Economics
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Operation Desert Furry
So today I went all the way with it I just realized I’ve been naming each day’s Wordland posts (such as this one) kind of the way the US military names campaigns. I’d hardly change a word Escaping the Black Holes of Centralization is getting some visits lately. I wrote it in 2014. Here is how Continue reading
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Thens Day
Be there Surveillance-based pricing (just for you!) will be the subject of this talk at 4pm Eastern today. Register and attend at that link. Continue reading
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Where Are We?
While the Web isn’t a place, we know it as one. The language we use to describe it is concrete and structural: domains at locations, with sites that are built and have pages that are authored, and contents that are uploaded and downloaded. For a generation or more, we have searched through the Web’s vast Continue reading
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Distinctions
Remembering Scott Adams Scott Adams understood business, and especially its innate absurdities, better than anyone else in the world. That’s why his Dilbert comic strips were so right-on and popular. He also correctly predicted the results of the 2016 election (as did I), but I think he was off-base on why. I think he was also wrong Continue reading
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Shitting Us Not
To the best editor I’ve ever had Paolo once told me that cats came to Earth to enslave the standing monkeys. While funny and in some ways true, cats can be more and other than that. They can be as loyal as dogs (and both species far more loyal than grown humans to each other), Continue reading
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How to Civilize Digital Life
The Right to Privacy is a brief written by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren and published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. It has not been improved upon since, because what it says is so damn obvious and simple: that the right to privacy is “the right to be let alone.” Those six words Continue reading
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On the frontier of caring
Adopt a Station is a way to compensate for the funding lost to US public radio stations when the CPB shut down. No state is more dependent on public radio, or hurt by lost CPB funding, than Alaska. Here is a table of all the stations there, with graphs showing how much lost funding they Continue reading
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My Three Hooks
For many years, I attended an annual gathering of folks who wanted to save the Internet for future generations. Aspirational guidance was provided by the metaphor “big hooks:” ones meant for catching big fish. Since I was a kid, my life has always been about big hooks, especially ones that maximize personal and collective agency, Continue reading
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If you like public broadcasting, be customers, not just consumers
Public broadcasting has three markets: Listeners and viewers. Philanthropies (wealthy individuals and foundations). Government agencies (primarily the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB). I saw the writing on the wall for #3 in 2010. (Actually much earlier, but that’s the oldest link I could find.) It has been clear for decades that Republicans have no Continue reading