At C4SS: Neoliberalism--All the Taxes of Social Democracy, None of the Fun

Quality Problems with Kindle?

As announced earlier, Homebrew Industrial Revolution is now available on Kindle. I was notified by one purchaser that there were problems with the formatting. I don't have an ereader myself, so I don't know how bad it is. I'd appreciate feedback from those who've purchased it. And of course if it's unreadable, please seek a refund immediately! If this thing is no good and there's no convenient way to improve the quality through Kindle, I'll take it off the market.

At C4SS: Bradley Manning--One Soldier Who Really Did "Defend Our Freedom"

New Quarterly Research Paper at C4SS

The Great Domain of Cost-Plus: The Waste Production Economy

Thomas Knapp's press release on it.

And by the way, if you like this and other C4SS content enough to support it, the year-end fundraiser is still going on.

At C4SS: Attack Tyranny at Its Weakest Link -- Enforcement

Homebrew Industrial Revolution Now in Kindle Format

The Homebrew Industrial Revolution is now available in Kindle format.

In addition, good news from Steve Herrick, who has produced an epub version of it.

And as always, it will continue to be available in free pdf format.

At C4SS: Back in the USSA

At C4SS--Statism: An Unfalsifiable Religion

At C4SS: National Security is the Last Refuge of Scoundrels

At P2P Blog: The Homebrew Industrial Revolution--The Serialization Continues

[Michel Bauwens has kindly invited me to serialize excerpts from my recently published book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto. Over the next several weeks, I will post two excerpts from each chapter. In this case I'm posting a third excerpt from Chapter Three, which is unusually long, and will post only one excerpt from Chapter Four.]

At C4SS: Mort Zuckerman's Police State Nostalgia

At C4SS: U.S. Pot Assesses Chinese Kettle

At C4SS: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste

At C4SS: A Criminal's a Criminal, No Matter How Powerful

And by the way, the unpaid balance on the C4SS fundraiser was rolled over into the end-of-year fundraiser. The 41% of our funding goals we managed to collect was divided up pro rata among the writers and service providers. That means I got $138 of the $425 I was due for writing in October (actually $118, minus my $20 monthly subscription to support the Center).

So now they'll try to recoup the balance in the year-end fundraiser, and the first priority will be to collect the rest of the money we're still due for the work we did two months ago. Anything over and above that will go to the work we've done since.

Doesn't look real great, does it? Something's probably gonna have to give. Apparently right now people are only willing to support a smaller amount of writing, so it looks like we'll eventually shake out at an equilibrium where either funding picks up or C4SS puts out less material.

At C4SS: Ignorance is Strength

C4SS Fundraiser: Down to the Wire

Well, we're three days away from the end of the latest extension of the C4SS fundraiser deadline, and have just reached 41% of the target. Thanks to all who have contributed.

To those who haven't, please consider doing so. If this fundraiser reaches its target, all the writers and fundraisers, promotional specialists, etc., will be paid through the end of October. Woo-hoo! That means we'll only be six weeks behind in pay. Then we can start the white-knuckle process for November!

There are a lot of us doing this stuff because we love it, but the money sure comes in handy. And I suspect all of us enter each fundraiser wondering if the readers will come through yet again, or if this is the time it will turn out we've been writing for free all these weeks.

Several of us are giving back donations out of our pay, just to set an example. Tom Knapp quietly went without pay for September for an extra month, just so others could be paid.

I guarantee, nobody's getting rich off this. Brad Spangler, the director, gets a hundred bucks and change for expenses, and he probably puts in more hours than anybody. Tom gets six hundred bucks a month for working twenty hour weeks as media coordinator, doing an amazing job in submitting our material to thousands of newspapers every day.

So if you value our work, and you can afford to contribute, please consider doing so.

At C4SS: Wikileaks as Systems Disruption

Furniture Microenterprise

A personal email from Benjamin Darrington:

Inspired by your book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, I've decided to try my hand at this backyard industry thing.

I've decided to go into the furniture business. Per the ideas in your book, I'm taking advantage of new technology (or newly cheap technology) to start very simple with very low up-front costs, little or no overhead, and close to zero stock and no licensing or bank loans.

I'm ordering a 2'x3' CNC router kit from this guy for $1,400. I think I can make cool, custom, coffee tables, benches, and shelves, that can compete on price with the mass-produced crap they sell at Ikea. For $15 in pine boards or salvaged materials, I should be able to make beautiful, one-of-a-kind coffee tables, emblazoned with highly-detailed old public domain woodcuts (or any image the customer wants). This sure as hell beats the hideous $40 MALM low-end particle board and plastic-veneer Ikea coffee table that you find in every dorm room and first apartment ever. I can even let my customers choose from a couple of different kinds of finish and leg design since I don't have to make the product until after they've actually ordered.

One idea I have is to sell my furniture at the local flea markets. With some pre-cut lumber and example pieces, I can churn out new articles for people while they watch. A CNC router is a pretty cool thing to watch if you've never seen one before. My customer gets an beautiful, inexpensive, piece of furniture and an interesting story, while supporting local, sustainable, industry.

Due to the nature of this sort of production, I can start small with a couple of simple items that I can market to local college students and hipsters (free delivery!). If they sell, I can move onto more elaborate and expensive items as my woodworking and artistic skills improve. The learning curve is shallow, and my risks are few. I can afford to botch some projects and turn out some dud products without breaking the bank or wasting massive amounts of materials. Eventually, I'd like to use digital camera shots from multiple angles, and the software that pieces them together, to make accurate reproductions of furniture and wood crafts that I find in museums or in the temples and palaces I visit in Asia and Europe. What a skilled craftsman, commissioned by an emperor, would have labored on for weeks or months, I should be able to reproduce quickly in my shop with minimum preparation and cost.

If things don't work out, I can pay for the router in a couple of months with extra money from my tutoring job, and I'm left with a cool craft toy that fits on a desktop. If I can make, say, $100 from the sale of a furniture set, I can pay for all of my capital machinery with less than 20 sales.

C4SS Begins Mirroring Wikileaks

By Brad Spangler (Cross-Posted from C4SS)

The Center for a Stateless Society is now hosting a mirror site of Wikileaks — an international whistle-blower site which reactionary elements in the US government have been attempting to suppress over the last week. The mirror site is available at this web address:

http://wikileaks.c4ss.org/

Censorship has always been wrong and irresponsible. Now it’s another thing: Impossible.

I feel Hillary Clinton’s pain. Wikileaks’ release of 250,000 diplomatic cables previously hidden behind a state secrets wall has been tremendously embarrassing to her, not to mention implicating her in an international identity theft scheme that looks a lot like Watergate and the Zimmerman Telegram rolled into one.

But embarrassment or not, state officials have no right to hide their misdeeds from the people who foot the bill, in money and blood, for government actions. Nor, now, do they have the power to do so.

The toothpaste is out of the tube and we intend to keep it out of the tube. This information will remain publicly available to anyone who cares to look it over.

We have put this mirror site together using custom software developed by C4SS web administrator Mike Gogulski. We are making that software publicy available because we want as many people who can also mirror the site to do so.

As Mike put it:

“This is an opportunity for those who support freedom of information to take action. We particularly hope to see people and organizations with greater resources than we dispose of — the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, or US Representatative Ron Paul’s IT staff — making use of those resources, and of the tool we’re offering, to settle this issue once and for all.”

The software, a bash script, is available for download below in a compressed archive. Instructions for installation, configuration and use are in comments in the code. Technical support for civil liberties/libertarian/anarchist organizations is available from admin@c4ss.org.

REQUIREMENTS:

• Bash shell
• Perl
• A subdomain to host the files
• HTTrack (mandatory)
• lftp (optional, if copying to remote via FTP)
• Ability to create a cron job

DOWNLOAD: mirror-wikileaks.bash.tar.gz

Wikileaks Address

Wikileaks' domain name may be shut down, but you can still access it at this address: http://213.251.145.96/

At C4SS: When the Government Promises It Won't Abuse Its Powers, It's Lying

At C4SS: The Unintended Humor in Wikileaks Criticism