Jerry Brown on Oakland’s Sideshows (a new term for me). Brown also posts a useful quote from Clint Eastwood. (read the comments)
Tim Draper on Skype, Telco’s and the VC Business
Draper is acknowledged as the inspiration behind the term “viral marketing” via his hotmail investment. Interesting interview.
We often list all the problems in society, and the politicians would make you believe that they’re going to solve all those problems.
Generally, I’d say it goes the other way. Businesses solve a lot of the world’s problems. The next big energy breakthrough will happen through a business.
The next big environmental breakthrough similarly could happen through a business. Medicine has been advanced through business. It turns out that it’s the businesspeople that tend to be the ones who solve all this stuff.
South Korea: World’s Most Wired Society
While we fiddle with poor (slow) broadband penetration and the incumbent telco’s try to stop any other approaches, such as municipally backed networks, South Korea surges (the US is currently 13th in global broadband penetration). Birgitta Forsberg takes a look at South Korea’s winning ways.
Open Records & Election Flaws
Greg Borowski continues his excellent coverage on local election flaws:
In the United States, your ballot is secret, but almost everything else about an election is part of the public record: Who voted and at what ward. Where they live. How old they are. Even what number they were in line.
Until recently, that is.
At least in Wisconsin, where a 2003 change in state law put the birth dates of voters off limits to the public, making it nearly impossible to determine whether someone voted twice, a felon voted improperly, or someone voted as a dead person.
And in Milwaukee, where officials have denied access – for now – to nearly all information about the Nov. 2 election, citing an ongoing local-federal investigation into possible voter fraud.
The irony: The investigation was started only after the Journal Sentinel revealed a host of problems about the election – including 7,000 votes that are unaccounted for – by examining information it obtained through open records requests.
Wisconsin’s Gateway Patrol Gets High Marks
BootFinder & Carjacking
New Haven city marshals, armed with a new tool that photographs auto license plates
and instantly matches them against a tax scofflaw database, had towed
Byers’ car right out of his driveway.
More on the changing advertising landscape
Several recent articles on the changing advertising landscape (struggling to keep up with our changing habits):
- Newspaper quality & quantity circulation continue to decline. More here.
- Terry Heaton on what happens when consumers reject advertising.
More on the Bad Bankruptcy Bill that Kohl voted for
Joshua Trevino calls the bankruptcy bill a “breach of faith,” and observes, “When it passes — and it will — it will be thanks purely to the Republican Party.” via instapundit. More here: red states have it worse under the bill, interestingly enough…. Interesting Republican payback. I still don’t understand Kohl’s support for this…
Malcolm Gladwell at the UW on Blink
New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and more recently, Blink, spoke a the UW Wednesday evening. Here’s an excerpt of his talk [Quicktime video | mp3] This was an interesting evening.