I thought your original posting was very insightful, but I don't think you are giving yourself enough credit for your success. "It takes a real screwup to fail!" It doesn't take a naysayer to point out that 80% of businesses fail within the first year. Books on entrepreneurship say plan on losing money for at least 6 months. If you started making a profit almost immediately, that's not normal, that's exceptional.
Maybe it was easy for you because you are smarter, luckier, and/or harder working than average, but I don't think it's because 4 out of 5 people who start businesses are "real screwups." More likely it takes an average person to fail and you are above average.
Maybe I just don't understand Andy's thought process. On the one hand he says software eliminates jobs by increasing efficiency, on the other hand he suggests that giving small businesses better software to increase their efficiency could create jobs. Huh??
One tried and true method of creating jobs is to start businesses and make them succeed. Maybe the best thing for software developers to do is to start companies to do things that haven't been done before, rather than focusing on better ways to do existing things for existing companies.
However, I really don't think computers and software can be blamed for unemployment. Computerization has eliminated some jobs and created others, just like the invention of cars did. Efficiency allows companies to do more things, but the ability to make twice as many widgets half as fast doesn't do any good unless you can sell all those widgets. The real limit to growth right now seems to be the capacity of customers to buy things. Right now the average American household carries $8000 in credit card debt. That's in addition to mortgages, car payments, student loans etc. There were more individual bankruptcies in the last 10 years than in the previous 50. Bankruptcy lawyers now advertise on television.
The culprit for unemployment is probably somewhere in the very nature of capitalism and human behavior. We might have used our increased efficiency to make life easier for everybody. Instead we used it to make a small percentage of people extremely rich, while the rest of us continue to work as much as we can, so we can buy more stuff that we can't afford and go deeper into debt than we should. Someone from 1900 looking at the automation of the past century would probably wonder why more than a handful of people still have to work. Yet we work all the time to pay for our consumption.
In some ways the American economy is similar to the way it was just before World War II. The economy has been stagnant for years. Unemployment has pushed many skilled people into unskilled jobs. Technological innovations languish on the doorstep as companies fail for lack of market. Look at wireless, for example.
In World War II the government employed whole industries for war production. Employment was high and people were making more money than they could spend, because consumer goods were scarce. So they paid off their debts and built savings. The government financed its buying spree by issuing war bonds -- basically IOUs with interest. People had the money to buy the bonds because they had less spending opportunity.
America was in WWII for less than 4 years. When industry switched back to consumer goods, most Americans were debt free, had money of money to spend and were eager to spend it. The next 20 years were a golden age for business and innovation in America. The taxes from that booming economy paid back the interest on the war bonds.
I wonder if we could artificially create the same scenario in peacetime? What if Americans went through a short period of self-imposed frugality? Maybe we could embark on massive public works projects, colonize the moon or mount a huge foreign aid campaign, I don't know. Imagine 4 years of near full employment without a lot of crap to spend money on, followed by an economic boom like the 1950's.
I hope t big boys don't expect the War on Terrorism (tm) to accomplish this, because it won't. It isn't making the public spend less. In fact, the overriding message from the government is don't let terrorists dampen our consumption habits, because then we let the bad guys win. That's crap. If we battened down the hatches for a few years we would come out the winners.
Long ago I accepted the idea that the US Congress works for its financial backers, not for the voters. They are in the business of doing what the money people want, and pretending to do what the voters want.
I believe the deciding factor in this case was that the FTC managed to measure citizen opinion in a tangible way that couldn't be swept under the rug. They didn't just poll people, they promised them something and let them actually sign up for it. Basically they announced free beer and let the line form.
No matter how much money the telemarketing association spread around, there was really no way Congress could squash this thing without looking like a bunch of complete assholes. The feeble argument that telemarketing provides jobs doesn't stand up against the expressed wishes of 50 million people, and I feel sorry for the 8 dumb bastards who think they are going to get any mileage out of voting against it.
On one hand it could be scary that a government agency could do something on its own that Congress would be forced to go along with. But on the other hand, it only worked because so many people got behind it. This is a good lesson in citizen action, and a reminder to Congress that people still are citizens and not just consumers.
"In my judgment I can tolerate the inconvenience of an unwanted phone call, but I cannot tolerate job loss," said Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Ohio, who voted against the bill. "Job loss in my district is devastating."
If anybody wants to start a fund to hire people in Ohio to call Rep. Ted Strickland every 15 minutes, I hereby pledge $10/month for a year. With 999 other people contributing, we could provide cushy $40k/year jobs for 3 people working 8-hour shifts. I'm sure Ted wouldn't mind the inconvenience.
Yeah I know autodialers are cheaper, but not as funny.
We could get rid of all all this tax bickering with a taxation plan that's been discussed for years but never taken seriously. Outlaw all taxes except sales tax. The federal government would impose a national sales tax on consumer purchases only, and would disburse an annual refund equal to the tax rate times whatever they say is the poverty level. ALL OTHER TAXES would be eliminated.
The flat refund is there to make the sales tax non-regressive, that is, to avoid disproportionally taxing the poor. To meet the federal budget the tax would have to be about 20%. If the federal govt defined poverty level income as $15,000/year, then everybody would get a $3000 refund, which means poor people get all their sales tax back, richer people get back only a fraction. It's a self-graduating tax scale using only 2 numbers, numbers not hidden in a forest of deductions, exemptions and loopholes.
Cash registers would tell you what your tax is every time you buy something. States would collect sales tax from retailers as they do now, and would turn over the feds' share. The IRS would shrink to a small office with only enough employees to deal with their counterparts in 50 states, rather than with 12 million businesses and over 100 million taxpayers. The maze of business taxes currently built into the price of everything would go away. There would be no income declaration forms, no 4000-page IRS code, no 105,000 IRS employees, no tax accountants, tax consultants, tax lawyers, tax lobbyists, etc. All of that mess would go away. Congress would have only 2 numbers to manipulate, and they would have to do it right out in the open.
This is an interesting development because it seems to represent a step toward the music business accommodating a concept of "fair use". These CDs contain tracks that can be copied to your PC and from which you can make copies for someone else that expire in 10 days. It seems to be a limited effort to let people do what they want to do with the music.
On the other hand, Whitmore still talks teaching the public that "stealing music" is wrong. The industry is not going to let go of the concept that copyright equals ownership, which simply isn't true. If anybody has "stolen" anything it's the Recording Industry, in their century of take-it-or-leave-it dealings with musicians.
On the other other hand, when I read this post my initial reaction was outrage that a music CD would install DRM software on my PC. But in the article itself I couldn't see any mention of software being installed. Maybe that information came from a more technical article somewhere else, or did the poster simply go off half cocked?
For those who didn't read the article, the Starving Artist game is only a little blurb in the middle. But if that's your hot button and you have kids in school, find out if the school plans to bring in this presentation. Talk directly to the teacher(s) involved. The school also has a PTA or PTSA where you can stand up and object publicly.
Be prepared that teachers in general tend to be unsympathetic toward behavior that seems to break rules. However, they also tend to frown on deceit and deception. Your best argument is the truth about how the music business works. Try this explanation:
Musicians don't make money from record companies selling CDs, they make money by performing. Recording contracts are deliberately written so that all the expenses for producing, advertising and distributing an album are taken out of the musician's share of the profits, which then magically turns out to be ZERO. What musicians get out of CD sales is exposure, which makes them more famous and gets them better paying performance gigs. They get this same exposure whether a person buys a CD, borrows it from a friend, listens to it on the radio or downloads it from the Internet. The record industry's "poor starving artist" mantra is a flat out lie.
Whatever you do, don't beat this into the ground or launch into a tirade about the Evils of Capitalism or whatever. Just tell the real story matter-of-factly and give them a chance to digest it. Tell them you don't want the Recording Industry or any other industry bringing in a marketing campaign disguised as a learning experience.
But will Ownership get in the way?
on
Practical RDF
·
· Score: 1
Or more to the point, How will ownership get in the way? For the masses, turning the web into a repository of all knowledge and distributing tools to digest it and do things with it would be great. But what ultimately drives progress is its ability to make money. What blocks progress is its negative impact on the people who are already getting most of the money.
Since the Internet came online we have seen a tremendous, mostly obstructionist reaction from the relatively small community that claims ownership of information. Although copyright conveys no actual ownership, the concepts of "stealing" and "pirating" information have become solidly entrenched. People who put information in front of the public are increasingly trying to control what happens to it. They feel they not only own the information itself, but are entitled to get paid whenever anyone benefits from it in any way.
I don't see this community of information controllers sitting still while other people develop new and wonderful uses for "their" data. What I do see is lawmakers giving them more and more control over types of progress that may infringe their rights, and to perpetuate those rights indefinitely. So when I read about the rosy future of RDF and all its benefits for mankind, I have to think, yeah, and we'll have jetpacks, undersea cities and lunar vacations by the year 2000.
All I can think of when I look at gizmos like this is that all this tinkering will become obsolete when voice recognition gets to a usable state. Maybe that's still a few years off, but personally I can wait for it.
Their attorney says, "A person who came to their Web site and looked at the way (the hotel) is promoted and marketed would think they were passing themselves off as connected with the owner of the Dewey Decimal Classification system."
Actually, no normal person would assume that ANYTHING that has been in use for more than 125 years would still be proprietary. To regard such bizarre thinking as normal, and to be able to say something like that with a straight face, you have to go to law school.
Come on folks, if this idea makes sense then I guess we could take a big bite out of crime by penalizing people whose houses get robbed. After all, if everybody had a top notch security system then we wouldn't have any burlaries, would we? Yeah, I see now, it's the people who create the opportunity for crime who are really responsible for it.
Holy Christ, somebody get me off this freakin planet.
A tree sprouts from the forest floor and grows to majestic height. For awhile it stands tall and massive, blocking the sunlight from other sprouts. Then eventually it falls over and becomes a log.
I wonder if the movie and music industries both base their prices on the price of performance tickets. $2 for the added movie content and $13 or so for a CD are roughly the same fraction of a movie ticket and a concert ticket respectively.
"Ms. Cranor has blatantly flaunted her piratical activities, publicly bragging that she downloaded nearly 200 movies from P2P file sharing networks," said an MPAA spokesperson, who added that the MPAA will seek $620 million in damages.
It gets better. According to the Caffeine Machine website the CPU refrigeration system also cools a compartment big enough for a 6-pack of Mountain Dew. Sah-weet!
Because the promise of science fiction becoming reality didn't happen. The real world let me down. Sure we have PCs, ATMs, more reliable cars and a host of electronic entertainment gizmos, but my perception of the progress of the last 50 years is that its main effect has been to streamline business and increase the pace of the economy, making everything lean and mean, just in time, downsized, right-sized, smart-sized, and dragging our personal lives along with it.
So at some point in my life the idea of a low-tech fantasy world started to seem more appealing. A world where mighty deeds might be accomplished by people without MBAs or attorneys. Maybe part of the appeal is that there's no expectation that it might ever really come true -- no promise to be broken.
So just STFU and consume. That's the message corporate America and it's subsidiary, Congress, are sending you. Increased IP protection is one way to keep low-stakes players out of the game. Increasing the legal risk of publishing counteracts that the Internet has reduced the actual cost of publishing to practically zero. Patenting algorithms counteracts that small software houses can compete with big ones.
The idea is to keep a wall between the peasants and the nobles. If the peasants build ladders, make the wall higher. If they start digging tunnels, put in a moat. If trees overhang the wall, cut them down. And if the peasants ever figure out how to turn straw into gold and mint their own coins, you burn all their straw and cut off their hands.
Watch the movie Startup Dot Com
on
Public Net-work
·
· Score: 1
Anybody interested in getting the government online should watch a really cool documentary called Startup.Com. It's about a real company called "GovWorks" based on the idea of paying various government fees online -- parking tickets, drivers license renewals, etc. Most of the story deals with all their business gyrations and personal conflicts, but the idea itself is pretty interesting.
What struck me about it is the parallel with evolution of information systems in the business world. Companies first started using computers for payroll and billing, then other applications evolved. The interactions described in the article seem far more idealistic, to the point of being pie in the sky, but turning minor government financial transactions into e-commerce might lay the groundwork for the more interesting things.
I doubt that the average American politician would be sincerely interested in a proposal to build an online channel that lets us peons see behind the curtain. But if there were a way for it to evolve under their noses, as the Internet did, it might happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Talkie Toaster
Would anybody like some toast?
Well then, would anybody like some toast?
Something tells me we won't have to wait long.
Next new thing: Namespace Squatting!
I thought your original posting was very insightful, but I don't think you are giving yourself enough credit for your success. "It takes a real screwup to fail!" It doesn't take a naysayer to point out that 80% of businesses fail within the first year. Books on entrepreneurship say plan on losing money for at least 6 months. If you started making a profit almost immediately, that's not normal, that's exceptional.
Maybe it was easy for you because you are smarter, luckier, and/or harder working than average, but I don't think it's because 4 out of 5 people who start businesses are "real screwups." More likely it takes an average person to fail and you are above average.
Maybe I just don't understand Andy's thought process. On the one hand he says software eliminates jobs by increasing efficiency, on the other hand he suggests that giving small businesses better software to increase their efficiency could create jobs. Huh??
One tried and true method of creating jobs is to start businesses and make them succeed. Maybe the best thing for software developers to do is to start companies to do things that haven't been done before, rather than focusing on better ways to do existing things for existing companies.
However, I really don't think computers and software can be blamed for unemployment. Computerization has eliminated some jobs and created others, just like the invention of cars did. Efficiency allows companies to do more things, but the ability to make twice as many widgets half as fast doesn't do any good unless you can sell all those widgets. The real limit to growth right now seems to be the capacity of customers to buy things. Right now the average American household carries $8000 in credit card debt. That's in addition to mortgages, car payments, student loans etc. There were more individual bankruptcies in the last 10 years than in the previous 50. Bankruptcy lawyers now advertise on television.
The culprit for unemployment is probably somewhere in the very nature of capitalism and human behavior. We might have used our increased efficiency to make life easier for everybody. Instead we used it to make a small percentage of people extremely rich, while the rest of us continue to work as much as we can, so we can buy more stuff that we can't afford and go deeper into debt than we should. Someone from 1900 looking at the automation of the past century would probably wonder why more than a handful of people still have to work. Yet we work all the time to pay for our consumption.
In some ways the American economy is similar to the way it was just before World War II. The economy has been stagnant for years. Unemployment has pushed many skilled people into unskilled jobs. Technological innovations languish on the doorstep as companies fail for lack of market. Look at wireless, for example.
In World War II the government employed whole industries for war production. Employment was high and people were making more money than they could spend, because consumer goods were scarce. So they paid off their debts and built savings. The government financed its buying spree by issuing war bonds -- basically IOUs with interest. People had the money to buy the bonds because they had less spending opportunity.
America was in WWII for less than 4 years. When industry switched back to consumer goods, most Americans were debt free, had money of money to spend and were eager to spend it. The next 20 years were a golden age for business and innovation in America. The taxes from that booming economy paid back the interest on the war bonds.
I wonder if we could artificially create the same scenario in peacetime? What if Americans went through a short period of self-imposed frugality? Maybe we could embark on massive public works projects, colonize the moon or mount a huge foreign aid campaign, I don't know. Imagine 4 years of near full employment without a lot of crap to spend money on, followed by an economic boom like the 1950's.
I hope t big boys don't expect the War on Terrorism (tm) to accomplish this, because it won't. It isn't making the public spend less. In fact, the overriding message from the government is don't let terrorists dampen our consumption habits, because then we let the bad guys win. That's crap. If we battened down the hatches for a few years we would come out the winners.
Thanks, you made my day!
Long ago I accepted the idea that the US Congress works for its financial backers, not for the voters. They are in the business of doing what the money people want, and pretending to do what the voters want.
I believe the deciding factor in this case was that the FTC managed to measure citizen opinion in a tangible way that couldn't be swept under the rug. They didn't just poll people, they promised them something and let them actually sign up for it. Basically they announced free beer and let the line form.
No matter how much money the telemarketing association spread around, there was really no way Congress could squash this thing without looking like a bunch of complete assholes. The feeble argument that telemarketing provides jobs doesn't stand up against the expressed wishes of 50 million people, and I feel sorry for the 8 dumb bastards who think they are going to get any mileage out of voting against it.
On one hand it could be scary that a government agency could do something on its own that Congress would be forced to go along with. But on the other hand, it only worked because so many people got behind it. This is a good lesson in citizen action, and a reminder to Congress that people still are citizens and not just consumers.
"In my judgment I can tolerate the inconvenience of an unwanted phone call, but I cannot tolerate job loss," said Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Ohio, who voted against the bill. "Job loss in my district is devastating."
If anybody wants to start a fund to hire people in Ohio to call Rep. Ted Strickland every 15 minutes, I hereby pledge $10/month for a year. With 999 other people contributing, we could provide cushy $40k/year jobs for 3 people working 8-hour shifts. I'm sure Ted wouldn't mind the inconvenience.
Yeah I know autodialers are cheaper, but not as funny.
We could get rid of all all this tax bickering with a taxation plan that's been discussed for years but never taken seriously. Outlaw all taxes except sales tax. The federal government would impose a national sales tax on consumer purchases only, and would disburse an annual refund equal to the tax rate times whatever they say is the poverty level. ALL OTHER TAXES would be eliminated.
The flat refund is there to make the sales tax non-regressive, that is, to avoid disproportionally taxing the poor. To meet the federal budget the tax would have to be about 20%. If the federal govt defined poverty level income as $15,000/year, then everybody would get a $3000 refund, which means poor people get all their sales tax back, richer people get back only a fraction. It's a self-graduating tax scale using only 2 numbers, numbers not hidden in a forest of deductions, exemptions and loopholes.
Cash registers would tell you what your tax is every time you buy something. States would collect sales tax from retailers as they do now, and would turn over the feds' share. The IRS would shrink to a small office with only enough employees to deal with their counterparts in 50 states, rather than with 12 million businesses and over 100 million taxpayers. The maze of business taxes currently built into the price of everything would go away. There would be no income declaration forms, no 4000-page IRS code, no 105,000 IRS employees, no tax accountants, tax consultants, tax lawyers, tax lobbyists, etc. All of that mess would go away. Congress would have only 2 numbers to manipulate, and they would have to do it right out in the open.
This is an interesting development because it seems to represent a step toward the music business accommodating a concept of "fair use". These CDs contain tracks that can be copied to your PC and from which you can make copies for someone else that expire in 10 days. It seems to be a limited effort to let people do what they want to do with the music.
On the other hand, Whitmore still talks teaching the public that "stealing music" is wrong. The industry is not going to let go of the concept that copyright equals ownership, which simply isn't true. If anybody has "stolen" anything it's the Recording Industry, in their century of take-it-or-leave-it dealings with musicians.
On the other other hand, when I read this post my initial reaction was outrage that a music CD would install DRM software on my PC. But in the article itself I couldn't see any mention of software being installed. Maybe that information came from a more technical article somewhere else, or did the poster simply go off half cocked?
For those who didn't read the article, the Starving Artist game is only a little blurb in the middle. But if that's your hot button and you have kids in school, find out if the school plans to bring in this presentation. Talk directly to the teacher(s) involved. The school also has a PTA or PTSA where you can stand up and object publicly.
Be prepared that teachers in general tend to be unsympathetic toward behavior that seems to break rules. However, they also tend to frown on deceit and deception. Your best argument is the truth about how the music business works. Try this explanation:
Musicians don't make money from record companies selling CDs, they make money by performing. Recording contracts are deliberately written so that all the expenses for producing, advertising and distributing an album are taken out of the musician's share of the profits, which then magically turns out to be ZERO. What musicians get out of CD sales is exposure, which makes them more famous and gets them better paying performance gigs. They get this same exposure whether a person buys a CD, borrows it from a friend, listens to it on the radio or downloads it from the Internet. The record industry's "poor starving artist" mantra is a flat out lie.
Whatever you do, don't beat this into the ground or launch into a tirade about the Evils of Capitalism or whatever. Just tell the real story matter-of-factly and give them a chance to digest it. Tell them you don't want the Recording Industry or any other industry bringing in a marketing campaign disguised as a learning experience.
Or more to the point, How will ownership get in the way? For the masses, turning the web into a repository of all knowledge and distributing tools to digest it and do things with it would be great. But what ultimately drives progress is its ability to make money. What blocks progress is its negative impact on the people who are already getting most of the money.
Since the Internet came online we have seen a tremendous, mostly obstructionist reaction from the relatively small community that claims ownership of information. Although copyright conveys no actual ownership, the concepts of "stealing" and "pirating" information have become solidly entrenched. People who put information in front of the public are increasingly trying to control what happens to it. They feel they not only own the information itself, but are entitled to get paid whenever anyone benefits from it in any way.
I don't see this community of information controllers sitting still while other people develop new and wonderful uses for "their" data. What I do see is lawmakers giving them more and more control over types of progress that may infringe their rights, and to perpetuate those rights indefinitely. So when I read about the rosy future of RDF and all its benefits for mankind, I have to think, yeah, and we'll have jetpacks, undersea cities and lunar vacations by the year 2000.
All I can think of when I look at gizmos like this is that all this tinkering will become obsolete when voice recognition gets to a usable state. Maybe that's still a few years off, but personally I can wait for it.
"Mrs. Mornumumurmn..."
"What?"
"Mrs. Farrrnnnmmurnnmm..."
"Who's there?"
"Candygram"
Their attorney says, "A person who came to their Web site and looked at the way (the hotel) is promoted and marketed would think they were passing themselves off as connected with the owner of the Dewey Decimal Classification system."
Actually, no normal person would assume that ANYTHING that has been in use for more than 125 years would still be proprietary. To regard such bizarre thinking as normal, and to be able to say something like that with a straight face, you have to go to law school.
If you get so much spam in your regular email, why don't you just use that?
Yes the email looks perfect, but even if I believed it Norton comes to the rescue:
"Norton AntiVirus removed the attachment: Qz.exe.
The attachment was infected with the Worm.Automat.AHB virus."
Ho hum.
Come on folks, if this idea makes sense then I guess we could take a big bite out of crime by penalizing people whose houses get robbed. After all, if everybody had a top notch security system then we wouldn't have any burlaries, would we? Yeah, I see now, it's the people who create the opportunity for crime who are really responsible for it.
Holy Christ, somebody get me off this freakin planet.
A tree sprouts from the forest floor and grows to majestic height. For awhile it stands tall and massive, blocking the sunlight from other sprouts. Then eventually it falls over and becomes a log.
Note to Microsoft: "Tim-berrrrrr"
I wonder if the movie and music industries both base their prices on the price of performance tickets. $2 for the added movie content and $13 or so for a CD are roughly the same fraction of a movie ticket and a concert ticket respectively.
Look for it soon:
MPAA Sues AT&T Researcher for Piracy
"Ms. Cranor has blatantly flaunted her piratical activities, publicly bragging that she downloaded nearly 200 movies from P2P file sharing networks," said an MPAA spokesperson, who added that the MPAA will seek $620 million in damages.
It gets better. According to the Caffeine Machine website the CPU refrigeration system also cools a compartment big enough for a 6-pack of Mountain Dew. Sah-weet!
If people should need a license to go online, they should also need a license to put forth asinine proposals.
Because the promise of science fiction becoming reality didn't happen. The real world let me down. Sure we have PCs, ATMs, more reliable cars and a host of electronic entertainment gizmos, but my perception of the progress of the last 50 years is that its main effect has been to streamline business and increase the pace of the economy, making everything lean and mean, just in time, downsized, right-sized, smart-sized, and dragging our personal lives along with it.
So at some point in my life the idea of a low-tech fantasy world started to seem more appealing. A world where mighty deeds might be accomplished by people without MBAs or attorneys. Maybe part of the appeal is that there's no expectation that it might ever really come true -- no promise to be broken.
So just STFU and consume. That's the message corporate America and it's subsidiary, Congress, are sending you. Increased IP protection is one way to keep low-stakes players out of the game. Increasing the legal risk of publishing counteracts that the Internet has reduced the actual cost of publishing to practically zero. Patenting algorithms counteracts that small software houses can compete with big ones.
The idea is to keep a wall between the peasants and the nobles. If the peasants build ladders, make the wall higher. If they start digging tunnels, put in a moat. If trees overhang the wall, cut them down. And if the peasants ever figure out how to turn straw into gold and mint their own coins, you burn all their straw and cut off their hands.
Anybody interested in getting the government online should watch a really cool documentary called Startup.Com. It's about a real company called "GovWorks" based on the idea of paying various government fees online -- parking tickets, drivers license renewals, etc. Most of the story deals with all their business gyrations and personal conflicts, but the idea itself is pretty interesting.
What struck me about it is the parallel with evolution of information systems in the business world. Companies first started using computers for payroll and billing, then other applications evolved. The interactions described in the article seem far more idealistic, to the point of being pie in the sky, but turning minor government financial transactions into e-commerce might lay the groundwork for the more interesting things.
I doubt that the average American politician would be sincerely interested in a proposal to build an online channel that lets us peons see behind the curtain. But if there were a way for it to evolve under their noses, as the Internet did, it might happen.