Archive for January, 2008
Stumble of the Day: What to do with your Dollar
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Economics
I recently learned what StumbleUpon actually does. I was intrigued because I knew there was some traffic directing here from SU users. Since installing the StumbleUpon plugin for Firefox, I’ve “stumbled upon” countless useful and interesting websites, so I think I’ll share some of that with you. The first thing I’d like to show you are some uses for your Dollar, now that it’s in a relative free-fall against other world currencies. It comes in a nice little slideshow at Portfolio.com.
It’s a nice little joke, but make no mistake: all paper currencies eventually reach their intrinsic value: zero. If you don’t want to share company with those poor Good Germans who found themselves carting wheelbarrows full of Deutchmarks to buy loaves of bread, invest in some gold or silver.
Incredible Power at your Fingertips: Do Your Downsizer Rounds
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under DownsizeDC, Liberty
Once again I’m going to shill for DownsizeDC.org, the most effective small-government PAC I have ever seen. I talk about them incessantly at Top of Center but as time goes on I’m going to be migrating back to RQ and rolling ToC into it. A strategy just occurred to me today which will help you have the biggest impact possible on your representatives in Congress. And that is to do your Downsizer rounds.
The steps are these:
- Log in to DownsizeDC.org.
- Click an issue at the front page.
- Write your comments at the bottom and click SEND.
- Repeat twice.
- Do this daily.
Start by creating an account at their website, log in, and look at the list of issues at the front page. Scroll down the page and pick any three issues. Just three. This will only take a few moments.
Click the issues one by one, scroll down, write a short sentence in the comments field with your feelings on the issue (20 words or less is more than OK) and fire it off.
Find a minute or two to do this every day and your cumulative effect on your Congresscritters should be noticeable. I regularly get letters back from them.
DownsizeDC takes advantage of the snowball effect by harnessing the many thousands of people who feel as they do about the issues and helping them aggregate their input to Congress into an avalanche of email. The people in Congress do notice when constituents send them messages. By making a habit of using DownsizeDC’s interface to send notes to your people in Congress daily, you will have your own personal snowball effect. They’ll see your barrage of messages and realize someone out there really really wants some change.
It does not take a majority to cause change. It takes an irate, tireless minority. And as a Downsizer you can be exactly that.
An Enlightening take on “Web 2.0″
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Liberty, Technology, Thoughts
Check out this article by Daniel at binaryorganic: socialized censorship: a web 2.0 revolution
I was floored by this realization. This guy is onto something. He makes the analogy that the transition from web 1.0 to 2.0 was like the transition from the sitcom to reality TV, and I think he’s absolutely right. With all the talk about user control, it isn’t the content that’s been decentralized at all; it’s the workload. If the content were really in the hands of the users, a web 2.0 site would “spin out of control” very rapidly. I have to take issue, though, with his idea of “out of control.” If a site is only out of control because other people insist on enforcing unenforceable intellectual property laws (ala Digg with the HD-DVD thing) then I’ve got no problem with it. I believe less and less in intellectual property solely because enforcing it brings us into the realm of thoughtcrime.
The free spread of an idea only ever helps humanity. Did the first generations of Mankind need to form regulatory committees to judge who had the right to fashion spears? Does the exact proportion of sulfur, charcoal and postassium nitrate needed to make gunpowder still belong to the estate of some uknown Chinaman? Who owns fire? Yes, the first one to discover a new idea will profit by being the first one to have it, and it’s right and natural for that to happen. Forging new ideas is a kind of intellectual homesteading. The first ones there do get the benefit of exclusive ownership for a time. But only for a time. Ideas have infinite reproducability — they are not stolen, only duplicated. And when someone duplicates them who is willing to give it away, then the party’s over. Time to go be productive and think of something new, or find a way to prosper in the new environment. To feel wronged when someone else discovers or reinvents your particular wheel only comes out of the wishful thinking that you could or should have your homestead forever. Why do you suppose patent law was originally written with a time limit? The genie can stay in the bottle only for so long. If someone took your professional photos off Flickr, maybe you should have watermarked them. It’s your own fault you gave them away. It’s no skin off your nose anyway; the pirates apparently found buyers you couldn’t find, and that’s a contribution they’ve made to the community, a contribution just as annoying but nevertheless valuable as those middlemen who sell you stocks.
As for the other ways a Web 2.0 apparatus could “spin out of control,” such as defamation, libel/slander, or subversive content, there’s room on the infinite capacity of the Web for setting the record straight, and people can choose to believe the truth or the bull in whatever proportions they please, just as they always have.
Web 2.0 forum providers, such as the purveyors of Digg, photobucket, and even evil Rupert Murdoch with his ownership of MySpace, do have the right to do with their property (the website and the bits thereon) as they see fit. Web 2.0 often does redistribute the workload under the guise of democratized control — just like communism or reality TV — but that doesn’t make it wrong. It just means we’re not free yet of the subtle means of crowd control the likes of which have already been perfected on TV.
But at least on the Internet, we can warn each other about it. For now, anyway.