Weekend Briefing No. 17
Good Sunday morning! Welcome to a special edition of Weekend's Briefing! We're back from traveling but still nursing our jet lag! In this briefing we highlight the annual bird migrations, the reasons why not to travel, and the company formerly known as Twitter wants to charge for usage.
Annual bird migrations
My entire family are amateur ornithologists. We have bird feeders around the house, we have bird-watching binoculars, and the Cornell Merlin Bird App. My son is so good at bird identification that he can do it by listening to their songs.
We get excited about the bird migrations because every September we see the migrating White-throated sparrow pass through to the south and every March we bid goodbye to our Winter friends, the Dark-eyed juncos.
Contributors to Wikimedia projects
If you're a friend of migrating birds then I ask you keep your evening lights off or on a timer because these birds migrate at night. Lights in the evening confuse them and many don't survive the migration. Let's help our fine feathered friends and keep things dark for a while.
The case against traveling
This article hit me like a ton of lead in a room with a pregnant pause. It is a scathing rebuke of tourism and travel in general. It made me think a lot about my recent travels to Portugal, Spain, and Italy.
I completely understand that travel and tourism isn't at all like living in the place you're visiting. You'll never be able to immerse yourself fully in the culture or the daily grind.
The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.
Yet, I do think that travel will change you for the better if you let it. My travels with my partner have opened my eyes to many new cultures, foods, and history I'd never would've discovered. It's made me appreciate the hard work that people do to welcome you into their homes, restaurants, or villages.
Twitter to charge for use
LOL. Elon Musk is a really smart businessman. He wants to charge X (formerly Twitter) users a subscription fee. What. A. Dumbass. Doesn't Elon know what makes social media popular? He's not a genius.
Todd Spangler
Musk brought up the idea of charging all users of X/Twitter during a wide-ranging conversation focused on AI that featured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. “We’re moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system,” Musk told Netanyahu, claiming that “it’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.”
The best retort to this news was from Mastodon user Missing the Point:
Infographic of the week
This week's infographic is on wine production, production, and flavor profile! Salud!
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