Kit Pasold is at it again. He’s posted another installment of Konk’s Blog featuring some fat old bastard and this time guest starring Bugs Bunny!
I kinda wish that codger had some old home movies of his past exploits slaying monsters. Maybe they’ll turn up in someone’s attic someday.
Cheers.
Maybe I’m just really fucked in the head today but I think this Insane Clown Posse video is right up there with the Symphony Of Science.
Yo.
P.S. If you enjoyed that you might like this.
You can file this under the blatant and shameless plug department but I just wanted to take a moment to mention TekSavvy, my ISP whom I went to after getting completely fed up with the bullshit of Rogers.
They have never let me down and have always provided the best service I could ever hope for. Their support staff are always helpful and extraordinarily patient. Their rates are low, their bandwidth is high and they continue to be strong proponents of Net Neutrality and competitive broadband access.
Bell, courtesy of the assholes in Ottawa CRTC, is allowed to throttle some of the traffic of companies like TekSavvy who resell the bandwidth they purchase wholesale from the telcos.
Despite this TekSavvy continues to provide me with exemplary speeds.
The CRTC rulings go beyond mere throttling and may endanger the very existence of independent competition to the big telcos. This is an onerous situation and will, hopefully, get resolved either through legal action, or a response from parliament to reverse the CRTC decision or perhaps at some distant time from now when the CRTC finally manages to get its pointy little head out of its fat pimply ass.
The decisions being handed down by the CRTC serve to maintain a dysfunctional monopoly and clearly illustrate the principle recently cited by Clay Shirky: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
In continuing to push back at the status quo of shitty overpriced monopolies like Bell, Telus and Rogers, independent ISPs like TekSavvy are doing the job of the CRTC – actually working for the rights of Canadian citizens.
This all sounds like a public handjob, I know, but I am very thankful to have TekSavvy as my ISP and just decided they needed to be acknowledged. If you are looking for an alternative to your current internet servce provider check out TekSavvy.
Cheers.
Full Disclosure: I did not get paid to make this endorsement but I do owe them money.
P.S. Here’s some posts from Michael Geist (along with some great comments) that cover this same territory:
• Canadian ISPs Fall Short In Meeting Net Neutrality Requirements
• CRTC Traffic Management Rules Apply To Wireless Too
• Liberals Call for Better Internet and Wireless Competition, Net Neutrality
• And this from Elliot Noss at Tucows
This is all about AT&T’s forgotten plot to hijack the U.S. airwaves – back in 1922.
In a brilliant post on Ars Technica by Matthew Lasar a faded remnant from almost 90 years past is revealed to remind us how little changes as we march toward our collective futures.
In 1920, nobody knew how to make money from this new technology. In fact, one magazine held a contest for the best essay on how to”monetize” radio, as we would say in contemporary jargon. It might amuse Ars readers to learn that pretty much everybody agreed that commercials represented the worst possible option. “The quickest way to kill broadcasting would be to use it for direct advertising,” warned then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. “If a speech by the President is to be used as the meat in a sandwich of two patent medicine advertisements there will be no radio left.” RCA Vice President David Sarnoff agreed. Soon he would propose a “super power” system in which a few high powered transmitters would broadcast radio fare to the whole country, the content subsidized by the sales on radio receivers.
But AT&T had another idea—a network of almost 40 radio stations strung together via the telco’s long distance lines. They would broadcast to local areas wirelessly and share content via AT&T’s long routes.
The obvious resonance with the lobbying, shenanigans, patent wars and foot-dragging by the current rogue’s gallery of telcos, cable companies and industry associations is more than merely amusing; it shines a light on the consistent behaviour of large powerful monopolies who are, and will always be, more interested in maintaining their positions of control and profit than any publicly supported effort to craft a world that betters everyones lives. As Lasar points out in his article, we cannot easily judge how any of our possible alternate futures could have evolved were things handled differently:
What are we to make of this short-lived technological gambit? It would be easy to celebrate AT&T’s demise in this area, and counterfactual history is always a tricky game. But it seems to us that an opportunity was lost here. The Bell System’s withdrawal from broadcasting left both radio and television in the hands of one technological institution, the licensed broadcast station. The owners of these entities quickly morphed into a powerful political lobby, constantly standing in the way of competing platforms, such as cable television, satellite radio, Low Power FM, and white space broadband.
- but we can readily presume, regardless of who emerged as the victor of any such scenario, the subsequently entrenched powers exercising their political and monetary clout will rarely, if ever, have the best interests of the world at heart. Quite the contrary, as is being amply demonstrated in our current day and age of disruptive technologies, they will grasp and cling at every possible vantage to themselves even as it destroys everything and everyone around them – including themselves.
As Kevin Kelly points out in his recent post on his Technium blog, Clay Shirky nailed it when he said: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” Kelly then directs us to a very good blog read from Shirky that fits with all of this: The Collapse Of Complex Business Models. As with all things Shirky, it’s concise and pithy and essential. He looks to find the way up through the falling debris of collapse which threatens to crush us and it’s a good perspective to have – but I think we also need to address how we as human beings, both individually and as institutions, continue to behave in grotesquely avaricious and irrationally self-destructive ways.
Mark Twain liked to say: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
I think it’s time we changed the tune, danced a new dance, and kicked those old fuckers off the floor.
Rock on.
UPDATE: I just stumbled upon Susan Crawford’s blog post today comparing the current cable companies monopolies with J. P. Morgan’s control over the U.S. railways in the late 1800′s. Terrific stuff and totally resonant with all my incoherent babbling.
UPDATE PART DEUX: Seem to have stumbled across a minor geeky meme with all this stuff. PC Mag has a post today on the FCC battle against the telcos to regulate broadband – with quotes from Ms. Crawford – and it’s all in context with the same stuff I’ve been yammering on about. Cool.
12 year old Adora Svitak has been described as a child prodigy and with good reason. She’s frickin’ brilliant.
Her best line from the talk:
The traits the word childish addresses are seen so often in adults that we should abolish this age discriminatory word when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking.
Svitak possesses something that not many people of her intelligence, let alone age, ever manage to grasp within their lifetimes: wisdom.
Having worked in the world of children’s television I have more than had my fill of clever, wisecracking kids. It’s a bogus fallacy that feeds Roald Dahl’s addage that to reach a young audience one must first conspire with them against the adults. Fair enough but some jerkweed midget version of Pauly Shore is not what the world needs more of.
We need more Adora’s.
Her insights into the need for children and adults to communicate more effectively and for adults to listen and take heed of what children see and know is vitally important to everyone’s future. Listen to this kid. And then go listen to your own.
Cheers.
It’s humbling to note that Kit Pasold is posting these Konk’s Blog videos faster than I am posting my own crap here on these pages. Shame on me. This latest oeuvre from Konk is entitled: Favourite Stupid Idea and it features that same old fat bastard.
Cheers.
It's going to be more of a personal news aggregator with a featured video blog from yours truly. We'll see how long that lasts. So bear with me - thanks.
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