Reasons Unbeknownst

I have a lot of reading to do, most of the ideas I’ve had over the last few days have already been discussed or invented. Del.irio.us is an open source version of Del.icio.us for instance. Which means a lot of my questions have already been answered which leads comment about a lot of reading. There are so many smart people thinking about this that it’s going to be hard to keep up with the progress but it’s so damn interesting.

Open Source del.icio.us discussion http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady/archives/000574.html

Google search objectivity – Jeff Jarvis on Flickr Interestingness

Cameras connected to a mobile broadband network that automatically upload images to either Flickr or a personal server without user intervention.

If people no longer need Google to do a search, how do businesses advertise? Embed it in content. Podcasts on wine could contain ads about wine, etc.

A search engine that’s distributed and built into web browsers. The following goes into the decentralized part.

http://security.riit.tsinghua.edu.cn/share/coopeer.pdf

“Insertion of personalized factor for searching results by routing in self-organized user community. These advantages are only possible in P2P network where the information and cost is shared among all the members.”

http://security.riit.tsinghua.edu.cn/share/coopeer.pdf

“Insertion of personalized factor for searching results by routing in self-organized user community. These advantages are only possible in P2P network where the information and cost is shared among all the members.”

Anger at an open source “clone” of del.icio.us is hypocritical if you also believe that business process patents are wrong. That said, if a clone isn’t addressing the right problem then it’s bound to fail, even if it is open source. The problem I forsee with Del.icio.us is currently afflicting Flickr. They’re your photos so why is Flickr getting rich off of them? What if everybody suddenly created a robots.txt file that prevented Google from indexing their servers? Their search system would break down in a matter of weeks. If an open source search engine was created and Google began to look more like Microsoft to the anti-corporate geek masses, a Google boycott could become trendy. Businesses would continue to allow Google crawling because they want to drive traffic but bloggers are starting to get more traffic from Del.icio.us anyway. What if Moore’s law is outpacing content growth?

Taggle… http://www.brianstorms.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=503
From a Google search:
Results 1 – 10 of about 1,490 for snuffalufagus. (0.25 seconds)
They emphasize the quarter second because they know it may be the only way to differentiate between the results of a distributed search engine

The community is rallying behind the person (joshua) and the brand not the idea. Instead of Venture Capital, Joshua could have made the code open source and requested hosting from the Wikimedia foundation. That would have addressed some trust issues surrounding profit and community software.

So my proposal is that a group of leaders in the field fork del.iRio.us and take it to Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame. Instant trust, instant publicity, instant servers. A big problem I’ve noticed with these tagging tools is that they’re quickly killed by overuse. It’s expensive to handle that much traffic even with a few thousand users. Now imagine Internet Explorer 7 comes out and it stores all of your bookmarks in Del.icio.us. Del.icio.us would instantly collapse. That problem is solvable.

If the network is the computer and the people are the network then

If Microsoft or even Google cloned wikipedia nobody would use it because of the ads required to make it profitable and they wouldn’t trust the entries on Google or Microsoft.

How Google can make money online without a search engine? Turn into a marketing company.

Export tag data from Del.icio.us to a file so it could be migrated to a new open tagging system.

Irony – I just used my DVR to rewind and re-watch a funny ad.

Job of the future:
Search algorithm designer
“I?m not sure Google can maintain its algorithmic secrecy indefinitely without consequence. I?m in favor of more transparent, user-configurable algorithms.”

Del.icio.us has a new feature that allows you to find a certain type of file like .mp3 or .mpg and sort the results by popularity.

Today I found something I thought was some sort of comedy sketch but it turns out that it’s a very real video from a Danish band from the 70s.
Some differing opinions from the Del.icio.us comments:

“Very possibly the most embarrassing thing the human race has ever done.”

“without question the finest music video ever made”

“the most amazing music video ever”

“It’s kind of amazing that at some time in some place in this very universe this actually took place.”

We can only hope that the aliens don’t find this bit of evidence or we’re all doomed.

Posted this on the Buzzmachine comments, my blog was feeling neglected so I reposted it below:

Wow, interesting discussion… I read the comments, brainstormed, and came up with a way to create a system that would rival Flickr and Digg with a few hundred lines of code and no cash…

But first, here is a feature comparison from both sites:
Flickr
- Content – user submitted (images)
- Tagging – proprietary internal tagging system
- Discussion yes (per image)
- Relevance filter – interestingness based number clicking the star(favorite)
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/dog/interesting/

Digg.com
- Content is user submitted (links) –
- Tagging – no but it does have categories and a full text search of the link description
- Discussion (per link)
- Relevance filter – people clicking “Digg This” moves up on the page

Del.icio.us
- Content is user submitted (links)
- Tagging YES
- Discussion (per link – show only submissions with tags AND description, newest last)
- Relevance filter – number of people tagging – popular page and per tag popularity – http://del.icio.us/popular/dog

So here’s how you could make Flickr irrelevant for $0 (not including domain name)
Flickio.us?.com
- User submitted content (links to photos hosted anywhere including Flickr)
- Tagging – uses Del.icio.us API similar to how Flock prompts you for your un/pw.
- Discussion (per image link) extracts and the del.icio.us description feature.
Relevance filter – uses Del.icio.us popularity instead of interestingness but with the same effect.

You could even link to Flickr images and simply not use their interestingness or discussion features to build a critical mass. There is nothing magical about the Flickr Interestingness system even though they’d have you believe otherwise. It’s just a lot of brains making decisions combined with a critical mass of images.

The semantic web would be useful here, if someone uploads to flickr and don’t make something private the assumption is you can repost the image elsewhere. That’s where the Semantic Web comes into play. image metadata needs to include things like the license, watermark, description, some static tags, fee for purchase, etc.

Some predictions :
- Flickr is about to redesign their homepage so it looks like Digg.com. Digg might get into the photo business without having to host the images, it could create a demand for better open source image hosting services – Flickr would prevent hotlinking no doubt.

- All of these user driven web 2.0 apps are going to start using a common source for tagging (Del.icio.us API) and maybe even discussions because they can borrow the critical mass of users (think trackbacks in blog comments but that are aware of the previous trackbacks). At that point people are going to say, just like they are now with Flickr, why is Del.icio.us making money from my tagging effort? Which leads me to the third prediction.

- A Del.icio.us backlash leading to calls for a non-profit tagging system will linger in the back of the mind of Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame. The WikiTag is unveiled and people cease to make money from the wisdom of the crowd except for the individuals in the crowd (advertising metadata – abusers would be subject to the wrath of 1 billion “spam” tags when the blogoshphere got wind of copyright/creative commons license violations). Try typing in Spam in Del.icio.us and rank by popular, now imagine that evil-rank embedded in a pagerankesque feature built into every web browser. The google pagerank doesn’t understand infamy, it just knows popular – take the reddit system – stir in some tagging and you’ve got a Google killing recipe but I’m tired now so I’m not going to continue :)

- This is all going to happen within a year. I’ll wager a case of beer on it.

I’m working on a big idea that’s been simmering in my brain. Notes below, I’ll clean this up in a few days when I find some thick coffee. What follows is just stream of thought stuff that I’m trying to fashion into something coherent.

Stuff to read first…
Benkler
Hobbes – Leviathan
Full Transcript of USVdiscussion

OUTLINE

1> The future – Personal servers vs. Flickr – Del.icio.us – Gmail
a> Centralization (flickr,gmail.com) is only necessary because we don’t have our own servers yet. Yet.
b> IP or domain name as unique ID key – social security #
c> Some issues like popularity can be solved from distributed data – see pagerank – apply pagerank to a p2p network of content to replicate popular posts data. P2p Crawler. Trust is the issue.
d> Problems that need solving

2> Ranking Systems
a> Open data architecture(New) vs. Open Network Architecture(Old)
b> Recommendations, Popularity, Input(voting – Digg, Reddit) , Reputation
c> Aggregation – user submitted and voted vs. crawled.
d> Harnessing the wisdom of the crowd == Aggregation?

3> Solutions to the problem
a> Distributed P2P data storage
b> Current thinking assumes solutions are engineering problems instead of considering emergence as a problem solvers. Just decrease the friction and let nature take its course and don’t pollute the discussion with bad ideas drawn from political affiliations/bias.

—————————

So we have a rusty machine, friction is rampant. My goal with this post is to throw a handful of hypothetical grease at the leviathan and try to figure out what it’ll look like in a few years. That might make it easier to figure out the steps necessary to reach that goal

To read
Benkler Coase’s Penguin – Similar to the Lessig arguments about restrictions/copyright, etc.

Pincus – Portable reputation, how would this look on a server? XML Friends Network, credit score. Open source banking!!!Plane Black market. Different types of reputation. Say Financial (credit). Privacy – get email – bob jones is requesting your financial reputation score, click here to approve request…

Centralization is misleading. Ebay reputations are only centralized in the sense that they’re contained on one server. The IP address could replace the user name whith regard to the reputation system. Distributed P2P database to contain transaction registry data. The non-relevant transaction details stripped from the data before upload. None of this would work without some sort of transaction standards system. Think Craigslist customization for car sales. There is no “miles” option for roommates. So if you miss a car payment it shows up in the p2p data and the next time you borrow money from the p2p bank your interest rate goes up, based on the decentralized wisdom of the crowd.

You could build a bot with its own bank account, this would be the ultimate Turing test.

Email hosting. Antivirus

The big difference between this type of non-profit peer production and socialism is that it’s not government directed, it’s emergent, which is compatible with free market proponents’ arguments for limited government.

The current thinking seems to be in black and white “It turns out that we voluntarily do thing we don?t get paid for, even for strangers. Sometimes we even do good anonymously. Now go figure. What a way to screw up the economists? models.”

http://blog.tomevslin.com/2005/10/good_news_peopl.html

Jeff Jarvis has a great, TomPaine-like post on the control of ownership. It’s really about personal freedom. Freedom to decide whether or not to restrict or profit from our own creations.

IMage – emergence

I like that he’s digging deeper into this issue b

Corporations represent the regulation here not government. But the argument for smaller corporate involvement in our personal data is identical to the argument for smaller governmnet involvement in our personal lives. It’s liberty.

Panoramic Abilities

Two issues here:
Search
– Forum search tools

Aggregators
– Flickr, Delicious

Kazza – Search result latency vs.

But the first thing that P to P networks are is social provisioning of a distributed data storage and retrieval system.

Google always emphasizes their speed, why unless they’re worried that their lead in accuracy is short lived?

Pure Popularity
Categorized popularity

Recommendations – Netflix

Bundled services – cable – phone – etc.

Mix between Open Directory Project and google results

Semantic Web?

Wife Verbs/Nouns

Timeframe – Podcasting

Sessions1 thoughts from the transcript

O’Reilly –
Greed vs. Good naturedness in peer production – what about those who are paid to write open source software either through IBM, Redhat or from donations. Politics are interfering with the argument at this point. Bias, left instead of right in this case. They’re talking really big picture issues, big enough that political belief has an effect on the ability to come to sound conclusions.

“There are a lot of very interesting things happening in the market.” Emphasis on market

Link to Benkler

http://crackhouse.blogspot.com/2004/07/theres-something-humorously.html

So what will the personal server of the future look like? Well for starters I’ll have a web interface so Webmin comes to mind.

Webmin

Why do we want to figure this out? So we can start working on the software and hasten the arrival. Talk about the problem of amateur control.

Motivation – cash – respect – good will is only important

http://www.opensourcexperts.com/bountylist.html

SEMMELACK
Apple – Ipod, closed system that dominates’s the world. OPEN SOURCE DRM as a solution!

Next Topic – Open Data Architectures

Flickr vs Gimages order by interesting!!! That’s what the google toolbar does, finds popularity and feeds the data back to the search engine algorithm.

Proxy server / cache as well for personal server

Obsessions with the top down design. The only thing that needs design are things that decrease what “Bla” calls friction. Those things are open standards and open source standards. Not open source for open source’s sake but if there’s going to be trust the code has to be out there. Think the overturning of speeding tickets based on radar gun source code transparency.

DNS Metadata as a model – take the median

Standards will kill the need for centralization assuming the network is good enough.

The supernode has privleges?

Not just businesses but intellectuals are threatened by this decentralization. What about the ginormous fee to attend the conference.

————————-

Post #1 is about USV Sessions #1

PAREKH:

And one of the things that I’m trying to figure out in a lot of these examples is
which of the systems that have lower friction points. Like Del.icio.us, where you would
assume that a lot more people, because it’s easier to put tags in, are participating and
contributing to the system as opposed to just taking things out, and one of the things we
need to be mindful about in all the peer to peer conversation is how do you make these
systems more efficient? How do you get more people to participate, whether it’s trust
factors, shyness factors, learning the tools. Whatever the element is of that system.

————————-
A test case…

You know, you could take, say Ares Galaxy, an open source p2p app and modify it to have a Flickr like user interface appearance, add metadata to the image file format and have a free, open source alternative to Flickr. It might have a catchy name like OINk for Open Image NetworK. It could be the second sourceforge project I start that I don?t have enough time to devote to :) Maybe I?ll make time.

…. Just solved a technical problem. If OINk was running on the same server as apache(your blog) and you mapped yourblog.com/images/ to the OINk down/upload directory then you could kill two birds with one stone. OINk could have a web interface so you wouldn’t need to host the server on your desktop computer, solving the portability issues Jeff was talking about earlier.

Maybe Google thinks this is all possible and knows that truly open APIs and web services are going to use more bandwith than even video which would explain why they bought all of that dark fiber. If the economists are right (there should have been a few at the USV Conference IMO) and human wants are unlimited then we’ll continue to find ways to use bandwidth even after the big web companies we now see as eternal fixtures are gone and we’re all hosting our own email, images, podcasts, video, etc. on our own servers shared over next generation P2P networks. Looks like we’re about to find the limits of emergent order. A potential libertarian utopia? Would it freak people out if no reassuring figurehead was in power?

There are cries of Swindle and Sweatshops when you ask those in the IT business their opinion of the H1-B system. Our sense of national entitlement is assaulted by the notion that we have to compete with foreigners. Borders lose their meaning when you can do your work on a remote website with no flag to inform the user of its location. In fact, maybe the only reason we really need borders anymore is due to a lack of international standards (currency, etc.) and inequality.

If everybody opened their borders today crazyness would ensue. Welfare issues would obviously spring up and the poor would flock to America for opportunity as well as for the health benefits (you can’t legally be turned away in America if you show up at an emergency room). As it stands, we just scrape the intellectual creme off of the international labor market which is arguably unethical because of the brain drain that negatively impacts the emigrants’ homeland. It’s funny listening to people complain about how the influx of foreign genius is bad for America. It’s bad for them because they have to work harder to keep up but they benefit from the taxes paid and the flood of H1B income into our economy.

This is like well intentioned communists debating how to design the economy instead of asking whether or not a top down system is even a good idea.

I posted this on Buzzmachine but this is the spell checked version regarding Nick Carr’s Amorality of Web 2.0 essay:

This is an old argument in a new arena. Carr is mimicking Bastiat but he?s not trying to be satirical. Instead of banning sunlight to spare the suffering candlemakers he?s proposing that we rid ourselves of the internet to spare the 9,000 ?professionals? simultaneously writing reviews of the movie ?Doom?.

A lot of liberals are having to re-evaluate their beliefs now that their love of a free and open internet is at odds with the bureacracy killing unemployment that it creates.

People who really need high quality up to date information will subscribe to high quality content providers like WSJ online. No university level paper would dare cite Wikipedia as a source. Carr assumes people are too dumb to pay money for higher quality content which is simply ridiculous. We pay to see movies even though free content exists on TV, how is that possible in Carr?s crazy world where people will only watch Law and Order re-runs because ?durr? it?s free?.

If opinions weren?t a dime a dozen, Times Select would be doing just fine. In the absence of a distribution monopoly, they?re forced to accept the market price of $0.00833 per opinion.

Substitue the Internet for the sun in this argument for a summary of Carr?s arguments:

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.

There’s a great overview of the Microsoft vs. Massachusetts debate over at Once More unto the Breach. I was reading a quazi-related Forbes article about Open Source where the guy has absolutely no understanding of Open Source

Moglen has been the chief legal officer at the Free Software Foundation, in charge of defending the General Public License, a subversive bit of lawyering that turns property law on its head by prohibiting the users of open-source software from charging money for it.

From the GPL FAQ

Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?
Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software.

It’s a little strange that you have someone supposedly informed enough to write for Forbes who doesn’t even understand the difference between free as in beer and free as in liberty when it comes to something as world-changing as Open Source.

At any rate, here is the important piece of the first, non Forbes, article:

Of course, while the patent license for the Microsoft Office XML formats is royalty free, the license is not sublicensable (preventing a free software GPL licensed implementation).

Now that doesn’t sound like a big deal, sub-licensing, but open source is more like biology than intellectual property. Imagine the consequences for people if our cells could only divide once and then stopped. We’d never be bigger than two cells in a womb somewhere. A sneaky god could say “What, c’mon, I’m letting cells divide, what’s the problem?” and we’d all have flagella instead of feet.

Understanding the interplay of liberty, licensing, source code, capitalism, open standards, economics and intellectual property law is probably a rare combination for the average business person and apparently even among Forbes writers. It’s sad that more big brained geeks don’t expand their interest into other areas, including journalism.

Since I’m suffering from writers block this week I’ve included below all of my half finished draft posts from the past few months:

http://www.newkerala.com/news-daily/news/features.php?action=fullnews&id=96932

Punctuated Equillibria

http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~theobal/PE.html

Productivity gains and Unemployment CPI
Over zealous guy that makes everybody look bad, stock prices on the rise, why fire anybody?

http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpiadd.htm#4_1

http://econpapers.repec.org/article/fipfedfer/y_3A2003_3Ap_3A13-27.htm

http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2001/el2001-28.html

http://www.economist.com/agenda/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=1985889

Productivity Made us better at what we were used to doing in the late 90s. That productivity is now beginning to take away our jobs.

http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ.htm

From ConvergeDigest.com

Hong Kong Broadband Launches 1 Gbps Home Service for US$215/month.
Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) officially launched its 1 Gbps symmetric service for the residential market. Approximately 800,000 households, out of a total of 2.2 million households in Hong Kong, are wired to receive the service. The 1 Gbps symmetric service is priced at US$215 per month.

As far as I’m aware that’s the first time an ISP has throttled bandwidth based on geography. It’s digital protectionism. The goal is to keep bandwidth use down but it could prevent the spread of culture especially as video production breaks free of mainstream media control.

Robotic steam powered Horses as bad thinking analogy. Equine Propulsion.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
-Karl Marx

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
-John Adams

Time is money. It follows that more free time, all things equal, is a sign of wealth. Gordon Gekko from Wall Street explains that he needs a private jet not for the status but because he can afford to not waste time.

The Consumer Price Index is a measure of inflation. It’s a measure of the increase in the cost of living. If the price of milk goes up it’s reflected in the CPI. The problem with the CPI is that certain kinds of progress can’t be measured in terms of dollars. Ipods may cost the same as early Walkmen but they hold thousands of songs and have much better battery life. The Internet is vastly more resourceful than a drive to a local library but that’s not reflected in the CPI either. The BLS explains:

It is very difficult to determine the proper treatment of public goods, such as safety and education, and other broad concerns, such as health, water quality, and crime that would comprise a complete cost-of-living framework.

Occasionally Original has a piece up on the potential for a Google/NASA sponsored global internet service. What follows is my best guess at how this might play out, assuming they’re considering it.

Google’s recent partnership with NASA doesn’t make much sense at first glance. Why would a fast paced business burden itself with a relationship with a bureaucratic monster? It’s not the money. It stands to reason that Google wants to get into space for some reason.

Globalstar

http://blogs.zdnet.com/images/globalstarnetwork.jpg

* 9.6 Kbps data speed
Iridium — 66 operational low-Earth-orbit satellites

400-700 miles for LOE .00625s round trip
22,300 miles for Geosynchronous orbits = .25s round trip at speed of light
40x closer to the earth than typical satellite

Vint Cerf needed to figure out the routing protocol and maybe orbits for the satellites.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=345031

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/index.php?cat=9

Blimp alternatives face international restrictions.

People of the left argue that Wal-Mart should be forced to pay its employees more. The corporation becomes the conduit for wealth re-distribution. You might ask, why don’t you just give money directly to the poor instead? Well the left finds welfare demeaning even though they call for more of it. They’d rather impose regulations on business because wealth redistribution laundered through business comes out clean. And by clean I mean it has the dignity of a paycheck attached.

The dry cleaning bill is passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices which are a veiled tax. Econ 101 says that the quantity demanded drops when prices rise so business have less need for workers… So the left is ok with lowered employment as long as the people that do work are paid well. But they’re really not ok with it. The protests in France are due largely to high unemployment. People aren’t making the connection that employment and business are related, maybe because the government provides so many jobs in socialist states.

As I read more of Hayek’s work I realize that taxes and regulations aren’t just an economic issue. It’s about freedom. I work from 9 to noon everyday to pay the government(taxes) which is then redistributed to pork projects like the bridge to nowhere or the $35,000,000 for the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board which is considered Katrina aid. That works out to about $3 from me for shrimp marketing. But that’s just one krill in the bucket.

From TechCentralStation:

A not so quick read of the 440 page bill soon demonstrated that the Louisiana lawmakers stuffed it with everything they could think of including many items having nothing to do with hurricane relief. The items include:

* $35,000,000 for the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board
* $8,000,000 for direct financial assistance to alligator farmers
* $12,000,000 for the restoration of wildlife management areas
* $25,490,073 to complete the Sugarcane Research Laboratory
* $120,000,000 for a laboratory, facilities and equipment at the Southern Regional Research Center
* $28,300,000 for the restoration and rehabilitation of forest lands
* $34,193,591 to support the research and education activities of the Agriculture Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service
* $19,000,000 for the acquisition of first-responder mobile communications, deployable cellular towers and for equipment necessary for public Internet access in a 100-block area of downtown New Orleans using wireless-fidelity technology.
* $250,000,000 for assistance to firefighters
* $100,000,000 for early intervention, prevention, and disorder treatment for children who are 0 to 5 years of age
* $100,000,000 for early intervention, prevention, and disorder treatment for school age children.
* $100,000,000 for substance abuse assessment, early intervention, prevention, and treatment.
* $600,000,000 for early childhood education
* $20 million for the establishment of development plans for development districts in the State of Louisiana
* $160 million to implement the 2005 recommendations of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission related to the Federal city development in Algiers, Louisiana
* $7 billion for rebuilding evacuation and energy supply routes on top of $5 billion for expansion of road and transit capacity.
* $150 million for a small business loans fund and tax breaks on top of $50 billion in block grants.

I run a 5 block outdoor wireless network. It cost less than $7,000 in parts. They’re asking for $190,000 per block to wire New Orleans. To call it pork would be a massive understatement.

UPDATE: To be fair to the left I’ve included a letter I sent to an author who was defending the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools. It reads:

Do you question the functioning of your microwave when you cook a potato? Maybe it’s time you did. The “theory” of microwave radiation explains why your potato gets hot but alas, it is only a theory. We should mandate in our cooking classes alternative, untestable theories.

One leading proposal, the theory of Intelligent Delicatessen (ID), postulates that the ghost of Julia Child cooks food in our so called “microwaves” through the warmth of her ghost’s heart. A gift from the grave to time-crunched chefs everywhere. Food for thought.

Sincerely,

Wolfgang Emeril Scopes

And the reply:

Love that clever sense of humor! What a great way to end my day.
Seriously, it’s far better than being called a “moron,” I assure you.

I will only say that neither I nor the Dover school board is calling
for the
mandating of the teaching of ID theory in public classrooms.

Many blessings,

Tim

Seems like a nice enough guy.

Microsoft can’t charge less than $0 to compete with Open Source on price.
The Fed can’t lower interest rates below 0% to counter deflation.

There is something weird about zero. I guess it’s the ultimate tipping point because the bureaucratic gears have to go backwards. I had a discussion about the simulation of a car’s gearbox once, we all agreed that a really good model wouldn’t require any hacks to make it work in reverse. It’s possible we’re using models based on historical trends instead of an understanding of what’s really happening. We still think the bowling ball falls faster than the marble. Maybe accelerating change is causing things to appear negative though we’ve really just been looking at them the wrong way. I’ll write about it later.

Recent thoughts on journalism:
I wonder if journalism will survive like open source software does now. I use WordPress for my blog and paid $50 for it even though it’s free. Wikipedia also survives on donations. That won’t work in a world where journalists rank near politicians in terms of trust-worthyness.

Free markets are leading to the demise of the MSM so is it really surprising that most old school journalists lean left? Or that there are unusual numbers of libertarian bloggers?

F.A. Hayek argues that smart people lean toward Socialism even though it doesn’t work because the truth is counter-intuitive and smart people are intuitive. Smart people tend to make more money so it’s possible that the right wing corporate media types are pushing a left wing agenda because advertisers will pay more for smart, and therefore wealthy, readers. It’d be kind of humorous and elegant if it was that simple. Maybe the journalists start out in the middle but eventually the adulation of their growing readership contributes to the leftification.