Tag: politics

Copying only gets easier

Copying only got easier following the passage of these laws—copying will only ever get easier. Right now is as hard as copying will get. Your grandchildren will turn to you and say “Tell me again, Grandpa, about when it was hard to copy things in 2012, when you couldn’t get a drive the size of your fingernail that could hold every song ever recorded, every movie ever made, every word ever spoken, every picture ever taken, everything, and transfer it in such a short period of time you didn’t even notice it was doing it.”

Cory Doctorow – Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing.

Dear Internet: It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works. This post is so well put. The tools our political representatives use may seem horrendously backwards, but they are reality and to affect change we have to understand how they work.

Americhrome. File this under things that make complete sense but which I had never thought about or realized before. It turns out the federal government has an official color palette for everything they contract out for. Every time I see a road sign I’m going to think of this now.

Thoughts on the occupy movement and UC Davis in particular. Great piece on the use of the human mic in the events at UC Davis yesterday. The video is fascinating. It’s just part of some great writing about what happened. Check out another take on the same video as well as an open letter to the UC Davis Chancellor.

The Information Arms Race. A fascinating but terrifying look at the way data is driving political strategies in campaign season. Some of the targeting statistics are mind blowing.

Baseball vs real life

I don’t think we can afford to view politics or technology as we view baseball. In baseball, I can personally insult Yankees fans, or condescend to Cubs fans, or feel a soulful affinity with fellow Mets fans, and it’s all fun. Because we know it totally doesn’t matter. But these other things do matter. So we really can’t afford to think of it as Us vs Them. It’s not Republicans vs Democrats, it’s Americans deciding what we want our government to do. And in technology, it’s the people of the world, in very much the model of Jefferson, deciding what we want to be. And not having corporations and their need for profit, be the sole determinant.

Dave Winer – Baseball vs real life

Michael Moore: I was the most hated man in America. This is what happens when you denounce the sitting president 4 days into an immensely popular war. Michael Moore writes about what happened after his Oscar acceptance speech.

What is going on?

The US Postal Service story is not a unique situation. It is the situation. And we are going to be living with this situation for many years to come. We are crossing a huge chasm from an industrial society to an information society. And there is immense pain in that transformation. Obama can’t solve the problem nor can any of his opponents. Time will solve this problem as new industries get built, people learn new skills and new jobs, and we dismantle entitlement systems that are not sustainable.

That is what is going on. I’d love to hear Obama tell the country that. But I doubt he will. But someone should.

Fred Wilson – What is going on?.

Why S. & P.’s Ratings Are Substandard and Porous. Fascinating read from Nate Silver about the S. & P. and the ways in which it’s broken as a means of investment guidance.

A little truth leaks out

What’s remarkable about [David Frum, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, and Paul Krugman], what gives me hope that there may be a way out of the bigger mess, of which this month’s meltdown is just a sympton, is that finally blogging is effectively routing around MSM. If you want to hear from smart people who know what they’re talking about, and who aren’t spinning, you can.

This is why blogging is important.

Dave Winer – A little truth leaks out.