In the future, everyone will be CEO for 15 minutes
It occurs to me that one great way to make a living would be to dress up as a fireman, carry a boot around, and hang out at highway/street intersections.
Plenty of sunshine, lots of time outdoors. And carrying around a boot full of change would significantly build up my upper body strength.
Andrew Keen, bloviating sycophant of the media elite, claims that the current economic crisis will result in:
One of the very few positive consequences of the current financial miasma will be a sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor. Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals. The altruistic ideal of giving away one’s labor for free appeared credible in the fat summer of the Web 2.0 boom … . But as we contemplate the world post-bailout, when economic reality once again bites, only Silicon Valley’s wealthiest technologists can even consider the luxury of donating their labor to the latest fashionable, online, open-source project.
Let’s dissect this for a minute. Mr. Keen is essentially saying that the current economic crisis will be so bad that leisure time, for all intents and purposes, will cease to exist. Everyone will be so cash-starved and desparate for income that the very the idea of spending 10 minutes blogging about a politician, or contributing to the information in Wikipedia will be inconceivable.
First, let me say that if the economic crisis is so bad that leisure time disappears, I think it’s safe to say that 5 billion people will starve to death. Almost everyone who writes or pontificates for entertainment/educational purposes will be included in that holocaust. So if he’s right, the entire concept of “professional media” will go extinct.
But perhaps he’s not saying that. Perhaps he’s simply saying that people will start to value their time far more than they do now. And thus, in Keenworld - no rancid amateurs spewing half-ignorant opinions like so much trash across their country-bumpkin lawns.
This might be true, if people currently valued their own opinions as something close to $0. But most people would refuse a good chunk of money in order to ‘just shut up and stop blogging.’ They value what they have to say far more than $0. They value sharing knowledge. They value reaching out to the uniformed. To many of them, it borders on a sacred duty to let the world know about X, Y or Z.
To put it another way - how much money would you have to give a Jehovah’s Witness to get them to stop prosyletizing altogether? If they think they’re doing important, Godly work, probably a lot more than $0.
And lastly, this ignores the class of people who consider blogging/sharing information to be something that will economically help them in the future - building credibility, building a track record, in preparation for a potential payday down the road.
It’s rare that I get to see someone so prominently attempt to wrestle reality into conforming with their personal agenda. Well, outside of politics. Let’s slip back to the Great Depression for a moment. Did missionaries stop preaching and converting? No. Somehow, despite the fact that they were struggling to find enough food, they still found time to spread the word of God. Did people stop listening to the radio or going to movies? No - they actually watched a lot of movies. They had lots of leisure time. If Mr. Keen is correct, there’s no way that someone would have “wasted” their leisure time listening to the radio when they could have been doing something productive. But yet they did, in record numbers. If Mr. Keen is correct, no one campaigned for politicians. No one agitated for a law passed, or for better working conditions, or equal rights. Because none of those things paid money. And during a deep economic crisis, that’s the only thing people cared about… right?
People value their opinions very strongly. They value sharing those opinions even more. If the choice is between starving to death, and making sure that everyone knows just how fascist Bush is, I’m willing to wager there’ll be more than a few skeletal corpses lying face-down in the dirt with Bushitler signs clutched in their emaciated, clawlike hands. And an equal number of people who would use their last dying spurt of energy to push ‘publish’ on their personal Anti-Obama screed.
Bottom line, Mr. Keen is attempting to strap Logic to a table, tilt her head back and vigorously waterboard her in order to get her to agree with any conveniently a priori-supporting fancy that plops into his gelatinous head. Alas, Logic is made of far, far sterner stuff than that, and has absolutely no desire to be made Keen’s bitch.
Slink back to your cave, troglodyte, and weep as your effete , aristocratic “professional media” sandcastles continue to be worn away by the innumerable tides of the great unwashed.
I hope that recent events have put a skewer in the ZOMG, PEAK OIL WILL KILL US ALL! drama of the last year. We’ve had demonstrable evidence that increased oil prices caused a very direct decrease in gasoline consumption, and now, with an economic slowdown, oil prices fall even farther.
And yes, if oil prices fall, it becomes less financially viable to pursue large scale wind, solar and other projects. So one could feel free to ramp up on the ZOMG GLOBAL WARMING drama.
The point of this post is that these are two counterbalancing problems - I’m not sure there’s a realistic scenario where you have both sky-high gas prices and significant growth in carbon emissions at the same time. Power plants can’t convert from oil-burning to coal-burning, and most power companies and collectives have a blend of sources - so even the idea of ‘burning more coal and thus more emissions’ as a response to sky-high oil prices is pretty weak.
Plus, high oil prices put a damper on the economy, which then results in lower emissions growth (emissions track to GDP fairly well, all in all)
So I say, pick your poison, and stop trying to worry about both at the same time. It’s not healthy.
Democrats see Obama as having:
Conservatives, on the other hand, thing Obama has:
I know, it’s deriviative. But then most jokes are.
Mondays at 10 on NBC
Starring: Christian Slater, Madchen Amick
I’m not sure what I was expecting from this show. The concept is simple enough - a secret agent (Edward) has a double life as a boring, run-of-the-mill family man (Henry). This is standard True Lies stuff. But there’s a twist - Henry (the family man) isn’t aware of his secret agent personality. The secret agent Edward runs his missions, goes home, and then Henry takes over, with a cover story implanted in his brain.
The acting is good - as one would expect from Christian Slater. He does an incredible job of showing the switch between the two personalities - the soft, weak face of Henry giving way to the hard-jawed certainty of Edward in a moment.
The story has some interesting plot twists and some minor puzzles. There was a neat gun fight, and some clever deception, but at the end of the show, I’m left with a couple of questions.
1. What benefit is there to creating the Henry (family man) personality? (Other than the obvious one - it gives shlubs like me the chance to imagine that we really are spies, instead of the mundane life we lead now). That is to say - why would a secret agent deliberately weaken himself like this - deliberately crippling himself half the time.
2. Where can this show go? True Lies had a very similar plot, and was wrapped up in 2 hours. Presumably, they’ve made 20 episodes of this - how are they going to string this plot along for 19 more episodes?
I’ll watch a few more, since I enjoyed the first one, but I’m not expecting it to blow me away. Not like Heroes, season 3, which is much more exciting than I expected.
Ok, I have an interesting idea for a conference discussion topic (well, at least I think so). I decide to look around for conferences that might be suitable. I find a website (which will remain nameless for now), which appears to provide the ability to search all conferences.
I find an interesting list on software conferences, but the problem is that the list is worldwide, and includes conferences in the immediate future. I need something that is only in the US, and no earlier than 2009.
This looks like a pretty acceptable interface, all-in-all. Ah, but look at those search buttons. Notice one next to each search field? Surely, you might think, those are just convenience buttons - everything gets munged together into one master query… right?
Alas, you think wrong.
But you cannot search by all three at once!
My kids are watching the 1985 Transformers. The oldest (10) say ‘Cool, Leonard Nimoy is in it’.
I blink. ‘Dylan, who is Leonard Nimoy?’
He says ‘He’s Spock.’
I said ‘Dylan, you’ve never seen Star Trek… how do you know who Spock is?’
He says ‘True, but I’ve seen Futurama!’
What an unexpected treat!
So far this season, Heroes has been pretty tight. Some great twists and turns, and only a couple of inconsistencies.
And you can watch it all on Hulu, with a decent quality picture, for free, with limited commercial interruptions.
One cheer for the 21st century!
