Lost In Comment

New Core Middle Party websites

2012-01-20T17:06:00.000-08:00

So the ideas that came onto the web on this blog for a new political party needed a new home, where attention could be just on them, so I've created two new websites to take that task forward:

Core Middle Party Google+ page

Core Middle Party Blog

I emphasize that so far it is still just me, so that people don't think there is established now a full organization as I see one that is called "Core Middle Party". What I want to do is see if it can be established as an actual organization, but that requires people, infrastructure, organization and I'm sure lots of others things, while now there are just ideas, some websites, and me.

But there is the odd feeling of having new websites born from this blog to carry on, on their own, and I cheer them, which may sound odd. They have a HUGE task ahead if they are to survive in one of the most competitive environments in the world--the United States political system.

This blog will return to whatever I feel like it doing, as it's my personal blog. There will be no need to continue postings on the Core Middle Party idea though, so I can shift, as needed.

Wishing the new websites the best as they move forward into a challenge like no other, in one of the fiercest times in US politics: political season.

Best.

James Harris

Health Insurance Responsibility

2012-01-12T08:37:00.000-08:00

One of the most contentious issues in President Obama's healthcare plan is the requirement that people have health insurance, and while I supported him and Congress in getting the healthcare law passed, I've put forward what I think is a better idea where people can be responsible without being forced, while being kept accountable.

The healthcare idea I have is an important element of the Core Middle Party, an idea for a new political party that I put forward back in October. Critical to any party platform is a healthcare plan and a tax position. I'll talk here about the healthcare plan and how it removes the need for a healthcare mandate.

The key idea of my healthcare plan is allowing health insurance companies to remain businesses, and not charities, while leveraging their key strengths to help people stay healthy, and limit fraud and abuse, as keeping up with how some people try to cheat is what they do. It's their business.

Our federal government is just not as good at figuring out fraud and abuse as private companies, and is not as fast in implementing the best practices as learned from the market, meaning there are continual concerns about waste, fraud and abuse, so I recommend third party administration.

That is what the last company where I worked did, where despite being an insurance company themselves--though not in healthcare--they used United Healthcare to administer their healthcare plan for workers, but the company itself actually paid out claims. That is just a smart way to do things.

So how does that remove a health insurance mandate?

Under my plan people who are healthy and able to pay keep their health insurance like they do now. The one addition is that preventive care becomes automatically part of all plans. Otherwise, no changes.

They are under what I called Core Care.

Health insurance companies pick them because they are insurable. It is a business decision.

If someone is not normally insurable, they still have the same insurance company if they wish, and no health insurance company can refuse anyone. But the health insurance company might put them in the Expected Care tier, where they administer but the government pays.

That person would pay their insurance premiums to the U.S. Treasury.

So let's say someone chooses not to pay for health insurance despite being healthy and despite having the ability to pay. Then they get sick and apply for health insurance! No problem, the health insurance company signs them up and puts them in Expected Care, which also covers indigents who lack the ability to pay.

That is, the system covers everyone, and if someone cannot pay for regular health insurance, even if healthy, they'd go into Expected Care, as indigent.

If you chose not to get health insurance while healthy and got sick, you'd end up considered indigent by the system and the U.S. Treasury would pay for your care.

And the government might review your case and charge you later for your entire cost of care.

You had a chance to get insurance, so why didn't you? If you screwed up, you pay.

So if you screwed up by not getting health insurance when you could, it was your choice. But the consequences are up to legislators.

So what's the problem with other approaches?

Well let's say that a person under a system without mandated insurance decides to screw the system and not get health insurance until he is sick. Then the health insurance company is not then a business if it has to take him on--it becomes a charity.

Worse that person could be then rewarded for being irresponsible, and other people would pay for it.

Punishing them at that point could be more difficult for a private company as it's politically a hot issue. So it is an area for politicians.

In contrast, by allowing people to choose health insurance companies they can pick the ones who give the best service, without refusal being possible for those companies. While the health insurance companies have an incentive to keep people healthy, so that they pay premiums.

While for those who are beyond the realm of profit for private companies, our nation does the right thing and takes care of them, but doesn't administer so the private companies can help in catching fraud, waste and abuse.

I like this plan. To see my original presentation with all the 4 tiers including Core Care and Expected Care explained, you can look at a previous post on this blog.

How hard would it be to try it out?

Our government could means test by taking some people from Medicare and Medicaid and having them pick insurance companies who would third party administer, and we could see if it could work or not.

Those people would just get an insurance card like anyone for, say, United Healthcare, and I don't have any affiliation with them, as I lost my health insurance when I was laid off. For me, being covered by them is just a memory. Yes, I could have done the COBRA thing. No, have never done it as it's too damn expensive I think.

I've sent this plan to my congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, but more of you need to ask for it as well, as one person is not enough, and should not be enough. I like my ideas, as I should, they're mine. But can they really work? Not sure. But if other people think they might and ask for them, then our government might try.

Health insurance companies should not be considered enemies. Smart solutions can turn business strength into an asset for our entire country, bring down healthcare costs, and give people choice without a health insurance mandate.

But still allow accountability for those people who foolishly choose not to get health insurance anyway, when it becomes, universal.

James Harris

A Connecting Reality

2012-01-09T10:16:00.000-08:00

For me the idea of coming up with a political party was intriguing, and coming up with a name seemed like a fun puzzle, where when I had one, it seemed important to attach a platform, but it was all a useful citizen political exercise.

Plenty of times when I hear discussions on various issues I think I know what my position is, until I realize I'm a little muddled on it, and sitting down for a few hours and putting words down has helped me, and I recommend it for others. You might be surprised at what you actually believe, politically, and what you thought you believed. Having to write it down forces different mental muscles to operate.

So now it's a cool thing but I find myself wondering about what it would really take to build a new political party, and the fantasy is no longer just about useful fun. The very concept is daunting and seems highly improbable, and clearly requires, connections. And I don't have what I think are the required ones.

What I do have is the ability to put things up there on the web, which is a wonderful thing we have today, which has to be kept in perspective. For me it's a hobby that is about personal pleasure and little else. No money in it so far. So I have to keep a regular job, worry about the bills, wonder if I'll ever make enough money to date. Fun things. Usual things.

We can be so much more connected today, which I think is great, as it allows you to put things out there that others may be interested in, without bugging family and friends. As a kid I wanted to be a writer, dreamed about it, and at times when I wrote something, where to go with it? Family. Friends. Acquaintances. People at random on the street if I could.

Today, put it up on my blog! So much simpler...

With family and friends relieved of having writing pressured on them, there is less friction there. But feedback here is mostly about seeing web stats. Wondering about hits from various countries. What possibly could they think of what I say? I don't know. But for a wannabe writer, having readers, even if you just know hints of them from abstract stats is better than bugging family.

Connections. I think a lot about connections now and realize fully how much they influence our lives. So much in life is about who you wish to be around who wishes to be around you!

Growing up in a small town I didn't see things that way as small town life is a lot about being stuck with people, and they're stuck with you.

Whereas in a great city like San Francisco, life is about endless possibility, and you're not stuck with anyone, unless you choose to be.

A new person is around every corner, walking by constantly, and streaming in constantly from all over the world. It is the opposite of the small town.

And shifting perspectives is an even greater learning exercise, especially learning to choose. And choose wisely.

After all, nothing like being with people you truly wish to be around. And nothing worse than being stuck with people who hate being stuck with you.

Making one of the best things about the web then is that choice.

James Harris

Joining Core Middle Party?

2011-12-15T10:25:00.000-08:00

Our world is more competitive now than ever, but our politicians have responded to greater challenges by getting worse at their jobs, and we, the people, are told we have no choice but Republicans or Democrats.

But why? Seems to me that if some people fail, it's time to find ways to get people who can do the job, and the failures in our top parties seem intent on blocking talent from within, so we have to get around them, and today you or I can just put ideas out there, and try to find ones that work.

And back in October I put out my ideas for a new party, which I call the Core Middle Party.

Search on it.

If you wonder how to join, consider that I am still a registered Democrat. But I feel like I am a member of the Core Middle Party, with my membership to it now just in my heart and mind.

There is no physical organization. No funding. There is no place to send money. No placards or television commercials.

For now the Core Middle Party is just an idea, but I invite you to read my ideas and put out your own! Together we can find a solution and it is our job if you believe in Democracy--rule by the people.

So what if we have failures currently pretending to be real politicians? Why wouldn't they? They can't do the job, but what would they do if they weren't getting paid to work for us? Tend their gardens? Sell pizzas?

If I were a bad politician in power I'd stay as long as I could as well. It is our job to make the decisions unless you're tired of the democratic process and tired of actually controlling our destiny as a nation. If so, leave them be to do badly, and get paid.

If not, work. Think. Do your job as a citizen and maybe I can help with clarity. For instance, is our government over regulated? Well, do you want doctors who don't have to have medical licenses?

Do medical regulations need to be relaxed? Anxious to have a "doctor" who takes a weekend course and then starts injecting you with stuff?

How about building codes? I live in San Francisco, so for me it's not a minor issue. When an earthquake strikes, do you want less regulation, or smart regulation?

See? Our current politicians distort the argument, as it's not about too much or too little regulation but about smart regulation. 21st century solutions. Competing effectively. Doing the best job possible given reality.

Reality check.

If a politician tells you there is too much regulation he is distorting the argument for his own gain and not yours.

We can change the discussion, and force politicians to work at real problems and not arguing or talking points meant to allow them to do the one thing they seem best at doing--subsidies for that person already rich, which I call white-collar welfare. Tax cuts for rich people, who just need more and more, no matter how many they get.

So joining the Core Middle Party may now be just about changing how you think about problems.

It may be an impatience with argument distortions and refusing to be told that you are powerless if you are an American.

If you are not, then maybe you are powerless, but if you were ever patriotic for this nation, and if you ever believed in our ideals then you have a job to do. So do it.

It is your job. WE control our own country. No one else. There is no one else to blame.

James Harris

The Core Middle Party

2011-10-27T12:30:00.000-07:00

Increasing challenges as our nation moves into the 21st century have not been met by our current political parties, while technological change has given a unique in history opportunity for the voice of the people, including each individual to emerge.

For the first time in our history, each individual has the opportunity through connecting technology to put forward a position, a platform or even ideas for an entirely new political party, with the flexibility, vision, and objectivity to handle the needs of our new world. And we, the people, should not miss this opportunity to be heard.

So here in this post, I'll present the foundations for a new political party, envisioned to leap forward with the best of today, while holding on to the best of our past, as a nation, as a people who have always striven to keep getting better.

Wonderful thing about today is you can have your say, and what I say here is mine, and I hope many others take the opportunity to put forward even more of their own ideas, including new political parties, as we need change that works, and works for us.

Not just words, but real opportunity, real vision, and real progress so that we compete on the world stage at our best, literally being the best that we can be.

And who am I? Just one citizen, living in San Francisco, California, who is a registered Democrat, but I'd really like one day to put down my affiliation as: Core Middle Party

The Core Middle Party believes fundamentally that intelligent governance is what is needed, and that reality tells us: in an intelligently governed world people's lives tend to get better, not worse.

The role of government is to protect and enable its citizens.

All our rights under the Constitution of the United States and under the Declaration of Independence are re-affirmed.

The separation of church and state is a core value that goes to the heart of maintaining both our freedoms and our objectivity in seeing the world as it is, and not as some wish it to be.

And it guarantees the power of our plurality, with the recognition that as a nation we are better from the strengths in our differences than by trying to stand in a complex world on one particular religious point of view.

Freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the freedom to gather peacefully are critical to the health of the nation.

That there is a fundamental right to access to information, and also a fundamental right to privacy, as well as the right to, as best one can, choose one's own destiny, including as a matter of course, a woman's right to choose.

That in protecting its citizens government must maintain a strong defense, and face the world objectively, with the means to defend its citizens against all enemies foreign or domestic. And in so doing the the US military remains under civilian authority as it has always, from its founding.

Proper governance requires accountability.

Those who say one thing to gain office, in order to do something else, shall under this political party's platform face mechanisms for their recall or dismissal from office, sufficient to make this practice a thing of the past.

The need to care for those in need is fundamental to a modern, civilized healthy society, which requires education for all children, food for all children, and healthcare for all children.

The needs for a healthy populace require healthcare for all, paid for by the able.

In order for accountability, there must be transparency so that at all times the citizens know what their elected representatives are doing, so that if necessary corrective actions can be taken by a knowledgeable electorate.

As government requires funds, it is accepted that a progressive tax system is necessary for the proper funding of government, with no more complexity than necessary. And that cherished deductions are not part of political game playing, specifically, deductions for the care of children, the mortgage deduction, and charitable deductions are to remain.

These positions represent what is fundamental to the basic core of governance in an advanced, modern and just society. They do not represent all that is necessary, but are a guide to what can be, should be, as a template for working for an ever better nation.

The history of our nation is more brilliant for those who spoke up, and let themselves be heard, and today each person who is willing, has that potential to reach out to others and be heard.

The ideas here represent one approach, and more should speak, and more voices must be heard, as we, the people, should not miss this wonderful opportunity that technology has given us, which is to make our wishes, our hopes, our dreams for a better future be known.

For the betterment of us all.

James Harris

Three Ideas

2011-10-15T13:55:00.001-07:00

For me talking about my own ideas helps give perspective especially when they aren't picked up, like I want to again mention three ideas here, where one covers healthcare, the other covers illegal copying of digital content and the final one is for the post office.

So why have my own idea for healthcare? Well, the plan put forward by President Obama has I think some aspects which worried me so I figured out my own and put it out, where essentially I copied from the playbook of the insurance company that laid me off. You see, they third party administered healthcare even though they are themselves an insurance company.

I will not say the name of the company that laid me off, but the health insurance was from United Healthcare so I used to have an insurance card from them. But if I got sick, my old company would have paid for it! Why?

Well if it puzzles you imagine you're a billionaire, do you have health insurance still?

You may think, no, but if you're smart, yes. As, consider why you might keep insurance in general even though you can self-insure since you're rich, like imagine you're riding along in your limousine in New York City and your car back-ends another car.

Were you at fault?

What if you end up settling out of court and then read about professionals who know how to trick people into running into their back-ends, as a racket, and also learn that insurance companies are adept at catching this crime. But how would you know?

Just because you're a billionaire does not mean you're expert on all things.

So you have an insurance company despite being rich, and let them administer claims, but you actually pay out if there are any damages and smart people do that and smart companies do that but our federal government does not.

Here's more on my idea on my other blog for those who wish to read more.

I've had the idea for years and rich people and companies have been doing it for years. And notice, I just copied the idea from a company that laid me off. I have sent it to my congresswoman who since I live in San Francisco happens to be the distinguished Nancy Pelosi. Got a form letter reply from her office, but that's not a big deal. An idea of this kind would probably need a lot of support from others.

And now to the next idea as years ago I started worrying about copying DVD's as I'd like to be able to make back-up copies of DVD's I buy as it's easier to use a back-up without scratching it.

Now as technology continues to progress I'd just as soon copy them to a harddrive as it's easier than keeping up with piles of the things.

So I came up with an idea years ago which involves self-encryption where your computer encrypts a copy so you can't just give it away, freeing you up from any begging from friends who demand you let them copy your stuff.

Turns out that an actual company later did something like it, though I have no idea if they noticed me talking about this idea and they were taken to court by the Motion Picture Association of America, aka the MPAA.

The idea by that company involved encrypting a copy of a movie to your harddrive, but the MPAA said if I remember correctly, among other things, that people might just rent the movie from Blockbuster and copy it.

And yup, I've talked about this idea on my other blog and here, including an answer to the scenario of people renting from Blockbuster.

What's nice to me about the two ideas above is that they both allow for real world connection, where you can read about third party administration and I took the idea from an actual company, and the idea of a billionaire who is smart enough not to self-insure--unlike the US Government--can resonate. And copying your own stuff is something people can understand where a company tried to let you and got crushed in court. So yeah, there is real world to get perspective.

This last idea is for the post office, as in any post office around the world, but I was specifically hoping to help the US Post Office which keeps getting in the news for being in trouble.

So with this idea you could write a letter on your computer and have the post office print it out, put it in an envelope and deliver from the closest post office that could do all of the above. In my original posting of the idea I talked about scanning at one post office for delivery to another, but hey, that was just to get the concept started.

While technology gives us lots of options now there are situations where it's nice to have a postmark, or a postmark is needed. And the concept could give the equivalent of next day delivery, or really fast, with conventional letters.

When I look at the news I consider problems in various areas related to my ideas and wonder how the world might be different if they were more widely implemented, especially when I know some of these ideas are actually being used by some smart people, like third party administration, or were tried to be used by others, like self-encryption.

While some just make sense, like print on demand from the post office with local delivery.

Will any of it ever happen? I think, yes. These are smart ideas which I think have a natural growth rate, but it could take time.

Nothing like perspective to consider that not only may simple answers be available for many important things, but they may actually be being widely used, but just not by certain parties, and your life is changed regardless.

Reality is complicated, but answers are not necessarily.

James Harris

One Black Viewpoint

2011-10-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me to talk about my own unique perspective on unemployment. I am a black male who grew up in Georgia, USA, literally next to a farm. My parents as I've mentioned before in posts were Jehovah's Witnesses, which shifts things a bit. But then again, that is simply a Fundamentalist Christian sect.

For me talking more here is an aspect of a potentially more public life, so it's kind of getting some of that story out ahead of time while I can quietly think about it. And also I think it is relevant to current issues as I am unemployed now.

I have been unemployed since late last year when I was laid off from a data entry job at a large insurance company. And I looked for a job for a couple of weeks, and drew unemployment, and then decided I had a great opportunity to do some thinking, so got off unemployment. Couldn't take the check when I wasn't looking for work. And I needed to not look for work for a while so I could think.

So yes, I quit taking the check, quite a few months ago. Since that time I've spent a lot of time thinking, wondering about what my next move will be, but I have lots of options, which is why I could simply walk away from thousands of dollars.

When I was a kid I carefully concluded that my family was lower middle-class. Both my parents worked, but my mother eventually went into sales, first with cosmetics and then with encyclopedias, long before the Internet wiped away that business. She did well, and eventually matched my father's salary. He worked a blue-collar job.

Their marriage collapsed when I was in my early teens. They had a bitter divorce, and my mother eventually descended into poverty with us in custody. I got my first job at 15. A summer program for disadvantaged youth. And later worked as a bag-boy when I was 16. My mother took my entire check. I got to keep the tips.

Both my parents eventually remarried but my mother remained in poverty. My father is middle-class.

By the time I went to college, my mother who had pushed education so eloquently when I was growing up, was so lost I had to beg her to sign my financial aid form for college. I filled it out for her. But also I had a full tuition scholarship to Vanderbilt University.

I went and graduated in 1991, so yup, my twenty year anniversary is this year. And in fact this month, but I'm unemployed. Not terribly motivated about going, but I could. Could just get a ticket and go, but I'm busy, doing things like typing up this blog post.

Ok. So I have a unique perspective on black unemployment where I've tried to make it clear that my situation is unique. I feel confident that I can get a job when I wish but right now I need to figure things out, like why my mother has such a difficult time.

I have tried to help my mother. I think I learned a lot of middle-class lessons in college and since, which I try to share with family, and have faced endless frustration. It's like I can teach them nothing about being a middle-class person. I have watched them toss away money in simple amazement and incredulity. They live in a different world. I don't know how to bring them into mine. And that includes my father who thankfully at least is middle-class. But I know he could also live better.

Why did my parents go from a lower middle-class life to a rather wrecked, in my opinion, post-divorce life, shattering their lives, except for my father who mostly did ok, but still, and forcing their kids to struggle that much harder than they might have otherwise?

Can't blame American racism.

In my opinion, they both have beliefs and habits that come from growing up in this country, but then again, they both have had lots of opportunities to move beyond them, right?

I find my family puzzling. I find many issues of the black community in the United States in general to be puzzling. Behaviors that make no sense leave shattered lives and communities. People who do much worse than they should when it can be difficult to figure out why, at least for me.

Soon enough I'll need to see if I can get a job. Maybe I'll end up a very scared and disappointed person who wishes he'd been more sensible about things when it might have been easier, but I'm sure I'll be fine.

The Black Community is an oddity. As long as it fails to see itself as being bizarre it cannot see where it acts really, really weird. Will not pay attention to endless waste and wasted opportunity. Will fail to see when it simply throws money away. When it simply throws people away.

I've discussed my own unique opinion of American racism on this blog.

Every thing I write is, of course, my opinion which I emphasize so that it is clear I am talking about one black viewpoint.

Now then, going to go back to thinking.

Soon enough, I'll need to make money again. Maybe I should think on that issue?

James Harris

Understanding tax cuts

2011-08-21T09:24:00.000-07:00

As an issue there are few that get as much interest in modern American society as tax cuts. And I think a problem in this society is that people think it's obvious why some people would want tax cuts, which is where you get a massive fail.

It's not obvious enough.

If it were obvious then the issues could be discussed intelligently, while instead people seem to be intransigent, I think is the word, with two sides who are crazed enough at times to endanger the entire planet's economy over the issue!

Seems it should be figured out.

The best answer I have is that some people get really rich, and then they eventually die. If they have descendants, often those descendants are not as capable as the person who got really rich!

It's the same problem that nobility have. The guy who became king is a bad-ass. His kids? Not so much.

Well the descendants want to do well as well, and of course it kind of bites for them to realize they're not as good as the one who became king, or master of finance, which means they engage in all kinds of bizarre behavior around the issue.

With nobility maybe they'd start a war and just get killed, but with finance, maybe they start a financial war and go bankrupt! (I think there are people who would rather start a physical war and get killed because of their shoddy skills than end up bankrupt.)

So there you have it: people who really need tax cuts are people afraid of losing their money.

Oh, how is it that Americans can miss something so simple?

Well the United States has bizarre beliefs about money, and many in this country believe that rich people are automatically awesome and intelligent.

They do not realize that you can both be rich and stupid.

Our global financial system is getting really competitive. It's easier to lose your money, ergo people afraid of losing their money are fighting hard for a leg-up, which means tax cuts!

Many of these people gained their money from someone else giving it to them while for the most part the ones who fought hard and earned it themselves, like say, Warren Buffett, are more agnostic towards tax cuts because they are not as afraid.

They know how to make money.

The others are those pitiful things called descendants, who have that eternal problem that Mother Nature or chance or Fate can give some dude or dudette all kinds of abilities to conquer and dammit, just leave their kids high and dry as ordinary as the day is long.

I don't blame them for wanting help!

Now then, when you see people howl about the need for tax cuts, just look at how they got their money, and you will be puzzled no more.

James Harris

Country music is not racist

2011-08-16T15:46:00.000-07:00

One of the odd things to me is a feeling at times that I need to defend liking country music, which seems to be colored by concerns about American racism. But the thing is, in my experience, country music has rarely if ever had anything to do with race, and when it does, it has stood out as being peculiar to certain artists, and not the genre itself.

For instance one of my best memories was from when I was a soldier in training at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, and us soldiers just loved bars. And one night when we went to a country bar, I had a great night dancing. At one point, holding in my arms a beautiful blonde, one of many wonderful women I danced with that night, I asked her about the willingness of the women to so freely dance, and she said they just liked dancing. Such a simple answer. Her husband was taking a break. No big deal. To my embarrassment I got a little forward, and she just corrected me and I flew straight the rest of the night.

When you look for innovation in American music it's all over the place, but it's worth pointing out that you can usually find it in country music, where you will find any number of other genres considered with covers, can see a wellspring of appreciation for all forms of music. And listen to artists who tell you of inspirations from all over.

I grew up with country music as I grew up in Georgia, USA, so to me it's just natural. I heard country music along with everything else.

And for those who appreciate it, it has so much to offer, especially for those couples that, well, just like to dance.

James Harris

Running away from religion

2011-05-17T09:37:00.000-07:00

For myself to work through certain things ahead of time, I'm putting up this post, to note why I'll try to carefully avoid any type of religious debate, and it's so much about the religion of my past.

As a child I was thoroughly indoctrinated in the fundamentalist Christian religion Jehovah's Witnesses, which I'll colorfully call in this post, the religion of no.

No birthday presents. No Christmas presents. No girlfriend, unless dating with the expectation of possible marriage, preferably with a chaperon. No military service.

And I could go on.

On top of all the things we were supposed to not do, which included the Pledge of Allegiance, so as a child I had to step out of the classroom when it was recited, you were dragged to something called a Kingdom Hall, which most people call church, usually about twice a week, plus bible study. And routinely, we were supposed to try and convince other people to join, which actually could be kind of fun. I got to see a lot of different people that way, but still it was a religious dominance of your life that people outside of such religions may find hard to fathom.

The religion seeks to dominate every aspect of your life and tells you that is God's will. For me it was my parent's will, and while they could make me, not much I could do but go along, and at times I was a true believer. But once I could move away from my parents' sphere of influence I left it as well.

It was in my opinion a relentless religion dedicated to dominating your life, and I left it when I could. And with it, I left religion entire.

I recognize that my feelings are very personal so don't trust myself in being rational on the subject, so no point in pushing one position or another on anyone else!

But having freed myself from the shackles of the religion of no, I have no intent of ever taking the slightest chance of being imprisoned again by any religion.

And it's not that I don't see a social role for religion, and it's not like I will not go to church, occasionally. But I just won't be committed to it.

And mostly I'd like to just not comment on it.

James Harris

My take on American racism

2011-01-31T19:57:00.000-08:00

Having grown up "black" in the American South as I grew up a black kid next to a farm in a small town in Georgia, in the United States, I have my own unique view on American racism, which is a subject on which I've given much thought.

Here I will present my own very peculiar and highly opinionated take on what most people in the United States think is American racism, which is wrong: they think I suggest that it is physical repulsion for someone because of their race.

Physical repulsion is key here to the wrong definition!

That's important as I've encountered American "whites" that I see as being very racist who claim they aren't! And it's like, they may put a hand on my shoulder as if that proves it! See? Not physically repulsed!--they seem to be saying.

But racism is not physical repulsion.

It's believing you're superior or that another person is inferior because of the color of their skin for the most part, as that is usually the biggest racial indicator that people use, though they also go with a variety of physical characteristics.

Surprisingly to some, scientists are not quite sure what race is, and a good introduction can be seen on, yup, the Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(classification_of_humans)

I've noted on this blog that I believe that racism is actually about class in the United States and is an attempt by some people to believe they're members of a nobility (without actually saying it).

Why? Because I believe, a lot of early American settlers came from England, and pretending to be nobility was kind of a bad thing to do, which could be punished. Americans are dead-set on not actually stating that they believe they are noble by birth, so American racism is a bizarre variant where they behave as if they are, while refusing to state they believe they are.

It is an attempt at a back-door into English nobility, in my opinion.

So yes, a white man who is racist can not only date a black woman, he might marry her! Because American racism is not physical repulsion. It is a feeling of innate superiority on the basis of "race". So a racist white man might marry a black woman because he feels he can dominate someone he believes is inferior. Just like a noble in Old England might marry a commoner. (Of course, women can find men who will marry them because they're believed to be inferior for lots of reasons of which race is just one.)

And a white racist can have black friends!!!

He or she simply associates with people believed to be innately of a lower class.

So why again the dodge? Why is American racism presented so often as physical repulsion as if that's all that matters?

Again, because America inherits a lot of its heritage from England, and pretending to be royalty is a major crime under feudal law!!!

Commoners are not allowed to pretend to be of a higher class.

In the South where I grew up Southerners would claim to be "gentlemen" and engage in a lot of pretend royalty behavior, which they would not admit was pretending to be actual English royalty in any way shape or form because that is forbidden under feudal law!

But that's what they were doing and still do when they engage in such behavior.

You see, they wish to be English nobles. They wish to be better than commoners. They wish to be royalty.

So they find some people to be beneath them and that is American racism, in my opinion.

So how racist then is modern American society? I'd say, not really.

Most Americans actually shirk from seeing themselves as innately superior to anyone, and really are not racist. But God help you if you run into one who is.

He may lie to you incessantly. She may calmly inform you that she is not racist and then just as calmly insult your intelligence to your face, because of your race. He may quietly inform you of bizarre things as if they were absolute facts.

My favorite such thing is the assertion that Asians do not like black people.

Living in San Francisco, I know quite a few Asians and haven't noticed much if any American racism from any of them.

But I'll end with a story that puzzled me for a while.

I was at a private party a few years back at a new nightclub that had been rented for the occasion. In the course of a conversation with a seemingly nice fellow where it's pertinent for the story to note that he was white, I realized he was becoming a bit agitated as he talked about having lived in Chinatown, and not getting along well with the Asian community there.

Inwardly I shrugged, not particularly caring, as I was half listening to him, but he got my attention quickly when he said to me like a confidant that he was sure I knew how Asians were, and that they really didn't like black people, even more than white people.

So yeah, end of that conversation, but what made the story fascinating to me for years was that I was actually eye-flirting with a beautiful Asian woman, which was why I was distracted while I listened to him! He'd not only reacted badly to try and convince me of the hopelessness of my interest I surmised later, he'd tried to smear the entire Asian race while so doing!

But why? Well, it occurred to me that it made him feel inferior for her attention to be on me, if he thought himself the superior male, by race, then he needed to convince me.

More than once in San Francisco I've been informed by whites that Asians don't like black people. Isn't that fascinating? In my experience, Asians seem to take you as you are, more than anything else, and to adjust based on how you behave--not the color of your skin.

Which is what we should all do, and I think, thankfully, most Americans do.

James Harris

One view of the merit argument in American politics

2010-12-10T04:38:00.000-08:00

Finishing out 2010 with a slate of bills held up in Congress because of a recalcitrant Republican block vowing to not pass anything until they get what they want in the Senate, it can be hard for most to understand what all the fighting is over, but I argue that the issue is about views of merit by the American population.

To keep things simple for myself I'll talk what I call the "Progressive" position versus the "Republican" position, though some might argue over whether or not I accurately define the Progressive position and some who identify as Republican may argue over what I claim is their position on merit, and I'll come back to that simplification later.

Oh, I have a very conservative background because my parents literally beat it into me, but I was brought up as a Jehovah's Witness, so there's a natural outsider aspect to that crazy conservative indoctrination. I've rejected most of that background though struggle with some things, and don't self identify as a liberal though I have very liberal views on most things, and love being in San Francisco for that reason among others.

But am I really a Progressive?

I look for reform. I think the government has a responsibility to its citizens and an increasingly important role in an ever more complex world. But I won't knee-jerk agree with a crowd on how best to get things done, and feel quite comfortable having my own opinion at odds with the group, whatever that may be. I think intelligent governance is what's needed, and don't accept someone else telling me what that is, as I think reality tells us: in an intelligently governed world people's lives tend to get better, not worse.

To keep things simple I'll call Republican the position being shown by the Republican block of the Senate, which is fighting to renew Bush tax cuts at all levels, as I hope to explain why, by talking about how different sides see merit.

The primary merit position of the American people is that you mostly earn what you have though it is accepted that some people just get things handed to them, but within certain rules, like winning the lottery, or your parents earned a block of it and handed it to you--though even then past American societies tended to take a lot of that away from you with what Republicans call the "death tax".

Why? Well a fundamental American ideal is that you earn what you have. So the merit hope is that people do well based on their own efforts, not because of birth, luck, or worst, cheating or stealing from others.

America, I suggest, wants to believe it is based on hard-work as an ethic and that people do better in life by working hard for their own good and the good of society, and the debate in Congress is about two differing views on this issue where it is my opinion:

1. Republicans believe that wealth in general shows worth, and that people who have worked smarter and harder tend to become the wealthy and should be rewarded--not punished--for that hard work which benefits society. In their view others who do less well did so because they were not good enough. So that homeless person is not smart enough, to keep himself off the streets in that view, as his circumstance reveals his ability.

2. Progressives believe that advantage can play a role in wealth and it's not a simple way to figure out who worked the best and hardest, so yes, Bill Gates did very well in our country, but how well would he have done if he had been born in China? Would China in the 1980's have given him the freedom? Also Progressives believe that some people can be disadvantaged by circumstance so that homeless vet on the street may be there because his PTSD was not properly treated among other things, and it is not an indication of his merit as an American worker.

I'm simplifying for a reason and using a homeless veteran because so many of them do walk our streets, and from a Progressive position, they can still be a major benefit to this country if we can help them, while from a Republican position, they are where they belong based on their own efforts.

So the howls from liberals over the shift in the Obama position is a fear that the president is shifting to a view that people who are disadvantaged are there because they lack the merit to do better. So rather than have the government, for instance, do a jobs program, it is mercifully extending unemployment benefits, as a recognition that the Progressives won't just accept the tax cuts which are meant as an incentive to the people who can do better on whom the country presumably relies to grow more rapidly.

President Obama has notably avoided turning to a direct jobs program by the federal government skipping entirely a path taken by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he was working to end the Great Depression.

But from a Republican view, it is worthless to hand jobs to people who are not good enough on merit to do better. Charity is all that is left.

For Republicans my examples and claims of their position may be ludicrous and execrable, as fear-mongering or "class warfare", with vast over-simplifications.

That may be true. But to the extent that ideas from either position resonate, I think it helps for people to seriously question themselves what do they personally believe about merit.

Is it a "death tax" to tell a young socialite that the bulk of the money earned by her father will be returned to society? Or is it social fairness that pushes her to learn to make her own money?

Or is it more motivating to allow the rich to become as rich as they can without taking their money away from them to fuel an ever growing federal bureaucracy that threatens to eat up the country entirely? We can't all be federal workers, right?

In challenging others to think in different ways with admitted oversimplification my point is that these positions can be understood and what I'm saying here is not meant to give an answer to the merit question--merely to help define it.

James Harris

Entertainment industry against the world

2010-08-28T19:17:00.000-07:00

With as much attention as the entertainment industry gets, it can seem a lot bigger than it is relative to the entire United States economy. But of course the entertainment industry is in the business of getting attention so that is expected. However, its executives I'll argue here have an out-sized influence on the emerging web economy, which is putting their perspective against the world economy.

That can seem way strange, but first off, how big is the entertainment industry? Trying to find US numbers I ended up at the US Census and a page that indicated for 2008 it was just under $200 billion. Wow, tiny. Don't think so? Well looking at the Wikipedia page on the United States, the entire US economy is roughly $14.25 trillion.

So the entire US economy is roughly 71 times the size of the US entertainment industry? That is, the US entertainment industry is roughly 1.38% the size of the US economy.

But it is an attention industry! It seems much bigger I'd say simply because it is so loud. Television and movies dominate people's attention on a daily basis. Music fills our lives with song, dance, and emotional moments. Celebrities are big news from their daily lives to the seemingly endless problems of some of them.

That industry naturally seems large, though it is relatively tiny. It is a small industry in comparison to the overall economy.

So why am I hammering that home? Well the Internet is emerging as a new economic force which is impacting a lot of the overall economy, but in terms of pay models on the web--how people actually get revenue--methods and ideas I argue are primarily coming from one place--the entertainment industry.

To some extent it makes sense. People think of seeing videos through the web, so yeah, why shouldn't say, movie executives figure out how to make that pay? It may seem to make sense, but the web is so much more than video, and potentially its economic impact dwarfs that of any vision that an entertainment executive might have from his or her tiny industry.

It may make a lot of noise, but entertainment is a tiny industry.

Most natural pay models that people use every day, which businesses use every day, have nothing to do with the pay models of the entertainment industry. If they tried to use those, they'd go out of business. For instance, would you buy a car you couldn't test drive? But how do you test drive a movie?

If your barber or hairdresser started demanding money upfront, would that be ok with you? After all, you know people, once they get the goods how do you make them pay? Entertainment executives have that problem: people read the book, the novelty goes away, they don't want to then pay.

Novelty industries have novel rules to those industries, an issue I address in more detail on my other blog, with the post: Where is the money?

The issue is not minor. If I am correct then an industry built on getting people's attention through novelty is running the web counter to the world's interests by not putting up pay models that are more natural to most people because its entertainment industry executives live in a world foreign to most people--a novel industry.

In their world, you can't trust people to pay if they can get the novelty for free. But you get remarkable drops even within entertainment areas. So for years it was difficult to pay for music! Until the company Apple let people pay 99 cents for downloads. YouTube for years did not give viewers even the option to connect to a site to download music. The belief was that people would not pay.

If your hairdresser or barber thought the same way it'd be like them worrying that if you didn't pay before your hair was cut, that you'd run out the door as soon as it was!

Entertainment executives live in a different world from other businesspeople. And their industry is a sliver of the US economy. But their influence on the emerging web is as over-sized as the attention their industry gets, and it may be costing the world.

We need businesspeople from other industries thinking hard about how to use the web without knee-jerk beliefs like, people refuse to pay on the web. Or, people are set on free on the web.

Don't let entertainment set the view that holds, until the obvious proves it wrong, like Apple did with iTunes. Let's get smarter first, and open the door for more opportunity by thinking harder about how commerce, business, and people work, in the real world--not the Hollywood version.

James Harris

My Healthcare Plan

2009-09-09T17:10:00.000-07:00

On July 26th of this year after pondering healthcare for some time I produced the following tweet:

My healthcare plan: Preventive Care--everybody, Core Care--insurables, Expected Care--not easily insured, Elder Care--quality of life at end

Here is a post explaining in detail the plan, which is tiered:

1. Preventive Care--the value of free preventive care for everyone is one of the least debated critical elements to a solid healthcare plan. The tweet notes that everyone is included.

2. Core Care--Health insurance companies get a lot of heat for trying to only insure healthy people when from their perspective that makes sense for profit, which is a huge issue which has created a lot of pain and misery.

This plan suggest that you can turn a negative around and see healthcare companies as being adept at figuring out people who are likely, or "expected" to get ill at some point, so that they can get help NOW, while allowing health insurers to still be for profit when it comes to the healthy, who would make up the Core Care tier.

So they are the insurables--those who are currently in healthcare plans now. For them, little would change except preventive care would now be guaranteed free.

3. Expected Care--Here those selected out as likely to become ill or who are currently ill who no longer are easily insurable under normal plans are now in a government paid for plan that is third-party administered by the health insurers.

So everyone gets the same health insurers, but those who are part of the Expected Care tier are third-party administered and the government pays for their care.

They pay premiums to the federal government, not the health insurer. If you're in Expected Care you get a bill from the federal government, not the health insurer.

Health insurance companies are then rewarded for figuring out which people are likely to get sick later and properly placing them in Expected Care because the government pays, and we're all benefited as they can get proper care as soon as possible. The health insurers now become part of the first line of defense for detecting those who need help!

But whether you're in Core Care or Expected Care you carry the same insurers card and the only difference is with payment: If you are Core Care and get ill, your insurer pays. If you are Expected Care and get ill, the government pays.

4. Elder Care--Is the final tier handling issues specific to the elderly with an emphasis on quality of life at end. It is also a government paid tier.

-------------------------------

One critical feature of this healthcare plan is that it rewards health insurance companies for being businesses by putting their strengths to public good. For instance, an obese smoker with a history of hypertension in his family might find himself put in Expected Care, which could be a wake-up call in and of itself. But it also means he is at risk, and healthcare workers can focus on the specifics of that risk simply by noting into which tier he has been placed by the experts who need to get it right to survive.

If healthcare companies do a great job, then their profits come from the healthy--by them remaining healthy. Those with underlying conditions are not discriminated against, and have the same health insurance carriers, who for them are third-party administrators, with payment coming from the government.

Some might still worry about discrimination against those ill or likely to get ill, but it has a built in protection.

To understand the beauty of this plan imagine healthcare insurers put all the people who are sick or likely to get sick into Core Care, and all the people who are healthy into Expected Care, then what happens?

They pay to their coverage limits at a much higher rate, while the government pays at a much lower rate as its Expected Care population remains healthier than expected, so there is a natural check-and-balance built into the system, rewarding for-profit companies for proper selection and punishing them financially for getting it wrong.

And that is the expansion of the 140 characters from the original tweet. It is exactly 140 characters as I needed every character I could use to get an entire healthcare plan in there.

James Harris

RealNetworks against the MPAA

2009-06-14T13:02:00.001-07:00

Link above goes to: Geek.com

Quote from the Source:

Real says Hollywood is a cartel, trying to kill DMCA Fair Use
May. 18, 2009 (8:11 am) By: Rick Hodgin

The ongoing legal battle between a group of Hollywood movie studios and RealNetworks stepped up a notch. RealNetworks filed a countersuit against the DVD Copy Control Association (CCA) and all major movie movie studios claiming abusive use of power....

The story here is amazing as it's hard to comprehend exactly why there is such a battle in this area, and I like the article I'm linking to, as it puzzles over the same issue and ultimately offers some conspiracy theories.

I know, I know, people tend to dismiss conspiracies, but what if they DO exist?

I have a personal interest here myself as I produced an idea I call Digital Media Equipment Self-Encryption or DMESE for short, and introduced it on one of my other blogs near the end of January 2007.

I gave it away as open source and have since discussed it on that blog and on this one, including a post which addresses a concern I've seen mentioned in press reports about the ongoing court battle, which I called completing DMESE.

Now that post was back in early July 2007, and handles the issue by having the system ask for the DVD that was copied, again, after some period of time like 30 days to try and ensure that the DVD was purchased by the user and not borrowed.

So nearly two years ago I had a solution out on the web that answers the objection I've seen reported as the main plank of the case against RealNetworks with its copying software, which I should mention has a component that is shared with my DMESE which is that the copy is encrypted, which is where the "self-encryption" part of DMESE comes into the equation.

I'm not saying that RealNetworks used DMESE (as if they did they'd need to attribute the idea to me as that's what open source means, free, but say where you got it from) and it's a simple enough notion that I don't think that is an issue.

But consider a massive court battle costing millions of dollars and involving such massive use of resources for a problem I feel confident I solved, almost two years ago.

But would anyone pay?

2009-05-24T07:07:00.000-07:00

I've been promoting this idea of actually paying for content, like a really good news article, after you read it, as only then do you know that it's worth paying for, and I think a natural issue with the idea is, would the average person pay?

And I think the simple answer is, no. But this idea is not for average people.

I call it Pay Back Value, and it's simply acting on the web like one would at a high end restaurant--you consume first, then you pay.

However, there are two types of people in the world: those who would pay without threat of punishment, and those who would run out of restaurants without paying all the time if there were no such threat.

The ease of distribution on the Internet means that you can market to the first set, and not worry as much about the second as unlike with a restaurant where the food has a higher reproduction cost, on the Internet, there is little cost in reproduction (production costs remain high!!!) so limited loss from the theft!

Electronic distribution and reproduction is cheap--buying, preparing and cooking food is not.

Still you can get a herd problem where even people who want to pay, feel stupid about paying if there is a perception that no one else is paying or that most are not, so the idea actually gives you the ability to identify people who deliberately steal value, and credit cards can help explain how it works.

You get a credit card, right? But what if you have no intention of ever paying?

When will the credit card company know?

Ans. When they send that first bill and you don't pay it.

What if you pay part of it, or pay for a while just to build up credit and then quit paying?

Isn't that reason for credit card companies to never issue credit cards?

What are they thinking!!!

Similarly to credit cards, you let people sign up for something that gives them content without them incurring upfront cost, on the expectation that they will pay for what they value, and if they don't pay, you find out after some time, like a couple of months.

Then you can stop giving them the content.

I like using the New York Times as an example, as last time I checked they have people sign up now to see articles on the Web, but you can see them for free with no ability to pay later.

Say they institute this concept. People can PBV--pay back value. Like there's a PBV button on the bottom of the page after the news article or column, you can hit that button and pay a dime or something, or if it didn't seem worth it to you, move on.

No payment, no penalty.

Hypothetically as I have no idea what the numbers would be (but psychologists should be interested!!!) they find that 20% of their users pay back more value than if they bought the physical paper and do this month after month, 40% pay back regularly--I know I said above the average would not pay but these are Times readers!!! I'm assuming a higher class of people--and 10% pay intermittently, while 30% do not pay at all.

At their discretion they can block members of the 30% who do not pay from their site, for instance, if someone is reading article after article, day after day, and giving nothing in return, they might simply cut that user off.

Also they can look at the content people across the board are clicking on and buying or not buying, and using regularly paying users as a benchmark for the real value of the paper--kind of a mark to market with content--get an accounting of their losses from theft of content without paying.

For the first time, they can get a real monetary number compiling losses, and have the ability to weed out people who will not pay, and they can reward that top 20% who regularly pay, so most importantly, they regain the ability to reward their best customers.

Quite simply, only then does the Times become a business again.

Free is not a business model.

I have no doubt that paying later will eventually dominate the Web as it's how we do most of our buying in the real world. We rarely if ever pay upfront without being able to thoroughly check for quality.

So the remarkable thing is that the Internet is backwards!!! It's not that the Internet was so advanced that money doesn't work any more.

It's that it's a laggard to how people actually do most of their buying in the real world.

James Harris

About the Zamboni Brand Ice-Resurfacing Machine

2009-05-23T08:18:00.000-07:00

Link above goes to: The New York Times

Quote from the Source:

SPORTS / HOCKEY
As Economy Stumbles, the Zamboni Glides On
By JOHN BRANCH
Published: May 23, 2009
The form, function and sales output of the Zamboni ice-resurfacing machine have barely changed in decades.

Good article. I learned a lot that I didn't know and it was rather heartening. A nice positive read to try and balance out so much doom and gloom lately.

Questioning with money

2009-05-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

Link above goes to: The New York Times

Quote from the Source:

YOUR MONEY / ASSET ALLOCATION
Time for a New Strategy?
By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD
Published: May 21, 2009
The definition of diversification is evolving as hard-hit investors rethink traditional approaches to take advantage of shorter-term opportunities.

Speed and liquidity. I'm no expert and I'm not rich, as I feel I'm at least for the moment solidly middle-class, but it just seems to me that when information shoots around the planet so fast it's harder to get away with bad bets.

Markets are punishing dumb moves when before you could get away with them as long as you were a big player or got a herd following you but today's market casually punishes entire countries.

It's a whole new world.

A promise to pay

2009-05-14T16:45:00.000-07:00

If you start to wonder what is money, one of the first things that comes up is that it is a medium of exchange, and that it is a better system than barter which is what people had before money.

But that is only part of the story, as there is another way to exchange value besides money and barter, and understanding that very familiar way can bring back an understanding of what money is, in an intuitive way.

And I think that's important as like the U.S. abandoned the gold standard years ago so that the U.S. dollar appeared to be backed by nothing (it's not), money itself has become disconnected in many people's minds from its symbolic nature.

Money has little if any intrinsic value, so most of its value is extrinsic--given to it by others--and it has to do with a promise to pay.

Understanding the symbol of what money covers is a lot like understanding how in algebra x is just a variable, so you can have equations like x+y=z, but you can change the symbol, and have a+b=c.

To get a grasp of the underlying thing that money is a symbol for, consider the other means of value exchange besides money or barter, which is giving and receiving favors.

Seem too simple? How about an example then, as if you have a significant other, consider asking that person to do you a favor and make you a cup of coffee.

Now someone without someone to ask a favor of a cup of coffee, can, if there is a coffee shop nearby, go and buy a cup of coffee--exchange money for the value.

So asking for favors is a way of exchanging value which is actually closer to money than barter, as often when you ask a favor there is an expectation that you will return it, at some point. Whereas with barter, there is an immediate exchange of value for value: like a shoemaker exchanging his shoes for, say an egg laying chicken.

He gives the shoes--he gets the chicken.

You ask a favor, you rely on the memory of the person who gives the favor. And they rely on yours. It is a promise to pay back the favor, later.

You hand them money, they get to use the money for something they want, later.

But people can forget favors, or ask for them, even repeatedly, with no intentions of ever paying back!!! The system is flawed by the need for good memories, and trust.

In contrast, rather than ask a neighbor say, for the favor of a cup of coffee, you can pay for the value of a cup from, say Starbucks, or Peets, or some other coffee shop, and get it, without further owing anything at all.

The abstract value of the favor that is remembered in one case is captured by the money in another. The money is like the encapsulation of a favor: a symbol of that value exchange, which now brings me to our modern Web.

To the extent that there is an exchange of value on the web, it can be said to be by all the means above: barter, favors, and money.

People can exchange attention for information, like barter. Or can pay for goods on the Internet directly by money. Or they can do favors.

The problem for modern companies operating on the Internet is not acknowledging the possibility of a promise to pay, so that often there is simply no way to pay.

For instance, let's say I write something that you think has value. You might say I did you a favor, unless I just wanted you to read it, so I just wanted attention, so you paid already, but...how do I know? Well you could comment, but should you have to comment? And is that really giving back value?

But what if I had ads (I don't) then if the ads paid from your attention then I'd be paid by the people who run the ads through someone else, like Google, and that would do it, right?

Well people who pay for ads pay for them if you buy something from them! As they are paying for the ads either from purchases you and people like you make or the promise to pay that is part of the system of ads, for instance, we watch television ads and enough people go buy the stuff to pay for the television programs.

So if enough people don't go buy the things in the ads, then there is no way for a payment to come from the people who would like to sell things.

So I did you a favor.

Let's go back if that seems wrong: if I write something and you see value in it, then maybe you can comment or if I had ads you could click on ads, but if those things aren't available then I did you a favor: transfered value with none in return.

But is there a promise to pay? And I'd say, no. So then, is it really a favor?

Was there an exchange of value? Yes. You read something that to you had value.

Was there a return of value in exchange? No.

So you get a value gap, which I also call a promise to pay, which in our big wide world is something that helped push money as a symbol of value, as you can ask favors of your friends or spouse--like a cup of coffee--but asking favors of strangers is often called begging.

Friends return favors and hopefully you would to your spouse as well, in more ways than simply say, making a return cup of coffee!

But strangers can't be expected to return favors, as, well, how do you even know what to give in return?

Imagine you go to a strange house to some people you don't know, knock on the door, and ask for a favor of a cup of coffee? Even if they wanted to (and weren't scared of you begging at their door) and gave you a cup of coffee, how could you return that favor really?

Bring them back a cup of coffee later? Offer to mow their lawn later? Something else...?

There really is no way. It's unlikely that you have anything of value to them--extrinsic value--to pay for the disruption of a strange person knocking at their door and asking for a cup of coffee! There is no way to pay them back. Best thing is not to bug them in the first place!

We don't ask favors from strangers normally, but somehow there is this massive and very enticing system called the Web, or the Internet, or the World Wide Web, or whatever where we end up forced to have favors from strangers just about every time we use it.

The biggest mistake that Web companies like Google, or Yahoo! or any number of other companies make, and the mistake people like me make in putting out content as freely as we do is that we are doing others a favor without giving them a way to do anything in return, and in reality, there really isn't any favor they can give in return that would work!!!

Money isn't a necessary evil. It is a symbol. It is a way to exchange value.

Without an ability to pay, on the web people can often not give value back, no matter how much they'd wish. There simply is no way.

You routinely use alternatives to exchange value when you do someone a favor, or receive one in return, where there, the "money" you might say, is your memory and theirs. The value is held in memory, held in trust.

But favors entail a promise to pay, but web companies often don't give you the ability to pay, so a value gap hangs...

Innovation potential of PBV concept

2009-05-10T11:29:00.000-07:00

A little while back I introduced an idea I call Pay Back Value, or PBV for short, which gives the Web one more pay model--pay after.

May seem strange but you do that all the time, like at restaurants or the barber.

What would you do if your barber asked you to pay upfront? Why do people think that's the only way to pay on the web?

It's kind of bizarre in a way that people do!!!

Do you know of any other way to pay on the web but upfront? It's even worse with subscriptions as you're paying upfront well in advance!!!

For a newspaper with a subscription you pay for papers not even created yet.

But there is this other way to pay that we use all the time.

Now I'm going to expand the concept with an innovation to it, which is to have a PBV corporation, and have PBV votes.

So there could be this mega corporation called PayBackValue.com, and you sign up to it, and it gives website owners the option of putting a PBV button on their site, with a link beneath it explaining that PBV is just a way to pay after you consume, like at a restaurant.

So, maybe you'd have 25 cents, below which is a PBV button, below which is a link that might say: "What is PBV?"

The PBV value is set by the website owner, though the PBV corporation may suggest prices, or give continual guidance on proper price given demand.

But what if PBV really takes off and some website that doesn't have it, wants it?

Well assuming a PBV base of members are setup--people who have signed up for PBV, which requires they give a way to pay like a credit card--why not give them the option to vote on whether or not the website should be included?

So a potential website might get a "PBV Test" button, where PBV users could vote as to whether or not they see value in the site itself and might actually pay at it, and if the site, say, didn't get 2/3 saying they might, then it'd be rejected for membership in the PBV network.

Hmmm...that also gives the option of letting PBV members vote on sites currently in the PBV network, but wait! That's dumb. They're already voting if they are paying, so each pay is a vote. But if revenue suddenly dropped at a site, it could end up with a "PBV Test" button (in the terms of agreement in the contract with the PBV corporation), and PBV users could then vote it out of the network, or let it stay.

Wow. Lots of options for users here! The PBV corporation would, of course, give users access to a report showing their expenditures, on what sites, etc. which could even break things down in various ways to give them insight into their own web valuing behavior.

Web site owners might really be surprised by something like PBV as well, as what if you have TONS of visitors by traditional measures, but find out from PBV that most don't think your site has content worth paying for? Another site with far fewer visitors might make much more money from PBV, while advertising would only give pennies.

It could be a quality differentiator on the web.

I increasingly believe that hypothetical company will be here some day.

After all, there is a pay model that many people use every day that is not on the web for some bizarre reason which is to pay after.

Here's a weird tidbit to leave you with: you buy a newspaper upfront, right?

Can you imagine having to pay, say, $1000 US to walk into a grocery store, and be able to fill one grocery cart with whatever you wanted, paying upfront there as well?

Oh, $1000 too much? What if they said, $100, but you have to walk past all these signs with ads on them?

Ever consider that the pay upfront with ads model is actually kind of strange?

Would you pay $100 upfront to walk into a grocery store and fill one cart?

What I call PBV is simply more like what you actually do: go into the store, take possession of what you want, and pay after, not before.

James Harris

Paying for value not a new idea

2009-05-09T09:29:00.000-07:00

Paying for value is not the new idea.

The new idea was paying upfront, by which I mean, you purchase something before you check it out, or even see it, like if you have a newspaper subscription--you're paying for newspapers that haven't even been printed yet!

People do not do that normally. They get a haircut and then pay. Usually order their food, eat it, and then pay, unless it's fast food. Even at the grocery store, you get possession of your food first, in your grocery cart, and later you pay.

ONLY with novel items or very well-known products, like fast food, do we pay upfront. Can you imagine giving the grocery store people a list of foods that you plan on buying, paying first and then going into the store to collect your items?

But you buy a newspaper in that way. Or you may have a subscription to cable television in that way, paying before you can check out for quality first.

It may be hard to see a newspaper as a novel item, but behavior says it is, as news was not a commodity, until maybe with the Internet.

Somehow the Internet has turned news into less of a novel item so most people refuse to pay upfront, and they don't see it as a known commodity--where you don't worry as much about quality like with fast food--so they can't be convinced to pay upfront.

And We, the people, are right! Buying upfront on television for so many years gave us a lot of crappy TV!!! People decried the quality problems but entertainment executives had a lot of power in being able to choose what could be watched, because people would buy with their attention anyway. And we got a lot of crap, but kept watching that novel thing called a television for years. But now, increasingly we won't. So television revenues can be predicted to crash.

My guess is that what is happening to the newspaper industry is the canary in a mine, and that a very rapid collapse in revenue can occur for the television industry, and it could be the next industry asking for a bail-out.

Buying behavior is not that complicated: novel items can become wanted before being checked out so people pay upfront. Newspapers, television and some other things were novel enough that executives in those industries got spoiled by the power to choose for people who would still buy. Today somehow the Internet has reverted people back to normal buying behavior, so they wish to carefully pick and choose--and pay later.

However, industry executives who had a lot of power don't want to give that up, and they don't trust the public, so unlike, say, a high end restaurant owner who trusts you to pay for your meal so doesn't make you pay first, executives in media are claiming that either you pay upfront--as you cannot be trusted--or the content must be paid for by advertising, and then they don't let you pay any other way.

Their power will be gone. The return to old buying behaviors will make crappy popular television shows a thing of the past, as it will force change, but no surprise, people who had lots of power in the old system can't seem to figure out the simple solution that your barber knows--pay after.

Could it be they fear the loss of that power? That industry executives will cling to it as long as they can even if newspapers go down in flames and later television stations begin to follow?

Unfortunate reality, pay models on the web

2009-05-04T22:00:00.000-07:00

I've had something of a dismal time recognizing that I've stumbled across the unfortunate pay realities of our world wide web:

1. Pay upfront--the preferred model when you don't trust the customer, which seems to only work best for porn. There is so much crap on the web that people mostly refuse to pay web only things upfront.

2. Don't pay at all, rely on advertising--the alternate model since people in general refuse to pay upfront. But web behavior is not passive like television watching behavior. People routinely ignore ads, so the people who put up ads, don't pay for the full cost of content. But even in television ad behavior is changing as technology in the form of DVR's give people the ability to zip past ads.

3. Pay after--what I call Pay Back Value, which is the model used by high end restaurants which allow people to eat first, then pay. Problem is, no one is offering it on the web to my knowledge, but I did just come up with it a couple of weeks ago!

You may think there are other pay options but my analysis is there are none, except if you wish, completely free, like this blog, where there is no payment at all, and no payment option.

The advertising model may have been something of a fluke anyway, as it is dying in its home territories as people go from being like zombies passively absorbing content to actively choosing content, which is devastating business models across the board albeit some slower than others.

My analysis is that if the news and entertainment world does not figure out how to do option 3. it will slowly starve to death, imploding upon itself--industry by industry.

First up is the newspaper industry, but television and radio will follow.

Industry behemoths are in denial though, and the public doesn't understand what it will lose until it's gone, so we may watch some of these industries die before they accept the inevitable.

Answers are not enough. People have to choose to accept them, as failure is an option.

Value for value

2009-05-01T06:37:00.001-07:00

So as I discussed in a previous post money is a way to abstract value, which was a great invention to take people beyond barter, where, for instance, a shoemaker would need to find someone who needed his shoes who had something he wanted in exchange.

Money abstracts value allowing the shoemaker to instead sell his shoes, and trade the money for something he values later on: value for value.

So all money really does is shift the value for value exchange in time because the money has no intrinsic value. It is a symbol of value.

The Web has, however, revealed a weird situation where companies are giving value, like news for instance, and not receiving commensurate value in return, where the perception has been that people will not pay for value, which defies thousands of years of human history!

The subtle answer then is that on the Web people are refusing to pay for something before they see value, which is something that actually occurs in other areas, and I have a story, from years ago when I lived in the Atlanta metro area.

I was at a restaurant having a meal, when I noticed a couple who had ordered a full meal and finished eating it, just get up and walk out the door without paying!!! They had noticed that the one server--it was a slow period--had gone to the back of the restaurant for something, and they just took off--they stole value.

They stole the meal.

I think some people might suppose that most people would steal value on the Web! But most of us I think would not get up and leave just because there were no servers watching. I don't think most people only pay for meals at restaurants because someone is watching over them.

But all restaurants do not force you to pay upfront.

Some do. Fast food restaurants get your money upfront.

The experiment on the Web with pay was like with fast food, but with fast food you generally know what you're going to get, and it's more of a commodity. With the Web people didn't know if they'd value what they were getting.

You still don't. I don't know if I'll value information I receive on the Web until after I get it, but then I have no option to pay for it, so the Pay Back Value concept is just giving the Web something that is already available in other areas.

Advertising doesn't work well on the web. The television model worked with a passive audience for a long time, but it is facing change as well as people with DVR's fast forward through commercials!

If no solution is found then value is being given for less value or nothing in return, which breaks the value for value principle.

Collapsing business models are the result, and we're seeing that now with newspapers, but will see that grow into other areas as time progresses.

Value for value is the very principle behind money.

It cannot be escaped.

James Harris

Understanding Pay Back Value concept

2009-04-26T08:07:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday I introduced an idea that is meant to be a solution to a surprising problem that has emerged with the Internet, which is the extreme difficulty some people, like me, have had finding remuneration, or compensation for efforts that seem to generate value based on interest.

In order to come to my solution I went all the way back to the very definition of money itself and worked outwards from there using The New York Times as an example company for how the Pay Back Value concept works.

Now with several days to think about it, I'm more impressed with how natural a solution it is, and with how it brings back what you might call traditional values to Internet interactions, so I'd like to talk about how that occurs.

For instance I noted that with Pay Back Value or PBV for short, a reader gets to PBV after reading, say, a column by Gail Collins, and doing so would eventually charge, say 25 cents to their PBV account.

The reader gets to pay back value for an article where they recognized value after reading, or simply go on their way, giving nothing, but the Times would record when they DO pay back value and after a year, you might get a report and be surprised to find what your interests are based on what you paid for, showing what you truly valued!

Columns could have their own box office in a sense, which is the total PBV given to them, providing a real-time measure of a columnist's appeal. Newspapers could get important feedback on topics that readers are actually interested in, and the approach in a way is simply a la carte buying of the newspaper, which is the way things must work on the Internet as people have already shown they will not just blanket buy contents of an entire paper on the Web, which is why newspapers are giving away valuable information for free now.

But that is against the concept of money--giving away value for free--and it's breaking the newspapers, endangering the very value that people seek, so innovation here is driven by necessity. Advertising is not enough. That old system worked with the more captive audiences of television and radio, but the Internet is an active audience.

People routinely go past ads barely noticing them. (I know I do.)

But another value emerges with this system--people would have to sign up for the PBV, and don't have to pay if they do not see value, and they get the information for free still.

So what if they don't pay?

Not ever giving PBV says you don't see value.

If you never see value, then why are you reading day after day?

If in 6 months time a person never sees value but is clicking on article after article, and reading daily then they are stealing value.

You can now, suddenly and wonderfully, identify theft, like you can in the real world.

The action of reading does not show value in what is read, but coming back again and again to gain content, is a clear indication of seeing value!!!

Rarely or never paying is a contradiction, showing--theft.

I have little doubt that the PBV concept will eventually take over because of the value it gives companies and creative producers like myself, and the reality that it restores proper balance by giving value back to creative producers for value they have given, while giving information consumers, freedom of choice to pick value as they see it.

If that is true then PBV may be as big for the Internet as the invention of money itself was with past technologies, like shoemaking.

Of course the test of any innovation is whether it gets picked up in the real world, so now with the idea pushed forward, the question is, will it grab hold?

James Harris

Recommending Doctor's Diaries on Nova

2009-04-25T07:27:00.000-07:00

Link above goes to: PBS.org profile on Dr. Cheryl Dorsey

Quote from the Source:

A DIFFERENT KIND OF HEALER
NOVA: Do you see a common thread between why you went into medicine and what you are doing now?

Cheryl Dorsey: I went into medicine because I wanted to help people and to be of service. Even though I don't practice medicine now, I think I still do those things.

Many of my colleagues who work with patients heal one person at a time or one family at a time, and that's incredibly important work. I just felt that I needed to choose another path, and that maybe my highest purpose was working on a more systemic and community level.

[Editor's note: The nonprofit foundation that Cheryl now leads, Echoing Green, provides grants to young entrepreneurs launching enterprises to bring about positive social change.]...

The quote is just the beginning of the page linked to above with an interview with Dr. Cheryl Dorsey, who is one of seven doctors profiled from the early days in medical school to later on in their lives in a truly remarkable series that offers perspective like no other into a field that is of massive importance in all our lives:

Doctors' Diaries on Nova at PBS.org

Watching the series is I think an extraordinary opportunity to feel good about the effort with which we live our lives as human beings, within the context of the bigger picture of why all our lives are often so challenging.

Ultimately I think the series is an excellent portrayal of the human condition through the lives of just some of the people we often count on the most.

Pay Back Value remuneration concept

2009-04-21T17:13:00.001-07:00

My previous post talking about money is a continuation of my concerns about what I've also called the Internet money conundrum--how do you make money on the Internet?

By going to the base of what money is, and considering how our current system must be inefficient I began to realize a concept that might be more, and my example company in explaining it is one of my favorite news organizations--The New York Times.

Despite being a premier information source that arguably gives great value, the Times has faced declining revenue!!! That is an apparent paradox in many ways.

After all, money is a medium of exchange, abstracting value for use at some future time versus barter where you traded immediately: The New York Times continues to give great value in terms of information and the Internet allows more people not fewer to experience that value with a cheaper distribution system, yet the conundrum is in declining revenue in the face of that greater value and wider distribution of value.

So what gives?

In analyzing the problem considering my own usage I've noted that I'm a far more regular reader of the New York Times than I was before it was available on the Web, and I'm not willing to pay for a subscription not because I don't value the newspaper, but because I don't want all the content a subscription would give. I want a la carte, but I also refuse to pay for an article before I've read it!!!

However, I feel a sense of value, often, from articles after I've read them, and before you go, no way, this idea can't be to pay later, consider music and songs.

Would you buy a song unheard? If you had to pay for music without ever hearing it first, would you? Maybe if you were a major fan willing to pick up any music that came from your favored artist, but most people wouldn't.

In fact, I know that I will often buy a song after having heard it dozens or more times, and some songs that I like I'll hear often on the radio or see music videos and never buy them at all, and just not own them (and not download them illegally either).

Back to newspapers--simple reality is that I pick and choose what I read, recognizing value after I've read it, like how I recognize that I like a song, after I've heard it!

So now to the concept--what if after I read a New York Times article that I liked, I saw a PBV button at the bottom, with 25 cents listed as its value?

Click it, and 25 cents is applied to the PBV account. The Pay Back Value account.

When the value of that account reaches $1 U.S. then my credit card is automatically charged.

I am purchasing the articles in that The New York Times will maintain a database of such articles that I've payed back value for, and may give me search information about my choices--for instance I may find that Gail Collins is my favorite columnist based on PBV, or that I tend to see value in articles about apple orchards.

I know, an immediate objection is, what if people just don't pay?

Well, they're not paying now! But I think some people, like myself, DO see value in the articles being read but having seen that only after reading, simply are lost with no option to pay back that value.

Money is a medium of exchange. Certainly one system of exchanging value for goods and services has dominated but the Internet is revealing faults with the old ways, as providers of significantly valuable services and products, like The New York Times, face declining revenue--a contradiction.

The music industry already has something like my Pay Back Value concept, where you get to hear a song--often many times--before you purchase it, possibly the solution to the "Internet money conundrum" is to follow that business model more closely.

The idea given above is open source, which means free, but not without attribution!!!

That is, you have to reference back to the source. I'd like to note that out of curiosity I checked to see if anyone had PayBackValue.com, and when I checked, that domain was available.

So why not get it myself and try to sell this idea?

Well, it's just an idea--who knows if it will work?

There are any number of upfront costs and issues to deal with in getting it out there in the real world, and I have experience with how difficult it can be.

Besides, I have LOTS of ideas, but little progress in getting value for those ideas, so for me, the recognition could be worth a lot of money. A LOT of money.

And, I'd love the chance to pay back value myself!!!

I will not subscribe to The New York Times because the full newspaper has more information than I want, and I will not pay upfront for articles before I read them--they may suck!!!

But I would be willing to make a payment, which is nominal for legal reasons (think about it) after I read an article and see value in that article, as I repeat again, money is a medium of exchange. We exchange it to pass value between each other, abstracting that value to be used at a time of one's choosing. I'd like to give The New York Times value back, for them to use at their choosing, for particular articles from which I gain value.

I hope you'd do the same.

James Harris

A medium of exchange

2009-04-20T21:17:00.000-07:00

People have learned that money is a more efficient way to exchange goods and services than barter. For instance, if you are a shoemaker, and feel like making some shoes, after you've made them, under a barter system, now you must go find someone who has something you want, who needs shoes, and your shoes at that.

Money abstracts your efforts, allowing you to get value to hold for later, and find what you want when you want.

Money in and of itself has no intrinsic value.

The United States dollar, used around the world as a valued medium of exchange, is itself made from waste products.

The money system has worked well for humanity but lately something strange has happened--in a world with more goods and more services than ever before, many people seem to increasingly work more for less!

How is that possible?

The simplest explanation is that some people are accruing money somehow without themselves actually doing anything of value. That is, they are not providing commensurate goods and services at the level of the symbol they hold which claims they did.

So they are committing a fraud.

The problem the world is facing though is that the system is not efficient at figuring out this fraud, so in a world where people are far more effective at using resources, where talents are at a far greater level than before, and where technologies allow great economies of scale, many live in uncertainty, and face significant hardships because they do not have enough money.

Money was an invention.

One has to wonder, is there yet another invention to take us to yet another level?

Yet another way to abstract the exchange of goods and services that solves the problems that now plague our world systems?

If so, such an invention could revolutionize our world revealing the people who really work, versus the people who just work the system--to the collective harm of us all.

James Harris

Credit card basics

2009-02-01T10:51:00.001-08:00

Link above goes to: The New York Times

Quote from the source:

YOUR MONEY / CREDIT SCORES
Credit Scores: What You Need to Know
By JENNIFER BARRETT
Published: January 6, 2009
You may not have checked your credit score lately, but there’s a good chance someone else has.

Excellent article that I think really covers the must-know basics of having and using a credit card.

Social reality and alcohol's importance

2009-01-24T09:54:00.000-08:00

Link above goes to: Wikipedia, article on alcoholic beverage

An idea suddenly occurred to me for why drinking alcoholic beverages has continued to be so important to social realities--from meeting new people to diplomatic events.

And it's so obvious that I'm not saying it's new or not well-known but that I'm emphasizing it to myself as it is so huge, which is, social reality is that people lie about themselves, and present cloaks on their own inner selves because they sense there is something inside that is not to be presented publicly if possible, for whatever reason that might be.

And alcohol is useful for stripping such cloaks away.

Drink with a person and they tend to talk more, but if they get quieter then you learned something about them.

If they talk more, they are more likely to let slip ideas and opinions they might otherwise hold in check.

And if they refuse to drink, for whatever reason, you learn something as well.

Social drinking reveals information about people no matter what, whether they want it to, or not, even when they do not engage in it.

No wonder it has remained and I have no doubt it will remain as long as there is a need to hide things about yourself from other people, and for them to try and find out more about you, whether you want them to, or not.

Quick recovery, but at what cost?

2009-01-04T10:32:00.001-08:00

Link above goes to: The New York Times

Quote from the source:

Some Forecasters See a Fast Economic Recovery
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: January 3, 2009
Many economists are heading into the new year declaring that the worst may soon be over. Others are pessimistic.

I'm willing to go out on a limb and predict a very rapid economic recovery with the U.S. returning to growth in the second quarter.

Any reasoning behind that?

Well I'm no expert but as they are so terrible anyway, I don't feel bad about putting in my opinion, which is that money still wants to move to the U.S. and with so much information available--yup, I'm blaming the Internet--there will be huge growth from seemingly unlikely sources fueling a bunch of mini-booms, cumulative impact being, growth.

But then I expect a return to negative in the third quarter as no one sees this coming (but me) so there will be yet another adjustment.

Um, if I'm right, I get nothing really, which is what I get if I'm wrong, but could maybe some people start calling for the tossing out of these "experts" who are never right, either on the upside or the downside?

WHY, oh why, please tell me why, do these people get paid so well for being so terribly wrong all the time? Can someone answer me that basic question?

They are literally paid to fail.

Two economic forces at work

2008-12-22T20:09:00.000-08:00

There is now a remarkable push-pull going on with the global economy as we have, of course, now learned that a lot of people were doing nothing of value but receiving huge financial rewards. They were a net negative creating a massive drag on the world economy which was masked through various means.

Now there has been a collapse of the fraud, rampant dissolution, and silly activities meant only to create the illusion of wealth creation which has been labeled the "financial crisis" which has begun the release of the drag against people who are actually generating real value for the world economy, who will be the engines of real growth in the future.

So there are two forces at work: the collapse of the fraud, giving opportunity for the reality of truly valuable work--not the illusion of it--but negatives as the world balances.

It is the balance all good citizens of the world seek, which is what will take some more time to achieve.

Madoff fraud case

2008-12-13T08:39:00.000-08:00

Link above goes to: MSNBC

Quote from the source:

Charities count missing millions in Madoff case
Philanthropic groups hit hard by ex-Nasdaq chief's arrest on fraud charges
By Binyamin Appelbaum, David S. Hilzenrath and Amit R. Paley
washingtonpost.com
updated 1:47 a.m. PT, Sat., Dec. 13, 2008

Madoff allegedly ran a Ponzi scheme though he had substantial social standing.

Here is another quote from the page:

It may be the largest fraud in the history of Wall Street, authorities said. Madoff is charged with stealing as much as $50 billion, in part to cover a pattern of massive losses, even as he cultivated a reputation as a financial mastermind and prominent philanthropist.

And one last quote from the page:

Madoff built himself into a brand....He advertised his integrity.

"In an era of faceless organizations owned by other equally faceless organizations, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC harks back to an earlier era in the financial world: The owner's name is on the door," the company's Web site said. "Clients know that Bernard Madoff has a personal interest in maintaining the unblemished record of value, fair-dealing, and high ethical standards that has always been the firm's hallmark."

The credit crisis is being credited with unearthing long-standing frauds and it is suspected more will be revealed with time.

Browse by cellphone

2008-11-30T11:38:00.000-08:00

Was bored the other day and decided I'd check out this site with my cellphone, and was happily surprised to see that not only could I cruise through posts, but could click though links back to the source articles, which were formatted for my cellphone.

So those of you with cellphones that can browse the Web can read through postings and articles rather easily. What I noticed that didn't come through were the headlines and videos.

James

An ounce of prevention in finance

2008-11-28T07:11:00.000-08:00

Link above goes to: The New York Times

Quote from the source:
Op-Ed Columnist
Lest We Forget
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 28, 2008
The story of how we failed to see this coming has a clear policy implication — that financial market reform should be pressed quickly, and that it should not wait until the crisis is resolved.

Yeah, if the best reforms are ever to be done, they have to be done while things are painful, and the realization is clear as a result that they are needed.

Past history guides us to the conclusion that whatever reforms are done now, in time, there will be calls to remove them and de-regulate.

So, if not now for the clearly needed reforms, when?

Giving the remarkable conclusion that as we fix the current financial crisis, we must also work to prevent the next one.

Middle class is a feeling

2008-11-08T10:31:00.000-08:00

However anyone else defines it, for me being middle class is a feeling. It is the middle way outside of class though the word "class" is part of the phrase as it is about living without a continual sense of fear, while class is about fear.

Classed societies separate themselves into at least two groups out of fear, and in the past when disease, famine or war could dramatically cut into the size of a population beyond 1/3 those fears were continually reinforced by losses hard to properly imagine today.

But today many people can be more afraid about hurting others than being hurt by them, and more concerned about their hopes and expectations than daily fights for survival--in middle class societies.

Those who pine for class do not understand it.

Possibly they have naive dreams of being royalty where to them that is just about parades and adulation, ordering others around and having plenty.

But class was about deciding who lived and who died, about surviving when so many others died to re-teach, and hold on to culture, as otherwise everything would have to be re-discovered. Starting would be from scratch.

The leaders were servants of the people, burdened with the task of living for the future no matter who else died, told that their duty was to preserve the knowledge, and rebuild after the disasters that always struck, killing vast numbers of their people.

Their lives were about pain and its inevitability.

Simply feeling safe is the most powerful gift of the modern world, and one worth striving to help others achieve.

Feeling safe is possibly the most under appreciated feeling in the world, until you lose that feeling, or live a life, where you never had it.

Slow boot times

2008-11-02T07:28:00.000-08:00

Link above goes to: The New York Times

Quote from the source:

Digital Domain
30 Seconds to Boot Up? That’s 29 Too Many
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: November 2, 2008
Unhappiness with boot times is shared by many computer users, as reflected in much online discussion of the issue.

Great article as I'll admit I'm increasingly infuriated by how long my computer takes to boot up, especially when I get to the point when my browser is open and I'm trying to surf the web and the stupid computer is still loading. What is it still loading then?

Clearly I have everything I need as my browser is open and I'm trying to get to sites so what is this other crap I'm paying for with my time that I do not need and do not want?

Maybe someone should get a class action lawsuit together against software companies that do operating systems for wasting our lives and get some monetary compensation for the time we're forced to lose because we have no options with these freaking machines which are increasingly so important.

I want my time back. So I think as a warning to tech companies, speed up these machines before the lawsuits. Please.

Super staph

2008-10-27T18:10:00.000-07:00

Link above goes to: MSNBC

Quote from page:

Experts: Staph germs becoming harder to treat
Bacteria acquiring ‘superbug’ powers, causing serious illnesses, doctors say

updated 1:43 p.m. PT, Mon., Oct. 27, 2008

WASHINGTON - Drug-resistant staph bacteria picked up in ordinary community settings are increasingly acquiring “superbug” powers and causing far more serious illnesses than they have in the past, doctors reported Monday....

AP story though that doesn't copy in, and I'm still somewhat hesitant to touch AP stories but this one is extremely important.

It seems past time that the CDC went into overdrive on educating the public.

So what's it worth?

2008-09-25T19:59:00.000-07:00

Link above goes to: The New York Times

Business
Plan’s Mystery: What’s All This Stuff Worth?
By VIKAS BAJAJ
Published: September 25, 2008
Washington will struggle to put a price on the troubled investments at the heart of the financial crisis.

Question goes to the heart of the matter.

Smelling mates and the Pill

2008-09-15T17:26:00.000-07:00

Link above goes to: MSNBC.com

Quote from the page:

The Pill makes women pick bad mates
Ability to sniff out a compatible partner affected by taking contraceptives
By Jeanna Bryner

updated 10:17 a.m. PT, Wed., Aug. 13, 2008
Birth control pills could screw up a woman's ability to sniff out a compatible mate, a new study finds....

I've read about this issue before in Psychology Today and in that article (sorry no direct reference) it mentioned marriages breaking up when a woman goes off the pill because the couple has decided to have children, and she finds she suddenly cannot stand the smell of her husband.

Kind of makes me wonder how people supposedly fall in love on-line. After all, you really cannot smell anyone through your computer.

Google says there are 1 trillion unique URL's

2008-07-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

Source: Google Blog

We knew the web was big...
7/25/2008 10:12:00 AM
We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

Kind of pondering exactly how significant that is and can't say I know. But it's worth noting here versus on my more techie blog.

I think it should mean that the content is out there for what you or I would want to see on just about anything imaginable but the issue to me still is getting to it efficiently.

James

Academic process and oil speculations

2008-06-28T07:22:00.000-07:00

Source: NY Times

Op-Ed Columnist
Fuels on the Hill
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 27, 2008
Why are politicians so eager to pin the blame for oil prices on speculators? Because it lets them believe that we don’t have to adapt to a world of expensive gas.

Having had a rant against those economists who are often wrong in a prior post (woo hoo what fun!) I'm glad to get a chance to highlight an excellent editorial from Paul Krugman, an economist providing I think timely and valuable information that covers both points of view in a balanced and objective way, on the issue of whether or not oil speculation is driving up the price of oil.

And I think for those parents who haven't gone to college (or didn't go to a good one) who have kids who are in college at a good school, there is an opportunity through reading what he says to see what that means in terms of how their kids get taught by the best professors, and why that is important in our modern world for those wanting to figure out how to make the best decisions on the issues.

Lazy politicians may wish to jump on oil speculators for the moment and that can satisfy people who don't know any better, but the problems won't be solved and later reality will force better solutions or greater catastrophe, while some naive people may be gratified with their empty and pointless anger.

If you wish to join them in wasted emotional energy, then fine. But I suggest you look into the facts and use Mr. Krugman's expertise as a starting point, which is what I did.

After all, we do have experts, so why not use them?

But what if economists just suck?

2008-06-24T17:59:00.000-07:00

Source: CNNMoney.com

Economists should listen to consumers
Experts have a half-glass full outlook for the economy while average Americans are far more pessimistic. Here's why the consumer is probably right.

By Chris Isidore, CNNMoney.com senior writer
Last Updated: June 24, 2008: 3:04 PM EDT

It seems remarkable to me that the economists, who I believe are academics so often wrong, just keep getting to be very, very wrong with no consequences as they are one group I'm sure is not the slightest bit concerned about their jobs when I ask, when are they actually right?

It seems to me they only get trends right mostly on upswings when they side with the view that most promotes big business or big investment interests, and rarely if ever seem to be worth much, like early warning, when it comes to the downside when people really need their government to get the best information so that it can help!!!

So these people seem to primarily get things right when it doesn't do anybody any good, and they drag their feet if the news is bad--or, gasp, maybe they don't have a clue?--when they should be warning leaders so that help can arrive so why do we pay them?

What are we paying these economists for, as if they are academics then are they not being paid primarily with our tax dollars?

Real diamonds

2008-06-21T06:26:00.000-07:00

Source: NY Times

Technology
Fake Gems, Genuine Appeal
By DAN MITCHELL
Published: June 21, 2008
Manufactured diamonds have become indistinguishable from their natural counterparts.

Here's a quote from the article, which quoted from Smithsonian.com:

...a man had approached him from behind at a conference a few years ago and warned him that, as Mr. Boser put it, “someone from a natural diamond company just might put a bullet in his head.”

The problem for the producers is that even though diamonds are not all that rare, people believe they are, so their price is substantially inflated....

(Glad the article is not from the Associated Press.)

Excellent article for perspective as it has long amazed me that people pay a lot for a fairly common object which diamonds are, when it's just about perception (and really good marketing).

Arrival of the new ad?

2008-06-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

Source: Mashable

YouTube’s “Sell Your Own Ads” Strategy: Desperation or the Future of Advertising?

June 9, 2008 — 08:48 AM PDT — by Adam Ostrow —

Google has added an interesting twist to their monetization strategy for YouTube: allow content producers to sell their own advertising....

Nice to know Google is still working on the problem of making money from YouTube, as I think the issue really has to do with the need for the arrival of choice and I came up with my own suggestion for a new type of ad, back in May.

Thinking more on it as I flesh out the idea it just seems so natural as a way to do advertising with video where you have a tab on the video, say in the upper left corner, like the tab on a browser that says something like "Advertiser supported" and to see the ad, the viewer has to, yup, click on the tab!

So if you don't want to see the ad, you just ignore the tab, watch the video and go on your merry way.

The viewer makes the choice.

Seem dumb?

Well, television advertising models I think still dominate the web where you push things on people which is the way television works as it's so passively experienced. In contrast the web is interactive and choice rules, so pushed ads work to some extent, but to me they're annoying, and I know I can just ignore pushed ads, and still get the content!

In contrast, newspapers traditionally are more like this idea as you get a lot of content until you turn the page and see an ad, or go all the way to the back to get classifieds, because, people have more choice with the paper in their hands.

So I'm not really asking for something completely new, but something closer to the newspaper ad model with a web twist as you can get a full video commercial--which had better be good!!!

Pairing a really good commercial with videos that get downloaded a lot is also just a good idea as that can help it go viral in a way that involves viewer choice.

As my belief is that people do not hate ads: they hate bad ads and ads being pushed on them which is what television and radio do.

So because of television and radio there is this notion that people hate advertising.

But I think they just dislike pushy sales tactics that are traditional in certain media, but unnecessary on the web, where choice rules.

More honesty in Japan

2008-06-07T08:50:00.000-07:00

Source: NY Times

Business / World Business
In Shift for Japan, Salarymen Blow the Whistle
By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: June 7, 2008
A decade ago, corporate whistle-blowing was almost unheard of in Japan. But a broad transformation of Japan and the global economy has occurred.

I am puzzled by one thing though which is how loyalty to an employer against honor could supposedly be in any way related to the samurai. Here's a quote:

Mr. Akahane said he knew of the company’s subterfuges for more than a decade, and had long felt torn between guilt toward customers and loyalty toward his company that he described as Japan’s “samurai spirit.” What finally moved him to take his story to a newspaper last year was the growing media attention on whistle-blowers. This made him afraid that if he did not act first, another employee would eventually expose the company, possibly implicating him.

Where yes, I've only read about Japan's history, but from what I've read, self-sacrifice in the pursuit of the greater good was part of the samurai code and if necessary samurai would speak up and if their advice was not followed, were willing to do what was right, even if it meant great personal sacrifice.

Superbug kills young and healthy

2008-06-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

Source: MSNBC, post title is their headline

Superbug kills young and healthy, experts say
Drug-resistant MRSA responsible for 24 deaths during 2006-2007 flu season

...Many of the cases were caused by a drug-resistant form called methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, the team led by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday....

Healthy foods article

2008-05-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

Source: Yahoo Health

8 Ultimate Flat-Belly Summer Foods
By David Zinczenko, with Matt Goulding
Posted Fri, May 23, 2008, 12:11 pm PDT

...To combat the nutritional chaos and the extra poundage that comes with the rising mercury, we’ve chosen the eight best foods to eat every day. Beyond being packed full of disease-fighting, life-extending nutrients, these foods will also help keep your belly full, because they’re loaded with fiber and protein, the sultans of satiety.

Your bacteria and you

2008-05-23T14:34:00.000-07:00

Source: NY Times

Science
Bacteria Thrive in Inner Elbow; No Harm Done
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: May 23, 2008
Even after you have washed the skin clean, there are still one million bacteria in every square centimeter of skin in the crook of your elbow. But they are not bad bacteria.

Awesome article. Who knew? Bacteria tribes in all of us? Our own cells are out-numbered 10 to 1 by friendlies living inside of us and out?

Here's a quote:

...These are not bad bacteria. They are what biologists call commensals, creatures that eat at the same table with people to everyone’s mutual benefit. Though they were not invited to enjoy board and lodging in the skin of your inner elbow, they are giving something of value in return. They are helping to moisturize the skin by processing the raw fats it produces, says Julia A. Segre of the National Human Genome Research Institute....

And one more because I think it's rather important:

...Much the same set of bacteria recolonize the gut after a course of antibiotics, he said, suggesting that the makeup of the colony is important and that the body has ways of reconstituting it as before.

The article says that biologists think we should be best described as "superorganisms" to properly include all the bacteria. So hey, in a way, we're all super beings with bacterial colonies adapting to our lifestyles along with us. Sort of your extra crew, one might say.

What they do, not what they say

2008-05-22T16:27:00.000-07:00

Source: NY Times

Editorial
What the F.B.I. Agents Saw
Published: May 22, 2008
In light of a report by the Justice Department, the Democrats in charge of Congress should press for full disclosure of President Bush’s inhuman policy on prisoners.

Republicans touted "rule of law" until they decided that the laws didn't matter, when it suited them.

Here's a quote from the article:

...These were not random acts. It is clear from the inspector general’s report that this was organized behavior by both civilian and military interrogators following the specific orders of top officials. The report shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners:...

But Democrats haven't managed to enforce this country's laws either, now have they?

The American system is increasingly under trial because our political leaders are humiliating us along with those prisoners, and saying to the world that what we believe is just talk and not substance.

It is as if our political leaders threw out the United States Constitution a long time ago, but just kept saying otherwise.

We have a leadership of liars, who will say they are "conservative" or "liberal" or "democratic" or whatever it takes to maintain power--and then do whatever the hell they want, and this nation be damned.

Repo stories, boats taken back

2008-05-20T17:43:00.000-07:00

Source: NY Times

Business
Economic Tide Is Rising for Repo Man
By DAVID STREITFELD
Published: May 20, 2008
The recreational boating industry has faltered amid the housing slump, leading to a boom in repossessions.

Here's a quote from the article:

...Finally he remembered: “I’ve taken this boat before.” Owners of repossessed boats have a few weeks to redeem them, and this fellow had availed himself of the opportunity. Now, a few years later, he was in trouble again. Mr. Henderson shrugged. “I took it before, I’ll take it again. After I take it a few more times, he’ll be eligible for a Christmas card. One guy, I took his boat four times.”

And one more telling quote:

Some people lose their house or their boat to abrupt setbacks: illness, job loss, divorce. Mr. Dahmen, who works as a technology manager for a car manufacturer, belongs to a second, probably larger group: he simply spent beyond his means. He is one of the millions of reasons the consumer-powered American economy did so well for most of this decade, and one of the reasons its prospects look so bleak now.

The article has an almost literary quality. It reads more like a well-told tale than a news article.

Science explaining wisdom?

2008-05-20T17:19:00.000-07:00

Source: NY Times

Health / Research
Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain
By SARA REISTAD-LONG
Published: May 20, 2008
New research suggests that memory lapses that occur with age might be a sign of a widening focus of attention.

That blurb doesn't do the article justice as it says so much more to explain how older can mean wiser in that people with more experience are able to notice more of what's actually going on. Here's a quote from the article:

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

The article mentioned that younger people tend to just speed past oddities, as if they weren't there, while older people, able to process more efficiently, can even pay attention to the things that should not be there, as well what should, and then understand better overall, what is actually going on.

Ant army taking out computers in Texas

2008-05-15T17:13:00.000-07:00

Source: Computerworld

NASA moves to save computers from swarming ants

Attack of the (computer) killer ants - pests taking out machines along Texas gulf coast
By Sharon Gaudin

May 15, 2008 (Computerworld) A flood of voracious ants is heading straight for Houston, taking out computers, radios and even vehicles in their path.

Learning penalty in nature

2008-05-06T16:59:00.000-07:00

Source: NY Times

Science
Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better
By CARL ZIMMER
Published: May 6, 2008
New research indicates that growing smarter has dangerous side effects that make its evolution even more puzzling.

Really surprising research to me, though reading the article it makes sense that learning has its costs.

Here's a quote from the article:

Dr. Kawecki and like-minded scientists are trying to figure out why animals learn and why some have evolved to be better at learning than others. One reason for the difference, their research finds, is that being smart can be bad for an animal’s health.

And one more:

Dr. Kawecki says it is worth investigating whether humans also pay hidden costs for extreme learning. “We could speculate that some diseases are a byproduct of intelligence,” he said.

Hmmm...

Stealthier advertising

2008-05-03T16:30:00.000-07:00

I was pondering once again the issue of advertising with YouTube, which is for some reason one of my favorite subjects it seems, when I realized something while looking at a website that had YouTube with AdSense which was that you could see who the advertiser was immediately.

It was right there in the form of this little ad. Plain to see.

But, what if for some ad campaigns--not saying all--advertisers could have a stealthier approach where instead you just saw something that said "Advertiser Supported" where you had to click to see who the advertiser was?

Sound dumb? Well, curiosity is a known thing, you know? And premium, or at least different, content on such pages might draw people to click to see who was advertising which would give them a full video commercial, and links back to the advertiser's sites of interest as they choose to look at it!

Free idea. Maybe I should quit giving away ideas for free, but I have them all the time. What else would I do with them? Sit on them? It's not like anyone's buying my ideas, you know?

Giving up on managed copy?

2008-05-01T21:14:00.000-07:00

Source: Blu-ray.com

Managed Copy: Over Before it Began
Posted April 22, 2008 06:26 PM by Josh

Reports claim that when the AACS content protection system gets finalized this summer - a full year after the self-imposed due date - Managed Copy is not expected to be a part of it. AACS is a mandatory protection system used on Blu-ray, and was initially supposed to include the ability to copy Blu-ray movies onto computers - a process that was named Managed Copy.

Oh well, and again I point out that I came up with a copy protection scheme where your copying equipment encrypts its copies to itself which I call DMESE some time ago.

Hey, but who listens to me. Consequences are easy to explain though.

Short of it: you will not be able to make high definition DVD copies.

So no backup copies of your purchased high definition DVD's in HD.

I'm stuck with you, but I'm also stuck because of you.

Immediate physical effects of alcohol consumption

2008-04-26T14:45:00.000-07:00

Source: TheSite.org

What drink does

Why do we dance on tables when drunk, why do we crave chips at 3am and why do we feel so, so awful the next day? Before you shout for your next Tequila let TheSite.org explain.

What makes you feel drunk?

When a person drinks an alcoholic beverage, about 20% of the alcohol is absorbed in the stomach and about 80% is absorbed in the small intestine....

Pig brain mist mystery

2008-04-16T17:51:00.000-07:00

Source: MSNBC

More workers sick from pig-brain mist
Patients worked at plant that used compressed air to empty swine skulls

updated 2 hours, 3 minutes ago

MINNEAPOLIS - The number of mysterious neurological illnesses among workers who processed pig brains at pork plants in three states has grown to as many as 24...

Shrinking Youngstown

2008-04-14T06:55:00.000-07:00

Source: CNN

The incredible shrinking city
Youngstown, Ohio, has long been on the decline and now is being hit by the foreclosure crisis. Its answer: Razing abandoned buildings and tearing up streets.

By Les Christie, CNNMoney.com staff writer
Last Updated: April 14, 2008: 9:50 AM EDT

...in a radical move, the city - which has suffered since the steel industry left town and jobs dried up - is bulldozing abandoned buildings and tearing up blighted streets, converting entire blocks into open green spaces....

Betting it all on "street smarts"

2008-03-30T12:49:00.000-07:00

Source: NY Times

Op-Ed Columnist
‘With a Few More Brains ...’
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 30, 2008
Our competitiveness as a nation in coming decades will be determined not only by our financial accounts but also by our intellectual accounts.

Remarkable editorial that starts out one way and then goes off in a slightly different direction presenting an argument which I translate to mean that Americans like stupid. And I worry about putting it that way, but how else do you describe priding yourself on NOT knowing things? Or dismissing knowledge as irrelevant and maybe even dangerous as if that "book learning" was a threat to prosperity?

I think it remarkable that I live in a country dominated by the view that you win by being stupider than the other guy, but I think that comes down a lot to the notion of "street smarts", which goes back to America's huckster past.

This country for a long time claimed to be the greatest, when it wasn't. When it had numerous "greatest shows on earth" roaming around which were not even all that good.

America got so used to being the land of the lie often told that it finds it hard to escape it, even when it can legitimately argue to be one of the greatest countries, and definitely one of the most powerful.

Here's a quote from the editorial linked in the title:

From Singapore to Japan, politicians pretend to be smarter and better- educated than they actually are, because intellect is an asset at the polls. In the United States, almost alone among developed countries, politicians pretend to be less worldly and erudite than they are (Bill Clinton was masterful at hiding a brilliant mind behind folksy Arkansas sayings about pigs).

So too many people here pride themselves on being stupid--though they don't say it exactly that way, of course, as they're not THAT stupid--as long as you have "street smarts" which translates to mean: fooling the other guy dumb enough to trust you as you try to cheat him out of everything.

Well, yeah, that can work, for a while, but what happens when the other guy wises up?

Then, I assure you, it's better to be the smart guy. Or billions of years of evolutions--as George W. Bush might say, if he believed in evolution--are just completely wrong.

To the extent that we the people of the United States hate pursuing knowledge we question the value of the science that got us here, and the philosophy that helps us understand where we are.

And that is betting it all on "street smarts" being better than logic, better than reason, and better than finding solutions that actually work, versus empty declarations of total victory against the evidence, because you can get some patsies to believe you, most of the time.

Stupid is as stupid does

2008-03-14T19:05:00.000-07:00

Source: CNN

Lawmaker: U.S. security agency faltering

* Story Highlights
* NEW: "Guards acted according to established mission guidelines," director says
* Federal Protective Service understaffed and underfunded, GAO says
* Embarrassing incidents show vulnerability of government properties
* Congresswoman compares agency to FEMA, blames Homeland Security

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A series of embarrassing incidents on federal property across the country, including the theft of a trailer of surveillance equipment from an FBI parking deck, is being blamed on budget cuts at the agency charged with securing federal grounds.

An absolutely incredible article in terms of unbelievable.

Truth IS stranger than fiction.

So the Federal Protective Service is rolled into the Department of Homeland Security, which guts its budget, so that you can have things like an FBI surveillance truck with "$400,000 worth of high-tech equipment" stolen or a homeless guy dead for days in a federal building.

Um, but aren't we worried about terrorists? That story doesn't sound like George W. Bush is worried about terrorists to me. But how is that possible?

Grain demand

2008-03-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

Source: NY Times

The Food Chain
A Global Need for Grain That Farms Can’t Fill
By DAVID STREITFELD
Published: March 9, 2008
When much of the country is contemplating recession, farmers are flourishing because of runaway demand.

Berkeley is right

2008-02-12T21:07:00.000-08:00

Source: CNN

Showdown looms in 'treasonous' Berkeley

# Story Highlights
# Pro-military groups demand Berkeley take back vote urging Marines to leave
# Military supporter: "Their treasonous action ... is not acceptable,"
# Anti-war groups also gather, stand toe-to-toe against military supporters
# City Council is to meet later Tuesday to discuss its previous vote

Kings and Queens of Britain demanded absolute loyalty. We Americans demand citizenship.

Citizenship is not about blind faith, or standing in line when told.

It's not about asking for permission when freedom is at stake.

It is not about saying yes, sir, or yes madam, when demanded.

Freedom is about courage, and standing for what our national anthem sings.

Freedom is about being brave enough to state your opinion and stand for something.

Our country has faced its greatest challenge, not from the enemy without, but from the enemy within, and in that challenge, there have been the true patriots who have stood for America, for our Constitution, and for what it means to be all fully human--truly trying to be all that you can be.

That some would twist the very foundations of our democracy into something for control and domination is the reality of human life.

There are always those who would hurt through even our most grandest ideals if they can.

But as long as there are free people willing to stand for something, rather than fall for anything, then there is a voice and a cry for freedom and a reason.

We must stand for something greater than ourselves.

And where we find that is part of what it means to be free.

You do not tell me my answer!!!

I must find the truth or forever be a slave if not in body, then in mind.

As when you tell me what I must do, and who I must be then you make yourself my enemy.

And you stand against the Constitution of the United States of America that I have twice sworn to defend.

True patriots know freedoms worth. And they need dominate no one.

As when you stand with me, you understand me. And as we understand each other, we find the reason.

And reason binds us in common duty.

I am an American. And I am truly free.

When murder is all in the family

2008-02-06T13:26:00.000-08:00

Source: CNN

Scout, 15, allegedly killed family without warning

* Story Highlights
* NEW: About 300 teens kill family members each year, experts say
* Families can be affluent, successful and there often is little warning
* Scout, 15, held on $1 million bail in slayings of parents, 2 brothers
* Nicholas Browning had good grades, played golf and lacrosse

Double Dippers dipping dilemma

2008-02-02T09:42:00.000-08:00

Source: MSNBC

Eww! Double dipping just gross, study confirms
‘It’s like kissing everybody at the party,’ researcher says

updated 3:27 p.m. PT, Fri., Feb. 1, 2008

COLUMBIA, S.C. - Keep an eye on the salsa this Super Bowl Sunday: A researcher inspired by a famous “Seinfeld” episode has concluded that double dipping is just plain gross....

...They found that three to six double dips transferred about 10,000 bacteria from an eater’s mouth to the remaining dip sample....

Eww, indeed.

Good cholesterol? Bad? How about neither.

2008-01-27T08:00:00.000-08:00

Source: NY Times

Op-Ed Contributor
What’s Cholesterol Got to Do With It?
By GARY TAUBES
Published: January 27, 2008
The truth is, we’ve always had reason to question the idea that cholesterol is an agent of disease.

An important read. Here's a quote from within the article:

...The lipoproteins LDL and HDL became “good cholesterol” and “bad cholesterol,” and the lipoprotein transport vehicle was now conflated with its cholesterol cargo. Lost in translation was the evidence that the causal agent in heart disease might be abnormalities in the lipoproteins themselves....

Wow. That gave me a quick wake-up this morning. Go figure.

Drying Lake Lanier reveals

2007-12-24T07:22:00.000-08:00

Source: CNN

History comes to light as lake falls

GAINESVILLE, Georgia (AP) -- The acres of drying mud that span much of what once was Lake Lanier jolt to a stop at a bend, where a concrete foundation appears as a sudden reminder of life before the lake....

Faster Internet in Japan

2007-12-01T18:50:00.000-08:00

Source: Washington Post

Japan's Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 29, 2007; Page A01

TOKYO -- Americans invented the Internet, but the Japanese are running away with it.

Broadband service here is eight to 30 times as fast as in the United States -- and considerably cheaper....

Older news which I missed until now.

New fuel standards in US

2007-12-01T11:15:00.000-08:00

Source: CNN Money

Fuel efficiency and the American driver
Congress is poised to finally make cars get better gas mileage. Consumers can expect to pay more for their vehicles but save on their gas bills.

By Steve Hargreaves, CNNMoney.com staff writer
December 1 2007: 1:15 PM EST

The new racial dialogue

2007-11-11T07:14:00.000-08:00

Source: NY Times

The DNA Age
In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice
By AMY HARMON
Published: November 11, 2007
Research is exploring how DNA explains racial differences, but it could give discredited prejudices a new potency.

Science is now moving towards answering questions long-held about differences between various groups and some fear that reinforcement of negative stereotypes may occur while I do not.

That is because I have a very nuanced view of American racism where I see it as in my experience people who rely on race to say they are superior do so because they need that extra, as normal people do not wish to learn that the size of their accomplishments may be lessened because of genetic gifts.

For instance, to do an extreme, what person struts around proud of being able to talk versus their dog's inability?

As human beings we are genetically capable of speech while our four-footed friends are not, but who prides themselves on that?

If "whites" were genetically superior to "blacks" in some areas of intelligence, then their accomplishments in those areas would be rated less in comparison.

Since no one can say that any racial group is completely shut out of any area of human society in terms of accomplishment, actual racial disparity in some particular area would elevate, not diminish the accomplishments of someone from a disadvantaged group.

So those who look to race for a sense of their own superiority do so I suggest based on a sense of their own personal inferiority, so they need the help, as no one wishes to be simply told that their accomplishments are not that big of a deal because they have a genetic leg-up.

Like, consider fashion models.

The new racial dialogue I believe will be a complex one that will go far beyond past ones that were about scared people looking for advantage in a highly competitive society, especially as more people realize that the person claiming supremacy on the basis of race does so because he has nothing else to rely on, so he needs to believe that something built-in gives him at least some worth.

People who value real accomplishment do not value innate advantage as they seek to prove to themselves and others who is the best.

In a world where genetics are increasingly not enough, where people have to learn to be the best, I doubt racial intolerance will gain more traction than it already has as it is instead a sign of fear and weakness.

And in this modern world showing such weakness is increasingly a way to lose.

Direct connect on video

2007-11-02T01:48:00.000-07:00

It has been almost three months since I posted a business plan for video where I tossed out some thoughts on monetizing YouTube, where the gist of what I came up with was sending videos through Google's AdSense network where I spend time explaining why I think that would work.

Now with Google actually pushing videos out through its AdSense network, and also employing a two tier concept which really just makes sense to handle licensing issues, I want to push direct connect with music videos, where you have a second tier as now but the ad on the video would of course be a link to where you can buy the music.

And I must admit it amazes me now with so many videos on YouTube that I don't see how to just click on something easily to go and buy a song that I like after watching that video. I have seen that in other places.

So you'd have a direct connect with music videos where you can go from listening directly to buying.

But it's such a natural progression on YouTube through AdSense where you could flash a link to buy at the beginning of the video and one at the end, letting users immediately go to purchasing after watching, where all the previous rules mentioned in my original business plan would still apply, like not allowing websites to talk about the videos coming in through their AdSense.

Oh, and a personal thing I would really like would be to be able to buy the music video too!

I like getting this idea out now as it's such an obvious thing to do that I cannot see it not happening eventually, and the only problem then would be figuring out how revenues would be distributed and who'd pay, like if a blog pulls in a music video that is watched thousands of times but few people bother to buy the music, should the artist or label get some revenue anyway based on the amount of watching pulled from revenue generated by the other ads on the site?

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2007-10-24T21:53:00.000-07:00

I noted in my prior post today that waking up in the early morning hours at times I get these realizations and this morning I realized emphatically that Google is just a referral company. So what does that mean?

Well, in real life people refer us to interesting things all the time. You know, like someone says, hey, check this out, or have you heard about this thing?

More so than any of the other Internet people out there Google refers people to interesting content on the web and it is raking in billions as a result, while the others are clueless and worse, they stumble in remarkably dumb ways, like looking to give people more choices when the Internet is already overwhelming in terms of choice.

Now I also mentioned a business idea for Yahoo! in my previous post as they are suffering and now I want to just say it's an open idea for anyone who can provide this cool thing that I'd like to have, which is to have a personalized web page that starts out blank.

Yup, you heard me, a completely blank page with some options on the left or right where you can switch sides as you choose, and you can grab things to put on your initially blank page, like news, photos, music, movies and television.

(Shoot. Google already has something like that! But looking at it, it gives you too many choices, so maybe there is hope. Figure out how to maximize choice and maybe you can get an edge.)

This page will not annoy you at the outset with ads begging for your attention, as big companies behave like street beggars trying to force themselves on you, but will, over time, as, say, you build your page piece by piece notice things that interest you and refer you to interesting content which may be books, movies or even cars.

Yup, if I'm in the market for a car and I have a decent referral site I do not care if it gives me Mazda or Audi ads.

Now Yahoo! does have some kind of page you can personalize and I checked it after my post earlier today to refresh my memory and noted a large number of choices. And I like choices like most people but I have gone down that road of spending time fiddling with options to find that after spending time I value, I do not really like what I get.

The web is dominated by people who believe in endless information because that's how geeks feel pride. They pride themselves on knowing more than others and having enough options that you could take a college course to really do anything.

Until the web is no longer dominated by geeks we will not have meaningful choices or referral, except from Google.

Which I think is a sad thing, meaning lots of people rush only to mainstream sites that get millions of visits even though they do not provide meaningful referral, while they continually try to cram ads at you, begging for your attention, while not giving you what you really need in return.

Our modern web is primitive. It hasn't yet learned well the most basic thing that people do for each other, and until it does, it will waste millions of hours of people's time, because it still does not yet know how to efficiently refer us to content we each care about in our own particular way.

So I say, in retrospect that my earlier thinking was on target, for whatever good it does. I understand what I don't like about the web, but executives with billions of dollars in resources have the power, including the power to keep annoying me with stupid ads forced on me until I hate the companies that they represent.

James Harris

It's referral, stupid

2007-10-24T05:43:00.000-07:00

I find at times I wake up early in the morning which is when I seem to have these insights. Like I was thinking to myself that the easiest way to completely define Google is to say that it is a referral company. They refer people to interesting content where that you can say is what all media companies do, which is why we, the consumers, allow them to exist.

That is what media companies do, they refer us.

Now Yahoo! is having some troubles so I'm going to help them out with a business idea, as I go to their main website often to see if I'm going to get referred to anything interesting and I do at times and it's always news, nothing else.

But they have so much stuff there that I know they want to refer me, but clearly they want to refer me only to stuff they or their various business partners want. But what about what I want?

I can tell what they want as they are painfully transparent in their needs and I know it's about money and they need money. They need my time so they can make money, I got that part.

But if they can't refer me to what I want then what good are they to me? And why should I help them continue to exist? (Yes, they have search too but Google is a great referrer so I can get more with its search.)

Oh yeah, so the business idea for Yahoo is a personalized page that builds based on your searches (with your permission of course) which kind of acts like a friend, in that, say, you do a lot of porn searches it kind of nicely ignores that (unless you ask it not to) and slowly builds a profile by suggesting at times a site or two but no more than three that you might want to add to your page.

And every once in a while it refers you to some interesting content, which, wow, can include advertising! Where instead of being another beggar on the streets of the Web, Yahoo! can actually be a referrer you appreciate.

I am tired of pushy companies either forcing ads at me--still begging people, no matter how flashy or snazzy the ads are--or never figuring out ways to refer me to interesting content.

While Google keeps doing this better it will clobber everyone else.

Ok, that is my sleepy idea of the day. May as well get up now and later I'll come back to see how this one sounds after the passage of time.

It's referral, stupid. IRS. Hey, that's kind of ironic. Go figure.

Idea check, video business plan

2007-10-13T19:39:00.000-07:00

About two months ago I tossed out some ideas, as I'm an idea person so that's what I do, musing on ways that Google might make money from YouTube. In that post I noted that Google might, of course, be thinking in the same direction and now that they've moved a lot in that direction I have an incredible opportunity to see how my ideas play out in the real world in a huge way.

Now there is something called concurrency, which kind of means that people can think in the same direction and I think that what I thought of was obvious anyway so there is no insinuation that Google was following my lead. What I am looking forward to though is seeing how well my ideas track with what happens in the real world and I thought I might comment on why I think it should work.

It's fun reading criticism of what Google is doing because a lot of it boils down to saying that videos should match site content, but, hey, commercials on television don't match the television show or when you watched "E.R." you'd only see advertising for medical products or medical schools or something.

Now some people out there have the notion that everyone hates commercials when an important function of commercials is NOT being what the show is about, as think of all the things you'd never knew existed if not for television commercials. Subtle point, eh?

We need distractions and human nature is to work by referral. The television show gets our attention and the commercials refer us to other things of interest that we might never know about on our own--and they give us a break from concentration on show content.

It reminds me of a criticism I had of another industry where satellite radio was crying about its failing business model and the two major players wanted to merge--I guess so they could fail together. And I noted that they should just follow the successful business model of cable television and I specifically said they should not focus on just providing content without commercials.
See: Consider satellite radio

And I have a good feel for why commercials can be great as a break and yes, a distraction from watching a lot of PBS in the past. And I like PBS and I think it important that they rely on funding and not on advertisers but I have sat during their programs looking at interesting material wishing for a break here and there to go to the bathroom or get a quick snack. And of course you do that anyway (when you got to go you got to go...) and feel like you missed something.

The Internet allows direct acquisition of information with a lot more power than ever before but that takes energy and concentration. Also it requires focus and knowing what you're looking for, and even with all of that you can have so many choices that you are overwhelmed.

So the short answer behind the business model idea as I see it (who knows what Google thinks) is that you are referring people to interesting videos and giving them potentially a break from concentrating on whatever brought them to the site, and they will click, I believe.

And that's where it gets interesting as we're talking about Google here so if that is true than it is very huge and if it's not I'm sure they'll do something else, so as a test of ideas it is just about perfect.

As I'm an idea person. I had been idly thinking about video since I put it on this blog, and wondering a bit here and there about how Google was going to make money on YouTube and one day I sat down, oh yeah, it was August 10th since thankfully that's recorded, and typed that post up quickly and that's easy to do.

Which is why I like tossing ideas out there as I have them all the time and it's just what I do, so what else would I do with them? Here at least happenstance has given a real world test, so I anxiously await information on how Google is doing in this area and hope they crush their competition into the dust.

What is the CDC?

2007-10-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

The CDC stands for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its website is the one government website that I highly recommend to any and everyone.

It is a site you should check for important information on a regular basis.

You can do so from this blog but I recommend adding it to your favorites:

www.cdc.gov

The more we know, the more we help each other.

Useful appendix

2007-10-05T17:37:00.000-07:00

Source: MSNBC

Scientists may have found appendix’s purpose
Seemingly useless organ may produce, protect good germs for your gut

WASHINGTON - Some scientists think they have figured out the real job of the troublesome and seemingly useless appendix: It produces and protects good germs for your gut....

Grape has more genes than you

2007-09-27T17:07:00.000-07:00

Source: Yahoo! News

Wine grape genes mapped
By JENNY BARCHFIELD, Associated Press Writer Thu Sep 27, 1:51 PM ET

...A team of French and Italian researchers has mapped the genome of the pinot noir grape, used to make bubbly and many red wines from France's Burgundy region and around the world — and it has about 30,000 genes in its DNA. That's more than the human genome, which contains some 20,000 to 25,000 genes.

Germs in space, experiment makes deadlier

2007-09-24T17:14:00.000-07:00

Source: Yahoo! News

Germs taken to space come back deadlier
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer Mon Sep 24, 5:02 PM ET

WASHINGTON - It sounds like the plot for a scary B-movie: Germs go into space on a rocket and come back stronger and deadlier than ever. Except, it really happened.

Oh, I love this story. And who thinks of sending germs into space and seeing how many mice they kill when they get back anyway?

Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site

2007-09-22T10:53:00.000-07:00

Source: NY Times, headline is their title

Business / Media & Advertising
Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: September 18, 2007
The move comes two years to the day after The New York Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect.

I say, cool. That means I have a preference for NY Times articles now, as I've noticed links to articles I've put on this blog to other news sites have just stopped working. No comment, no explanation. The news company just drop the links after a while which is annoying to me. Why can't they at least put up a note saying why or where it went? Or give some kind of notice?

At some point I may have to go back and clear or make comments on articles I've linked to from news sources that are no longer there, which is a headache I'm procrastinating on, but at least now I can count on the New York Times!

Iceland's clean energy

2007-09-20T20:07:00.000-07:00

Source: CNN

... Virtually all of the country's electricity and heating comes from domestic renewable energy sources -- hydroelectric power and geothermal springs.

It's pollution-free and cheap....

About class, not really about race

2007-09-15T19:01:00.000-07:00

Source: MSNBC

The ‘Jena Six’

Things are looking up for six black teens charged with trying to kill a white classmate last year after a Louisiana court vacated the conviction of one of the men. But national civil-rights advocates say something remains very amiss in the small town.

People may be puzzled by the endurance of weird racism in the United States, as consider the story linked to above where the start was with white teenagers angry at black teenagers sitting in what was considered a whites only area--a spot under a tree.

So how is it about class and not race?

Well, if the town could send a message to its black teenagers that they are second-class citizens who have to defer to whites, is that not telling them that the whites are nobility?

Story after story of American racism when looked at from a class perspective really are attempts at one group asserting its nobility over another and demanding respect.

In England in the past, nobles could have people physically punished for not giving them "their due". Calling a lady, a lady was not about choice.

American racism is best interpreted as I have said before as an attempt by one group to make itself a noble class in this country along the lines of what its members saw in their country before they came here.

It is so hard to stamp out as it is about a social safety net, where the belief is that all you have to do is be in the top class and live off the bottom one, which is that naive perspective of how British royalty worked--or did not.

So if only those pesky black people would accept their role at the bottom, then the upper class could get to the business of enjoying life! Like in jolly ol England.

Now not every person labeled white in the United States thinks this way, and I'd think that the majority do not.

I believe that the majority of people in this country like a middle class way of life, and would actually get sickened by a real upper class riding herd over a dominated "commoner" class, but while they ignore the reality that not everyone in this country thinks the same way, they allow these people to create very un-American situations, like a special tree for only whites, and punishments meant to send a message to black kids who stepped over the class lines drawn.

That's not the United States that most people think of, when they think of here.

Internet marketing and food analogy

2007-08-25T08:40:00.000-07:00

Having had some time to think even more about my business plan for video that I posted a little while back I feel a need to do a post about Internet marketing as I spend a lot of time on the web and mostly feel frustrated with this sense that the information I want is out there, but it is so hard to get to it, when I want it, in the way I want it.

The primary problem I believe is that marketers do not appreciate that the web is empowering--I have to go to places and I signal interest by clicking on something--while television is passive--you cut on the TV and watch what people put there, where at best you can change the channel.

Big money has been spent on pushing things on people following the passive line of thinking where someone else decides content and at best you can change the channel, while the Internet allows you to pick and choose.

So it's like a difference between a buffet table, and a la carte.

But worse, as today's big name providers try to give you a buffet table with only one thing!

Or you get sites piled with tons and tons of different kinds of things to the point that you spend a lot of time trying to choose.

And my favorites to criticize, are bloggers who do BOTH, so you get a blog dominated by one flavor of life, like a political blog, so it's like the buffet table is stuffed with nothing but, oh, broccoli and on the sides they might have hundreds of links all over the map, so it's like, lots and lots of broccoli and then in a corner there's a little table piled high with every food you can imagine in little bites!

In between are news sites and portal sites like Yahoo! where you get the buffet table with, say, just different kinds of meats, so you have beef, chicken and pork, but no vegetables! And oh yeah, at the bottom you have every kind of food imaginable plus some other stuff, in little bites.

Oh, and hey, to punish you for even bothering to come by, you get these ads pushed at you.

But if you look to the right on this blog, you'll see disparate videos which would seem to have nothing to do with the subject of the blog.

Like I have a search on Mazda videos because I love Mazda's and have been a big fan of them for years, but I thought I needed some other automaker as well so I settled on Audi, not that I knew much about Audi, or cared much, but just as another car to put up there and I had heard of them. I put them up and the videos that came in looked cool, so they stayed.

And now I like Audi's.

The videos cycle some kind of way and I pick them so it's kind of passive, like channel surfing, but hey, you can just forget they are there. And that's a lot of the point as I don't want people coming to this blog to watch videos!

I want them to read the blog.

The web empowers me so if I'm at some website and reading about something of interest--the main course of the meal--then at some point I might want a bit of distraction and appreciate a video about some product that interests me.

I want a smörgåsbord when I go to a website.

And I will click on, say, a video about Mazda's at some site not about cars just because it's there and I might get bored reading what is there, or be done with it and want something else.

But I don't click on ads pushed on me at the major sites, as they are not about pleasantly distracting areas of interest but about some person trying to make me do something and this is the web and you cannot make me do anything!

Who knows if I'll ever buy an Audi, but next time I'm in the position to buy a car I will make an effort to go look at them, and maybe do a test drive...

Marketers on the web need to become partners with people, sharing interesting content, and at times just putting up things that are just there because they're fun, and hey, you might want to check this out! But if not? Ok. Not going to push anything on you.

Major portals have a hard time though picking and choosing so I'm sure there are ways to personalize, but that means I have to do all the work, personally, while it's nice to discover things, like at a table with just enough disparate content so you can pick and choose like a regular meal and get pleasantly full.

Give me that and I'll go to a site over and over again, happily and feel like maybe there is something to this web thing.

Bug me with too narrow a range of content, with insult added to injury from boring ads, and I will feel greatly empowered by going anyway to get what I want while ignoring the ads as best I can, muttering to myself that these people do not understand the potentially empowering wonder that is the modern world, wide web.

Middle way with a business plan for video

2007-08-10T17:13:00.000-07:00

I was ecstatic when I finally noticed that Blogger had added video for blogs, and happily added them to my site which is a major reason why I visit this blog every day, whether I post or not, and it is extraordinary to me how far advanced things are so that with little technical knowledge--ok you need none--you can pull from YouTube and get videos.

And that gave me an idea that I'm creatively presenting to Google by posting it!

But first a disclaimer as if this is something Google is working on, then hey, we are just thinking alike and that's a good thing! And if not, hey, isn't it just great that there is this medium for presenting ideas to the world and who knows where it can lead!

Having gone to YouTube I see it as a warehouse of tremendous possibilities with a lot of choice, and I wonder about the revenue stream, while bloggers can put videos on their blogs, but how do the artists get paid, and just as importantly, how do they protect themselves from obnoxious bloggers who might LOVE to pull in a video just so they can rip on it?

Since Google owns YouTube, owns Blogger and has AdSense already, it makes sense that they can form licensing agreements with content providers who get a piece of ad revenue and in exchange provide videos for blogging, but the devil is in the details, right?

Maybe not. Currently with AdSense users are required NOT to talk about the ads that appear on their pages, so it isn't a leap to preventing bloggers from talking about videos pulled in by their blogs if they do advertising as well, which leads to the idea of having a second tier of videos provided by content providers only for bloggers with AdSense who then will not talk about those videos!

But that may seem silly, why pull in videos that you cannot talk about?

Well, I do it on this page. And I like to start a video and watch the financial headlines play across the top and if I see something interesting, I'll open it in another tab. The videos have nothing to do with the content of the blog, and I haven't even mentioned them until now.

The second tier of videos on YouTube could then be ones where only bloggers with AdSense get them or paying subscribers to YouTube can see them, while that is not the primary revenue stream as it's unlikely to provide much in the way of revenue--users are just not good about paying for non-porn videos!

BUT bloggers able to pull in videos to add continually changing content, can get premium and exclusive content without needing to address what that content is and scare the artist, who then doesn't need to worry about conflicts with her own marketing efforts or wacky bloggers attacking those efforts!

But still you need more protection so there could be arbitrary blog exclusions allowing the artist to not allow a particular video to play on a particular blog or group of blogs in some category--like music if the artist is a musician or singer--at will. Or, like if, say an artist wishes to release a video to only an authorized fansite--remember there is an exclusion on talking about the videos so unauthorized ones would be blocked--she would need to be able to add specific blogs.

Artists would be able to add or remove videos at will under the licensing agreement, and might use this as a way to put out a video the other mainstream providers might not want, just to see, you know? And be able to yank it off quickly if there isn't the desired response.

So how do you measure impact? A key metric would be total time of video play.

Like if a particular video logs several thousand hours of watched time, then that sounds like a hit!

I see this idea as a middle way, as bloggers can be middle marketers between the warehouse of YouTube with tremendous amount of content and a HUGE number of choices, and consumers who can go to blogs and see videos that are usually unrelated to the blogs content, but still nice to have, without the artist facing interference with her own efforts which might include a blog of her own, where she can show videos, or an authorized site where that can be done as well.

YouTube then provides yet another clear revenue stream for Google and provides a benefit to the consumer who like me finds it hard wading through all those choices at the main site.

And that's it! Contracts with bloggers are easy as AdSense already has them, and with Google controlling so much of the territory the legal aspects should be manageable in a way satisfying to all parties.

Yet another free idea! But I'm putting it in the fantasy section as what are the odds that anyone will listen to me? But just in case, hey, Google, I also have an idea for expanding my Class Viewer project to enterprise and other languages, like hey, what about Class Viewer for C?

So I need venture capital and a partner willing to give the product away for free!!!

Call me?

Coming back and looking at this post and adding just a bit I am not as excited about it as before but that is normal for me as I come up with ideas all the time so my expectations are not high.

IN this case I was wondering this afternoon again about the next wave in terms of providing content as users want it when they want while still generating needed revenue and this idea which I have been kind of mulling for a while, matured, or at least I think it did.

But it is just another idea.

Ice keeps New York office towers cool

2007-07-24T16:28:00.000-07:00

Source: CNN, title is their headline

...Some office towers and buildings are keeping their AC use to a minimum by using an energy-saving system that relies on blocks of ice to pump chilly air....

"Controlled Burn"

2007-07-15T07:03:00.000-07:00

Source: Fox station KTVU

POSTED: 8:36 am PDT July 14, 2007
SACRAMENTO -- Two dispatchers with the California Highway Patrol initially dismissed 911 calls that came in reporting a fire on the south rim of Lake Tahoe, causing a seven-to-nine minute delay in their response, recordings of the 911 calls that were released Friday show.

On the tape from five calls answered by the CHP Truckee field office, dispatchers tell callers the smoke they are seeing is from a controlled burn in the area. The smoke actually came from a fire that ultimately destroyed 254 homes and burned 3,100 acres of mountain wilderness....

Completing DMESE

2007-07-10T18:41:00.000-07:00

I've introduced an idea for protecting digital media from unlimited illegal copying which I call Digital Media Equipment Self-Encryption or DMESE for short, where the essential part of the idea is that the copying equipment encrypts its own copy where it can read it but it is harder to pass to others, but part of the idea is use of a flash drive so you can pass the copy.

But thinking about it more I realize that now people can do things like pass their master copy around to all their friends who can make copies that way, and while that might be a bit more involved than things are now it might not be enough to satisfy the entertainment industry.

So the completion of the idea is that the copy will work without hassle for 30 days and at the end of the 30 day period, you have to put the master disk back into the drive after which the copy will work indefinitely. That way if people pass their master disk around copiers will need to keep it for 30 days or ask for it back in that time.

I arbitrarily picked 30 days of course as it could be shorter while I think it wouldn't help to be longer. And key to the idea is the copying drive keeping up with each of its copies, but they're all individually encrypted anyway with a time stamp from the original idea.

So now, yeah, someone might still let, say, their close friend make a copy, knowing they'll either have to keep the bought original disk for 30 days or ask for it again, but it'll be a hassle, and the point of all this is making it not worth it, so that it's easier to just buy your own.

11-year-old charged with driving drunk in Alabama

2007-07-07T09:16:00.000-07:00

Source: Yahoo! News, title is headline

An 11-year-old girl was charged with drunken driving after leading police on a chase at speeds of up to 100 mph that ended when she flipped the car in an Alabama beach town.

CDC and TV

2007-07-06T18:59:00.000-07:00

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Millions of Americans have been able to dispel myths and stigma around cancer, obesity, HIV and many other public health concerns through the power of entertainment. Popular shows like ER, Grey's Anatomy and Girlfriends have helped CDC educate and inform the public while also reaching at-risk audiences with prevention messages....

Entertainment industry, copy protection and DMESE

2007-07-05T16:52:00.000-07:00

Back in January of this year I made a post of an idea for copy protection on one of my other blogs, and as time goes by I like it more.

Simply enough I figured that when you make a copy, say of a DVD--wait, let's shift to CD's now because the music industry's flagging sales of CD's are in the news--so you make a copy of a CD, then if it's a music CD you bought from a store with some artist, like say, Celine Dion, then your copy is automatically encrypted by your own pc's CD player as it makes the copy. That copy is its own, like its baby, so it can read it with no problem, but no one else can, without a key, which you can pass by a flash drive.

May sound silly, why should your computer's CD drive encrypt your copy?

Simple, so no one else can easily use the copy while you can use it without hassle or even caring that it is encrypted. Flash drives can fit into USB ports, and that part of the idea is so that you can play the CD on some other device you own, but yes, it also means that if you must you could give the copy to someone else, but they have to have the flash drive with the decrypting code as well and the copy has identifying information about you.

That means the point of this idea is that you the end user are unlikely to be able to take your CD player apart, pull the chips that encrypt it and solder in new chips re-programmed to give you unencrypted copies so that you can widely distribute to your friends and family.

I christened the idea Digital Media Equipment Self-Encryption or DMESE for short.

It has been on a blog of mine since January of this year.

For the sake of argument let's attack the idea with some questions:

1. Why can't anyone just figure out a way to get around this like they seem to do with every other copy protection idea?

Ans: Sure, experienced hackers with electrical engineering degrees might be able to re-program their digital equipment like take apart their CD drive or their DVD drive, but can you if you're not one? And will you go find that local guy to do it for you so that you can make illegal copies to give to lots of your friends, or will you just settle for legal copies that you can still give to your friends anyway if you really want?

2. Doesn't copy protection just suck anyway? Why have any?

Ans: Because illegal copying cuts into profits for people who control the production and distribution of entertainment media and while the system may suck in many ways, it is the system we have, so why not get a solution that helps everyone? This idea lets you make copies, say, of Transformers when it comes out on DVD without worrying about some studio hating your guts, as they can figure, sure maybe you'll give a copy to your daughter, your Dad, or your Mom, but you will not supply the entire neighborhood, and all your co-workers, and total strangers who you meet on the street, etc. with copies of their movie.

3. Sounds great, can I expect to copy my movies and DVD's legally by Christmas?

Ans: Probably not. I call myself one of the most successful failures in human history because I have quite a few spectacular ideas--mostly ignored by the mainstream--where I am in this arena where money matters (I hope) because my other big ideas are mostly in mathematics. Being an idea person I know how hard it can be to get institutions to look for ideas from unexpected sources, so despite the millions in losses from the industry, I know that this idea can just sit, without anything being done.

4. Wait a minute, if it's such a great idea and you think you're so smart, why not patent it and get rich?

I tried to patent an idea once. After over $4,000 U.S. ( I got an attorney) and silly objections from a patent examiner, I gave up--no patent. I have no interest in repeating working at a broken system, and besides, this is more fun! I estimate this idea is worth possibly over $100 million U.S. over its patentable lifetime, and I'm giving it away! For free!!!

Who can do that? Who else? No one but me, and it's kind of a fun thing to contemplate as I am an idea person and ideas intrigue me.

Besides, it allows me to feel quite a bit smarter than an industry full of arrogant people and I get a kick out of the idea of, say, some music executive whining in some meeting about flagging sales around people who may know this idea, and quietly smile to themselves...

James Harris

Jumping Sturgeon Striking Boaters

2007-07-04T07:08:00.000-07:00

Source: New York Times

Summertime. Fish Jumping. That’s Trouble.
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Published: July 4, 2007
Florida’s season of “sturgeon strikes” — collisions between the leaping fish and hapless boaters — is under way.

Happy 4th of July!!!

Taxing reality

2007-06-27T16:33:00.000-07:00

Source: CNN

...Speaking to several hundred supporters of the U.S. Senator from New York, Buffett revealed his puzzlement that he was taxed at a lower rate than many of the lesser-paid individuals working for his company.

Buffett said he makes $46 million a year in income and is only taxed at a 17.7 percent rate on his federal income taxes. By contrast, those who work for him, and make considerably less, pay on average about 32.9 percent in taxes - with the highest rate being 39.7 percent....

Mystery shark pregnancy, aquarium experts ponder

2007-06-25T17:04:00.000-07:00

I paused for a bit wondering who'd want to hear another shark pregnancy story? But then I realized this one should go into what I fear may be a hard to fill category, so here it is:

Source: CNN article

...Asexual reproduction among sharks is more likely to happen in captivity, when there is no other option for reproduction, than in the wild, Hueter said.

Crossbreeding, on the other hand, is not known to happen at all among sharks, said Heather Thomas, aquarist at the John G. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.

"It's not natural," Thomas said. "If you've got a shark that needs to swim to breathe and cross it with a shark that can lay on the bottom to breathe, what are you going to get? Are you going to get these weird mutations?"

Article on CDC sex, drug survey

2007-06-23T08:28:00.000-07:00

CNN has an article about a survey of sexual behavior and drug use in the United States released Friday.

Here's a quote from the article:

A new nationwide survey, using high-tech methods to solicit candid answers on sexual activity and illegal drug use, finds that 29 percent of American men report having 15 or more female sexual partners in a lifetime, while only 9 percent of women report having sex with 15 or more men.

The median number of lifetime female sexual partners for men was seven; the median number of male partners for women was four.

Fascinating. It is the kind of information that automatically has one thinking, where do you rank?

100-foot deep Andes lake disappears

2007-06-21T19:46:00.000-07:00

Source: CNN, title is headline

• Lake disappeared between March and May
• Ice chunks that floated on lake now lie on rocks
• Scientists say no earthquakes that could have caused cracks in lake bottom

New York City pays $29,000 for arresting topless woman

2007-06-18T17:04:00.000-07:00

Source: CNN, title is article headline

• Jill Coccaro, 27, accepts settlement for her 2005 arrest during topless stroll
• NYC police held her for 12 hours before telling her she wouldn't be charged
• Appeals court ruled in '92 that women have same right as men to go topless
• Lawyer: "We hope police learn a lesson and respect the rights of women"

Re-thinking DNA and RNA

2007-06-14T21:17:00.000-07:00

Source: Economist

Molecular biology is undergoing its biggest shake-up in 50 years, as a hitherto little-regarded chemical called RNA acquires an unsuspected significance

Alabama state senator hits another

2007-06-07T22:30:00.000-07:00

Source: CNN

MONTGOMERY, Alabama (AP) -- Simmering tensions in the Alabama Senate boiled over Thursday when a Republican lawmaker punched a Democratic colleague in the head before they were pulled apart....

What is "managed copy"?

2007-05-26T08:41:00.000-07:00

Link above is to a news article on managed copy which is a subject that has recently been in the news.

Idea as I see it is to let people do what comes natural and make backup copies of DVD's that they buy. I know I want to have backup copies as I learned that lesson with CD's as I have lots of scratched up CD's that I don't like playing because you have to keep jumping them over the really bad scratched parts.

Trouble is, if you make a DVD easy to copy, movie studios and other people in the chain are worried about losing lots of money as people then make copies for their friends, or even people who are strangers as I've noticed as today copying is a casual thing.

What gets me though is that it is easy to solve the problem by digital media equipment self-encryption (DMESE)--I like making up phrases so I just made that up--where your computer makes a backup copy--encrypted by it, for it.

So because your computer encrypts your copy, your computer can read your copy, but no one else can without a key.

Ok, problem solved, next thing?

Sure, yeah, the problem can be solved by me casually on a blog just like that but we live in a world complicated by massive human egos so don't necessarily think that because I put out a simple idea that would let me back up my DVD's like I backup CD's that you'll be able to do it by Christmas!

Oh yeah, I've talked about this idea multiple times on one of my other blogs:

Post on my other blog

James Harris

House slides into Bodega Bay

2007-05-23T20:57:00.000-07:00

Source: KTVU, San Francisco

Link is to a slide show about a home that slid into Bodega Bay.

Back again

2007-05-14T15:55:00.000-07:00

I had this blog for a while and then dropped it, but found that my other blogs just didn't satisfy all my needs so I've revived it.

If only partly because I have a new compilation of some of my short stories and a couple of poems, which I'm tossing in the link section.

But mostly I've realized that at times I want to just babble, and my other blogs are just too focused like on my programming work or my mathematical research, while this one can just be silly, and I can do what I like at times to do, comment on the world.

I think I should make another post, with one of my poems.

James Harris