The Story of Evil Marketing - A Conspiracy Theory for 2020

Ok folks, it's Conspiracy theory time.  

Long ago, Soros, The Koch Brothers, Davos, Qanon, the Knights Templar, whoever.... hired a company

EVILMARKETING .COM

This group was very very good at marketing. They had a process, evolved over time, that worked well, delivering quality product with a minimum of work on the client's part.  They made the person who hired them look good.

The process is simple... the customer supplies a few pieces of very important information, and then they go to work, show a version for approval, and then the product is given to the client for use.

Item #1 - Who do you want to listen to your message  - The Target Market
  Client:  The 99%, those who want to take our wealth and power

Item #2 - What are the top 3 messages you want them to remember
  Client:

Their neighbors are not like them

Their neighbors are stupid

Their neighbors are evil

Item #3 - What are signs we did our job so you can prove it to your boss? - Metrics
  Client:

Increased division

Increased violence

Ignoring us completely

Item #4 - What are your goals for this campaign? - Goals
  Client:

Divide the 99%
Divert attention from us
Social Media Profit

The team went away... and came up with a brilliant strategy to accomplish the goal.

They came up with a few simple phrases that sounded a bit odd, but contained different meanings, depending on the audience. Turns out, you can test this.... tell the phrase to a sample from each target market, and see how they interpret it. If the answers diverge, you're on the right track.... if the answers oppose, you've hit the mother load.

But that wasn't enough for Evil Marketing... they had a better idea, and had to explain it to the client.

In this campaign there are 2 phases, in phase 1 we'll spread specially crafted phrases. "Received Words" - These are phrases that have an obviously evil meaning, and a plausible good meaning. To help explain it, we'll use Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave as examples.

Alice is a well meaning person who will first use the phrase when talking with her friend Bob, who has heard it before and agrees. Alice and Bob now recognize each other as allies.

Alice them talks to Carol, who is unfamiliar with the phrase, and asks a few questions because it sounds a bit strange. Alice and Carol invest time so that Carol now understands the phrase in the same way as Alice.

Carol later talks to Dave, who also asks questions, but rejects the phrase because the evil meaning is too much for him to swallow. The seeds of resentment are sewn between Carol ad Dave.

Dave later talks to Elaine, who decides she agrees with the Good meaning.

Later Dave is talking to Fred, who agrees with Dave on the Evil Meaning

The client understood how little effort it would take to spread, and nodded in understanding

Phase 2 begins when a critical mass of people are reliably using the phrases we supplied.

Now that Alice, Bob, Carol, and Elaine have invested energy in the phrase, they are strongly oppose to changing it. The phrase practically defends itself from change and dilution.  Dave and Fred also share an understanding that the others are allies, with an easy to recognize flag.

You, and your associates now begin to use the Evil intent of the phrase to accomplish your goals.  Alice, Bob, Carol and Elaine now feel forced to support this new (to them) meaning. They are trapped.

Dave and Fred now think that the others support the Evil intent of the phrase. They are fooled.

So, as you can see... this campaign will be highly effective, dividing and distracting your target market with almost no cost.

The clients loved it, and would be happy to use Evil Marketing again. The Metrics are off the chart!

So that's the story, and here we are... in an country about to rip itself apart, where nobody at the top dares actually lead because admitting mistakes is political suicide, throwing these phrases at each other over and over and over, and expecting that eventually we'll get different results if we try hard enough.

It's as if the phrases all have a good message in them, trapped in an evil spell... if you change the words, you break the spell.

We all have to admit our mistakes because our leaders wont.

I'm just a cranky old white guy with both liberal and conservative views.... actually their neither... they are MY views of the world.
I am more than ready to change my views and admit fault while doing so, publicly. Our "leaders" can't do that.

Please stop using the phrases as given... change a word or two, eliminate the double meaning. Please also be willing to lead us out of this mess by admitting the mistakes of our side as you see them.

Let's all be adults, and snuff this conflict out before it destroys our country.

E Pluribus Unum - One of Many - United We Stand, Divided We Fall.

CapabilityPipes v0.001 - A very rough draft of an incredibly powerful idea

This is a raw dump of an idea that came to me at 4AM... I hope it's coherent enough to catch on... I will of course keep refining it.

This is v0.001 of the idea

++ Capability Pipes  

Unix/Linux is a set of tools which work together to allow you to pipe output from one program into another, and the resulting plumbing lets you do very powerful things. We need a similar set of tools for the capability security model. This would allow you to have complete and total control over your applications, your network useage, and everything your computer does on your behalf, in a rational and expandable manner.

Instead of trusting applications to do everything, why not use the pipe/api model to limit their connections to the world, so that you can tightly restrict the side effects of everything, as needed?

Give the user a traditional view of the world, just like the linux they have now, but instead of trusting applications blindly, force them all to use capability pipes (like file handles) to do all their I/O.

Of course, you could always default things to the current look/feel of a typical linux desktop, to make transitioning easy for users.

It is impossible to overstate the amount of power this would put back into the hands of users.
 
Examples, use cases:

  A mute filter to allow control over the audio output of a web browser.
  Filtering of which URLs a web browser is allowed to access
  A batch file which could do more than chroot ever could, with all the limits hard enforced by the operating system
  All file pipes would be chosen / supplied from outside the application.

iptables allows a linux system administrator to do very powerful things with the network stack of a machine... this would be a much more fine grained approach as you could control I/O of everything down to the bit level, or not... as you see fit, in the unix way.

You could count the bytes a web browser sends or recieves on each and every page. You could log things.

Digital Rights Management would be killed stone dead as a nice side effect.

Ad blocking could be scripts that users could tweak themselves.

Secure programming - good intentions

I recently read a good article about security practices in applications and software as a service. The author lays out some very good rules to help keep users information secure in today's threat environment. However, it strikes me strong reminder of the vast amount of effort we're wasting by trusting applications programs at all.

We should never completely trust any programs, services, or drivers outside of the very kernel of an operating system. We shouldn't have to.  The millions of lines of code that are required to do even a basic database with a web front end are bound to have bugs which can lead to unintended and unwelcome side effects. The effects can be subtle to disastrous depending on what cascade of events happens.

The application programmer has no tools to prevent his program from exceeding its scope at a given task. Current operating system design holds that the user is the proper level of granularity for deciding what access a given task is to be allowed. All of the responsibility is then thrust upon programmers to keep things safe as a result. The programmer and/or install package is then responsible for setting all of the permissions on all of the the objects (files, pipes, registry entries, ports, etc) in the end system to be appropriate for the given tasks.


This is an impossible task, given that there can be literally millions of such permissions to set, and it only takes one mistake to let things pass through. 


It doesn't have to be this way.

Capability based security is an approach that uses the principle of least access to enforce security in a much more appropriate manner.  The millions of choices about what to deny are replaced with a much shorter list of what things to allow. This list is per process, not per user.  It tells which files, folders, ports are to be allowed, and which mode (read only, write only, append only, full, etc).

This is a much more natural way to handle risk, as you simple decide what side-effects you are going to allow a given process to have, and the operating system enforces your decision. You don't have to trust your code, nor does the user. If something goes wrong, the maximum extent of damage is already known. You don't have to worry about the entire system shattering.

Isn't it time we stop spending so much effort on making our programs safe, when it could be better spent building better programs?  Help support efforts which will deliver operating systems with capability based security, such as Genode, which provides a choice of 8 microkernels, capability based security, and runs native Linux applications.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Knowledge and the Internet

There's a service called HARO - Help A Reporter Out, which is pretty cool. Today one of the queries asked for opinions about the value of "real knowledge" in the internet age. I'd post it here, but there is no clear policy about what kind of privacy they expect for the queries that go out.

First, it's important to understand that there are categories of knowledge, and they are nested.

1. Stuff you don't even know you don't know
2. Stuff you know that you don't know
3. Stuff you actually know
4. Stuff you do all the time and can apply practically

People think that the purpose of Education is to increase to the necessary size the area of practical knowledge (#4), but this is a false assumption. The real purpose of education is to increase the size of #2, thus decreasing slightly the size of #1.

Category 1 stuff is the most dangerous stuff. It's the reason we parent children. They are naive to the dangers around them, having no idea of the tremendous potential energy surround them in the form of stairs, shelves, cars, trucks, trains, etc. Parenting is first of all about reducing the size of #1 stuff to the point where you don't get killed just going about your day. It then moves to #2 over time.

The problem with teenagers, fundamentalists, and younger versions of myself is that they don't really know about #1 at this point, because they have deluded themselves into the false and dangerous belief that they have reduced its size and scope to zero. This leads them to undervalue any skills or products that depend on knowledge that they didn't even know existed.

Through reflection and life experience, wisdom comes when you are fully aware of the vast size and scope of the stuff you know you don't know. It humbles you, and makes you more likely to consider fairly the opinions of others who do know the domain in question.

Now... how does the Internet and Google come into play here?

The internet helps you to explore stuff you don't know anything about, and get the basics. By makes you aware of all of the details of that stuff, and increases your awareness of the stuff you didn't know you didn't know... and makes it stuff you now know you don't know. This allows you to have a much better sense of an area.

So, if you are wise, and open you can both greatly decrease the size of #1 for a subject of interest by moving it into #2, and possibly increase #3 along the way.

Now... this does not help you become an expert instantly. That continues to take practice and work, but it does help you become more well rounded. The internet and Google play an incredible role in making it possible to learn about things that would otherwise be opaque. They are an immense positive asset.

Thoughts on Thoughts on Flash

Steve Jobs has made his case against flash on the iPad. It's interesting, and I kept reminding myself about the presence of the well known reality distortion field that permeates his being.

As a programmer, and person, I hate reality distortion fields. This blog post is meant as an exercise in building skills to see through it.

First, the post was not just Steve, sitting in his office, jotting down a few notes. He's thought about it, long and hard, carefully avoiding certain areas that might cost him points, while pushing the strengths of his position. Lots of my stuff here is off the cuff, and might qualify as a jot... his definitely is not something quick and dirty.

First, there is "open", as Steve said. Just how do you send code to someone who owns an iPad? It appears to this observer that the way is definitely not open, but only goes through the Apple toll both. Open ports like USB would be nice too.

The there is the "full web"... Flash sucks because it's a layer between the web and the browser. It's a shim at best. However, it's the best shim out there for most cases. Allowing flash, with some disclaimers would be far better than denying the use of this shim.

Then there is security. If you can't protect your iPad from bugs in Flash, you certainly can't protect it from any other rogue applications either. It's just a matter of time before the holes start showing up. Steve - read up on Capability Based Security.

Battery life - good point. Hardware acceleration is good. It would be nice if I could replace the battery at some point as well.

Then there is Touch - If you don't allow cross compatibility, how are others going to figure out how to deal with touch? You'll always be a special case, and never mainstream.

Conclusion - Steve is good at distorting reality, but it's a near field effect with limited range.

Thoughts on the Cluetrain, and manners.

It occurs to me that the ClueTrain Manifesto wasn't just about marketing. The message was that Mass Marketing is dead, and conversations are what we need. While the message was valid, I think it's really all about manners.

I've embarked on a one man crusade / war / battle / journey / pilgrimage / marketing campaign.... whatever you want to call it, to get the word out about Cabsec, capability based security. In the course of things I asked for advice, and got some great tips.

One of the things Doc Searls said was:

Again, link generously. Also, don’t be dogmatic, or polemic. Look at the topic as a field in need of greater substance, and contribute all you can that is plainly substantial. Don’t evangelize. Just set the bait and wait for the right people to come. Promotion is distorting and mostly starts arguments.

(Emphasis mine)

I just couldn't get past this little bit... otherwise everything he said I'm going to do. In mulling over the cognitive dissonance of it, I came to the realization about manners.

People don't like Evangelists because they are too much like old style marketers... they interrupt your life, and don't really care about anything but pushing their message, and converting you to their particular set of values.

I don't want to do that... I want to make people aware of my views, and see what they have that might help. I think this means that there is a new style of evangelism/journalism/activism, etc... coming down the pike, and I'm the case study for it.

I have a story to tell, and I want to learn. So, labels aside... I think something new is coming, it needs a word to hang meanings on... I'll leave that up to you, gentle readers.

3 Tipping Points

Here are three big tipping points which determine much about the way we use the internet.

1. Secure operating systems
2. Mesh networking
3. Distributed content systems / sync gets solved

Fixing these may take 20 years... but I believe they can all be solved.

Secure Operating Systems

There is a big hole in the way we currently approach computer security. The user has no way to limit the actions of a program. They are forced to trust completely that each and every byte of code does no harm. To get around this hole, layers of firewalls, virus scanners, and support personell are thrown on top of the big hole in the side of the Titanic, with similar results.

You'll know you've got a secure OS when you can run ANY program, without fear. You'll be able to throw away your virus scanner... and the technicians will stop blaming the user for clicking on the wrong button.

Until this gets fixed, the insecurity of the ends, and the need to use maintenance staff as a bandaid will be used to justify filtering, censoring, and increasingly intrusive regulation of the internet.

Mesh networking

The internet is a very brittle tree, with few main branches, which is only reliable because of the heroic efforts of the staff of the various entities who work around problems. It's a bailing wire and duct tape affair, on a massive scale. It doesn't have to be this way.

It's possible to expand the address space, auto-assign addresses to everyone, and just get on with it... doing away with fixed IP addresses, etc. The woman who invented the protocol that makes all of our switches just work together has said so.

If we change the nature of the internet so that it actually can route around problems by itself, with the need for obscure and hard to configure protocols, it can get an order of magnitude faster, and reach into smaller crevases.

Adding wireless nodes into the mesh would make the final transition to a truely shared resource possible, with everyone chipping in to make things faster, every time they turn on their gear.

Distributed Content Systems / Sync gets solved

I'm a commuter, and have extensive experience with the woes of having multiple computers. You're always being forced to sync things, and resolve conflicts. You never seem to have the right stuff on the machine in front of you.

The promise of always on connectivity seems appealing, but doesn't actually solve the real problem, synchronization. In a single person, multiple machine environment, it's possible to us manual sync processes, with sufficient discipline... but any deviation will result in lost work.

When you scale sync problems up to groups, even a perfect file sync system (everyone sharing the same files on a server) has problems. The next problem is one of granularity of changes.

Google Wave solves this problem, by breaking up any set of changes into discreet chunks which can be broadcast and synchronized for any given number of users, across organizational bounds. There is a lot of code to be written to build upon this solution, but it will be worth it.

Summary

I've presented what I think are the 3 tipping points for the future. All of them require major changes to the code we use in order to be implemented, most of them bordering on "boil the ocean" level... but the costs will be worth it, in each case.

Thank you for your time and attention.

more thoughts about Google Wave

I recently wrote:

 

It would be nice to be able to actually markup hypertext... but that still appears to be outside the range of feasibility.

Maybe it could be called TLM - Text Language Markup?

It turns out the given name is Wave, and is a dialect of XML still being tweaked by the wizards of Google and a few thousand developers who just saw it for the first time this week.  I spent the time to see the demo, and have been following up to see what others think. The gut level reaction seems to be one of  hope that this is something good, because it does seem to be a game changer.

The void being filled here is hard to describe, I've been trying for years... it all boils down to context. When you send an email and then reply, you're forced to use all sorts of mechanisms and tools to attempt to keep your train of thought, your conversational cache, your context.  Every step away from being able to just add a note, circle something, highlight or annotate text to draw attention makes conversation less efficient. Wave is going to provide a mechanism that does a much better job of preserving context. 

I expect Wave to succeed because of the good Kharma that Google has built up, along with their pledge to open-source most of it... which will greatly help adoption as a defacto standard.

The money quote for me was Tim O' Reilly's mention of the need for granularity when editing book manuscripts, which I feel vindicates some of my howling in the wilderness these past years. 

Somewhere between twitter, rss, and tag clouds lies a better path forward

Dave Winer correctly points out some serious flaws in twitter, and while he might not get brownie points or whuffie for it, he's right. He also shows where he thinks things could go. It's all about the metadata, and this subtle point seems to fly right past most people who read him.

I think it's time to explode twitter into its components making each of them public, implementable as a service, or as a hosted app, or something run on the end user's hardware.

The success of Twitter is because it allows for the rapid spread of messages from a controlled user base... there is a central control that can (but doesn't always) ban a user, etc. This means that every message is authenticated a bit... and all messages are tied to an identity. This makes filtering possible.

There is NOT any really good rating metadata. The messages are too short. This sets expectations, but really does cripple it for important stuff.

Blogging is seen as too slow, but RSS is a slow version of twitter. I think that metadata richness is the fix to this whole thing. Trade a bit of speed (twitter is too fast anyway) for expressive power.

We need to be able to aggregate our own stuff, which is one of the strengths of RSS. The ability to follow (and unfollow) an authenticated message channel is a great plus.

Collective ratings are ok, but the scales of services such as digg (up or down), and slashdot (funny is the same as insightful), are very limiting. It would be more useful for longer term (slower) conversations to be able to add more expressive metadata. Funny, Insightful, Biased, SelfPromoting, etc... could all be but a few of the plethora of possible bits of critical review that could be added.

It would be nice to be able to actually markup hypertext... but that still appears to be outside the range of feasibility.

Maybe it could be called TLM - Text Language Markup?

Tired of the monopoly game.

Doc Searls is tired of a specific part of the monopoly game, sucky AT&T coverage.

I like to think bigger, I'm tired of the whole monopoly game.

I think we should take a few big chunks of spectrum and dedicate them to a new mesh transport network. There would be standards for equipment, with the good old FCC doing type approvals. We could then all buy our own off the shelf part of the internet. Everyone could own it, or improve it. I expect that groups would quickly form to meet common needs, and the commercial interest would leverage their existing sites to move into this new opprotunity.

Instead of government enforced monopoly use of the spectrum, everyone would have to fairly peer with everyone. For the commercial end of things, there would be minimum requirements that would allow you make money, but keep the incentive there for others to contribute to the spectral commons. The main billing event would be transit off the wireless grid and back into the phone company or internet. Those would be the toll booths. This means that if you maintained enough equipment to have good wireless connectivity, you wouldn't have to pay any tolls.

The other option would be to bill it out like railroads if necessary so that everyone gets fairly paid for how much traffic they help move. It's my understanding that owner of a section of rail gets paid by whoever moves cars over it. The owners of the cars get paid rent to use them. It's complicated, but it works.


Either way, let's give strong incentives for people to put up mesh network nodes, and keep them powered and maintained. This can help route around the huge cost of laying fiber, and get us acceptable speeds at acceptable costs, right now, in spite of the economy, etc. Pay back the unused portion of the rents we've charged the cellular networks if they agree to the plan, and are willing to provide access in a neutral manner.

Adding value - looking for balance in photography

Here is an example of added value... done after giving the family all of the raw photos from the Baptism. It took a few train trips worth of effort to get these three panoramas stitched, and did require some manual editing.







The reason I gave them the raw photos was one of simple expediency, and to hedge against the possibility of the task of delivering them falling off my to-do list. I'm not as happy with this as I thought I would be.

The first reason is that I take a LOT of photos... 1202 at a baby shower on Saturday, and 900 at the Baptism and other associated events on Sunday. This means that I've given the task of reviewing that many essentially random photos to families that have other things to do.

The second reason I've come to realize lately is that I don't get feedback... I really need to find out what people like, so I can give them more of that, and less stuff they don't care about. It's impossible to learn without feedback.

The last reason is one of adding value which is kind of a merge of the others... I want to make the photographs a gift of value... not just a pile of snaps. I want to help people make memories they will cherish through their years, and be able to share with others. I can't do that alone.

Signal and noise - Separation of concerns

I keep seeing the same meta-problems over and over again. Some new tool comes along to make it easier to communicate, and it takes off. Then people complain that it makes it too easy to communicate... and it loses steam.

We've been through this cycle so many times, and history always rhymes. This particular portion of the rhyme of time involves Doc Searls, Twitter and Facebook, because he mentioned all of them in one place.

History - Email

Email made asynchronous messaging possible for most of us. It became a de-facto component of any "internet access" package. There were some improvements along the way, but the basic protocol hasn't really changed since the switch from ! to @ email addressing.

Because the environment has changed, the lack of authentication of the sender of a message has turned it into the spam pit we all learn to accept as the status quo. If you take spam out of the picture, email is a great way to get data from sender to reciever. It's a deliberate 1:1 transmission means, which means the sender implicitly signals the intent for someone to read the message.

Mailing lists preserve the intent because the are opt-in and dedicated to a certain topic. Social conventions arose to keep the clutter down, and keep things on-message.

History - Usenet

Usenet is a distributed protocol for hosting discussions on an internet-wide basis. Before the spam got out of control, it was a useful way to get information on a wide variety of topics. Once again, the nature of the environment changed, and the lack of authentication made it into an even bigger spam pit than email is today.

History - IRC / Instant Messaging

IRC - Internet Relay Chat made it possible for real-time group discussions across the internet. The spam factor drove some innovation amoung closed systems, which requried some form of authentication, spawning a wide range in so called Instant Message (IM) offerings amoung the various walled garden services such as AOL and Prodigy.

The VHS/Betamax style battles to capture customers lead to a lack of a single service arising to unify things, though with clients like Trillian it was possible. The need to install a specialized client was a big hindrance to adoption as well.

History - Twitter

While there have been other web-based messaging platforms in the past, the rise of twitter as a way to broadcast messages has been quite solid, in spite of some growing pains. The ability to see all public "tweets" and the additional innovation of third party tools such as search has kept it growing.

The fact that there is a central authority to register users and enforce some rules does help keep the signal to noise ratio in check. Like instant messaging, you chose who you listen to, but in addition your audience choose you as well.

The problem faced by twitter is one of the loss of Intent. When you send a message to twitter, it goes out to the entire audience, there is no way to segment your audience by intent, which forces you to artificially limit yourself to the one common interest of your audience if you don't want to lose them. Otherwise you have to play a very delicate (and unneccessary from my point of view) balancing act to try to keep everyone happy.

History - Facebook

Facebook gives us an easy to use place for putting sharing our stuff with others. Because of the lack of intent, there is becoming a friction between work and home, and people really like the tool because of ease of use, so they don't want to lose it to the lessor choice. The tension of multiple audiences is becoming easier to see with the rise in user population, and the increasing adoption of social networking platforms by businesses who have gotten a clue.

History - Internet Access and the soda straw

I have at least 320 Gigabytes of stuff I'd like to share. I'm sure that anyone who has had a digital means of capture of images or sound could easily generate a gigabyte or two per month without breathing hard. The entrenched providers have built their networks on an assymetric model that prohibits running servers, which is the only reasonable strategy for making this much content available on a discretionary basis.

Prohibition of servers at home actually then forces us to chose carefully the content we wish to share, and to send it to a silo where we begin to lose control and rights over our own stuff. We're forced to live our online life breathing digitally through a soda straw.

The Present

There are many tools to allow you to share content, but there is something lacking in each of them. As we see the ones that allow specifying audience don't seem to have the necessary authentication or regulation of the senders. The ones that work well for social networking don't allow for the separation of concerns. There is an additional factor of the difficulties of moving content to, from, and between these platforms and silos. The fact that this all has to be done through a limited bandwidth connection certainly doesn't help much.

Defining The Future - Social Aspects

If we are to have the future we desire, we must articulate the vision clearly and build consensus to push towards it as a goal. There are no obvious technical limitations that prohibit a future where we can share all the content we care to create. We do need to take care to make sure the signal to noise ratio remains as high as possible for those we share with. I believe that the simple act of being polite and mindful of our audience is going to carry the highest social value in the future, as it currently does with our limited tools.

Defining The Future - Technology

The future is all about metadata. We don't have enough of it right now. Flickr helps by allowing tags, and this is a very powerful tool. We need to build tool sets that allow tagging to become a socially shared tool as well. It would be valuable to allow someone else to review my photos, and decide which are keepers, or to tag them for specific keywords, possible venues, etc.

HTML needs to be expanded to allow for the markup and tagging of existing content by other parties. Of course, there needs to be some authetication built into it, to prevent grafitti and other forms of spamming from taking over. This would allow someone to highlight the "geek speak" parts of this very blog post, for example. It would also allow someone to highlight the part they found insightful, or insulting, or whatever.

Offline forms of sharing should be sought out to allow familes and others to route around the poorly designed "broadband" we've all been brought up to think was fast.

Twitter, Facebook, and others should allow for some form of tagging, like flickr, to make it possible to subscribe to only certain content from other users.

In Summary

The limitations of Twitter and Facebook that Doc Searls complains about are those of metadata and intent. They are not unsolvable, and they can be addressed. It remains to be seen if that happens via inclusion of new features, or migration to even newer networks that offer the required features.

Predictions for 2009

Here are my predictions for the new year

• Computer security still remains unaddressed, as nobody cares enough to fix it.
• The insecurity of the nodes on the ends becomes an even more valid reason to offer internet access instead of true connectivity
• IPv6 still sits on hold and fails to get traction.
• The value of the US dollar increases for a while, then drops to a new low of 1 cent relative to the 1913 value.
• The cutover to digital TV goes bad, and gets postponed at least 6 months.
• Netbooks continue to become more popular
• Fixing things will emerge as the hot new skill set as consumerism ceases to be a viable lifestyle choice for many.
• Just In Time as a management strategy will be shown the door.
• Sneakernet comes back into style as a way to transfer data outside of the net.
• Wifi networks for small groups that aren't network connected will begin to become popular for neighbors in rural areas.
• Software to distribute twitter like feeds amoung ham radio operators takes off, and causes a huge number of no-code amateurs to take up packet 2.0 to get around the phone companies.
• A new standard for tagging links with additional information takes off, allowing us all to vote on anything with a link.
• HyperText Markup Language continues to prohibit the markup of existing hypertext. (A personal pet peeve)
• The US dollar is devalued to 1/2000 ounce of gold, or 1/200 ounce of silver. Gold bugs rejoice. Inflation killed dead in its tracks.
• Growing ones own food becomes a popular hobby.

Ok... it's 1 AM while I'm writing this... and it's a wild stab in the dark. I look forward to the year ahead. I live in interesting times, and hope to do so for a long time.

--Mike--

Why I blog, and what to do afterwards.

Andrew Sullivan has written a great piece over in the Atlantic about why he blogs. He goes through the history of blogging, and weighs it against other forms of writing. I agree with it in the most part, but I disagree with his characterization of blogging at the start: (italics are mine)

This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible by technology widely available only for the past decade or so, allows for no retroactive editing (apart from fixing minor typos or small glitches) and removes from the act of writing any considered or lengthy review. It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in.

I agree that social convention around blogging is to not go back and do heavy editing of what you've written in the past. This is a crucial cornerstone on which we build our arguments with each other and ourselves over time. If the past is allowed to be edited, then anything can be forced to be true with sufficient effort. So there is much value in keeping the archives safe.

However, there is also something to be said for adding to the archives, which I don't think is currently done on anywhere near the scale that it could be done. It might be useful for me at some future point to add references that point back to this article, add corrections, etc. I think there is quite a bit of value to be added in this way.

I personally flit around a bit too much for even my own sensibilities... tending towards a tangential life at times, but I do manage to get back to the basics, and get things done sufficiently well to allow society to consider me a valued member. (I hope)

I'll try to go back, see what value I can add, and make this blog a bit less ephemeral, and a bit better value for everyone. There are lots of good and bad arguments that have been made, decisions informed, and lessons learned. It's a shame to lose the value in them because they simply are too hard to find.

I believe we need to put a bit more effort into this, collectively as well. We need to slow down our pace, be a bit more considered, and we'll all be better for it. This requires no new tools, just a bit of a tweak to the social contract we bloggers share.  We can all make our existing work more valuable, and a proper gift to our children, instead of just a random pile of rants.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Blogging tools still suck

Here's an article which is interesting, insightful, and dead wrong...

To be able to do a full criticism of it, you really need to be able to do markup on it. That is, you need to be able to add a layer of commentary on top of it. Currently, the only way to do this is to copy the whole bloody thing, and then embed your own layer of markup into the copy. This sucks.

The idea of marking up text is hard coded into things like the Torah... which is 5000+ years old... yet the wizards that give us toys like IE, Firefox and Chrome can't seem to grasp this concept.

ugh!

The Bailout and how we got there... actually explained.

Please spend an hour of your time listening to episode 365 of This American Life. 

They explain how the economy got to the dire straights it's currently in, and discuss the bailout.

If you have any desire to understand, you should listen.

Quote of the day

"We are now in the golden age of thieves. And where I come from we put thieves in jail, we don't bail them out." — Rep. Pete Visclosky, Democrat.

Thanks to Scott Olsen for the tip, and WSBT for the Quote, and to Pete for doing a hell of a job.

Bailing out the world?

If Karl Denninger is right, the bailout really is an attempt to bail out the World's banks... which explains why the people in Europe would care about our mess... watch the video, and decide for yourself.

I don't want to give away $700,000,000,000 of our money overseas, neither should you.

Learn from History

The depression became the Great Depression because Congress got stampeeded into passing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and made things worse. From Wikipedia (emphasis MINE)

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (sometimes known as the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act)[1] was an act signed into law on June 17, 1930, that raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to record levels. In the United States 1,028 economists signed a petition against this legislation, and after it was passed, many countries retaliated with their own increased tariffs on U.S. goods, and American exports and imports plunged by more than half. In the opinion of most economists, the Smoot-Hawley act was partially responsible for the severity of the Great Depression.[2][3]

Now we have the Bailout which is opposed by Economists... don't let them repeat the mistake again.

Trivia... it was the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act which was the dry boring history that Ben Stein was talking about as a Teacher in Ferris Bueller's day off, which is why I knew about it.

Here we go again.... damn thieves are trying to rip us off again!

Senator Bayh's voicemail was full, but I was able to call Senator Lugar's office... I suggest you do the same. We can't let this bailout pass... it'll be pissing away $700,000,000,000 of our money as a start, and won't fix anything.

The administration is trying to scare you into giving them money... normally this would be called Strong Armed Robbery in the state of Indiana, but in Washington DC it's called politics as usual.

Don't let the thieves get away with it.