Rich Seymour's stochastic statements.

I think when my own personal history is written and I tell people about what I was doing in the summer of 2006 in LA one thing will stand out. That I stood by blocks away while the South Central Farm got bulldozed. It’s not a 100% binary issue, since it does involve to some degree squatting, but not like squatting and making a crystal meth factory, more like squatting and growing edible plants. So for that, I feel sorry, I think it could’ve been done a different, more interesting way… why not warehousetop farms, why wasn’t there a proper migration plan laid out for the individual farmers. Why didn’t people take the time to do the right thing. Sure plants can grow back (and will in my opinion, somewhere somehow), but the very act is so disheartening.

But on another note, if you’ve heard the words net neutrality and don’t really know what it means. Imagine if your favorite toll road all of the sudden started charging variable tolls, with certain large corporations (the telephone companies here on out referred to as the telcos) choosing who pays what size toll. As it stands now, the telcos compete to offer service to both providers (ie Yahoo, Google, About.com) because these service providers need wires to hook up to the internet (this is done in big ol’ data centers or in Yahoo and Google’s case the telco wires usually go straight to their own server center) Anyway, then you and I (or our work) pays the telco to hook us up to the other end of that line, so we can see internet services anywhere from here to Zaire (with North Korea excepted (they don’t want to join in, but we would accept them if ready) and maybe some others… for example Iraq didn’t actually have internet properly (as in the .iq country extension) until after our invasion and some gutsy entrepreneurs went and set it up.) Anyways, as you can see a telco gets money from both ends, anyone who connects has to pay. And everyone pays based on some scale or other, but now they’d like to set the scales such that the people who pay them the most get the fastest transport through their lines. This would be like if 18 wheelers could slip the toll booth operator a $50 so that you could go 40 miles over the speed limit. Sure, they’d get where they’re going faster, but my oh my, things would get dangerous to the point where you’d see a lot less small cars on the road.

And lets remember that google, like a small car basically started out in a garage (actually a dorm room, but close enough)

Here is the link to the main hub for people fighting to save net neutrality (as in everyone on the net plays by the same rules in terms of speed):

Save the Internet

Note it’s couched in sort of breathless terms, but it’s true, when the post nuclear apocalyptic visionaries at RAND set out the first blueprint for what the Internet (then called ARPA/DARPA net) should be in order to survive a nuclear holocaust, this idea would’ve seemed pretty queer.

I apologize for the half truths, mixed metaphors, etc. etc. in this post, but I hope I got some one to get the concept of net neutrality that didn’t before. And peace to the displaced south central farmers, I am truly sorry that I didn’t even try to really help out.