The King of Beers Wants to Push Craft Brews out of Your Supermarket | Mother Jones

What’s a brewer to do? How about brewing something its customers actually want to drink?

Pity Anheuser-Busch InBev, the Belgian-owned behemoth responsible for such beloved US beers as Budweiser, Bud Light, and Michelob Ultra. When InBev bought US beer giant Anheuser-Busch back in 2008, the company accounted for 49 percent of the US beer market, the Wall Street Journal reported. Since then, its US market share has dipped to 45 percent. Since 2005, sales of its big domestic brands like Bud have dropped 5.7 percent, even as craft-beer sales have rocketed up 173.6 percent. What’s a transnational, industrial-scale maker of flavor-light, marketing-heavy brews to do?

Source: The King of Beers Wants to Push Craft Brews out of Your Supermarket | Mother Jones

Computers getting more efficient all the time

I was chatting at a party Friday night with a gentleman who sells data center construction projects. He made the point that data center power consumption accounts for 4% of overall electricity consumption. What’s more, he said that this percentage is only going to go up.

I’ve been thinking for a while now about how cloud technologies are not only affecting our computing habits but also our power consumption. When the Internet Age first dawned, the backend of websites consisted of beefy servers that did all the work of serving up websites: databases to churn out data, a layer to render it (PHP, Java, etc.), and so forth.
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Saying hello to Isaac Hunter’s Tavern

Isaac Hunter’s Tavern with roads overlayed

After staying up too late Thursday night searching maps for Isaac Hunter’s Tavern, Friday morning I pulled up a Google Search which corrected me on the actual location. My friend and fellow armchair historian, Mike Legeros, took my 2010 post and ran with it, connecting with Hunter descendent Betsy Hunter Amos along the way.

Betsy is a 7th generation neice of Isaac Hunter who connected with me via email shortly after my 2010 posts, offering photos and family history to fill in the blanks. What Mike and Betsy showed me was that the building I thought was the tavern is not the tavern at all. The real tavern is the building on the far western end of the property, not the ramshackle building I saw behind the home in the 1959 aerial photograph. The grand home itself was the home of Judge Biggs and went by the equally grand name of Hardimont. You can read more about it on Mike’s excellent website.

Tavern site as it appears today. Stones and bricks are on the right.

I visited the North Raleigh Hilton at lunch Friday to see what I could see. As Betsy said, the hotel library has a wonderful display of tavern photographs as well as artifacts from the tavern. One handy annotated photo showed how the tavern was originally positioned at the “top of the key” or driveway, across from where Hardimont was built. You can easily imagine it as it once stood between the “Lafayette Oaks” in the photographs. Judge Biggs moved the tavern out from in front of his stately home in 1936 and put it 100 yards west. It remained there until sometime in the early 1970s, when it was bulldozed.

Isaac Hunters Tavern foundation stones

With a little time on my hands, I decided to venture into the woods behind the hotel to see if I could locate the old site. After a few minutes of wandering I came across a clearing. To the left of me was a few mounds of raised dirt. A closer look showed a pile of large stones and brick. It was the foundation of the old tavern!

I whipped out my cellphone camera and snapped photos of the bricks and stones. A concrete bench that once provided respite in the beautiful backyard gardens lay in sections to the left of me. Near it is a set of stones seemingly configured in a step formation. Could these be the old horse mounting stones that once stood outside the tavern?

Bricks from foundation of Isaac Hunter’s Tavern

Broken bench from gardens, and are these the mounting stones on the right?

I quickly turned on my phone’s GPS and got a fix of the foundation site. After returning to work, I compared my coordinates to the historical photographs. Bingo, it fits!

For those who would like to visit what’s left of the tavern, it can be found at 35°49’52.3″ N 78°37’21.5″ W. Surprisingly, its last location is not on hotel property but the parcel directly behind it (roughly 900 St. Albans Drive), so if were bulldozed due to potential development that development never came. Perhaps it was demolished after being deemed a hazard.

Accounts say that local historian (and current Apex resident) J.C. Knowles was supposed to take ownership of the tavern but it was bulldozed before he got it. I will try to get up with Mr. Knowles to see what he might know or remember.

Gag Order Gone, Secrets of a National Security Letter are Revealed | FRONTLINE

An interview with Nicholas Merrill who, after 11 years of court battles, can now discuss the National Security Letter that the FBI gagged him with.

There are ways to legally compel information, they’re called warrants. Instead we have a security state that’s run amok. Funny how we don’t have much safety to show for the trillions of dollars we taxpayers have poured into the national security apparatus.

For the first time in 11 years, Nicholas Merrill is allowed to fully reveal the contents of a letter that came hand-delivered to him from the FBI.

In 2004, Merrill, then the CEO of a New York-based web-hosting firm called Calyx, received a so-called national security letter. The letter asked for what Merrill described as a significant array of information from the company, but because of a gag order, he was legally barred from even speaking about it.

“It was not a warrant. It was not stamped or signed by a court or a judge,” Merrill told FRONTLINE in the 2014 film United States of Secrets. “It was this letter demanding this information from me. And it also told me that I could never tell anyone that I had gotten the letter. It said that I could tell ‘no person.’”

Source: Gag Order Gone, Secrets of a National Security Letter are Revealed | FRONTLINE

Shady charity calling from 980-242-3241

I just got a mystery phone call from 980-242-3241, a number allegedly located in Charlotte, NC. A quick Google search shows that it is apparently a fake charity scam, asking for donations for breast cancer research. Comments on the 800Notes.com website indicate that the caller is rude and unprofessional.

If you get a call from these folks simply hang up. Don’t get scammed by an unsolicited phone call.

The final resting place of Isaac Hunter’s Tavern

Update 3 Dec 10:25 PM: I am wrong about the location while Mike Legeros is correct. The best news of the day, though, is that I found the remains of the old tavern building! I will post details as soon as I can get Google Earth to behave. Sorry for the wait!

Courtesy North Carolina State Archives

If you’ll recall, five years ago I set out on an Internet quest to determine exactly where Isaac Hunter’s tavern once stood. The Tavern was of important historical significance because it when North Carolina’s state capital was being created, legislators decided it should be within ten miles of the Tavern. Sadly, the Tavern met the same fate that many of Raleigh’s historical properties met in the early 1970s: it fell into disrepair and was later bulldozed. Also sad is that I never completed my quest.

Tonight I got an email from Steve Hall, who found my blog post and asked if I’d ever actually solved the mystery. Steve’s email prompted me to actually finish what I started, so tonight I present to you a few additional historical photographs of Isaac Hunter’s tavern, courtesy of some resource links that Steve sent me (thanks, Steve!).

Here is the Tavern as it appeared on an aerial photograph taken in 1959. Wake Forest Road runs north and south on the right side of the photo and you can see St. Albans Road stretching into the northeastern corner. The curving driveway leads up to a larger, more modern home that was built on the tavern property. In the red circle to the west of the home is the tavern, based on some time I spent matching up the tavern roofline. I learned that near the end of its existence the tavern was used as a horse stable, so its spot here behind the main home seems to support that.

Isaac Hunter’s Tavern, 1959.

The funny thing is, an aerial photograph taken in 1938 does not seem to show the tavern at this same spot. In fact, I’m not sure where the tavern was at this point as I’ve scoured this imagery and can find nothing I can match up with it. My guess is that the tavern might be just south and slightly east of the main house along the curving driveway but I don’t really know for sure. It could actually be in the same spot as it is in 1959 but it sure doesn’t look like it to me.

Isaac Hunter’s Tavern, 1938.

So where would you go if you wanted to stand in the spot where the tavern last was? Since I only know where it last was and have not located its original spot, I can only show you the last location:

Isaac Hunter’s Tavern today

Here’s the same spot with the current Google Maps satellite imagery added:

The location of Isaac Hunter’s Tavern

A smile crossed my face as I was lining up these images. Benson Drive started off as the dirt path that split the home and the tavern! Also delightful is the fact that the land where the tavern itself last stood is still (for now) undeveloped! There still could be historical nails and/or other artifacts to be found at this spot. Hurray!

I want to thank Steve for prompting me to finish my quest and for the handy links he provided: the 1938 aerial and 1959 aerial sets from UNC’s collection of USDA Historical Aerial Photos. For reference, I used images 6W_145 from the 1959 imagery and 13-212 from the 1938 imagery.

Dependent Verification Services are still a bad idea

If there’s one thing the handful of longtime MT.Net readers know it’s that there’s never been a dead horse that I didn’t love to beat! In this case, I’m returning again to the topic of dependent verification services such as those offered by AON Hewitt. My employer is changing health plans and as a part of the transition employees are being asked to go through the dependent verification process.

This is my second go-round with this process and it makes as little sense the second time around as it did the first. The verification firms tout fraud rates of up to 15% as justification for employers to hire the firm. Some research I’ve found online suggests that verification process costs the employer about $21 per employee.

Employers take note: the cost to your employees should also taken to account. The verification process is an anxiety-ridden exercise that does not engender trust in one’s employer. Under threat of terminating their health benefits, you are asking your employees to gather their sensitive and confidential personal documents and scan, fax, or mail them to a third party: the verification service.
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The Jones Street Exodus

The architects of North Carolina’s so-called “conservative revolution” are abandoning ship in droves now. Paul “Skip” Stam, Leo Daughtry, Bob Rucho, and Tom Apodaca, have all called it quits. Thom Tillis started the ball rolling, leaving town to go to the U.S. Senate.

The N&O’s Rob Christensen posits that it’s because the “revolution” has been a success. Apodaca agrees:

“We’ve come to a point where we’ve accomplished almost everything we set out to do,’’ Apodaca said.

Let’s take stock:
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Reagan and Gorbachev Agreed to Pause the Cold War in Case of an Alien Invasion | Smart News | Smithsonian

Interesting. Did Reagan know something about aliens?

At one point during the 1985 Geneva Summit, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev took a break from negotiations to take a walk. Only their private interpreters were present and for years, the details of what they talked about were kept secret from both the Russian and American public. But during a 2009 interview with Charlie Rose and Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz, Gorbachev revealed that Reagan asked him point-blank if they could set aside their differences in case the world was invaded by aliens.

Source: Reagan and Gorbachev Agreed to Pause the Cold War in Case of an Alien Invasion | Smart News | Smithsonian

Update: You can watch Gorbachev’s comment here, beginning at the 2:53 mark.