Tag: technology

Don’t Rely on the Altruism of Baby Boomers

Post author By David
Post date February 2, 2010
2 Comments on Don’t Rely on the Altruism of Baby Boomers

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David Brooks must have thought yesterday was April Fools Day – that or he thinks he’s getting old so he decided to pen a column painting a rosy picture for seniors by coming to a senile conclusion. In The Geezers’ Crusade he comes to this wildly impossible conclusion:

It now seems clear that the only way the U.S. is going to avoid an economic crisis is if the oldsters take it upon themselves to arise and force change. The young lack the political power. Only the old can lead a generativity revolution — millions of people demanding changes in health care spending and the retirement age to make life better for their grandchildren.

Tags change congress, health care, KVNU FTP, money, New York Times, Obama, technology, term limits

National

New Government Website

In keeping with his propensity to launch new .gov websites (e.g. change.gov, recovery.gov, sigtarp.gov) President Obama has launched a new website where he can share some ideas that he knows won’t pass any Congress (Democrat or Republican) no matter how sound those ideas might be. It’s called AprilFools.gov. He includes ideas that are possible but not very likely, such as nominating cabinet picks without tax problems but the really depressing list is found among the ideas listed under “Impossible” –

The Senate refusing to confirm cabinet nominees because of tax (or similar) problems. (Note that those nominees who were not confirmed all withdrew before a vote was ever taken.)
Balancing the budget for one month.
Ending government waste.
Lowering real taxes on the middle class. (He’s proposed it, but he seems to know and accept that it won’t survive the Congerssional budgeting process.)

Tags government, money, Obama, technology

New Domain

I have been wanting to get a more suitable domain for my site for some time and I have been wanting to do some less political writing (family journal type) at davidjmiller.org. I finally took the plunge and purchased pursuitofliberty.net (I’m looking into getting pursuitofliberty.com, but while the current owner mulls multiple offers I decided to move ahead with something). I am leaving all the old posts on the previous domain, but that will start to be updated less frequently and less politically. I have imported all the posts of any political nature here and will continue to write politically as I have been doing – minus the really non-political stuff.

There are a few plugin glitches to work out (no classic posts listed at the moment) and I have removed the “politics” category since everything here is politics to one degree or another. I hope that everyone can make the transition smoothly with me so that all the great comments keep coming.

Tags site, technology

culture technology

Lehi News Organization

One primary concern for a Lehi news organization would be cost. Especially the upfront cost. Getting a website would be financially painless, but getting paid reporters or printing with any regularity would become cost prohibitive very quickly without a revenue stream. Without a very compelling argument I would not want to take money from the city to run the organization. It should be privately funded and run from neutral sources of revenue. Advertising on the site should be able to pay the modest costs of running the site, but I would be wary of expecting it to pay for much else (at least until I saw actual revenue coming from that advertising). Ideally the cost of printing would be such that a modest price for the printed version of the paper would cover the costs of printing and print distributions thus allowing people to access the news for free from the site if they did not want, or could not afford, to pay for the printed version.

For the reporting, I wonder if it would be possible to get by with less than 5 paid employees. One would serve as editor and head of the paper, perhaps three would be paid reporters, who would be expected to extensively use bloggers and comments from readers as sources of information to drive their reporting, leaving one employee to manage any other administrative functions. I wonder if there would be any possibility of collaboration with the high school or with university students interested in reporting as a way to add some unpaid staff to the press corps.

The initial move in starting such an organization would be to find out how much interest there is. Are residents interested in having a Lehi-centric source of news? Are there bloggers who are interested in their community (as opposed to some other special interest they might blog about) who would be willing to contribute and work with reporters? Are there others who are not current bloggers but who are interested in contributing to an ongoing discussion of local news items? Would the city council and local businesses be interested enough to provide information relative to whatever discussions are current?

Anyone from Lehi or surrounding areas is welcome to answer.

If you are not near Lehi I would still like to hear your thoughts on this – would this interest you in your location? Does the idea seem sound?

Tags community, media, technology

culture

Community News Organization

Post author By David
Post date July 5, 2007
No Comments on Community News Organization

I read a blog post on 10 things about the future of newspapers which seemed to paint a clear picture of what news can and should be like in our current age. One of the key points was that newspapers need to be focussed on items of local importance because national news is pretty well covered already. It struck me that a local orientation to a newspaper could be a very valuable tool in building a community. At times it might seem necessary to “make news.” If that were done by using slow-news days to bring a spotlight on areas of the community that often go unnoticed (like local artists, or community projects) it might help people feel connected to each other in a more meaningful way.

Among the 10 things there is a heavy emphasis on embracing many things that might otherwise be considered competition by the newspaper – search engines, and online advertisements may seem to cut into the potential revenue that is needed to run the paper. Bloggers and other amateurs of reporting might be seen as competitors to paid reporters when they could be used as allies. In the current world of publishing there are also more opportunities for publishing in a variety of media formats (text, audio, and video) and through many different means of distribution (print, rss, website, podcasting, mobile devices). These same technologies open doors to allow more participation and interaction with the audience (comment boards as well as letters to the editor, even the possibility of allowing people to submit images, audio, or video in response to what has been published) so that the newspaper is really a vehicle for discussion instead of becoming a platform for declaration.

This gets me interested in breaking Lehi away from the publishing center of Utah County. Currently we have a town section that gets published weekly by the Provo Daily Herald. With a population of 30,000 there is no reason that Lehi should not have an independent community news organization. We should have no aspirations to compete with the New York Times, or even the Daily Herald, but there is nothing to stop us from controlling our own platform for local news coverage.

I will have to write about how a Lehi community news organization might be formed, run, and financed and see if the idea is viable.

Tags community, ideal, media, technology, thoughts

General

Political Excitement

I noticed last week that I had not found much commentary worth marking in my daily reading of the news and the many blogs I follow. I went on vacation for a couple of days so that I read nothing for nearly 4 days. When I got back I was surprised at the number of things I found worth reading. If I didn’t know better I would think that I had lowered my standards on what was worth reading during my break. The fact is that for some reason there was just an unusual amount of very good commentary over the weekend.

There were two major topics, plus some good commentary that I will cover in my upcoming Fourth of July post.

One topic that I saw a lot of commentary about was immigration reform. This makes sense because it was being debated (and eventually killed) in the Senate. There were two angles of discussion there. One was about what bad legislation it would have been. The second was what we can learn about the changing face of politics in our connected world.

One particularly good post came from Steve Urquhart, who is both blogger and politician. He takes this "victory of the people" and reminds those who have worked so hard to defeat the bill that there is still work to be done, and that part of that work is to actively help legislators navigate in the new, and increasingly connected world by "embracing Senators who engage directly with the people." The second thing that the victors need to do is foster "a productive, result-oriented dialogue on immigration."

The second common topic surprised me. It was government provided health insurance . The surprise was not the topic, which is only going to get more air time as the 2008 elections heat up (only 16 months to go). What surprised me was that up until now everything I have read on the topic has amounted to varying degrees of "let’s make it happen." Suddenly I have multiple independent sources taking the time to argue why it’s not such a good idea.

Tags connections, technology

culture

Information Processing

Thanks to Joshua for pointing to this quote from Douglas Adams (author of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy).

Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural skepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back â€“ like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust â€“ of course you can’t, it’s just people talking â€“ but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV â€“ a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make.

This goes hand in hand with an argument that some people have heard me make about our “information society” as we call it. In a society so full of information sources the great challenge and skill is to be able to identify which sources are accurate or trustworthy. That is the skill that we need to have and that we need to pass on to our children. If Adams was right about humans being naturally hard-wired for this then we should do just fine.

The whole piece was published in 1999 which has given us 8 years to prove that he was right on target. Go read it.

Tags connections, insights, technology