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Sat, 29 Nov 2008
Last week I attended the monthly Geek Dinner at AS220 in Providence, a regular get-together for anyone interested in Rhode Island's tech industry. I got there early enough to get a seat and sat at a table with a guy who runs a database business and who is thinking about a new venture that -- well it would be unkind to describe his business idea, since I was talking to him as a fellow geek, not as a reporter. But it was great, and I would buy it, so I hope he goes ahead with it.
The evening's speakers were from DandyID.org, and they have a proposal for unifying your online identities across different services, so that your Facebook identity matches you on Amazon and Twitter, too, along with about 150 others. This way, your friends on one service can find you on another, and you can save having to maintain all these separate identities. It's an interesting niche, but what caught my attention is the three partners just moved their company here from Boulder, Colorado, a place I'm more accustomed to hearing about moving companies to.
I spoke with Sara Czyzewicz, one of DandyID's three partners and she told me that Boulder is oversaturated with startups, which makes it hard to get actual employees, and it's quite expensive to get space. They toured places like Seattle and San Francisco last year, looking to move. They added Providence to their list, and were quite surprised when they got here. (Sara is originally from Pawtucket though her partners are not.) She said they were attracted by affordable office space, but also by events like the Geek Dinners, and efforts like RI Nexus which show off the active community of technologists and inventors they found here. Since arriving in August, they've settled down to their new routine, and have found themselves a new programmer, too.
14:54 - 29 Nov 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Mon, 24 Nov 2008
I don't completely understand the details behind the idea that we are going to make $7.4 trillion available, but I understand a couple of things about it:
- There was no plan for the $700 billion, and so the half of it that was spent was essentially wasted. It allowed Wells Fargo to buy Wachovia on our dime (which may have contributed to Citigroup's stock price collapse), and it allowed some AIG executives to party on. What else? Where we did wind up owning things, we did it on terms that do not allow us any control.
- Not only is the crisis the result of having infantile ideologues mind the store — people who never saw a market they didn't want to deregulate — but they have completely screwed up the rescue effort, too.
What a country.
10:37 - 24 Nov 2008 [/y8/no] link
Sat, 22 Nov 2008
The state budget chickens are coming home to roost. After five years of self-inflicted fiscal crises, we finally have a real one, and your state is pretty much helpless. You might remember all the fuss last spring about closing a $400 million deficit in this year's budget. That was the manufactured crisis, created by years of ill-advised tax cuts, deferred maintenance and a refusal to raise enough money to pay our bills.
But now we face a real crisis. Last week the Revenue Estimator Conference met and agreed that we're going to be short around $233 million from what was estimated last May. We're also spending more, for nursing home care, RIte Care, DCYF and other services. The Governor's office says the overspending plus the shortfall totals $372 million, though I expect that number to change.
21:41 - 22 Nov 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Fri, 21 Nov 2008
Did you know that our state taxes are below the national average? Did you know that this fun fact comes via the Tax Foundation, whose crazy methodology exaggerates the impact of our income tax? Don't believe me; check it out for yourself.
For once, I wish we could have a debate in this state about the reality of taxes, without getting all tangled up in the bizarre civic self-loathing our policy makers suffer from.
23:39 - 21 Nov 2008 [/y8/no] link
Fri, 14 Nov 2008
In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy created an absorbing story about how individual actors created the events that shaped European history, but how none of them were ever knew what was going on when they did. Napoleon won battles during which no one followed (or even received) his orders, and yet was credited with strategic genius for those victories. Weather and disease lost other battles (and the war) and Napoleon got the blame. In Tolstoy's view, the sweep of history is nothing more than the story of individuals blundering about, doing the best they can with their limited views of circumstances, and grand generalizations about it all are just hot air.
The opinion pages of our state's newspapers are routinely filled with exactly these kinds of grand generalizations, facile words describing how our state's politics can be explained because voters have "chosen" the status quo, or "refuse" change because they re-elected so many members of the General Assembly.
I'm with Tolstoy on this: it's silly to encase the individual acts of hundreds of thousands of people in some kind of frozen metaphor like "the people want..." It doesn't explain anything and besides, in our government, "the people" have no way to express "their" opinion. If you are reading this, you probably have opinions about how the state would be best served. When you were in the voting booth last week, did you feel that any of the choices on offer represented your opinions well? The fate of our state deserves at least an essay question, but elections are multiple choice tests. Actually, given how many candidates run unopposed, many elections are True/False tests, where you're not allowed to check "False."
So, given all that, can we learn anything from the state election results of last week? Studying the results, the best I could come up with was this: when given the option, voters often seemed to prefer new faces, but not Republicans. Where elections were about policy issues, progressive views seemed to prevail. Mostly.
23:24 - 14 Nov 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 08 Nov 2008
I had to write this column last week, and my crystal ball was cloudy, so not a word about the election today, but in the spirit of changes afoot, I have a couple of pieces of good news worth sharing -- your government succeeding by doing interesting and creative things.
The first concerns the state bond sale of a couple of weeks ago. This was when Treasurer Frank Caprio arranged to sell bonds to the public. Here's what happened.
10:09 - 08 Nov 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Wed, 05 Nov 2008
07:09 - 05 Nov 2008 [/y8/no] link
Sat, 01 Nov 2008
A friend passed along a fascinating perspective on the bailout by an executive at a big bank, here. See especially comment number 56, which is a rebuttal of a number of the comments, from the original emailer.
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