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The Not-Libertarian Edition Tuesday, July 24, 2018

The Political Education Of Silicon Valley, by Steven Johnson, Wired

But when you investigate the actual values held by the tech sector, the narrative of tech’s steady leftward march gets much more complicated—and intriguing. A widely discussed 2017 study conducted by Stanford political economists David Broockman and Neil Malhotra, collaborating with technology journalist Greg Ferenstein, surveyed the political values of more than 600 tech company founders and CEOs—the elite of the tech elite. The top-line finding was, unsurprising by now, that Silicon Valley is not libertarian. The founders they surveyed were less likely than even Democrats to embrace the core expression of the libertarian worldview—that government should provide military and police protection and otherwise leave people alone to enrich themselves. They expressed overwhelming support for higher taxes on the wealthy and for universal health care. But in other ways they deviated from progressive orthodoxy. They were far more likely to emphasize the positive impact of entrepreneurial activity than progressives and had dim views of government regulation and labor unions that were closer to that of your average Republican donor than Democratic partisan.

We Compared Moment, The App That Gives Your Phone Camera DSLR-like Controls, To Apple's Native Camera App — Here's How They Stack Up, by Sean Wolfe, BusinessInsider

Moment definitely gives you more control over how your final shot turns out — but that also requires more work on your end. The ability to shoot in RAW could be a deal changer for photographers who also shoot on their iPhone, but want the same image-editing capabilities that come with shooting on RAW on a DSLR.

Hands On: Highland 2 For macOS Wants To Be The Sole Tool For Screenwriters, by William Gallagher, AppleInsider

If you write a script in a word processor, you will constantly be distracted from what you're trying to create as you also try to get Word's margins to behave. Highland 2 wants you to leave all this necessary formatting to it while you get on with the writing.

For News Publishers, Smart Speakers Are The Hot New Platform, by Lucia Moses, Digiday

Early on, getting content on voice assistants was mainly the job of the product people. Just like with TV and the internet before it, media companies just took their existing news and information and put it on voice assistants with minimal reformatting. But now that publishers are getting more interested in making sure they have a unique voice and proposition on the devices, they’re adding editorial-side resources, too.

Bottom of the Page

Somehow, last evening, I've decided that I enjoyed listening to podcasts from BBC much more than podcasts from NPR. I have no idea why.

And, yes, I've refreshed my podcast subscription list.

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And I've accidentally deleted a playlist in iTunes. Thank goodness for backups. Although restoring just a playlist from backup into iTunes is not the most intuitive thing to do.

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Thanks for reading.