Using a new “crowdfunding” program called Solar Mosaic, the city is selling solar tiles to locals for $100 a pop and installing them on public buildings
By Maria Gallucci, SolveClimate News
Apr 22, 2011
The city of Oakland, Calif., is getting its residents to help build out a clean energy economy, one solar tile at a time.
By selling 5,000 tiles at $100 each to locals, the city is aiming to piece together entire rooftop solar arrays at seven budget-strapped schools, youth centers and houses of worship. A team of Oaklanders will be trained and hired to install the panels by as early as July.
The city's efforts are part of a pilot program called Solar Mosaic, a web-based marketplace for community solar initiatives that launched on April 15.
Using the “crowdfunding” model, residents can help generate energy savings and scale back greenhouse gas emissions without having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for a solar installation at home.
Phi Beta Iota: The existing tax system in the USA is so corrupt it must be abolished. The public is now ready for line-item crowd-sourcing and the fully-transparent Automated Payments/Transaction Tax.
10 April 2011: John Vidal: Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as “blessings” and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry
19 Apr 2011: Jonathan Glennie: Bolivia under President Evo Morales is seeking a radical development model based on equality and environmental sustainability – and there are lessons we can all learn.
13 Apr 2011: John Vidal: Development, by the west, creates considerable imbalances and a million problems. Indigenous people can solve these, says David Choquehuanca, Bolivia's foreign minister
Unions representing Central Florida teachers, firefighters, police and other government workers are pulling an estimated $10 million from five banks affiliated with the Florida Chamber of Commerce, blaming them for an attack on public employees.
The unions are also asking their members — an estimated 20,000 people — to withdrawal their personal money from Bank of America, PNC Bank, Regions Bank, SunTrust and Wachovia. And labor leaders across the state could follow in the coming weeks, union officials say.
Archangel73 at 11:59 AM April 22, 2011I have noticed that all of these attacks on Public servants [are] having an opposite effect.
The Fire and Police depts used to be mostly Republican, now all of those folks are leaving the party because they're upset that the burden of everything is being put on THEIR backs.
What was intended to WEAKEN the Unions appears to be having the opposite effect, and employees are becoming more resolute. More importantly, they are becoming angry with the GOP.
I continue to be focused on the future of the Internet and aware of divergent paths. In the later 2000s, following a period of digital and media convergence and given broad adoption of evolving high speed (broadband) network connectivity, the Internet has become an environment for mixed media and marketing. The Internet is increasingly centralized as a platform that serves a global business engine. It’s a mashup of business to business services and business to consumer connections, a mashup of all the forms of audio, text, and video communication and media in a new, more social/participatory context: the faceless consumer now has an avatar, an email address, and a feedback loop.
The sense of the Internet as a decentralized free and open space has changed, but there are still many advocates and strong arguments for approaches that are bottom-up, network-centric, free as in freedom (and sometimes as in beer), open, collaborative, decentralized. It’s tempting to see top-down corporate approaches vs bottom-up “free culture” approaches as mutually exclusive, but I think they can and will coexist. Rather than make value judgements about the different approaches, I want to support education and thinking about ethics, something I should discuss later.
Right now I want to point to a collaboration forming around the work of Venessa Miemis, who’s been curating trends, models, and projects associated with the decentralized Internet model. Venessa and her colleagues (including myself) have been discussing how to build a decentralized network that is broadly and cheaply accessible and that is more of a cooperative, serving the public interest rather than a narrower set of economic interests.
I’ll be focusing on these sorts of projects here and in my talks on the future of the Internet. Meanwhile, here are pointers to a couple of Venessa’s posts that are good overviews for what I’m talking about. I appreciate her clarity and focus.
Phi Beta Iota: A great deal of the credit goes to Doug Rushkoff, the originator of ContactCon, for whom Venessa Miemis (also a contributing editor here at Phi Beta Iota) works. Using Doug Rushkoff's social capital, and Venessa Miemi's inspired scouting on emergence, they have quickly become a hub for innovation and information sharing about the needed Autonomous Internet.
Global Voices Blog Critique from Jacob Appelbaum: My motivation for writing this response is to inform readers of the serious concerns that many people, myself included, have about the recent Freedom House report. I am always pleased to see more analysis of censorship circumvention and Internet security tools, but I have concerns about this report’s methodologies and resulting conclusions. The report in its current form could be dangerous to the users it aims to help.
The reporting methodology is sloppy at best and the information in the report is often inaccurate or poorly written. The report demonstrates a general disconnection from the language used by the projects and the circumvention community as a whole.
Internet censorship poses a large and growing challenge to online freedom of expression around the world. Censorship circumvention tools are critical to bypass restrictions on the internet and thereby to protect free expression online.
Circumvention tools are primarily designed to bypass internet filtering. Therefore, the core principle behind these technologies is to find alternative paths for data packets. These alternative paths use one or more collaborative servers in order to bypass the network of blocking mechanisms.
This document provides a comparison among different circumvention tools, both in terms of their technical merits, as well as how users of these tools describe their experience with them. The countries included in this report are Azerbaijan, Burma, China and Iran.
Phi Beta Iota: Within the emerging Autonomous Internet, these tools assume use of the existing grid, and can in turn be used by the authorities, sometimes with the collaboration of the Internet Service Providers, to identify dissidents. The Autonomous Internet seeks first to bypass local interception points (local solar-powered nodes using leased satellite communications), and ultimately to permit all individuals everywhere to enjoy the Internet for free and in liberty. Novices forget that anonymous is not the same as invisible, and that security is needed at the point of receipt as well (counter-intelligence outside the denied area is focused on identifying dissidents on the basis of leaks outside the denied area). NOTE: Freedom House has a trojan virus–if you don't see the deletion notice your security program is not up to par.
FROM Electronic Frontier Foundation: On Monday, April 11, 2011, we launched a petition to the largest Internet companies asking them to stand with their users and be transparent in their practices. Here's a chart showing how we think each of the companies is doing right now — a gold star indicates that the company is doing a stellar job, a half-star indicates they are taking steps in the right direction. This page will be updated as companies change their practices in response to public demand.
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Phi Beta Iota: Visit the EFF page to view a rather extraordinary chart that shows NONE of the major digital service providers to be anywhere near an acceptable standard of privacy before a government that has used the false war on terrorism as an excuse to both grow in unwarranted size and corporate vapor ware services, and to set aside centuries of legal protections rooted in the Constitution. We recommend regular visits to the EFF page to see how, if at all, these services of common concern respond to public interest. This could be a dry run for Electoral Reform!
Let's start with the state of inequality in the USA today–the concentration of wealth would make Hitler proud. The middle class is the Jews, the blue collar class is the working Poles (the ones allowed to live), and Congress is the appeaser and co-conspirator. The White House is the SS for Hitler (Goldman Sachs and Wall Street).
For the US media to be consumed with a less than $100 million budget cut at a time when the US Government is borrowing, WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION and WITHOUT CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY, one third of its operating budget, over a trillion dollars a year, is grounds for the impeachment of the President, every Senator, and every Member of Congress. This is a Demo-Publican Co-Conspiracy of insane criminality.
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The fraud inherent in the government shut-down “confrontation” and the craven collaboration of the mass media, particularly the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Bloomberg, and CNN, is breathtaking. The lunacy continues.
To the left is a simple chart of where the federal, state, and local governments get their revenue. The fact that one third of the federal revenue is DEBT is itself breathtaking, and grounds for impeaching every Senator and Representative now serving. Source Online
Below is more interesting. This is a pie-chart that shows the current (tiny) slice of revenue sources in relation to the total economy and the much, much larger “pie” that has been ignored by the US Government because the US Government at the political level is CORRUPT and so is the corporate media that refuses to do holistic accurate reporting on what is and what could be.
