Melissa Gregg

Title Guidance Advice on how to optimise the title of your article for search engines and readers

"Don’t be funny. Boring is better" bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/journals/aut...

The full program for today's event run by Chips Communities United, right in the middle of SemiCon West. Fascinating convergence of interests in AZ: www.eventbrite.com/e/the-semico...

YouTube video by Dirk Knudsen Remembering the Nez Perce Stories of Resilience and Heritage - A Dedication By Silas Whitman

Giving a talk today on the economic and ecological colonisation that continues to define Silicon Forest, inspired very much by the work of local Hillsboro archivists and historians who are trying to stave off environmental amnesia. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR_F...

A reminder that this is happening online on Wednesday. More info and registration below

Walmart's removal of synthetic dyes could ripple through the food supply chain Walmart says 90% of products from in-store brands are already free of these additives. But even a 10% change for a retailer as massive as Walmart can have a big effect on the industry

If I were a female cochineal right now, I would be quite worried www.marketplace.org/story/2025/1...

Agaton | AI-powered sales superiority Agaton builds secure, domain-specific AI agents for sales teams introducing superhuman co-workers that help companies win.

Even now that we can apparently have superhuman co-workers, they still have to be advertised with attractive women www.agaton.ai

MCJ's Investment in Aalo Extra-modular nuclear reactors for data centers

Another landmark in alienation as data eats the world: "Aalo’s approach reimagines the whole nuclear facility—reactors, turbine, containment, and balance-of-plant—as a single modular product built off-site." newsletter.mcj.vc/p/aalo-inves...

YouTube video by Asianometry Silicon Valley’s Doing Hard Things Again

The robots are still far too creepy youtu.be/cru2bkqwSYk?...

A paragraph from the Miya Tokumitsu book “Love What You Do” describing furniture from the TV show The Good Wife

I forgot about this

I just re-read those opening pages as I move libraries again. It's so good. I still haven't figured out the way to write about my original home, it is going to be painful. Currently writing about the most recent one first (Oregon) since Silicon Forest could well be over

YouTube video by Stringer media Everyone Was FORCED to Leave - How This Oregon Town was ERASED for Internet Ground Zero

In Hillsboro OR data centres are demolishing the past and the future youtu.be/m3NeM0SELVA?...

YouTube video by ABC News Monsoon and dust storm leaves thousands without power in Arizona

Next time I'd like a time lapse video over the TSMC and Intel plants that are located in this region. Because that's where we're putting the infrastructure that runs the global economy www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCYu...

10/ “Steve used to always tell the groups, ‘This will be the high point of your life,’ and I was thinking, God, I hope not, right? Because that’s really a sad way to think.” To this day, I still hear tech execs saying this to employees to encourage long hours and peak performance.

9/ I did appreciate the comments by Jon Rubinstein from a CHM interview: “A lot of people got sick at Apple. The list goes on and on of people who got terminally ill or really ill…and I worried that if I stayed, I’d end up damaging myself, and my health was, frankly, more important.”

8/ "At the end of each shift, men from the small, traditional Muslim community would park their vehicles outside and shine their high beams at the factory. It was an unnerving practice, meant to ensure the factory girls came home rather than stay out late camping around with the Californians."

7/ "...with their small hands they would thread all the wires through the four metal parts of the gooseneck. It took eight to ten minutes per neck, a terribly inefficient process." 🙄

6/ To create one desktop computer design inspired by the sunflowers planted by Laurene Powell Jobs, "extension metal components were assembled in a VCR factory on a palm oil plantation in Malaysia. Inside, young women would form three to four assembly lines, with around twenty people on each"

5/ Beyond all the workaholic bravado (multiple "mystery" cancers, dedicated United flights to Hangzhou, 5am gym sessions with the boss, spousal trips to accompany endless 7 day work weeks, the need for 2 PAs per day to keep pace with maniacal execs) there are further awful workplace stories:

4/ "When Apple first hit the $3 trillion valuation in January 2022, it meant Apple’s market value had grown by more than $700 million a day from when Cook took over in August 2011."

3/ "Gou got in on the ground floor and created a name for himself making reliable sockets and connectors–small components that facilitate communication between different parts of a computer. The conn in Foxconn–Hon Hai’s international name–refers to connectors. 'Fox' is just an animal he likes"

2/ "By 2012 the value of Apple-owned machinery in China had soared to $7.3 billion - more than Apple’s US buildings and retail stores put together. Apple had essentially cracked the code on how to manufacture the world’s best products without doing any of the manufacturing itself"

Some notes from Patrick McGee's Apple in China:
1/ "The meeting of the minds between Steve Jobs and Jony Ive had made Apple products unique, but it was Terry Gou and Tim Cook who would ensure they were ubiquitous."

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excited to share the call for the workshop

EXTRACTIVE NATURES / NATURES OF EXTRACTION

happening at @uobrisceh.bsky.social on 6-7 Nov 2025,

made possible by the @britishacademy.bsky.social

deadline: 10 September!

full call below ⤵

#envhist #envhum

YouTube video by HillsboroHerald Trammel Crow and City of Hillsboro Shut Major Access To Hillsboro In 2025 - Is this Unprecedented?

Silicon Forest continuing a long tradition of removing forest. youtu.be/fEmPYtx6bJw

but we should seek to achieve the same objective as that of foreign high-technology programs… without direct government intervention in the free-market process” - Robert Noyce, 1981

"The American response to… aggressive foreign development programs should not be to emulate the policies and practices of our trading partners…

The first location was this (gorgeous) former Martin Marietta building, which Tektronix bought and donated for the purposes of establishing the Graduate Center to attract and retain tech talent in Oregon. #SiliconForest

I've driven past this site thousands of times, and never realized it was once the Oregon Graduate Center, a private, postgraduate-only research university which ran from 1963 until it merged with OHSU in 2001. Founded by Portland business leaders from a Tektronix endowment.

Is Science a Public Good? Fifth Mullins Lecture, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 23 March 1993 - Michel Callon, 1994 Should governments accept the principle of devoting a proportion of their resources to funding basic research? From the standpoint of economics, science should ...

In light of the passing of STS luminary Michel Callon, we have arranged for his landmark 1994 article "Is Science a Public Good?" to be available for free access: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy On climate, the U.S. and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate worlds.”

On this and several other topics… www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...