During the month of October, my 17 year old son has been accepted to college, awarded a significant scholarship, and been invited to interview for a full ride. He also improved his rating in fencing to C, which puts him into Division I. His 15 year old…

I linked to the Punk Rockers Make Great Parents article on Facebook and G+ a few days ago. However, I was thinking about it again. I don’t subscribe to the idea that the point of parenthood is get the kids into college. However, I have to admit that I’…

It’s been a month. I’m sold on Duck Duck Go a a viable replacement for Google search. I’m still using Horde on my server as my primary email interface, but I’m not quite sold. There are just a few too many quirks. Overall, it works, but after a month I…

So I’ve been using Horde as my webmail interface for 10 days now, and I must say, I really don’t have many complaints. It may not be as elegant or snazzy as Gmail, but it works just fine, and I know that the Googlebots are not reading my mail and insta…

As part of the ongoing De-Googlization of my life, I’ve been investigating various options to share photos on the web. There are plenty of purpose built apps that will do that, some of them rivaling Flickr or Picasa in features. I was looking for somet…

Since I actually got a fair number of comments (by this blog’s standards anyway) on my Google is the next AOL post, I thought I’d update what I’ve actually been doing.
The easiest thing to change was my default search engine. I’m using Duck Duck Go, an…

I was initially a big fan of Google+, and I still think it is a more privacy friendly social networking platform than Facebook. However, Google’s insistence on real names in the service is concerning. I’ve always used my real name online, but I certain…

Twenty years, really?
Since that day we said I do.
I’m a lucky guy.

We should all be familiar with the tragedy of the commons, right? It’s a basic economic principal. However, watching the news makes it abundantly clear that many people are not familiar, so here it is.

The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen.

Replace individual with corporation, which we can do now that the Supreme Court has ruled they are the same thing, and you have a pretty decent explanation of what has happened in America over the last 40 years.

It might make sense for one corporation to screw over their employees and outsource manufacturing to a 3rd World Country, but when every corporation does it you end up eroding the manufacturing base of the country, and the result is a middle class that can no longer afford to buy the products you are making.

It might make sense for one politician to sell out to the big money interests, but when they all do it you end up with a country being run by the rich, for the rich. They may think that is what they want, just like the farmer overgrazing the common pasture thinks fattening up his cows at the expense of others is what he wants. And he’ll keep thinking that, right up until the pasture fails and no cows can get fat. The middle class is that pasture.

It might make sense for one investment bank to scam the world by packing up crap mortgages into CDOs and selling them as A rated investments. But when they all do it the ponzi scheme eventually has to crumble, and you end up with a middle class that probably on the whole, has net negative equity in their homes.

Just like the classic example from Econ 101 with farmers that need to cooperate and maintain the common pasture for the good of the village, politicians, corporations, and financiers needed to maintain a stable economic base so that the American economic engine could keep running and growing. They didn’t. They all acted in personal self-interest, and screwed the country in the process. The power interests in this country only saw the rest of us as a resource to be used in their pursuit of wealth and more power. And now they’ve depleted the resource, the rich are doing essentially the same thing the most rich and powerful farmers would do in our mythical example. They have put armed guards at whatever resources are left, and they aren’t sharing.

This post inspired by this comment in a discussion at Metafilter.

When I was in high school and college there was a lot of talk about how much better off we’d all be after we shipped all the dirty, labor intensive manufacturing jobs overseas, so we could all live a life of luxury reporting to work every day to do the…