Thursday, July 3, 2003

Whether you agree with him or not, Howard Dean is doing some interesting grass root work with his blog and video. It seems he has taped into some real anger in the Democratic party (much of it is frustration with the party itself) and has the other candidates asking questions. Will the grassroot efforts on both sides shift to the Net with time? Can they avoid such a shift? 10:05:43 AM     Dan Gillmor pointed out a Washington Post piece on privacy and web businesses. (of course this sort of thing isn't unique to web businsses). It seems reasonable to not do business with companies that do this sort of thing. The best line in the article is: Some companies, like psycho ex-boyfriends, tend to see relationships where they don't exist 8:11:07 AM     So what happens when normal telemarketing becomes painful for telemarketers? The simple way for consumers to deal with this is to refuse to do business with any company that does this to you. If the people who add themselves to the do not call registry adtoped this practice you would see most of the companies who tried it go out of business. An interesting question is how many people need to move their business to put an offending company out of business. This could be a very interesting project for the blogging world. The dark side is that marketers are beginning to use blogs and other mechanisms (they've been using chat rooms for more than a decade) to influence behavior. 5:53:23 AM     This is very interesting ... cameraphones are popping up everywhere and people are beginning to realize there is a great potential for abuse. A proposal in South Korea would make people aware of their use. In any event their use is extremely interesting socially. 5:47:29 AM     Most economists seem to agree that consumer spending is the major thread holding the economy together - corporations basically gave up on investment a few years ago and aren't showing many signs of returning to the table. Tax cuts for the rich seem to be a fantasyland (and most economists agree) if your goal is job creation (of course they are very important if your goal is keeping a powerful political base happy). If Iraq doesn't mire down, if there aren't any major terrorist events in the US and if the job situation doesn't get worse Bush will probably walk away with the election. But now comparisons with Hoover are being made. The Bush target of a million new jobs is lame to begin with, but may be difficult. (it would be interesting to see what the nature of those jobs are ... does it constitute under employment, or are they real jobs?) 5:25:54 AM     Not all soldiers serve their country in the same way. 5:11:58 AM     Some time ago I built a variety of electrostatic motors (the physics dept I was associated with had several high voltage DC sources, so -- why not?). None of them were particularly good, but thinking about Ben Franklin (recently featured in magazines) got me thinking about this again. A bit of searching turns up numerous plans. This one seems very easy to build. I recommend negative ion generators as inexpensive high voltage generators. Of course CL Strong conducted several discussions on the topic. I was able to find one. Highly recommended! 5:11:13 AM     Speaking of toys, two of our ferrets love an old (at least 20 years) Zube Tube. You can still buy them ... these are really fun. A ferret will put their head into the tube and bang the tube from the inside to make noise. This generally results in a completely pilo erected tail followed by a wild ferret dance. 5:10:46 AM

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