Grok Headline matches for First Impression : Respect Your Elders
Suspected Taliban Kill Pro-Election Elders (AP)
Suspected Taliban Kill Pro-Election Elders (AP)09/18/2004 09:02 AM AP - Suspected Taliban rebels killed two tribal elders who were
encouraging participation in elections and shot to death an Afghan
military commander in an ambush, officials said Saturday
China's Newest Cultural Revolution Worries Elders (Los Angeles Times)
Microsoft Can't Get No Respect10/31/2003 07:25 PM Microsoft (Quote, Chart) has apparently been spurned in an attempt to
acquire Google, according to this morning's New York Times. ...
LG Demands Your Respect
LG Demands Your Respect03/06/2004 01:57 AM Like high-school yearbook editors trying to reinvent themselves as
college hipsters, South Korean electronics firms are doing their
darndest to shed their low-end reps. First...
Respect for Web Developers
Respect for Web Developers03/23/2005 05:23 PM Back when I was first paid to build web-based applications (around
1998 or so), the world of Web Development as we know it today did not
exist. When I began working my first post-college full-time job,
things had improved a bit. I learned all that fancy JavaScript,
VBScript, Applets, and ActiveX stuff. But I couldn't really put it to
use because the cross-platform and cross-browser support was horrible.
I swore off DHTML and went on with life, focusing more on...
iSCSI gets some respect
iSCSI gets some respect08/16/2004 05:57 PM Having received a renewed boost from those who see it moving out of
niche markets, iSCSI (Internet SCSI) may finally be getting some
much-needed respect.
No belly, no respect
No belly, no respect05/05/2004 08:15 AM During my pregnancy, strangers constantly told me that I was too small
to be healthy -- even suggesting my baby might be abnormal. Who said
expectant mothers have to look like fertility goddesses?
Respect 1.0 (Default branch)04/18/2005 11:11 PM
Respect is a GDM theme based on a location that
demands respect.
Learn To Respect Shorts
Learn To Respect Shorts04/04/2005 01:50 PM If people would just stop shouting, they might learn something.
Dell Can't Get No Respect (washingtonpost.com)
Dell Can't Get No Respect (washingtonpost.com)05/14/2004 10:36 AM washingtonpost.com - Dell Inc. executives are justifiably pleased
about their first-quarter profit, but the PC maker's latest financial
results are generating little more than middling enthusiasm from tech
industry analysts. The numbers show a company that is holding its own
against the various slings and arrows of the PC price wars, but at the
same time is suffering from the high costs of doing business.
Apple, Respect Your Resellers06/17/2004 10:10 AM Apple must craft a plan to rebuild and reinvent its ties with small
resellers.
By Alex Salkever, BusinessWeek (via MyAppleMenu)
RE lessons 'to respect all faiths'04/26/2004 06:05 AM All major religions should be studied to promote 'understanding and
respect', new guidelines say.
Minds of Their Own: Birds Gain Respect
Minds of Their Own: Birds Gain Respect02/01/2005 09:41 PM Scientists are arguing that the avian brain is as complex, flexible
and inventive as any mammalian brain.
Howard urging return of respect
Howard urging return of respect08/09/2004 11:25 AM Tory leader Michael Howard is to call for tougher discipline at school
and home in a keynote speech on Tuesday.
RELIANCE is great in many respect, except its accounting is
Columnist: 'Apple, Respect Your Resellers'06/17/2004 05:07 AM In his latest "Byte of the Apple" column for BusinessWeek, Alex
Salkever writes that if Apple refuses to heed the complaints of
resellers (that Apple Stores are damaging their businesses), both
sides will suffer...
nytimes.com/2003/12/03/national/03HOUS.html?hp track this
site | 6 links
from the new-found-respect-for-OECD-analysis department
from the new-found-respect-for-OECD-analysis department04/11/2005 01:39 PM The OECD has released a fantastic new report
on "Digital Broadband Content." I saw a draft a while ago, but it was
embargoed at the time, and then, delayed in its release by those who
didn't like its very balanced message. Unlike those pressing the "US view,"
there's lots in this document that advances the debate quite well.
Some bits I would disagree with, and other bits, quibble with, but
this is precisely the stuff this debate needs.
One issue that the document frames nicely, but doesn't quite address:
Notice the trade-off between (1) the way we choose to protect IP and
(2) the kinds of creativity we encourage. (This is a point made well
by Terry Fisher in his discussion of "semiotic
democracy.")
If we INDUCE and support the "per copy" model of copyright, for all
content, especially video and music, and if we supplement that
protection strong DRM, we pollute the opportunity for remix culture to
develop. That should force us to ask: is there a way to protect the
legitimate IP interests of the copyright holders, without polluting
remix culture?
themorningnews.org/archives/how_to/tricks_of_the_trade.php track
this site | 6 links
Developing nations shouldn't respect US copyright unless farm subsidies end
Developing nations shouldn't respect US copyright unless farm subsidies end01/16/2004 11:35 AM Lessig points out that the US spent a hundred years ripping off
everyone else's copyrights and now expects that no one else will ever
do the same: moreover, we're demanding onerous IP regimes from
developing nations in the name of "free trade" even as we engage in
unfair trade subsidies ourselves.
The dirty little secret, however, is that we don't respect the free
trade rules that we impose on others. While the US sings the virtues
of free trade to defend maximalist intellectual property regulation,
we poison the free trade that developing nations care about most -
agriculture - by subsidizing farming in the industrialized world to
the tune of $300 billion annually. Rhetoric about family farmers
aside, most of that money passes quickly to agribusiness. This is not
Adam Smith; it is corporate welfare par excellence...
A block of powerful developing nations should first take a page from
the US Copyright Act of 1790 and enact national laws that explicitly
protect their own rights only. It would not protect foreigners.
Second, these nations should add a provision that would relax this
exemption to the extent that developed nations really opened their
borders. If we reduce, for example, the subsidy to agribusiness by 10
percent, then they would permit 10 percent of our copyrights to be
enforced (say, copyrights from the period 1923 to 1931). Reduce the
subsidy by another 10 percent, then another 10 percent could be
enforced. And so on.
Peter
Brown's latest book provides a dispassionate, rational and compelling
argument for the need to change our economic, political and social
systems in order to properly steward the planet, and practical ideas
on
how to do so.
Conservationist Peter Brown
moved a few years ago from Maryland, where he still manages a forest,
to Quebec, where he also now manages a forest, to take up the role of
Director of the McGill University School of
Environment, where he continues to teach. His latest, innocuously
named book The Commonwealth of
Life was recommended by four environmentalists I respect
enormously (and have written about), David
Suzuki, Elizabeth
May, Peter
Singer and Herman
Daly. I just finished reading the book and it's astonishing.
Brown starts by laying out the false assumptions by which our
economic, political and social systems currently operate:
that well-being can be measured by economic
growth
that humans enjoy a unique moral place in the
universe
that we can safely predict the consequences of our
actions
that nation-states are morally privileged
that
markets and democracy are mutually reinforcing institutions, and
that the world is largely unperturbed and
unperturbable by human actions
The book systematically and thoroughly deconstructs these false
assumptions and provides an alternative framework for the
reorganization and management of our economic, political and social
systems, that could create a society based on respect for all life on
Earth, and at the same time, not coincidentally, maximize human
well-being.
He starts with an argument, which he eloquently provides historical
context for and then defends, that there are three rights that must be
satisfied for a healthy, functioning society: the right of bodily integrity (freedom from
injury and undue confinement), the right of moral, political and religious choice, and the right of
subsistence (to make a decent
living and hence provide for the basic needs of life).
He goes on to say that in a functioning society these rights are
honoured through three duties: individual duty to respect the rights
of
others, government duty to enforce these rights when individuals
abrogate them, and international organizations' duty to enforce these
rights when governments fail to do so. He then, again using
historical,
moral and philosophical argument, says that in our interdependent and
finite world we must, to fulfill that duty, extend these rights across
space (to all people of all nations), across time (to future
generations), and (at least insofar as the first and third rights are
concerned) to all other species that reason, communicate and feel
pain.
He further argues that such rights can only be granted and enforced if
we have respect for the entire interconnected 'commonwealth of life'
including not only all sentient species but the ecosystems in which
they live as well. These duties and responsibilities of commonwealth
are, he says, analogous to and natural extensions of our duties and
responsibilities of citizenship. They are what he calls duties beyond borders (geographic,
temporal and ecological). Not surprisingly, he calls the exercise of
such duties stewardship.
Recognizing that this is groundbreaking argument, he rigorously raises
and then dispels the objections that can be made to each of these
theses, and analyzes and contrasts alternative theses for their
ability
to provide direction towards sustainable human well-being. He's his
own
critic, diligent and rigorous in his analysis.
In Part Two he goes on to explain what changes to our economic,
political and social systems will be needed to act on these duties,
protect these rights and achieve a properly-stewarded commonwealth.
Starting with the 'stewardship economic' system needed to restore,
protect and enhance the commonwealth (and extension of Keynes'
definition of the function of classical economics to 'protect human
life and culture'), he argues that in order for the new economic
system
to entrench the three basic rights it is first necessary to constrain
the extravagant and wasteful use of some resources (notably water,
energy, forests, heavy metals and soil nutrients), which has been
allowed to continue because of the pervasive myths that we are not
significant actors in Earth's biophysical systems. He counters the
argument of "technological optimists" that prices, supply and demand
will self-regulate the depletion of resources (implausible in the
presence of market-distorting subsidies and in the absence of full-costin
g
of resource extraction) and that new substitutes for scarce resources
will always be found in sufficient time (because the cascading impact
of the depleted resources on other parts of the ecosystem, including
parts critical to our economy, can be catastrophic). He concludes his
economic prescription by saying "The space between the lower boundary
of satisfying basic rights, and the upper boundary allowing other life
forms to flourish is the space for legitimate human wealth". He need
not add that, in today's economy, that space is negative.
Turning to political systems, he sees the role of government as a
trustee, acting only when individuals and groups fail to respect the
commonwealth of life, or abrogate the three basic rights or their
responsibility to protect them. Government therefore has seven
duties:
duty to preserve and enhance the well-being of
all
duty to discharge its obligations impartially
duty
to uphold the three basic rights
duty to prohibit wasteful use
of resources
duty to address crises of scarcity
duty
to respect the virtue of commerce to optimize the production and
distribution of necessities of life
duty to protect the
commonwealth undiminished for future generations
He demonstrates that the exercise of such duties need be no more
interventionist than existing government, and that it requires
government to be altruistic, rather than merely responding to the
collective parochial demands of today's citizens, corporations and
special interests. And he skewers the myth of the infallibility of
'free' markets, demonstrating that 'free' markets do not exist today,
and never have.
Next up is the changes to social systems, to the functioning of civil
society, which must intervene when necessary to check the excesses of
both the economic and political systems, and give them direction. He
shows why the most common solutions to dealing with the Tragedy of
the Commons
(those solutions being: making all property privately owned, or making
all property government-owned) don't work. He describes the essential
aspects of property rights (right to exclude access, right to use,
right to dispose) and proposes a merging of today's property rights
with a new public trust
responsibility
commensurate with those rights. This responsibility is identical to
the
seven duties of governments bulleted above, insofar as that property
is
concerned, and is consistent with the stewardship theme of Brown's
entire philosophy.
In Part Three Brown extends the personal and government
responsibilities to the international arena, arguing that the world is
in essence a community of 'fiduciary states' (nations with stewardship
responsibility). He says that individual nations and supra-national
organizations (like the UN) must ensure that all
nations exercise the seven duties transparently, and that each person
and nation has a community responsibility to all others. In response
to
self-proclaimed 'realists' whose view of human nature is cynical and
who see human motives as inherently opportunistic and Machiavellian,
Brown counters with the Aristotelian view of human nature, and
provides
historical context to justify its greater plausibility. In response to
the argument that nations 'need' to be able to act in their own
self-interest, he reviews the entire history of nation-states and
shows
them to be a largely arbitrary and evolving concept, suggesting that
they are readily adaptable to a more altruistic purpose and may in the
future evolve or devolve into a very different form or disappear
entirely in favour of other forms of government.
This is the part of the book I struggled with the most, for two
reasons. First, I've gone on record as saying I think any solution to
the current ecological crisis will require political and economic
power
to first devolve from nations to communities. Secondly, I've argued
passionately in favour of the rights of national sovereignty, even,
with limits, when the exercise of that sovereignty may sometimes
offend
our personal and cultural values. I'm re-thinking my positions on
these
two issues.
In the final chapter, Brown starts with a lovely quote from Albert
Schweitzer:
Sooner or later there must dawn the true and final
renaissance which will bring peace to the world.
He then lays out a 14-point action plan to migrate our economic,
political and social systems to their new stewardship of the
commonwealth roles:
Assess the current state of the three basic rights in
each country.
Inventory the current state of productive
resources,
capacity to rebound to natural, sustainable levels, and capacity of
'sinks' to absorb human activity.
Compile an overall global
biological survey of ecosystem health and robustness.
Design
and construct new institutions to protect the commonwealth, modeled
after Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons analysis
of effective common pool resource management
structures.
Introduce new regulations and incentives (emphasis
on the latter) to extend and entrench the three basic
rights.
Create national Councils of
Stewardship to supplant Councils of Economic Advisers.
Create
incentives for good-stewardship substitutions e.g.
grants, tax changes, short-term subsidies, that could, for example,
lead to the elimination
of the need to raise animals for food.
Grant legal
standing to future generations and other sentient species, so that
actions can be launched on their behalf.
Implement
cosmopolitan education: teach stewardship,
tolerance, and educate and fund research on good-stewardship
substitutions for existing activities.
Promulgate an international declaration of
stewardship
acknowledging our responsibilities and also the need for all people to
take action to significantly reduce both human population and levels
of
consumption.
Create an annual report of our stewardship and
trusteeship of the planet.
Brown acknowledges that some of the countries that fail to provide the
three basic rights will be belligerent in the face of pressure to do
so. He recommends the program of treaties, oversight, sanctions,
cooperative and collaborative institutions and agencies outlined in Richard Falk's book This
Endangered Planet as a means of dealing with belligerents,
rather than the hasty rush to war, which usually does more harm than
good.
All in all, this slim (160 page) volume is a remarkable mix of
idealism
and pragmatism. Just one more recipe for saving the world, but one
that
has the weight of research, the intelligence to avoid rhetoric and
blame, extraordinary sponsorship and scholarship and the common sense
to take it one step and one country at a time. It deserves our
attention. If people are unwilling to accept the duty of respect and
responsibility that Brown calls for, we are all lost.
(Brown is working on a new book called Reverence for Life: A Philosophy for
Civilization. I'll let you know when it's out.)
If there's any reason this four-year-old book has not
become a best-seller, it must be because it's so hard to find: You'll
search Amazon in vain (though you may find it under its even more
innocuous European title Ethics, Economics and International
Relations). In Britain you can get it under the Canadian title from Politico's
Books. Americans will, alas, probably have to get their local
bookseller to order it in -- publisher and ISBN can be found here, or order it for CAD $20 from McNally Robinson, the great
Canadian independent bookseller.
Microsoft scores highest in customer-respect study
Top Iraq Cleric Urges Respect for 'Holy Najaf'-Aide (Reuters)
Top Iraq Cleric Urges Respect for 'Holy Najaf'-Aide (Reuters)08/12/2004 06:07 AM Reuters - Iraq's most influential Shi'ite cleric
urged Shi'ite rebels and U.S. forces fighting in Najaf to
respect the holy city and its shrines, an aide said on
Thursday.
First impression: JOE
First impression: JOE01/09/2004 09:57 PM As work on my books moves into a higher gear, I've just installed the
open-source Java Outline Editor, or JOE, on a Windows XP box.
Interestingly, my collaborator knew all about JOE already even before
I mentioned I was considering...
Respect is a GDM theme based on a location that
demands respect.
Remember those in-theater MPAA ads blogged