Not so long ago, okay — yesterday, someone said to me live and person, “hey you haven’t updated your site since April.” Really, I wondered, I’ve been busy working and writing all over the place, but it seemed that this site, the site that is my platform for all things local, really hasn’t been updated since April.
That created an odd sort of philosophical question to ponder on about. Did I really have nothing to say since April? The answer is not really. I’ve been over in twitter-land posting in 140 character increments for awhile, writing about London, writing grants, coding big projects that never seem to end and all the while popping over to the local media sites to drop a comment here and there on the issues that just seemed to call for a comment here and there.
So yes, I’ve neglected this site a bit. Not that I haven’t been thinking about it. It’s in, in dog years, 13 years old, and in internet years a lifetime. When I started the idea there were still dial up modems in the land. And the economy was booming, the dot com bust hadn’t happened and so there’s a lot of mileage under the tires. It has over the years periodically lain fallow. I think for many of the same reasons that it happened this time around.
And yet, here I am, dusting off the psoting engine and looking around.
I think there’s still much left to say about Connecticut and that little project that I like to putter around in called Norwalk.
Stay tuned.
Following one of basic principals of best practices– you can't manage what you don't know, a new initiative is driving tech innovation. They're lots of things that we are chastized to "manage" but not armed with the data that informs the actual usage of whatever we supposed to be managing. Take all the pleas to do a better job conserving energy. CFL lightbulbs abound, when a simpler way to reduce energy consumption may have been just to turn off the lights. But I digress, last fall the CTO of the United States, Aneesh Chopra, proposed that utility companies allow consumers a simple way to access their utility data. First– how cool is it that at least one branch of goverment gets that having a tech position might be a good thing to inform policy– I'm looking at you Congress. The Green Button is what that initiative spawned and last week three big utility comapnies in Califormian announced that they had a green button on their web sites.
The idea, realsing consumer data, originally rolled out as a way for veterans to access their medical records. Let's pause for a moment there and think what a great world we would live in if every medical record you have could be downloaded by you, and thus armed with a usb drive, you could see your next doctor armed with your entire history.
Meanwhile new apps and web services are actively being built around the concept of the green button, because that is how tech innovation comes about. And why is NYC becoming the tech innovation leader? Because wise peeps in NYC get that investing in startup ideas is economic development. Sadly, Connecticut misses out on that concept.
Now that the tweets and chatter has digested former Senator Chris Dodd's statements about SOPA and PIPA, the response was crowdsourced and the result, a whitehouse petition to invetigate Chris Dodd for bribery. You too can sign it at this link. I did, for the simple reason that on page 18 of yesterdays New York Times there was this gem of an article:
Soon after he retired last year as one of the leading liberals in Congress, former Representative William D. Delahunt of Massachusetts started his own lobbying firm with an office on the 16th floor of a Boston skyscraper. One of his first clients was a small coastal town that has agreed to pay him $15,000 a month for help in developing a wind energy project.
Amid the revolving door of congressmen-turned-lobbyists, there is nothing particularly remarkable about Mr. Delahunt’s transition, except for one thing. While in Congress, he personally earmarked $1.7 million for the same energy project.
So today, his firm, the Delahunt Group, stands to collect $90,000 or more for six months of work from the town of Hull, on Massachusetts Bay, with 80 percent of it coming from the pot of money he created through a pair of Energy Department grants in his final term in office, records and interviews show.
It's time to stop the revolving door of politicians who abuse the trust of the American people to do the right thing for the public good. Dodd's implied bribery is just another form the the same old self-serving thing.
Arrrghhh Pirates. Let's think about piracy for a moment, as in classic piracy on the high seas, not Johnny Depp's Pirates of the Caribbean. You see in the olden days, pirates used ships to sail the high seas and then find other ships carrying valuable cargo, and commence an intricate battle that may or may not involve swashbucking swordfights. They boarded those ships and pillaged and plundered and stole the cargo. Let's be clear here, they removed the cargo, depriving the rightful owner of the cargo the rights of ownership. So chests of pieces of eight, and baubles of gemstones etc. were taken. That is piracy.
Flash forward to the days of Yahoo! instead of yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum, and we get the label piracy attached to just about anything. But in the case of the Internet, or as former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens once said, the tubes, piracy has morphed from an action that deprives ownership to one that simply deprives profit. That's a whole lot of important distinction.
You see, making a copy of something doesn't deprive ownership. The original is safe in the hands of whomever owns it. But now another replica exists. So instead of one person enjoying the use of let's say, a post card of a bottle of rum, two or more people can enjoy the same postcard. There is no loss of ownership.
But wait, you say, what about if the original owner wanted to sell that postcard. If there are all these copies that you can get for free, no one will buy the original. Well that's an interesting philosophy there. But we already know what happens when massive amounts of copies get made that are free. What happens is that more people become aware of the original and not surprisingly, want to buy it. We know this because of the lowly VHS tape. Remember those?
For nearly three weeks, a group of twenty-somethings have been camped out at Zuccotti Park, as close to the Federal Reserve Bank and the financial institutions as you can get these days. Estimates place the number of people in the movement at two hundred, and while the media and curious on-lookers have checked the encampment, the main stream public has largely been unaware of what this group was all about. But on October 5, fifteen major unions announced they would march with the Occupy Wall Street protesters and suddenly main stream America has started to pay attention.
From the Occupy Wall Street’s web site its clear that the roots of protest that they are grounded it resemble those of the nascent Tea Party. Not the Tea Part circa 2009, but the original one whose purpose gets lost to the sands of time. In 1773, the original Boston Tea Party activists were protesting against a private corporation, the East India Trading Company. The British Parliament created the The Tea Act, essentially a tax cut for the East India Trading Company, exempting it from taxes while the American tea companies had to pay the tax. The Occupy Wall Street protests center on similar themes, the signs of “banks got bailed out, we got sold out,” “Corporations need to pay their fair share,” and “We are the 99%,” all speak to those themes.
The other more recent tea party also started with the populist claim that it was fighting for the middle class but quickly morphed into anti-government spending and a strong anti-tax of any kind dogma.
The common thread here is the perceived assault on a fair economic environment. That should be worrying to the corporate and political classes. While the 2009 Tea Party has successfully been integrated into the Republican Party, and for the most part subsumed, the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement is just at the early stages of its conception. And while the 2009 Tea Party could easily be defined by angry white men whose fight was more about protecting their assets, the Occupy Wall Street movement is fueled by angry young people, who recognize that they have been left with mountains of debt and little voice in how the country has been making economic policy for years. For the Occupy Wall Street founders, its personal too. Signs and stories about how much they owe in college tuition debt, and the stark unemployment numbers for the twenty-something generation should be a wake-up call to everyone.
Even in tony New Canaan, the young twenty-somethings who have been brought up in a world of economic privilege are experiencing first hand the harsh economic realities of jobs that don’t pay enough for them to dig out of college debt and afford the basics of suburban life. While much focus will be placed on the themes of class warfare, and the statistics of how few hold how much of the wealth of America, simmering just below that is the plight of the youth. And they all have parents who are facing economic uncertainty whether by gyrations in the global markets, or the domestic economic policies that seem focused undermining their stability.
For now, Occupy Wall Street is attracting every protest group in solidarity. From the anti-war, anti-government, to the anti-corporation, anti-nuclear crowd. It would be easy to dismiss this movement as yet another drum circle infused radical happening. And while labor movements have been focused union centric messages, there’s the overriding recognition amongst all groups that it is the economy that is driving the angst, anger and action.
Only time will tell if Bank of America’s $5 a month debit card fee will be the same spark that the 1773 Tea Act was to another generation. But one things is as clear as the sign hoisted to proclaim it, “the middle class is too big to fail.”
Most of the news we hear about China runs along the lines of how they are either out educating us, out manufacturing us, or simply owning us via the massive debt financed by chinese purchase of our treasury notes. We here about how the price of everything is going up because Chinese demand for raw materials, like concrete, is driving price increases. What we don’t hear about is what this surging economy in China is actually doing. An Australian news site has put a twelve minute investigative report on Chinese ghost towns.
The visuals are familiar to us here. Empty storefronts, vacant buildings, but just on a massive scale. Luxury condominiums stay vacant while affordable housing, often nothing more than communal rooms linked by plumbing, ring the new construction. China is presenting a starker vision of the divide between the need, better affordable housing and higher paying jobs– and the finance market driven investment, luxury housing and shopping.
The interesting thing is that this contrast is really an exercise in financial darwinism. In the end, the infrastructure of roads and buildings will be used. But first investors will lose billions, and many low skilled Chinese workers will lose livelihoods and homes because the job market they currently struggle in is being replaced. Fifty years from now, no one will be worrying about empty luxury condos that sit empty, and sociologists will mark a footnote on the enigma of what happened to all the agrarian based economy.
Behold:
I think back in the 90s I gave thought to what the formal etiquette was for emails. Then, like now, I concluded that since an email is already addressed with the “to” field, that the correct opening to an email was just to get to the point. The issue thought, still plagues those that cover the etiquette beat. Today on the BBC:
It’s time we ditched “Dear…” from work e-mails, according to a US political figure, who says it’s too intimate. So what is the most appropriate way to greet someone in an e-mail – hi, hey or just get straight to the point?
Two words. That’s all Giselle Barry needed to leave a lasting impression.
The spokeswoman for US congressman Ed Markey was e-mailing a group of reporters, to alert them to an important announcement.
“Hey, folks”, she began.
Such a casual salute raised eyebrows at the Wall Street Journal, which interpreted the beginning of her e-mail as the end of a centuries-old written tradition.
“Across the internet the use of ‘dear’ is going the way of sealing wax”,noted the newspaper.
Dear does sound too stuffy in my ears these days. I settle for a hey, hi, and the occasional “Friends from Nigera suggested I contact you…” Okay, I’m just kidding about that last one. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a “dear” in the salutation of even my printed out and snail-mailed correspondence.
Is “Dear” over and done with?
The Hour reports that there are questions over the decision to close schools on Thursday. To recap the situation, big storm, lots of snow and by mid afternoon Wednesday, the city still was snowed under.
According to Hal Alvord, there were streets that were still not touched by a plow. His complaint to the Mayor was that he was still down 10 employees and 2 bucket loaders. Union rules of course dictate how long a shift can be, not to mention those OSHA safety regs too, and therefor the decision to make was constrained by the time it would take to clear the streets and the schools. And oh by the way, also collect the garbage.
There are some things that we see all the time that we simply take for granted. Such as the now iconic photo below, that I, and apparently much of the world call the Rosie the Riveter poster. But, that’s not quite the story. Rosie the Riveter became an icon, and this poster did too, but there were many Rosie’s and just one “We can do it girl.” Continue reading
The Onion nails satire perfectly with this news report about Obama’s new high speed busway plan. The sad part is that it could almost be something that the GOP leadership puts forth as a way to cut spending.
Obama Replaces Costly High-Speed Rail Plan With High-Speed Bus Plan