Wasting the digital dividend
The internet means that many time-consuming forms of white-collar drudgery have disappeared, or at least been offloaded to cheaper people who aren't you, permitting you to spend more time on things that are actually productive and highly leveraged.
No more standing in line at the copier, trudging to the Fedex box, waiting two weeks for a letter to be returned, leaving voice mails, searching for the right person to contact, waiting months to learn a skill or a fact, discovering that a project is hopelessly broken, and on and on.
It's a little like the bump we got after the Cold War ended. The peace dividend was there, just waiting for us to repurpose our military, our military budget and our military research. We didn't. We squandered the window, wasted the money and didn't rush to fill it with the sort of top-down industrial projects (like high speed rail and efficient new forms of energy) that could have changed everything.
So, what are you going to do with the digital dividend? Cruise Facebook?
Phi Beta Iota: The blatant dishonesty of the US Government is breath-taking in that it fails to inspire a public backlash. Instead of spending $12 billion a year on Internet freedom, it spends it on corporate vapor-ware ostensibly to achieve cyber-security. NEWS FLASH: The current grid is impossible to defend and not worth defending; what we can steal is not worth the cost or time. For the public to not realize that one third of the federal budget, over one trillion a year is borrowed, and to allow the “debate” to be about less than $100 million, suggests that the US public has the government it deserves: the stupid “led” by the unethical.
