Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage

About a month ago, I asked, “ Monday, October 19, 2009

Can the Teaspoon Model stand up to Bloodsucker Streaming Sites?”

Now, on the occasion of the first small victory of the “Teaspoon Model” over PirateCorp (aka NewsCorp), I’m catching my breath and looking back at this process. Note that if you have tuned in just for the victories, you should scroll down to the section with “Victory” in the title.

Over the past month, its become clear that one of the biggest bases of support – not active support, but tacit complicity – lies within the NewsCorp media empire itself, on the MySpaceCDN servers owned by 20th Century Fox’s “Intellectual Properties” division.

There’s irony there, because the whole point is that these are by and large neither creations, productions, nor licensed works of any NewsCorp enterprise. They are, rather, bootlegs being illegally copied by uploaders, and then repeatedly extra-legally copied by NewsCorp when they stream the files on request.

crossposted from Agent Orange

The Steel Interstate concept (tagpage) is one that I have been discussing, off and on, in my Sunday Train series. The basic idea is to electrify the Department of Defense STrategic RAil Corridor NETwork, STRACNET (right), and establish 100mph Rapid Freight Rail paths, to allow an estimated (Millenium Institute pdf) half of long haul trucking to shift to electric freight rail at a saving of about 10% of our current oil imports.

This diary is about how to overcome the only thing standing in its way: Public Finance. And that is to impose a $1/barrel tax on imported petroleum and petroleum products, and allocate 1% of any Carbon Fee to financing construction.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Now New and Improved with Poll Technology

Programming Note: I recently received for review a copy of Waiting on a Train by James McCommons, published by Chelsea Green Publishing. I’ll likely be talking about it next week, but til then, you can read James Kunstler’s Intro online at AlterNet.

Back in early September, I discussed the Steel Interstate in the context of the Appalachian Hub. The concept of the Steel Interstate is electrifying main rail corridors and establishing 100mph Rapid Freight Rail paths.

The broadest application of this concept is the proposal to Electrify STRACNET, the STrategic RAil Corridor NETwork.

The Appalachian Hub, recall, is a hypothetical Emerging / Regional HSR passenger rail network, modeled on the Midwest Hub and Ohio Hub plans.

And it is hypothetical, of course, because the state governments of the Appalachian regions have been laying down on the job. The High Speed Rail corridor planning framework established under the Clinton Administration in the 90’s is a bottom-up system, with states establishing High Speed Rail commissions, advancing plans to the stage of gaining designation as a HSR corridor, sorting out the financing, and applying for Federal funding.

Check last week’s review of the story so far.

Act on Friday, 4pm and 10pm Eastern, 1pm and 7pm Pacific.

The diary this week is to throw the floor open. I have listed the various reasons why I am happy to impose a Direct Action Citizen’s Tax on Rupert “The Pirate” Murdoch. The focus this week is on you. What do you have against Rupert “The Pirate” Murdoch?

• His Hypocrisy?
• His War-Mongering?
• His Vicious Union-Busting Politics?
• The further destruction of our political discourse, also known as “Fox News”?
• His ongoing fight in support of monopoly power in the media?
• …or whatever – share it in the comments.

The ongoing story of the “Teaspoon Model” is below the fold, and after that, instructions on how to impose the Direct Action Citizen’s Tax, and The List.

No moving lines.

Retreat    Retreat. Success.    In what is small, perseverance furthers.

The Image

   Mountain under heaven: the image of Retreat.

   Thus the superior man keeps the inferior man at a distance,

   Not angrily but with reserve.

________________________________

No moving lines: this does not contain within it the immediate seeds of its own change – though of course, all things contain within them the ultimate seeds of their own change.

Retreat. The inner trigram is “the sky”, “The Creative”. We have mountains at home if we need them, and Big Sky – there is no need to play the Game of Empire in mountains far abroad.

Retreat. The outer trigram is “the mountain”, “Keeping Still”. In poise, we advance without effort, but the sword that is constantly taken from its scabbard will rust and break.

Retreat. An imposing mountain from without, but within a whole sky to explore. A cabin in the woods, the autumn woods rustling at night, quiet conversation among friends.

Retreat.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

A few weeks back, SubsidyScope, “launched by The Pew Charitable Trusts, aims to raise public awareness about the role of federal subsidies in the economy”, pursued its mandate into transport subsidies, coming out with a study with the headline figure of $32 subsidy per passenger for Amtrak.

Why Amtrak? Why not provide a headline figure on federal subsidy per motorist or airplane passenger? Critics of the report suggest that the answer is simple – consider, for instance, Charleston WV mayor Danny Jones:

Jones admits Amtrak relies heavily on subsidies, but so do other modes of transportation, he said.

“I think it’s just easier to see how much of it’s subsidized with Amtrak,” he said.

And there is a lot of merit in that. Further, SubsidyScope is not focusing on Government subsidy, but on Federal subsidy. Not only is it harder to analyze government subsidies to driving and flying, given how many direct and indirect subsidies there are to take into account – but many of the subsidies are at the state and local government level, so for SubsidyScope’s purposes they “don’t count”.

But its worse that that. Even accepting SubsidyScope’s twisted framing of the issue of government subsidies – the actual core part of the analysis that they themselves perform is hopelessly bad. The gory details, and then the numbers that pity forced me to rescue from the clutches of SubsidyScope, below the fold.

In the store, or at the airport, a “bike box” is a box that is supposed to have a bike inside of it.

However, at an intersection, a “bike box” is when you make a space at an intersection ahead of the “traffic stop here” line. They are often combined, as in the picture, with a “protected by paint and optimism” bike lane. In some cases for traffic lights that are tripped by stopped vehicle detectors, as in the YouTube clip below, they include a more sensitive stopped bike detectors in the bike box, so that the sensitivity of the regular vehicle detector does not have to be adjusted.

Looking at the overall concept, as John Allen does in A LOOK INTO THE “BIKE BOX”, this is yet another case of, probably subconscious “if only we could kill off these cyclists we wouldn’t have to worry about them” thinking by traffic planners.

One thing the bike box does is amplify the encouragement of the regular “protected by paint”, aka “kill the cyclist”, bike lane to pass stopped motor vehicles on their right side. This is a practice that you can get away with day after day, but sooner or later you are going to end up trying to go straight when a car is trying to turn. And given the fact that the car is risking its paint job and you are risking an extended stay in the hospital, that is a monumentally stupid habit to pick up. Its bad enough that “protected by paint” bike lanes encourage this habit – the “protected by paint with a prize at the end” is even worse.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage

This is week 3 of the Hours of Action against bootleg streaming by servers from inside Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp media empire.

Act on Friday, 4pm and 10pm Eastern, 1pm and 7pm Pacific.

Part of the point here is to Call Out Rupert and NewsCorp on their institutionalized Hypocrisy, as Rupert goes around lecturing countries on Copyright Piracy while various crevices of his media empire are passively streaming bootlegs in competition against serious and audience-friendly efforts to adapt to the New Media economy.

Part of the point is just to attack Rupert and and the senior executive management of Newscorp for being a bunch of dirtbags.

Part of the point is an experiment in whether the blogosphere can be of use for more than a talkshop and campaign season ATM machine for politicians claiming to be “progressive”.

And part of it is curiosity – I am, after all, one of the minority of economists with an interest in how the real world economy works and evolves, beyond the blinkered confines of calculus-based models of non-evolving mechanical systems.

If you want to know more, there’s a remote chance I’ve already said it, so check out the “story so far” links below.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage

Two weeks ago, I speculated on applying the “Teaspoon Model” to the problem of protecting small, niche, video streaming markets faced:

• on the one hand with Copyright Protection laws focused on protecting the cash flows of large media distribution middlemen; and,
  
• on the other hand, with a plague of bloodsucking bootleg streaming sites, surviving on miniscule revenue flows because they leech off of everyone – not just the creators of the work themselves, but also fansub and video-rip groups that make the content availbale for download, and free stream hosting sites for the streaming itself
  

Refer to the lovely Shakespeare’s Sister for the teaspoon concept itself – the idea of this application is:

So this is what I was thinking. Perhaps a small, struggling company that wanted to reduce the density of the cloud of bloodsucking flies draining the work of the artists who create this material of market value could gain leverage not by trying to find the Super-Teaspoon – but by recruiting a supporting group, each armed with ordinary teaspoons.

There’d have to be at least one person at the company actually sending out the letters to the sites streaming the bootlegs – but they would be far more effective if backed up by ten or twenty people contributing a couple of hours a week tracking down where the material is located. Indeed, the “white hats” could drop in info on where to get the material legally while at the bootleg bloodsucker streaming sites, including the proliferating opportunities for legal free streams.

The objection has already been raised, “but everybody does it”. But the experiment reported here shows, no, everybody does not sit around passively waiting to get a legal order to Cease and Desist. There are companies that do check out tips and clean out the trash and even YouTube does a far better job than MySpaceCDN.

Note: most graphics are samples from extant Photobucket and Flikr albums, but the “Storm in the Teacup” is an entry from a Photoshop contest, and “You’re Both Idiots” is by ~ZeKarmaMisama who can be found at Deviant Art, and the teaspoon is by Western Australia artist Pearl Rogers

… or is NewsCorp just an Old Media Dinosaur that cannot keep up?

Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage

Also available in Orange

Breaking the Silicon Cage is for breaking down those barriers that prevent us from leveraging the full potential of the netroots for progressive populist action – whether that involves using the internet for collaboration on works to be delivered live on the street, or breaking down barriers between different social networks on the internet itself.

The latter is what we have here. The progressive blogosphere, if people are to believe our words (though not always our actions) is an enemy of Rupert Murdoch and his Iraq-Invasion-supporting, Conservative-Politician-electing multinational media empire. We in the US know him primarily for the Faux News Channel, but in the UK and Australia they know him for his grossly biased newspaper oligopolies.

If Progressives were indeed intent on taking power (something Cassiodorus questions), we would be eager to take any shots at Rupert Murdch’s Media Empire that we could.

Now, I’m game, and a few others have expressed their interest, but for the most part the reaction of the blogosphere is a big, “why should I become outraged by that in particular”. If the thousands of US service members and hundreds of thousands of lives disrupted – hundreds of thousands of Iraqis kills and millions of Iraqi lives disrupted – is too big a reason to grasp for being outraged at Rupert Murdoch and his media empire … then be outraged for the mother (above right) of Cpl. Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, killed in action in a War of Choice that Rupert Murdoch loudly banged the drum in favor of choosing.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Crossposted from MyLeftWing, also in Orange

The big knock against high speed rail is, of course, that it does not run door to door. This is, of course, why the passenger air transport market is such a strategic target … it is an existing fuel-inefficient mode of transport where everyone travels as a pedestrian. And a well designed high speed rail system will deliver the target market among pedestrian travellers from as close or closer to their origin, and drop them off as close or closer to their destination.

But those are not the only passengers that HSR will be catering to. A term I have heard railfans use for this type of activity is “recruiting” patronage, so, after the fold, I step through some of the important current, and potential, recruiters.

I am sure you have heard of Fox News, owned by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

This diary is about a direct action against Rupert Murdoch in another dimension of his media empire. It turns out that Rupert Murdoch has the biggest pirate base in the US anime market.

This direct action involves those of us with flat-rate broadband connections right-clicking on a bunch of links and downloading a bunch of bootleg files into a temporary directory – then erasing the files. Since Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace servers host hundreds of bootleg anime streams, from one anime streaming site alone, if enough of us download enough files at the same time – it will increase the amount of money that Rupert’s media empire has to pay to host bootleg anime.

In short, it hits Rupert in his wallet, where it hurts him the most. More, after the fold.

Act on Friday, 6pm Eastern, 3pm Pacific, and 10pm Eastern, 7pm Pacific.