Juanhijo

Republicans have mastered the double-speak

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 12:23:00 -0700

Perceptions about Gov't Spending are different than Reality...

In this graph you can see the annualized growth of per capita federal spending by POTUS Adminsitration.

Republicans have mastered the double-speak ... and persuaded us that it is not their hand in the cookie jar.

Drive to fact, drive to root cause, assess, then act.

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Industries Using Government to Undermine Innovation and New Competition

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:31:00 -0800

The pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation provides the opportunity to clearly delineate old industry from new - established markets from emerging market forces.

Old Industry is seeking policy to protect their media distribution models. New industry is seeking the continued openness that is currently driving innovation, creating new markets, one could even argue, driving revolutions both figurative and literal. Below you can see who is driving the new regulation and see who is opposing it.

What is SOPA? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as H.R.3261, is a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011, by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX)

http://maplight.org/content/72896 - data source

Industry	Business Interest	Contributions
		(Jan. 1, 2009 - Jun. 30, 2011)

Computers/Internet (Opposes)	Computer software	$273,744
	Online computer services	$251,233
Total		$524,977

TV/Movies/Music (Supports)	Cable & satellite TV production & distribution	$672,750
	Commercial TV & radio stations	$265,050
	Entertainment Industry/Broadcast & Motion Pictures	$320,800
	Motion Picture production & distribution	$282,150
	Recorded Music & music production	$317,446
	TV production & distribution	$125,400
Total		$1,983,596

Grand Total		$2,508,573

It's the new American way of doing business in the post-modern digital swish:

Write new rules and litigate.

As disruptive innovation in an industry emerges, old business, people who have profited from predictable market conditions over time, are tempted to pay lobbyists and buy legislators to create policy that undermines competition, ultimately protecting their markets and their revenue streams.

Alternatively, businesses have other strategic and tactical options when faced with innovation - competition via: price, value, R&D, partner, buy the competition etc.

Do nothing and a business faces declining revenue and closing up shop (see: Polaroid, Blockbuster, Borders Books)

Enter disruption to the status quo >>> Thesis challenged by an Antithesis that results in Synthesis.

Anachronistic crony capitalism is the act of buying government policy and policy makers to avoid competition, to externalize costs, and to make revenue streams as permanent as possible. Established companies need to become good at sustained investment and innovation learning how to strategically invest and drive a sustaining innovation path.

This is key. Your profits are not guaranteed into perpetuity. You cannot use government to enforce market conditions that guarantee your competitive edge.

I am a promoter of open source and open standards and peer review. Be that as it may, it is worth noting, that even Microsoft continuously includes strategic R&D investments in their business model in order to drive sustainable future revenue.

Corporations should not be allowed to buy policy, buy market conditions, write laws and effectively influence and deviate markets for their benefit.

Compete. Damn it.

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Son is home

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 07:31:42 -0800

... On leave, finally. No new tattoos to report.
His presence 'displaces a lot of water' in our family. While he's gone, we're not the same.

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Lonely Bag Piper

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 10:42:00 -0700

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Disco Jesus to the Rescue

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 10:39:00 -0700

A family favorite. Bring on the funk.

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Spending Levers: Federal budget investments that will shorten the recession

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 08:15:00 -0700

The US labor market is still in terrible shape. Virtually every economic textbook affirms that increased Gov't spending in recession eases unemployment and shortens the duration of the downward cycle. Some want to debate this evidence - but the majority of pople who make this claim never cracked a book on economics (macro or micro) and are stuck debating ideological jingoism rather than facts.

Knowing that part of our strategy is the need to jump-start investments, where should spending be targeted? I submit that US Gov't policy should re-focus federal $$ on the economies of tomorrow > building that road to the 21st century: Research and Development, Science, Sustainable Environment and Development, Alternative Energies, Smart Grid, a double-down on Education, Technology, Transportation, and Infrastructure design that leads to the future.

There is a place for government seed $ and investment: see NASA and ARPANET for examples of trillion $ returns from million $ government investments.

While we struggle to frame the correct policy questions and strategies, India and China steam ahead executing investment strategies that forcefully position their economies for future hegemony.

Tick-Tock Peeps: This game is 3 dimensional, not a linear Sunday stroll where the Protestant work ethic 'better tomorrow' is guaranteed through belief and culture. The future is earned, prioritized, and funded.
Progress requires purpose.
Building a better America requires intention.
Results require discipline and vision...
and a commitment to something larger than the just the American individual.

I keep this reality in my field of vision: The American Individual alone can not compete with China. While individual innovation is a critical wild-card and one of the US's competitive advantages, it alone does not win the day. Laying line for telegraphs, transcontinental railways, the interstate highway system ... All kickstarted by federal investment.

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Us vs Them Income Reality: The Experience of 99% of Americans

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 16:43:00 -0700

Economic graph #1 explains the expanding income gaps that the vast majority of Americans are experiencing. People know something is wrong, but are too busy working, to make ends meet, taking care of their families, saving for college, looking for work, trying to save their homes, and ...

... paying for rising medical costs. The middle aged middle class is responsible for raising the next generation of Americans, and increasingly becoming responsible for the care of the preceding generations. Graph #2 shows that rising health care costs remain the primary long-term budget challenge we face as a nation. People can make a case for debt, real-estate inventory glut, loss of manufacturing base, declining infrastructure, ineffective under investment in education - however, rising healthcare costs threaten to overtake the Federal Budget, placing increasing downward economic pressure on the middle-aged middle class.

In graph #1 we see the splintering and detachment of the high income class; the self-extrication of the top 1% from the common American Experience and National Identity. The expanding income gap suggests the development of a permanent two-class society. The process by which the top 1% have detached is through the buying and influence on elections and more important gov't policy. With the Federal Government firmly in the hands of the funders of vicious campaign fund-raising requirements, do not expect those that have purchased policy-makers to suddenly drive policy to solve national issues that do not involve their income class (re Graph #2). The hyper wealthy have purchased government legally - they will not only use it to enable the policies that support their objectives, they will also defend the power of government policy from those who would seek to use it to benefit the 99% of Americans represented by the US Republic.

In graph #3 - meet the 1%:

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Costs of Bush and Obama Policies

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 06:56:00 -0700

Another compelling chart about policy changes that exploded the deficit. Bush tax cuts are at root.

It's based on data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Its significance is not partisan (who's "to blame" for the deficit) but intellectual. It demonstrates the utter incoherence of being very concerned about a structural federal deficit but ruling out of consideration the policy that was largest single contributor to that deficit, namely the Bush-era tax cuts.

source - http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/07/the-chart-that-should-acc...

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Bush Legacy on Long-Term Deficits

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 06:48:00 -0700

This information is impossible to ignore; difficult to dispute. Put this graph in your back pocket the next time a GOP ideollogue lays the debt at Obama's feet. Call BS on it. Deal in Reality.

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National Deficit as a Percentage of GDP

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:00:11 -0700

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One thing that remains 10 years on

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 19:54:00 -0700

I heard this poem read the day after September 11, 2001. Like many, I was trying to make sense of what had just happened, and was about to happen. 10 years on, I still associate this writing with that lonesome day ... for me, it still speaks to our very human journeys, how we move forward through the great uncertainties, it speaks to the path we all travel, knowingly or unknowingly. Thinking of my son, in his dress blues, uncertain where our futures will take us; only knowing that our family has a gravity that holds and deepens as we pull each other closer through the turns. -Brian
Waltzing the Spheres

"We pulled each other closer in the turn
around a center we could not see -
This holding on is what I had to learn.

The sun can hold the planets, earth the moon,
but we had to create our gravity,
by always pulling closer in the turn.

Each revolution caused my head to whirl
so dizzily I wanted to break free,
but holding on is what I had to learn.

I fixed my eyes on something out there firm,
and then our orbits steadied so that we
could pull each other closer in the turn.

The joy that circles with us round the curve
is joy that passes surely as a peace,
and holding on is what we have to learn.

And, if our feet should briefly leave the earth,
no matter, earth was made for us to leave,
and arms for pulling closer in the turn,
This holding on is what we have to learn."

- Susan Scott Thompson, 1946-2007

http://www.pbs.org/americaresponds/moyers912.html

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Top US Tax Rates 1917-2010

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 09:25:00 -0700

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This Man Pulled the Thread that Unraveled Dictators

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 13:36:00 -0700

All things are possible in this century, all things happen fast now...

Excerpt from Time:

"He is now famous throughout Tunisia and the Arab world — a legend, in fact. But Mohammed Bouazizi never set out to be a byword. His aunt Radia Bouazizi says his dream was to save enough money to be able to rent or buy a pickup truck. "Not to cruise around in," she says, "but for his work." Her nephew was a vegetable seller. "He would come home tired after pushing the cart around all day. All he wanted was a pickup." Instead, he started a revolution.

Bouazizi was like the hundreds of desperate, downtrodden young men in hardscrabble Sidi Bouzid. Many of them have university degrees but spend their days loitering in the cafés lining the dusty streets of this impoverished town, 190 miles (300 km) south of the capital Tunis. Bouazizi, 26, didn't have a college degree, having only reached what his mother says was the baccalaureate level, which is roughly equivalent to high school. He was, however, luckier than most in that he at least earned an income from selling vegetables, work that he'd had for seven years. (See pictures of the ransacked mansions of Tunisia.)

But on Dec. 17 his livelihood was threatened when a policewoman confiscated his unlicensed vegetable cart and its goods. It wasn't the first time it had happened, but it would be the last. Not satisfied with accepting the 10-dinar fine that Bouazizi tried to pay ($7, the equivalent of a good day's earnings), the policewoman allegedly slapped the scrawny young man, spat in his face and insulted his dead father.

Humiliated and dejected, Bouazizi, the breadwinner for his family of eight, went to the provincial headquarters, hoping to complain to local municipality officials, but they refused to see him. At 11:30 a.m., less than an hour after the confrontation with the policewoman and without telling his family, Bouazizi returned to the elegant double-storey white building with arched azure shutters, poured fuel over himself and set himself on fire. He did not die right away but lingered in the hospital till Jan. 4. There was so much outrage over his ordeal that even President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, the dictator, visited Bouazizi on Dec. 28 to try to blunt the anger. But the outcry could not be suppressed and, on Jan. 14, just 10 days after Bouazizi died, Ben Ali's 23-year rule of Tunisia was over."
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2043557,00.html#ixzz1HpnOGa8j

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi

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London fiddle gigging

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:26:00 -0700

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London Street Music

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:25:00 -0700

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Cajun music in London

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:43:47 -0700

Old English man singing the blues playing fiddle, Irish Grandmother on
bass, Hindu on lead guitar, singing Cajun music in London. All that's
missing is a washboard.

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I call this London foto ...

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:41:48 -0700

"Old Man on the old Tube"

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Undermining the Idea GateKeepers

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 09:47:00 -0700

Love this interview with LeVar Burton on Building 43 - Communities without Gatekeepers.

We should not be afraid of “more accountability and integrity in our communicating.”

Broadcast media & commercial communication are one-way conversations bundled with sales messages, actors, branding, and entertainers. Often it is marketing made to look like authentic human interaction.

The goal of most mass media communication is to generate revenue.

When you unpack Broadcast media messaging we find it is often a partial hollow representation of human communication. In the age of mass media, companies and large organizations have controlled, or at the very least influenced, the messages that people receive in the broadcast channel.

Mass media messages have been tightly controlled. With revenue protection in mind, the distribution channel owners and funders have acted as the message gatekeepers.

No more.

Check out LeVar's thoughts in the video above. He has has been a champion for challenging people to think, discover, and ask "what if?" for decades now.

In the Web 2.0 Social web, we are increasingly able to find and choose messages that make sense and resonate; conversations that enhance our perspective and our understanding. And ironically, it is technology that is extending our authentic conversations beyond our local reach.

The many-to-many Social Web now matches and extends beyond the reach of one-way broadcast media.

More than ever we are able to choose an alternative to the status quo of how we hear, understand, and discuss issues that involve all of us. With broadcast messaging declining and non-commercial communication increasing, we are finding connections with new people and forming new communities – along the way uncovering those things that make us more alike than different. We are able organize around different commonalities and undertsandings. It is here that we are collectively remembering that there is more to life than selling, consumption, and commercial agendas.

The hegemony of the idea gatekeepers is eroding every passing day. And it is in this sharing of stories of being human, Levar Burton says, we have an opportunity for imagination ... An opportunity to say “what if ...?”

We should not be afraid of “more accountability and integrity in our communicating.”

That, friends, is our starting point and ideal worth evangelizing.

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CBO - Projected Federal Spending

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 05:45:00 -0800

The federal budget is on an unsustainable path, primarily because of the rising cost of health care.

(Percentage of gross domestic product)

You solve rising Health Care costs - you solve the Budget.

http://www.cbo.gov/publications/collections/health.cfm

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Voter Registration

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:09:00 -0700

I am compelled to repost these thoughts from the 2008 Presidential Election. I've registered several 1000's of voters in my lifetime. And I never did it for money. I did it because I believed in people and open ended democracy. Even more so today, I remain committed to ideals and concepts that are often bigger than the individual self.

-- Brian

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]

I always had faith in the idea that filling the ballot box was the best way to change courses. It's hard work. It's non-violent force of collective wills. The beauty of America is a our ability to change directions; not locked down by the baggage of history, and the trajectory of that history. Our society has a built in mechanism of change. We are not forced to keep living the errors and mistakes of the yesterday's decisions. We avoid anachronistic systems, we avoid extinction ... we change, adapt, and improve. Thesis, Anti-thesis, Synthesis. Rinse, repeat.

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