Reality on the blink... blink... blink...

I get to say "Reality is on the blink" so often these days, for phrases on the tip of my tongue its right up there with "Did IQs drop sharply?". But this news report about Bush and Blair being nominees for a Nobel Peace Prize really takes the biscuit. Of course its ironic that Nobel awards, the peace prize included, are financed by the monetary legacy left by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, the first safe encapsulation of high explosive. But at least dynamite has more peace time uses than a Bush or Blair...

However on second thoughts, a Bush and Blair win of the peace prize would entirely in keeping with the award to that other infamous peace prize winner Henry Kissinger who got the award in 1973 with Le Duc Tho "for jointly negotiating the Vietnam peace accord in 1973." Why? Because to this day Kissinger still faces arrest for war crimes charges if he ever steps foot in Belgium. Right now there's a good number of people who would like to see Bush and Blair, the big bullies on the block, step up to the dock with Kissinger.

Just in case you need a quick history lesson, Kissinger became imfamous for his support of Augusto Pinochets overthrow of the democratically elected leader Salvador Allende in Chile thirty years ago (1973), and his subsequent turning of a blind eye to Pinochets crimes against humanity in Chile which included thousands of people murdered, tortured and disappeared over a seventeen year period. Kissinger met with Pinochet after the 1973 coup and at one point told him:

My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist. But we have a practical problem we have to take into account, without bringing about pressures incompatible with your dignity, and at the same time which does not lead to US laws which will undermine our relationship.

The rest, that is the conservatively estimated 3,200 people killed and tens-of-thousands tortured and disappeared, are now history. History because they never lived to see Pinochet ousted in 1990.

Of course at the time Kissinger got his award in '73 the full implications of his support of Pinochet were yet to be known. The same could be said for people that supported Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden before they turned into enemy of the state #1 (that would be Bush, Bush and Rumsfeld. Naturally sanity might, if pigs are in flying condition, win the day and Bush and Blair might join the list of infamous nominees who never made it t the winners circle. These include famous tyrants Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic. But if sanity doesn't win out, I wonder how Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King would feel about sharing the Nobel Peace Prize winners title with Bush and Blair who are now more infamous for the wars they waged, and the blood they spilled in the name of peace, than their efforts to bring peace itself?

"In-your-face isn't our style"

The National Public Radio Ombudsman, Jeffrey A. Dvorkin has recently written about complaints regarding an NPR interview with Dick Cheney. In the interview Cheney was allowed to get away with making statements already know and proven to be false. Listeners criticised NPR interviewer Juan Williams heavily for not dismissing such erroneous statements.

In response Dovrkin said:

Many asked why NPR is not more like the BBC. However the "in-your-face" interview style as practiced by the BBC ("Oh come on Prime Minister. Do you really expect anyone to believe that?") is not done on NPR and American political interviews -- for a number of journalistic, cultural and stylistic reasons that are probably good subjects for a future column.

Now I for one would really like to know exactly what those "journalistic, cultural and stylistic reasons" are that prevent NPR setting a standard for all other interviews to follow. I regularly listen to BBC interviews on the radio, and grew up with them. Its only after ten years of living this side of the big blue wobbly thing that I have come to appreciate how refreshing the so called "in-your-face" BBC style is. By comparison USA news interviews are conducted with "white-glove-and brown-nose" style. News channels are afraid if they will alienate guests by asking them frank and intelligent questions, instead they accept canned sound-bite responses at face value and with happy smiling faces and thank yous. Such a weak and afraid press is a dangerous thing, it is left disempowered and lets interviewees simply use the national news media as a platform to broadcast unchallenged party propoganda.

I believe that the NPR should seek to pursue higher goals of journalisitc achievement and in doing so that it can lead the rest of the weak and timid media masses in the right direction. In the UK the BBC is the standard, and no politician can get away with refusing a BBC interview and not looking cowardly. After all to survive a BBC interview one need only speak intelligently on topic and be prepared to defend a view or point, exactly as anyone able of intellectual debate should be capable of.

As someone in the UK recently pointed out to me, the world would be a better place if the President of the United States could stand up in a forum similar to the British Prime Ministers Question Time and take on all comers without an army of policy makers and political advisors to massage and vet every word spoken. If such a thing happened we could probably expect to have far fewer "yes-men" running the country in the interests of their and other peoples pocket books, and even those that did make it to power could at least be easily put on the spot by the press and shown in their true colours.

This race has super sized itself to death...

There's an album by Roger Waters, he of Pink Floyd fame, called "Amused to death". Its one of my favourites - dark and tragic, full of portents of doom and gloom. One of the songs goes, "this race has amused itself to death..." and perfectly describes the fear frenzied, TV sedated malaise that has fallen on us in the early 21st century. Except it was released in the 1980's during the Reagan era and while appearing ahead of its time reminds us that periods of military build up and empire building (not to mention massive deficit spending) are always just then back in our past if we care to, or still can remember them.

Well now there's a movie "Super Size Me" about a man who experimented with super sizing himself to death. Okay the point wasn't to kill himself with fast food, but it was a crash diet of three square (well round) McDonalds meals a day for a month. The results are hardly suprising given that a big mac is about 900 calories and all the other fixings probably take it well over 1500 calories so he was probably pounding four to five thousand (or more) calories a day. But at least he proved that super sizing ones food really does super size ones body, for Morgan Spurlock it was a massive 25 lbs gain in one month. Beefcake! And then there were many other side effects on his well being that are documented in the movie.

The New York Post has a story about "Super size me", as does Newsweek, and the movie even has its own website. In the mean time McDonalds is trying to distance itself from the documentary by claiming that it has plenty of healthy food options and that no one eats all their food from McDonalds. Well of course not - sometimes they still pop next door to Burger King or Jack in the Box! But the point is, even if they only eat a McDonalds six days a week, or five days, or four or three or two or one... at what point does including a Big Mac with fries or some other "happy meal" become an unhappy meal and become a grave and present danger to ones well being?

Unfortunately you wont be finding out much more information or seeing Spurlock's documentary any time soon, someone has bought it and has stopped all showings and previews of it . Lets hope it wasn't McDonalds who bought it to bury it before it gets into wide circulation and before they find themselves labled as purveyors of billions of Meals of Mass Destruction.

I've got two home movies and a Macintosh...

Fresh from Brian Flemming comes Bush vs. Dean. The jury is out on whether Bush is swigging a coke or something else, never the less his goofy "very boring person, hates to drink, doesn't like to smoke" doesn't exactly leave one with a sober Presidential after taste.

Wake up SCO, time to meet your nemesis!

Those who know their movies will recognise this entry's title as a misquote from the "Blade Runner" when Leon says: "Wake up Deckard! Time to die!".

So what's this entry all about then? Well you might have guessed by now that I'm not really very supportive of SCOs predatory and imflamatory tactics relating to its patent claims. By all means defend you intellectual property rights if you're legally allowed to, but at least do it with some humility in the face of the fact that patent claims are frequently never upheld in court, and until they are upheld in court your claims are just that - claims. Which also means that infringements are actually just alleged infringements. That means if you run around (like Geoworks did) trying to extract large somes of money from every customer who ever bought the product that you say infringes your patent, then it means there's quite a reasonable chance you're going to end up with egg in your face. Or in this case MyDoom.

Yes it seems that the MyDoom virus is set to target SCO and bring down their website on February 1st. Such revelations do bring out the worst in me so I can honestly say that it raised a little grin when I read it. Not because I think its a particularly clever way to get even (I'm suprised it didn't happen a long time ago), just that it is a fitting retribution for SCOs dirty tricks to date, a case of reaping what you sow if you like. Can you just imagine people at SCO waking up this morning, reading the news and saying to each other, "Why do they hate us?".

Well SCO, regardless of why they hate you, or indeed regardless of who "they" are^*, it seems you are about to meet your nemesis. Don't know what a nemesis is? Well continuing with the movie quote theme I'll give you a definition of nemesis straight from "Snatch":

Nemesis: A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.

Don't know what a righteous infliction of retribution is? Well how about this quote from Ezekiel 25:17 given by Jules in "Pulp Fiction":

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.

So watch out SCO, it looks like the shepherd is out to get you and rain some down some doom on your web site. I suggest you pick up the phone and dial 1-800-CALL-FBI while the phones are still working.

^*See also my entry on why using Linux may one day be considered terrorism

Outsourced tea-time

Many of my friends bitch and moan about the onlslaught of outsourcing in the IT industry, the reason it is happening should be obvious to anyone. The connection between IT outsourcing labour to India, and corporations like Wal-Mart cutting local labor costs to the bone and importing the majority of its stock from overseas, is glaringly obvious. Both are consequences of multi-national companies exploiting differences in the cost of commodities (be they goods or labour) across a global playingfield to make a profit. In the finance world its called arbitrage.

Believe me, if there was a way for Wal-Mart to have cheap overseas labour operating its stores as well as producing the goods to supply them, it would. I'm imagining some kind of robot wandering around their stores stocking shelves, operated remotely by telepresence from some offshore location. Until that is a reality (remember you heard it first here) they will have to make do with just outsourcing its supplychains overseas.

Unfortunately for my IT friends there is no need for a fancy robot to outsource their jobs. The smart ones have been predicting this problem for years - if you lived through the dot com era you could not help but notice the influx of H1-B visa workers. The economics of it were that a person with three or four years experience out of college could command $150 per hour or more. At those prices consultancies could start up, ship visa holders over, pay them a fraction of that and make a tidy profit on the difference. I even knew of one person working for such a company that was taking a one hour taxi ride to and from work each day. The $100 a day that cost him was worth it because he paid for it after just one hour of work. Imagine how you would feel if you were a minimum wage worker at Wal-Mart - that could be as much as a half a weeks salary. Well such crazy times are over now and IT contract rates are for most part back to well under $100/hr and often as low as $75/hr or less. Furthermore the government slashed H1-B visa allocations and the market is so full of unemployed workers its almost impossible for a company to satisfy the labour department's requirements to actually get anyone into the country on an H1-B visa.

Anyway, there's an interesting article over on Alternet.org that discusses the flip side of the outsourcing coin. It reminds us for every unhappy, unemployed IT worker in the USA there's also a human being in the other country working away, often through the night hours, to compensate. Of course I'm not saying its inherently bad that this global labour market arbitrage is creating jobs in countries like India or China. Its just that most of the profits don't stay in the country where those labourers are. They are instead syphoned off into global corporations to enhance the bottom line and line the pockets of highly compensated executives and the wealthy corporate plutocrats that are running this country, and arguable much of the western world now. So you end up with mega-corps like Wal-Mart with a market cap of $240 billion and making $8 billion in profit a year. That's enough to give every one of their 900,000 employees a $9,000 a year raise and perhaps throw in free health care to boot. That would take them all off food stamps and make a huge difference to living standards of their poorest employees. But of course that doesn't happen.

To see how Wal-Mart is also exploiting overseas suppliers note that last year they generated $246 billion in total revenue to yield a $54 billion gross profit - enough to invade a small country. When 85% of Wal-Marts products are imported from overseas that means its its likely most of that $54 billion gross profit came from buying low overseas and selling high in the USA. One can imagine that given Wal-Marts supply chain squeezing practices in the USA, the overseas suppliers also saw very little profit to give their workers a decent living wage. In the mean time there's $8 billion in net profits left on the table at the end of the day. Imagine if Wal-Mart had a million workers overseas supplying them, they could give them all a $1,000 a year raise and still have $7 billion a year in profits left over. To someone working in a sweat shop in Vietnam $1,000 a year would be a fortune, probably doubling or tripling their annual salary - remember that over 50% of the worlds population lives in poverty earning $2 or less a day.

Anyway, I'll leave you with the closing quote cited in the Alternet article. It could almost have been written by me ;-)

What we are seeing is capitalism working in a totally uneven playing field and it will carry on until the playing field is evened out. That is going to be a long and painful process and the world simply isn't going to be able to support its entire population at the standard of living we would like to continue to enjoy.

Tech interlude

I'm not entirely sure what it means, but apparently this blog now has an Atom XML feed available from the URL http://www.0101010.org/atom.xml. I say not entirely sure because I haven't really been tracking blog technology but apparently Atom is the new blog publishing API and browsing/syndication format that will superseed RSS. More details on Atom compatible clients can be found at AtomEnabled.org.

Earth is room enough

A while ago, on a plane to the UK, I was wondering just how much land there is per person on the planet Earth. The Earth's surface area is about 5500 trillion square feet, but only 30% of that is land, and of the land only 30% has farmable topsoil (the rest is snow, mountains or desert) hence approximately 10% of the Earth's surface is farmable land. So by my calculations, if the Earth's seven billion inhabitants all spread out evenly across that land we'd each have about 78,600 square feet to call our own^*. That is a square about 93 yards on each side, or 1.8 acres, or around-about a US city block.

Not exactly roomy, but then you should allow for a reasonable amount of cohabitation of plots via vertical development and simple sharing due to the existance of families. Also there is bound to be some spreading out into some of the 90% non-farmable areas - it might be an idea to keep the farmable area for farming. All things considered it is clear there is going to be a lot more land available per family, probably five to ten acres. But the question is, just how much land does each person need to keep themselves feed and watered?

Another way to think of these figures is to compare them to a city dweller living alone in a two bedroom apartment of 700 square feet. Effectively they using 1% of the land that is theoretically available and that's without considering vertical stacking of apartments in a city. Its likely most industrialized cities have a density of people that is ten to one hundred times higher than single storey developments would yield. Thus you city dwellers are probably using one-thousandth or less of the land available. Since the majority of the worlds inhabitants now live in cities its clear there is still a lot of room out there.

Of course I'm not condoning over population, just trying to get some sense of perspective. What would be nice of course, was if the majority, if not all of the current seven billion people were actually out of poverty, able to get critical health-care, education, enough food to eat and clean water to drink. For well over a billion even getting a simple light after dark is a big problem of the day.

^*Yes I know these calculations don't leave any room for farmable land that is used by parks, wilderness, uninhabited or for infrastructure. If you want divide my final figures by two.

Exactly...

Of course, these "family values" types, who insist that "marriage is between a man and a woman", uniformly fail to mention that, these days, marriage in America is, quite often, between a man who works eight hours a day in a factory and five hours a night as a security guard and then comes home to an empty bed because his wife is on the night shift, stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. It's pretty damn hard to "manage your conflicts in a healthy way" when the two of you are never in the same room. And for all the talk about how much better off kids in unbroken homes are, there is very little said about how these barely-making-ends-meet parents are supposed to pull off the Ozzie and Harriet routine. Talk to your kids about drugs? When? In the waits at the emergency room, which you're using as your GP because you haven't got health care?

From The State Of The Union: Bush Leaves No Bride Behind

Visualizing the baby boom

I found a good illustration of what the baby boom looks like:

From these three charts you can clearly see how just prior to 1950 there had been a decline in births due to WWII followed by a boom towards the end of the war and through the fifties and sixties as people were encouraged to have babies. Then you have a decline in birth rate over the last thirty years and a clearly defined bubble riding up the stack as shown by the 2000 census data. That bubble will be hitting retirment age in 5 to 10 years and will be riding up the stack for another twenty to thirty years.

As of 2000 there were 35 million in the 65 and up age group, 174.1 million in the 18 to 64 age group, and 72.3 million in the under 18 age group. That makes the ratio of productive dependents to non-productive independents currently at 0.61. I'll be very interested to see what that number looks like in 2010, if only to see if there really has been a post 2000 baby boom or whether I've just been imagining it all. So far, figures as of the end of 2002 indicate there isn't one overall, although the birth rate for women in the 34 to 44 age range has been on the increase which probably explains my observation which is largely based on births among my thirty-something friends.

Another to visualize the baby boom it is just look at a graph of absolute numbers of births and also the birth rate (per capita):

Of course another baby boom right now only helps to fuel the problem of government and social security bankruptcy as in case you haven't noticed, any new babies fall right into that non-productive dependent age group. So if Bush suddenly proposes to raise the retirement age and decrease the age at which kids can leave school and go out to work you'll know he's trying more economically inspired policies to "solve" the baby boom problem. It seems unlikely but when the government is bankrupt (yes folks, its bankrupt - it owes almost $7 trillion at the moment and is still borrowing hundreds of billions more each year) they might try anything.

$1.5 billion to promote marriage

Apparently Bush now wants to spend $1.5 billion to promote marriage, that would be 50% more than the amount of new funding just proposed to return to the Moon. Applying my new found economic X-ray vision for Bush policies I'm lead to wonder just how much money Bush's advisors figured they could re-coup in taxes when all those suckers get married and see their tax bills increase as a consequence. Hmmm, interesting.

For me I would be far happier if instead of spending money to promote marriage, people spent their efforts figuring out why the divorce rate is so staggeringly high. That would probably have a much more positive impact on the social welfare of all concerned, especially children. After all what is the point of encouraging people to get married, if they just go out and get divorced again. Stunt's like Britney Spears' 55 hour quickie marriage-annulment show just how little seriousness people regard marriage with these days.

Some oblique commentary on this is available from Mark Morford.

A preemptive moon strike against the unstable, sneaky, ungrateful and dangerous

Tony Long's story in Wired News is barking up exactly the same tree as George Bush and his out of this world plans. The article even compared Bush to "some latter-day Mongol warlord, ... eagerly extending American might to its absolute limits.". It also quoted Bart Gordon a Tennessee Democrat who in a December interview with the New York Post said:

We don't want to wake up too late one day and say, 'Uh-oh.' We don't want somebody else to get there first. We need to have our base there. We need to be the chairman of the board.

The article then goes on to say:

The justification for lunar hegemony is preemptive. We want to prevent the unstable Russians, the sneaky Japanese, the ungrateful French and -- especially -- the dangerous Chinese from gettin' the drop on us.

So basically one interpretation is that NASA has just unwittingly become the weapon for a preemptive strike to annex the moon before the unstable, sneaky, ungrateful and dangerous hordes elsewhere in the world get there. Let me remind you of what JKF said on the subject of the original race to the moon:

Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

So simultaneously he affirmed the policy of preemptive colonizing for peace, while warning of the dangers of repeating prior mistakes made when doing just that.

Echoing Long's comment, wouldn't the best way to avoid repeating previous mistakes be to fulfill the spirit of Armstrong's first words when stepping onto the moon. We should make the project to return to the moon an international one, just like the space station, and truely make it another "giant leap for mankind" and not just another preemptive strike for America. As such Bush's announcement could have been used a great and famous first step to all of America's disruptive foreign policies of the previous three years and truely unite all nations across the world in a shared mission to put mankind on the moon.

Could have been... Sigh. But don't forget this is the long dark tea-time of the soul.

Terrornomics 101

Today I went back to school. Its was the first time I stepped foot in a class room to learn something non-job related in almost 16 years. Gulp. One minute I'm clicking a button labeled "Enroll" in a web browser, the next minute "Macroeconomics 001" is apon me. I wasn't entirely sure I was going to enjoy the experience, but so far so good.

However the jury is still out until I've suffered the other trauma it entails - exams. Exams might not seem like a big deal to most people, but the last time I did any of those was also 16 years ago when I did eight three-hour exams pretty much back to back over four days. If you thought that the last Lord of the Rings movie was long, try watching it eight times over four days sitting on a hard seat in a class room wearingsubfusc and during that time try to recall and answer questions on everything you have learned in the last three years. Remember there is no popcorn or soda either to help you cogitate either (which is fortunate because even going to the bathroom will be an ordeal you didn't really want to have to endure).

However, during class after the first hour of tedious but mandatory formalities things began to improve, especially when the first reference to Bush policies came up. By the time teacher had made his third reference to Bush policies I knew it wasn't a fluke reference to whoever happened to be President at the current time. After he went on to describe Bush's policy of giving residency to illegal immigrants as "terrorism against Mexicans" I was definitely hooked.

So why is giving greencards to millions of illegal immigrants "terrorism against Mexicans"?

Well America has a looming problem - a giant bubble of baby boomers about to retire. As teacher was at pains to point out, social security being bankrupt has nothing whatsoever to do with a big bank account labled "social security savings" being down to zero. Quite the contrary, thanks to syphoning of surplus social security contributions to offset the annual deficit that "account" has always had next to zero in it for years. In fact its at a huge negative thanks to issuing of bonds against it to finance the national debt. So what is social security being bankrupt all about then? Well its all about there being not enough productive social security paying 19-65 year olds contributing to social security to in turn make the payments to those retiring baby boomers.

You see there's nothing special about social security, its just a tax leveyed on your payroll. And the irony is that social security payments are capped at a fixed dollar amount. So the super rich millionaires and billionaires who sit at the top of a huge and distinctly wide bottomed pyramid of less well of folks, actually pay no more social security than someone earing abou $80,000 a year. The reason this is unfair is that it took legions of minimum wage workers to generate the corporate profits that pump up their salary and wealth to where it is today. Since 1970 the wealth of the top 1% of this country has multiplied many times over, while the average wage and living standards for the rest of us have declined. So for the vast majority of us the last thirty years, supposedly the hayday of modern civilisation, haven't been anything at all to write home about. That's why poverty rate in the USA are higher than they were thirty years ago, and... well I think I've blogged about all this before haven't I.

So, the cunning plan from Bush to fix all this is that you give residency to 75% of the 8 to 10 million estimated illegals in the USA, most of who are naturally from south of the border. As teacher said, just how many people fly 10,000 miles to come to the USA illegaly compared to those who can walk or drive over? Then you let those people pay their social security while they are working, now legally, whereas the probably paid none before. That creates a huge infusion of new social security payments that go a long way to curing the problem without burdening the rich Republican voters with increased social security payments.

Then the clever bit. Include a little clause in the residency of illegals bill that encourages them to leave the country for Mexico - when they retire because they can still draw social security from there. However for most this will be a pitance and the biggest cost will be healthcare which, you guessed it, is going to have to be paid for by the Mexican people. In the mean time for sponsoring this Bill you hopefully endear yourself to all the Latino voters as the great patriarch who liberated all those illegals that had previously being getting the shaft for anyone who could stick it to them. Hence the claim about terrorism against Mexicans - you exploit the workers to contribute to our social security fund and then when retired send them home to be cared for by their own country.

I'm not saying its all bad, things certainly aren't great for illegals, and back home things aren't a bed a roses either - just ask Brazil and the rest of South and Central America what they think of American foreign policies right now. Nor have I managed to dig up a figure for how big the baby boomer bubble is (the inbalance of dependent old age folks to social security paying workers) to see if the magnitudes of the theory make sense. However it goes to show when you learn a bit about economics it shows up all kinds of policies in a new light and I definitely think this theory that unexpected Bush benevolance to Latinos probably has some darker exploitative sub-texts worth considering. So next time you hear about some Bush election year grand give away don't be so quick to hail him as the great paragon of human rights^** and golden gift horse that he has recently been claiming to be. When there's an offer that sounds too good to be true, there's usually something amiss...

^*It appears that no one has ever used that word before. It means: the study of the economics of policies and actions relating to terrorism

^**Link courtesy of Chicken or Beef?

President? Racketeer? Who cares? RICO does!

Ellen Mariani is suing a basket of cronies from the Bush administration (GWB, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Rice, ...) under the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act for intentional, organized criminal activity, that's racketeering to you and me. Say what! GWB has been brewing up some 'shine in the Whitehouse basement? No, Mariani's complaint is that the Bush administration has been profiteering from the outcome of 9/11 (regardless of its cause) and that they see this as an excellent opportunity to dig into the secrets and lies that might be lurking in the Whitehouse.

So far the only consequence of this suit is that Bush's representatives filled to dismiss it on technicalities - mainly that the statute of limitations had expired. Not that I think anything is likely to come of this suit until Bush is comfortably out of office. That seems to be the way. However just the idea of Bush and his henchmen being accused under an anti-racketeering act is an entertaining, if sad, one.

George and his out of this world plans

As a friend of mine said, "Bush is all bark and no bite" and todays announcement of the return to the Moon and sending Man to Mars is clearly yet another example of this. What you have is a big announcement about going to the Moon and Mars, with almost no execution and less committed funding than he promised for hydrogen power research. Basically Mars is just a pipe dream that there is no commitment or even planned date for. Returning to the Moon is ten year goal - longer than it took Kennedy and NASA to put man (little 'm' intentional) on Moon thirty-five years ago.

But wait, there's actually only $1 billion in new funding from the government because the other $11 billion will come from other NASA projects over the next five years. Quite a lot of that will no doubt come from scraping the space shuttle fleet which has proven very costly to run, and replacing it with a simple man launching rocket system to get people to the space station. To be honest the later makes sense - the shuttle always has been a ridiculously complicated and expensive launch system that was mysteriously selected over all other superior, cheaper and safer launch technologies in development at the time. Well it wasn't that mysterious because the alternatives weren't being made by the big defence contractors at the time.

So, basically what Bush has announced is $1 billion extra NASA spending over the next five years - just over 1% extra per year so in real terms an effective freezing in all NASA spending. Plus he's announced a scrapping of the space shuttle, and a replacement of it with a return to the Moon goal that will easily be canceled without too many tears. Even if it happens probably wont be appreciated by anyone but the hardcare space exploration fans, after all most people have already seen what it looks like on the Moon. For them its a been there, seen it, done it thing that probably happened before they were even born. Without batting an eyelid they can tell you on the Moon its cold, dark, grey and basically boring. Even from a scientific point of view there isn't much else to do on the Moon until you actually build a base there.

Finally, does anyone remember that China just announced that its going full steam ahead with its space programme including a mission to the Moon and beyond. The fact that China has never formally acknowledged that the USA has actually landed on the Moon is just icing on the cake. Its quite clear to me that GWB is really just afraid that in the next five years China will steal Americas thunder and put Chinese Man on the Moon with high resolution multimedia coverage to boot and Uncle Sam will be caught out sleeping under a Red Moon. For $1 billion, less than he spends in Iraq in a week he can hedge his bets with another big bark and no bite.

When Americans do get back to the Moon I'm sorry to say it wont be Mankind that is making the giant leap, or sequel to the giant leap. It will be Corporate Mankind that will because really, the only reason to go back to the Moon any more is to make money. After that it only remains to be seen how long it will be before the USA decides to shred The Moon Treaty and declare open season on terra-lunar for commercial exploitation and Coke, Disney and Time Warner are all lining for commercial naming rights to the big ball-o-cheese formerly known as "The Moon".

Everybody's driving and no ones getting high

Time for my own quiz. Read this quote:

S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.

Now you tell me, was that written by a) an environmentally concerned progressive liberal (okay, like me - I failed the Neocon test) or b) a sales man for the new Toyota Prius Hybrid?

Baaaah! Sorry, trick question. The correct answer is c) by market researchers for the auto industry. Yes, shock horror, this industry quote was taken from an article by Malcom Gladwell in The New Yorker^*. You'll have to buy The New Yorker to read it in full, but a brief interview with Gladwell is available online.

In the article Gladwell discusses the phenomenom of "overperformance" -- the idea that there is a growing gap between the technical characteristics of a product and its real-world use. Such as buying a vehicle that is optimized for rugged outdoor activities that feature in our fantasies, and then using it to satisfy our mundane real life chores like driving to Wal-Mart for a 60-pack of toilet roll and a gallon of pickles.

Another interesting comment is that SUV commercials almost never include children, because SUVs are designed to allow those who would otherwise have to buy a minivan, to pretend they don't actually have any children, or even a wife, next to them. What fun would a manly fording of a river, or streaking across a rock strewn dusty desert be if the screaming kids are back there singing along to "The Lion King"...

Gladwell also makes an excellent point about safety and how it andthe cost of accidents is minimized when all vehicles are of equal, and hopefully low mass:

If every car on the road was a Mini, then the cost of an accident would be quite small: if you are in a Mini and you hit a Mini, you aren’t going to be that bad off. So, in the old days, the premium on active safety wasn’t so large. On the other hand, if every car on the road is an S.U.V., the cost of an accident grows substantially. When a Ford Explorer hits a Chevy TrailBlazer, both parties suffer enormously. And, if a Ford Explorer hits a Mini, the Mini driver is a dead man. I’m more interested in active safety now than ever before. As a non-S.U.V. owner, I simply cannot afford to get into any accident at all these days.

^*Thanks to JB for the reference.

Are you a Neocon?

From a link in a previous entry I discovered this quiz that will tell you if you are a Neocon. If you are, what the hell are you doing wasting your time reading this blog? Get back to studying the Project for the New American Century. Otherwise you can swing over to the Project for the Old American Cenutry.

Democracy, plus or minus 500,000

Today I am reminded that over 500,000 people (almost 600,000 actually) in the District of Columbia are still without any federal representation in the United States. They are taxed but have no senator or congressman to represent them. Well, that's only 0.2% of the population, surely they don't really matter? Well actually if DC were a State of the Union it wouldn't be the smallest, try taking away the representation of the 493,000 people in Wyoming, or the 608,000 in Vermont, or the 642,000 in North Dakato, or 626,000 in Alaska.

The population of DC is also about the same size as the number of voters (540,000) who voted for Gore over Bush in the last Presidential election. Its also more than a 1,000 times the number of countedvotes (about 500) that swung the outcome of the election in Florida, or 500,000 times the number of people (one Justice) who swung the election in the Supreme Court.

Which all goes to show, sometimes even one vote counts even if America, the country that put Man on the moon, and proclaims it will put Man on Mars, has yet to solve the problem of allowing its citizens to vote when the are legally entitled to, and counting their votes when they actually do.

Isn't it about time the half million or so people in DC had some representation in this country?

Population figures from the U.S. Census Bureau

The smoking gun is found at last!

Well they couldn't keep the smoking gun burried for ever. Fortunately "they" is the Bush government, and the smoking gun is the set of revelations from Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in a new book called "The Price of Loyalty". They indicate that the real weapons of mass destructions are alive and well, above ground and living and working in the Whitehouse. You can read about it, or watch the 60 Minutes video.

Apart from O'Neill's assertion that Bush was looking for a way to invade Iraq from Day 1, we also got great quotes like:

At cabinet meetings, he says the president was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection," forcing top officials to act "on little more than hunches about what the president might think."

Of course Bush's intentions to invade Iraq whatever the cost should come as no suprise to anyone who has been keeping up with the NeoCon manifesto and writings by its followers such as Ralph Peters Constant Conflict in which he says:

There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

and also:

The very struggle of other cultures to resist American cultural intrusion fatefully diverts their energies from the pursuit of the future. We should not fear the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist regimes. They are simply guaranteeing their peoples' failure, while further increasing our relative strength.

And what did The Whitehouse have to say about O'Neill's revelations? Apparently they just said "We're not in habit of doing book reviews" and followed up with some mumbo-jumbo about the president being forward-looking and making the world a safer and better place:

We appreciate his service, but we are not in the business of doing book reviews," he told reporters. "It appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinion than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people. The president will continue to be forward-looking, focusing on building upon the results we are achieving to strengthen the economy and making the world a safer and better place."

So they are neither confirming or denying what O'Reilly said, but stating that in any case they think the results of Bush's policies and actions were good and they look forward to more good results.

Just how big is $87 billion anyway?

Few people can comprehend what a million of anything, let alone a billion of anything is. How about the $87 billion Bush asked Congress for to fight the war (aka "military action" more accurately "invasion") in Iraq and Afghanistan? Well I just located a great site that helps you get an idea of how much money $87 billion is. Imagine eighty-seven billion one dollar bills stacked up in a cube, having a hard time? Well this is what it would look like with you and your car next to it for comparison...

Visit the "A Little Perspective on $87 billion" website for the whole story.

After that start thinking about how "big" Bush's annual budget deficit of $374 billion is. Or how about the trade balance deficit of $418 billion? Or the $1,180 billion increase in the national debt since Bush started his maniacal deficit spending? Or ultimately the toal US national debt of $6,987 billion dollars.

National debt figures from Debt to the Penny

The SCO scam

When I was a kid the big bad computer company on the block was IBM. They were the 800lb gorilla of the computer hardware and software market and had been implicated in all kinds of predatory and unfair business tactics worthy of the title of Evil-Doer #1 in the computer industry. Everybody loved to hate IBM. Later on the upstart Microsoft earned its title as the big bad computer company everyone loved to hate. Arguably they still have that title inspite of shrugging off the anti-trust charges leveled against them with few real tangible effects to your average consumer.

However right now it appears the heir apparent is the Santa Cruz Operation aka SCO. While not big, SCO has certainly been labeled as bad, and the free software community has them pegged as Evil Doer #1 right now. That's for daring to implicate Linux with copyright infringement, and embarking on a campaign of terror against all Linux users threatening them with law suits if they don't by a license from SCO. The ensuing $3 billion suit against IBM for allegedly introducing SCOs copyrighted code into the Linux kernal was clearly a pathetic money grab exercise, but inevitable. After all when you're the evil doer you're working for the evil empire and you've got to stoop to every cheap low down trick available, even if it is coloured sparks flying from your wizzened fingers.

Hence I wasn't very suprise when I read an article in Software Development magazine called "State of the Scam". In it the author points out that SCO's actions have all the characteristics of a pump and dump scam. I witnessed one of these before just after entering the dot com world, when Geoworks decided that a patent it owned covered the WAP protocol and browsers used to browse WML content. They then proceeded to send threatening letters to almost every web based company out there telling them they needed to buy a license for $20,000 and up to even serve WML content from their web sites. Although their claims were unfounded, and later challenged by other companies, they managed to extract large payments from some of the key mobile players of the time. For most it was simply not worth the effort to go to court over a few million dollars. The result was that the also-ran Geoworks who was once dwindling to penny-stock status on the stock market suddenly transformed over night into a company worth hundreds of millions with a stock price of over $50. Ultimately Geoworks' claims were shown to be groundless and they now trade at a fraction of a dollar.

So, as the article on SCO points out, it is not without interest that SCO has gone from a company with a stock price of $1 in February 2003, to $17 as of writing, and as high as $22.29. During that time the legal company representing SCO received $1 million in cash and 400,000 shares of SCO stock. During the time since the stock reached its low point SCO has issued an additional 300,000 shares at a par value of $0.001. In addition several SCO officers have sold large quantities of stock at market prices while receiving additional options to buy shares at $0.001.

Ironically SCO claims the insider trades were only made to "cover the tax costs of stock grants made to them". Hence one can deduce that the stock grants made were pretty damned lucrative. If you have to raise $500k and up to pay your taxes then clearly you've just been given a couple of million dollars or more pay off in no-risk restricted stock, presumably to ensure "loyalty". Such payments are typically required when you make a Section 83b Election to avoid being taxed on the full value of options as income when your restrictions expire. Instead you run away with your stock paying only the much lower capital gains tax, or even lower long term capital gains tax when you sell it.

In the mean time SCO made another payoff when they used their new stock issues to buy a company called Vultus which was funded by Novell Founder Ray Noorda's Canopy Group. The Canopy Group coincidentally funded a company Caldera which had also previously merged with SCO. By further coincidence Vultus was also based in the same building as SCO. No doubt this transaction was quite wonderfully beneficial to all concerned at Vultus and Canopy Group.

So behind the barrage of their fire and brimstone warnings against the Linux community, a bunch of SCO executives and investors are quiety making out like bandits. My prediction is that the SCO suit will quietly "go away" after IBM lawyers and the Linux community demonstrate their claims are largely frivilous. Then just after further stock dumping by SCO executives, their stock price will plunge back into the penny stock range, and SCO as a company will dwindle back into obscurity and infamy.

Driving ourselves to death

I always find it staggering that the carnage on the roads caused by automobiles largely goes unnoticed. Somewhere along the line every growing infant is taught that autos are dangerous, you've got to do everything you can to avoid putting yourself in harms way and that's just the way life is. So every year (as of writing) approximately 1,170,000 people are killed by an automobile in the world, and 43,000 are killed in the USA. But somehow most people don't even give a second thought as to why, despite all the increases in car safety equipment (antilock brakes, airbags, impact bars, crumple zones, traction control etc. etc.) this figure is so high.

If say, computer viruses were killing this many people a year you'd bet your life that something would be done about it. Or how about if airlines were killing this many Americans per year?

And lets not forget the number of injuries caused by cars which is now almost 3 million annually. Add to that the cost of providing emergency services, treating injured people, loss of earnings from injuries and loss of future earnings and damage to society caused by death.... Well then you have an annual cost of tens, if not hundreds of billions (given that airlines value a human life at around $1.5 million for insurance purposes). The problem is no one seems to care very much even though automobile accidents are the greatest cause of accidental death in the USA by a factor of three and they account for about as many deaths as ALL other leading causes of accidents combined (as this report shows).

So I'll ask you this simple question: why is is that pedestrians and autos are routinely combined in the same environment when in a factory any machine as dangerous as an auto would be bolted to a floor and surrounded by safety cages, flashing lights and big emergency shutoff switches? The answer is probably just historical - that roads used to only be occupied by only pedestrians, bicycles and horse drawn carriges which hardly ever killed anyone and usually gave you a fighting chance to dive out of the way. Autos should be on their own entirely separate space, just like a freeway and pedestrians should enjoy complete freedom on our urban streets and city centers.

Or how about this one: why after all the technological innovation we have are cars still manufactured to exceed speed limits, sometimes by factors or two or more (even on a freeway)? All arguments for this I've heard are just plain hogwash and its about time some enterprising lawyer launched the worlds biggest class action lawsuit on behalf of everyone killed by a speeding car.

Ditto for: cars that start when the driver is intoxicated, cars that continue to drive when no longer legally licensed or insured, cars that don't automatically take control when the driver falls asleep or stops paying attention (like yapping on the cellphone), cars that will drive themselves dangerously close to another vehicle, cars that will drive themselves into a brick wall. Etc. etc. etc.... the list goes on. The tragedy is solutions for all these problems have been found and are available if only someone would be bold enough to make them a requirement.

So if you're wondering why I'm so down on automobiles today, well I just read yet another newspaper report about a pedestrian killed crossing a street, and the driver was injured but released with no charges. The assumption is the pedestrian was at fault. Goodness knows I see enough people wandering aimlessly in the middle of the road every time I drive home at night. But I'm wondering, well who really was to blame? It's easy to blame the dumb pedestrian who was just giving Darwin a hand, but shouldn't we dig deeper and point the finger of blame at people's apathy to really do anything about the car problem we all have?

Ultimately that apathy is caused by people and their idea that 43,500 people dead every year is just nothing to write home about, let alone blog about. But let me tell you this - 43,500 people every year is about 1 in 6,666 of us Americans every year and if you live to be 70 then that's a 1 in 95 chance of being killed by an auto, or 1 in 1.3 chance of being injured by one. Furthermore, if you have a hundred friends and relatives then the odds are, in your life time, a least one of them will die in a car accident. Me? My father was hit and killed by a car, a friend at school was killed by a car, my girlfriend's fiancee was killed by a car (driven by a drunk driver) and I've been in four car wrecks (one caused by myself) but thankfully never seriously injured. Every day I drive my biggest fear is I'll inadvertantly kill someone else - not myself - someone else.

I rest my case - this country is driving itself to death.

Bush in thirty seconds

In case you haven't noticed Moveon.org is running a competition to select a 30-second ad about Bush to air on TV. Assuming that is, that any TV channel is unpatriotic enough to run it (I think we can count Fox TV off that list).

The Bush In 30 Seconds web-site has the finalists and I think it would be worth your while to spend the seven and a half minutes required to watch all fifteen. My favourites are Child's Pay, , Hood Robbin', Wake up America, Bring 'Em On and Imagine.

Unfortunately quite a few of the entries could use just a few seconds more to get the point across more effectively. For example "Hood Robbin'" should end with "George Bush - robbing the poor to feed the rich", and perhaps be followed in the same commercial break by Leave no billionaire behind. I would like to see all the ads aired, but I know there would never be enough cash to make that happen. If I had to pick three I think it should be "Bring 'Em On", "Child's Pay" and "Wake Up America" should be aired.

Patently wrong?

Today's Wired News has a comment by MIT professor Lester Thurow, in which he says some interesting things about Patents. For instance:

If they can't find some way to lock up music, music is going to end. Eventually, there will be no professional musicians, because there's no way to make money, and we're left with a world full of amateurs.

What I think what he meant to say was "If they can't find some way to lock up music there's no way for the big music corporations to make money". Lets face it, music and music professionals have survived for hundreds of years, if not longer. Its the role of mega-rich music superstar and the huge multi-media music industry that are recent phenomena that are endangered.

While it is true that the ability to make a direct and perfect digital fascimile of music and carry it around in your pocket, or broadcast it from your computer are recent. It is also true that the current rampant free copying of music without permission from the owner is at best unethical, at worst going to impact the ability of some people to make a lot of money for the time being.

However the Apple iTunes service flies in the face of this argument. Its well on its way to 50 million paid for music downloads and show no sign of stopping. And personally if the fee was more like 50 cents even I'd be using it - yes that's significantly less than the price of a CD, but a CD gives me a perfect digital copy, not a compressed one, and I have no rights or media restrictions attached with a CD purchase (so far). Whenever I'm tied into a particular format or playback system I'm unhappy. I don't mind using a proprietary format so long as I can migrate to a new one for free or at neglibile cost. So I think 50 cents per track is a reasonable discount for buying something that doesn't give me a perfect digital original, and doesn't let me easily play anywhere on any CD player.

That's why I like CDs - if I have the original CD I can always re-rip my music and move on and CD compatibility is likely to be around for decades to come, since lets face it, in my life time I'm looking at buying and storing music on long line of optical media from CD, to DVD to enhanced DVD to who-knows-what next. Probably in 10 years time there will be a completely physical medium free system in operation - of the download anything you want from the air kind (but it wont be ubiquitos), or at least a download onto your hard-drive based device at the store. But I believe that optical systems will survive.

Ultimately I think the music industry needs to go away and "we are not evil" companies like Magnatunes need to flourish. They are helping re-discover the music experience with musicians getting the music directly to the listener and perhaps purchaser and putting the element of trust back into life. Personally I feel good that a musician can trust their audience enough to show appreciation when its due and I applaud Magnatunes efforst in this direction.

When I was a kid trust and honesty were drummed into me from an early age, they go hand in hand. When a society has a population with those kinds of values it can make huge savings by not being forced to make huge investments in security, protection and enforcement systems. Furthermore it can reap huge benefits by not having an intimidated and fearful population that feels the need to medicate itself to blur the grim reality of life into a sickly three score years and ten me-centric joyride.

Game theory

I confess, someone gave me a copy of Halo over Christmas and now I'm hooked. For those that don't know, Halo is a video game that consists of running around a ring world shooting pretty much everything in sight. Yes, its one of those evil first-person shooter games that supposedly trains young kids to go out and shoot the teacher, their classmates and yes, pretty much everything in sight. And its not the only one I play, I'll list Unreal Tournament and Americas Army as additional exhibits in my confessional.

Ms. Gently finds it ironic that someone who goes to a half dozen anti-war marches in one year, gets very upset over the sight of dead bodies, and generally loathes violence can still stay up half the night shooting all and sundry on the computer. Well I could use that tried and tested explanation "Its just a game!" but there probably has to be something more to it than that. I think I know why I enjoy such games - I think its partly some innate hunter-gatherer gene kicking in (did you ever meet a cat that didn't like to chase small objects?) but mostly something I learned as a kid and at school.

No I didn't go to military school, and I wasn't found and raised by a platoon of Navy Seals. However I was raised in the seventies when every self respecting boy was given cap guns, holsters and was expected to play cowboys and indians, or soldiers at every available opportunity. I distinctly remember the onset of summer at school when the grass playing fields, previously off-limits during winter and spring, suddenly became huge stages for war game after war game played out over lunch time.

Such war games went like this:

At the start of lunch break gangs of boys (and yes it was all boys) would link arms and rove around in a long line chanting something that I still remember but can't really translate to text. As more boys joined the line got longer and longer and it would eventually break up and then sides were picked by two boys. I don't recall what rules were used to determine who picked sides but I do remember it was never me. After that there was a fleeing of teams to opposite ends of the playing field followed by a long game of cat-n-mouse chasing with hand raised, finger pointed and endless "bang-bang you're dead" stuff. Of course there was also endless "I got you first!", "No you didn't I got you first - you're dead" stuff that on occassion ended up with real fights. However for the most part the only damage done was scraped knees and grass stains on our britches. I don't recall that anyone ever really won these games, or that it made any difference. If nothing else it stopped us all sitting around burning bugs with magnifying glasses and running around trying to peek up girls skirts - not that anyone knew why we were supposed to do it. It was just one of those handed down traditions thats what little boys do at lunch time when the playing fields of war were off-limits.

I guess I'm supposed to know better and that I could make a conscious effort not to play such games on my computer. But, you know what? Its just a game. People have always played games of some sort or other, even animals play games. But one thing I've learned in life so far - there are people who know the difference between a game and reality, and there are people who don't. Its always the latter who tend to wreck havoc on the world, forgetting that in real life the losing side bears physical harm, and probably doesn't get up to play the next day, and will hold lasting grudges. For this reason I actually have a lot of problem with people who treat games as if they are real, and as if they really mattered, i.e. they begin to place a signifcant amount of their lifes meaning on the outcome of games. I mean, guys get depressed because you lost your job due to corportate fraud, because the is no free health care, because the government "misspent" your retirement funds, or your full-time employeer doesn't even pay you enough to buy food for you family. But riot on the streets because "your team" that doesn't give a rats-ass about you lost some game? Get real! Its just a game!

Yes, its okay for professional sports people to care if they are good at a game or not, or if their team wins or not. However when ordinary people think its okay to go out and trash their neighborhood just because some team of people (who probably never even lived in their neighborhood) lost, or won for that matter, well that's a problem. The problem is that such team games really have no meaning any more. The players often don't care one iota what the supporters do or how they behave, and the only people who really win when the win are corporations who run these sports teams as a profit center. Even the olympics, formerly a purely amateur event, has become an orgey of winner-takes-it-all mentality tainted by drug abuse and big corporate money.

Just where did the spirit of "its the participation that counts" in sports and games go to? Is the situation in modern sports just a reflection of reality gone bad; where every aspect of life must reflect the competition for dollars, bragging rights and the perpetual chase for position of top-dog?

So, I'll keep my games essentially meaningless, harmless and above all fun to participate in. The day I start taking them seriously I'll know its time to unplug and go cold turkey on the computer games...

Blog power unleashed

Moments after posting my last entry (well, in the shower actually) I got to thinking about why blogs have been so effective as a filter for noise on the web. While it is true that blogs in themselves generate and propogate quite a bit of noise, it does seem that the net overall effect is a filtering. It is know that most bloggers read and often link to other blogs in their own entries, this has lead to the description of all blogs as the "blogosphere". However a blogger can only read and filter so much information in a day, so even the authors of the most popular blogs lying close to the center of the blogosphere, only generate entries and links to a relatively small number of items per day.

While blogs now number in the millions, the most popular blogs probably number in the thousands, or perhaps only a few hundred. Naturally it all depends how exactly you define "most popular" but I'm talking about the ones in the top one percentile (or less) of the blogs vs. unique visitors per day curve (I'll call these the "alpha-blogs"). That is to say hits are squewed towards a small number of blogs rather than being evenly ditributed. Thus large numbers (millions) have only a few hits per day, but very few have thousands of more hits per day. To be honest I've actually no idea what the distribution curve of blogs vs. number of daily visitors looks like. So far I've only seen statistics on connectivity of blogs (number of inbound links per blog) which is easy to figure out as part of a standard search engine or blog crawler. Since the blog visitors per day statisitcs are not normally published by each one tt would be interesting to find out. Presumably some of the large hosting sites like blogger.com and livejournal has such information for the blogs they host. So if you have a pointer to such statistics and analysis please send it this way.

One could argue that the most popular "alpha-blogs" are just like the relatively few number of TV channels available to the average media consumer. One could also argue that the blogosphere is not unlike the interconnected official news sources that feed off each others output and filter news from small local communities sources up to the big five media conglomerates. These arguments bothered me, since it still seems apparent that the blog phenonmenom is fundamentally different from the mainstream news reporting system.

In the end I decided the fundamental differences are:

1. It is the very nature of blogs and websites that they interconnect and hence people reading them are constantly poking at the edges of their information network, investigating new sources and ultimately migrating their reading time from one place to the next. Imagine if every day when you watched the news from your local CBS affiliate it gave you an easy link to a dozen other news sources and highly recommended them to boot! Well there's no way that is going to happen, TV channels, radios and newspapers never want to lose their views, listeners or readers - they need you to stay with them to boost their popularity so they can make more money from selling you advertising! Indeed it appears that advertising is the antithesis of blogs, and cross-reference (links) is the antithesis of the mainstream media.

2. As a consequence of 1 the central core of the blogosphere is very fluid because blog popularity is based entirely on free and ever changing selection of sites to visit by the readership. This is contrary to the mainstream world - if find you don't like your NBC, CBS or ABC reporting you probably don't have too many alternatives to turn to. Even if you have cable, by the time you've exhausted Fox (okay, stop laughing), CNN, PBS and a few others you're essentially all out of luck. Plus to a large degree these big guys get the bulk of their content based on Reuters, AP and a few foreign feeds for world news. Ditto for newspapers and radio. Yes, you can do a lot better if you go online and find web based versions of all reportage across the world but you'll find that this is not something a great number of people do. Few people check news from more than one source per day or know of more than a handful of web sites that they might get news from.

3. The mainstream news system has connections down to the city level with most cities having at least one local paper, and perhaps if they are large enough a local radio and TV station, although often as not the latter are more regional. So while you may have some media channels addressing smaller communities it seems that it is increasingly common for members of such communities to resort to an internet forum, website, mailing lists or in most recent time blog based communication. This lack of small community representation by the media appears to be an economic problem. It is simply very expensive and time consuming to put together a newspapaer, TV show or run a radio station without making it a full time job and having hard money to throw at the problem. However, as mentioned earlier, almost anyone can create a blog - even if you are without a computer or Internet connection usually a free library card will get you to somewhere that has. Thus the blogosphere is able to deeply penetrate all communities and hence is relatively much larger than the mainstream "mediasphere" and can draw on a much richer pool of information sources and blog creators. Another consequence of the ease of creating blogs is that the ratio of blog readers to blog creators is much lower than mainstream media consumers to creators.

4. Mainly as a corollary of the previous points, blogs are seldom financially inspired. It is true that some people manage to make a living at it but these are a very tiny, tiny fraction of the total. A larger number might put in some small amount of advertising to defray some of their costs. But the vast majority either has no advertising, or just advertising that is put in automatically by their blog or website host and with which they have no connection or direct gain (other than free hosting). This gives bloggers across the world immense freedom to say whatever the hell they like, do it effectively anonymously if they desire, and best of all they never have to worry about whether anyone is actually really reading their blog or not.

I believe that the above points have together created a unqiue news reporting and filtering system that self-selects popularly defined "interesting" news while still leaving the entire gamut of less interesting stuff out there freely available for those that simply care to Google for it. In many ways the blogosphere acts like the search engine Google itself. The very interconnections between Blogs define how important various blogs are at defining what interesting is, and these interconnections evolve over time, as do what is interesting itself. Thus the blogging phenomenom has engaged us all as a giant distributed, dyanamic and human search engine.

Power to the people, but not to the iPod

With the dumbing down of the media the Internet has been a great boom for freedom of speech, now anyone with access to a computer can put up a website and say what they want. The flip side is such messages get drowned out in the noise of countless millions of other websites. However in recent times large networks of interconnected blogs and independent user forums have come to rescue. They have an interesting and unexpected ability to filter out a lot of the noise and amplify even the quietest important message to the level of popular consciousness. So quite often it is now what the popular mass of people think is important that gets propogated, instead of what story some single corporate controlled editor decides to send us.

This effect is how the Neistat Brothers Message From the Neistat Brothers about iPods premature battery problem got widespread publicity and eventually, perhaps, had some effect in causing Apple to instigate a $99 battery replacement policy and extended battery warranty.