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Friday, April 2, 2004
Peace out 
| | A mutual friend has, in a private email, sought to push toward each other the circles that surround Harrison Owen (of Open Space Institute and Practice of Peace), John Bunzl (of The Simultaneous Policy) and myself. I'm flattered that a loudmouthed journalist like me would be urged into the company of gentlemen who have been building serious and important organizations, and doing constructive work in the world, for a long time. |
| | Reading their respective sites has made me think about how hard it is to advocate peace and cooperation, to act as well as talk about finding and building on the stuff that works together rather than drives apart. |
| | I've been trying lately to listen to political talk radio. Man, it is hard. It is so damn tiresome to hear people bash the "other side" constantly. We're not getting balance here. We're getting extremes. Reminds me of Peter Shickele's old PDQ Bach number, "Echo Concerto for Two Unfriendly Groups of Instruments." Or the line I once heard from an old Texan, talking about a debate he once heard, his fingers pointing in opposite directions. "It was kinda like a longhorn. You got one point way over here, and another point way over here. And a lotta bull in the middle." |
| | It was a relief, while I was making coffee in the kitchen a few minutes ago, to hear a program on KCRW called Left, right and center, in which conservative John O'Sullivan said the Bush administration used bad judgement when it tried to smear Richard Clarke, also explainws that inconsistencies between administration (and other) witnesses have larger contexts that explain those differences, which anybody can understand if they aren't busy playing "Gotcha!" |
| | Anyway, all this has me thinking about how much more important it is, finally, to work than to talk. A toast to all the people, on all sides, doing the hard work out there. |
The man kicked ass at Sim City... without the Sim
| | Like Patrick Gregston, I don't have experience with the government stonewalling me at all, and I've spent a lot of time working with governments. Before I became a tech junkie, I was a Denver-area real estate developer. I've formed three metropolitan districts, closed two municipal tax-exempt fundings, annexed 1600 acres to a 90 acre town and made a lot of money changing zoning, installing utilities and building streets. I even patented a solar home because we couldn't get natural gas service for a subdivision. You can get a lot done by filling out government forms, but it's a lot like writing code. |
| | One of my projects involved 120 acres on the Denver-Boulder turnpike, but without access. All it took to increase the value of our land 20-fold was to get four layers of bureaucracy, including the Federal Highway commission, to authorize us to build the interchange by adding an assessment to our land and other interested parcels. Add 15 years of brain damage and bam! Overnight success: |
| | (His graphic points here.) |
| | The difference between building a fence in your back yard and building an interchange is only a matter of scale: the interchange involves more permits, more layers of government, more zeroes and more financing. |
| | No one at any level of government wants to prevent citizens from creating infrastructure. But you must be willing to help them work within the regulations. That means a lot of paperwork, patience and empathy. As Patrick Gregston says, they're interested in output, which is a kind of throughput: Citizens fill out paperwork declaring what they want, and government processes it. Too bad businesses aren't as responsive. |
| | The larger purpose of his discourse is a project called Open Republic. It's a cool idea. Check it out. |
To air is human
| | Hot Air is my report on Air America's first day (Wednesday), at Linux Journal. It's the long piece I promised the other day. Look for follow-ups there too, starting in the comments pile. Feel free to add your own comments there as well. |
| | A guest on the Randi Rhodes show right now is talking about how Clinton got impeached over a blowjob. Nothing new there; just wondering if the network is being "indecent." Ya never know anymore. |
Buzzing Tall
| | I love that term, citizens media. It's so perfect. From one Jersey guy to another, Fuckin' A, Jeff. |
| | Remember CB radio? Unlicensed, low-range, junk wattage. All but useless in the beginning for everything but making hobby noise. The truckers did a helluva job putting it to work. Still do, far as I know. And I'm sure there are still a few good uses for it, around firefighting, civil defense or whatever. |
| | My point is, CB is about all the feds ever wanted us ordinary citizens to have. It's not their fault. They could hardly have imagined a platform for citizens media — one that let any one of us publish or broadcast whatever we pleased, in ways that cause zero interference to anybody else, from anywhere, to everywhere. |
| | Before the Net, Business was a world in which everything worth having in abundance was produced by the few and consumed by the many. All the big money was to be made by joining those few and controlling the means of production and distribution to the many. Or, in the case of high-quality goods, subsets of the many. |
| | The Net gave us the platform we needed to start making our own abundance. And a place to stand and witness the increasingly absurd attempts by Big but Limited Supply to control not only Big Unlimited Demand, but Unlimited Supply as well — by Big, Small, and every size between them. No limits. |
| | Kudos to Jeff and others like him who keep trucking the clues. |
Lockin-free demand-based webstream service wanted
| | Let's say I want to start listening to an Internet radio station, or any kind of webstream (using any codec) by pointing to an entry in a directory that's updated by RSS. The pointing could be with a Web client, or (better yet, to keep the concept simple and not locked into anybody's client) from a command line. |
| | Is there any way of doing that yet? |
| | [Later...] Doug responds. Also Lucas and Jay. Great stuff. What I'm hinting toward here is the idea that we're not too far away from having a something like real infrastructure here. You know. NEA stuff on which a whole new form of radio and TV can be built. An industry, even. One not nannied by the FCC. Or anybody. |
There are responses to this message:Re: Friday, April 2, 2004, Shannon Clark, 4/2/04; 5:08:50 PM Re: Friday, April 2, 2004, Jay Fienberg, 4/2/04; 12:58:43 PM Re: Friday, April 2, 2004, Lucas Gonze, 4/2/04; 12:17:56 PM Re: Friday, April 2, 2004, Doug Kaye, 4/2/04; 11:51:45 AM
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