Co-ops, L3Cs, and Hybrid LLC/Co-ops
March 17, 2010 | Business & Commerce | Cooperatives | Governance | People & Society
I wrote a comment to Don's post, but it was too long for Blogger to accept....
I have a close friend who started one of the first VT L3Cs a couple of years ago, and his intent was to signal that they weren’t out to get rich but to do something interesting and useful that a “traditional” investment wouldn’t normally value. I suppose if somehow they become billionaires that will turn out to sully the L3C pool, but it would be good to get some data on how L3Cs are performing, and what the outcomes are, and then tune the law accordingly prior to rejecting the form out of hand because of, well, I’m not sure what the argument against them is. Innovation is good. Why not in corporate forms?
The challenge for cooperatives, speaking from close experience, is that, due to their traditional rejection of “marketing” (granted, slowly changing in some areas) the public associates co-ops with alternative dirty hippie funny-smelling weirdo food shops from the 1970s. Part and parcel of the whole culture-war thing. So it’s true there are huge swaths of the economy organized as cooperatives, but the executives at, say, a large electric cooperative, don’t have incentive to play up that aspect of their organization because it might lead to more oversight of their own leadership or their business decision trade-offs. Plus, and perhaps less cynically, the AP (for example) doesn’t have much incentive to promote it’s internal organization - there’s no easily noticed benefit to the listener/reader. Great long-term benefit, but our collective ability as a species to connect the dots from short-term actions to long-term impacts is now well-known, and a likely failure-mode leading to our future extinction.
Another challenge, more structural, is that cooperatives, by nature, provide the opportunity – and at the same time *require* people – to self-organize. But we live in a convenience culture. It’s all about saving time and money, everywhere you look. Coops typically take more time (to set up, operate, participate in) and cost more money (lack of economy of scale). It’s great if people want to take responsibility for their own destiny. But it goes against the entire cultural thrust of the infantilization of America. We don’t take responsibility for anything we do!
Finally, it is difficult for the cooperative movement to make affirmative statements about the value of coops because of 1) lack of knowledge, skill, or experience in “attention-marketing;” and 2) they’re not cheaper or faster. Thus, we only hear about coops in reaction to something else: L3Cs, single-payer health care, non-meltdown banks, etc. As a general rule it’s tough to make a positive case when it’s framed as a negative reaction to an external event. (I speak from challenging personal experience.)
Cooperatives have a huge value to offer people, but I think the most likely case in the modern culture is they will rise again to respond to some very large societal problem, or take better hold as worker-coops rather than as consumer coops. Workers have far more incentive to self-organize, it’s a smaller group, and the incentives are aligned. A nice smaller-scale alternative to union collective bargaining. And, if we actually pass health reform, people may have the chance to be a bit more entrepreneurial without corporate health insurance as a friction to leaving their jobs.
And this gets to why I think hybrid coop/LLCs are so valuable (and not a bastardization of the coop form). Having personally started three LLCs, and been an early employee in a couple of venture capital funded startups, I can tell you starting a business is hard. Raising money is hard. Running a business profitably is hard. Moral and social trade-offs abound daily. The idea of a worker coop that can sell up to 40% of it’s stock to long-term value investors has the chance to completely change the perceptions of coops noted above. The investor sees a group of committed workers with real skin in the game (not semi-worthless future-vesting stock options), and the employees attract capital – where the capitalists can get an actual return, even if it’s a lower or longer-term one – rather than being limited to what they can scratch together themselves. This form could be the fuel to push cooperatives affirmatively forward, rather than always looking backwards and saying, “If only they’d considered cooperatives....”
Otherwise coops are going to have to get good at the sort of “hard-sell marketing” that captures a reader’s/listener’s attention and directs it to what the speaker is saying and why it benefits them in concrete, right-now terms. I look forward to the day coops are confident, savvy, marketers of their own brand of humane goodness in this harsh overly-capitalistic world.
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Cherry Table
October 9, 2009 | Life
Dear Friend,
I have enclosed a photo of what I believe to be a cherry coffee table. It measures 2' x 4' x 17"H and is in very good - really quite close to excellent - condition.
The table - it does not yet have a name - was given to us last year by M.G., former board president of the B. Food Co-op. He had purchased it direct from the source while on a two-day spree in the Rt. 2 corridor of furniture manufacturers in Massachusetts. He offered it up because, after several years of trying, he could not really fit it into his furniture scheme. 2' x 4' - just too big. And, just bought too much furniture that day. He's been giving things away ever since.
We haven't found a purrrfect spot for it either, even after a year of considering the nearly-infinite range of possibilities. But now we've started to make some halting initial conceptualizations - to say nothing of the future potential actual *physical* manifestations, - of a move toward a more zen minimalist approach than our current post-integration maximal mashup would allow.
And so today we find ourselves in the same predicament. It's a nice table. Sturdy. Good condition. Holds a LOT of book piles. You can sit on it. Nearly perfect size for a couple of cat beds. You can see it here, in the enclosed grainy low-light iPhone spy photo, eBay style, stepping out in one of our objet arrangements which some have called, "The Annex Appendix Bric-A-Brac Congregation Diversity Evincement Fez" series.
Imagine the possibilities....
Picture yourself owning this fine table, set properly amongst your cherished belongings. Imagine your books, your tea, your cats, your very selves, enjoying the large, welcoming platform for your every purpose. Feel the smooth polished surface with your fingers. Listen to the solid "thump" you hear as you place it firmly onto the floor in the precise location you feel is best. Change the location at any time.
Experts say that nothing can occur that you can't also imagine, so in that sense you now already possess this table, in your minds. A simple matter of manifesting that reality - for yourself and your family - is all it takes to immediately create a stronger, smarter, sexier, AND wealthier version of your best self.
The most amazing part of this offer? You can have this very table - not a very similar table as seen elsewhere or in stores, but the very same table itself that I have described herein - for the exact same price which we ourselves paid: FREE!!! You sure don't hear that everyday! Let's spell it out: F-R-E-E-!-!-!. You heard correctly. Free as in beer, and also free as in speech. Gratis and libre, indeed. Absolutely, positively, 100% free. Senza soldi. Pas d'argent. Nolo denario.
There is only one of these fine tables. It won't last forever. Like all assemblages of atoms and matter, it will eventually cease to exist. Unlike most carbon-based bipedal life-forms, it doesn't really care. But you care. You care because you're you, and you care. And now, you have the opportunity to care about this table, and fondly remember the many years of pleasure you've received from caring for it.
When would you like to take free home delivery of this fine quality heirloom?
M & K, Co-Founders
Zen Minimalist Potentialist Industries
Shadow Ministry of Information and Architecture
Annex Appendix Bric-A-Brac Congregation Evincement
Comcast Sector, The Internet, Earth, Milky Way.
10:53PM GMT-5, Julian 281, 02009
[Update: This item has been claimed.]
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Why not to burn bridges
August 5, 2009 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
Karlyn, via Twitter, asks: "why is it so important to not burn bridges when you're leaving a job? especially if the person you're burning it with already set it on fire"
- There is no absolute truth.
- Different people will have different views of a) What bridge-burning is; b) Whether one should burn bridges or not; c) Who is right; d) Who is wrong; e) Who "started it."
- Future a) Employers; b) Colleagues; c) Customers d) Friends; e) Lovers; will wonder what will happen to them in a possible future "falling out."
- Everyone reaps what they sow. No need to further the bad vibes.
Apparently they don't teach much about human relations in MBA school. As if managing people were an insignificant part of the job. Not surprising given the quant focus in our business culture.
Just Another Datapoint for my theory that everyone should do four to eight years of weekly depth analysis starting a few years after college (or workforce entry). Would do a society good.
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State of the Backups
May 26, 2009 | Technology
In the past few weeks a couple of folks have asked what I'm doing for data backups. Here's the story.
First, I bought a ReadyNAS NVX with RAID, so I could stop worrying about a single hard drive crash ($1,400). This was more money than I wanted to spend right now, but it forms the hub of everything data-related going forward.
[A brief digression rationalizing the expensive NAS purchase. The ReadyNAS is also an iTunes server, so I can pipe music upstairs to the big-rig stereo once I buy another gadget to connect the wifi to the stereo preamp. I like the Squeezebox Duet, but it's a little long in the tooth and I'm hoping to hold out long enough for an 802.11n version, which I have to assume they're developing and will deliver at some point. There's nothing wrong with the current version, but the rest of my network is 802.11n instead of b/g, so I'd rather wait. Someday I hope Apple builds a home media server, but the AppleTV ain't it for me, especially since even they claim it's only a hobby.]
For off-site backups I bought a NewerTech Voyager Q bare hard drive backup unit ($99), based on Dan Benjamin's review. His followup review is also useful.
I bought two WD Caviar Green 1 TB drives, and will probably buy more for rotation. Amazon has them for $109.
Then I got some WiebieTech anti-static cases to carry them around, $7 each.
I use SuperDuper! to do the actual work of copying stuff to the bare drives. I will also – soon! – make a SuperDuper! schedule to back up the laptop to the NAS. Right now I do it manually to an external hard drive and also to the off-site bare drives.
Essentially, K carries the bare drives in their anti-static cases to her office, and I ask her to bring them home when I want to do another off-site rotation. A bank safe deposit box may also be in my future to make this easier. Note that these bare drives are unencrypted, so if she or I lose a drive data is exposed. We treat them like a pile of $10,000 bills. I.e., don't leave them in the car while going to the gym.
The NAS is currently a 1TB setup (two 1TB drives in a mirrored RAID config) with two empty drive bays. So right now I can back that up to an external 1TB drive. But when I add another 1TB drive to the NAS it will be a 2TB setup (with one empty drive bay). Then I'll need a $300 2TB drive for off-site backup. If I get to a 4TB NAS setup I'm hoping they have 4TB drives, or that I can easily split the data and backup to two 2TB external drives.
My brother, crazier than I am but also with more reason to go the extra mile, actually bought a second NAS and a foam-padded hard case to hold it, and backs up his primary NAS to the secondary one, taking the second one to and from the office. That's certainly the most robust method, and if one goes down, there's no restore - just plug it in and give it the same IP address. But that's an expensive solution.
The online backup stuff I looked at, including the ReadyNAS Vault service, ended up pretty expensive, around $125/month for 250GB. If you don't have all that much data check out JungleDisk which is an interface to Amazon's cloud storage. It's $0.15/GB/month, and gets good reviews. It takes a long time for initial upload but it's probably fast enough on the nightly deltas.
The biggest thing I'm worried about right now is a fire or theft of the NAS. I've probably got a decent weekly schedule going for off-sites, so the impact would vary depending on exactly when disaster struck. I've thought about moving the NAS out of the office, maybe hidden in the basement ceiling far away from the furnace, possibly near a basement window. Then your typical pawn-shop house thieves (or maybe former investment bankers) would be less likely to rip it just because it's there, since it wouldn't be visible and blinking its lights at them, looking all valuable and come-hither. And if the house were burning down I could potentially break the window, root around and yank the thing out of the ceiling. I suppose if the house were going to be empty for more than a weekend I'd do a round of off-site backups and move the disconnected NAS and hide it somewhere. But not in a dresser or a closet, since that's the first place to look for valuables.
If I ever build a house or an office outbuilding, I'm definitely making a secret room, or at least a secret storage stash for stuff like this.
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Apple WWDC 2009
April 7, 2009 | People & Society | Software | Technology
If you read my post last year and want to make plans, here's the link.
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The Twitter Inversion
April 5, 2009 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society
Perhaps another time I could elaborate further on the profound nature of Twitter's interaction model. There are flaws, but it's wired us together in as many ways as there are participants. Today, by way of illustration, here is a screenshot view into a couple of minutes of my Twitter stream:
The stream actually starts on the bottom, so right off the bat if we want to experience time progressing in the familiar direction we are reading from bottom to top, the opposite of what we expect. Thus, leaving Kansas, we hear from some characters. Context is everything.
Daniel Jalkut owns Red Sweater Software, makers of the fine MarsEdit, the weblog editing tool upon which I sculpted the very words you're reading. We've corresponded by email on a couple of topics. Nice guy. Lives about two hours south of here (in Boston) and I've always thought I should get myself down to one of the various meetups in that area and say hello sometime. His tweets and posts are each of equal quality.
Next up, Howard Rheingold, an old online friend from The WeLL, who lives in Northern California. When I got fully online in 1988, Howard was there waiting, pointing the way. We met during Internet 1.0 at the offices of Caucus Systems, maker of a well-designed multi-user conferencing system similar in interaction structure to The WeLL. I doubt I'll ever forget riding the DC metro with Howard in his bright orange silk suit, hand-painted leather shoes, and white derby. You can turn heads dressing like that. It's unlikely Howard remembers me, but no matter, I love you too buddy.
OM_o is the Open Museum (online), produced by Heritance, where I am a director serving on the board with several others, including friends and founders Maureen and Jeff Doyle. The visual design of openmuseum.org is a fork of the xhtml/css codebase I wrote for GiftEcology.com (nee Handmeon.com). I usually always check the links posted here because the objects are interesting and the stories are good. And they're friends and I'm on the board and I usually have thoughts on the interface evolution and I'll probably see them soon so I want to stay up to date with the project.
And then, look, right there, just above OM_o is Maureen, who lives in Vermont. Always nice to see her. But wait, I don't like seeing those duplicate Tweets – no no, that suddenly feels like PR. I need to email her a link to this blog post, because I want to encourage people to never do this. Don't multi-tweet with pasted text. Adopt a specific identity for each posting account, or simply tweet for yourself, as yourself. Using that imperative to make a leap to the broader issues around 'social media marketing,' I pretty much agree with everything in this 10-minute video by Perry Belcher. (Some language not safe for work.) He's coming from the Internet marketer perspective but watch it anyway, he's right on beat with the social media rap. In another video he claims to have earned in excess of $50 million on the Internet, and also that he has personally paid over $10 million to Google AdWords advertising. If you're thinking about making money online he's probably a good guy to listen to. But whatever you think about that he speaks for me on current business best practices using Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Above Maureen is my close friend and all-around great person Meg Maker from New Hampshire. You should go and read Maker's Table, her food and wine blog, right now – this post will still be here when you get back. I've known Meg 20 years, we've worked together in many different roles and structures, and we see each other socially many times a year.
Above Meg is Dave Winer, a brilliant, visionary, hard-working nerd of the first order, who lives in Berkeley, California. Dave was instrumental in creating among other things, RSS, which is what blogs use for subscriptions; podcasts, which are now ubiquitous; and outlining, which is taken for granted but wasn't really in use much prior to Dave's "ThinkTank" and "More" software. Dave also kind of invented the idea of "bullet charts" for presentations, sort of a proto-PowerPoint feature built into More.
Finally at the top, Dan Benjamin, who I've never met or corresponded with, but who I came across because in 2007 he wrote the best-ever articles on Ruby/Rails/MySQL/etc Mac OS X installation and configuration. I think he lives near Orlando, Florida. We've corresponded a bit via Twitter. He posted something about BBEdit and opening projects, and I @replied (quickly) along the lines of, "X doesn't just work?" To which he @replied me something snotty, like "@notio, no, obviously, X doesn't just work." (I paraphrase.) [See update below.] I felt horrible, like I'd annoyed the Master, and wondered if he'd make it so that my specific computer could never read his website again, but then several other people who I also follow @replied him with the same idea, before they saw his response to me. So then I didn't feel like quite such a dunderhead. Dan's a very serious meditator, so I know in my heart that his tone to me was not personal but was just part of his practice.
Now, take another look at that screenshot and tell me: Are these, you know, inane, unnecessary, frivolous, 140-character "messages?" To me, because of the context, not so much – it reads like human conversation. Not transactional messages between humanoids, but conversation between people. If you've ever transcribed recorded conversation literally you know it's really something to read – you can hardly follow it. If I think about conversation as "messages" then most conversations don't pass for quality of messages. But what's nice about human conversation is that it has all sorts of structures and processes and norms and degrees of freedom so we can actually get to know each other and find common interests, aside and apart from the transactional and informational quality of messaging.
In that two-minute snapshot of my Twitter stream I am updated on lives and perspectives, and am provided opportunities to further engage with links to several topics. I can reply if I want, or not. Some people I know well, others only through this medium. It's not email, it's not threaded, you have to be concise, the company is growing quickly and there are a lot of hiccups.
And yes, there are ways to sort-of spam Twitter and people are discovering ways (cough, TweetBlast, cough) to make sales with viral Twitter schemes, but there's one big difference.
If you don't like your Twitter stream content, you can un-follow people, and you'll never hear from them again.
How different from email lists, where names are shared and sold and the spam never stops. Here attention is earned, not demanded. That inversion makes the whole thing worthwhile, because even if Twitter dies, we'll have experienced this form of communication.
This new form is such that the listener is in control of the attention paid to talkers, and once you experience this you will never want to go back to letting the broadcast-era talkers attempt to dominate your attention and listening. This interaction model started with RSS subscriptions, and has now hit the mainstream with Twitter.
The future? Let me know when I can watch the most creative advertising whenever I want. That will be fun.
Update: Dan Benjamin commented below, and due to a problem with my TypePad ID I am unable to write a comment response on my own blog. Gotta get off this platform. In any case, I don't mean to overstate the case – I'm sure whatever Dan said was reasonable, because after reading him for several years I think he's a reasonable guy – my intent was to convey my internal horror of tossing off a flip comment to an expert. Apology accepted, with my own apology added for good measure!
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Patrick Byrne at Dartmouth Tuck School
February 16, 2009 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
Patrick Byrne visited Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business this evening. It was something of a local event, since Patrick and his father, Jack Byrne, both attended Dartmouth. The 90-minute format was was structured such that three '09 Tuck students each asked a question and then the audience asked a bunch of questions. His answers were very complete thoughts with muti-minute responses.
Jack was president of GEICO insurance which was owned by Berkeshire Hathaway, owned by Warren Buffett. Because of this Warren was a regular houseguest at the Byrne's in the 1970s and Patrick grew up hearing Buffett describe his approach to thinking about business. Some Buffett pearls:
On buying companies: "Always try to buy a dollar for sixty cents, forty if you can." Byrne continues, "Sometimes, every once in a while, like now, maybe twenty cents for a dollar."
On buying stocks: "Here's something adults don't understand. When you buy a stock, don't think of it like a piece of paper that moves up and down. Instead, if you buy the stock, and the stock market closed tomorrow and you had to hold the stock for five years, would you still buy the stock? That's the question. Act like you're buying a part of the company that you're going to own. Because you are."
On buying bankrupt RTC real estate in the '80s: "If you're not going to kick a man when he's down, when are you going to kick him?"
After graduation Byrne started a nine-month master's program in philosophy at Stanford. He was diagnosed with cancer, and during the next four years (age 22 - 26) was in and out of treatment. He said he had three rounds of remission and return, each putting him in the hospital for three to nine months at a time. An interesting side-effect of this was that having fallen so far behind his peers he was never trying to keep up or prove anything. After beating cancer a couple of times he decided to live his life in six-month blocks, hoping for the best, and doing things he wanted to do. He went on to obtain a master's degree from Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford.
During this time he alternated between school and various real estate deals, sometimes with his brother. Often this involved buying RTC properties, doing a company turnaround, and selling for decent profits. They purchased a large (one million ft2) mill building in Manchester NH ("a skyscraper lying down") for $3.5 million ("the price of the carpet") and sold it 20 months later for $10 million.
In November 2000 the Wall Street Journal delivered an ego-puffing profile that covers this era pretty well.
Byrne spoke passionately about education reform. He is a strong supporter of school vouchers. He ties this issue directly to our competitiveness in the world economy. Byrne believes Americans are living in a cloud of illusion. We think we're such a great world competitor, but we forget at the end of WWII we had bombed all of our industrial competitors to destruction. We cleared the table and ran the house. But now the world has rebuilt it's industrial and educational capacity, and we have become the consumers, not producers. We cannot ever be competitive in the world with our current 140 year old educational system. We spend $11,000 per pupil per year, significantly higher per capita than other industrial countries, yet by any measure we rank in the bottom quintile of performance. We cannot fix this problem by throwing more money at it. The "guild" (teacher's unions, administrative apparatchiks, etc.) has little left to argue its case except fear of change.
Along the way he had alluded to structural corruption in the American capital markets, closing with an anecdote about a news story in India that presented America as a cautionary tale of capital corruption. At this point a student asked if he could be more specific in his criticisms of the capital markets, and we transitioned into a long segment on financial corruption.
The Wikipedia entry covers the basics, but essentially he claims there are loopholes in the stock settlement system – originally designed to allow some flexibility and elasticity in the case of systemic issues – that allow "options market-maker exceptions to rule 203b1." He joked this could be more memorably named, "The Madoff exception." This is related to changes in Regulation SHO exemptions. The whole ball of wax you may also know as "naked short selling."
This is wicked complicated, and I'm sure I don't fully understand it, but what I gather is: When you buy a stock a seller has sold you the stock. The two of you need to "settle" the deal, where they get cash and you get a numbered stock certificate. Sometimes, for a variety of logistical reasons, the stock certificates cannot be physically transferred at the exact moment the cash arrives. So the settlement company is allowed to write an IOU for the certificates. Most buyers don't take possession of the certificates, so they don't actually know this has happened.
He wrote an infamous slide deck about this called The Miscreants’ Ball.
For a long time the SEC took the position that this didn't matter. People didn't abuse these IOUs! But then in 2007, the SEC changed their mind and wrote:
Regulation SHO's grandfather provision was adopted because the Commission was concerned about creating buy-side volatility through short squeezes if large pre-existing fail to deliver positions had to be closed out too quickly....
That's secret code for, "If we forced everyone to deliver on the IOUs the market would realize those stock certificates had been sold several times over on various small foreign exchanges, sucking $2 trillion out of the system without anyone noticing. We don't want them to notice all at once, so we're going to forgive all the ones we know about and pretend they don't exist."
In other words, what supposedly wasn't happening yesterday is today so bad that if we acknowledge it the financial system would collapse. Again, this is wicked complicated, and I'm sure I don't fully understand it. But I have a feeling he'd agree wholeheartedly with Catherine Austin Fitts.
Long story short, when he took Overstock.com public they were the first company to do an IPO dutch auction – an OpenIPO – Google followed them two years later. They took a lot of flack from Wall Street, and since he had worked there people he knew told him he would be a pariah. He got an unusual phone call from a guy who told him he was living in South America out of a backpack so the Mafia didn't whack him, and Patrick needed to watch out. Byrne didn't believe him, but the guy said, "Watch. What's going to happen is: First these five prominent business journalists will write hack jobs on you or your company. Next you'll find your stock trading on exotic foreign exchanges where you've never listed. Then you'll have a Federal investigation that will amount to nothing but will take a lot of time and money. Finally, you'll find your company on the top-30 list of stocks with fail to deliver positions." Over the next four months all of those things played out, Byrne got in touch with the guy, and they started to piece together how it all worked.
Byrne's blog is Deep Capture, where all this is laid out is long-form detail. It's worth noting that he has critics. After last year's financial meltdown, he feels the intellectual argument is over.
He said he's paid millions of dollars over the past four years on attorneys and economists to gather freedom of information act requests, sue hedge funds and options market makers, and fend off the SEC. He believes the SEC is a "captured" regulator. In this case "captured" doesn't mean "control" but more like "cognitive capture," in that the industry behavior is considered so normal, and so obviously correct – it's a market, after all – that if there's a rule violation they must have written the rules wrong, because this is in fact what the industry does.
Toward the end someone asked about the supply chain he built with Overstock.com, and how it's different. He thinks supply chain theory is the most important and a highly undervalued aspect of retail business. The short version is the normal retail distribution system can't deal with small quantities and odd lots. Overstock built their system to account for this. Their warehouse is "random load" – there isn't a single place where items sit, because the items are always changing. Took a long time to get it right.
Byrne told the story of where the fair-trade worldstock idea came from. Again, the bio covers the basics:
During a vacation in Southeast Asia Byrne found many village artisans were held back by the lack of retail channels, as their production was fragmented and the quantities produced were small. He further realised the Overstock model was perfectly suited for their needs.
In this case "during a vacation" meant cruising the country on a motorcycle, before eventually driving over the edge of a bank and fracturing his arm, 15 hours from medical care, and being carried to a family's hut. When they say, "he further realized," what they mean is, while smoking whatever it was the family gave him to smoke – "I didn't ask" – to take his mind off his broken arm, awake and alone blazing in a hut in Southeast Asia in the middle of the night.
Byrne called it the best idea he's ever had.
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Facilitating Online Identity Management
January 26, 2009 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software
Companies should make identity management easy within their online services. Specifically, it's becoming more and more desirable to have a "split my identity" feature.
For example, I have a Twitter account. Turns out I like Twitter. (It wasn't always the case.) Eventually I want to split my twitter stream into a personal stream and a business stream. The business stream would be open to followers. The personal stream I'd probably restrict to people I've met in person. When I'm posting about selecting music for vacuuming, that's personal-stream material. When I'm wishing out loud for a feature improvement in Adobe InDesign that can be public.
But what if I decide to split my streams after I have 100 followers, not all of whom belong on the personal list?
The current practice is to start announcing on the existing account that you have a new account – "if you haven't met me in person I'm planning to block you, so go follow me over at this new account." You might announce this every day for a week, perhaps a few times on the last couple of days, then go block everyone you haven't met in person.
Some followers will make the move, some won't. Unless you care a lot you probably won't track who fell off the list, especially if you have far more than 100 followers.
It would be better if I could choose which followers to "move" to the new account. That is, I would choose which followers will follow my new business account instead of my existing personal account – without any action on their part. I move their "following" subscription to another identity. Maybe they get an email letting them know.
That's it: no business rules, no criteria, no searching. Just a list of followers (rows) and maybe two columns of checkboxes – people could be on either or both lists.
This wonderful solution assumes that the service can associate my two accounts with each another. In other words, one person can have more than one account. For many services you are allowed to have more than one account, but many times the service uses your email address to create the unique account.
It's very convenient for developers to use an email address as a login – I've done it myself. It's convenient because it's guaranteed to be unique without any development effort. No downcasing, no uniqueness checking, the user doesn't have to remember lots of different login names, etc. But if every account requires a unique email, then this "split my identity" feature is very, very difficult – potentially impossible – to implement.
To allow each email address to have more than one identity is a very big architectural change if the initial design didn't account for this idea. Changing the one-to-one relationship of a login account to a one-to-many relationship will likely have a lot of "ripple effects" throughout the codebase, so the development cost will be very high. Thus the probability of developing the feature is low. Well-financed services can do whatever they need to do to service their users. Bootstraps and startups usually cannot.
Had the service started out with this idea it would be much easier to design and build, even if they didn't implement it at the start. This is a good example of the importance of key architectural decisions made early in the design process. Sometimes you know what you'll want to do in the future, and sometimes you don't. But it's worth spending enough time in the very earliest design stages to think through the implications of the trade-offs you're making.
In theory this problem is an aspect of what OpenID is supposed to solve, going further by abstracting across websites and services, not just within one service. It's designed by Brad Fitzpatrick, so it's probably the right idea. Reviewing the history you can see why, in general, adoption by developers is slow (but growing and accelerating). But even using OpenID, the service will have to build their data model around a one-to-many login/account relationship. Twitter's growth provides a good example of why the effort might be worth it.
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Link Love
January 16, 2009 | People & Society
Shout out to the The Macalope, who noted Notio's comment over at Megan McCardle's place, regarding her annoying Apple commentary. I had left an earlier comment, suggesting she use Daring Fireball as a primary source, but it didn't make it through moderation.
I was just connecting the dots between the Macalope nomination for Michael Wolff as jackass of the year, as outlined earlier today, and Megan, who failed to win this particular round, though not without consideration.
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Economics Blogs
January 9, 2009 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
I gave a talk to a local business group about blogs, Twitter, social media and all that, and one of the participants emailed asking for blog recommendations to learn more about economics. Here's what I suggested.
I think Umair Haque is by far the most interesting 'business strategy' writer right now. Strategy has to take account of economics, and he's pointing the way forward.
It would be hard to leave out Paul Krugman, having just won the Nobel Prize and all. I happen to agree with his politics, but he's worth reading even if you don't, simply because he's so dang smart.
Barry Ritholtz called BS on the housing market several years ago, and his irreverent take on things keeps him in my regular reading list. You will learn a lot about how to interpret relevant numbers and statistics from him.
Nouriel Rorbini is SUPER-smart, and was also a contrarian to the bubble mentality. His predictions will probably be scary, and more-so once you notice that he's been right most of the time.
There's the Freakonomics blog which is always interesting for always-different reasons.
Locally, Andrew Samwick of Dartmouth has always had good pointers and a take on things that doesn't always line up with my way of thinking.
Tyler Cowen gets a lot of linklove, and though I don't read him often, it's good to check in once in a while.
The Calculated Risk blog is interesting, as is The Cunning Realist in that they are anonymous, but the insight is obviously deep and worthwhile.
Probably the most important thing to do is follow links in the posts. When you find an author you like, and they link somewhere, it's like a citation to the background source. You'll often find good related blogs this way.
Also, look at blogrolls. These are the links of blogs the author scans regularly, something of a recommendation – "if you like this, you'll probably like that." For instance, the blogroll at Barry Ritholtz's blog is excellent for the econ topic.
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Introduction to Grateful Dead
January 8, 2009 | Arts & Culture | Life
So, you have a new friend, and one day she says, "You should burn me a Grateful Dead CD because I'm really not familiar with anything they've done." You say, "Sure," and a few minutes later your head explodes as you reel from the possibilities. It takes a week of full-time leisure-thought to sort it all out and find an entry point....
The catalog is vast. 30 years of concert performances. Over 3,000 shows, most of them available as recordings! Hundreds of songs in the repertoire. Dozens officially released concert CDs. Thousands upon thousands of authorized private non-commercial concert tapes and discs. The Internet Archive has 2,854 multi-hour downloads online, and it's certainly incomplete.
You start by wondering how your friends might answer this question. So you ask a few, and their first response is to laugh. "Wow, not sure. I don't know...." is the typical response before their voice trails off.
Do we start with the old experimental shows? (No.) Or the most modern powerhouse shows? (Maybe.) The middle years, at the peak of their creativity? (Possible.) Pigpen-era? Keith-ear? Brent-era? We certainly know enough not to start with the Vince era.
Do I burn something I like? Or something I think she will like? Do I pick something with clean sound, or something gritty, real, and otherworldly? Do I choose an official release so it's nicely edited, or a tape I recorded myself in the '80s?
When people asked this during the college years I'd just give them a copy of whatever I was listening to at the time. It was always changing, there was always more. If they liked it, or even if they didn't, we'd just bring 'em along the next time the Dead were playing nearby and see if they caught the live magic lightening. Or maybe they liked it a lot, and wanted to drink from the fire hose – they'd bring over a tape deck and spend the weekend copying cassettes. Tape flip every 45 minutes. Oh, the slow lazy days of real-time dubbing. Roll another one.
Today, virtually none of this is possible. We have only the recorded legacy, and a lot of it. Today, we burn 70-minute CDs in 14 minutes.
For starters, let's eliminate the studio albums. Although there are some worthy of listening, there's no sense in starting there. The Dead experience revolved around live performance. Maybe a Dick's Pick concert release? But then what to say? That 1971 show that turned Donni into a raving Deadhead? The 1983 one with a chunky Scarlet Fire? The '77 Fox Theater shows? That weird '74 Alexandra Palace show that makes you feel like you're tripping just listening to it? Maybe that '73 Oklahoma show because it has such a hot summer beer-drunk lazy vibe?
Dick's Picks narrows it down but doesn't really help the selection process. Maybe we should just have an all-Dead weekend and see how that goes....
How about if I just burn the five-disc chronological set, So Many Roads? This was put together by scholarly Deadheads, with carefully selected songs and thorough liner notes. It flows well, and you can start in the middle and work out toward the early and late years. But you don't want to overload. She just asked for a sample, a taste, you don't need to deliver a box-load of discs to paw through.
Maybe Dozin' at the Knick, that's a pretty safe bet. The playing is quite tight; the polish meets anyone's standards, and it's from a good era. But somehow, no. Can't tell you why. Probably a good second round offering.
What about an audience recording, like Lewiston 1980? Well, that was a short-lived thought. It is a rockin' fantastic show, and it seems like every Deadhead I know was there, except for me. And the audience recording on archive.org is a fantastic representation. But, man, that show is dead to the core. I think it's best left to round three or four.
What about a multi-track release like Go to Nassau? This was a contender, and I listened to it on my commute for two days. Strong contender. But, like Dozin', not quite right. A little too rock 'n roll, not enough representation of the thoughtful, mellow side. Yes, I know that High Time is rarely played and it's well-played on this release, but still.
It came down to eras. Late '70s, early '80s, or late '80s/early '90s. Each has their charms—and there are other options but these seem best for introductory material—and it depends a lot on what the prospect likes and listens to already.
In the end, I decided on the remastered versions of Reckoning and Dead Set. Two live recordings from 1980, when Brent was new but settled in, and highly polished in production. Reckoning is all acoustic, so you get the Folkie Country Dead, and Dead Set is electric, with the more typical sound. The innovative recording technique pioneered new ground, and the band, rarely allowed to play sophisticated and intimate venues like the Warfield Theater in SF and Radio City Music Hall in NYC, rose to the occasion with fresh, tight ensemble playing. The remastered versions are two discs each, with a lot of bonus material. It's still four discs – what can a deadhead say? – but split in half by the acoustic/electric difference.
I figured if that floats then round two will be a single show (complete experience), from the west coast (home field advantage), in a small venue (raise the stakes), from the Dan Healy era (psychoacoustic sound effects). So we're talkin' probably the Greek or the Frost, maybe Ventura, from the 1980's.
On a plane to Detroit I listened to a soundboard from 6/19/1989 (Greek Theater). It's a serious contender. The headphone experience was something else. The harmonic vocal processing, the stereo exchanger effects, the setlist, Garcia's heartfelt Candyman, Crazy Fingers, and Knockin' – really brought me back, I tell 'ya, even on a plane.
I think a full survey of the late-eighties Greek and Frost shows is in order, but if you had to choose today you could do a lot worse than the 6-19-89 at the Greek.
[I wrote this in August, 2006, but never posted it. I think I had intended to link up a lot of the text and never got to it. Decided to post it today without the link farming.]
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Stop Counting Calories!
January 8, 2009 | Life | Nature & Environment
It's amazing!! Did you know salad has almost no calories!?! But a bacon cheeseburger with fries and a coke is nearly a whole day's calorie budget! You can eat as many carrots as you want! - they're like free food calorie-wise. But ice creme, whoa! - smaller portions, please. And then, exercise: If I did almost ANYTHING in movement I could eat more junk food! That hour of snow shoveling this morning was worth a muffin or something, maybe even a chocolate croissant. Mowing the lawn for 90 minutes burns 900 calories - a guy could have a couple three beers on a sunny day and yet his beer-gut expansion would be neutralized. They say God works in mysterious ways....
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Yglesias and Ambinder and sometimes Klein
December 19, 2008 | People & Society
Now that the election is over, my main two politics blogs (i.e. daily) are Matt Yglesias and Marc Ambinder.
Yglesias came out of Harvard in 2002/3(?), did a stint at Talking Points, then the Atlantic, now at Think Progress. I like his focus on policy implications, with a snarky style that suits me.
Ambinder is a reporter at the Atlantic, with good sources and clear analysis. He's more of a "what's really going on" guy, which fits my insider identity. ;)
I still read Sullivan, but he's best when he's got a bone to pick, and after dispensing with Clinton, McCain, and Palin it will be a while before there's an opposing force of requisite magnitude.... (Although Rick Warren is taking the bait this week.)
I also kind of like Ezra Klein, who has a focus on healthcare. He's a little more rambling, and topically kind of all over the map, even for a blog, but worth checking maybe weekly, because when he's got it he's really got it. I actually really like his attitude; I can't really place why he's not a daily skim.
It's amazing how much time I reclaimed after the election. Some days I must have been spending three or four hours a day reading politics. I'm rationalizing that it was all part of raising the energetic vibration to get Obama elected....
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Downloading .asx video streams
October 21, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Software
Say there's an online video that is only available for real-time streaming, and you want to watch it offline at your non-'net convenience, like on a plane or on your iPhone. A lot of these streams have urls that end in .asx. If so, here are some (techie, Mac-centric) references that will let you download them and watch them later.
The Major MMS page is a good starting point. You'll quickly realize that the .asx file is just a redirector that has an mms:// url inside of it. In most cases you'll need to figure out what the mms:// url is.
Chris James Martin also had some good pointers, though his curl-based approach didn't work for me. I forget why, but I moved on.
You'll probably also end up at jwz's saving video streams page, no surprise. Short version:
mplayer -dumpstream -playlist url -dumpfile filename.wmv
Unfortunately, even after downloading the mplayer source, configuring, making, and installing it, this didn't work for me due to a "stream not seekable" error, which I could not debug, even with Google. Oh well, got some geeking in. Although it failed, and I didn't have the time to hone my ninja chops to master the source, this is probably the most promising long-term and flexible approach.
In the end, I used an application with a graphical interface to mmsclient, AFSRecorderX. You still have to figure out the mms:// url, and then you paste that into the url field, and choose "mmsclient" from the Tool pop-up menu. There is a "Select" button to choose a destination folder, but it doesn't do anything – everything is saved to the root (/) of your hard drive no matter what you point it to. Sometimes AFSRecorderX will spew a lot of information into the log section of the window, which you can ignore. It will not tell you when it's done; you'll have to occasionally check the file size of the download and eventually when it stops you can open the file and see if you got it all. Sometimes the log stops, and you think it's failed – you might reboot your computer, or even your network, and re-try several times. Only when you leave it alone long enough will you notice that the file size is indeed increasing, and it's working correctly. It's not apparent why the log is sometimes flying by like a 9600 baud modem, and why it sometimes stops dead, regardless of the success of the download. Despite the hackish nature of ASFRecorderX, it worked, and if you want the video badly enough it's currently the most straightforward approach.
Net-net, so to speak: The academic and corporate overlords that want you to watch video only in real-time streams are going to a lot of effort to make them hard to download. But, like all things code, if you're willing to go through your own personal video stream download hellfire, you can do it, because in the end, the data manipulates pixel-bits on the screen, and if you have access to the stream, you can do something with it.
The complete and total fall-back hack, the gawd-am-I-really-going-to-have-to-do-THIS? solution would be to use SnapzProX and make a real-time recording of the video window on your screen. I wasn't willing to stoop that low.
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Mostly Twittering
October 14, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Technology
Thoughts are shorter-form these days. Twitter is a good place to follow me. Example:
New Macbook video: http://bit.ly/1xNvDH Awesome emo marketing, utter techporn, richly deserves to be parodied.
So there's that....
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Here Is What Is
September 12, 2008 | Arts & Culture
It's a beautiful work of art, expressing a unique vision of music-making and the creative process. It is officially 93 minutes long, but there's another hour or more of extra footage, just as good as the main event. It is Daniel Lanois's movie, Here Is What Is, and I recommend it without hesitation. (Previously)
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Labor Day Weekend (Four-Day Edition)
September 2, 2008 | Life
- A beautiful and easy hike in the White Mountains with a friend.
- Sunburn.
- Great dinner out with said friend and our partners.
- Finally, a day to sleep in.
- One electrical outlet added.
- One closet light and switch removed.
- The lawn mowed.
- The dining room layout redesigned.
- Wow, Sara Palin.
- Another closet light and switch removed.
- Took advantage of big Home Depot paint sale and stocked in 15 gallons of paint and primer, in five colors and 2 tints.
- One visit to the emergency room due to a nail embedded in a 2x4 bashing and bouncing off the top of my head. Hey, head injuries bleed a lot!
- Lunch with mom and family.
- Supper with dad and family.
- Experimented with fruit fly trap. Incinerate or drown, that is the question.
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Byrne/Eno Return!
August 18, 2008 | Arts & Culture
Big news in music! The Website The NY Times story. And, the tour!
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Clay Shirky on Governance Models
July 18, 2008 | Cooperatives | Governance
Noted for the future: Chris Heuer interviews writer and speaker Clay Shirky. The important moment for me come in at around 10:15, continuing to the end, where he desires a new model for governance and corporate structures. He wants a co-op model, but doesn't know it yet. I plan to educate him.
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25 Seconds of Joy
June 25, 2008 | People & Society
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The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond
June 23, 2008 | Arts & Culture
This is the first philosophy article that ever seemed relevant to me.
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Better to ignore than to critique
June 23, 2008 | People & Society
dayna boyd: "In an attention economy, it's better to ignore than to critique."
I'm deeply disturbed by the proliferation of troll-like behavior in contemporary life. Why are public figures increasingly appearing whose whole identity is wrapped around driving others batty? Why does it seem as though more people are starting to write controversial books purely to make money off of the attention they receive when others attack them? Why are reputable publications publishing these authors' tirades against others that are intended specifically to draw them out in a public fight? I guess we know the answer... Or at least the equation. Attention = money. And in the world of media, attention = advertising revenue.
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Desiderata
June 19, 2008 | Arts & Culture
It's worth reading Desiderata once in a while:
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
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Up and Out (1:40)
June 10, 2008 | Life | Technology
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Hot Dating Tip [SF, CA, USA]
June 9, 2008 | People & Society | Software | Technology
It's sweeping generalizations day at Notio!
I guess it's kind of a semi-secret, but once you crack the code, dating geeks is a really good move. Granted, the male/female ratio is unbalanced – but generally, if you're a woman and you're looking for a guy, you could do a heck of a lot worse than finding a cool geek to hang out with. The girl geeks tend to be really cool too, there are just fewer of them.
Here's a post that gives you the downlow howto. The comments there flesh it out. Here's another one a little more cliched. But their summary is good:
Why Geek Dudes Rule
- They are generally available.
- Other women will tend not to steal them.
- They can fix things.
- Your parents will love them.
- They're smart.
This post is decent too. The classic essay on dating geeks is called Dating an Apple Developer by Emily Hambidge, but the link is currently broken; maybe it will come back.
The reason I bring it all up is, this week in San Francisco CA, there are 5,200 Macintosh and iPhone developers – programmers, engineers, ubergeeks – mostly age ~16 to ~50, congregating downtown at The Moscone Center for Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC). These are the people who designed and built things like the iMac and the iPod and the iPhone. There are over 1,000 Apple engineers (SF local) on-site. As Kathryn said this weekend, "Hot dating pool."
Even better, Apple has provided a two-hour keynote stream live on the Internet. Why would you want to spend two hours watching Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller (and a dozen other geeky guys) do technology demos? Well, when you go crawling the hotels and pubs around Moscone, this is what everyone will be talking about. It's rocking their world. They're hanging with their peeps, and life is good. The video is two hours of ultimate inside conversation starters, background info, and geek dude archetypes. It's like a briefing book for engaging with the hot geeks this week.
If you're single in SF, go down to the Moscone at the end of the day and follow the packs of geeks to the pizza and beer joints, and ask them what's cool at the conference, or what cool iPhone apps they've seen.
And if you miss this year, it's an annual event, usually in June, so just come another time.
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Crusty old out-of-it white guy
June 4, 2008 | Governance | People & Society
History Train: "It really will say something about this country if Obama, with all his intellect, his verbal gifts and his strategic canniness, ends up losing to a crusty old out-of-it white guy who left his principles in the dumpster years ago and has nothing to offer this country but the chance for conservatives to go on playing Jack Bauer and G.I. Joe for another four years."
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Obama's Electoral Map
May 21, 2008 | Governance | People & Society
Must read for any political junkie. via Dave Winer
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Approximately one in four odds, depending on your bias
May 19, 2008 | Life
Days can be characterized in one of four ways: Outstanding, Fine, Difficult, and Off.
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Loop and chill
May 19, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Nature & Environment
One-hour hand-recorded 54MB mp3 of Ocean Beach waves, San Francisco, 2008-05-14. Loop and chill. A gift, via Jessamyn.
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Summary of political pundantry today
May 16, 2008 | Governance | People & Society
In only four minutes!
Matt Yglesias: "Conservative radio host Kevin James is on Hardball to call Barack Obama and appeaser, and Chris Matthews hits upon the nice idea of asking James to explain what it was that Chamberlain did wrong at Munich. As becomes apparent, James has no idea! He just likes to say "appeasement" a lot, but doesn't know what it means, what the context was, what was wrong with it, or how it might possibly apply today. Basically, he's an idiot, which is no surprise, but it is rare to see these things so amply demonstrated."
