[Case] The first thing I would do is reinstate the laws that required local and limited ownership of public airwaves and return of the satellite fleet to the people who paid for it in the first place.
[Arlo] "Free the Commons!" I'm with you, amigo. My guess is that in order to do this a revaluation of "private ownership" would have to occur. Lessig writes about this extensively. The modern dogma is that "private" is ipso facto "good" and "public" is ipso facto "bad". Anything even veering close to mentioning the dreaded "C" word, "community" (or "commons"), is aggressively attacked. Public lands, public airwaves, public "fill-in-the-blank" are seen as wasted resources, or worse, signs that Stalin has risen from the dead. [Khaled] My suggestion would be Locality. No national syndication of the arts, music, theatre and so on. We all have to consume local productions. Within a couple of a hundred miles. [Arlo] I had a similar suggestion once regarding garbage, pass laws to require all garbage to be dealt with within 100 miles of its orign. No shipping millions of tons of garbage from the large metro areas into my little clean valley. There is no incentive this way to reduce waste. Germany also has a similar progressive law. Require upfront all business to pay for the disposal of waste/packaging from the products it sells. You want to sell a doll with 2 lbs. of plastic and box packaging? Fine, you pay the cost of disposing of that 2 lbs. of junk. It's really made a difference. Packaging waste is way down. Less garbage. Win win scenario, I call it. But the reason Germany had to do this was simple, they had no where to go with their garbage. There were no clean little valleys left to turn into landfills. We still have them. But this is a tangent... There was an article last week in Time on "The Perfect Apple" that looked at organic vs. locally grown produce (is it better to eat an organic apple from Washington state, if you live in Pennsylvania, or a local, non-organic apple from 1/2 mile up the road?). Bottom line, nearly everyone, including the CEO of Whole Foods agreed that locally grown food tastes better, and is better for the environment. So short of government decree, what kind of value changes would make such a situation occur naturally? My first thought reading the article was, "if local food tastes better, why do people buy the same things they could get locally from far away?" It seems like a Quality issue, does it not? If something tastes better, and yet you buy the poorer-tasting one, why? Convenience? Is it like the "shim" scenario described in ZMM? Do people want food that bears the mark of approval from someone else? And here too I'd say "community" would have to be revaluated. A concern with "locality" seems to flow naturally from a concern with one's "community". Supporting local business flows naturally from valuing local economic conditions. moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
