Technology Blog

Well, that was quick!

Right after posting this, I hear about Labour’s new transport strategy for Dublin. Here’s the top 3 items:

• Labour will increase the Dublin Bus fleet by 50% (500 buses), significantly increasing frequency and reducing waiting times.

• Will complete the Quality Bus Corridors, and greatly reduce journey times.

• Will introduce a EUR 1 per-trip fare for adults and a 50c per-trip fare for children.

The flat-rate fee structure makes a lot more sense than the confusing and
rip-off-ish current model, whereby if you don’t know in advance how much a
particular journey is going to cost, you’re given a useless receipt instead of
change. This wierd and rip-off-ish policy has certainly stopped me from
catching buses in the past. In general, flat-rate pricing models appear to encourage use in other fields. And the increase in the fleet is obviously a fantastic idea. Fantastic stuff!

Read the full policy paper here (as a PDF).

Tags:dublin ireland labour politics public transport

This post was written by Justin, source: Labour’s flat-rate bus tickets

Sitting in Germany, each morning scanning the morning Google News, I can’t describe how depressing it is that this story — Kerry’s gaffe — is the top story on Google News. Can it really be that the most important story is (yet another) gaffe by a presidential candidate who couldn’t beat George Bush? I can’t believe how good the GOP is in playing this game. I can’t stomach how bad the Democrats are.

source: ok, sorry, THIS is really depressing

While driving around Ireland on a wedding-location-scouting trip, we started receiving texts talking about riots in Dublin; I texted a friend, and got a reply along these lines: “Celtic-topped scobes
run riot through O’Connell St, torching cars in Nassau street, hospitalising cops and Charlie Bird. madness!”

I thought he was joking, but nope. A load of IRA-slogan-shouting scumbags really had been allowed to run riot — with paving stones of all things left unsecured in their midst! — and it quickly got way, way out of hand.

The blog coverage is excellent, with lots of photos. I suggest starting with Indymedia Ireland, these Flickr photos and the links on this weblog. It appears the gardai really fell down on this one.

For what it’s worth, I was in town a few hours later, and the rest of Dublin was trouble-free — just the usual Saturday night goings-on. O’Connell St. was still a rubble-strewn mess when I passed through on Sunday, though.

dublin ireland policing politics riots

This post was written by Justin, source: Dublin Riots

I’ve just finished Sir John Sulston’s inspiring book about the Human Genome
Project, The Common
Thread, in
which he discusses how he found himself on one front line of the battle between
intellectual ‘property’ maximalism attempting to grab ‘property rights’ over
the human genome, and the common good, preserving such rights for all humanity
and unfettered research. (Thankfully, he — and therefore the latter side — won.)

I’ve been meaning to post a few choice quotes here about it at some stage, but
haven’t had the time — I’ve had to just limit myself to correcting the
Wikipedia entry for the Human Genome
Project instead.

Anyway, Sir John is in the news again, as part of a new international
initiative — the Adelphi Charter:

Called the Adelphi charter, it is an attempt to lay out those principles. Central among them are the ideas that policy should be evidence-based and that it should respect the balance between property and the public domain, not eliminate the latter to maximise the former.

Coverage:

• The Economist
• BBC
• The Guardian
• raw notes from Suw Charman of the ORG

Very encouraging to see something taking off at this level. I hope it does
well, and I hope Ireland and the EU’s lawmakers take note, since I’ve been
hearing a lot of IP maximalist party-line from there recently…

adelphi charter ip law patents politics sir john sulston uk

This post was written by jm, source: The Adelphi Charter

O’Reilly’s “moral to the story” of the Katrina disaster is a perfect plan for the opposition. His basic message: see, this shows government doesn’t work, so don’t rely on it. The response it invites: see, this shows how we need to make government work. Government has failed. Must government fail?

(Meanwhile, Fox had some fantastic reporting on all this. Gone were the sycophants in the field. Here are two great examples, snipped from a fantastic article at Salon. (Thanks, Lauren.))

In a recent New Yorker. On health care.

Stunning.

Please read it.

Rolling Stone just put out an exceptionally damning portrait of how Congress works: Four Amendments & a Funeral, by Matt Taibbi Check out this quote: “The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world’s outstanding bureaucratic abomination — a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish.” There’s plenty more of that. Read it and weep….

Bush Prosperity

Lobbying has become a growth industry.
Business, causes, organizations
need to stop government
from messing with their plans or profits.

They pay a monthly retainer
and the lobbyist keeps bad things from happening.
It’s called influence peddling now,
we used to call it the protection racket.

If you RSS, add Ken’s feed. Nothing like getting the news lyrically.

This post was written by George, source: Politry by Ken Duncan

From this week’s Cool Cleveland:

So I’m going to quote from an old article I wrote in the Free Times back in February 2001, or before the convention center issue ripened and before the new county offices became a carcass issue for them to fight over again. It gives some flavor to how these two development giants have treated Cleveland and been treated by Cleveland.

Here it is with minor changes:

The underground battle between two of the city’s top business moguls over political access, favors and deals from City Hall has surfaced again.

Like a low-grade fever, Sam Miller of Forest City Enterprises and Dick Jacobs of the Jacobs Group, have infected city politics for more than a decade, two rivals currying favor with politicians.

Nate Gray, let me say presently, is peanuts in this gimme game.

In the last two weeks, legislative moves by Council President Michael Polensek – fronting for Jacobs interests – and Mayor Michael White – fronting for Miller interests – showed that the temperature has risen a degree or two…

This post was written by George, source: Roldo on the politics of development

The anonymous author of the Right Angle Blog mentions Mal Mixon and Dick Pogue were at the fundraising event for the republican party last night.

That explains a lot.

Here’s a bit from Making Change on Dick:

Dick Pogue played his role in shaping Cleveland beginning with the dark days of the city’s economic default in 1978. He’s been affiliated with The Cleveland Foundation, United Way, the Greater Cleveland Growth Association, The Greater Cleveland Roundtable and the Presidents Council…just to name a few. Pogue says there may be a perception that leaders of his generation are reluctant to let go of the reigns, but that’s only because they want to make sure the next generation knows what to do.

DP: The people who want to move up have to recognize, you don’t just snap your fingers and get placed…

Seems he’s also chairing Taft’s Commission on Higher Education and the Economy.

How many boards can one person be on?

Not much on Mal Mixon, except that he’s backing James Draper.

Want to do something about Cleveland’s inertia?

Follow the money.

This post was written by George, source: Right Angle review of republican fundraising

Sean observes:

I observed a sign in front of the home belonging to a nice couple I know. Before this day, I thought they were run-of-the-mill Republicans. The sign was a George Voinovich for Senate 2004 placard that the couple previously had on their lawn during the last campaign. Although now it was markedly different. There is a hand-painted red circle with a line through it covering the front. It had become the opposite of what it was intended, thanks to fringe conservatives’ disapproval over Voinovich becoming a so-called “turncoat Republican”.(This term can be attributed to Rush Limbaugh’s view of the Senator over the Bolton U.N. nomination) I was immediately struck with a feeling of delight. For me, this represents the beginning of a civil war among Republicans.

For the last decade, GOP talking heads would point to Democrats’ supposed inability to form a cohesive ruling platform that appealed to main stream Americans as the number one reason they should not be in charge of the country. Intrinsically, liberals hold a belief that people have the right to think differently, and these differences are what make the country great. It was this basic tenant of the Democratic party that differentiated itself from the GOP; a party that held strict beliefs that were not typically stretched to encompass differing viewpoints. It was the ability of the GOP to toe the line that enabled Republicans to retake the House in 1994, the Senate in 2002, and give a rather weak president a second term. Unity ruled over common sense, and America followed.

However, it is this strict unity that is biting the Republican Party in their proverbial ass. Most main stream conservatives made a Faustian gamble with their support of Bush…

Make sure you read the whole post. Good stuff, Sean.

This post was written by George, source: Lakewood is a microcosm of America

He’s a follow up post on the Hawken Blog, recounting one person’s experience with our government. An excerpt:

In my years of Vietnam antiwar organizing, no FBI ever officially called upon me. In 1975, I obtained thru FOIA my heavily censored FBI files which confirmed we had been thoroughly spied-on in our YSA and Student Moblization Against the War meetings. As these were often very boring business meetings (like most movement business meetings), I felt a little compassion for these stooges, altho they were presumably paid and we weren’t!

This post was written by George, source: Follow up on COINTELPRO

Toledo City Councilman Frank Szollosi thinks we need to take a look at our values:

Tonight in Columbus the GOP dominated Legislature is set to vote on a $51 billion budget that cuts millions that cities and counties rely on to support police, fire, and emergency responders. The City of Toledo stands to lose as much as $3.6 million. This comes as the Noe Coins scandal begins to sink in…at least $12 million unaccounted for, with revelations of Beanie Babies and comic books among the collectibles seized by investigators in Maumee.

So much has already been reported about the malfeasance of Capital Coin Fund, managed by Tom Noe. Why shouldn’t Republicans at every level return contributions made by Noe? How can an elected official justify keeping money that could possibly belong to Ohio’s injured workers?

Indeed.

This post was written by George, source: In the Noe

Bill @ the Hawken blog spent an hour transcribing this passage from The Indispensable Chomsky:

The real lesson of Nixon’s fall is that the President shouldn’t call Thomas Watson (Chairman of IBM) and McGeorge Bundy (former Democratic official) bad names–that means the Republic’s collapsing. And the press prides itself on having exposed this fact. On the other hand, if you want to send the FBI to organize the assassination of a Black Panther leader, that’s fine by us; it’s fine by the Washington Post too.

Incidentally, I think there is another reason why a lot of powerful people were out to get Nixon at the time–and it had to do with something a lot more profound than the Enemies List and Watergate burglary. I suspect it had to do with the events of the summer of 1971, when the Nixon administration basically broke up the international economic arrangement that had existed for the previous twenty-five years (i.e. the so-called “Bretton Woods” system…) the Vietnam War had already badly weakened the United States economically relative to its industrial rivals, and one of the ways the Nixon administration reacted to that was by simply tearing apart the Bretton Woods system, which had been set up to organize the world economy after World War II. The Bretton Woods system had made the United States the world’s banker, basically–it had established the US dollar as a global reserve currency fixed to gold, and it imposed conditions about no import quotas, and so on. And Nixon just tore the whole thing to shreds: he went off the gold standard, he stopped the convertibility of the dollar, he raised import duties. No other country would have had the power to do that, but Nixon did it. And that made him a lot of powerful enemies–because multinational corporations and international banks relied on that system, and they did not like it being broken down. So if you look back, you’ll find that Nixon was being attacked in places like the Wall Street Journal at the time, and I suspect that from that point on there were plenty of powerful people out to get him. Watergate just offered an opportunity.

This post was written by George, source: Chomsky on Watergate

Over at Cleveland Townhall:

The very day that Council was announcing they had gotten Wal-Mart to agree to opening a store without the groceries, my councilman was attending my block club meeting. He said that Wal-Mart would build a regular store and would agree not to sell food until 2013. Now this is the important part. He said this would protect local grocers. Then a resident asked if there would be any grocery stores as part of the new development and my councilman suggested that talks were taking place with Giant Eagle! Oh, so Wal-Mart selling food is a threat to local grocers…but Giant Eagle is not? This is so utterly transparent. The only difference between Wal-Mart and Giant Eagle is four letters…UFCW (United Food & Commercial Workers). Giant Eagle is union and Wal-Mart is not. And that is the only reason Council opposes the Supercenter. This is all about pandering to the UFCW.

How about pandering to the residents of the city for a change?

I agree about the residents of the city, but is this really an issue of “those liberal democrats schilling for the union”? Are we really this divided? Or is that just the lens we use?

This post was written by George, source: Is it really a union thing?

From the Right Angle Blog:

Ohio residents spent between $12.2 billion and $14.2 billion a year in [surrounding state or Canada]. That was the finding of The Committee to Study the Impact of Gambling in Ohio, a group formed by the Ohio General Assembly.
Just four casinos in West Virginia account for 10 percent of that state’s budget, Casey said. Half of the take at the Argosy Casino in Indiana comes from Ohio, DiPietro added.
Another $60 million was wagered on the Internet, according to Christiansen Capital Advisors, and Ohioans spent another $2.3 billion on illegal gaming activities, according to the committee formed by the General Assembly.”

Just because Ohio can support 15 casinos doesn’t mean it should.

I’m not a gambler. I find no pleasure is gambling. I think it’s a poor value for your entertainment dollar. I also think that there’s plenty of people out there trying to beat the system. Whether it’s for thrill or pleasure (and I’m thinking in terms of the movie What the Bleep…), gambling is an addiction.

My question is, what do we do about it (besides build casinos)?

This post was written by George, source: Houston, we have a gambling problem

source: You got something against Jimmy Stewart, Senator?