 by Flemming Funch
When talking with regular Americans, like my neighbors, about how it might be to live in different places, people here will always bring up how there are all these "freedoms" here and how it is a really "free" country. And people who haven't actually traveled much will tend to believe that story, and have weird ideas about what it might mean to live in a place that isn't "free". The truth is that the only thing here I can think of that makes it feel free is that, if you live in a very populous place like California, there are so many people that nobody's particularly watching you. The government doesn't bother much to keep track of you, unless you particularly stick out. And the general mindset of people is that you don't worry much about what your neighbors are doing. When it comes to it, there are more restrictive laws and morals here than in most places I know in Europe. You are much less free here to stand up and speak your truth. But you're more able here to hide and do your own thing, if you don't make too much noise about it. But if you're really successful and make a lot of money, then you will be allowed to bend the rules more. Which is pretty much the opposite to how it works in Denmark where I'm from.
Some of my good friends in the Bay area, specifically Allan Saxon, have created votery.org, which is a way of having a structured conversation where everything gets rated by the participants. The idea is that the most valuable or the most agreed-upon stuff will float to the top. I've been searching for good ways of doing that as well. Ways for collective intelligence to emerge while confusion is kept at a minimum. I'm not sure yet if this thing does it, but I think it is useful. You can see it as a guest, but to participate you need to be sponsored into Friendly Favors.
The government of Venezuela has adopted a policy of using Open Source software whereever possible.
The future has arrived. My cable TV has Video-on-Demand now. Except for that it already had about 300 channels that I'm not watching, so I don't really care. What'll make a difference is when it is like Napster and anything anybody could imagine watching would be readily available, from multiple sources.
"There is enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed." --Gandhi
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