I read a complaint on Randy Katz’s Facebook page about a quality journal having a pay wall.  In reply, Randy said the following:

Why should quality content be free?

I posted the response below.

Quality content should not be free. Quality content providers should learn that the 21st century needs a completely different subscriber model from the 17th century, let alone the 20th.

When you only had access to a small number of publications, it was easier to decide which few you were going to pay to subscribe to.

Now that we all have access to 100s if not 1,000s of publications, the choice is not so easy. Any whole dollar subscription to each of 1,000s of sources would still be too expensive.

Google and all the ad selling web sites have the technology to make micro-payments to people who agree to host ads on their web sites. They could use this technology for subscribers to web sources. Why couldn’t Google or other site create a “Publisher’s Clearing House” of the web? You would pay one subscription fee to Google, and you would get access to 1,000s of sites. A micro-payment would be taken out of your subscription and paid to the source of whatever articles you actually read.

With this system the subscriber does not have to decide beforehand which publications are likely to have an article that he or she wants to read on any given day, week, month, or year. For a set fee, the reader can decide on the spur of the moment which source to read with the knowledge that the chosen source would get a fair payment.

When you use up your fee in micro-payments you replenish your subscription with some more money.

I am going to keep pushing this idea until someone finally takes up the challenge.  I think my last post on this topic was Monetizing Internet Content – Refresher Course.  It’s not so much a question of why people can’t think outside the box, but more of a question of why am I the only person who can think outside of this particular box?

Think Progress has the article Watch Obama’s Top Science Advisor Repeatedly Shut Down Climate Deniers At House Climate Hearing.

There are three videos in the article. I’ll include the first one here.

The Congressional climate change denier did not understand how his argument was cut off at its knees, but I do understand it. Whereas the congressman will go on repeating that nobody can answer his question, I will remember the answer quite clearly.

This segment did not include the explanation that ice melting in a glass of water does not raise the water level in the glass, but ice dropped into the glass from outside the glass raises the water level quite dramatically. Apparently, this congressman has no idea that the Antarctic ice sheet, the Greenland ice sheet, Alaskan ice, Siberian ice and all of our mountain glaciers are not yet sitting in the oceans. Once they melt it will be like dropping them into the ocean.

What are these ignorant people doing judging science in the halls of Congress?

After posting this, I ran across a posting on Jacquelyn Wells’ Facebook page. This link points to the Politicus USA article Jon Stewart Obliterates Republicans By Highlighting Their Ignorance On Climate Change.

Here is a snapshot of the Stewart scientific experiment.

Here is the video of the segment. The scientific experiment is only a small part of this great segment.

New Economic Perspectives has the article A Bottom-Up Solution to the Global Democracy Crisis by Joe Firestone.  There is a good description of what has gone wrong with our current system.  Ultimately, the article leads to a description of a possible solution.  Firestone says the following:

I know of a global web platform now in development that can be brought online rapidly which, along with its members and participants will generate new voter-controlled institutions capable of countering the factors I’ve named earlier. This platform can empower U.S. voters, for example, across the spectrum, to join forces to replace poorly performing elites with leaders that will represent the people in time for the U.S. presidential and Congressional elections of 2016.
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If you want to learn more about the project to bring this web platform for re-inventing democracy to fruition, and how it can restore the ability of democracies to change their leaders, then please go to reinventdemocracy.net, and reinventdemocracyfoundation.net for more information.

The web site presents some very intriguing ideas and possibilities. In looking through the pages of the web site, I don’t think I found evidence that the patented software systems are actually available on this web site, yet. I can hardly wait to see the software in action.

I have sent an email query about how to help the web site get developed more quickly. I have asked if there are thoughts of turning this into an open source software development project. I’ll report back here if I get any further information.

September 22, 2014

I did get an email response which was an Invitation to Join the Re-Invent Democracy Community. The link below will take you to their crowd sourcing web site. There is a slide show explaining what Re-invent Democracy is trying to accomplish.

New Economic Perspectives has the article BANK of the COMMONS. by J. D. Alt. In discussing an assumption that Thomas Piketty made in his book Capital in the Twenty First Century, Alt says:

Instead of simply assuming, however—and in such an off-hand fashion!—that legitimate “democratic governance” cannot possibly be inserted into a central bank’s procedures for issuing fiat currency, why not try to imagine a way that it could? This is precisely what a “Bank of the Commons” might accomplish.

This is a very interesting idea.  One of the people commenting on the article claims that this was done in the 1930s and 1940s.

This idea isn’t far fetched at all.  We have systems almost like that in operation right now.  Think of government funded research grants.  What the NIH does right now is one example.  PhD’s at Universities and other research institutes write grant proposals, and the NIH funds some of them.  The current system is pro-cyclical though.  The amount of funding goes up when the economy is doing well, and it goes down when the economy is doing badly.  Highly qualified researches are dropping out now because of the lack of funding for good proposals.  I read of one newly minted Professor who decided to open a winery (maybe it was a brewery) because he couldn’t get funding for his biomedical research proposals.

The Bank of the Commons would not restrict itself only to research proposals by scientists with advanced degrees.  It would be open to anyone or any group that had a good proposal.  (Of course that is also true of some government grants now.)   However, the other difference is that a Bank of the Commons would be economically counter-cyclical, if that is the way we decide it should be run.

MassLive, the online arm of The Springfield Republican, has the article US Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey oppose President Obama’s Syrian rebel training plan.

U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey on Thursday broke with the president and opposed the request to train and arm the rebels for a war against Islamic state militants.

The Senate approved the request late Thursday on a 78-22 vote.

Warren said she wasn’t convinced the proposal to train and equip Syrian rebels advances U.S. interests or that it would be effective in pushing back Islamic State fighters.

“I remain concerned that our weapons, our funding, and our support may end up in the hands of people who threaten the United States,” Warren said in a statement. “I do not want America to be dragged into another ground war in the Middle East.”

I was thrilled to hear that my favorite Senator, Elizabeth Warren, has finally showing signs of developing independent judgment on foreign policy matters.  Through years of hard fought battles, Elizabeth Warren learned to be skeptical of the domestic policy statements of the powers that be.  I am glad to see that she now realizes that the propagandists on domestic matters don’t just automatically become honest brokers when they speak on foreign policy.

Naked Capitalism has the article European Union Court of Justice Imposes Anti-Rasmussen Rule – Sanctions Cannot Be Imposed by Reason of Fabrication, Lies, Dissimulation.

For the second time, the EU court has ruled that sanctions are illegal if they are based on allegations which cannot stand up in court. With an irony yet to be tested in the US, the EU court has also ruled that state organizations and companies targeted by sanctions have the same human right to due process, as human beings, Russian dissidents, and Americans.

The ruling ends two years of proceedings in Luxembourg. The Iranian central bank’s case was that EU sanctions were unlawful because they were based on evidence which was in error; because they violated the EU’s obligation to give defensible reasons for its action; because the EU had violated fundamental human rights, including the protection of property, the right of defence, the right to effective judicial protection, and the right to proportionality between act and penalty.

It is nice to see that a court thinks that truth matters. I think the court goes a little far in jumping to the conclusion that because a corporation is called “a legal person” in some laws, that this automatically determines what rights a corporation has compared to what rights “an actual person” has. It is true that “a legal person” has some similarities to “an actual person”, but it is also true that there are some differences. To ignore this truth is as bad ignoring the truth (or falsity) of allegations.

Other parts of the article cast significant doubt on our stance on Russia and the Ukraine.

Politico has the video Solving for Y with Elizabeth Warren and Suze Orman.

Full video: POLITICO’s Mike Allen and Maggie Haberman moderate a conversation with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and personal finance expert Suze Orman on ‘Solving for Y: Exploring Opportunities for the Next Generation.’ 09/17/2014 12:14 PM

I only got through the first 5 minutes before my browser crapped out. Perhaps you will have better luck.

October 6, 2019

Look at the date of this post. It was posted on September 19, 2014. It is obsolete for the purposes of the title. I keep it on this blog only for historical reasons.

For the campaign season of the upcoming Massachusetts state election on November 4, 2014, I am going to deliver lawn signs for Martha Coakley, Maura Healey, and Anne Gobi in five towns around Sturbridge, Massachusetts.

My delivery area covers the towns of Charlton, Holland, Southbridge, Sturbridge, and Wales

The online request form is at . The previous URL is an abbreviation of www.ssgreenberg.name/Campaign/LawnSignRequest.php

Martha Coakley has put up the video below.

To finish Charlie Baker’s sentence – “If we fired everybody who helped cover up for domestic violence, then there might be a lot less domestic violence.”

I have been thinking about just what it is about the Rice video that puts the behavior in a different class, it is not so much the punch itself, bad as that was. It is his callous behavior after she falls into unconsciousness. An NFL football player hasn’t the strength to gently lift his wife, carry her out of the elevator, and then care for her. He barely manages the energy to drag her most of the way out of the elevator. He shows no indication of realizing what an awful thing he has just done.

If this video makes you want to donate to the Coakley campaign, here is the link.

The Young Turks network is taking a survey as explained in the YouTube Video. Here is the explanation of the video.

Are you dissatisfied with Hillary Clinton as the presumptive democratic nominee for President in 2016? Are you hoping for a more progressive candidate? We want to know who you want, email us your choice of candidate at petitions@tytnetwork.com once we receive your choices we will publish petitions for your candidates at http://www.tytnetwork.com/petitions. We’ll leave your petitions up on our website until October 1st, at that point any candidate who has reached 1000 signatures on their petition we believe should be taken seriously as a legitimate progressive challenger to Hillary Clinton, we will leave those names up on our website indefinitely to see how many signatures those petitions get. Email your choice for a progressive challenger to Hillary Clinton at petitions@tytnetwork.com

I think that if your candidate is already on the list, you just have to go to the website above and cast your vote (sign the petition).