"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

On The Bubble

One of my beats is inequality. If you read this old blog or you get my tweets, you know I frequently highlight news or analysis about the disparity in wealth and income in the US and elsewhere.

Recently I had cause to look at it from a different perspective than I'd before, from someone worried about all they had slipping away; the "I'm going to leave less to my kids than I had" worry. Led to some halfway interesting thoughts.

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Burn The Town Down Blues

So I posted a reference on the Twitter machine to this song I love from a concert some friends of mine recorded years and years ago in Portland at Reed College. There ain't no online version, so I thought I'd share:

John Henry Crippen — Burn The Town Down Blues.

Hopefully John Henry don't mind me postin' oldie-but-goodie MP3's on this old blog. If you like this you can listen to snippets and buy the whole double-length CD of Tom, Dan and John's legendary performance from CD Baby: Blue Language. I'm clearly no objective source — these are my friends — but I think there are many true gems in these tracks.

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Moving...

I'm moving to Pantheon, which has been delayed because I didn't want to deal with the legacy hand-roll that was the first three years of this now decade-old (so old!) website.

Update: Moved! I even found a few bugs in documentation to fix. Hooray dogfood!

While I was at it I went ahead and ported the venerable (CivicSpace powered!) Vagabender dot com as well. Turns out updating CivicSpace/Drupal 4.6 to run on Pantheon was actually easier than dealing with ten years of random cruft and symlinks. Who knew!

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In Which I Badmouth the Scene for a Minute

There's a lot to like, even love, about being an entrepreneur. There's agency, opportunity, creativity, the singular challenge and potential rewards of doing something different and new. I wouldn't want any other kind of career.

That said, there are things I really don't love about the Startup Scene, and I've had a stressful week. At the risk of bemoaning what are undoubtedly "first world problems" (and then some), I want to write a bit about what I find irksome about the Valley. Writing helps me process, and maybe my scribbles will help some fellow traveller somewhere down the line.

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In Which I Contemplate Capital Gains, Aristocracy, and Romney

The other day I tweeted a paraphrase from one of my favorite bloggers Atrios regarding Mitt Romney's tax returns that went something like "the tax rate on any money the pile of cash earns is much lower than it is on the money earned by people who actually work." A couple people asked me to explain this a little more so I thought it would make a good bloggy topic.

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The Search for Political Economy

I haven't written much at all about electoral politics because frankly they're not very interesting. The GOP nomination process has had its moments of entertainment, but that's largely a matter of theater, not substance. The Occupy movement got me excited for a hot minute, but outdoor protest tends to ebb in the winter. In today's edition of "doing the pages" I'll write a little ditty about a contemporary political debate within the left that's interesting in it's own right, and explains some of my lassitude.

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Fitness notes

Pursuant to yesterday's(!!!) post in which I resolved to "do the pages" in an effort to get my writing muscles back in form, I'm blogging with my breakfast and the topic will be yesterday's other topic: arresting my rapid physical decline.

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Goals you meet, resolutions you keep

Another eight-week drought. I also failed to mark the 10-year anniversary of this little publishing enterprise; I'm generally just not moved to write. That's bad.

It's one of a set of symptoms I'd like to address in the New Year. Is that really possible?

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Life and Times

It's been a while. I haven't just been neglecting this old blog, but really almost all my social interfaces. So a bit of a catch-up is probably in order. In this edition:

  1. Personal life and romance report quarterly update.
  2. How's business?
  3. And what about all that ranting...

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The Zeitgeist On Wall St

Following on my last post, I wanted to collect some thoughts on the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protest, which has rapidly grown more interesting. Today, for instance, instead of biking to Golden Gate Park and seeing some of the great free music, I watched mass arrests of hundreds of marchers who made their way onto the south (bklyn-bound) lane of the Brooklyn bridge where they were kettled by the NYPD. Live on the internet. Pretty high drama, but it's possibly quite a lot bigger than that.

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