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.
A few years ago I saw a TED demo video about BumpTop, a prototype 3D desktop designed for pen interaction. Now this prototype has grown into a Mac desktop environment called BumpTop. (There is a Windows version too.) Now it is time to see how much the product can live up to the presentation.
A great thread on the Code4Lib list gives shoutouts to a number of web hosting services. Every few years I take a look at this market, so I wanted to remember to look at these in the future: Heroku (for Ruby), Slicehost (now owned by RackSpace), Linode (founded in 2003), WiredTree (noted for Drupal), DreamHost (which I’ve used too), and Sonic (run by geeks).
I’ve been wondering why nobody has done this. Inklet makes the modern Mac trackpad a pen tablet as well. If I had a newer MacBook or Pro, I’d be checking it out.
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!
Do you have a few minutes? 12? If you care about libraries, take those 12 minutes to listen to a bit of wailing from Tim Spalding, the guy behind LibraryThing. I showed LibraryThing to a small group at Minitex in September 2005, the same month it became public. Today LibraryThing gets more traffic than WorldCat. What I love about Tim is that even as an outsider to the profession, he takes librarianship seriously and does everything he can to help drag libraries into the future. This is just a gentle kick in the pants for librarians.
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.
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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.
It looks like Access 2009 was a great conference, and they have many of their presentations online. The shame of this is that until a few hours ago I didn’t even know Access existed. With my US blinders on, I failed to realize that Canada hosted a conference that falls somewhere between DLF Forum and Code4Lib. It’s been going on for a long while, I have no excuse! I’d better start watching some video.
