The first time I heard that term, Do It Yourself, was in relation to hardware stores. There was a big marketing push to get people to fix things themselves.

One of the fastest spreading ideas in the past decades has been the idea of "free open source software" and the related idea of the Creative Commons.

1. The argument's been made so often, it needs a macro.

2. See http://laeastside.com/

3. The real Eastside is east of the LA river. It's had this name for around 50 years. The area around Silver Lake is not the Eastside.

It's one of those "synchronicity" weeks. Robin Bloor wrote a quick bit about a fundamental error with the "cost of copying is zero" argument, and he's right. The cost of copying is not free, but very cheap. Computers, electricity, and the internet cost money - in my case, over $100 a month. So, copying some songs is not "free" - I paid others so i could copy. (FTR, I just signed up to Napster, and used to sub to Emusic, both decent song sellers.)

And one other thing I think we've got to remember: As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, "That's a terrible statement," I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that you have to cut some slack. And I'm going to be probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you: We've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, "You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus." And you know what?

Crap... this upgrade didn't work out so great. A detailed check of the tables show that the tables are okay. For some reason, the data isn't quite right, and I need to fix up the themes.

Business

It's been a while since I've blogged, because of a short term overload of things to do, putting in full time at a client's, and also taking a business class at the CC. Yes, business. It was a little bit of a shock to my anarcho-socialist mind to learn that most of the ideas we hold aren't different from the ideas taught in biz school... it's the "masses" who are uninformed about it... and it's only the anarcho-socialistic types who think something is wrong with the way things are. The biz class attitude is to just get yourself on top of the pyramid, and hope to avoid a revolution. I suspect biz school is also a leading vehicle for teaching the finer points of shady business practices and political corruption, but I can't be sure of this.

What I was hoping for were lessons on accounting and standard business practices, negotiation, and laws. Being an intro class, though, none of that was being taught. So, I'll have to just take some specific classes for those things. What was taught: money, organization, government, marketing. It's just basic capitalism, and as enlightening as sitting through an intro to Marx, Weber, or Gramsci. The book was okay, but was biased in favor of business, and also had some factual errors. The factual errors kind of killed it for me.

Read Apocalypse No! by Juan Santos.

Buddhist themed video games. The games are pretty difficult, and generally well done.