Business
Richard Florida calls it the Great Reset. Others call it Freelance Nation and the Gig Economy. Sara Horowitz, writing for the Atlantic, calls it the industrial revolution of our time. It’s been a long time coming, and now it’s finally, really here. No more spending an entire career working for a single company, keeping your head down for the last 10 years to ensure your pension. As Horowitz writes, “We’re no longer simply lawyers, or photographers, or writers. Instead, we’re part-time lawyers-cum-amateur photographers who write on the side.” Horowitz reports that as of 2005, one-third of the US workforce were at least partial participants in this new freelance economy and that by 2009, “entrepreneurial activity” was at its higher than it had been for 14 years. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the US government stopped tracking independent workers in 2005. Horowitz, who founded Freelancers Union, writes that it’s time to migrate our support system from the employment model to one that is more flexible and mobile. “The solution will rest with our ability to form networks for exchange and to create political power,” writes Horowitz. “I call this ‘new mutualism.'” She promises to dig deeper in subsequent articles.
This week the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) released its 18th annual executive compensation report which opens, “Corporations don’t dodge taxes, the people who run corporations do. And these CEOs are reaping awesomely lavis rewards for the tax doding they have their corporations do. In fact, corporate tax dodging has gone so out of control that 25 major US corporations last year paid their chief executives more than they paid Uncle Sam in federal income taxes.” Those 25 companies averaged global profits of US$1.9 billion (seven showed losses) and paid their chief executives an average US$16.7 million annually. The IPS report, as Katrina vanden Heuvel, writing for the Nation, points out, has cost the US government at least US$100 billion annually. Chuck Collins, one of the co-authors of the IPS report, notes in an article for Yes!, that “20 of the 25 companies spent more lobbying Congress last year than they paid the IRS in federal corporate taxes.General Electric invested $41.8 million in lobbying and got $3.3 billion in tax refunds. Boeing spent $20 million on lobbying and got a $35 billion contract from the US government, while paying a paltry $13 million in US taxes for a company with $4.3 billion in US income last year.
ESRD
Let’s not forget that health insurance mandates and market exchanges for health insurance — the backbone of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act — were fairly broadly held conservative Republican principles. But, because Obama pressed to implement them — rather than pushing for a single-payer, Medicare for all model — the Republican candidates everywhere are running away from it like it’s toxic and pledging to overturn it. In former lives, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman have both embraced both concepts; Romney so far as to actually implement it in Massachusetts. Rick Perry, at least being consistent, never liked either — referring to them as “socialism on American soil.” Perry did everything he could to restrict expansion of healthcare coverage in Texas while simultaneously — and successfully — working to implement tort reform, limiting malpractice damages against medical professionals. Accordingly, Texas has the highest rate of people without health insurance and the lowest rate of prenatal care in the US. As Kevin Sack, writing for the New York Times, notes, Perry’s administration has “accepted nearly US$20 million in grants authorized by the [Affordable Care] act, including US$1 million to plan for the new insurance marketplaces known as exchanges.”
Intellectual property
US Representative John Conyers Jr. (D-Michigan), the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has called for a revision of US copyright law clearing up ambiguities about who can reclaim ownership rights to music. The 1976 revisions to the US copyright law granted “termination rights” to musicians and songwriters, allowing them to regain control of their work after 35 years if they notify licensees two years prior. The record labels, predictably, are now fighting those musicians and songwriters who have the temerity to file such notifications. The labels’ position — along with that of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), its lobbying arm — argue that most recordings aren’t eligible for “termination rights” because they were works for hire. Unless the labels can produce a valid copyright registration, this is a hollow argument. In 1999, troubling work for hire language that specifically applied to music recordings was added to an omnibus bill that passed without debate. Mitchell Glazier, then the copyright counsel to the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, was responsible for the language. Glazier now works as the RIAA’s chief lobbyist. A year later, the troubling language was removed. Larry Rohter, writing for the New York Times, quotes Conyers as saying, “For too long the work of musicians has been used to create enormous profits for record labels, radio stations and others, without fairly distributing these profits to the artists.” The Republicans are, also predictably, mum on the subject except on the broadest of terms.
Internet
Kevin Kelly rethinks “impossible” in his must-read “Why the Impossible Happens More Often.” Automobile sales between strangers on eBay, Wikipedia, and Google Maps (with Streetview) are all things Kelly considered either to be impossible or non-starters when they appeared. He was wrong and attributes his mistakes to emergence. “As far as I can tell the impossible things that happen now are in every case manifestations of a new, bigger level of organization,” writes Kelly. “They are the result of large-scale collaboration, or immense collections of information, or global structures, or gigantic real-time social interactions. Just as a tissue is a new, bigger level of organization for a bunch of individual cells, these new social structures are a new bigger level for individual humans. And in both cases the new level breeds emergence. New behaviors emerge from the new level that were impossible at the lower level. Tissue can do things that cells can’t.” Highest recommendation.
Google’s identity policy for its Google+ service, requires true names. In actuality, it requires merely a plausible name, as Google doesn’t actually validate the identity of its users. Google’s position is that people behave better when using their true name and that if you don’t like it don’t use the service. That last bit is truly absurd. “Because when Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, told NPR’s Andy Carvin, ‘Google+ is completely optional. No one is forcing you to use it,” he implied the only time a service should come under critical scrutiny is when it is mandatory,” writes Cory Doctorow in his column for the Guardian. Doctorow correctly notes that Schmidt’s position is “perfectly incoherent.” Marketplaces (like Google+) aren’t restricted to binary roles for anyone. Consumers aren’t restricted to buy or not buy and decisions should be “informed by vigorous debate and discussion” not just marketing messages. Doctorow, more than anyone, has put his finger on exactly why we need a critical debate about Google’s true names policy.
Media
Navid Hassanpour, a Yale political science graduate student, studied the Egyptian uprising and came up with an interesting thesis: Blocking social media causes political unrest (and even revolutions) to expand. In his paper, “Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest,” Hassanpour writes, “Full connectivity in a social network sometimes can hinder collective action,” concluding that contrary to widespread opinion, social media did little to spur the Egyptian protests. “The disruption of cellphone coverage and internet on the [January] 28th exacerbated the unrest in at least three major ways,” Hassanpour writes. “It implicated many apolitical citizens unaware of or uninterested in the unrest; it forced more face-to-face communication, i.e., more physical presence in streets; and finally it effectively decentralized the rebellion on the 28th through new hybrid communication tactics, producing a quagmire much harder to control and repress than one massive gathering in Tahrir.”
Boing Boinger Mark Frauenfelder has a fascinating email interview with novelist William Gibson. Best Gibson response is the last (about what he worries about): “Sometimes I remember that I evidently assumed that Ronald Reagan was probably about as weird as it was going to get; that that all seemed a bit over the top, a grave if semi-comic but blessedly temporary anomaly. That’s scary.”
Politics
US Republicans are systematically trying to prevent millions of people from voting next year and are receiving significant support from the infamous Koch brothers. That’s the gist of Ari Berman’s article for Rolling Stone. Berman’s research indicates that the Republican campaign to suppress “elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008″ is centrally coordinated and targets students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts, and the elderly. “In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council –- and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party –- 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process,” writes Berman. Meanwhile, Obama is seemingly doing everything he can to alienate the progressives that initially voted for him.
Privacy
The three-judge 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle heard arguments this week concerning dozens of dismissed lawsuits alleging that the US National Security Agency (NSA) worked with US telecommunications and cable companies to illegally eavesdrop on internet traffic and telephone calls. One of the cases, brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) alleges the telecommunications companies cooperated with the NSA in violation of federal wiretapping laws and their own terms of service. A separate case, in which the EFF is also involved, alleges the US government violated its citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights. Most of the cases were dismissed by a federal court in San Francisco under a 2008 law that authorized then-President George W. Bush to grant retroactive legal immunity to the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the NSA. The Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping initiative — which continues under President Obama — was first exposed by the New York Times in 2005. The EFF has published video and audio of the arguments.
Sustainability
Atlanta-based PodPonics is transforming old shipping containers into urban farms. Aaron Saenz, writing for Singularity Hub, reports that the company is “already supplying about 200 pounds of leafy greens each week using six converted containers.” Using hydroponics, each container can produce an acre’s worth of produce in 320 square feet using less water and fertilizer and no pesticides than traditional farming.
In yet another blow to his base — and yet another genuflection to the Tea Party Republicans — President Obama has abandoned strengthened air-quality rules. Obama flatly rejected a proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reduce emissions of smog-causing chemicals (ground-level ozone), citing an undue burden on industry. The EPA proposed lowering the current ozone standard of 75 parts per billion, set by the George W. Bush administration in 2008, to 60-70 parts per billion. This comes only a week or so after Obama’s State Department signed off on the Keystone XL tarsands pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Barak Obama’s former staffers have been arrested protesting the pipeline, and they’re not going to work for him again. Obama is banking on progressives and environmentalists never joining the Republicans, but what he’s not counting on is that we will stay home — going back to the “don’t vote, it only encourages them” days. If Obama had governed like he campaigned, things could have been so much different.
User experience
Contents, an online magazine focusing on content strategy, online publishing, and editorial issues launches this fall. It’s by Erin Kissane, Krista Stevens, Ethan Marcotte, and Erik Westra. This should be good.
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The blotter: Week ending 4 September 2011 was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Sunday, 4 September 2011 at 12:38 PM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (64.237.45.114)