I’ve been down to the Occupy Wall Street protest a few times in the past couple of weeks. When people ask me about it I’m not always sure how to explain it. Unions, anarchists, environmentalists, disillusioned Tea Partiers, celebrities and everyone in between can be seen down there on any given day. There are so many disperate groups. They all want different outcomes and have different goals, but they all have one thing in common: they are all really mad about the current economic and political situation. In an op-ed, NY Times columnist Paul Krugman has summed it up better than I have been able to:
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.
Makes me want to go re-watch Sidney Lumet’s classic film Network. Because I’m mad as hell and I can’t take it anymore. Read the full article on the NY Times web site.
Facebook messenger is finally here, but it is no longer the app I want. I’ll explain.
Back in May I wrote a post about how there was a need for a standalone messaging app and obviously some people at Facebook agreed. Read the full details on the app launch via TechCrunch.
Last week they launched the app. The timing was curious. At the same time London was in full on riot mode and now MP’s have set a date for a formal inquiry into the methods rioters were using to coordinate. They have singled out Facebook, Twitter and RIM (makers of the Blackberry) for inquiry. Details can be found here. RIM’s Blackberry Messenger (BBM) service appears to be the main target. The thought among some (not all) MP’s is that the UK government should have access to messages to either identify perpetrators of crimes or outright censor the messages. Serious free speech and privacy implications aside, here is what worries me about Facebook messenger. Facebook already at least censors these messages in helping the MPAA and RIAA fight piracy (evidence here). What’s to stop them from extending this censorship in times of perceived crisis? Slippery slope to say the least.
Here is what I now want. A standalone messenger app that works on either mobile device or computer. It behaves like text messaging in that the messages are generally shorter. It would detect where I am at the moment and direct messages only to that location. For example if I’m logged in on the computer and using that to chat it wouldn’t blow up my phone at the same time. It would be encrypted. It wouldn’t log messages or at least it would delete any older than a few days. It wouldn’t be owned by some company ready to sell me out for a few pennies. All my friends using it. It would be great.
Does something like this exist? If not, someone should build it.
Maybe the title of the post is a bit of an overstatement. It is actually very cool and rewarding to see that someone over at The Economist is thinking about the same questions as I was almost three years ago.
Essentially my hypothesis was that increased access to information would make a country more free than those with less access to information. (Disregard the obvious question about which way this relationship goes. Are countries more free because they have access to information or do they have more access to information because they are more free?) My original thinking was related to the internet, but it quickly became clear that I needed to expand that idea into communication in general. There just wasn’t enough solid data available to only focus on the internet. This was three years ago and the best data I could find at the time was another few years old. In the past five years alone, the number of internet users has doubled.
A very simplistic version of what eventually happened was that I took a combination of the percentage of the population of a country with access different types of communication (phones, radios, internet, etc.) and compared that to the Freedom House Index score of the country (a measure of how free a country is). I did this for about 180 countries. In the end there was only a slight correlation and I couldn’t event start to claim there was causation. I can still remember sitting in my professor’s office telling him I think I needed to start over. His advice was great. He essentially told me that it was beyond the scope of this project to actually come up with some big revelation and find out that two things were definitively connected. The point of the project in my case was to go through the process of doing research and learn how it worked. It would have been nice if at that time Freedom House was compiling internet freedom scores like they are today. That would have saved me some serious time and headaches.
In the end, it is really interesting to see how in my case the lack of available data ended up shifting my thesis topic away from the original question. In that vein, it was incredibly satisfying to come across this article in The Economist. With people asking if social media played a role in some of the Arab revolutions, it makes sense that serious thought is going into the question. I’d like to believe that unfettered access to information is making people more free, don’t you?
The image in question is below, here is the original article.
Fraternity brother @jonathanclark has been tweeting about some political advertisements from Alabama where he went to grad school. I’m not sure if these are real or some sort of joke. The best one is embedded, the others can be found below.
When some Americans believe the current president is a communist cult leader trying to brainwash the nation’s schoolchildren, and other Americans want the last president to be dragged off his ranch in handcuffs, it is time to reassess the state of our union. So may I make a modest proposal. There is a way to end the bitter bickering over health care, affirmative action, abortion, religion in the public square, taxation, torture, and the proper role of government. It is called secession. Yes, I know: Splitting the U.S. into two nations is a bit extreme. But extremism in the defense of America is no vice. And since we’re already segregating ourselves by what we watch, listen, and read, why not go all the way?
Think of the possibilities. In a new nation fashioned out of the current red states-call it, for the sake of argument, Limbaughland-the federal tax rate would be cut to 10%, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security would be abolished, abortion would be illegal, gays would be closeted again, and Christianity would be the official state religion. Anyone could buy any kind of gun, no questions asked. In the current blue states, which we will call ObamaNation, the federal tax rate would top out at 90%; all employers would institute quota systems for minorities, women and less-abled persons; and you’d get your health care form a single-payer system like Canada’s. Fast food and guns would be banned, while gay marriage and marijuana would be legal. Voila! No more rancor, leaving only one remaining problem: What would we all feel so aggrieved about?”
