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OccupySF IT Admins Using Pedal Power For Protest
99luftballon writes "The OccupySF team have been running an ad-hoc computer network on the streets of San Francisco without a steady power source, no Wi-Fi and even the occasional police raid. It turns out the best way to keep the lights on is car batteries and pedal power."
The American Work Ethic? I'd say they have it. They're pedaling to keep things going.
I've met many of those protesting. You know what? Many of them do have jobs. They do have lives. They're there anyway because they know things are messed up.
In my city the protestors are feeding the homeless. They're doing good works, and they're encouraging discussion about the future of our nation. There is no possible way this is a bad thing. Why are there so many unemployed out there? It isn't because the employed don't care, it's because the employed are trying to keep their jobs.
Pedal away, SF.
Oh my! My webpost parser jammed up bad on this one! Either you are horribly deluded about the present situation and woefully ignorant of why freedom to assemble to address grievances is a constitutionally protected right, or you are a serious troll doing serious trolling.
In the case of the former, the problem is that the "american dream" you are alluding to no longer exists in the form you are implying; it is no longer possible to "pull one's self up by one's bootstraps" as you put it, due to artificial barriers to entry that are strongly enforced by power of law.
Beating the protesters to disperse them is a violation of their civil liberties, and the fact that their protest irritates you is simply a sign that it is working. A protest that does not illicit a reaction is a protest that means nothing. Simply because somebody is doing something you don't like is not reason to lynch them. Under that logic the protesters should drop their signs, and instead pick up ball bats and molotov cocktails and start firebombing rich people's houses and beating them bloody when they run out screaming from the fire.
So, as far as I can tell, the only whiny bitch I see here is the one whining about the protesters.
Perhaps for some. For others it might be better explained as a desire to be free from the defacto serfdom that comes with bearing the label of "consumer."
Say for instance, with "owning" a ps3, but being dictated to about what you can use it for, or what services you connect it to.
Or perhaps in regard to being held hostage by the fallout of the market manipulation that comes about by driving speculation trends by wallstreet? (Eg, perhaps some people might not like having the equities in their 401k devalue radically after some random wallstreet firm shorts millions in stock based on a tiny deviation from expected value.)
The protest appears to be about this radical imbalance of power, and the flagrant diregard these organizations and individuals have for the consequences of their greed motivated activities.
One effect of being well organised is that only a few need to be taken out for the movement to fail. Taken out can include bribery, change of attitude, killing, etc.
Not having one key demand makes it very hard for the power structure to undermine the key message.
It is often considered to be one of the strengths of the movement that saw NZ buck its dominating partners (Britian and US) and become the first country in the world to go nuclear free. There were attempts by the authorities to undermine the power structure, only they could not find it as there was no heircachial power pyramid for them to comprehend.
Many other example can be quoted but the real message is the effect - a group with similar goals but no strong structure can be a very effectivce counter to a strong power structure with rigid form and plentiful resources.
Hopefully Occupy Wall Street will remain somewaht amophus. Tight enough for people to agree they support it, loose enough to be hard for the indrisal-military combine and allies (banking and oil included) to comprehend.
I understand they are frustrated, but they are so completely unfocused, or focused like laser on expanding the same problems that created this situation in the first place, that you can't define it.
But the one common theme is that they want to take money away from people who have a lot of it. And not pay their student loans.
I am frustrated, too - that a bunch of people are trashing things my tax dollars pay for.
99% of them are stupid whores who have 3 kids,
Actually fertility and marriage rates have been uniformly declining for decades, especially among college graduates -- it's a serious demographic problem, and if all of these people had three kids then Social Security and Medicare would probably be solvent, unchanged, for the next hundred years.
got a $100,000 degree in some bullshit subject like Black Studies,
While I cannot quote statistics, most corporate officers and successful entrepreneurs I've interacted with generally had undergraduate degrees in some kind of "soft" liberal arts, like American studies, history, political science, and anthropology.
Steve Jobs famously dropped out of college in order to study calligraphy. Worked for him.
and then wonder why no one wants to hire them and that a nonprofit that gives out needles to dopeheads doesn't pay $100K a year.
Needle exchanges save lives. And I know a lot of people involved in non-profits, doing things they love and believe in, getting paid jack and making no complaints.
The problem aren't the people who want $100k a year to distribute needles. The problem are the people who think that anyone who chooses to not be a millionaire is a chump, and should be exploited, because they "bring it on themselves."
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
From the website I found it's about solidarity, which seems like an awfully nebulous concept to be campaigning for...
Yeah, did nothing for Poland, the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Oh my! My webpost parser jammed up bad on this one! Either you are horribly deluded about the present situation and woefully ignorant of why freedom to assemble to address grievances is a constitutionally protected right, or you are a serious troll doing serious trolling.
In the case of the former, the problem is that the "american dream" you are alluding to no longer exists in the form you are implying; it is no longer possible to "pull one's self up by one's bootstraps" as you put it, due to artificial barriers to entry that are strongly enforced by power of law.
I guess someone forgot to tell me. I had to drop out of high school in the 10th grade, because I was forced to support myself. I've since got my GED and paying for college courses out of pocket and will probably continue for the rest of my life (Non-degree seeking). Now, I'm a productive adult employing others and running a successful business. If that's not "pulling one's self up by one's bootstraps" I don't know what is. I'm not so diluted to think that everyone can do that, because no they can't. However, it is still possible.
I agree with you though. The right to assemble is very important and even if someone doesn't agree with the protesters they have should have the right to peacefully protest. However, a lot of their complaints seem to be silly and self severing.
It's driving force is a desire for equality, where equality means that you get free money from the government.
Or maybe it just means that rich people should have to pay their own way too.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Or car batteries and goblin farts. Car batteries and pixie snot. Car batteries and invisible pink unicorn spunk. See where I'm going with this?
Thankfully, no.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"The group were having to run a 12 volt supply, convert it to 150 AC and then back down to five volts for phones and the portable radios used to maintain emergency contact."
Glad to see that there are NO electronics engineers or other people that have a clue as to what they are doing.
12V run into inverters to make 120VAC (not the 150AC the writer failed to fact check) and then using wall chargers for the devices. Nobody had a fricking car charger for their phone? This is getting utterly comical.
I am glad to see this because it means in the SHTF situation, most of the populace will die horribly because they are far too uneducated about basics of life so they will pedal 40% more than they need to to make up for the power losses because they cant be bothered to think through what they are doing.
get some basic education people. learn about electricity, you fricking use it every day.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Probably the easiest and most sustainable setup would be to convert a port-a-potty into a biogas digester, and use it to run a small gas genset or even a thermoelectric generator. Of course that would make something of a target for police.
Some motorcycles or scooters have alternators, that can be used for battery charging. Or if size is an issue, there's always a small generator like the Honda EX350 that can be had for around $200.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It is also important to take the elapsed time since your "success" into account. The situation the protesters are protesting is the situation in the now, while the situation that gave rise to your success story is in the "then."
I agree that the movement seems nebulous. I attribute it to a total constellation of several effects, including but not limited to the following things:
The american school system sucks balls to the point that higher education is essential to become gainfully employed. The number of institutions offering that service has not appreciably grown to meet demand, causing prices to rise. Students leave colleges with thousands of dollars in debt for a slip of paper that essentially just says "I can finish what I start and am not an idiot who can't write his own name." Given the actual value of their degree in the job market, they are naturally angry to have been forced into having to take on mountains of debt to accomplish this simple milestone when a simple core competencies test would have sufficed.
Coupled with the proclevity for large corporations to offshore inexpensive and low training jobs to places like mexico, china, and india, there is a stark lack of entry level jobs for these debt laiden college grads to take to gain the much needed work histories they need to create careers.
The reasons why these trends are occuring is indeed because of systemic greed at many levels, so protesting against institutionalized greed sorta does make sense.
The greed of the accredation institutions motivates them to maintain the status quo of very high student tuition.
The greed of the public school system, coupled with absurd laws, makes it originate the need to require a degree for janitorial work.
The greed of multinationals makes them seek every possible means of squeezing profit from the market.
The greed of stockholders (and by proxy, wallstreet) drives the corporations to be ever more greedy to satisfy the already horribly unrealistic expectations of those stock holders. (Purpetual gains in profitability are not sustainable.)
So, the protest message as I can see it is "I have been victimized by the system you created. I had to sell many years of my life in the form of intractible debt JUST to be ABLE to work, only to have to fight for scraps with what are essentially slave laborers in other countries because of your insatiable greed. We want to be released from the burden of our unfair debts, and have the possibility of finding work without competing with HIB visas and slaves from china."
When you think about it, that doesn't really sound like such a terrible demand.
I know this is /. but did anyone read the article? The second page is ridiculous.
“We’d love to get an Apple, because a lot of the software we’re used to is on the Mac,” What software does a protest need other than maybe a web browser to organize and spread your message? Where are all of these people's computers? I'm guessing sitting at home because they don't want to have it broken, stolen or lost...
Then they continue on to make a cellular hotspot or an android phone sound like complicated network infrastructure being managed by the protestors...
The TARP was a TINY fraction of the free money the banks got. They paid back the TARP money they got directly but they didn't even have to pay back all the money that was funnelled through AIG directly in to their pockets, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche bank in particular. If AIG has been allowed to fail and those tax payer billions hadn't been funnelled through AIG, Goldman Sachs and the rest would have failed.
The banks are still getting free money by the truck loads.
First, they got to unload hundreds of billions in toxic assets on the Fed in exchange for fresh green backs at 100 cents on the dollar.
The Fed has their interest rates to banks set at approximately zero. The economists term for this is "financial repression", where interest rates are substantially below inflation. Its designed to completely screw people who save to bail out debtors including banks. It especially screws seniors who live on CD interest. It is designed to force them to gamble on the stock market to just stay even. Many seniors who remember the '29 crash dont want to play the stock market.
There are also still trillions in loan guarantees that will dealry cost someone if those assets crater which some of will if there is a double dip.
And the Fed constantly pumps hundreds of billions in short term, low interest loans, to all sorts of troubled banks, all the time through the discount window.
Companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are pure gamblers, they pocket the profits when they win. They should NEVER be allowed to come to the U.S. taxpayer or the Fed when they lose.
Bottom line, banks get their money at zero percent. The poor get their money from payday loans at 30% and up.
@de_machina
It's driving force is a desire for equality, where equality means that you get free money from the government.
Well that's how FOX News viewers would perceive it, the demonstrations come out of frustration with the state of the current financial system, and the fact that the people who caused it are very well off whilst the middle class is being obliterated.
People aren't protesting to get free stuff, but to express their disagreement with a country where 1% of the population control 40% of the wealth and growing, being able to use this to influence legislation in order to keep it that way.
So yeah, maybe you should get a clue before making incorrect assumptions/uninformed statements.
Can the protesters focus on winning instead of trying to be techie??
Winning what? Nobody knows what they actually want, including the protesters. Their message ranges anywhere from simply giving unions a bigger piece of the pie to outright Marxism.
I find two things very curious about the 'confusion' surrounding, and some of the reactions to, the protesters:
1. The 'confusion': Ignoring the stuff manufactured purely for rhetorical effect("Those crazy kids are just lazy communist anarchists who don't even know what they want!"), you don't really have to be able to trace every detail of exactly how American financial and labor systems have evolved to produce a practically banana-republic wealth distribution in order to take a look at the numbers and see that they, however the details work, definitely have. This is basic "black box" analysis here, the sort of thing that you use (formally or informally) all the time when dealing with complex situations. I don't understand why some people suddenly fall flat on that.
2. The "53%"-er response, and its ilk: Yes, everybody realizes that is, in fact, possible to make money and survive in the US without being a member in good standing of the plutocracy. Were that not the case, things would be a little noisier. That is orthogonal to the displeasure people feel at having to work increasingly hard for a steadily dwindling slice of the pie and no chance of the handy state handouts received by the people who need them least. This school of response isn't false, per se, it's just an enormous non-sequitor.
A brilliant lie. Almost believable, with that tiny grain of truth in the middle. Of course, the top 10% of earners pay 70% of income taxes. Which account for well under half of the government's revenues. Most of the rest comes from Social Security payroll taxes, of which the vast majority is paid by the middle class.
Once you account for that, you quickly find that the top 10% earn about 45% of the income and pay about 45% of the taxes. Except for one small problem. No one is out there saying "We are the 90%". The top 1% of earners have 35% of the wealth and pay only around 25% of the taxes.
And then, of course, you need to account for disposable income. Someone in the bottom quintile has no disposable income at all. If you charge them an extra dollar in taxes, you have to give them an extra dollar in food stamps or else let them starve. Someone in the middle quintile has some disposable income, but not much. Most of their paycheck immediately goes to their mortgage and car payments and insurance premiums and grocery bills and so on. They pay what they can, but higher taxes can cause them serious hardship.
In the top 1%, nearly all wealth is disposable. These people could live in luxury on just 10% of their incomes... often on just 1%. Raising their marginal tax rate by 5 percentage points would have no real impact on their quality of life, while giving us enough extra money to (and this is just an example, not a recommendation) double the funding of the Department of Education.
And I haven't even started talking about sales taxes yet....
Well, it did nothing for the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.
"take money away from people who have a lot of it"??
When the fuck did paying your fair share of taxes become akin to theft?
Most expensive of all however would be th[e] impou[n]d fees. If you park on Market they'll tow your car in minutes even if there isn't a demonstration going on.
Just use one of those Smart cars... Kinda hard to tow a vehicle that's been tossed up in a tree or hidden in a porta-potty.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan