Andy Carvin & NPR crew get kicked out of a public place for taking pictures with a weird (but way cool) camera.
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Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, which has recently resorted to what Joe Klein calls a “paste-on populism”, has been reduced, even with her West Virginia victory, to a Monty Python sketch.
One of the worst effects of the Reagan Revolution was a near-complete loss of conscious caring about public infrastructure in the U.S. Most capital-intensive essentially public projects with no Wall Street box office were neglected. For decades.
I’m reminded of this by On the pot-holed highway to hell, by John Gapper in the Financial Times. It begins,
| If anyone doubts the problems of US infrastructure, I suggest he or she take a flight to John F. Kennedy airport (braving the landing delay), ride a taxi on the pot-holed and congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and try to make a mobile phone call en route. |
| That should settle it, particularly for those who have experienced smooth flights, train rides and road travel, and speedy communications networks in, say, Beijing, Paris or Abu Dhabi recently. The gulf in public and private infrastructure is, to put it mildly, alarming for US competitiveness... |
| There are lots of ways in which infrastructure inadequacy matters to the US but I would focus on two. |
| First, it imposes a drag on economic growth. The private infrastructure is poor enough – broadband speeds lag behind other countries and mobile coverage is spotty. But much of the public infrastructure is unfit, a fact that was becoming clear even before Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and a Minneapolis bridge collapsed during rush hour last year. |
| Second, it presents an awful image of the US to investors and other visitors. The state of transport and communications infrastructure is a symbol of a nation’s economic development and the US is starting to look like a third world country. In fact, scratch that. Many developing countries look and feel better. |
| Of course, they are in a different phase of development. The US invested 10 per cent of its federal non-military budget in infrastructure in the 1950s and 1960s as it built the interstate highway system – at the time, the envy of the world. While US investment has fallen to less than 1 per cent of gross domestic product, China has been matching its double-digit postwar record. |
Will this be an issue in the upcoming election? Barack Obama lists 21 issues in a pull-down menu. One of those is “additional issues“. There are six of those. Last on the list is “transportation“. Its entire text says “As our society becomes more mobile and interconnected, the need for 21st-century transportation networks has never been greater. However, too many of our nation’s railways, highways, bridges, airports, and neighborhood streets are slowly decaying due to lack of investment and strategic long-term planning. Barack Obama believes that America’s long-term competitiveness depends on the stability of our critical infrastructure. As president, Obama will make strengthening our transportation systems, including our roads and bridges, a top priority.” But there is a .pdf of the full plan. Argue with it if you like, but at least he has one.
John McCain lists 13 issues in his pull-down Issues menu. None of them cover this stuff, near as I can tell.
This morning I got a request from a friend to connect through Reunion.com. Seemed innocent enough, and I fell for it. Which is to say, they got one of my email addresses. Nothing more. Far as I know. But somehow they put X and N together and began spamming people I know.
Now I have five emails from friends, so far, plus one each from my wife and my sister, each with copies of spams from Reunion.com. The reunion.com emailings go like this:
| Hi, |
| I looked for you on Reunion.com, but you weren’t there. I use Reunion.com to search for lost friends and contacts, and to stay connected with people I know, so please connect with me. |
| — Doc |
| RESPOND TO DOC: |
| Connect with Doc Now! – You’ll also find out if anyone else is searching for you. |
I left out the links.
Oh, I also got one like the above, from myself. Another other notified me that “You’ve just been added to Doc Searls’s Reunion.com Address Book.”
What address book? And how exactly did they get that list of contacts?
Fortunately all those friends and relatives who wrote back were smarter than I was and saw the email from reunion.com as the scam it is. Others? I dunno. Live and re-learn, I guess.
Here’s the Google lookup of Reunion.com and spam. Plenty there.
I am among the least litigious people on Earth. But I can’t help but wonder … Could I (or we) sue these bastards for false representation? Invasion of privacy?
[Later, on 28 October 2008…] Since this post currently comes up first in Google searches for Reunion.com spam, it’s a lightning rod for continued complaints about Reunion.com, which is obviously still an asshole company. Though that they may be, I’m not going to sue them, since I have lots of better things to do. So I just posted this update, and suggest readers go to the Wikipedia article on Reunion.com for details about what’s wrong with the company and what little you can do about it other than avoid and complain.
| Network neutrality exists as an issue primarily because there is little real competition for residential high-speed Internet service. |
| In most of the United States there are only one or two ISPs — that is, a monopoly or a duopoly — offering residential Internet connections — if there are any high-speed service offerings at all. A number of technologies have been touted as a potential “third wire” (after the phone line and cable coax) into the home, but none has shown much deployment. |
Where I live, not far from where Scott works (also where I work, for what it’s worth), we have more than three wires going into the house, and past us on the street. We have Comcast cable, Verizon DSL (phone wire), RCN fiber and Verizon FiOS (also fiber). Since Verizon offers the best Internet deal — 20Mb symmetrical service — we go with them. (And yes, it rocks. Worse, it spoils. I only upload large numbers of photos when I’m home. And they all go up in seconds or minutes.)
What Scott has me wondering is if Verizon is only offering its symmetrical service where there are also two or more competitors. Anybody know?*
It would be interesting data, if true, and an argument on behalf of a robust marketplace.
* CZ does, and notes in the comments below (also on his blog) that Verizon offers symmetrical service to all its FiOS customers. When I ordered the service, and got on the horn with a technician to shake down the setup, he told me it was only being offered in certain areas. Maybe that was wrong information, or right only at that point in time, which was several months ago.
Rush Limbaugh drives me nuts, because he’s sometimes at least a little bit right about some things. Of course he’s a shameless partisan hack — yet with just enough humor and warmth that you can’t help but stay tuned.
Anyway, here’s a transcript of Rush’s show yesterday. It’s one in which he’s feeding on Rev. Wright’s exposed flesh, no less than — as Dave correctly points out here — the rest of Washington’s shark tank. Stories like this (with character and struggle out the wazoo) are too juicy to ignore.
Of course Rush’s teeth are all over Obama as well. Though mostly he’s working to submerge and drown the best of Obama under the worst of Wright.
Andrew Sullivan finds some stuff to agree with, in the midst of Rush’s several-hour chew-fest on Obama. But Andrew also points back toward the high road that Barack needs to find again, if the candidate doesn’t want to hand the game over to Hillary, for her to hand over to John McCain (which is the way to bet now in any case, if you’re just following the odds). Sez Andrew:
| Obama is a mixture in this, as in so many things, a complicated mixture. My view is it is that very mixture, that very embodiment of American complexity that makes Obama such a next-generation candidate. |
| It is no wonder the some of the old guard have mixed feelings about his ascendancy; or that Wright, at this point, might feel jealousy and the erosion of his worldview. And that’s why Obama needs to spell out again his own vision of a post-racial America that is not a non-racial America. Instead of seeking to play out the clock, he needs to seize the narrative again, before it irreparably seizes him. |
Good luck with that. He’ll need a lot of it.
So I decided to cave in and say yes to patients waiting in the accumulating pile of friend requests at my Facebook account. Haven’t been to Facebook in awhile, so I was also curious to see if “friending” has improved since the last time I slogged my way through the process.
First, l lost count of how many seconds passed during login. As usual, I clicked “remember me”, but I have no faith that it will next time. It never has before.
Second, I now have 190 friend requests. I know a few dozen of these folks. I would like to say yes to them as a group. While this would be handy and useful, and must be something that users have wanted for a long time, it’s still not there — though it’s nice to see that the silly intermediate checkbox thing (about how you know this person) is gone. Still, it takes another 10 18 25 seconds or so between clicking “confirm” and actual confirmation. With nothing happening in the browser’s status bar. So you have no idea if clicking even worked.
Makes me wonder if there is a cure for silos that isn’t yet another silo.
There has to be. Eventually. Somehow.
[Later…] I just “friended” a few people. They took, 30, 15, 8, 14, 33, 5, 34, 15, 5 and 5 seconds. I won’t bother to average those, because they don’t include the last two I tried. Both took more than a minute before I gave up because nothing happened. Awful.
When a blog comment to an ancient post comes into moderation and it has no relevance to that post, and the English is awful, I’m figuring it’s a splog (spam blog) comment. So I kill it.
The latest one killed went, question: How many guys ( MARRIED) feel that all they do is for not? eg… work around the house/ work for a living eg… bring home the bacon. / try to do all they can with their kids and then some. If you feel the same way i do tell my wife. That’s in response to this post from last September.
What would have happened if I had approved it? Well, in the past at least one of them turned my server into a spam slave. Or something. I just remember that the server was compromised and unscrewing it took a lot of work. The compromise came in through an old WordPress install that hadn’t been updated. One blog was killed outright and another still isn’t back.
More about the risks here. Sad that the Web has turned into a city where everybody has to bolt their doors, but … it is.
At ROFLCON, this time for more than a few minutes. Observations…
I can’t post a question using the question tool.
I’m at a panel on fame, and I don’t know any of the panelists. (They are, in fact, moot of 4chan, Randall Munroe, and Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics. They are arranged according to size: moot, Randall, Ryan.)
I am >2x the age of 90% of the people here. I may be 2x the age of ANY of the people here. (Not true, but it seems that way.) Worse, I’m dressed to “go out” to some place nice later, so it’s like I’m in costume.
A sport here: being first finding the too-few power outlets. (That’s the headline reference, btw. Figger it out.)
Neo-Cantabrigian observation: MIT does wi-fi right, while Harvard does power outlets right. At MIT, it’s a snap to get out on the Net through the wi-fi cloud, but there are too few power outlets, and some of them have no power. At Harvard, there are power outlets for everybody in all the classrooms (at least at the Law School, to which most of my experience is so far confined), and getting out on the Net requires a blood sample. From your computer.)
Great question from the floor… “At what time have you been most afraid of what you’ve created?” Answer: “Right now.” At which point Anonymous Thinker — a guy dressed in a suit and a fedora with a black stocking pulled over his head — just made a bunch of noise from the back of the room. Near as I can tell. I’m in the mid-front, and can’t turn my head that far. Still, funny.
Best question on the Question Tool: “SUDO MAKE NEW QUESTION.” Top vote-getter: “What is your zombie defence plan?”
Unrelated but depressing: The lobby for US-style copyrights in Canada has gone into overdrive, recruiting a powerful Member of Parliament and turning public forums on copyright into one-sided love-fests for restrictive copyright regimes that criminalize everyday Canadians.
I don’t have the whole fotoset up yet, but it’ll be here.
Randall just called blogs a “four letter word”. Blogs are very outre here.
To get (and stay) in shape, I’ve been spending more time off-grid. Less blogging and twittering, more time communing with nature. Some of that time I’m not indulging my curiousities. Or at least I’m resisting them. No electronics, for example. It was on one of those walks that I became curious about the story of infrastructure, past and present. What were these metal plates doing in the ground? Why were they there? Why were there so many of them? What were their different purposes? Which ones were remnants of services or companies no longer in existence? Which ones had found new uses? Why do so many carry the signatures of companies and utilities long dead?
I started on the Minuteman Bikeway, which passes close to our home not far from Harvard, where I’m headquartered these days. With a minimal slope, it’s perfect for active but low-stress strolling or biking. And it connects a lot of interesting historic sites. At one end is the Alewife “T” stop on the Red Line subway. At the other is something in Belmont I haven’t reached yet, because I usually go only as far as Lexington. Most of the stretch runs through Arlington, which combines the former villages of West Cambridge and Menotony. This is roughly the path along which the British soldiers retreated from Lexington on April 19, 1775, losing men (mostly boys, actually) and killing colonials of many ages. Thus started the Revolutionary War.
The Middlesex Central Railroad was born in 1846 and died in 1982. Part of it was better known as the Lexington and West Cambridge Railroad. It began as a vein of commerce, carrying goods from mills and ponds along its path. The Earth was colder in the early days of the railroad, and the winters were longer. Ice cut from Spy Pond was shipped all over the world from docks in Boston. This past winter the pond was thick enough to support skating for about three days.
But I’ve become more interested in the infrastructure story. So, over the last couple weeks, as Spring breaks out along the trail, I’ve been shooting pictures, mostly of stuff on the ground, before it gets haired over with vegetation, in faith that patterns will start making sense to me. I’ve also shot a lot around Cambridge, Boston and other places, but haven’t put those up yet. Right now I’m adding descriptions to the photos in this set here.
This is part of a long-term project, methinks. We’ll see how it goes. If you’re interested in following the same threads, tell me in the comments below.