Archive for February, 2009

F2C: Freedom to Connect — the very latest information

Feb 24

[Note: This item comes from friend David Isenberg. DLH]

From: “David S. Isenberg (isen)” <isen@isen.com>
Date: February 23, 2009 7:41:15 AM PST
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
Subject: F2C: Freedom to Connect — the very latest information

Dewayne,

The readers of DewayneNet may be interested in the
newest additions to the program of
F2C: Freedom to Connect
March 30 & 31, Washington DC.
http://freedom-to-connect.net
(Note: Price goes up $100 on February 28!)

The speakers announced below join already-announced
speakers such as the CIO of San Francisco, the CTO of
Seattle, the Chief Technologist of the FCC, and the
visionaries of Lafayette LA and Burlington VT municipal
networks.

Also, see announcements below:
+ F2C Musician in Residence: 2009 Grammy Winner!
+ Special hotel deal for F2C participants.
+ New Collaborating Partners.
+ F2C on Facebook.

SPEAKERS:

1) Kevin Werbach was co-leader of President Obama’s
FCC Transition Team. He also produces the high-powered,
well-respected SuperNova tech conference, and he authored
the 1999 FCC report entitled, “Digital Tornado.”
Kevin will discuss his experiences on the Obama FCC
Transition and the prospects for the new FCC.

2) Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for
Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State
University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism
and Mass Communication. He’s also Kauffman Professor
of digital media entrepreneurship. The Knight Center
is working to help create a culture of innovation and
risk-taking in journalism education, and in the wider
media world. Dan will interview Kevin Werbach.

3) Billy Ray, CEO, Glasgow (KY) Electric Power Board,
In the mid-80s, Billy was spurred by energy crisis #2 and
an unresponsive cableco to create a broadband network for
the citizens of Glasgow KY. By 2001 it was serving 75% of
Glasgow’s households at less than 60% of the U.S. average
price. Today Ray is building FTTH and thinking about how
fiber can asuage the need for new electric power plants.
I think of Billy Ray as the Father of Muni Networking in
the United States. More: http://tinyurl.com/2kto5f

4) Andrew C. Revkin is the New York Times science reporter
on the “beat” of global climate disruption. He travels
the world, witnessing first-hand changes that may
indicate bigger changes to come. He’s surfing the edge
of Internet reporting on his blog dotEarth
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/ . . .

5) L. Aaron Kaplan will discuss how Vienna Austria’s
community-built, community-owned, 500-device, 30-km
diameter, Wi-Fi mesh network, free-of-charge to its
users has achieved financial sustainability. More:
https://map.funkfeuer.at/wien/

MUSICIAN IN RESIDENCE:

John Jorgenson Quintet!!! John Jorgenson just won Best
Country Instrumental at the 2009 Grammys. The winning
song, “Cluster Pluck” is aptly named theme music for a
Washington DC discussion of telecom and Internet policy.
John’s previous honors include winning “best guitarist”
three years in a row from the Academy of Country Music.
The John Jorgenson Quintet plays hot, hot, hot Django
Reinhardt-style Gypsy Jazz. The quintet boasts burning
jazz fiddler Jason Anick and a rhythm section so smokin
I’ve bought carbon credits.
http://johnjorgenson.com

SPECIAL HOTEL DEAL:

The brand new Hampton Inn, across the street from F2C
and down a block, has offered us a real deal — just
under $180 a night, which is substantially cheaper than
any other hotel within walking distance.
YOU MUST CONTACT THE MANAGER PERSONALLY to get this deal:
Aloysious Cory Phillips, Sales Manager
Phone: 301-563-3843
Email: aloysious.phillips@hilton.com

COLLABORATING PARTNERS

F2C depends on word-of-web to get the word out!
Here are a few of the Collaborating Partners who
are helping us with publicity, and what they’re up to:

FTTH Council: Fiber to the Home Council is a non-profit
organization dedicated to the advancement of fiber to
the home networks. It has been a major driving force
in bringing fiber to American homes. It is also very
active in Europe and Asia. It’s holding a service
provider workshop open to all in New Orleans, March 11.
Agenda here [.pdf] http://tinyurl.com/dhkjng that
will include a very knowledgeable analysis of what’s
in the Obama stimulus package to spur FTTH networks
by Tom Cohen. I went to the FTTH Workshop in Petaluma
CA — a most fascinating day! The FTTH Council annual
meeting, also open, is another great event featuring
the superstars of fiber — this year it is scheduled
for Houston, Sept. 27 through Oct. 1, info at
http://ftthconference.com

DSL Prime and and FastNetNews: Dave Burstein, editor,
is a close observer of the Internet scene, an original
who talks to everybody and calls it like he sees it
without regard for convention or what passes as wisdom.
I’m delighted to give him a plug, and I appreciate his
heartfelt enthusiasm for F2C!
http://dslprime.com/
http://fastnetnews.com — “Often interesting reporting.”

New America Foundation: The New America Foundation
hosts the public-spirited network work of my friends
Michael Calabrese and Sascha Meinrath. Sascha’s
co-chairing an F2C panel on “What we can learn from
Networking Failures,” and he’s one of the prime movers
behind M-Lab http://measurementlab.net a suite of
tools announced two weeks ago designed to assess the
quality and neutrality your Internet connection.
http://newamerica.net/programs/wireless_future

Personal Democracy Forum: How Technology is Changing
Politics . . .
PDF’s organizers, Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are
friends and mentors. The annual PDF conference in June
2008 was stellar, unmissable. This year’s PDF event
has not been announced yet, but it is certain to
be better. This is from the heart: I love these
guys and the spectacular events they do!
http://www.personaldemocracy.com/

OpinionSource is a service that consolidates and
summarizes Op-Eds and other opinion materials,
and puts them all in one place, or slices and dices,
e.g., you can get the daily China summary, the
Middle East summary, etc. Friend Jack Hidary runs
this worthy operation. http://opinionsource.com/

F2C ON FACEBOOK

Join the Facebook event. Invite your friends.
http://www.facebook.com/reqs.php#/event.php?eid=69047882728
or http://tinyurl.com/bj8cvr

The price goes up 100 bucks after February 28,
so please register asap.

I’ll see you at F2C on March 30 & 31.
Call or write if you have any questions!
David I
——————
203-661-4798 (main number, follows me everywhere)
888-isen.com (toll free)
AIM, Skype, Y!IM: david_isenberg
http://isen.com/blog
http://freedom-to-connect.net
——————

Start Up the Risk-Takers

Feb 24

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

February 22, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist
Start Up the Risk-Takers
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/opinion/22friedman.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all>

Reading the news that General Motors and Chrysler are now lining up for another $20 billion or so in government aid — on top of the billions they’ve already received or requested — leaves me with the sick feeling that we are subsidizing the losers and for only one reason: because they claim that their funerals would cost more than keeping them on life support. Sorry, friends, but this is not the American way. Bailing out the losers is not how we got rich as a country, and it is not how we’ll get out of this crisis.

G.M. has become a giant wealth- destruction machine — possibly the biggest in history — and it is time that it and Chrysler were put into bankruptcy so they can truly start over under new management with new labor agreements and new visions. When it comes to helping companies, precious public money should focus on start-ups, not bailouts.

You want to spend $20 billion of taxpayer money creating jobs? Fine. Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today because their partners — university endowments and pension funds — are tapped out, and make them this offer: The U.S. Treasury will give you each up to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come your way. If they go bust, we all lose. If any of them turns out to be the next Microsoft or Intel, taxpayers will give you 20 percent of the investors’ upside and keep 80 percent for themselves.

If we are going to be spending billions of taxpayer dollars, it can’t only be on office-decorating bankers, over-leveraged home speculators and auto executives who year after year spent more energy resisting changes and lobbying Washington than leading change and beating Toyota.

I’ve been traveling all across the country on a book tour, and every evening I return to my hotel with my pockets full of business cards from inventors in clean energy. Our country is still bursting with innovators looking for capital. So, let’s make sure all the losers clamoring for help don’t drown out the potential winners who could lift us out of this. Some of our best companies, such as Intel, were started in recessions, when necessity makes innovators even more inventive and risk-takers even more daring.

[snip]

Like Paper for Oil and Guns for Butter: Why the Economy is Frozen

Feb 24

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

Like Paper for Oil and Guns for Butter: Why the Economy is Frozen

By: Stirling Newberry
Saturday February 21, 2009 5:01 pm
<http://firedoglake.com/2009/02/21/like-paper-for-oil-and-guns-for-butter-why-the-economy-is-frozen/>

Paper for Oil and Guns for Butter

I have a small part in the lore of Robert J. Barro, macro-economist. I stumbled across the fact that he did not have a wikipedia entry. This was absurd, so I scrawled something quickly – Barro being one of the most widely cited and important macro thinkers of the last generation. Recently he’s been saying some things about the crisis that are dumber than they sound, and smarter than they seem. He is writing as a partisan right winger on economics, and the party line is that cutting corporate income taxes would be “brilliant.” You know, the way invading Iraq was “brilliant.” No, really. Let me explain.

The global economy for the last generation has been a working out of a paper for oil cycle. The US forms the basis of paper, this is sold to the oil producers. The US consumes with this, and provides global security. Other nations then sell consumer goods, primarily to the US, and buy their energy needs with it. This means everyone is attached to a system of trade that swaps Paper for Oil, or Guns for Butter. Here guns can be broadly thought of as including all of the access to the industrial and mechanized world. Hence China provides cheap labor, in order to get access to that technology. The technology they need to build their own economy, including their own guns.

What’s in it for you. And you. And you. But not you.

Everyone who matters gets something:

   * The elites of the resource flow economies get to stay on top, and get access to a world of uber-luxury that would not exist absent there being a large supply of billionaires in the world.
   * The elites of the developed world get a very narrow game, and control over a pipe of money which cannot be disturbed. They also get access to uber-luxury that they would not have in purely Democratic world. Democratic orders have no need for 50,000 dollar a night hotel rooms.
   * The middle class of the developed world gets to over-consume, and to be infantile about politics. Elections don’t matter for the size of the pie, just who gets it. Two words people: muffin top.
   * The elites of developing nations get a crack at joining the first world if they can figure out how to make consumer goods for the first world.

It’s important to realize that this cycle started in a faltering way under Nixon, but was established by Thatcher-Reagan, and has been maintained ever since, with several crisis points. More or less, the President of the United States was the interface between “deep liquidity,” and the American public. The central banks dominated the monetary economy, and sanitized most of what elected officials did. Elected officials, for their part, since they didn’t have to worry about maintaining equilibrium or pareto optimality – economic words for “things are as good as they get without being unstable” – could spend their entire time fighting over the “guns versus butter” knob.

Why this worked is rooted in Barro’s famous paper on the Ricardan Equivalence Hypothesis: basically, if infinitely long lived rational profit maximizing trolls see that a government gives a tax cut and runs a deficit, they will just buy government bonds to pay the eventual tax increase. This is not as strange as it sounds, many early versions of paper money were issued for silver, with the proviso that one could pay taxes in the notes, or in silver, later.

However, there are some holes in this thesis. The most important one is the well known problem that in theory the best corporate bonds should pay the same as government bonds, because if big corporations get in trouble, either the government will have to bail them out, or bail out the results of their bankruptcy. However, in practice, the two never do. So our profit maximizing trolls realize “Wait, I can buy corporate paper, take the better return, and pocket the difference. This is because if it every does come to the worst, the government can’t increase taxes, but will have to borrow more any way. So if nothing goes wrong, I make an arbitrage profit, if everything does go wrong, well, we are all eating babies.” Even better would be to invest in a basket of stocks, because that basket has to do somewhat better than treasuries, and again, if the basket of stocks tanks, then the government has no credible threat to tax in the short term anyway.

The hole then is that while fearful profit maximizing immortal trolls take the bonds and wait, greedy profit maximizing immortal trolls try and use arbitrage to enhance their returns without increasing their real risk. And since they are the ones that fund the economy, they can make the bet that if things go wrong, that the government will be very nice to them. The problem then isn’t the amount of oil, it is that there are pockets in the global economy which produce a great deal more than they consume, and can keep it this way by decapitating or otherwise liquidating parts of their population that complain, and buying off the rest with military adventures.

There are subsidiary benefits, for example, it means that the developed world could persistently underfund the future retirement benefits, because banks can effectively tax the developed world and that money can be used later to pay retirement.

For all these reasons, Obama, and virtually everyone else, no matter what their sympathies of left and right are, has been trying to maintain the financial infrastructure, because that is the wheel that needs to start turning again. Every bank in the world is now located on the Road to Wigan Pier: we have the apparatus for credit, but it is idle, and people are now fighting for scraps.

This is why Iraq was an insane solution to a real problem. Recall that one of the groups of people left out of the paper for oil, and guns for butter.

[snip]

Re: The Big Fix

Feb 22

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

[Note: This comment comes from friend Steve Schear. DLH]

From: Steven Schear <schear.steve@googlemail.com>
Date: February 21, 2009 10:21:18 AM PST
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>, David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: Re: [Dewayne-Net] The Big Fix

February 1, 2009

The Big Fix

By DAVID LEONHARDT

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/magazine/01Economy-t.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all>

I. WHITHER GROWTH?

The economy will recover. It won’t recover anytime soon. It is likely to get

significantly worse over the course of 2009, no matter what President Obama

and Congress do. And resolving the financial crisis will require both

aggressiveness and creativity. In fact, the main lesson from other crises of

the past century is that governments tend to err on the side of too much

caution — of taking the punch bowl away before the party has truly started

up again. “The mistake the United States made during the Depression and the

Japanese made during the ’90s was too much start-stop in their policies,”

Once governments finally decide to use the enormous resources at their

disposal, they have typically been able to shock an economy back to life.

They can put to work the people, money and equipment sitting idle, until the

private sector is willing to begin using them again. The prescription

developed almost a century ago by John Maynard Keynes does appear to work.

Seriously, what is happening is not in fact that unheard of, nor was
it entirely unpredictable, even though nobody did in fact predict it.
But economics is entirely a 20/20 hindsight affair, and aside from
some basic ‘rules’ that allow a fairly accurate prediction of likely
outcomes, there are no certainties.

One such rule is that the more the government meddles in an economy,
the worse the outcome will ultimately be.

The second rule is that the longer the government meddles in an
economy the longer the downturn will take.

The third rule is that it is impossible to reliably predict anything
as complex as the human interaction that comprises The Market with the
limited availability of contributing data and ever shifting short-term
motivations.

Now, all that aside, there are ways to identify probable trends (based
on hindsight and mass psychology), but these would result in very
broad predictions.

As an example of what has happened in crisis situations in the past,
and adjusted for the likely situation we are currently in, most
consumers will suffer from the benefits of deflation in the earlier
stages of this recession. Suffer because they don’t know what to do
and will likely miss the brief window of opportunity in a year or two.
And benefit of deflation, because prices of capital goods will fall
and inefficiencies will be flushed out of the system – if the
government finally lets it happen.

The hardship period of rising unemployment and falling production will
be prolonged by governments rewarding inefficiencies with stimulus
packages and punishing profitable companies by protecting their
competitors, while also severely limiting the inherent ability of the
market to allocate resources in the most useful manner.

At that stage we will reach a fork in the road. Either government
succeeds with mis-allocating resources and props up the economy to an
extent where statistics suggesting growth can be forged again, or it
doesn’t. The way it looks right now, they will probably fail at it
this time, which is technically a good thing.

If they fail, then there are again two options. Either the government
continues trying and ultimately begins to outright confiscate means of
production and distribution, in a vein attempt to micromanage the
entire economy – the path to socialism and the ultimate collapse of
everything in a couple of generations – or the government practically
gives up, allowing the market to heal itself. Of course, the government
is unlikely to adopt a hands off policy, and the only reason they
might forgo the outright socialism path is the probability that they
would face an open rebellion if they did it too quickly.

That then leaves the following scenario:
The stimulus packages will not achieve anything, but prologue the
ordeal, and keep the government in power while the masses wait for the
packages to trickle down to them.

In the meantime the economy muddles through for a couple of years,
inadvertently creating opportunities for the entrepreneurial class. At
one stage towards the beginning of the reversal – I’d say in about two
years – clever operators will buy up everything of value they can lay
their hands on. When growth starts kicking in, they will leverage what
they have and buy even more, because they can be reasonably certain
that inflation is just around the corner.

Then, a year or so later, the price of the stimulus packages starts to
hit home. Gallopping inflation wipes out whatever savings survived the
depression of the previous two years, but also wipes out the loans
those clever lever handlers took on. And in about five years from now,
we’ll get a currency reform.

In other words, the rich and a few smart individuals will get
substantially richer, everybody else will lose everything.

Then the market gets to run things again for a few years until the
whole thing starts all over again. Well, unless government does in
fact chose the outright socialism path. Then things get much much
worse.

Dewayne-Net Technology Weblog

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