It does not say, “leaning out your org,” “paying down transformation debt,” “cutting it out with this command-and-control crap,” “focusing on outcomes and getting better at discovery work,” “fixing your medieval budgeting system,” or any of the other far more value-adding things people have tried to glom onto it. If you do discovery work with Agile teams, the next time you’re asked to “demonstrate your worth,” try this. You had leaders trying to keep control of the system at the top and Agile teams trying to drive value closer to the source (the actual users and customers).

In August 2016, the European Commission ruled that Apple’s banking of its European profits in Ireland, which has a low corporation tax rate, amounted to billions of pounds of illegal state aid. Ireland’s tax arrangements with Apple between 1991 and 2015 had allowed the US company to attribute sales to a “head office” that only existed on paper and could not have generated such profits. The result was that Apple avoided tax on almost all the profit generated from its multi-billion-euro sales of iPhones and other products across the EU’s single market.

PriestmanGoode has been working in close collaboration with Austrian Federal Railways ÖBB on interior designs for its Intercity day train, as well as its Nightjet overnight services, in which the rail operator has invested heavily to create Europe’s most comprehensive network of night trains. For the Day train, we have designed new Eco and First Class carriages, including entrance areas with integrated seating and digital info panels, luggage areas, Eco Class seats, First Class seats with personal digital displays, family/business berths as well as a restaurant carriage with multi use areas for bike and ski storage. For the Nightjet services, our work includes new family rooms for up to four people, First Class apartments for two people with a personal bathroom, sleeper pods and new hallways and entrance areas.

If your research group is planning to release open-source software, you can prepare for the support work and the questions that will arise as others begin to use it. Private US foundations such as the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) also fund open-source software support. Varoquaux and her colleagues have received $138,000 from the Alfred P. Sloan and Ford foundations to study “the visible and invisible work of maintaining open-source software”, she says, including burnout in researchers who devote their time to this work — part of a portfolio of 13 digital-infrastructure research projects funded to the tune of $1.3 million.

THREAD: Today I went to the public library for the first time in a long time. I tried to help her set up an account with most of the major email providers—all of whom required a phone number to text to link to an account. Governments and tech platforms need to find a way to be able to both stop fake accounts from being created by verifying identifies, and allow those who need to be able to access the digital post office that is email to apply for jobs.

This means that the iPhone in your pocket has over 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago. If we compare the two calculators against the Apollo guidance computer we can note that the TI-73 has slightly less ROM, but eight times more RAM. The Apollo computer was state-of-the-art in its time, but what would have been different if the moon landing had the state-of-the-art computers that are available today?

org domain names, letting the domain’s manager, Public Interest Registry, charge as much as it wants for the domains. org domains are currently registered and were registered under a system in which Public Interest Registry could not increase prices at will. Now, non-profits and other organizations that have been using these domains for years could face steep price increases.

Like every other company in America, Amazon’s tax returns are private, legally considered to be a trade secret. We can only make rational policy decisions if the public knows what companies are actually paying

Most of what we know about Amazon’s taxes comes from the company’s SEC filings, helpfully explained in this Wall Street Journal piece. We need to know which deductions Amazon is taking and why

When politicians like Warren complain about Amazon not paying taxes, the real argument is that the company is abusing the tax deduction system, exploiting poorly designed deductions and using political influence to keep those loopholes open.

In short: I’m glad that IRC doesn’t have the features that are “showstoppers” for people choosing other platforms, and I’m worried that attempts to bring these showstopping “features” to IRC will worsen the platform for the people who use it now. Some IRC clients (Matrix) have this feature today, but most Matrix users don’t realize what a nuisance they’re being on the chat. Most people post images on IRC as URLs, which clients can do a quick HEAD request against and embed if the mimetype is appropriate:

For most of these features, I think that people who have and think they need them are in fact unhappier for having them.

This following article is of a conversation between Stewart Brand, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead and was originally published in the CoEvolutionary Quarterly, June 1976, Issue no. 10, pp. 32-44. Gregory and Margaret worked together on the result of their Bali fieldwork, Balinese Character – A Photographic Analysis, and then were separated increasingly by World War II and their own diverging interests. Mary Catherine, his and Margaret’s daughter, wrote a book about one of Gregory’s conferences, Our Own Metaphor (1972, Knopf).