category archive: society

Aaron Swartz

Just caught up on the Aaron Swartz story. Very sad news. It’s especially sad to me that this has happened in the same week as Alex Jones’ widely-linked, totally unhinged “tyrannical government” 2nd-Amendment argument on that show. It just underscores that, to me, the only REAL protections from so-called tyrannical government are computers… and hacktivists […]

more thoughts on the self+crowdfunding era

There’s a really interesting discussion going on, sparked by Amanda Palmer’s smashing of a significant milestone on Kickstarter in May. I was drawn in by Austin Kleon’s response to a New York Times article about the whole thing. Go read that in another tab. I’ll wait. Then Scholl responded, via Tumblr, with a clarification: he […]

mini-rant on gay marriage debate

It’s been an odd week on Twitter for JavaScript enthusiasts, as folks started forwarding around the fact that JS creator Brendan Eich donated money in support of Prop. 8, California’s gay marriage ban. As one might expect, this generated a whole lot of discussion and debate, with varying levels of civility. I have abstained from […]

my harebrained scheme

So, we can all pretty much agree that the American economy is going to hell in a handbasket. It also seems clear that nobody really knows what to do about it, so even though I’m not an economist, a policy specialist, or anything that even remotely qualifies me to propose a solution, I’m gonna go […]

the national debt

There are many indicators of a healthy or troubled economy, but I never took economics (stupid, stupid, stupid!) so I’m not in a position to tell you much about them. However, I got curious tonight about one of those indicators, the National Debt, and did some research. Here’s a quick look at what I found […]

we tweet, therefore we are

I’m snipping this and posting it here just so I have a place to refer people when they ask, as they sometimes do, what the hell the appeal is of Twitter (for me, at least). This nails it: Twitter is a social network, yes, but it’s a social network without the superpoke scrabtaculous zombie noise […]