Robert Reich, who is, like me, surfing the advancing wave of Baby Boomers, suggests that we can (and maybe are the only ones who can) solve our own problem. [April 9, 2010]

More specifically he recommends allowing more immigration and the increased payroll taxes that immigration would bring with it. (Don’t confuse immigration with illegal immigration.)

Reich quotes Ben Bernanke:

Fed Chair Ben Bernanke … listed the choices. “To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits,” he said in a speech on Wednesday, “the nation must choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.”

And then:

Bernanke is almost certainly right about “some combination,” but he leaves out one other possible remedy that should be included in that combination: Immigration.

Reich reminds us that immigrants are younger, want to work and to “succeed” and given a chance can make a difference in the economics of the US.

I think there’s a gem of truth here—but Reich is limiting this discussion to the US economy and not looking at global solutions. Yes, physical immigration and local (read “US”) taxation of income could make a big difference locally. But we’re in our current employment crisis in large measure because we have become global economically while not becoming global in terms of social policy. And maybe we just can’t do that.

And also implicit in Reich’s rhetoric is that we as old timers will need to be taken care of. Certainly we’re all playing the lottery of life, but we’re far less decrepit than people were at our age even 50 years ago.

When I began programming computers at the age of 16 (super-computers, of course, not PCs)^[1], I thought the age of software was upon us and there would be a never-ending stream of challenges and problems that I’d be able to throw my intellect at. Basically forever.

But, in the last couple of decades a lot has changed. First, beginning at most 20 years ago, software has been written by smaller and smaller groups—a few hundred engineers at Microsoft could develop software to be used by many millions of people.^[2] And then, more recently, software engineering has spread around the world with teams in Russia, India, China and many other places, now taking on development tasks. The economic and personnel growth in those parts of the world has stayed localized, reducing the employment chances is the US and therefore the tax base for care of soon-to-be-late-life boomers. It’s clear that the standard of living has to “level out.”

I think that the boomers will face the challenge by continuing to be productive long past the time when our forebears would have retired. And that our productivity will be in the intellectual sector, not the “sweat” sector. Boomers can “give back” in terms of wisdom, stories and experience. And maybe it’s not a case of giving back, but of forward-looking contribution to the active life of the present day. If the Internet survives (I have definite opinions on the fragility of the Internet!), and since online nobody cares if you’re a dog, nobody cares if you have gray hair, or none for that matter. If you’re smart, you can still make it. But, be prepared for living a simpler life.^[3] And your competitors will be all over the globe – as will be your customers.

[2] For the moment I’m ignoring free and open source developments like Linux, Gnu and many others. But they can’t really be ignored, so suspend disbelief for a moment if you will and ride with the current argument.

[3] More about the simpler life later on. It means less moving your body around the globe on airplanes, and more audio and video conferencing.

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Regardless of how you feel about government agencies having unchecked access to this kind of information — If you ran an online service that promised “we never share your information with anyone else” – what would your reaction be to an NSL requiring that you give up something like IP addresses, or physical address, or other information about a user of your service, without informing anyone? Would you be happy telling your users that you never share their information?

What I do to deal with this is have a statement on any service-oriented web site I create that lets users know that we may be required by law to give up information and that if they are concerned about this they should either not use the service or they should never use their true name or address information. But how honest is even my policy if I couldn’t tell users their information has been subpoenaed?

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Thanks to Xeni at BoingBoing for pointing it out. And click the diagram to see how the terms relate.

Also see Traveling Geeks. Not Traveling Dweebs, Traveling Nerds or Traveling Dorks.

And here’s an interesting bestiary of geekdom, listing many different types of geeks. I know a few who fall into some, but not all, of the categories.

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I’ve been doing some thinking about media recently, and particularly in light of Tom Foremski’s series^[2] on everyone being a media company these days. It particularly got me to think again about my CyberSpark.net project, which looks on the surface of it like just another product, but in fact the goal is to create a seed where community can form. So even CyberSpark is really a media project.

x

[2] Tom is a journalist who was with the Financial Times and just about six years ago left his job to work online. He now writes Silicon Valley Watcher and he’s one of the Traveling Geeks. He wrote the series a few weeks after his Traveling Geeks trip to the UK (he was also with us in Paris in December, 2009). During that trip we were all considering the role of established media—His series comprises:

A kind of “summary” article: 5yrs: Lessons And Insights: Wish Everyone Well… August 21, 2009

and three others as a series:

Part 1: Why I left the Financial Times August 18, 2009

Part 2: Where’s the disruption from the Internet? August 19, 2009

Part 3: Meeting Cisco’s Dan Scheinman and realizing every company is now a media company August 20, 2009

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The thread of his post struck me smack in the face:

Economy has become so powerful because, in the absence of the political ideas to reform government to deal with the real issues of the world, economy emerges as a way to cope with 6 billion people…

Economy has become a form of governance…

The result is a way of life based on dollars and what dollars can buy, which is not so much meaningful goods but stuff…

The result is that we do not really have a governance of society. We have a governance of the society via economy and a governance of economics through the narrow interests of its major participants…

The well being of the people has been replaced by the well being of the economy, which, to make the rich yet richer, has chosen to eliminate people as a cost to the economic engine.

—Douglass Carmichael [excerpted by Sky from Governance and economy]

For 10 years now I have wondered how we expect to both 1) reduce jobs in the US and 2) maintain a functioning economy. I so much want to see people everywhere in the world achieve a good standard of living, and I know that we in the US need to reduce the way we squander our resources, but I don’t see how we can keep eliminating people from the economic engine and expect to have a sustainable economy, let alone a sustainable world. The gears of economy need to function differently—and I firmly believe that the turmoil we see in economic systems right now signals that we will never return to “normal” but instead will have to wrestle with these kinds of questions, and solve these kinds of problems, in order to stabilize our economic and social systems.

Read

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It’s a “service” that shows my little face photo on sites that subscribe to their service, saying “Sky has been reading this page.” Given what Facebook did to me in December, revealing who all of my friends are^[1][2], I’ve become somewhat protective of where I go and what I read. Why would I want people to see that I’ve been reading some blog that just happens to subscribe to this service? What if I arrive at a site, gag on its contents, and then leave? MyBlogLog still shows that I’ve recently been there.

Goodbye privacy? Nope, goodbye MyBlogLog — I just unregistered. And they miss me already?

[2] The King (Facebook) has no Friends — and Neither do we [any more]

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Chris started by saying “I don’t have an agenda; I don’t have an announcement…” referring, of course, to the number of companies that had been making announcements on the stage. Probably not unusual, since you want to make product announcements where they will be heard, but it was certainly being noticed this time around.

The full video of Chris’ talk appears at the bottom of this article. I’m going to pick and choose from the points that Matt jotted down.

So, what is the essence of community? Community…

[Chris says] Community… lives inside us. Where I go, community goes. We create it based on our preferences, likes, dislikes and the people we link up with;

Sky sez: Community is a construct composed of our connections and interactions — to that extent, wherever we go we bring those connections with us. Because we are becoming highly-linked through electronic media (and social media), our communities may in fact be available to us almost everywhere we go! Communities of interest and Communities of practice are examples of these kinds of virtual communities (unlike our neighborhood, which is a physical community). We all participate in many communities, sometimes interacting in a number of them at the same time.

… is becoming increasingly distributed, as we distribute our ideas and thoughts across social networks;

I have already made a comment on this (prior to hearing Chris), in remarking that bloggers are beginning to spread out beyond blogging and take their communities with them into Twitter, Facebook, and so forth. But, of course you’ve noticed that too. You probably started tweeting a long time ago, added a Facebook or Linked-in profile, and put more of your photos on Facebook now than on your old photo-sharing site. So if it’s true that 25% of Web traffic is to Facebook^[2][3], then this certainly means that some of the social behavior that motivated blogging has moved, with many of us, to Facebook.

… is a commodity, but people [themselves] aren’t. It’s easy to set up a website or blog, but the people and voices behind it are what makes it unique, special;

I’ve been promoting this idea for years—and I still have to remind clients that they can set up an online community web site, but they still need people to staff it, and they still need customers’ voices to make it really happen. And when you inject people into the equation, it forces things to scale more linearly and it costs more for upkeep and maintenance of the human community members.

… cannot be controlled, but can be “guided”;

That’s the essence, isn’t it? You have to listen to what your friends, community, customers, are saying. I’m reading Peter Block now, and he’s one of the masters of using transformational change to solve community issues. [Photo is from peterblock.com.]

… is no longer defined by physical boundaries. You probably have more in common with a geek living on another continent than your next door neighbour;

About a year ago someone asked me whether The Dalai Lama Foundation wasn’t just “a big web site with a small organization…” At first the question offended me, but that didn’t last long as I realized and even pointed out that the organization in fact did do much of its work online. So it is indeed a large web site with a (smaller human) organization behind it. The organization was and is distributed geographically. It uses network communications to get people going and then local groups of people may begin working on their own. There is little planned organization of this process, and it grows entirely organically.

… grows its own leaders. the best leaders come organically out of a community, and is not an appointed one. It’s crucial that communities grow it’s own leaders for credibility and respect reasons;

Leaders arise organically from within communities. Leaders arise when a cause needs someone to carry it forward. At the Foundation we have had six years of growing in response to leaders who arise organically and naturally from our communities. This is reflected in the many projects that the Foundation has incubated or supported. This leaves the central organization small, but promotes the growth of new organizations that respond to the immediate needs of the constituent communities.]

… is the antithesis of ego. Community is myself and everyone else, not just me or my Twitter stream;

Yes, community is looking outward to see and to listen to what those in the community want. And that’s why leaders develop and grow organically within healthy communities.

… is everywhere, inside you. It’s what you share, your passions — and it’s this that will spell success.

Focus on these points: 1) look for people who share your needs, desires and motivations; 2) connect with them; 3) expand that connection by listening to the needs of those in the communities you form or join; 4) help foster organic growth of leaders within your communities; 5) continue looking outward at all times!

[2] Could 25% of page-views on the Web really be attributed to Facebook? Drake Direct says so. Their source for the stats is compete.com, which uses a sampling methodology (they have a sample set of people who “represent” the Internet user population) and projects their results to a large population (all Web users). They are not directly measuring real traffic to any web site—they are estimating. I have done statistical work of this sort, and for certain kinds of probability distributions it is problematic…particularly long-tail distributions. So don’t believe the 25% statistic, but do believe that traffic to Facebook really is quite high!

[3] Remember not to confuse the Web with the Internet. It is only a subset of overall traffic on the net. Email probably still accounts for far more traffic than web pages, and video is coming into its own rapidly.

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But anyway it’s too late. Whatever harm has been done has probably been scarfed up by the scurrying search engines which have picked up this valuable information while it has been available. What if some unscrupulous operator has already built a private search engine that has traversed Facebook pages and sucked up all of the relationships while they were public. Even if Facebook hides them later on, any such information could be preserved and used by unscrupulous individuals. (And in case you think you can’t build a search engine in a few hours, I built a search engine in 1999 that spiders, on my behalf, any site I point it at… and I could easily configure it to spider Facebook for this kind of information, and have it running on the task within an hour.)

Julia says that Facebook has added the option to protect your friend list (must have happened while I was sleeping). But I can’t find it. I did find a place to restrict what Facebook shows to the search engines, but searchers have ways around that. And there’s an interesting, long post that I found in Valleywag, that deals with some of the intricacies of making your information more difficult to find. It’s worth reading.

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EPIC—the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and nine other co-signing organizations have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about this problem.^[1] Read what Larry Dignan says on ZDNet about this. I investigated and found that we’re all naked now…

I checked my own profile and turned the volume down on some of the privacy settings, but I was unable to restrict my friend list – all 127 of them are freely available to anyone who searches for me on Facebook (not to search engines – just to someone who joins Facebook, but that’s trivial). Now I ask you, do you want the entire world to know who you have friended on Facebook? It exposes your entire set of social connections. I consider my friend list to be much more private than the rest of the info they release. (Though I’m not entirely happy that they show my fan pages, for that matter.)  ¡No way José!

34. Facebook now treats the following categories of personal data as “publicly available
information:”

• users’ names,
• profile photos,
• lists of friends,
• pages they are fans of,
• gender,
• geographic regions, and
• networks to which they belong.38

35. By default, Facebook discloses “publicly available information” to search engines, to
Internet users whether or not they use Facebook, and others. According to Facebook,
such information can be accessed by “every application and website, including those you
have not connected with . . . .”39

36. Prior to these changes, only the following items were mandatorily “publicly available
information:”

• a user’s name and
• a user’s network.

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[2] gov2.0Summit (Government 2.0 summit) September 9-10, 2009

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This music video is a trippy artistic rephrasing of how two thinkers talked about the meaning and inspiration of all of this.

Please also continue reading for footnotes and a second video where Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan discuss the universe…

Also for more fun, listen to this discussion: Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Arthur C. Clarke (momentarily) — play it below God, the Universe and Everything Else

Phil Plaitt’s original Bad Astronomy blog.

Hubble Telescope web site at NASA.gov.

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FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski spoke about this [Wall Street Journal report] at the Brookings Institution earlier this week. He proposes that all carriers, including wireless carriers who handle data traffic, should have to carry traffic without regard to what its content is or who is providing that content. The new provision in his proposal is that wireless carriers would have to carry voice-over-IP traffic as well as other kinds of data, which brings very cheap voice communications to mobile devices – much cheaper than the rates now charged for mobile voice calls.

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The  Allied Security Trust acquires patents that might at a future date be used to attack companies using Linux. Open Invention Network announced recently that it had bought 22 patents that AST had acquired Microsoft Corporation. Once OIN acquires a patent, they release it for use by others.

Some years ago I realized that since the US Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO) was allowing patents on business processes and software, it was only a matter of time until everything that I do every day when writing programs, would be patented and I would no longer be able to write and sell programs without infringing someone else’s intellectual property. (It would probably be OK to write a program if I kept it secret, but as soon as I try to sell it – kaboom! – the long arm of the law would come down on me.)

In fact, I was an expert witness a few years ago, in a case where a company had patented one of the most basic and key processes related to something that we do every day. Basically if you 1) look at a process and measure it; 2) decide on the basis of measurement what you want to fix or change; and 3) then fix only the things that were wrong… they you would be violating this patent. Holy moly! This is so fundamental you would think it couldn’t be patented. But it was.

And believe it or not, the two companies involved in the dispute settled the case before it went to trial. For tens of millions of dollars. In my opinion, the patent should never have been issued because the fundamental work had been done by someone else in 1973 (not by the person who held the patent). But it had been patented.

The trouble is that even if the patent should never have been granted, it is often more costly to defend yourself, or to get the patent overturned, than it is to settle and pay a ”ransom” to the people who have the patent.

Can you image what the Linux world of open source software would be like if an unscrupulous company — and particularly one which doesn’t actually have any business other than going after people who violate their copyrights — were to patent the basic processes of Linux and then sue everyone to stop them from utilizing the processes?

The business of AST and OIN is to protect us from these nightmares.

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