The weakness if the crowd: Part 2

I wrote these two posts completely independent of one another, only to realize there is a common thread connecting them - just as there is a common thread connecting the two articles below.

 Something's going on here. 

1.http://www.salon.com/2014/08/31/why_uber_must_be_stopped/

2.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/opinion/david-brooks-the-revolt-of-the-weak.html?emc=edit_th_20140902&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=48794199&_r=0&referrer=

Here we see the weak working to tear down the rules and institutions that society has erected, leading to disorder, chaos, entropy.

In Uber's case it is the Wildwest mentality of unfettered and unregulated competition. A business model emerged so quickly that legislative powers had no time to implement a regulatory environment for it to operate within. And since ethics are a function of cultural relativism - which is to say there is no commonly shared set of them available to operate from - the competitive landscape is reduced to a bare-knuckle brawl.

Now take a look at Putin, Syria, Somalia, and other "medium-sized" conflicts playing out on the world stage in the New York Times article. The underlying dynamic is eerily similar. With no Imperial body to stop them nationstates, or tribes within them more to the point, are behaving just as they please, with complete disregard for any rational, ethical limitations. In other words they're behaving in an unfettered, Wild-west, no-holds-barred fashion -- just like Uber.

I do not believe this is a coincidence. People who feel disenfranchised, with very little or no access to the system that leads to great success, feel as if they're left with no choice but to co-opt the system.

The weakness of the crowd: part 1

The economic hollowing out of our services-based economy that defines the American economy of the 20 century is somewhat analogous to the extractive practices that drive the economies of countries that rely heavily on mining and other extractive practices. 

In this case the resource that is being mined is the relative wealth that our nation affords even an average worker. With a median household income that is greater than most developed nations in the world, we can afford discretionary spending at a level that most countries can only dream of. This means that so-called luxuries like cable TV, high speed Internet service, and vast levels of public services at the local state and national level have come to be considered near necessities for most households. This provides a juicy target for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of entities, which are in a position to make pricing and thereby extract incrementally more and more from every household. 

With so many entities reaching into their pockets, no single individual has any chance of taking on even one of the large entities that is doing it. This is partly a problem of isolating a target to go after. And then developing a coordinated assault on that target to try to drive prices down. There are so many targets to go after and so many households to coordinate, how does one possibly begin?

This is somewhat analogous to those wildlife documentaries where the shark tries to attack a school of fish but can't single out a target to go after, so he goes away hungry. 

Companies, municipalities and other entities have come to understand this. They have come to understand that they needn't rise pricing exorbitantly. They just need to keep raising their pricing and coordinating their lobbying efforts to ensure that policy continues to move favorably in their direction.

If they all do it together it leaves the hapless individual consumer with little recourse to fight them. As a result individuals are reduced to price takers and end up being nicked away at by large entities. 

These same entities also are organizing themselves to back political policy and legislation which works in their favor. Again any single individual has very little power to fight against these coordinated assaults. And that assumes that individuals are even aware that these assaults are taking place, which in most cases they are not. So the same entities are in effect creating the rules that enable their ability to continue to hollow out the middle of our economy. 

Take for instance taxation. The prevailing political sentiment is that by lowering taxes we create the possibility for new jobs because business owners will have more money to invest in their businesses which will lead to creation of new jobs. 

Meanwhile state local and federal government have less tax revenue to deploy on public works and infrastructure projects which are the very things that lead to new jobs as well as improved public infrastructure, both of which benefit society as a whole. 

These types of investments are not done ultimately to increase any single entity's profitability. They benefit society as a whole.

Businesses, on the other hand, do not operate this way and therefore the monies that they do attract only serve to improve their own profitability, often at the expense of society as a whole. Cumulatively this has been done at a great cost and detriment to our public infrastructure as a whole over the last few decades. 

How many of us were aware of or involved in the discussions around setting pension levels for public employees in our communities, as they were taking place? 

How many of us were given the opportunity to have a say voice our opinion or vote in favor of other similar decisions which over time are coming to have a catastrophic effect on our communities?

How many people actually understand what "Net Neutrality" means, or have an opinion about whether or not the federal government should support it? For those few folks who do,what chance could they possibly have in swaying federal opinion, when they are up against millions of dollars spent by large Internet, telecomm and cable companies funding professional lobbyists?  

In all these cases there have been thousands of small, incremental decisions that move in favor of these entities that seek only profit maximization. No one of them could be viewed as significant on its own for the most part. But collectively their effect has been cumulative and devastating for the average individual.

What can be done?

Aereo and our confused Justices confuse me

“Your technological model,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. told Aereo’s lawyer, “is based solely on circumventing legal prohibitions that you don’t want to comply with.”

“What disturbs me on the other side,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer said, “is I don’t understand what the decision for you or against you when I write it is going to do to all kinds of other technologies.”

- New York Times: Justices Skeptical of Aereo’s Business

And so it went during yesterday's Supreme Court hearing of the case, ABC vs. Aereo, in which the presumable fate of the entire free-to-air television broadcast industry will be decided. The background of this case has been well covered by the media (and not just TV media) in the months and weeks leading up to yesterday's hearing. At issue is whether tech startup Aereo has the right to capture free-to-air tv signals and store them for later use by its subscribers, who pay a monthly fee of $8. The cable companies and the "big 3" tv networks are all crying foul, saying that Aereo's practice constitutes theft of copyrighted material, and if they want to rebroadcast this content they must pay the content owners.

For its part, Aereo says it is not violating anything. It is simply leasing an antenna and a DVR to willing subscribers, who will gladly pay the $8/month fee in order to get the local broadcast signals delivered to their home without the hassle of installing and managing their own antenna on their roof.

And the justices are confused as all getout because to them it looks like a flimflam scam aimed at exploiting a loophole in order to mine the airwaves for free and sell the resulting product. And they're worried about the implications this case may have for other technology innovations, particularly in the area of cloud computing (which they obviously don't understand, either - but more on that in a minute).

So here's my take on Aereo's business model and this case: Aereo wouldn't even exist were it not for the fact that most households do not have adequate access to the free signals that the broadcasters are required to provide. By failing to provide a signal that can be easily received by many households, the television broadcasters are able to package and resell their "free" local broadcasts to cable television carriers, who then charge their subscribers to view these broadcasts. It is the broadcasters, not Aereo, who are exploiting a legal loophole by appearing to comply with the letter of the law by airing their broadcasts for free, yet still managing to charge the majority of households to view them. 

Free means free, right?

The basic premise of broadcast TV is based on a covenant between the government, the broadcasters and the American public. The federal government owns the rights to the entire radio spectrum, which is considered a public good. The FCC manages access to the airwaves, making portions of the radio spectrum available for commercial, public, and private use. Because it is a public good, and because it has value, the FCC charges for access to some portions of the spectrum, including the part used for television broadcasts. It made a deal with the major tv networks way back when, basically saying the networks could have free access to the broadcast spectrum if they in turn made their broadcasts freely available to the public. As a result we got to watch All In The Family, Ed Sullivan and Bonanza for "free" - along with an unending barrage of content from Madison Avenue's finest (i.e., commercials).

Theoretically you can still put an antenna on your roof, run a wire from it to your television, and watch for free whatever shows your local tv stations are broadcasting. I say theoretically because the ability to do this in the digital tv era has become a bit challenging. TV signals require line of sight access, and residents living in the canyons of large urban areas like New York City often cannot get the line of sight access needed to receive these free signals. As a result if they want to watch local tv news they need to pay their friendly cable provider an additional fee for the local station package. Same thing goes for a large number of the tv-watching households across the US (did you happen to notice the rabbit ears sitting on top of your friend's 60" plasma when you were over watching the Superbowl? Me neither).

When broadcasters were forced to dump analog signal broadcasts and go 100% digital a few years ago it made matters worse because unlike analog signals, digital is a one or zero - you either have the signal or you don't (remember watching those "snowy" black and white shows?). And many households, particularly in suburban areas located several miles from the broadcaster or otherwise obscured due to buildings or geography, cannot in practice receive the free signals they are supposedly entitled to.

Enter Aereo

Aereo came up with a way to leverage some interesting advances in antenna technology, giving them a way to build a very capable, low-cost, dime-sized antenna, that they could use to pull down these free-to-air broadcast signals for customers who wanted to view their local stations' signals, but didn't have access to them. Aereo determined it could set up an antenna farm with thousands of individual antennas, each hooked up to a DVR, and use these to capture the local tv broadcasts, store them, and then give its customers access to the stored content via the internet using TCP/IP transmission. So now, instead of me having to figure out how to get an antenna on top of my apartment building's roof in Manhattan, I could just lease an antenna from Aereo, and skip having to put one on top of my building and running a wire from there to my tv, or having to deal with my landlord at all. Cool.

So: by the convenant between the US federal government and the tv broadcasters, everyone should have the ability to freely receive via an antenna in their home the complete suite of content broadcast by local television broadcasters, and, via a wire connecting their antenna to their tv set, watch this content on their tv for free. They should furthermore be able to save this broadcast content for viewing later on a DVR if they so choose. The broadcasters, for their part, have the right to include a specified number of minutes of advertising in their broadcasts; and can charge advertisers whatever the market will bear for inserting these ads in the broadcasts.

In the event that an individual doesn't wish to install and maintain their own antenna and dvr, or their viewing location is unfavorable for receiving the free-to-air signal from the broadcasters, why shouldn't that invidiual be permitted to lease an antenna and dvr from someone who is in a favorable location for receiving the signal? In effect that is what Aereo is doing. And instead of running a physical wire from the antenna farm to each subscriber's residence, Aereo is using the near ubiquitous TCP/IP data transmission capability of the internet to move the stored programming to a subscriber's home.

The US Supreme Court Justices are confused - but why?

The "other technologies" referenced by Justice Stephen Breyer include vague references to cloud computing, and some nebulous concern that the popular business models in use by other existing companies like Apple and Amazon could somehow be disrupted by this case if it ends up in favor of Aereo.

The network broadcasters and the cable companies both claim that what Aereo is doing amounts to theft of copyrighted material, and a violation of the laws restricting retransmission of broadcast content to public audiences. If you look at this closely, however, it doesn't quite add up.

Apple's iTunes and cloud-based music collections are not apt comparisons to what Aereo is doing. Sony and other owners of copyrighted music never intended to make their content available for free. You pay Apple for the music in your iTunes collection, and Apple pays the owner.

Radio stations pay a small fee to the copyright holder of every song they play over the air. And technically if you're in a bar (a "public place") listening to a song on a jukebox or over the air the bar is supposed to pay for making that song available to you because it is rebroadcasting the content for profit (I say "technically," because policing this has historically been a challenge).

All Aereo is doing is making available to the consumer a signal that:
a) the broadcasters had intended for the consumer to have for free; and
b) the consumer either cannot access due to physical inability to get the signal; or choose not to access for whatever reason
They are doing this by setting up a dedicated antenna, dvr and wire, for each of their customers, and leasing access to this equipment. That's it. The end result is exactly the same as it would have been had the customer been willing to set up their own antenna and DVR - assuming that they are in an area where their antenna would be able to receive the signal that they are supposed to be able to receive.

The revenue model from the broadcaster's position is not affected at all - they still have the right to charge advertisers whatever the market will bear for including ads in their free broadcasts. If anything, Aereo's model could end up increasing the number of viewers of free-to-air television, by capturing viewers who do not have cable tv, and are otherwise unable to receive the signal in their homes.

Conclusion

What Aereo is doing does not violate any copyright or rebroadcast agreements. It also seems to me that if Supreme court holds for Aereo in this case it could have quite a disruptive effect on the broadcast television industry. But it's the right thing to do, since it is consistent with current laws, and would benefit consumers.

As for the Justices and their comments, in my opinion the tenor of yesterday's discussion had more to do with positioning, and less to do with the actual facts and merits of Aereo's argument. At least, that's what I hope. Otherwise, I have great concerns about the ability of our highest court to understand and correctly evaluate the implications of other more complex technological developments that are surely coming their way. 

What happened to the middle?

We live in a society that worships excess and lionizes those who achieve it with near-total disregard for how they did it, yet marginalizes dedicated effort and success of the plodder. This is a form of social dissonance that has become the new normal. Everyone knows that not everyone can be the winner - that was the whole point of the middle class; of large corporations; of the real working man or woman.

Being average was just that - average. Statistically, by definition, that's what most people are. So how is it that we've become completely disenchanted with anything so pedestrian as being average? When did winning at all costs become an imperative; ethics, kindness, and personal integrity be damned? And when did we decide that if you were among the unfortunate masses of averageness, you would be doomed to a stagnant job in a stalled career, with zero prospects of advancement, no salary increases at all, and the constant cloud of being laid off - possibly for good - looming ever overhead?

It's interesting that companies are scrambling to keep up with technology, citing the importance of being innovative with their products and services, while they are ignoring or laying off the very employees who are best positioned to help them do it: middle aged, stalled middle managers. Instead they look to their twenty-something or thirty-something rising star MBAs, who often have little or no business experience outside the company they hired into right out of grad school, and even less life experience. Meanwhile a fifty-something middle manager with twenty or thirty years of life and work under his belt is toiling away in some corner, hoping his job isn't outsourced or turned over to some new-hire half his age as a way of saving the company a few bucks.

The missing piece, it seems to me, is that companies talk a lot about the need to be innovative and creative, and how much they value that "out of the box" thinking we hear so much about. Yet if you look at the people charged with doing the work where that sort of thinking would be the most valuable, they are often completely ill-equipped. Young, ambitious, socially adept MBAs are also often linear thinking. Focused sometimes to the point of narrow mindedness, these are conservative achievers who's very success is a function of methodical dot connecting, not quantum leaps of imagination.

What's needed is a way of defining both a company's creative needs from a business standpoint, and the employees with the requisite background, talent and skills to fulfill them. And then add to that a recognition and rewards system that values true innovation and creativity, regardless of where it comes from in ther enterprise.

What would have to change in order for such a system to exist in a large, mature company?

On Jaron Lanier's new book and luddism

@Jaron Lanier's new book, "Who Owns the Future", is getting quite a bit of play of late. This NYTimes article did a nice job of hitting some of the high notes:

Web businesses exploit a peasant class, that users of social media may not realize how entrapped they are, that a thriving middle class is essential to keeping the Internet sustainable. When “ordinary people ‘share,’ while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes,” even that elite will eventually be undermined.

 Well, I don't know about the undermined bit, but the rest rang true. The rant is basically that companies like Facebook are exploiting all of us by getting us to basically create content for free, which they then use to draw millions of viewers to their site, providing a juicy platform and trove of data for advertisers. Google does the same thing. So, why don't *we* start charging FB each time we post something there? After all, we're contributing content, and without content FB would be worthless. Then at least there would be some equity in terms of them making billions off of our contributions.

It would be an interesting argument, except that we've been doing something similar for a hundred years. We buy stuff using money that we worked for instead of making the stuff our selves. We're trading a resource that has value for an item that we want, that we either don't want to make, or couldn't possibly begin to make, by ourselves. Take your car, for instance. The auto makers and their chiefs make enormous sums of money which we gladly provide every time we walk into a dealership and fork over a huge amount of money that may represent half a year's wage for some people. In exchange we get a car - and we don't seem to mind that someone else is getting quite rich off of us.

So why should FB be any different? We contribute a small amount of time to make a post, knowing that we're also handing over a tiny scrap of information that by itself is nearly without value to anyone, but in aggregate is worth - well - a lot.  In exchange we get to stay in touch with family, friends, and high school buddies we had long lost touch with. Should we begrudge FB their billions because they are exploiting our desire to stay in touch with our social networks? Could we just go build our own platform and do it ourselves without them?

Each epoch of human technological progress has brought with it significant social disruption. The dawn of industrialization led to armed conflicts in Europe, as weavers began vandalizing the new knitting mills. They invoked their mythical leader, Ned Ludd, as the inspiration for their attacks, which were motivated by a desire to retain the rural, country life of individual artisans that allowed them to band together in small towns. Industrialization would eventually sweep it all aside, moving people into cities to work in large factories, and do away with much of what was then known as "the way things are" in terms of small towns and vernacular society.

What we are seeing now is some of that same disruption again. The drivers are similar, and so is the bargain we all make - every time we decide to buy something we could have made ourselves, or done without.

Citizenship

I am not a liberal, I am not a conservative - I am a citizen.

I think having a strong military makes sense; I think sticking our nose in other countries' business doesn't. I don't like oppressive regimes - at home or overseas.

Hunters should have the right to own and bear guns for hunting; and should be required to keep those guns in zip codes where it's legal to hunt.

Women should have the right to choose.

I believe access to quality health care should be provided for all citizens of our country. And if you're not a citizen or otherwise here legally, quit the free ride and and go back to where you came from.

I think overtly demonstrative public displays of religious preference, sexual orientation, and affection for one's partner should all be looked upon the same way - keep it to yourself, kids, because we're really not interested. Really.

Everyone has the right to work for a fair wage. And employers should be required to treat all employees fairly. This should include a company's leaders. And investors should be the ones who decide what's fair.

Corporations and other large institutions are not individuals, and should not be treated like them, because you can't send a corporation to prison (if you could, most of the Fortune 500 would be behind bars), and no individual can cross swords with a corporation on a level playing field.

I believe in science, facts, physics, and the mystery of the universe.

I believe we were once a truly great nation. And I believe we have allowed ourselves to fall into a state of disrepair.

I believe one of the things that made us great was the strong sense of individualism, ingenuity, and boldness that our European founders embodied. They enshrined this attitude in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I believe in the potential of every human being, and in doing what one can to help others realize their full potential.

I believe in the potential for our country to prevail as one of the world's greatest, but to do it we're going to have to take better care of our citizens.
It's time for each of us to think about what it means to be a good citizen, and to actively seek a change in our attitude about what it means to be an American, and what constitutes living a successful life here.

I believe that unless we do this or something else that drives a change in direction, in 100 years time we will not be the country our founders risked their lives to create.

Newspapers biting the dust....

Today's headlines includes news that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer would be publishing its final issue in the coming days, and its staff of 180 would be reduced to 20 or so. This is the lastest casualty in the newspaper business, which is seeing many of its century-old icons bite the dust. Then again, if you think about it, it really does sorta make sense. I mean, how many people does it take to capture any given image? Or document any given story?

There is too much capacity chasing too few data points. There are so many cameras deployed on cellphones and hanging around people's necks; and there are so many twittering bloggers now - does the "official" media ever get a scoop before it hits the internet anymore?

There is certainly a need for professional news organizations - objectivity, fact checking, the ability to cover a story in its proper context. All of these have merit. But the idea of coverage has to change. It is no longer necessary for dozens of news agencies to have their own unique coverage of major events. That is redundant. Seems to me that has something to do with the problem newspapers are facing. Along with lowered readership (because readers are getting their news off the web).

Another letter to the NYTimes - Jonesers are in charge, damn it!

To the Editor:

How in the world anyone could argue that someone like President Obama, who was seven years old during the Summer of Love, has anything in common generationally with a bunch of grey-haired, tie-dyed, social-security-collecting retirees is beyond me (a 49-year-old). There is a new generation assuming its position of economic and political power. Generation Jones includes anyone born between 1955 and 1965, a generation with more people in it than the Boomers born between 1946 and 1955. We Jonesers danced to disco, knew no "free love", and remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when the space shuttle Challenger exploded (not when JFK was assassinated). The Boomers had their run, and now it's just about over. I wish they would do us all a favor and get over it - and themselves.

- In response to They Warned You About Us, NYTimes Style Section, 1/25/2009

Obama's inauguration speech (fantasy version)

Greetings, fellow Americans! Here we are, the change you said you wanted, the change we all need - is here, and it starts now. For the last six administrations the Boomers or their elders have been in the Whitehouse. While great changes came from these administrations, they also brought with them great excesses. Two years ago the first of the Boomers became eligible to retire, creating a flurry of news and concerns about how our country was going to cover the exodus of wisdom these new retirees created; and more importantly, how our nation was going to pay for social security benefits as the retiring hoards left the workforce and tax rolls, to become a burden on their children and those of us left behind them in the workforce.

Well, it turns out that 60 million boomers did not all retire at once - we knew that would not happen. It turns out that there is actually a larger, silent contingent of us, born between 1955 and 1965, who are not Boomers, who are going to be in the workforce for another 15 or 20 years. We are the Jonesers. We are in charge. And it is we who are going to make things right again in America.

Oooh - I like this: News as a public service

In today's NYTimes:

“Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity,” he said. “It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well.”
- from NYT, 11/19/2008, Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs

Laid off journos are being redeployed by guerrilla startup news services aimed at covering very local news in order to keep corrupt local pols and businesses in the community spotlight.

OBAMA!

Enough said on that for now - he is in, and I could not be happier about being an American in the 21st century.

In an op-ed piece in the NYTimes Nick Kristof wrote entitled Obama and the War on Brains, in which he discusses the reinvigoration of intellectualism in our Whitehouse and ergo in our country after an eight-year drought. I share his sentiments overall, and was inspired to fire off the below posting on his blog. After re-reading I thought I'd add it to my own collection - as so often happens articles I read coalesce my thoughts about various topics and out pops something I like.

Could it be that historically speaking the reason intellectual leaders tend to live in the shadows of leaders with lesser grey matter gifts is because intellectual horsepower is negatively correlated with political eptitude :-) ?

I mean, how did a nincompoop, mental midget like The Shrub get elected to Governor and then POTUS in the first place? Sure he had some help from Daddy and oil-sodden friends in that great southern republic. But still, he had to get to the finish line and somehow he did - beating out intellectually superior opponents - twice.

I see this in in the workplace, too. Intellectuals assume forthrightness and honesty more frequently, I think, and therefore are easy prey for those who would use those qualities to advance their own agendas. Just a thought. Oops - there I go again - laying myself wide open for political assault. Story of my life…

I've been wanting to get that off my chest for a few years. Feels good.

935

935 - that is the number of lies that Bush and seven of his top officials made in the two years following the 9/11 attacks, leading the US into the war with Iraq, according to research conducted by two different independent agencies. A trillion dollars and 4000 lives later the war is still underway, and the damage to our nation's reputation globally is incalculable.

You can read more about it here: http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/ They are not making up the number. They are not playing with words or hyperbole. They are documenting the lies that are easily obtainable in the public record by anyone who cares to look.

We're not talking about lying about having sex with an intern here. We're talking about lying about a foreign nation's policies and actions, and using those lies as the basis for making a trillion dollar, 4000-life decision. Egregious. Heinous. The enormity (look that word up, folks - it doesn't mean large) of this administration's actions is on a par with just about any other evil propogated by a government in the last few hundred years.

And if you're wondering who the Center for Public Integrity is, just click on the "about us" link at the top of the page - you will find they are a non-partisan research group.

I am disgusted. This is disgraceful.

2nd Amendment (again)

So the NYTimes once again has an article about the 2nd Amendment. This one does a nice job of analyzing the syntactical structure of the Amendment, stating that the first part (about an armed militia) is a "purpose clause", while the second part is an "operational clause." The reason for the article is the Supreme Court is presently evaluating the 2nd Amendment and is expected to decide something about it shortly.

Here's the 2nd Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, [purpose clause]

the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. [operation clause]

Waxing oratorical, I drafted up this note to the editors at the NY Times:

To the Editor -

The reason for ensuring people have the right to keep and bear arms being encoded in the purpose clause, the need for this right should rest on whether it can be stated that an armed citizenry is capable of ensuring our nation's security today.

Reminds me of my college days studying Cicero.

evhead: The Focus Paradox

RE: Focus

So EvHead wrote on his blog:

Both Facebook and Google had early success in (large?) part because of their focus. Google in terms of what they did, Facebook in terms of who could use it.

That success provided both pressure and opportunities to grow in new directions. Expansion is always tricky, and each company has handled it in different ways.

Discuss.

Reminds me of an article from the early 90s about the degree to which tech companies can successfully vertically integrate. For instance, in computers you've got

hardware components
hardware systems (ie, computers)
operating systems
middleware
software (apps)
content


The argument was that companies that tried to go farther than two levels above or below the one that was their core business would struggle. So take IBM. Core business initially was hardware. They also quickly got into components, like hard drives, which made sense for them. And they had to write their own O/S because no one else built the big boxes. Made sense. Same thing with some of the middleware apps, like DB2 (if that could be considered middleware). But look what happened when they tried to do software apps - when they bought Lotus. Notes could be considered a middleware app - it really is just a development environment, not an app. Most companies didn't appreciate that. But the real Lotus apps - 123, WordPro, and Freelance Graphics - are pretty much gone. IBM paid around $3 b for all this stuff, and couldn't make a successful run on Big Bill.

So....If I was Google or Facebook, I'd be thinking about the levels thing. First, what *are* the levels in the webworld? I've seen lists of them before, but I don't have them at hand. Then, what would represent "two steps" in either direction from search?

The Second Amendment vs. the wordsmiths

In Sunday's NY Times there was an op-ed piece entitled, Clause and Effect (NYTimes, 12/16/2007), in which the writer was discussing the effect of punctuation on the way our Supreme Court interprets the Second Amendment about the right to own and bear arms. After reading it I was inspired to draft up a letter to the editor, offering a different approach to the problem. Unfortunately my letter quickly ran past the recommended 150-word limit for letters to the Times, so I decided to post it here instead.

Greetings -

Glad to see that the Supreme Court has decided to take a look at gun control and the second amendment again - this alone fills me with optimism. Being somewhat of a wordsmith and a sometime punctuation pedant myself, I understand well the allure of debate around the phrasing our forefathers used in laying down the second amendment. Unfortunately I believe much intellection has been spent uselessly on this debate since it is impossible for anyone to know what, in fact, was in the heads and hearts of the authors when these 27 words (and the attendant two - or was it three? - commas) were written.

For purposes of application to our current society, would it not make more sense to attempt to understand first what was going on in America in the 1790s? It seems to me that once we are armed with an agreed understanding of the prevailing winds of the day we could have much better insight into what the authors were trying to address with their work. It would also allow us to ascertain the degree to which such conditions were still present today, and in need of addressing.

Do we have an agreed understanding of what they meant by "militia," for instance? What was going on in the late 18th century that caused them to think about having one? And based on that, why did they think it was so important to preserve the right of "the people" to own and bear arms? And which "people" do we think they were referring to, anyway? The police? Farmers?

The Constitution has proved to be one of the most prescient documents ever drafted in the history of humankind. For the most part, its language has proved durable and resilient, in spite of technological and social progress and evolution far beyond the authors' ability to posit. One thing that has changed significantly since 1790 is our place on the world stage. We have evolved from being an upstart, defenseless nation of religious and political dissidents, to the world's lone "superpower." As a thought experiment, consider a fanciful case of society of mice that through some magical transformation grew up to become a society of lions. One could well imagine the society of mice declaring their right to own and bear arms, to protect themselves against their many oppressors both real and imagined. With the magical transformation into lions, however, would not their original fears be completely eliminated?

While this case is obviously fanciful, it does in fact represent what has occurred to our nation. And it is understandable that the people of the day would have had no way of predicting our nation's transformation into its current position at the top of the world. Who'd a thunk it?

Perhaps we should enlist the help of a playwright to draft a stage play about the relevant characters and their conversations on this subject. It would be a period piece, complete with powdered wigs and odd turns of phrase. Yes, I can see it - this is what we need to engage the people in a proper, informed dialogue about one of our nation's most divisive and least understood issues.

Generations in the workplace and the changing nature of of war

Vietnam was the last great war fought according to the military theory known as Superiority. Under this theory of war, numbers are the key to victory. When we talk of "air superiority" we are saying that we can field a greater number of and/or more sophisticated aircraft than our adversary can, and therefore in a war of attrition, we will ultimately win. Kills are carefully recorded and tracked, for they tell the tale in a war fought under Superiority theory - remember the body counts being carefully reported (and sometimes guarded) during Vietnam?

Superiority theory of war goes back to the beginning of war - Napoleon, the middle ages, the Romans, WW I - all were fought according to this theory, which informed strategy and tactics (which did evolve a lot under this theory).

Then came Gulf I, and things were different. The citizenry no longer had an appetite for wartime losses, to the point that any level of loss was viewed as politically unacceptable. That and a smaller military armed with weapons born of the high-tech, information-based era provided us, the US, with a unique and distinctive advantage, especially in the air but also on the battlefield. And thus was born a new theory of war: Dominance. Under dominance theory each battle is planned and executed with the expectation that the enemy will suffer heavy losses, while we will suffer none. The only way this theory can be realized is if we have a technological advantage that our enemy cannot replicate. For the most part, ever since Gulf I, this has been the case. Stealth aircraft, UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), laser-guided precision weapons, GPS, etc. plus the Joint Forces doctrine have all combined to give the US the ability to engage an enemy and, through the combination of maneuver and overwhelming force, completely dominate the battle theatre with a reasonable expectation of zero losses. This is Dominance theory.

So why am I prattling away on this? It occurred to me that in the workplace of today people may be bumping into generation-based issues. Understanding the shift in the theory of war that has taken place over the last 20-30 years may provide some insight into the dynamics that exist between the various generations. Vietnam was the last war that relied heavily on the strict hierarchy on the battlefield, and command and control from the rear. The book, Warfighting, talks about this shift in doctrine. Under the new doctrine (described in Warfighting), initiative needs to come from the front. Decision making needs to be turned over to the soldier with the rifle who is actively engaging the enemy. You combine that with Dominance theory and you have a very different mindset from the Vietnam era warfighter. And it spills over into the public arena, too. Especially the concept of zero-loss, and its heavy reliance on technology and information sharing and collaboration. This is a marked difference from the way combat operations were planned during Vietnam; and the way the general public thought about getting things done.

There is one last dimension of war in today's era that should be considered, and that is the notion of asymmetry. The 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center, the bombing of the USS Cole, and other similar acts against the US performed by terrorists are all examples of asymmetric warfare. The asymmetry refers to the size and scope of the enemy as well as the tactics they employ - the good old days of the US versus the Evil Empire seem to be over. There is no distinct, bounded enemy embodied by a nation state. Instead the enemy is diffuse, and uses tactics that our military was never designed to counter. As a result the terrorists are able to incur significant damage on us. A parallel phenomena is observable in business and is really the basis of the high tech industry: two college drop outs toiling away in a garage with no funding somehow unseat established tech sector goliaths in the marketplace. This is another manifestation of asymmetry.

So how do these new realities shape the way younger people think about work? Strategy? Authority? Hierarchy? Innovation? Information technology? Product life cycles?

By the way, the book, Warfighting, is a military document in the public domain. You can buy it as a book on Amazon, or you can download it as a pdf here: http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/service_pubs/mcdp1.pdf . It is the same text in its entirety. Very good read (I bought and distributed at least a dozen of the books before I found the online version).

Nuclear power, and the lies the media wants us to believe

In an editorial published in today's Rochester (MN) Post Bulletin, op ed contributor Karl Grossman wrote about the dangers posed by nuclear energy. In response I submitted the following letter to the editor.

Sir - Mr. Grossman asserts that today's efforts to revive nuclear power are based on false premises. Unfortunately the premises he bases his argument on are themselves false. His first point is that building and operating nuclear power plants generates harmful greenhouse gases. He does not cite a source for his data, nor does he provide any indication of quantity. Would the quantity be more than, say, the amount of greenhouse gases generated by manufacturing, transporting, installing and maintaining an equivalent generation capacity in windfarms, for instance?

Secondly, referencing Chernobyl to support his assertion that nuclear power is inherently dangerous is nonsense that the popular media has used to mislead the public for long enough. For one thing modern reactor designs include passive safety features designed to shut down the reactor should things go wrong. More important, though, is the fact that the reactor at Chernobyl was housed in what amounts to a backyard polebarn, with no containment building at all. All the existing reactors in the US are housed in massive steel-reinforced concrete containment buildings, many of which are designed to withstand a direct impact from a jumbo jet. Had the Chernobyl reactor been built to the US standards in place at the time the loss of life would have been limited to those inside the plant (possibly none), and the subsequent radiation release would likely have been eliminated.

Mr. Grossman and much of the print media seem to be disinterested in reporting this factoid when referencing Chernobyl. Isn't about time the whole story was told?

regards,

2nd Amendment - so you can protect yourself from your government

At least, I think that's the gist of what Republican candidate Mike Huckabee bases his support for it on. He says this on his website:

"Our Founding Fathers, having endured the tyranny of the British Empire, wanted to guarantee our God-given liberties. They devised our three branches of government and our system of checks and balances. But they were still concerned that the system could fail, and that we might someday face a new tyranny from our own government. They wanted us to be able to defend ourselves, and that's why they gave us the Second Amendment. They knew that a government facing an armed populace was less likely to take away our rights, while a disarmed population wouldn't have much hope."

Wow. That may have been a realistic approach to the problem of fending off oppression by the incumbent government of the day, what with muzzle loaders being what they were. By ensuring the populace was allowed to be armed as equally as the government's soldiers, the balance of power between the Fed's forces and the farmers was roughly equal.

Sometime over the last 200 years or so this parity has eroded a bit. Yeah, Mac-10s, M-16s and AK-47s converted to full auto can certainly raise hell in urban gangland ruckuses. But does anyone really believe that if our government decided to mobilize the US military against its own people in order to...what? Fend off a coup? Overturn an oppressive president? Well - nevermind that. Like I was saying - if for some odd reason the US populace decided it was necessary to wage a war against our own military, does anyone actually think the commoners would have a snowball's chance in hell of winning?

Just watch one of those military marvels tv shows one night and take a look at the toys our military has at their disposal. And the training they receive on applying those toys to maximum effect. Now with all due respect to rednecks, gangsters, law enforcement types, and anyone else who feels they are pretty handy with a 9mm or .30-06, you'd have to agree that if it came down to y'all and the US Marines, for instance, you really wouldn't have much of a chance.

Meanwhile another 30,000 or so people will die this year from guns, including a large number of children.

If you want to argue that you have a right to own a gun because you believe you might need it to fight your government some day, well, as of late I can't say I blame you. I think you'd lose, badly, but I feel your pain. Maybe things will get better after the Shrub is booted out of the whitehouse, and someone with some sense is in charge.

Citizenship: America's great 20th century failing

I'm not talking about citizenship, as in the latest partisan argument du jour about our nation's Southern border and migration policies. I'm talking about citizenship the way it was used and taught in our schools back in the first half of the previous century - that now-nearly-lost-forever amalgam of habits, rules, and social norms that all served to temper a person's natural self-interest, forging behavior that somehow seemed to nearly always support "the collective" (that would be what used to be known as a community).

In perusing today's New York Times I see articles about a range of seemingly disparate topics:

• In the wake of the collapse of an interstate highway bridge in Minneapolis/St. Paul, it turns out that thousands of bridges in the US are in a similar state of disrepair. Officials are citing lack of available funds as one reason for it, along with local governments choosing to shunt off responsibility for footing the bills to their successor administrations;
• the world of sports being undermined by steroids, unscrupulous officiating, and unsavory off-the-field behavior (such as breeding fighting dogs);
• young and even pre- teens, pushed by over-zealous parents to focus on and excel in a single sport, seeking the help of psychologists to help them overcome mental blocks;
• families living in Silicon Valley communities with net worths over a million dollars, some in the several millions, feeling they need to keep working to keep up (with what it is not always clear);
• an editorial writer reacting to last week's article about medical costs and the way high salaries paid to doctors are a big part of the problem. The writer wanted to ask whether anyone thought his or anyone else's kids, who were capable of getting into med school, would do so if the salary for doctors was limited to a paltry $120,000 per year, the way it is in Europe;
• a recap of the week's news, showing how members of the President's cabinet, when asked to testify against Gonzales, invoked executive privilege in refusing to testify.

See the trend? No? In each one of these items there is a common theme. In some ways it will come as no surprise. The theme is greed. This should not be news to anyone over the age of about six years old, who can understand the concept.

What may come as a surprise (to some, anyways) is that greed is not the relatively harmless pursuit many of the over-achieverers or the other self-absorbed think it is. The bridge that collapsed killing a dozen or so motorists was caused by greed. And I don't mean some abstract, governmental notion of greed - I'm talking about the only kind of greed that truly exists: the greed of individuals. Leaders. People who are more concerned about maximizing their own little patch in this country than they are about the safety and well-being of those they were elected (and entrusted) to serve. For if I'm a local official and know about the need to spend extra dollars, but driving for that spending will either upset voters, or otherwise compromise my ability to do things that would get me even more votes, then I won't do it - even though it's the right thing to do.

And if I'm a professional cyclist training for the Tour, and I believe that using banned chemicals is the only way to be successful - and earn fame and fortune - then I will do it, even though I know it's wrong.

And if I'm a member of the President's cabinet, and I think I can save my hide by lying, or otherwise corrupting the proceedings against me or my administration, I will do it, even though I know it's wrong.

And if I'm a bright, school-minded teenager looking at career options, and doctoring doesn't pay enough, then I'm going to Wall Street, even though I really care about medicine, and helping people.

What in the hell has happened to us? When did we, as a people, stop caring about each other completely, and turn our focus so single-mindedly on ourselves? We have lost much of our understanding of what it means to be part of a collective; to be citizens who are part of one nation. We have forgotten what it was like to settle untamed wilderness, establish communities that banded together to fight the elements, ensure enough food to endure hard winters, and help each other build whatever the community needed to survive. In other words, maybe we've lost any sense of needing to rely on each other.

This is sad. It is frustrating. For a growing number of people the inequity of it all is infuriating. Marx predicted rebellion of the masses would be the outcome of a society that becomes too lopsided. Are we headed that way? Would that be a good thing? Is the war in the Middle East a well-considered diversion, intended by the current administration to keep attention off of the growing inequity and societal collapse inside our own borders?

I hope we can rediscover what it means to be a citizen again. I hope we can remember how important it was to our survival to be a part of "the collective." One suggestion: re-introduce the teaching citizenship to our children. Make it mandatory. I don't think that's enough, though. A lot of this starts at home - with parents whose values are communicated to their offspring as sure as day follows night. Wake up, people! We are doing this to ourselves.