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| Monday, November 26, 2001 |
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Another BigMeme 
| | Dave gave us (and is now defending) the BigCo meme. Seems to me we need a similar abbreviation for Big Government. So I volunteer BigGov. We could use BigGo, but that almost sounds positive, which isn't exactly the idea. Whaddaya think? |
Insufficient voyeur compliance
| | The only problem with Alison's PantsCam is that only 20 eyes can peek through it at the same time. |
The Net is not handbasket compliant
| | Because Schumpeter understood growth as a function of innovation, he understood recessions as inevitable periods of adaptation: An economy assimilating a new innovation accumulates deadweight that must be purged--firms made obsolete, firms that adapt slowly or poorly, and firms dependent on firms in either of these categories. The speculative phase Schumpeter identified exacerbates the problem by creating more deadweight. As a result, more people have to bear more pain--in the form of bankruptcy and job losses--for a longer period of time. |
| | Then he goes into the railroad boom & bust of the late 1800s, and compares that to the Internet boom & bust going on now: |
| | In all, more than 40 million miles of optical fiber were laid--enough to send an e-mail to Mars and still have cable left over. And, ironically, much of it was laid along existing rail lines. |
| | Unfortunately, as with railroads in the 1860s, no one has figured out what to do with all that cable just yet. Even under the wildly optimistic, if popular, assumption that Internet traffic was doubling every few months, it would have taken years for demand to warrant the amount of cable actually installed. |
| | Then he goes on to explain how monetary policy is a lousy way to manage the economy, which is getting to be obvious, so let's get off this train of thought at that last point, about the growth of demand and all that. |
| | Then let's try not thinking about the Net as a way to "deliver content," but rather as a place where anybody can play the part of supply, demand, or both. Look again at what David Weinberger says about C2C (below and here) to see where I'm going with this. |
| | Then look at what he says about "managing" stuff, and the Industrial Age conceits by which we presume that habitats as wild and wooly as the Web can be "managed" in the military sense in which we actually mean it. |
| | Then think about what blogs are doing to publishing, in a very C2C way. Except the customer is also the supplier. The producer is the consumer. Supply is demand. All in a very reciprocal, self-organizing, self-proliferating kind of way. Kind of like ice-9 or The Andromeda Strain. What makes this hard to see, from a traditional economic point of view, is that most of the participants aren't sellers and buyers, and approximately none of what's happening makes sense to the mainstream media that report on it, and through which we still get most of our news. |
| | Right now this site is being served by a box outside my own house. But it doesn't have to be. And even if it is, that fact is less important than these opening statements on the Radio Userland page: Radio UserLand is a full Web application development and runtime environment. It puts an industrial-strength Web server on your desktop. Apps run in the browser. Server software and data are on your system. |
| | You're author, publisher, supplier, first source and distribution system, all in one place. You can job out some of that functionality, sure; but conceptually you're in very radical territory here. It's the same radical territory Apache and Sendmail opened up in their own ways, and Jabber is opening up too. Same with XML, XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS and other hard-to control ways we have of making things interoperate. |
| | So I'm optimistic. We'll find uses for all that capacity, thank you very much. We always have, and we always will. |
He'll be hanging out with Osama any day now
Whoa
Coincidence?
And it's not a drag
| | And the dude looks kinda like Marek, no? |
BcB
| | That's for Blog click Blog. Short for the kind of circle jerking we do around here. |
| | There's almost no chance that the SSSCA will shut down the Open Source movement in a way that the courts will uphold. Yes, we should be alert. Yes, we should write the letters and sign the petitions. But we should not let the SSSCA through even if it made Linux the 51st state. |
Wear yours proudly, and be ready for anything
| | A reader points out that yes, there is such a thing as a Hanky Code. |
Smile when you scan that bag
| | Now in our third month since 9-11, the sight of uniformed soldiers with mean-looking firearms is standard in airport concourses and security portals. All these guys look young, and have one thing in common: they caress their guns. I mean, they finger these mothers full time. Has anybody else noticed this? I have a five-year old who treats his crotch the same way. Just a coincidence, I'm sure. |
| | Anyway, my cousin Paul just sent me a link to Dressed to Kill, a piece by Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post that goes into why "the front page of this or any other newspaper, or the richly detailed color sections of the newsmags, all look like photo spreads in Shooting Times." |
Feel the yearn
| | Just got back from my first workout on weight machines, plus the treadmill and crosstrainer I started on last week. It felt good go get into a groove and to feel just a tiny bit more fit. But the scale told an awful story. Even after my workout and shower, with almost no breakfast weighing me down, I was 187, which is three pounds more than the shocking number the scale told me last Tuesday. Turkey and beer, I guess. |
| | So I start a diet today too. Mostly greens and grains, like a grazing animal. Just in time for the holidays. Yum. |
| | But hey, it worked before. That time I got down to 155, which is my goal again this time — along with keeping it there. |
Have faith
| | Kuro5hin is down, but not out. That's the message that currently comprises the site. This is a disappointing development, but the story — a technical Shit Happens mini-epic of a type as common and unique as snowflakes — is well-told and points to the excellent Acts of Gord site. So while all is not lost, at least one thing is found. |
| | [Later... Rusty says K5 will be up tomorrow morning.] |
You've got spam!
| | Just got home. Had our first big rainstorm at the new house, which is even older than I am. It was a test of our new drainage system, which passed just fine. However, I didn't expect it to be a test of the roof. But it was. There were large puddles on the floor of my office, which used to be the back of the garage. The apparent culprit is a lack of roof overhang above the office and garage. If the wind whips around from the East, it works through the edges of old shingle layers underneath the current top roof layer of half-rotted composite, and soaks down inside the wall beneath. Something like that. Gotta get somebody out to look at it today. |
| | Anyway, I just sat down and fired up the email. Got 83 messages, 32 of which were spam. Guess those leaked through filtration that's about as good as our roof. |
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