I took a book out of the library the other day. The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride. Inside were these two photos.
They’re evocative, partly because they’re artsy but printed on Kodak paper in postcard size. Someone making postcards would have printed on actual postcard forms, wouldn’t they? Not relatively thin Kodak paper.
It isn’t a great mystery, but I liked the photos. They would make nice indie rock CD covers.
I wrote about the warring DeMoula cousins a couple of weeks ago. They’ve come to a settlement, finally, after two months of worker actions that essentially destroyed the Market Basket supermarkets’ business.
Arthur S., the worker hating bond salesman who wanted to suck every last penny from the company, will be paid a lot of money to give control to Arthur T., the progressive grocery man who thinks a good business values its employees and contributes to the quality of the communities in which it does business.
He’s taking on a lot of debt, but if the energy of those workers and the supervisors who supported them during the recent job actions can be applied to rebuilding stores with fantastic shopping experiences, anything is possible.
“The nation’s leading law enforcement agency [FBI] collects vast amounts of information on crime nationwide, but missing from this clearinghouse are statistics on where, how often, and under what circumstances police use deadly force. In fact, no one anywhere comprehensively tracks the most significant act police can do in the line of duty: take a life,” according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal in its series Deadly Force (Nov. 28, 2011).
D. Bryan Burghart is an editor of the Reno News and Review. Confronted with this information gap, one has come to believe is intentionally maintained by the FBI and police forces across the country, he has set up a crowd-sourced database project to collect basic information about every incident of the use of deadly police force.
Progress relies on FOIA requests and research provided by volunteers. We can all help with this important project.
I saw my first live challenge the other day, my nephew Andrew, and it was funny and in good fun. The whole thing is a goofy fad, like people making their own Call Me Maybe videos, and maybe it’s raising some money that wouldn’t otherwise be raised. Which is a good thing, probably.
What can be said for sure, however, is that watching Bucket Challenges that didn’t go exactly right is great fun, and a reminder to rewatch Idiocracy.
http://youtu.be/1t2zn7Ve0bw
I just published (I hope) the Kindle edition of Bolick’s Guide to Fantasy Football Prospects 2014, JD Bolick’s survey of this year’s NFL rookies crop, handicapped for fantasy football players. That means it’s all Quarterbacks, Running Backs, Wide Receivers and Tight Ends.
I say “I hope” because the Kindle edition is still in review at Amazon. Sometime today they should approve it, more than two weeks after I was able to publish the iBooks and PDF editions. There are a few reasons for this, and since handy guides to epublishing are all over the internet (and available as eBooks), I thought I would add my two cents.
Publishing for the iPad with iBooks Author is easy.
Author works like a page layout program, and while it doesn’t appear to be very flexible, it is dead simple to enter text and graphics and convert them into an eBook. Bolick’s Football Guide has photos and stats tables. These were easy to enter and look on the page the way they’re supposed to, with little fussing necessary.
It is also easy to save that eBook as a PDF.
Done.
The only issue I had with Author for this project was the process for adding hyperlinks. This book has more than 500 hyperlinks to YouTube clips that illustrate nearly all of Bolick’s observations about each of the players covered. The process for creating a link in iBooks author is (assuming the Inspector is open): Copy link to the clipboard, highlight text to be linked, click the checkbox that says Enable Hyperlink, click dropdown and choose Link to Webpage, then paste in the link from the clipboard. This is three clicks too many, and those add up when you’re adding hundreds of links.
Publishing words for the Kindle is easy.
The Kindle started out as a reader. Load an eBook and it would let you read it on its screen. You could (and still can) specify the type size and style, and it will reformat the pages based on the user’s choices.
When I turned Bolick’s Guide to Fantasy Baseball Prospects 2014 into a Kindle book, after laying it out in iBooks Author, I just copied the text into a Word document. Then I saved the Word document as an htm file, and uploaded it to Amazon. It was easy.
That’s because creating an eBook with only words that the Kindle can read is very straight forward. You don’t have many options. And all of the guides available on the internet (plus Amazon’s own Guide) quickly tell you all you need to know. The most complicated thing is making the Table of Contents.
Publishing graphics for the Kindle is something else.
The Kindle is not a single device. There are the epaper black and white readers, and the color Fire ones. There are small screens and larger ones, and each comes with different expectations.
People who write about creating their eBooks, people like me, have their own experiences, and aren’t necessarily experts in all the different paths one might take to create a book. I’m no expert, but I offer up the following just in case you’re hoping to create a Kindle book with a lot of tables in it.
Amazon discourages you from using tables in your layout to organize different parts of the page. Using tables to create html layouts was a common hack in web page design in the days before css. It was frowned upon, but also sometimes the easiest way to get things to line up the way you wanted.
Using tables to similarly hack page design for the Kindle is a mistake, but Amazon isn’t as clear in all places that tables full of tabular information are also not welcome.
In the Guide we use charts like this one, to show a player’s statistical history in college.
When I converted the iBook version into a Word document, the tables were converted into html tables via the TABLE tag. They displayed fine in Word and later in Dreamweaver, when I got away from using Word, but were a jumble when I viewed the file in the Kindle Previewer or in Chrome.
I wasted all sorts of time trying to change the settings. I noted that someone, maybe Amazon, said that tables wouldn’t display properly in Kindle Previewer, but I still couldn’t get them to display in Chrome. I tried to upload my layout full of tables to KDP, the publishing arm of Amazon, and it was rejected. It was only then that I came across a caveat that tables were not supported for the Kindle at all. It was suggested I use jpegs instead.
I spent yesterday making screen grabs of all the stats boxes in the iBook version and replacing the tables in the Kindle version. When I was finished I tried publishing again. Success.
The eminently readable author of 1492 and 1493 takes on the problem of developing an implementable climate change policy.
I think his reading of the situation is very reasonable. If the situation is as dire as James Hansen suggests, it’s hard to get motivated to get active and make sacrifices, while there are clearly ancillary benefits from reducing our reliance and use of energy produced by burning coal.
It isn’t clear to me why a tax on carbon has to be jointly implemented across the developed nations to be effective, at least partly, but this somewhat long essay does an excellent job of laying out the issues and looking at them from the perspective of climate scientists, environmental activists and economists. Well worth the time to read it.
I was near Boston yesterday, in the western suburbs, and everyone (I talked to, at least) is talking about the family feud that has disrupted business for DeMoula’s Market Basket supermarkets.
This is a family feud, but it also turns out to be a textbook illustration of the perversity of inadequately progressive tax rates and the rapacious nature of those who don’t work who own rights to the returns from those who do.
I’ve shopped in the original Westford Market Basket many times, and as someone who likes food was mostly impressed by lack of the foodie stuff in the store. But what regular shoppers tell me is that the store was customer friendly. Not only did they have lower prices than all the other groceries, but they also rebated four percent of what you bought. And they stocked local produce (that actually was a reason I shopped there sometimes).
On top of this, it turns out, they also had a generous profit sharing program, excellent wages, a program for paying for college tuition and a pension program it was easy to join and easy to collect on.
Not only did the company produce value for its workers, but it also threw off a ton of money for its shareholders.
I didn’t know about the good benefits or the happy workers, until recently, and often shopped at Hannefords and Stop and Shop when I was visiting the inlaws, because those stores had cooler food (more organic, though not more local). But things have changed.
After years of feuding, the DeMoula cousin who is a financial operative has taken control of the company from the cousin who has been a successful retailer. And business has ground to a halt. This fine story from Slate has more details, but doesn’t really hint at the main issue here.
DeMoula’s family business, started in the shadow of the War to End All Wars (the centenary of which we’re now recognizing), has grown into a business worth more than $3 Billion dollars. Some significant part of that expansion was due to the nice cousin’s investment in worker and customer satisfaction.
These investments cut into the bottom line and shareholder reaping in the short term, and the current dispute seems to stem from the dissatisfaction of those who own shares but do no work and who hate seeing money paid to people who actually labor.
The people I spoke with in the Boston area (including some self-described conservatives) seemed to understand that this was a feud between a grocer who recognized the value (and profitablity) of good wages and reinvestment, and a guy schooled in investment who was looking to squeeze as much cash out of cow as quickly as he could. Ouch!
Obviously there is a value to people investing in the products of other people’s labors, but too often this ends up with rich people using money to extract more money from those who actually make the value. Which not only hurts workers, but also strips away the dynamics of our society. We need workers who buy to expand.
The rapacious policies of Artie S. have radicalized, though I’m not sure they would call it this, a broad swath of suburban Boston. But the bottom line belongs to Artie T. It’s better business in the long term to have a well paid workforce than to force them into penury for immediate riches that are there to be gained.
As a society, unfortunately, we’ve allowed the plutocrats (a minute minority) to define the discussion, rather than look out for our own (and, curiously, society’s) interests.
That’s where we can make change.
David Nicholson is making use of the World Wide Web to compile and publish annotated histories of the license plates of North America since 1969. This is a huge enterprise and we should all be glad he’s undertaken it.
Burkhard Bilger wrote about cave divers a few months ago in the New Yorker. It is full of delightful scenes of adventure and incipient horror, as our divers enter apparently endless labyrinths of jagged rock and running water. Undoubtedly there is great beauty under ground, and there is also the constant dread of dying by suffocation or drowning, far from where the sun shines.
Burk narrates an overview of the cave diving life in a video at the New Yorker.
His piece is exciting and rewarding reading, but the following clip will give you a case of the willies because the fear and danger are so imminent, and hardly an arm’s length away from safety. At least this time.
The mission statement is in Spanish, which means my understanding is fuzzy, but some guys created an automobile that will run on both paved road and train tracks. Why? To explore the abandoned rail line that runs from Mexico City to the Pacific Ocean, and find out about the people along the way who have been affected.
The slide shows from the explorations are cool, with some narration that is in English as well as Spanish.