ihoby wog

First I checked in with Launchnet and Covad separately and found out some bad news: my new house would cut my download speed in half. 3mbit is the fastest I could get from them or any other DSL provider. Hm. Also I’d have to buy a new modem and be locked in for a full year (or was it 2 years?). The other DSL providers could indeed be cheaper but they wouldn’t be better or faster. Next I checked to see if Verizon has gotten fiber into the area. Nope. Has the city done anything with all the fiber they strung up and down the city limits? No. Okay so cable internet. I had high hopes that cable companies other than Comcast had begun providing in the area but they all turned out to be ones that sold ONLY to tenants of the giant sky-rise appts/condos downtown. For WiMax all there is, is Clear, who used to be called Clearwire.

So now from 5 potential options I’m down to 3 actual options:

I had a thought then about the companies themselves, about their evil factor, so I looked up their history:

The info on these companies can be found in many places but most of it is already summarized well on Wikipedia.

Faced with this information I was twisted in a dilemma: Should I choose the least evil for the highest cost, slowest service, and most inflexible contract? Or the middle evil for questionably better service? Or the cheapest, fastest service who will use all the money I give them to undermine every internet/media policy I stand for?

In the end, I ended up trying out Clear since it seemed the easiest to back out of if it didn’t work well. It certainly wasn’t a clear winner (bad pun) but it seemed like the only balance between evil and connectivity in North Seattle. It shouldn’t have to be this difficult.

Greening Jobs
        Federal and State Departments for employing people directly
                For centralized services mainly
                Track everything to measure success
        Loans, Tax Breaks, Grants, and Contracts for companies/people
                For individuals and small regions
                Guard against monopolies
        Job Categories
                Research – reviving old tech and finding new tech
                Design – making what is built the best it can be
                        Non-toxic fabrication methods
                        Recyclable materials
                        Power/battery efficiency
                Construction – manufacturing and building new solutions
                Installation – putting new solutions directly into use
                Retrofitting – replace innards with green tech, melt/recycle old tech
                Maintenance – keeping centralized, business, and home solutions running
                Trade – exporting services, technology, and equipment internationally
        Job Industries
                Power Generation from Wind, Solar, Thermal, and Tidal
                        Dual focus on centralized and home/business generators
                                Decentralization reduces transmission waste
                        Australian Power Tower Design
                        Cut subsidies for toxic dig & burn sources
                                coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear
                        Cut subsidies for ethanol crops
                New Power Storage
                        Hyper-efficient batteries
                        Hydrogen Fuel Cells
                        Flywheels
                        Rain Collection
                Electric Transportation
                        Bikes, Scooters, Cars, Trucks, Busses, Trains
                        Focus on fully Electric Vehicles
                        Power management intelligence
                        Retrofitting used cars with new fuel/engines
                        Cut subsidies for gas, diesel, and ethanol vehicles
                Carbon Neutral Building
                        Green Materials
                        Energy Efficiency
                        Water conservation
                        Green Roofing
                                Grass, Garden, Function (rain to power conv.)
                Water Purification
                        “Amphitheater” and other designs
                        Reduce waterway contamination
                                from farmland, industrial, and residential waste water
                                renegotiate/enforce pollution agreements
                Greener General Consumer Goods
                        electronics, clothing, furniture, etc.
        Organization and Transparency
                Invest in transparency network for governmental funding tracking
                Fund a universal citizen participation network
                        (of my design: swiftmouse.com/icare/ )

Education Jobs
        Grade School
                Federally fund public schools
                        Boost teacher salaries
                        Reduce administrator salaries
                        Reduce class sizes
                                Build more schools
                                        150 students max
                        Replace outdated materials
                        Develop admin software to reduce waste/corruption
                        Broaden subjects taught
                Increase support staff for students
                        Shift style from industrial-lecture to “coaching” model
                        Create more types of counselors
                                for students
                                for teachers
                        Focus on participation instead of assessment
                        Mandate paid leave for parents to participate certain days a week
                Regulate out corporate influence
                Increase food self-sufficiency
                        school gardens, cooking, and nutrition
        College and University
                Increase subsidies
                        Encourage lower tuitions
                        Offset textbook costs
                Increase financial transparency
                Reduce administrator pay
                Increase instructor and assistant pay
                Federal grants for more domestic students
                Reduce interest rates for student loans
                Build additional colleges
                Promote continuing education
        Trade School
                Validate/Accredit certifications
                Build some federal trade schools for industries in this outline
        Adult School
                Fund night-time working family education
                        Community promotions
                        Modernize courses
                        Increase teacher pay
        Free School (“teach-in”)
                Subsidy funding
                Promotion grants
                Certification and accreditation
        Prison and Jail Schools
                Create one or more in every jail and prison
                        both state and privatized
                Fund and manage separately from prison/jail budget
        Textbook publishing
                Research and Develop electronic materials technology
                Encourage younger authors to publish
                Re-assess copyright law to make developing coursework easier/cheaper
                

Agriculture
        Break up and auction off farming conglomerates
                Fund small farmer buy-back programs
        Subsidize smaller and independent farms
        Encourage more employment and less equipment
        Research and Educate for best practices
                Encourage systems-based “grass farming” approach
                        Organic growing
                        Locally consumed
                        Humane livestock conditions and waste management
                        Increased crop/breed diversity
                Gather and compile local/cultural wisdom
                Employ ex-farmers as educators
                Ban genetically modified food and open-air testing
                Tax sale of nonreproducible hybrid seeds heavily
        Create subsidies/policies for decentralized farming
                Urban gardens
                        Commercial building roof gardens
                        “pea patch” community gardens
                Organize farmers markets
                Organize/assist CSA programs
                Create a federal farmworker job type
                Create federal farming exchange programs
                        land owners open specific acres for outside farmers to grow on
                Expire patents on all “living systems”

Healthcare
        Grow Medicare jobs and eligibility to replace Insurance for all ages
                Treat all citizens automatically for basic care
                        consider most women’s treatments as basic care
                Treat immigrants and foreigners with some conditions and charges
                Normalize practitioner salaries for basic care
                Offset cost of “optional” medical care with federal funding
                        Working class pays moderate amount
                        Rich pay more
        Set up little state run clinics in communities without nearby hospitals
                mobile and in unoccupied buildings
        Develop open source tools for medical information management
        Provide incentives for doctors and nurses to return to general practice
        Ban Insurance companies from healthcare
                Liquidate assets of healthcare portions of insurance companies
                Replace with loans/savings programs for costly optional treatments

Employment Quality
        Streamline federal employment hiring procedures
        Cap executive pay maximums
        Raise minimum wage
        Increase vacation time
        Increase national holidays
        Reduce weekly hour maximums
        Regulate against “crunch times”
        Create incentives for co-op style businesses
                Everyone is paid the same
                Everyone has a vote for important decisions
        Encourage “monkeysphere”-aware organization sizes
        Ensure new programs reach the most marginalized populations
                American indian, african american, latin american, immigrant

Net for neutrality, jobs, education, voting & free access

The internet has the potential to be an amazing means to right the wrongs of the past and remain an agile society faced with resource depletion.

Network transmission must be kept free, open, and unbiased – that makes the rest possible. National effort must be put into solving some of the employment crisis by hiring people to build free access hardware, educational materials, independent media, governmental transparency, and bring it all back together with Democracy 2.0 online.

Power that with electricity from “green economy” energy infrastructure and you’ve got a bright future for this country.

For various reasons, these would be my picks for CTO in order of priority:
Brad Templeton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia
Lawrence Lessig of the Creative Commons
Brewster of Internet Archive
Craig Newmark of Craigslist
Rob Malda of Slashdot.org

My vision of the future is about a change of national and international priorities from empire, conquest, profit, and control; and into making our cultural goals being sustainability, tolerance, balance, culture, and awareness.

As for actions, they can be prioritized into the following categories:
1. Diverting funding from the absurdly rich to the working class.
2. Turning our foreign actions from aggression to healing.
3. Holding the crimes of the Bush administration to account.
4. Healing our population and planet.
5. Reforming our government to fully represent us.

My expanded action list can be found at ihoby.com/plan but I can also summarize further in future posts.

1. Diverting Funds – Bankers and Billionaire Corporations have been receiving free handouts in the form of subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks funded by the hard work and tax dollars taken from the majority of Americans. This has gone too far for too long. While Americans are increasingly prudent and in need, they are being neglected by the collusion of business and government setting disaster capitalism to run amok. Business is treating government and government is rewarding business.. this exclusive relationship is poison for this nation’s people, land, sea, and air. It’s a poison that has built slow but it’s effects are unmistakable in causing this financial crisis and climate change. Trickle-down economics has been proven time and time again to never work. Trickle-up however, obviously works very well.

The rich have this power because we are allowing them to keep it – either from kindness, obedience, or ignorance. The time has long since past when we need to claim our eminent domain on the hoardings of the rich, to cut off their supply of corporate entitlement programs, corporate welfare, corporate socialism. They have enough money to be just fine while we route our federal spending back into America’s communities:

– bail out the families facing foreclosure, make their mortgages be affordable
– start the Green Economy with jobs building wind and solar generators
– supplement medical costs to make health care affordable
– increase the minimum wage and lower taxes for smaller businesses

All this and more can be funded by cutting off the corporate free lunch and requiring the richest CEOs and bankers to pay their fair share.

2. Foreign Actions – Our wars of aggression into Afghanistan and Iraq (among other places) are clearly both internationally illegal and extremely immoral. They were started out of a series of dysfunctional world views and need to be ended immediately so that pacification, reconciliation, and healing can bring about the changes and improvements that war can never, ever accomplish.

– remove combat from countries we’ve invaded, replace with infrastructure services
– cut aid to countries who are committing atrocities
– halt all contracts to mercenary, service, and construction profiteers
– cut spending on military procurement programs

3. Holding Accountable – Many many people in and well outside of the Bush administration are clearly guilty of some involvement in War Crimes, Treason, Crimes Against Humanity, and other more minor but serious breaches of law and moral turpitude. Since these crimes were not thwarted at the time or dealt with swiftly after through impeachment – they’ll have to be treated to justice slowly and carefully over the next few years. The perpetrators of these modern atrocities have done these deeds in our name, with our flag, and they must not be allowed to continue their evil deeds under new titles.

– set Congress to investigate War Crimes, Invasion Pretext, War Contractors and Mercenaries, Election Crimes, 9/11 “false flag” evidence, Domestic Spying, etc.
– prosecute perpetrators of crimes being investigated in federal and international courts
– draft regulation to help keep these tragic atrocities from happening again

4. Healing – The endeavor of medicine should simply not be run by organizations who’s primary goal is to maximize profit. That is unfortunately what we have and that is why our medical system is failing to meet the needs of Americans. We also have industries trampling across our fragile earth in a reckless surge of exploitation and pollution. Our natural systems, our global ecosystems cannot handle this level of abuse. We must enact ambitious programs to provide free healthcare for all citizens, affordable healthcare for all people, and a livable planet for ourselves and our successors.

– build a free, universal healthcare system
– dismantle the insurance companies and replace them with assistance programs
– ban the building of any new “dig and burn” plants
– build “green” sources of energy
– shut down the existing “dig and burn” plants

5. Progressive Reform – The Bush administration has been the most secretive, corrupt, criminal, deadly, and unrepresentative office ever. They have privatized, militarized, and marginalized more aspects of our country than ever should have been. All of this has to stop, all of it must be reversed. We want a government who is accountable, transparent, just, peaceful, respectful, and receptive.. a government who spends our money wisely and truthfully.

– do all of the previously stated action items
– expand citizen access to continually participate through democracy
– regulate yourselves
– solve problems instead of creating or exacerbating them
– declassify, declassify, declassify

Don’t draw the wrong conclusions from history.

Railroads were undone by a first a corrupted monopoly and then by the post-war interstate highway initiative championed by all the war profiteers hoping to profit further in peace time.

Deregulation of the Airlines has resulted in massive layoffs, instability, increased mechanical failures, delays, and horrible customer service (tacked on charges, re-schedule charges, no refunds, longer lines, passenger harassment, removal of amenities like food and water, etc.) with not enough change in ticket value to justify any of the other deficiencies. With the fleets continuing to age, we’re only going to see more mechanical problems in the future.

Looking to the sorry examples of deregulated TV or Radio will find you nothing good to report.. several hundred channels and nothing on, propaganda machine for war, corruption and self-descructive consumerism.

Regulation in most cases, provides the only preventative protection available to the general public (or as industry would call them, the customer). Why do we have a list of ingredients on our food packages? Regulation. Why is “price fixing” (a secret agreement between competitors to artificially inflate prices) prosecutable? Regulation. Why do we have an 8 hour work day? a 40 hour work week? workplace safety standards? It’s all various forms of Regulation.

Caps on what big business can do are necessary because otherwise, they WILL eventually increase the severity of immoral practices to make bigger and bigger profits. History is RIFE with examples of this.

Cooper’s article basically is saying game developers (publishers and their shareholders) aren’t listening to lawmakers in washington (well, christian lobbyists really).

He’s TRYing to say that game makers aren’t listening to We The People, but anyone who knows how D.C. works also knows that very rarely do the needs and desires of The People get put first. What this is slanted opinion piece is doing in a News section, I have no idea. He’s taking sides with the moral elitists and doing very little reporting… BAD journalist!

So, in this battle between a small cabal of shareholders seeking infinite profits and a small cabal of neo-christians seeking a Stepford Wives society, you’re never going to have a truce when the subject at hand is what the general public is going to purchase or consume.. regardless of whether it’s something they really want, or the plethora of products that appeal to the ‘must look at the car crash’ instinct.

The real conflicts, issues, and potential dialog of this matter are almost completely outside of everything Cooper just wrote. Obviously Cooper doesn’t get it and surely, he can do better.