-organization happens? You notice and shape patterns. Patterns are meaningful events that repeat over time—actions and interactions, outcomes and results. (more)

Nathan Schneider: Online Communities Are Still Catching Up to My Mother's Garden Club. Alongside whatever else mothers and sons talk about, I have begun receiving regular updates on the governance of my mother’s neighborhood garden club. They make me jealous. (more)

Scott Alexander: Change My Mind: Density Increases Local But Decreases Global Prices. Matt Yglesias tries to debunk the claim that building more houses raises local house prices. He presents several studies showing that, at least on the marginal street-by-street level, this isn’t true. (more)

What if Facebook were owned by its users? — The Internet Health Report 2019. Could there be a truly democratic way for users to steer companies? (more)

Nathan Schneider: “We need to reinvent the co-op.” the hardware company my grandfather ran at the end of his career was a cooperative (more)

Rhys Black: Using Slack.com for remote teams: Where we got it wrong. But something happened once our team hit 100 employees: our Slack communication broke (more)

Simon Willison: Mojo may be the biggest programming advance in decades. Mojo may be the biggest programming advance in decades (via) Jeremy Howard makes a very convincing argument for why the new programming language Mojo is a big deal (more)

Why more and more journalists are launching worker-owned outlets. When staff at the Long Beach Post and Long Beach Business Journal decided to unionize in March, they were almost immediately hit with layoffs. (more)

like Car Pooling but oriented to adhoc single-ride handling (more)

customer service engine - online help docs, chatbot, etc. (more)

northwest-us mini-city

Home Page of a site driven by Internet Marketing. (more)

Franklin C. "Chuck" Spinney (born May 2, 1945) is an American former military analyst for the Pentagon who became famous in the early 1980s for what became known as the "SpinneyReport", criticizing what he described as the reckless pursuit of costly complex weapon systems by the Pentagon, with disregard to budgetary consequences. Despite attempts by his superiors to bury the controversial report, it eventually was exposed during a United States Senate Budget Committee on Defense hearing, which though scheduled to go unnoticed, made the cover of Time Magazine March 7, 1983. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_C._Spinney (more)

Matt Seybold: The Ellisons Are Beta-Testing Big Brother. In a kleptocracy, antitrust is not a tool for diluting monopoly power, but for concentrating it. During his first term, Donald Trump openly fantasized about using federal antitrust provisions to break up media conglomerates and tech companies he felt threatened by. (more)

Matt Taibbi: Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever. Ailes was the Christopher Columbus of hate (more)

Opinion: Fox News and the anxious elderly."Viewers don't want to be informed. Viewers want to feel informed." Those are the words of Chet Collier, one of the founders of Fox News, as quoted in Gabriel Sherman's new biography of Roger Ailes, the network's chief. (The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country) (more)

The Billionaire Trump Supporter Who Will Soon Own the News. Larry Ellison is already a major stakeholder in CBS and Paramount. Now CNN, HBO and a major share of TikTok are in his sights. If all goes as anticipated, this tech billionaire, already one of the richest men in the world and a founder of Oracle, is poised, at 81, to become one of the most powerful media and entertainment moguls America has ever seen. (more)