cool to think that you can tap volcanos for energy. question is, if you're drawing off that energy, might you not also be reducing the likelihood of a catastrophic eruption? i am a simple caveman lawyer who does not understand your modern ways, but that would be pretty neat.
i don't even understand from a business perspective why you'd even want region coding. it's not like everybody's going to take a special trip to botswana to buy games or movies. it's just silly. it's a retarded idea from any angle and therefore must have been thought up by an MBA.
BSG is currently my favorite show. It has even overtaken B5 as my all-time fav SF show. But I gotta say, I really hope the writers pull this next season out, because turning the whole series into a Mila 18 reprise is tedious. It would be great to see some retribution, and then exultation. Blood-and-guts as the soul of human endeavor is an apt lesson in these times.
And all this time I've been harboring a secret fantasy that Britain would re-assert hegemony over her ex-colonies and re-educate them about how to run a democracy, turn a really good phrase, and finally, once and for all, instruct the English-speaking online world how to spell the word "lose" correctly.
of the Senators, Congressmen, Cabinet Members, and President who are assaulting our freedom thus twisting in the wind, strung up in the trees lining the Mall in D.C.
You know it's getting bad when people are talking armed revolt, but here we are.
I interviewed with the CIA. It was wired to succeed and they were drooling. Then came the round when I spoke to the supposed station chief for Europe, a singularly ridiculous woman who called herself 'Beth.' She revealed that my assignment would be to work as a "diplomat," in a "consular office," attend parties and try to recruit informants from the international political, diplomatic, and business communities. I said, "I'm new to this spying business, so forgive me if this question sounds a bit odd, but isn't that rather obvious? I mean, if I were a foreign counter-intelligence service, consulates and embassies would be places I'd watch minutely." She brushed that off. Then she gave me a series of 'what-if' scenarios in which I was to demonstrate quick thinking by improvising a solution under pressure; and the scenarios were so painfully silly and the solutions so incredibly obvious, that I was embarassed for her. It was like junior highschool thinking with a mean streak. The interview concluded, thanked her, and politely told her that I was not interested in accepting a position.
Four weeks later the woman's picture appeared on the front page of the NY times, having just been picked up by the Russians while posing as a "diplomatic officer" at a "consulate." One of the best laughs I've had in years.
In short, the answer to your statement is that, yes, the CIA are that stupid. Not stupid in the "I want you to think that I'm stupid so that you'll stop paying attention to me" kind of way, but in the actually retarded kind of way. With a mean, psychopathic streak.
I'm sure that's why Bush gave them the job of torturing people, because the people in the other actually somewhat competent agencies like the NSA and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) probably said A) torture is ineffective, and B) what kind of sick bastard are you, you un-American piece of crap?
The best remedy for tyranny is action. Two hours a month volunteering to elect candidates who will put a stop to this slide into fascism will do infinitely more good than a million hours posting on Slashdot. Or pick up the phone and call your Congressman. They do listen, because you might be anybody, with a big enough circle of acquaintances to change votes and make the difference between them getting elected or not. Or give money to a campaign, although that's a distant third and kind of a cop-out, because it comes without qualification. That is, they simply deposit the check and either spend it well or not.
The only way our democracy will work, the only way to get it back, is for each of us to pick it up by the scruff of the neck and shake it until the rotten bits drop out.
Top and middle management travel so frequently that it would make almost no practical difference in results if we outsourced them. It would, however, make an enormous difference to the profitability of corporations and shareholder returns. Imagine how desirable it would be to save $150 million golden parachute and reinvest in R&D or employee retention? And so many foreign students have come and earned MBAs in U.S. business schools that there is absolutely no argument there that foreign CEOs couldn't do as good a job as American CEOs. Aha! the American CEO might say, 'but business is about communication and bold action, and that's something that people from protectionist economies and repressive societies just can't match.' Uh-huh. The average foreign student scores higher on any test of English than any American does. And bold action? Apparently they've never seen Chinese grandmas trying to get on a Beijing bus.
In short, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. The single best way to cut U.S. corporate labor costs is to outsource the top of the pyramid.
You have tried all the law enforcement channels without success. Another poster suggested contacting the local papers. A further step could be contacting your local city council member/alderman. All of them have offices in their districts. Try going there in person with photos, video footage, etc., and ask for their help. Do the same also with your member in the House of Representatives, if you are fortunate enough to live in an area with enough population for their office to be within your easy physical reach. But even if not, it's still worth a try to call/email them. It's an election year, so chances are they might respond so they can stick another feather in their cap and prove they're "fighting for you."
Another tack to try is the legal angle. Chances are someone owns the building that the lab is operating out of. Sue them for bringing down your property value or harming your business. If there is no owner and it's simply an abandoned building, sue the city and find an ambitious young lawyer who wants to make a name for him/herself.
You could also bring the matter to the attention of the local PTAs, business councils, and any number of other organizations. But the key thing to do is make the issue visible. If you do that, law enforcement will be forced to act.
Nice to hear a journalist stop peddling the Kool Aid. On the other hand, the more they try to hold back the tide, the more furious it will be when the dyke bursts. After all the suffering the press and *AA's have inflicted, it would be gratifying to see all their shiny mansions repossessed and their delusions of grandeur punctured.
Is to plan and build cities with dense urban cores that facilitate public transportation and walking rather than sprawling empty suburbs that require driving single-occupant vehicles to the supermarket or just about any other place. It's immensely wasteful, and directly attributable to how communities are planned.
We actually have Robert Moses to thank for much of our current addiction to oil. He was rabid about sprawl. Loved it. Bulldozed entire urban neighborhoods rich in history to build superhighways to take you out to endlessly expanding suburbs. Car companies and oil companies loved that idea and lobbied heavily for it.
Sure, we could hash through hybrids vs. biodiesel vs. solar vs. pedal power or what have you, but in the end there are simply too many people who live at points A which are too far away from points B and C. It doesn't take some incredible breakthrough in technology to fix that. Just intelligent planning.
In addition to blogs, podcasting's blooming as an outlet for many groups and interests. Are there any you would recommend (in Arabic or English) for folks in the West to hear what folks in the Middle East are thinking, without media spin?
I believe that infinite copyright actually does encourage creativity--mine.
What I mean is that because the RIAA has grown so draconian and copyright law so ridiculous that I've been compelled to opt out of that noise entirely. I don't buy nor download music.
Now if I want music, I'm forced to make it myself. I've always thought that it would be nice to know how to play piano or guitar or something, but it seemed like some impossibly difficult to acquire skill that could only be obtained after shackling yourself to an instrument, or climbing the Himalayas to study at a music monastery, or having scientists run tests to establish that I possessed that elusive music gene. It was much easier to let someone else's virtuosity stand in for my own self-expression, even if there was always a low-level dissatisfaction with the passivity of that.
But now the cost-benefit equation has changed. I'm a little older and care less if I can't play Bach guitar suites straight out of the box. I've seen enough of popular music (Britney Spears, etc, etc) to think that as bad as I might be, I couldn't possibly do much worse than what other people consider "good." And the RIAA has just totally shut down my avoidance and procrastination of DIY.
So the other week I picked up my girlfriend's guitar, looked at her chord chart, and started plunking away. My fingers hurt like crazy at first. Now they're calloused enough to go for more than 5 minutes. I have enough finger strength to hold the chords. Don't know how to read music yet. I know four silly little chords, D, A, G, and E. I play them in varying combinations that don't really amount to anything. But it makes me happy. I look forward to getting home from work to play my four little chords.
So I have to say, thank you RIAA for souring the milk so much that I was forced to be weaned from their teat and feed myself.
Sorry I missed this the first time this story came out, but the guy who's muzzling scientists at NASA is a 24-year old stooge? Talk about adding insult to injury. The only thing that would have made this more humiliating is if the guy had failed to graduate from Oral Roberts University or Bob Jones University.
Seems to me that the more the gaming industry tries to force in-game advertising on their customers, the more mods and hacks will become the norm. After all, advertisers are successfully killing TV as we speak, having already killed radio and newsprint. People have fled those media for the internet, because they can control their mindspace. All over the world, everyone's breaking free of information control with blogs, video iPods, file-sharing, OSS, etc. I dunno if we'll ever see an OSS model arise with game development (that is, beyond mods and hacks layered on top of a corporate game), but it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility.
But at any rate, the gaming industry will probably wake up too late to the fact that in-game advertising will kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
On a more speculative note, I wonder if advertisers will eventually chase people out of all media and into the real world. Maybe then everyone will blink, look at each other, and realize that there's plenty of storylines, challenges, and problems to solve in the real world to keep everyone busy/entertained for a lifetime.
If the game industry shrinks this year, I don't think it will be for lack of demand. Trends show guys 18-35 are spending more and more time gaming and less time watching sports.
The problem seems sooner to be a lack of new titles, and/or a lack of diversity in the new games that do come out. I go by GameStop (and similar places) all the time looking for new releases and used titles that I haven't played before. What do they have? 90 sports titles, 5 anime titles, 3 FPS, and maybe 1-2 games that have story lines. Unfortunately, I find all but the latter tedious. Cross that with trying to find titles that have story lines and allow for more than one player (my girlfriend and I both like to play cooperative mode games), and the pool shrinks even further.
TFA blames the Xbox 360 or PS3 anticipation for the slowdown. But really, if the games coming out for those platforms aren't different from what's already out there, who cares? Yes, the graphics on the 360 are amazingly sharp. But their racing game is still just a racing game.
The vast, vast majority of the calls the NSA intercepted were innocent Americans. None of them were actionable. The FBI has formally complained that the NSA has been wasting their field agents' time with massive, indiscriminate data dumps that they then have to chase down. The FBI, also an executive branch agency, has expressed concern that the searches are unconstitutional.
If we therefore take them at their word that the surveillance is directed at "Americans that the government is suspicious of;" then apparently the Bush administration is suspicious of all Americans until they are proven innocent. That, my friends, takes them beyond the event horizon of tyranny. The day may be rapidly approaching when all of us will have to concede that it's a damn good thing that we have the right to bear arms.
This is probably a true statement for people who've been in office a long time, say Teddy Kennedy or Chuck Schumer. Those people barely know what a computer is, or how to use the Internet, much less how to blog.
It's likewise probably fairly true of party hacks who get elected. They are of the party/union/corporation, by the party/union/corporation; they really don't care what their constituents think, because they don't rely specifically on their support.
However, among freshmen Congressmen who don't fit the hack label I can well believe that they actually blog themselves rather than hand it off to staffers. For one thing, most of those people come in because they want to serve their constituents and change things. They start off dying to know what their constituents want them to do. They wouldn't hand such a direct line of communication off to their staffers because most of them have never had staff that would handle such things. Traditionally the freshmen start off asking and asking their constituents what they want, holding town meetings, etc., and get a deafening silence in return. Or they get the same lobbyists/special interests/kooks following them around like groupies. Eventually if they last they just say what the hell and do what the special interests want, because the public won't speak up and it never seems like they get to hear from normal people.
So if you think about it, having these guys blog is an exceptionally good thing. It retards their developing a BeltWay mentality, innoculates them to some extent against special interests, and gives them better guidance on how they should vote. In my book that's good for democracy.
The corporations keep getting more powerful, and the average Joe keeps losing more, and democracy is vanishing down the tubes. What do you do about it? File a lawsuit? Really. When an administration can torture and spy on you with impunity, what good is the rule of law going to do you?
The only thing that does any good whatsoever is to get together 5-10 friends, and go make a personal visit to your Congressman's office. Not Senators, mind you, since they all think they're little potentates and don't give a crap what you think. But House members can be influenced, especially by a motivated group of citizens in their district.
Why is that? Because in the eyes of a politician none of us is just one person. Rather, we're a node in a network of an average of 150 friends, family, and acquaintances. They piss you off, and you become a message repeater to that network telling them not to vote for that politician, which in turn could echo from each of those 150 people in your network to the 150 people in their individual networks. That sort of math adds up quickly. Sure, it could be no more than a person two or three hops removed from you saying, "Yeah, I heard that guy was a real dickhead." But you'd be surprised how many people vote based on such vague hearsay. Definitely enough to cost someone an election.
Then you throw in the possibility that you might be the niece of their biggest campaign contributor, or that you might be one of those people Malcolm Gladwell talks about who has a personal rolodex of 5,000 contacts, and suddenly the math takes off even faster. They don't know, so better for them to play it safe and not piss you off.
House members have a much smaller pool of constituents than Senators, so they're much more vulnerable to the math. For state and city elected officials, even more so.
And what happens if they do piss you off? You and your 5-10 friends make up a simple flyer, go out to the Walmart/supermarket/mall whatever for a couple hours on an weekend and hand them out like crazy. Guarantee you'll get action then. I did it with three friends for two hours on a Saturday outside a supermarket in Greenwich Village last year after a snotty state senator told us she wasn't going to support legislative reforms (like being required to actually vote) in Albany. Next day I got a nasty call from her Chief of Staff asking us what the f*ck we thought we were doing. Apparently they had gotten 2-300 phone calls from their constituents asking her to change her position. I asked her if I could quote the senator on that, and forward it to a friend at the Village Voice (a widely read paper in NY). I also said we were prepared to do the same every weekend until she changed her mind. We heard through the grapevine that the woman was so panicked that she complained to the chairman of the state party; the story pretty much reverberated throughout the state. Ultimately when the reforms came to a vote, she voted for them. 4 people, two hours, vote changed, reforms passed, worst legislature in country cleaned up.
You can make a difference, but complaining about it on Slashdot doesn't do anything. Writing letters to congressmen does make more of a difference than you think, but it's still not much. Small groups of people can make a big difference if you do it right. I'm no expert, but I've been through lots of experiences like the one above and have some idea about what works and what doesn't. Drop me a line at dakong27 at yahoo.com.
With the natural quirkiness of geeks, the vast world of technology, and a good mix of pop culture a good writer could put together a very entertaining show. I hope we'll get to see it here in the States.
Slashdot Mirror
cool to think that you can tap volcanos for energy. question is, if you're drawing off that energy, might you not also be reducing the likelihood of a catastrophic eruption? i am a simple caveman lawyer who does not understand your modern ways, but that would be pretty neat.
Are there any mathematicians who can explain how a non-prime is the third riemann moment in the string of riemann zeros?
I'm cool with using physical violence to resolve file-sharing disputes with the *AA's, but my vision is closer to the lynching scene in Frankenstein.
Peasants: Burn Hilary Rosen, burn!
Hilary: Rarrrrgh! RAAArrrghhh!
i don't even understand from a business perspective why you'd even want region coding. it's not like everybody's going to take a special trip to botswana to buy games or movies. it's just silly. it's a retarded idea from any angle and therefore must have been thought up by an MBA.
BSG is currently my favorite show. It has even overtaken B5 as my all-time fav SF show. But I gotta say, I really hope the writers pull this next season out, because turning the whole series into a Mila 18 reprise is tedious. It would be great to see some retribution, and then exultation. Blood-and-guts as the soul of human endeavor is an apt lesson in these times.
And all this time I've been harboring a secret fantasy that Britain would re-assert hegemony over her ex-colonies and re-educate them about how to run a democracy, turn a really good phrase, and finally, once and for all, instruct the English-speaking online world how to spell the word "lose" correctly.
of the Senators, Congressmen, Cabinet Members, and President who are assaulting our freedom thus twisting in the wind, strung up in the trees lining the Mall in D.C.
You know it's getting bad when people are talking armed revolt, but here we are.
I interviewed with the CIA. It was wired to succeed and they were drooling. Then came the round when I spoke to the supposed station chief for Europe, a singularly ridiculous woman who called herself 'Beth.' She revealed that my assignment would be to work as a "diplomat," in a "consular office," attend parties and try to recruit informants from the international political, diplomatic, and business communities. I said, "I'm new to this spying business, so forgive me if this question sounds a bit odd, but isn't that rather obvious? I mean, if I were a foreign counter-intelligence service, consulates and embassies would be places I'd watch minutely." She brushed that off. Then she gave me a series of 'what-if' scenarios in which I was to demonstrate quick thinking by improvising a solution under pressure; and the scenarios were so painfully silly and the solutions so incredibly obvious, that I was embarassed for her. It was like junior highschool thinking with a mean streak. The interview concluded, thanked her, and politely told her that I was not interested in accepting a position.
Four weeks later the woman's picture appeared on the front page of the NY times, having just been picked up by the Russians while posing as a "diplomatic officer" at a "consulate." One of the best laughs I've had in years.
In short, the answer to your statement is that, yes, the CIA are that stupid. Not stupid in the "I want you to think that I'm stupid so that you'll stop paying attention to me" kind of way, but in the actually retarded kind of way. With a mean, psychopathic streak.
I'm sure that's why Bush gave them the job of torturing people, because the people in the other actually somewhat competent agencies like the NSA and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) probably said A) torture is ineffective, and B) what kind of sick bastard are you, you un-American piece of crap?
IBM made Microsoft, and it would be amusing if this were to unmake them.
The best remedy for tyranny is action. Two hours a month volunteering to elect candidates who will put a stop to this slide into fascism will do infinitely more good than a million hours posting on Slashdot. Or pick up the phone and call your Congressman. They do listen, because you might be anybody, with a big enough circle of acquaintances to change votes and make the difference between them getting elected or not. Or give money to a campaign, although that's a distant third and kind of a cop-out, because it comes without qualification. That is, they simply deposit the check and either spend it well or not.
The only way our democracy will work, the only way to get it back, is for each of us to pick it up by the scruff of the neck and shake it until the rotten bits drop out.
Top and middle management travel so frequently that it would make almost no practical difference in results if we outsourced them. It would, however, make an enormous difference to the profitability of corporations and shareholder returns. Imagine how desirable it would be to save $150 million golden parachute and reinvest in R&D or employee retention? And so many foreign students have come and earned MBAs in U.S. business schools that there is absolutely no argument there that foreign CEOs couldn't do as good a job as American CEOs. Aha! the American CEO might say, 'but business is about communication and bold action, and that's something that people from protectionist economies and repressive societies just can't match.' Uh-huh. The average foreign student scores higher on any test of English than any American does. And bold action? Apparently they've never seen Chinese grandmas trying to get on a Beijing bus.
In short, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. The single best way to cut U.S. corporate labor costs is to outsource the top of the pyramid.
You have tried all the law enforcement channels without success. Another poster suggested contacting the local papers. A further step could be contacting your local city council member/alderman. All of them have offices in their districts. Try going there in person with photos, video footage, etc., and ask for their help. Do the same also with your member in the House of Representatives, if you are fortunate enough to live in an area with enough population for their office to be within your easy physical reach. But even if not, it's still worth a try to call/email them. It's an election year, so chances are they might respond so they can stick another feather in their cap and prove they're "fighting for you."
Another tack to try is the legal angle. Chances are someone owns the building that the lab is operating out of. Sue them for bringing down your property value or harming your business. If there is no owner and it's simply an abandoned building, sue the city and find an ambitious young lawyer who wants to make a name for him/herself.
You could also bring the matter to the attention of the local PTAs, business councils, and any number of other organizations. But the key thing to do is make the issue visible. If you do that, law enforcement will be forced to act.
Nice to hear a journalist stop peddling the Kool Aid. On the other hand, the more they try to hold back the tide, the more furious it will be when the dyke bursts. After all the suffering the press and *AA's have inflicted, it would be gratifying to see all their shiny mansions repossessed and their delusions of grandeur punctured.
Is to plan and build cities with dense urban cores that facilitate public transportation and walking rather than sprawling empty suburbs that require driving single-occupant vehicles to the supermarket or just about any other place. It's immensely wasteful, and directly attributable to how communities are planned.
We actually have Robert Moses to thank for much of our current addiction to oil. He was rabid about sprawl. Loved it. Bulldozed entire urban neighborhoods rich in history to build superhighways to take you out to endlessly expanding suburbs. Car companies and oil companies loved that idea and lobbied heavily for it.
Sure, we could hash through hybrids vs. biodiesel vs. solar vs. pedal power or what have you, but in the end there are simply too many people who live at points A which are too far away from points B and C. It doesn't take some incredible breakthrough in technology to fix that. Just intelligent planning.
In addition to blogs, podcasting's blooming as an outlet for many groups and interests. Are there any you would recommend (in Arabic or English) for folks in the West to hear what folks in the Middle East are thinking, without media spin?
I believe that infinite copyright actually does encourage creativity--mine.
What I mean is that because the RIAA has grown so draconian and copyright law so ridiculous that I've been compelled to opt out of that noise entirely. I don't buy nor download music.
Now if I want music, I'm forced to make it myself. I've always thought that it would be nice to know how to play piano or guitar or something, but it seemed like some impossibly difficult to acquire skill that could only be obtained after shackling yourself to an instrument, or climbing the Himalayas to study at a music monastery, or having scientists run tests to establish that I possessed that elusive music gene. It was much easier to let someone else's virtuosity stand in for my own self-expression, even if there was always a low-level dissatisfaction with the passivity of that.
But now the cost-benefit equation has changed. I'm a little older and care less if I can't play Bach guitar suites straight out of the box. I've seen enough of popular music (Britney Spears, etc, etc) to think that as bad as I might be, I couldn't possibly do much worse than what other people consider "good." And the RIAA has just totally shut down my avoidance and procrastination of DIY.
So the other week I picked up my girlfriend's guitar, looked at her chord chart, and started plunking away. My fingers hurt like crazy at first. Now they're calloused enough to go for more than 5 minutes. I have enough finger strength to hold the chords. Don't know how to read music yet. I know four silly little chords, D, A, G, and E. I play them in varying combinations that don't really amount to anything. But it makes me happy. I look forward to getting home from work to play my four little chords.
So I have to say, thank you RIAA for souring the milk so much that I was forced to be weaned from their teat and feed myself.
But it's ironic because women have always had much shorter life expectancies because of childbirth.
I wonder just how in the heck fetal cells can remain in a mother's body that long. Do they move into the bone marrow and set up shop?
Sorry I missed this the first time this story came out, but the guy who's muzzling scientists at NASA is a 24-year old stooge? Talk about adding insult to injury. The only thing that would have made this more humiliating is if the guy had failed to graduate from Oral Roberts University or Bob Jones University.
Seems to me that the more the gaming industry tries to force in-game advertising on their customers, the more mods and hacks will become the norm. After all, advertisers are successfully killing TV as we speak, having already killed radio and newsprint. People have fled those media for the internet, because they can control their mindspace. All over the world, everyone's breaking free of information control with blogs, video iPods, file-sharing, OSS, etc. I dunno if we'll ever see an OSS model arise with game development (that is, beyond mods and hacks layered on top of a corporate game), but it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility.
But at any rate, the gaming industry will probably wake up too late to the fact that in-game advertising will kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
On a more speculative note, I wonder if advertisers will eventually chase people out of all media and into the real world. Maybe then everyone will blink, look at each other, and realize that there's plenty of storylines, challenges, and problems to solve in the real world to keep everyone busy/entertained for a lifetime.
If the game industry shrinks this year, I don't think it will be for lack of demand. Trends show guys 18-35 are spending more and more time gaming and less time watching sports.
The problem seems sooner to be a lack of new titles, and/or a lack of diversity in the new games that do come out. I go by GameStop (and similar places) all the time looking for new releases and used titles that I haven't played before. What do they have? 90 sports titles, 5 anime titles, 3 FPS, and maybe 1-2 games that have story lines. Unfortunately, I find all but the latter tedious. Cross that with trying to find titles that have story lines and allow for more than one player (my girlfriend and I both like to play cooperative mode games), and the pool shrinks even further.
TFA blames the Xbox 360 or PS3 anticipation for the slowdown. But really, if the games coming out for those platforms aren't different from what's already out there, who cares? Yes, the graphics on the 360 are amazingly sharp. But their racing game is still just a racing game.
The vast, vast majority of the calls the NSA intercepted were innocent Americans. None of them were actionable. The FBI has formally complained that the NSA has been wasting their field agents' time with massive, indiscriminate data dumps that they then have to chase down. The FBI, also an executive branch agency, has expressed concern that the searches are unconstitutional.
If we therefore take them at their word that the surveillance is directed at "Americans that the government is suspicious of;" then apparently the Bush administration is suspicious of all Americans until they are proven innocent. That, my friends, takes them beyond the event horizon of tyranny. The day may be rapidly approaching when all of us will have to concede that it's a damn good thing that we have the right to bear arms.
This is probably a true statement for people who've been in office a long time, say Teddy Kennedy or Chuck Schumer. Those people barely know what a computer is, or how to use the Internet, much less how to blog.
It's likewise probably fairly true of party hacks who get elected. They are of the party/union/corporation, by the party/union/corporation; they really don't care what their constituents think, because they don't rely specifically on their support.
However, among freshmen Congressmen who don't fit the hack label I can well believe that they actually blog themselves rather than hand it off to staffers. For one thing, most of those people come in because they want to serve their constituents and change things. They start off dying to know what their constituents want them to do. They wouldn't hand such a direct line of communication off to their staffers because most of them have never had staff that would handle such things. Traditionally the freshmen start off asking and asking their constituents what they want, holding town meetings, etc., and get a deafening silence in return. Or they get the same lobbyists/special interests/kooks following them around like groupies. Eventually if they last they just say what the hell and do what the special interests want, because the public won't speak up and it never seems like they get to hear from normal people.
So if you think about it, having these guys blog is an exceptionally good thing. It retards their developing a BeltWay mentality, innoculates them to some extent against special interests, and gives them better guidance on how they should vote. In my book that's good for democracy.
The corporations keep getting more powerful, and the average Joe keeps losing more, and democracy is vanishing down the tubes. What do you do about it? File a lawsuit? Really. When an administration can torture and spy on you with impunity, what good is the rule of law going to do you?
The only thing that does any good whatsoever is to get together 5-10 friends, and go make a personal visit to your Congressman's office. Not Senators, mind you, since they all think they're little potentates and don't give a crap what you think. But House members can be influenced, especially by a motivated group of citizens in their district.
Why is that? Because in the eyes of a politician none of us is just one person. Rather, we're a node in a network of an average of 150 friends, family, and acquaintances. They piss you off, and you become a message repeater to that network telling them not to vote for that politician, which in turn could echo from each of those 150 people in your network to the 150 people in their individual networks. That sort of math adds up quickly. Sure, it could be no more than a person two or three hops removed from you saying, "Yeah, I heard that guy was a real dickhead." But you'd be surprised how many people vote based on such vague hearsay. Definitely enough to cost someone an election.
Then you throw in the possibility that you might be the niece of their biggest campaign contributor, or that you might be one of those people Malcolm Gladwell talks about who has a personal rolodex of 5,000 contacts, and suddenly the math takes off even faster. They don't know, so better for them to play it safe and not piss you off.
House members have a much smaller pool of constituents than Senators, so they're much more vulnerable to the math. For state and city elected officials, even more so.
And what happens if they do piss you off? You and your 5-10 friends make up a simple flyer, go out to the Walmart/supermarket/mall whatever for a couple hours on an weekend and hand them out like crazy. Guarantee you'll get action then. I did it with three friends for two hours on a Saturday outside a supermarket in Greenwich Village last year after a snotty state senator told us she wasn't going to support legislative reforms (like being required to actually vote) in Albany. Next day I got a nasty call from her Chief of Staff asking us what the f*ck we thought we were doing. Apparently they had gotten 2-300 phone calls from their constituents asking her to change her position. I asked her if I could quote the senator on that, and forward it to a friend at the Village Voice (a widely read paper in NY). I also said we were prepared to do the same every weekend until she changed her mind. We heard through the grapevine that the woman was so panicked that she complained to the chairman of the state party; the story pretty much reverberated throughout the state. Ultimately when the reforms came to a vote, she voted for them. 4 people, two hours, vote changed, reforms passed, worst legislature in country cleaned up.
You can make a difference, but complaining about it on Slashdot doesn't do anything. Writing letters to congressmen does make more of a difference than you think, but it's still not much. Small groups of people can make a big difference if you do it right. I'm no expert, but I've been through lots of experiences like the one above and have some idea about what works and what doesn't. Drop me a line at dakong27 at yahoo.com.
With the natural quirkiness of geeks, the vast world of technology, and a good mix of pop culture a good writer could put together a very entertaining show. I hope we'll get to see it here in the States.
...Pigs glow in the dark." Oh wait...