Recycling: People should stop thinking of recycling as a virtue, and start considering whether individual recycling programs are actually doing good. On the 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy podcast.

Can You Hear It? Sonic Devices Play High-Pitched Noises To Repel Teens

Philadelphia is putting a gadget in 30 parks and recreation centers that blares a constant, high-pitched ringing noise that only teens and young adults can hear, all night long. Some 20 parks departments around the country are implementing the youth-repellent devices. But the devices are also extremely annoying to some older adults with sensitive ears. And critics say the campaigns are just prejudice, and wrong.

“In a city that is trying to address gun violence and safe spaces for young people,” Philadelphia City Council member Helen Gym tells NPR, “how dare we come up with ideas that are funded by taxpayer dollars to turn young people away from the very places that were created for them?”

Gym is right. Ban behavior, not people.

Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong

In the early grades, U.S. schools value reading-comprehension skills over knowledge. The results are devastating, especially for poor kids….

What if the best way to boost reading comprehension is not to drill kids on discrete skills but to teach them, as early as possible, the very things we’ve marginalized—including history, science, and other content that could build the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand both written texts and the world around them?

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/…

Jibes with my own experiences as a child. Reading comprehension books bored me. I learned to read in school but taught myself to get good at it at home, with books I found interesting, generally science fiction.

They finally built a better ketchup bottle. And soon it’s going to be everywhere. www.washingtonpost.com/business/…

The bottle will be everywhere. Not the ketchup.

I don’t use much ketchup anymore, but it will be a happy day when they start using this for Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard and Sriracha sauce.

IBM: We Won’t ‘Bluewash’ Red Hat: IBM executives say they’d be fools to compromise Red Hat’s independence, following the $34 billion acquisition that closed this week. By me on Light Reading. www.lightreading.com/cloud/ibm…

ONAP ‘Dublin’ Lightens Network Orchestration: The latest release of the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) sports enhancements designed to get the software up and running faster, so carriers can get on with sexy innovation. www.lightreading.com/open-sour…

" … much of the dysfunction of tech regulation — from botched anti-sex-trafficking laws to the EU’s plan to impose mass surveillance and censorship to root out copyright infringement — are the result of trying to jury-rig tools to fix the problems of monopolies, without using anti-monopoly laws, because they have been systematically gutted for 40 years." craphound.com/news/2019…