I rant regularly when people abuse Latin binomials by adding an unnecessary article in front of them, like people who refer to "the acanthomyops latipes". As I said at the time:

While I happily refer to the Skidelskys, I would never dream of calling them the Edward Skidelsky and the Robert...

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Various forms of basic income have apparently been around since the days of the first industrial revolution in the UK: just one of the things I learned listening to a recording of an event last December at the RSA.¹ I also learned that free marketeers quite like the idea, especially if it is described as a negative income tax.

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I had high hopes for Flattr. Back when I signed up I quoted Dave Slusher as saying:

It makes little sense to sign up as a listener when there is nothing to flattr. As a creator, it makes little sense to invest in a platform with few users. Let's cut through that, and push on both fronts simultaneously with a mutual leap of faith.

So I did, and for a while all was good. But Flattr seemed to go into a bit of a decline and the relaunch, a month or so ago, was a bit of a botch as well. Many things didn't work, and still don't, despite the developers' assurances. And their "reasons" -- so many bugs, there are just the two of us, we have no time -- strike me as unprofessional and feed my feeling of gloom and doom. Given that they take a cut of each member's flattrs, my guess is that they're depriving themselves of income.

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There was a bit of noise about dead air recently on ADN that reminded me of one of the best bits of the recent Hearsay 2015 audio festival in Ireland. Dead air, in case you didn't know, is silence, usually on broadcast radio, but the term has been adopted for podcasts, which is radio to all intents and purposes. It is far more prevalent in podcasts because people can be very lazy about going back and doing even cursory editing to get rid of those long pauses while someone thinks of something witty to say.

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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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