Hi ,The US has just changed time so I guess it's almost winter time! It was a pretty cold day for Halloween in Chicago, that I enjoyed at the Halsted Street Parade. As I believed I've mentioned I'm spending quite a bit of time aside from work at planning ski time for the winter, and so Google often recommends ski related information, one of those I pulled for this newsletter. Enjoy and remember to forward to a friend if you enjoyed it! Best,Willem"Sky Spotters" on XKCD, A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math , and Language

 Weekly Combo Two or three flavours, interesting separately, fascinating together 

Fight the Man. Own the Mountain. (Start Engine, 3 min video / 7 min read)As mentioned I came across thanks to Google knowing I search ski stuff these days, and this article in the Denver Post about this crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the RED ski resort, as far as I understand to shield themselves from big corporate consolidation of mountain resorts like Vail resorts (I have their Epic Pass for this coming season, it's kind of difficult to say no to given the different resorts it covers - of course they get you with the affordable(ish) pass price and charge extra for everything around the mountain I suppose.That said, while fascinating for the community aspect, are these types of crowdfunding campaigns really fighting the man? Is asking people who have that kind of money to invest the only way to protect community activities - even when they're typically for the relatively wealthy? How about the said corporations investing in communities of the future, collecting data about all our behavior, like in the example below? I find it's becoming increasingly difficult and complex to figure what seems like good ideas or not.Alphabet is trying to Reinvent the City, Starting with Toronto (Wired, 5 min read)Given how I enjoyed visiting Toronto last year, I was curious to have a look at this one, and of course also being interested in tech and what the Google overarching Alphabet holding are up to. And this smart city of the future project sure sounds interesting though it's a good thing the author points out a few failures from other planned cities that haven't done as well as hoped, and I'm not sure data by itself or moving park benches around to be in the sun will help all that much. And it's also interesting in the view of the other article, here it's pretty much the corporate man taking over a part of the city, in sci-fi tradition, or at least what seems to be going in that direction.I'll be looking forward to reading more about the progress. And wonder which alternate or unexpected corporate sponsor might lend support to the cause of RED mountain, which could protect it from Mountain Resorts corporations while leaving it in the hand of a different one. What if Facebook bought it, promised the community its pristine powder snow in exchange for an office campus and a data center (because those like cold weather, cheaper to cool all those data servers)? Would it be worth the trade off?