Google today announced its Fiber for Communities initiative. They want to bring 1 gigabit per second connections (20 to 100 times faster than what most of us have access to) to 50,000 to 500,000 homes. Google figures it can (1) do something cool, (2) learn how to run a network, and (3) demonstrate the benefits of the kind of open network it advocates by putting some money where its mouth has been. This looks like a really great opportunity, now the challenge is to get our community to make a concerted response by the March 26th deadline!
Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) just announced that it is suing the Central Corridor project. That is a line I am not willing to cross, so Mary and I have suspsended our membership. I love MPR, but this is a boneheaded move! Here’s the note I sent them:
Please suspend our sustaining membership of MPR.
We are not willing to support an organization that is hindering as important a civic project as the Central Corridor rail line. We have been uncomfortable with your position for years because the Central Corridor plans were well known long before MPR renovated its space. As far as we are concerned, it is wholly MPR’s responsibility that it built studios as close to a known future rail line as it did. You should not be suing the state, but rather asking funders like us to up our contributions a bit to help you make necessary remediations.
Now that you have decided to sue the Central Corridor project we can no longer in good conscience support MPR. Maybe once this suit is over we will consider rejoining, we will see what the consequences of your action are. If this in any way leads to the demise or diminishment of the Central Corridor project, though, then you have lost us as member for good.
Are you as frustrated as I am at the timidity of Democrats in Washington? We act as if it takes 60 votes in the Senate to do anything. The Senate! Already an undemocratic institution (Wyoming == California, I don’t think so), has been made even more ineffective by our readiness to cave to filibusters that don’t even happen.
51 is a majority! And we have way more than 51 votes in the Senate. Let the Republicans talk for days on end if they want to block legislation. We should be making law! We have the votes. If someone wants to filibuster, make them get up and do the deed.
So I say, 51 is a majority, use it or lose it. If we stay timid, we will get what we deserve come November. Democrats have to be ready to make sausage, to compromise, but we must also get things done.
Pick something up there if you agree. Pass it along. Tweet, blog, talk to your friends, call your Congresspeople, and call your Senators or Senator-wanna-bees. Make sure they know you expect courage and progress.
I just called Betty McCollum’s DC office and asked where she stood on passing the Senate plan. I was shocked that the office could not articulate a position on this. I can understand “yes,” I can understand “no,” but I can’t understand a leader sitting on her hands and waiting for more input. This is a crisis time and the outlines of the crisis have been evident for over a week. I’m afraid this wishy-washy response left me feeling like my congressperson is weak and ineffectual.
After this past year of wrangling back and forth, I find myself urging my representative to hold their nose and vote for the Senate bill. And not only vote, but lobby her on-the-fence colleagues HARD to do the same. Yes, I hate what the Senate did, I can’t stand, especially, the abortion provisions, the Nevada deal, and much more of the mess they made. But we have worked too hard and fought too many special interests to let this moment pass by. Democrats have everything they need to turn ashes into victory here. As bad as the Senate bill is, it is not “toxic.” That notion is poison being fed to the Hill from the right. It is, in fact, antidote. Passing a bill, even the Senate bill, is the only way to wake up the public to what has been good in this fight all along. Once it is a done deal, we can wake people up to all the positive things that are in the bill (yes, even in the Senate bill). Democrats gain nothing by letting the moment pass, all the real toxins, the negative thumping of the right wing, remains our baggage if we cave in now. The only way to refute lies is with demonstration, and we can only demonstrate with action, and the only path of action left is the Senate bill.
I know you are not in a position to carry the water on this. But you are all I’ve got. You can call your representative now, during most important week of the year that was and the year to come, and ask them where they stand. This will define Democrats. Governing is not about getting everything you want, it is about compromise. Can the Democrats govern? We have majorities in House and Senate and we have the White House. There is nobody else to blame. Can we govern? Can we compromise? Can we make sausage? Now we find out. Today. This week.
Last week I spent an evening training new caucus convenors for our February 2nd DFL precinct caucuses here in Minnesota. In general, precinct caucuses can be great fun, and I’ve found the caucus system here in Minnesota was much more successful at getting me involved in party politics at the local scale than I ever was in Massachusetts or Ohio, which rely on primaries.
One tradition of the caucus is that if there are more people in your caucus who want to be delegates to the next level of party convention than you have delegate slots available, the walking subcaucus process (a kind of proportional representation) will be used to determine who gets elected as delegates. In theory the walking subcaucus is a pretty easy process, each person just walks over to the group that best represents their point of view. If that group ends up big enough to elect one or more delegates, they do so within the group. It is a fun way to get to know your neighbors.
In practice, the simple math involved can be a bear. It is well described on page 4 of the 2010-2011 Official Call put out by the DFL, but even that clear description does not make it easy. I decided to write a web-based calculator to help with the math, and after I dug into the problem I realized that even the training we had been giving convenors was incomplete in some minor, but notable, ways. In fact, I’d never been given a complete picture myself!
This is all a long way of getting around to the point, my Minnesota DFL Subcaucus Calculator is now available. I still consider it beta, because it is only a few days old and I hope some early testers shake out some problems. I have had a couple people from the statewide DFL dig into it and report a raft of problems to me which I’ve fixed, but please don’t blame the DFL if the calculator still makes mistakes. Just let me know.
In particular, I’ve tried to make this a tool that can be used from an iPhone or other mobile device. I was particularly pleased to find ways to make the calculator iPhoneaware (though it could be prettier) and even able to use the numeric keypad by default for certain text fields. The small joys of programming!
Anyway, if you are a Minnesota DFLer, take a look!
Sam Bowles, once at Amherst and now at the Santa Fe Institute, has had a remarkable career as an economist. These days he has been thinking about something close to my heart: “the weightless economy.” As described by Ethan Zuckerman after a visit by Bowles to the Berkman Center:
The big idea behind Bowles’s recent research is that some of the fundamental laws of economics – notably Adam Smith’s invisible hand, may not work in the “weightless economy – the economy that can’t be weighed, fenced, or conveniently contracted for.” Rather than being based on material wealth, knowledge-based economies are based on embodied and relational wealth. In these economies, individual-posession based property rights are difficult to enforce, and socially harmful to enforce.
…
Network wealth is the contribution made by your social connections to your well-being. This could be measured by your number of connections, or by your centrality in different networks. A simple way to think about this is the number of people who will share food with you. Embodied wealth is a combination of what you know and how strong you are. It measures factors like hunting prowess and grip strength. Bowles asserts that we’re moving from a history where network and embodied wealth mattered more that material wealth – we briefly (for about eight thousand years) moved into a world of embodied wealth, and now we’re moving back.
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It might be time to look back to the Pleistocene.
I’ll have to look for the archived presentation when it appears, the topic sounds dense and I’d love to give it a careful listen. I think it may open up my thinking about copyright issues and fair use, though. We have to come to some sensible place with regard to “intellectual property” and I’m not sure how to get there. I hope Sam may help.
The blogosphere is bubbling with concern over new FTC rules, due to go into effect in December, which would require disclosure of any relationship between reviewer and reviewee. For example, if a reviewer received an advance review copy (ARC) of something they then reviewed, they would have to disclose that fact in the review. This is an effort by the FCC to stem the tide of viral marketing that appears “authentic” to the reader, but is in fact “paid for” in some sense by the manufacturer or publisher.
The rules seem, on the whole, reasonable to me. Granted, I’ve never reviewed something I’m paid for or received for free, so I’m not the “target” of these changes.
The one troubling objection I’ve seen made is that the new rules may hold the manufacturers or publishers liable in some way for false statements made by bloggers. In other words, the rules may treat blog posts and tweets as traditional advertising subject, in some way, to “false advertising” claims. As one blogger laments:
Like I want publishers breathing down my neck while I try to write fair and honest reviews. We’ve already turned away publishers who wanted to have oversight over our reviews. And frankly, I feel like I should be giving instruction to publishers on labeling issues.
This would, indeed, be a problem. I hope the FTC does not equate an ARC to the kind of payment and responsibility an advertiser assumes for an ad that they place. But on the whole I am glad to see the FTC thinking about the future of marketing and the consumer protections we need in place to be able to judge the information we get via the web.
The Design Director of the Obama campaign, Scott Thomas, has collaborated with artists and designers to create Designing Obama, a chronicle of the art from the historic campaign. Get the inside story on how design was used by the campaign, and scope out the pieces, created unofficially, by grassroots supporters.
Yesterday Alex and I went to support President Obama’s call for healthcare reform at the Target Center in Minneapolis. We got a couple day’s warning of this event, and the Target Center is a huge venue, so I didn’t worry much about getting in. Sure enough, though it was great to be there, this rally didn’t have nearly the fire and sense of community that attended the campaign rally last June. I’ve put a set of pictures up, if you want a look.
When I got home, though, I learned that 9/12 was the date of a huge rally in DC by opponents of the administration. I realized that part of the purpose of Obama’s quick visit to Minneapolis was to make sure that the administration caught a part of the news cycle. Sure enough, today’s online New York Times featured these juxtaposed headlines…
Well done, White House.
But not nearly enough to satisfy me. The President made a point of stating his support for a “public option” at yesterday’s rally. This statement got one of the largest rounds of applause of the event. Obama twice tried to move on, but had to wait for the cheering to die down. But today’s Star Tribune featured schizophrenic coverage stating on the front page that Obama reiterated support for the public option while inside running an NYT article noting that the Obama administration was letting the public option go.
I don’t know what to believe. But I do know that this playing of both sides of the fence leaves me with very little hope for how this will all play out. If we lose the public option but keep individual mandates, then I think the plan may be enough of a disaster to work for its defeat. I noted that Obama didn’t even mention individual mandates yesterday, so lets hope we don’t end up with that doomed scenario.
I’m looking for leadership on this one, I don’t think I’m seeing it.
