Thought for the day: “TV was this kind of box that people watched before they had computers.”
Something to think about while watching …
Ted Cruz, candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, joins the effort to STOP SOPA:
We can all agree that stealing intellectual property online or elsewhere is wrong, but SOPA and Protect IP bills are the wrong solutions to stop it. These bills threaten free speech and damage liberty. Needless to say, the Internet has transformed the way people receive and exchange information, and opened new doors for the sharing of ideas. The amazing innovations online are a product of a market relatively free of government regulation. In fact, the web is an example for the wider economy — that we should not trade innovation and vibrancy for stifling regulation.
It’s gratifying to see conservative leaders getting on the right side of this issue and bill.
SOPA is not only DOA in the House, but Senate Republicans are now set to block it in Senate. From Senator Cornyn:
U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, joined Sens. Grassley (R-IA), Hatch (R-UT), Sessions (R-AL), Coburn (R-OK), and Lee (R-UT) in sending a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) requesting him to delay consideration of S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), so that concerns with the proposed legislation can be addressed.
“We strongly believe that the theft of American intellectual property is a significant problem that must be addressed to protect property rights,” the Senators wrote. “However, for both substantive and procedural reasons, the process at this point is moving too quickly and this step may be premature.”
The effort to stop SOPA and its regulation of the internet is succeeding.
RedState reports a Hill story saying SOPA is dead in the GOP House:
The President went mushy on SOPA, Harry Reid and Senate Democrats decided to push forward, but Eric Cantor, Darrell Issa, and House Republicans want to kill the bill. That’s a clear, bright line, folks.
I think I found a way to explain to my anti-Obama conservative friends how bad SOPA is while explaining to my Tech friends in a tizzy over SOPA how bad Obamacare is:
SOPA is the Obamacare of the technology and media industries
With one nefarious difference – SOPA is (ugg) bipartisan special interest legislation. With SOPA, you have conservative Republican Congressman Lamar Smith joining with liberal Democrat Senator Pat Leahy (Protect IP bill) and assorted other Congress-critters to do the bidding of Big Media (represented in DC by RIAA) with a bill to clamp down on ‘pirates’ in a blunderbuss, over-the-top, over-regulatory manner.
The SOPA/ProtectIP bills, the sponsors claim, will fight ‘piracy’, but they are restricting freedom, innovation and consumer choice. In recent news, Lamar Smith removes DNS blocking from SOPA, but it is a small victory, not a real fix of the underlying problem. The problem is this bill has a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ manner allowing the blacklisting of whole sites based on infringements from user-provided content. It directly assaults the ‘pro-sumer’ user-generated-content social networking communities that have built up in 10 years. As commneter in the above article notes:
They are well-intentioned. They want to prevent piracy and copyright infringement. But they do so in an overly-aggressive, innovation-endangering way. They allow the entertainment industry to censor sites they feel “engage in, enable or facilitate” infringement.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes SOPA as the “blacklist bill” because it would “allow the U.S. government and private corporations to create a blacklist of censored websites, and cut many more off from their ad networks and payment providers.”
These concerns are creating a firestorm of opposition from both the left and the right – on the right Redstate has promised to ‘primary’ SOPA supporters with conservative opponents.
Obamacare is likewise rife with massive dangerous unintended consequences that stifles both innovation, freedom, and choice. Alas, there wasn’t a twitter campaign to “STOP OBAMACARE”, but it is gratifying that this particular effort to defend freedom and choice is making an impact and is being felt.
STOP SOPA now … defeat Obamacare later (by defeating Obama in November). Doing both will be good for freedom.
The Application Development Landscape – 2012 and beyond
– a summary of the trends in computing and applications from a very high / macro level: PaaS, Saas and cloud computing; move to continuous deployment (DevOps); PaaS becomes “new OS for apps”; mobile internet is 10X, with move to mobile/social/local; big data and analytics; social moves to enterprise; consumerization of IT; gamification; HTML5; components and APIs.
This thought was inspired by reading Evan Baehr on compassionate conservatism. It’s clear that the compassionate conservatism of the Bush Presidency has become discredited amongst ‘real’ conservatives, who saw only more Big Government in it. Evan walks through a history of it, with a look to its future; he concludes:
Conservatives ought to revisit these Tocquevillian truths, adapt them to modern public policies, and develop a powerful brand around them. While the platform probably cannot be called “compassionate conservatism,” it ought to be based on this set of truths, which are key to sustaining human flourishing.
Which ‘Tocquevillian truths’? It can be found in the American spirit of voluntary civic-mindedness. Evan states: ” we need to learn from and uphold private sector models. Social entrepreneurs should not be liberal democrats. ” Indeed! He adds:
Conservatives ought to encourage and highlight this incredible social entrepreneurship and even innovative CSR models that effectively use private models to solve public problems.
Compassionate conservatism has been about addressing social problems (poverty, illiteracy etc.) via conservative means. Conservative (in US terms) means are freedom-based, Burkean ‘little platoons’ of independent volunteer efforts. If I was to give a correct and proper definition of ‘compassionate conservative’ it would be that: Using private-sector, free and civil society institutions and methods to solve public societal problems. Private charter and parochial schools, your local Rotary Club, the Salvation Army, those are the ‘little platoons’ of voluntary social charitable action.
As we have seen innovation being used in addressing societal issues, the term ‘social entrepreneurship’ has come about. If, as I defined in a previous blog post, an entrepreneur is an opportunity-seeker who disregards lack of resources, a ‘social entrepreneur’ is one who seeks to improve societal conditions in new ways without regards to resource or other status quo constraints. Break rules to solve society’s problems! Blaze new ways to serve others! The line between entrepreneur and ‘social entrepreneur blurs under this definition, because in effect the only difference is the path to monetizing and paying for whatever valuable social change is created. The social entrepreneur innovates via private-sector means to solve public problems.
The ‘compassionate Conservatism’ of President Bush failed because it became the oxymoronic big-government conservatism where bureaucrats made funding decisions. There is no way for government funding to not be this way. Inevitably, Government is about rules and regulations, and taking from one person by force to give to another, and those stymie innovation and limit freedom.
Social entrepreneurship is far different, but closer to what conservatives should embrace as an ideal – of not having monolithic central control but a diversity of free institutions making headway and doing good. Lauren Bush’s FEED efforts is a better example of compassionate conservatism than what her uncle did as Bush43; (yes, she says she is non-political, but she is one of those ‘thousand points of light’ her grandfather Bush41 spoke of). And this quote from the article about her efforts is a good example of why we NEED social entrepreneurs:
“There was just one problem [with a UN program]: Their efforts to get the UN to sell the bag ran into so many legal and logistical snafus that the project nearly collapsed.”
The classic large bureaucratic means for achieving things, including social ‘good’, is often a failed, clumsy, and expensive path to failure. Social entrepreneurs are finding new ways, working around the limits of the status quo and of bureaucracies. Recently, some conservatives have (properly) rallied to defend private equity’s role in our free market system (defending Romney).
Bottom-line: Conservatives should embrace ‘social entrepreneurship’ as strongly as they embrace entrepreneurship – it’s the ideal of ‘compassionate conservatism’ in action.
I’ve been looking into co-working spaces in Austin – there’s Conjunctured, Co-Space and Co-create to choose from - and via conjunctured found this: Redefining Coworking by Dusty Reagan. He asserts that co-working is a verb: “If you’re working and socializing, you’re coworking.” Excellent point to keep in mind, as the benefits of co-working are about the serendipity of community and the value of relationship-building outside the boundaries of a firm, vital to any small business or startup. you don’t need a co-working space to do this … but it helps.
Inc. magazine has an answer to the question What’s an Entrepreneur? The Best Answer Ever was conceived 37 years ago by HBS professor Howard Stevenson:
Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.
Of course, one can pursue opportunity in different ways. Everyone who gets up and goes to work is pursuing opportunity. While attending a pitch session for startups this week, it occurred to me that a pitch for a business has the same elements of a job interview – we all at some point need to sell ourselves or show something of value in what we’ve done or plan to do.
However, the difference is the level of uncertainty and control. Entrepreneurs don’t have a path laid forward where they can just ‘show up for work’ do work defined for them and get paid.
Many become entrepreneurs to ‘control’ their fate, but in fact the key challenge is dealing with so much outside one’s control, and the very uncertainty of that environment, customers, etc. What makes a job a ‘steady job’ is predictability and the way companies create a situation for productive work: Defined business model, defined roles, defined value. All this equals ‘steady income’ in a ‘steady job’.
In a startup, none of things are defined in certain terms as the business model itself is being constructed. Eric Reis defined a startup as “A human institution designed to deliver a product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” For those entrepreneurs who already created and have a working business model, they’ve managed to squeeze out the uncertainty of startups, but still are captains of a ship that needs steering.
As the Inc. article points out and has been noted elsewhere, entrepreneurs, contrary to myth, are not necessarily risk-seekers. They have enough risk thank you. What they are instead are opportunity optimizers. If I gamble, I want to play the ‘house’ and put the odds in my favor, while doing everything to minimize downside and maximize upside.
The entrepreneurial difference is pursuing opportunity by disregarding artificial limits, turning closed doors into open doors, seeing opportunity others can’t see, taking necessary risks to establish a business, and overcoming what to others might be insurmountable obstacles. As in many other ‘learn by doing’ endeavors, I’ll learn best what an entrepreneur is by simply being one.
Samsung and LG are showing some amazing large-screen OLED TVs at CES, leading Forbes contributor Michael Kanellos to opine that OLED TVs Could Really Be Real This Time. If we follow the usual technology trajectory, gadget-lovers will start buying them in 2013-2014, it will go mainstream in 2015, and by 2019, we’ll finally decide we need to keep up with everyone else and get it in our home.
In our household, we had a perfectly serviceable CRT TV and decided to keep it until it broke down; it never did; I finally decided to get a flat screen TVlast year. Our working CRT TV went to goodwill. The 2 PCs, 4 laptops and various hard drives and devices in our home are evidence of the aging-but-working device pileup. gadgets become technologically outdated well before they actually break down. my contribution in the tech world to making this situation worse in a small way? Today I just was going over a patent application with a lawyer on a patent I have to provide more accurate SOC/ chip-timing to account for semiconductor aging effects; Freescale designs parts, in particular automotive parts, for 10+ years of life, and accurate timing for aging effects means better performance with longer life, so your 2012 model car will have working electronics in 2025.
So in the next decade, you will not only have an OLED TV that will be superthin and energy-efficient and blow you away in terms of color and sharpness, but also you will have so many old LCD and other displays, devices in working order, you will be wondering what to do with them all.
