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Tuesday, September 2, 2003
Maybe now the title isn't an oxymoron 
| | With a track titled Embracing the Connected Consumer - Entertainment and Technology - From the Broadband Home to the Mobile and Wi-Fi Universe, is it too much to expect them to unwire the place for attendees? Hope not. |
Live Journal Phone Home
| | [...] unlike blogs, which are dated musings on certain subjects and often carry links to similar blogs, online journals are designed to be more like a coffeehouse, where a community regularly gathers, building friendships and connections as they share personal details [...] |
| | ... even though Live Journal's own index page calls it a simple-to-use (but extremely powerful and customizable) personal publishing ("blogging") tool... |
Harvard, the University of Ivy at Blogistan
X-Rayted movies
| | The prettiest results, of course, are joint products of Hubble and Chandra. If you've got the bandwidth, check out this 20Mb movie of a pulsar sending out waves of matter and antimatter throbbing from the midst of M1, the Crab Nebula (which was born in a supernova explosion in the year 1054). |
Market Police Statecraft
| | There are a number of very good reasons that I distrust Libertarian leaning folks (although the Libertian hot dog stand in Berkeley was at least funny); just how often they tend to use the imagined effect of decisions as the primary litmus for political endorsements is one of the biggest. The market won't fix everything (the Irish Potato Famine is a fan-fucking-tastic example of just how bad the determinations of the market are for dealing with human problems) much less itself. Even here in the US we have financial shamans like Greenspan tinkering with things all the time. With the incredible amount of effort exerted in reducing taxes for larges business to virtually nil you'd think that the coffee would eventually hit the cup about specious (at least to those benefitting from tax cuts) reasoning behind those cuts. Biggest.Deficit.Ever. There aren't any jobs. There is very little hope unless you're a Christian fundamentalist sitting on an oil well at this point. |
| | Doc Searls is apparently embracing the "well if we just eliminate taxes we'll all have rocket cars" philosophy of sleep walking through an economic situation that is eating other people alive. |
| | It's the creepy blind faith in the market to police itself that irks me. |
| | Well, the apparency is in the eyes of the beholder in this case. I said nothing about taxes. |
| | But I will say something about California's voter initiatives, which are the real problem here. Proposition 13 capped property taxes, forcing the state to depend on more volatile sources of revenue, such as taxes on income, capital gains and stock options, which dropped precipitously at the end of the dot-com boom. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Proposition 49 required the state spend $400 million a year, starting in 2004 which will, Arnold's campaign site says, "allow California's economy and state revenues to recover" from a $38 billion shortfall that largely reflects the cascading cumulative effects of voter mandates. |
| | This recall thing is one more example of the same insanity. Our elected governor, who faces a recall required by a petition signed by 12% of the voters, needs a majority vote to stay in office, or else be replaced by another candidate who might get less than ten percent of the total vote. |
| | My vote against the recall will be a vote for representative democracy and against the mobocracy of voter initiatives. |
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