Velcro City Tourist Board

Tag: networks

  • the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky

    Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly…

  • protocols > platforms

    I used to read Techdirt, and Mike Masnick in particular, with genuine reverence when Futurismic was still a running concern. He was tech-critical long before it was fashionable to be so, but from a position that challenged my own thinking quite a bit, and still does: in short, Masnick’s about as close to First Amendment…

  • a house that grows

    Paul Dobraszczyk on Graham Caine’s Street Farmhouse eco-structure from the early 1970s: Even though Caine intended the eco-house to be a model for a new kind of society that embraced self-determination as a fundamental tenet in all aspects of life, it nevertheless failed because of its vulnerability to disorder. The ways in which humans occupy…

  • Qui autem temperet moderatores?

    … [UK] consumers have overpaid for the natural monopolies and other networks underpinning many of these markets for at least the past 15 years. Because of patchy reporting from regulators, it’s impossible to document the full extent of these overpayments. However, this research finds that regulators have systematically set prices too high, leading to consumers…

  • Opportunity cost

    The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those lab rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were…