People I follow have singled out poor crop prices as one of the most important agricultural stories in 2015. That specific article is very US-centric; one stub mentions New Zealand recognising animals as "sentient beings,"¹ Canada gets a brief mention, and so does the WHO's meat and cancer warning. I can't fault it for that. Agweek is covering its beat for its readers and their concerns. But whenever agricultural prices are low, farmers everywhere complain that they cannot make a profit, and when they are high, poor people can't afford to eat. Somehow, though, low agricultural prices never seem to compensate for not making much profit by reducing the cost of a farmer's food purchases, and high food prices never seem to result in more profits for farmers.

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Glenn Greenwald lays it out, in The Intercept:

So now, with yesterday’s WSJ report, we witness the tawdry spectacle of large numbers of people who for years were fine with, and even giddy about, NSA mass surveillance. But now they’ve learned that they themselves, or the officials of the foreign country they most love, have been caught up in this surveillance dragnet, and they can hardly contain their indignation. Suddenly, privacy is of the highest value because now it’s their privacy, rather than just yours, that is invaded.

One of my social-media friends, Chris Krycho, wrote a piece reviewing his 2015 and looking forward to his 2016 that was an interesting read and that inspired this post of mine. Any number of people will tell you that it is a good idea to set yourself some goals and review them from time to time, but I'm crediting Chris with tipping me over the edge. And because I want to get this out sooner rather than later¹ and an arbitrary news peg is better than none, I'm pushing to post this before the end of the day, so it may be a little notesy.

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We'll be eating a goose tonight with friends, and preparations are well under way. In order to be absolutely ready, though, we needed to be sure that there would be rye bread in the house, for the inevitable leftover goose sandwiches. And that sent me searching for the recipe for Dan Lepard's Black Pepper Rye, one of the best savoury sandwich breads I know.

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It breaks my heart to see so many of my colleagues prefix their job titles “senior” (not least because it becomes completely meaningless when every single Visual Designer is also a “Senior Visual Designer”).

I remember being at a conference after-party a few years ago chatting to a very talented front-end developer. She wasn’t happy with where she was working. I advised to get a job somewhere else After all, she lived and worked in San Francisco, where her talents are in high demand. But she was hesitant.

“They’ve promised me that in a few more months, my job title would become ‘Senior Developer’”, she said. “Ah, right,” I said, “and what happens then?” “Well”, she said, “I get to have the word ‘senior’ on my resumé.” That was it. No pay rise. No change in responsibilities. Just a word on a piece of paper.

Jeremy Keith