Recently

Reading

Cool Gray City of Love: 49 views of San Francisco. This very ‘local’ book has been really fun. I realize that many of my reading picks are simply downers, things that I strongly feel I should know about but that are guaranteed to strip away a little more faith in people. And there are elements of that in practically everything I read about San Francisco: the city’s habit of patting itself on the back for superficial ethics at the same time as it becomes the purest expression of America’s race and class-based stratification is grating. But, there are respites from that storyline and this book has a great way of pulling me into positive cycles. For example, I’ve been reading about the hills of SF, which inspires me to go and see or climb those hills. And I’ve been taking more photos from those hills, posting them on Flickr, and having a fun time trying to identify all the features I can see from the vistas and tagging those with notes. It’s altogether a pretty nice, positive loop. If you’re interested in it, there’s a chapter posted on Found SF: Western Addition: A Basic History that was my introduction.

In shorter reads, ‘How an Offer to Sell Wistia Inspired Us to Take On $17M in Debt’ was worthwhile: there are plenty of think-pieces in the same vein, but this one was particularly interesting because it’s specific about how they compensate employees without the possibility of a sellout: which means, profit-sharing and a stock buy-back. And, on the topic of buy-backs, Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy? is a bracing read.

How much might workers have benefited if companies had devoted their financial resources to them rather than to shareholders? Lowe’s, CVS, and Home Depot could have provided each of their workers a raise of $18,000 a year, the report found. Starbucks could have given each of its employees $7,000 a year, and McDonald’s could have given $4,000 to each of its nearly 2 million employees.

Watching

I watched Sorry to Bother You and it was excellent, as expected. As was Fruitvale Station. Before watching the former, I read ‘Black Issues in Philosophy: A Conversation on Sorry to Bother You’, which was interesting but could be a lot tighter.

Listening

I’ve still been listening to a lot of Sen Morimoto:

And also Nnamdi Ogbonnaya:

And been feeling some DC nostalgia with Bad Moves, DC’s new successful punk band: