Category: Things I think about

Are Democrats annoying?

From the “unsubscribed mailing list archive”… or, “If you don’t like to read about politics, don’t waste your time on this post.”

Give'em Hell Harry

Some time ago, I’d signed up for a bunch of Democrat mailing lists… Y’know, MoveOn, Dean for America… some others. At some point the newsletters became less relevant and less interesting, so instead of unsubscribing, I’d just delete them as they arrived. No big sweat off my back.

But I decided to open one of their missives today today titled “Getting Even”. Here’s what it said:

They are not going to get away with it. I am not going to take the lies that Republicans are telling about me and other Democrats in Congress sitting down. And neither should you.

What our opponents are trying to do to me is just a taste of what they have in store for us in the months ahead. Karl Rove’s Republican Party will stoop to any level to smear our candidates, and it certainly won’t let the facts get in the way.

But we won’t get mad. We’re going to get even.

Ok, so, the next thing I did was find the unsubscribe link:

Give'em Hell Harry unsubscribed

The thing is this. I can’t stand 98% of politics today. I especially can’t stand the cry-baby tactics of the Democrats. The Republicans are generally deplorable, but that almost makes them tolerable. The Democrats, on the other hand, have for some time seemed so feeble and self-loathing (not to mention disorganized) that I’ve all but lost faith in the one-and-an-eighth party system. It’s like, why don’t you guys just join up with the Republicans and make way for a full-bodied, more filling second party?

I dunno, maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh, but I’ll tell you what, the Republicans don’t whine nearly as bad as the Dems. Sure, they gripe and they lie and they cheat and steal and they do terrible things — but that’s what politics are all about. In fact, they’re willing to publicly take down their own members if it’ll serve the cause (unless the nickname of the member in question rhymes with “Dummy”). The Democrats, on the other hand, seem to think that fighting fair is American or something — and that they should be treated with dignity and esteem. Just like the folks at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo.

Ahem. Let’s start somewhere, mkay? Start treating the folks you need to rely on the way that you want to be treated and then we’ll talk. Stop treating me like an uninformed ATM. I don’t want to give you any more money and I don’t care about your fundraising efforts. Gas prices are still up, remember? Until you come around to the fact that I’m not a “constituent” but a normal person (just like you), I’ll be on the lookout for a party that actually gets me and reflects the concerns I have. I want to see radical solutions that reflect new thinking — followed up by execution. And I’m tired of you guys always defining and defending yourselves against the Republicans. It’s annoying.

I’m waiting to see something new, that wasn’t around in the last two elections. Obama seems, on the surface, to be an iota more interesting than the rest of the bunch. Crissakes, he’s a got a MySpace account. But I haven’t really even bothered following him that much. Man, just put George Clooney up against Bush — we’d win for sure. I mean, it worked in California for the Republicans. And heck, despite that debonair attitude and winning smiling, annoying is one thing I’ve never thought of him.

Oh, and to keep this in context… I’m just another citizen in this grand ol’ country concerned about the path we’re on. And I’m voicing my opinion, incomplete, uninformed and probably annoying in and of itself, because I’m tired of deleting pointless mailings from Democrats that I simply can’t bring myself to believe in. Yep, that’s it.

Untitled #2, Incomplete

Someone was telling me how, two years ago, they commented that Google is basically Microsoft 2.0.

Big companies follow a pattern. Evil ensues. Rinse, wash, repeat.

WiFi is a municipal matter. Connectivity should be considered a public good.

For obvious reasons. Look, I mean, I decided that privacy is bunk a long time ago so it’s not even that that I’m terribly worried about (your privacy is little more than sand between your fingers).

While quality of service is certainly important — and someone like Google, with its oodles of dollars — can probably ensure adequare coverage and uptime, that’s still not the issue. Communities are resilient when left up to their own devices.

I mean, look at Indian traffic (something I experienced firsthand in Bangalore). You wouldn’t think that it’d work — there’s practically no rules — but y’know what? Almost because the drivers are the ones responsible alone for their fate, they pay better attention, drive more cautiously and use their horns for communication instead of anger. It works — and it’s not just because of some kind of pacifist disposition inherit in Indians.

Point is, okay, that Google is interested in behavior. They’ve shown that they’re interested in 1) selling advertisements 2) pleasing their investors. Innovation is a means to an end. None of these things are intrinsically bad. Guns don’t kill people, robots do. Capitalism didn’t ask to become the scourge of our age, but dammit, someone severed the hand of Adam Smith a long time ago.

Anyway, here’re my two beefs du jour with the GoogleNet plan. Equal distribution. I simply don’t believe that privatized systems give a shit about under performing, under represented or unprofitable ventures. Oh yeah, that’s why they have philanthropic arms (yeah, ok, tell me if this makes sense: poison the environment while contributing to the Sierra Club?).

Second issue? Competition. State-sponsored monopolies suck.

Oh, and hell, toss in one point five more: Network Neutrality and the fact that it’s unnecessary. Here’s an alternative plan — just like you can buy your electricity and cable from multiple vendors, I’d like to be able to get my WiFi from the vendor of my choice. With prices falling all the time for the tech, that’s not the problem. Google wants to lock down the market. With technologies like WiMax available and being deployed elsewhere, seriously, we don’t need the Google Machine monopolizing this space.

You remember there was this company that embedded its browser in its OS and was forced to offer alternatives after an extremely costly (to taxpayers) legal battle? Give it 5-10 years and you’ll see a similar battle over embedding one company’s ads and search services in the state-sponored privately-run WiFi network.

But I’m jess sayin.

Brad Neuberg tackles offline access and permanent, client-side storage for AJAX apps

The man‘s a madman. I can’t even keep up with him. Oh, a snippet from his thorough explanation:

I’ve finally finished; dojo.storage is now done, in beta, and fully open source under a business-friendly BSD license.

…

The offline and dojo.storage work together, because whether you are offline or online you can access the same persistent storage, saving data while offline then syncing when online. Expect a dojo.offline and dojo.sync in the future that will provide abstractions for common operations like this. I’m looking for financial sponsors on this if you are interested.

(Emphasis mine).

Personal blog assistant

Now that I’m back and jet lagged from Bangalore (where Barcamp kicked mighty ass and with three more in the country to come) I’m realizing that I have a tonne of stuff to blog about, not the least of which concerns things that I’ve personally instigated and have an obligation to report on.

The problem, however, is how to be involved with everything, actually execute and still have time to blog about it. Admittedly I end up being a tad verbose at times, so cutting my Average Word Count Per Entry down would help — as might treating my blog more like a public email repository… returning back that “Four Readers” focus that encouraged informality and brevity over details and loquaciousness.

Anyway, the matter remains that I’m countless blog posts behind and barely able to keep up with the off-topic rants I’d like to get to, not to mention follow all the threads going on meanwhile.

So wouldn’t it be great if we put all those soon-to-be-displaced journalists to work as personal blog assistants? I mean, a PBA could have multiple simultaneous clients — indeed, they could cover a local sector of a given topic (like beat journalists — beat bloggers?). Or, perhaps they could be “topic writers for hire”… For example, how cool would it be to have someone that the community endorses to attend events and report back for them? I’d love to have a Barcamp or Mash Pit PBA go out and attend each event, providing specialized reports that matter to, oh, say, 2,500 people worldwide.

I mean, when Tara reports that “The World is Mega Uber Bloody Flat” she reveals a whole new realm of reportage that the MSM will simply never see as economically viable (or perhaps even interesting) (even though, historically, that’s where local papers made their bread and butter).

And yet the experiences and people involved in these worldwide camps are extremely interesting to me — as I’m sure they are to many others in our community. But, as it is with blogs, they are fairly poor at really capturing what went on, at least in comparison to the way a dedicated journalist who sees the continuous threads of the story might… and indeed, those threads of continuity are what make the Barcamp story so compelling.

So what I’m proposing is this: blogs are a great mechanism for communities to talk amongst themselves or for independent voices to gain an audience, but they are not entirely a substitute for a unified perspective that can connect the pieces and reassemble a complete story. The role journalists traditionally played was to tell stories that interwove diverse and contradicting views in the interest of keeping the public informed. Of course, this was before the advent of subliminal product placement and expressing everything in terms of stock prices and market valuations.

But as usual, I digress.

…which a PBA would not — or at least not without good reason and good measure. Anyway, I’m not going to stop blogging for myself… it just would be highly interesting to have someone follow the topics that are interesting to me and report back about them. The way that only a human can. The way that journalists are supposed to.