I really don't know why Katz is even bothering. This movie had nothing to do with the 50s and 60s. The strongest nostalgia I saw was for the late 70s through mid 80s, and the film was definitely set in the present day (or at least sometime after Stereolab's Aluminum Tunes and the Beta Band's EPs were released), both in millieu and in attitude. The only character who fit Katz's demographic was Tim Robbin's reprehensible Ian - every other character there was in their 30's or younger. I don't like to get personal when I respond to someone's writing, but Katz really is looking through the narcissistic rose-colored glasses of baby-boomer self-importance.
The author seems to have no objection to the change in venue from London to Chicago. I assure you, we have many losers of that ilk here in the states. On the other hand, "Fever Pitch", his novel about football (soccer), absolutely could not translate across the sea.
Hornby actually discusses the limits of geography on story in the interview.
It should be noted that while Rob is a bit self-pitying, it isn't really accurate to describe him as simply "lonely." He's not just a frustrated geek who can't get a date - rather, he's under the impression that he is getting rejected, yet is initially blind to the ways in which he sabotaged the relationships he was in.
but the little independent corner record store is alive and well in 90% of the cities that I travel to (and I travel to a lot of cities.) As an institution, I don't see it in any danger of disappearing.
They don't compete with Walmart. Walmart will never carry Stiff Little Fingers vinyl and Beefheart first editions. They may be competing with Ebay, but I know of very few music geeks who would buy vinyl sight-unseen. If they are under any threat, it's much more like to be a matter of the pandemic rent hikes that major cities are experiencing now. But I still see a lot of indie record stores. In the Bay Area (Berkeley and San Francisco) we have Amoeba Music, the greatest music store in the world, and my favorite small store, Aquarius Records. We've got places like Streetlight. When I travel to San Diego, Seattle, Portland, and Chicago, I never fail to find cool little stores.
I just saw the movie. It was excellent - not Oscar material, but a good, funny, honest movie about relationships. I also do know some people for whom pop music is so deeply enmeshed in the fabric of their day to day lives, that it is part of their emotional and interpersonal language, a sort of kaliedoscopic reflection of their inner lives.
I don't think I need to tell you how different shoes are from an education. Nor do I need to tell you that there are many parts of the world where shoes still are, if not a luxury, still something not taken for granted. I can point out the long-term economic, political and social effects of eviscerated and non-existent public education systems throughout the Third World, though: I don't think you'd want to live in those places. I just want to know how you would make democracy work in illiterate populations.
Re:Uh, doesn't seem very "rational" at all
on
The Mind of God
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· Score: 1
I know of animals that create, marry, have morals, and even do calculus. They're called humans.
Here's an important three-fold distinction between intolerance, resentment, and justified anger:
Your neighbor and you are roughly within the same economic class, but with different lifestyles. You could probably afford his house and vice versa, your incomes are in the same order of magnitude. He buys an SUV; you buy a lot of beer and a trip to Jamaica. You frown on his choice as bourgeouis and tacky (not because of the environmental consequences of that choice) - you key his car because you think he's being a Yuppie. That is intolerant, just as it would be intolerant for him to have your ancient Beetle towed because it's an eyesore. No argument there.
Your neighbor makes a lot more money than you do. Perhaps he won the lottery, perhaps he worked his little tuckus off while you sat around eating Cheezy Poofs and watching Iron Chef, perhaps he got lucky or you got unlucky or both. You can still afford your apartment. You can still afford to eat and go to the same restaurants you've always gone to. If you rent, no one is offering your landlord 5 times the current rent for your place. If you own, the city hasn't appraised your land based on an escalating market and increased your property tax 10 fold, and no developer has tried to get your building condemned so that he can put up a loft-condo. Your neighbor just has nicer stuff than you do - and it isn't a difference in taste, either: if you can afford it, you'd get it. You key his Land Rover, because you wanted a Land Rover. That's resentment. In a way, it's both pettier, yet more human than intolerance. On a micro level it's destructive, but less so overall than intolerance.
You've been living in a neighborhood for a while, you work and get by. Perhaps you own your place, perhaps you rent, there may be others around who do better and worse than you do, but you have a life. However, property values skyrocket as a new class of people with remarkably high levels of disposable income move into the area. You may even like some of them as intelligent and personable people, but this is a mass phenomenon, with tens of thousands of people and hundreds of businesses. The city adjusts its tax code to cater to the new money. The vacancy rate drops. Units for rent at 5 times the amount you can afford (where they were in your range two years ago) have hundreds of wealthy prospects interested in moving into them. Your landlord is becoming hostile. Or, your property taxes have quintupled. (This does, I will admit right now, present much less of a problem for someone who owns property who is willing to sell it.) Because of the parking crunch, parking meters are installed in front of your house - if you aren't lucky enough or rich enough to own a place with parking, you have to pay for offsite parking if you can find it. Where restaurants used to cater to your income, the vast majority of them now charge 5 times more per meal than you can afford. After all, commercial rents have just quadrupled. Your favorite neighborhood bookstore closes because they can't afford the rent. Your neighborhood cafe, where they know you by name when you come in every morning, closes because they can't afford the rent. You have fewer options. You are afraid that the landlord could serve you an eviction notice at any time. It may have already happened to people you know. You wish that you didn't have to compete for local resources with a large class of people with significantly more wealth than you have. If you are a minority, you notice that your new neighbors call the police when they see you walk home at night, and you get stopped by cops a couple times. You are angry and scared - you key a Land Rover that is parked in front of your house. The act may be wrong, but the motivation is neither simple intolerance nor simple resentment.
I disagree with your observations about rent control - after all, rent control only applies to buildings over 30 years old, I think, and yet the newer-than-30-year-old housing is showing greater inflationary trends in rent costs. When some people note that rents are high in cities with rent control, they blame rent control for the high rents. It's sort of like blaming the earthquakes in San Francisco on the seismic codes, because cities without seismic construction codes don't get earthquakes: rent control was introduced into these cities because of ongoing problems with escalating rents and exploitative landlords. Berkeley's rent control law was gutted, and rents skyrocketed with no signs of coming down. Oakland still has rent control, and lower-middle and working class people can afford to rent there - but developers are working to change that.
Some details to be aware of are that there is no commercial rent control, which has a whole slew of corallary effects on market motivation.
That said, your point about the exploding cost of housing in other (non rent-controlled!) parts of the Bay Area is quite accurate, and I'd forgotten it. One little irony is that Marin County, once the most beautiful expensive counties in the Bay Area, has become remained a lot more affordable (especially for renters) and largely avoided the crunch of the rest of the Bay Area. It's not cheap, by any means, but their decision to NOT invest in a lot of transportation infrastructure, and to keep many of their interior roads one-lane and to completely control growth (it's virtually impossible to build on green land in most of the county) has made the portions of it that are far from the freeway an unattractive option to commuters, and kept housing prices stable.
I find it ridiculous to compare hostility to the newly arrived rich with hostility to blacks and other minorities. But I'll attempt to explain the reason for the hostility a bit more, anyway.
You don't understand 'tolerance.' Tolerance is a live-and-let-live attitude. If it were a matter of 'oh, I don't like my neighbor's nice new car, I wish it were gone,' it would be a matter of simple resentment. If I don't like my neighbor's sexual practices or hobbies or skin color, that's intolerance. But that's not the problem.
The problem is an inflationary economy, and the effect on a market when a good sector of the consuming side of the market has a lot more income than another, the local economy will server the former far more than the latter. Food prices skyrocket. Rents and housing go up. Police serve the class in favor over the class that isn't - someone who would have be a functional part of the community 7 years ago is now an 'eyesore' today and hassled by cops. The proliferation of SUVs is a huge problem in a city with a parking crunch, and often present a menace to pedestrians and bicyclists.
There have been a lot of evictions of poorer residents in order to be able to rent at ridiculously higher rates to new ones (fortunately there is some rent and eviction control, but increasingly landlords are weakening it and making loopholes.) New residents in SOMA, where I live, will move near a nightclub, then complain about the noise, move a lot of political money around, and have the night club closed. (Ask jwz, himself a silicon implant 'gone native,' about this sometime.)
People are defending an already rare lifestyle, and they are also protecting some of the little character that exists in an increasingly homogenous, franchised country. San Francisco is - or will have been - one of the last urban places with a true sense of place. (Check out jwz's rant on Silicon Valley to see what many people here are trying to prevent.) You are confusing 'tolerance' with 'acquiesence.'
I know plenty of people who are ridiculously successful by these standards, who still don't like what income polarization is doing to San Francisco and other metropolitan areas. It's better to win a horrid game than to lose it, but you can still recognize it as a horrid game and wish that it didn't exist.
The new economy in San Francisco has polarized people: this is just one amusing sign of that. The invasion of dot-com wealth has created a new title for the people who are coming up from Silicon Valley: silicon implants.
With a significant segment of the population here taking in income that is an order of magnitude higher than that of the general, non-high-tech population, a local inflation has made it very difficult for the working poor and artists who had long considered this a home to survive. The service industry here has gotten outright hostile to people it percieves as part of that economy - especially the MBA types (less so the geeks, since we're less into conspicuous consumption, even though we are just as guilty of pushing up rent costs.) Jobs at restaurants and cafes that pay $10 an hour go begging.
Also good targets for abuse are people who buy and drive SUVs in a crowded city without parking - there was a campaign encouraging locals to vandalize SUVs and luxury cars, partially out of vengeance and partially to scare away the rich arrivers, who are pushing up the cost of living. (It was called the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project.) Another source of contention is the property-tax exemption for so-called live-work spaces. Originally designed to motivate artists to move into troubled neighborhoods and convert industrial space into studio and work space, the vast majority of so-called live-work lofts are new construction that simply is built in an industrial style, which is bought for $200,000 to $600,000 a unit by trendy nouveux riches. Then these people pay no tax into the local school system, while local residents in regular housing (including those of us who rent, since it is part of the cost of renting) pay property tax.
I see a lot of vaguely guilty sympathy for these anti-tech-yuppie efforts among the creatives of the web industry - after all, many of them had hoped to be artists themselves - as well as among the more thoughtful tech geeks. Most real artists, unless they are very rich or married to someone who is, are leaving the Bay Area; San Francisco is in danger of falling off the art map.
Concerts have been designed as "loss leaders" only for those artists for whom CD sales are big enough to make it more valuable to take a loss in live performances. There is nothing inherent about live concerts that makes them a profitless venture. If music-as-a-commodity dies and music-as-a-service rises to take its place, then big pop musicians will do what classical, jazz, and independent musicians have long ago learned how to do - figure out how to make concert profitable (i.e., not spend $400,000 on props to have Stonehenge get crushed by a dwarf.)
If musical recordings becomes fluid, and part of the atmosphere, then it will be as impossible to expect to make money off each copy of a recording as it would be to expect me to pay for everything that my eyes just chance upon: I don't pay architects for every building I see, or artists for every mural I look at. They make their money in advance, as a service.
Classical and experimental musics are already largely poised to thrive in the new environment. I agree with posters who say that the technology is much too ubiquitous to treat this as a moral problem any more: it is now virtually impossible to treat recorded music as a discrete commodity for those who are in the world of MP3s. The attempt to map the laws of physical property into this domain are futile.
Classical composition and, largely, performance, are not funded by the sale of commodities. There are royalties for performance, but CD sales are usually too low to sustain new work. Instead, many composers are academics, or are funded by public and private grants. There's thus less accountability to mass taste and a more sophisticated aesthetic discourse.
Whether this is a good or bad thing is, of course, dependent on who you are. If you are making money as a manufacturer and producer of pop-music objects for retail sale, you of course hate the rarified model of grants, patronage and peer review. You got rich from mass appeal, not from critical appeal.
This is unabashedly elitist, even as it democratizes access to music.
However, it should be recalled that the technologies of music distribution created pop music as we know it - before the era of the mechanical reproduction of sound, most popular music was sold as sheet music which was performed - for very little recompense - by local musicians. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away.
The problem is that the closed-door approach relies on the relationship of one CEO to another, and it is completely unhelpful for other analogous situations. The root problem - in this case, the fact that a company can hamstring competition by exploiting flaws in our patent system - is completely unaddressed.
A boycott sends the message to the entire industry, that a critical mass of the public finds a certain behavior unacceptable. The first strategy is all very made-for-TV drama in which one instance of an injustice is addressed, but the second is more reliable as a way of getting things changed in an entire sector, and possibly even in getting the underlying flaw (the broken patent system) fixed.
And guess what? If Bezos is convinced on ethical grounds, but the stockholders of Amazon aren't, then it's quite possible that Bezos would get overruled, as well as facing liability for failure to take the most profitable route.
Why isn't Tim joining the boycott call at this point? He seems to be taking the CEO-to-CEO ol' boy's network approach to it. This bothers me - rather than respond to communities and markets, he tries to get things happening behind closed doors. There are way too many decisions that happen that happen that way.
And his objection to the boycott is based, weirdly enough, on the value of the service that Amazon provides. That's missing the point of a boycott: 'boycotting' companies with inferior products or services isn't boycotting, it's just shopping. When you choose not to give a company its business because of the moral and social aspects of their business practices even though they may have the best service in the market, thenyou have a boycott. Why is Tim opposed to boycotts as part of a multifaceted strategy against harmful business practices?
The radio station pays a fee to play that song, and income from advertisers covers their costs, but when they broadcast they do *not* pay for each person who hears it. We can listen for free, and are (technologically, not legally - this is important to note for the mp3 issue) completely free to record that broadcast. Once I record it, I have no need to purchase the CD.
While the recording industry gets a nominal reward for each time the music is broadcast, the real motivation for them - the reason why they send hookers and drugs to the hotel rooms of DJ's - is to promote the music and sell more CD's, even though theoretically the broadcast should cost them sales, according to the logic with which they are attacking mp3s.
You know, standards about dirty words on broadcast TV really aren't were I'm willing to make a big stand on censorship. The "South Park" message can and will get out, and Stone and Parker are already very rich. There's nothing to prevent a "director's cut" of South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut being released - in fact, it was their desire to make more money that motivated the initial kowtow to the MPAA. I agree with their general messages: that it is hypocritical to wring hands over sex and bathroom humor while sanctioning large-volume depictions of violence, and that the patronizing "someone think of the children!" attitudes of middle America are maudlin and an evasion of responsiblity. As far as modification as compromise goes, that happened already with the original movie!
However, there's a much more serious ongoing form of censorship: corporate censorship by litigation. The McLibel suit is the most classic example of this, but the attacks on fan sites, parodies (like Negativland - U2 case), artists sites (like Etoy), and the vicious attacks against DeCSS are a much bigger threat to speech. Since words, images, and ideas are treated as property, and corporate reputation is more important than critical investigation, free speech only exists for those with massive legal budgets or absolutely nothing to lose.
I know that I'm preaching to the choir here, but I'd like to know if it would be possible to see federal legislation that penalized SLAPP cases(with extreme prejudice!) and even provided a legal warchest (funded by those who were found guilty of SLAPPs) for those who are accused; I'd like to see it in the context of legislation which removed the 'defend it or lose it' trademark restriction, while affirming the 'first come/first serve' sector-agnostic approach to domain names, and expanding 'fair use' of copyrighted images and texts to more increase protection for fan sites and parodies.
I wrote a long essay on Bruno in college. One thing that is fascinating about him and remarkable for his era was his openess to ideas from non-Christian traditions - he incorporated a lot of ideas from Sephardic Judaism (especially Qabalaism) and from Islamic philosophers. This fact was one of the reasons why he was targetted by the Vatican. He got right in the crosshairs of the counter-reformation.
I have a rich social life: I go out with friends several times a week (usually for brunches and dinners and films), I have an active romantic life, I travel a lot for work, and I'm generally out-and-about. I don't go to clubs or parties any more, but I am definitely not a shut-in.
That said, there are some sorts of social interaction that are better served in an electronic medium. Round-table discussions about a topic of interest, especially more intellectually intense and referentially rich ones, just work better in that medium. I have a tendency to get tongue-tied at times in person, especially in larger groups.
One sort of conversation that is possible in chat (I participate in private chat channels with bright, sophisticated and mature people, so YMMV) is the conversation-with-pasted-URLs - it isn't possible in real life to have that sort of real-time citing!
Make no mistake, I don't think that there's a replacement for F2F relationships when it comes to matters of personal growth and emotional health. Text doesn't convey the gestures of support and sympathy that are the basis of such relationships. But most social time isn't spent in that mode, anyway, and for the renaissance of the culture of the salon, the online world has a lot to take credit for.
If Linux et al. are content to be modest niche hobbyist OS' on the desktop, rather than taking in a sizeable market share, we will not present enough critical mass to persuade content producers to distribute media in formats we can read. We will cede the web to QuickTime, the Windows Media Player format, and versions of RealMedia for which Linux players are unavailable. Others will exchange files that we can't read, and wonder at our curmudgeonly disinterest in communicating with them.
This is already the status quo to some extent (it is one of the main reasons why I have a Windows machine.) Arrogance towards the 'great unwashed' will exacerbate it; growing the ranks will make it unteneble to keep content in closed formats.
The parent message is not a troll. It is, in fact, a problem with a lot of advertising-model web sites: they just post their ad copy onto a web server and wait for the traffic to come in. They actually have confused their advertising for their product. One contribution that the web could make to the political process would be to get BEYOND the lowest-common-denominator syndrome that marks televised campaigning.
It would be naive to think that a site for a political figure doesn't advocate that candidate, but there are things that a good political site could do. One thing I *wouldn't* put on that list would be an online forum for discussion, because that is just a magnet for hostility. However, voting records and links to analyses of voting records are useful resources. Policy studies and links to more indepth study (perhaps even documents available for download); endorsements and links to the endorsing organizations; even historical context studies.
Ideally, I'd like to see web campaigning be part of a process of trying to cull a couple statesmen out of the murky pool of politicians we've got.
The crux of the tragedy isn't the dwindling nightlife. That's sad enough, but the yups and the "silicon implants" (the silicon valley millionaires with delusions of hipness who buy half-million dollar so-called "live-work" spaces that were originally allowed to be built and purchased with reduced or no property taxes to help *artists*) will keep some sort of nightlife alive. I'm sure that JWZ can sustain DNA with the hordes of paper-millionaire goth-garbed tech-support staff that are now the closest thing SF has to a counter-culture.
The real tragedy is that actual working artists, especially young ones, simply can't afford to live here. To sustain a true art scene, you need cheap rent paired with some sort of public space for artists to meet and work. End of story. And the growing wage inequities in the Bay Area make it impossible to find cheap rent in any area metropolitan enough to support an art community.
The situation is escalating, fueled by the "irrational exuberance" and the loss of public funding for the arts, there are no mechanisms for changing it. Artists in the US now work primarily in design and advertising: the invisible hand of the marketplace won't sustain fine arts.
There's a problem in the current environment with simply encouraging women to focus on QA, UI, management, and the other less low-level aspects of open-source development: how much of the Red Hat and VA Linux share offers went to people who did that sort of work? I think that winding up in the CREDITS files for work on device drivers was a lot more well rewarded than participating in the mailing list with bug reports - it is questionable whether the last category was rewarded at all.
In general, there's a self-perpetuating cycle, in which the activities in which men excel are rewarded more generously by the well-rewarded men who excel at them. It's the tendency that is at the root of the difference in pay for men and in comparable jobs. It is very natural for people to think more highly of the things they are good at than those they are not, and most of the people who control compensation and investment are men.
The "let's be gender-blind" argument is an ingenuous one, I think. It doesn't realize some basic facts:
that there is a natural tendency to translate the probabilities which we internalize through our past ("I don't see a lot of female geeks") to expectations ("I don't expect women to be good at this;" "I don't expect *this* woman to be good at this."). The very adaptive inductive shorthands we use to make a lot of quick decisions, by their very nature, perpetuate discrimination.
Hiring always involves taking a bit of a chance on someone, and we are always much more willing to take chances on people who resemble ourselves.
Even if 75 percent of men are completely equitable and fair and gender-blind, the other 25 percent can make women's life a living hell.
We are hard-coded to think in terms of gender difference: it takes conscious effort to compensate for our predisposition to discriminate.
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I really don't know why Katz is even bothering. This movie had nothing to do with the 50s and 60s. The strongest nostalgia I saw was for the late 70s through mid 80s, and the film was definitely set in the present day (or at least sometime after Stereolab's Aluminum Tunes and the Beta Band's EPs were released), both in millieu and in attitude. The only character who fit Katz's demographic was Tim Robbin's reprehensible Ian - every other character there was in their 30's or younger. I don't like to get personal when I respond to someone's writing, but Katz really is looking through the narcissistic rose-colored glasses of baby-boomer self-importance.
Hornby actually discusses the limits of geography on story in the interview.
It should be noted that while Rob is a bit self-pitying, it isn't really accurate to describe him as simply "lonely." He's not just a frustrated geek who can't get a date - rather, he's under the impression that he is getting rejected, yet is initially blind to the ways in which he sabotaged the relationships he was in.
They don't compete with Walmart. Walmart will never carry Stiff Little Fingers vinyl and Beefheart first editions. They may be competing with Ebay, but I know of very few music geeks who would buy vinyl sight-unseen. If they are under any threat, it's much more like to be a matter of the pandemic rent hikes that major cities are experiencing now. But I still see a lot of indie record stores. In the Bay Area (Berkeley and San Francisco) we have Amoeba Music, the greatest music store in the world, and my favorite small store, Aquarius Records. We've got places like Streetlight. When I travel to San Diego, Seattle, Portland, and Chicago, I never fail to find cool little stores.
I just saw the movie. It was excellent - not Oscar material, but a good, funny, honest movie about relationships. I also do know some people for whom pop music is so deeply enmeshed in the fabric of their day to day lives, that it is part of their emotional and interpersonal language, a sort of kaliedoscopic reflection of their inner lives.
I don't think I need to tell you how different shoes are from an education. Nor do I need to tell you that there are many parts of the world where shoes still are, if not a luxury, still something not taken for granted. I can point out the long-term economic, political and social effects of eviscerated and non-existent public education systems throughout the Third World, though: I don't think you'd want to live in those places. I just want to know how you would make democracy work in illiterate populations.
I know of animals that create, marry, have morals, and even do calculus. They're called humans.
Some details to be aware of are that there is no commercial rent control, which has a whole slew of corallary effects on market motivation.
That said, your point about the exploding cost of housing in other (non rent-controlled!) parts of the Bay Area is quite accurate, and I'd forgotten it. One little irony is that Marin County, once the most beautiful expensive counties in the Bay Area, has become remained a lot more affordable (especially for renters) and largely avoided the crunch of the rest of the Bay Area. It's not cheap, by any means, but their decision to NOT invest in a lot of transportation infrastructure, and to keep many of their interior roads one-lane and to completely control growth (it's virtually impossible to build on green land in most of the county) has made the portions of it that are far from the freeway an unattractive option to commuters, and kept housing prices stable.
Almost as silly as dressing up as Indians and throwing tea into the Boston Harbor.
You don't understand 'tolerance.' Tolerance is a live-and-let-live attitude. If it were a matter of 'oh, I don't like my neighbor's nice new car, I wish it were gone,' it would be a matter of simple resentment. If I don't like my neighbor's sexual practices or hobbies or skin color, that's intolerance. But that's not the problem.
The problem is an inflationary economy, and the effect on a market when a good sector of the consuming side of the market has a lot more income than another, the local economy will server the former far more than the latter. Food prices skyrocket. Rents and housing go up. Police serve the class in favor over the class that isn't - someone who would have be a functional part of the community 7 years ago is now an 'eyesore' today and hassled by cops. The proliferation of SUVs is a huge problem in a city with a parking crunch, and often present a menace to pedestrians and bicyclists.
There have been a lot of evictions of poorer residents in order to be able to rent at ridiculously higher rates to new ones (fortunately there is some rent and eviction control, but increasingly landlords are weakening it and making loopholes.) New residents in SOMA, where I live, will move near a nightclub, then complain about the noise, move a lot of political money around, and have the night club closed. (Ask jwz, himself a silicon implant 'gone native,' about this sometime.)
People are defending an already rare lifestyle, and they are also protecting some of the little character that exists in an increasingly homogenous, franchised country. San Francisco is - or will have been - one of the last urban places with a true sense of place. (Check out jwz's rant on Silicon Valley to see what many people here are trying to prevent.) You are confusing 'tolerance' with 'acquiesence.'
I know plenty of people who are ridiculously successful by these standards, who still don't like what income polarization is doing to San Francisco and other metropolitan areas. It's better to win a horrid game than to lose it, but you can still recognize it as a horrid game and wish that it didn't exist.
Remember, just because the pot calls the kettle black, doesn't mean the kettle isn't black.
With a significant segment of the population here taking in income that is an order of magnitude higher than that of the general, non-high-tech population, a local inflation has made it very difficult for the working poor and artists who had long considered this a home to survive. The service industry here has gotten outright hostile to people it percieves as part of that economy - especially the MBA types (less so the geeks, since we're less into conspicuous consumption, even though we are just as guilty of pushing up rent costs.) Jobs at restaurants and cafes that pay $10 an hour go begging.
Also good targets for abuse are people who buy and drive SUVs in a crowded city without parking - there was a campaign encouraging locals to vandalize SUVs and luxury cars, partially out of vengeance and partially to scare away the rich arrivers, who are pushing up the cost of living. (It was called the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project.) Another source of contention is the property-tax exemption for so-called live-work spaces. Originally designed to motivate artists to move into troubled neighborhoods and convert industrial space into studio and work space, the vast majority of so-called live-work lofts are new construction that simply is built in an industrial style, which is bought for $200,000 to $600,000 a unit by trendy nouveux riches. Then these people pay no tax into the local school system, while local residents in regular housing (including those of us who rent, since it is part of the cost of renting) pay property tax.
I see a lot of vaguely guilty sympathy for these anti-tech-yuppie efforts among the creatives of the web industry - after all, many of them had hoped to be artists themselves - as well as among the more thoughtful tech geeks. Most real artists, unless they are very rich or married to someone who is, are leaving the Bay Area; San Francisco is in danger of falling off the art map.
If musical recordings becomes fluid, and part of the atmosphere, then it will be as impossible to expect to make money off each copy of a recording as it would be to expect me to pay for everything that my eyes just chance upon: I don't pay architects for every building I see, or artists for every mural I look at. They make their money in advance, as a service.
Classical composition and, largely, performance, are not funded by the sale of commodities. There are royalties for performance, but CD sales are usually too low to sustain new work. Instead, many composers are academics, or are funded by public and private grants. There's thus less accountability to mass taste and a more sophisticated aesthetic discourse.
Whether this is a good or bad thing is, of course, dependent on who you are. If you are making money as a manufacturer and producer of pop-music objects for retail sale, you of course hate the rarified model of grants, patronage and peer review. You got rich from mass appeal, not from critical appeal.
This is unabashedly elitist, even as it democratizes access to music.
However, it should be recalled that the technologies of music distribution created pop music as we know it - before the era of the mechanical reproduction of sound, most popular music was sold as sheet music which was performed - for very little recompense - by local musicians. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away.
What happened to Obi Wan Kenobe when he turned off his lightsaber?
He became more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
A boycott sends the message to the entire industry, that a critical mass of the public finds a certain behavior unacceptable. The first strategy is all very made-for-TV drama in which one instance of an injustice is addressed, but the second is more reliable as a way of getting things changed in an entire sector, and possibly even in getting the underlying flaw (the broken patent system) fixed.
And guess what? If Bezos is convinced on ethical grounds, but the stockholders of Amazon aren't, then it's quite possible that Bezos would get overruled, as well as facing liability for failure to take the most profitable route.
And his objection to the boycott is based, weirdly enough, on the value of the service that Amazon provides. That's missing the point of a boycott: 'boycotting' companies with inferior products or services isn't boycotting, it's just shopping. When you choose not to give a company its business because of the moral and social aspects of their business practices even though they may have the best service in the market, thenyou have a boycott. Why is Tim opposed to boycotts as part of a multifaceted strategy against harmful business practices?
The radio station pays a fee to play that song, and income from advertisers covers their costs, but when they broadcast they do *not* pay for each person who hears it. We can listen for free, and are (technologically, not legally - this is important to note for the mp3 issue) completely free to record that broadcast. Once I record it, I have no need to purchase the CD.
While the recording industry gets a nominal reward for each time the music is broadcast, the real motivation for them - the reason why they send hookers and drugs to the hotel rooms of DJ's - is to promote the music and sell more CD's, even though theoretically the broadcast should cost them sales, according to the logic with which they are attacking mp3s.
However, there's a much more serious ongoing form of censorship: corporate censorship by litigation. The McLibel suit is the most classic example of this, but the attacks on fan sites, parodies (like Negativland - U2 case), artists sites (like Etoy), and the vicious attacks against DeCSS are a much bigger threat to speech. Since words, images, and ideas are treated as property, and corporate reputation is more important than critical investigation, free speech only exists for those with massive legal budgets or absolutely nothing to lose.
I know that I'm preaching to the choir here, but I'd like to know if it would be possible to see federal legislation that penalized SLAPP cases(with extreme prejudice!) and even provided a legal warchest (funded by those who were found guilty of SLAPPs) for those who are accused; I'd like to see it in the context of legislation which removed the 'defend it or lose it' trademark restriction, while affirming the 'first come/first serve' sector-agnostic approach to domain names, and expanding 'fair use' of copyrighted images and texts to more increase protection for fan sites and parodies.
I wrote a long essay on Bruno in college. One thing that is fascinating about him and remarkable for his era was his openess to ideas from non-Christian traditions - he incorporated a lot of ideas from Sephardic Judaism (especially Qabalaism) and from Islamic philosophers. This fact was one of the reasons why he was targetted by the Vatican. He got right in the crosshairs of the counter-reformation.
That said, there are some sorts of social interaction that are better served in an electronic medium. Round-table discussions about a topic of interest, especially more intellectually intense and referentially rich ones, just work better in that medium. I have a tendency to get tongue-tied at times in person, especially in larger groups.
One sort of conversation that is possible in chat (I participate in private chat channels with bright, sophisticated and mature people, so YMMV) is the conversation-with-pasted-URLs - it isn't possible in real life to have that sort of real-time citing!
Make no mistake, I don't think that there's a replacement for F2F relationships when it comes to matters of personal growth and emotional health. Text doesn't convey the gestures of support and sympathy that are the basis of such relationships. But most social time isn't spent in that mode, anyway, and for the renaissance of the culture of the salon, the online world has a lot to take credit for.
If Linux et al. are content to be modest niche hobbyist OS' on the desktop, rather than taking in a sizeable market share, we will not present enough critical mass to persuade content producers to distribute media in formats we can read. We will cede the web to QuickTime, the Windows Media Player format, and versions of RealMedia for which Linux players are unavailable. Others will exchange files that we can't read, and wonder at our curmudgeonly disinterest in communicating with them.
This is already the status quo to some extent (it is one of the main reasons why I have a Windows machine.) Arrogance towards the 'great unwashed' will exacerbate it; growing the ranks will make it unteneble to keep content in closed formats.
It would be naive to think that a site for a political figure doesn't advocate that candidate, but there are things that a good political site could do. One thing I *wouldn't* put on that list would be an online forum for discussion, because that is just a magnet for hostility. However, voting records and links to analyses of voting records are useful resources. Policy studies and links to more indepth study (perhaps even documents available for download); endorsements and links to the endorsing organizations; even historical context studies.
Ideally, I'd like to see web campaigning be part of a process of trying to cull a couple statesmen out of the murky pool of politicians we've got.
The real tragedy is that actual working artists, especially young ones, simply can't afford to live here. To sustain a true art scene, you need cheap rent paired with some sort of public space for artists to meet and work. End of story. And the growing wage inequities in the Bay Area make it impossible to find cheap rent in any area metropolitan enough to support an art community.
The situation is escalating, fueled by the "irrational exuberance" and the loss of public funding for the arts, there are no mechanisms for changing it. Artists in the US now work primarily in design and advertising: the invisible hand of the marketplace won't sustain fine arts.
In general, there's a self-perpetuating cycle, in which the activities in which men excel are rewarded more generously by the well-rewarded men who excel at them. It's the tendency that is at the root of the difference in pay for men and in comparable jobs. It is very natural for people to think more highly of the things they are good at than those they are not, and most of the people who control compensation and investment are men.
The "let's be gender-blind" argument is an ingenuous one, I think. It doesn't realize some basic facts: