Frymaster
Come to the Wooly Fair Town Meeting Tonight
If you have not attended Wooly Fair, you are either a recent transplant or make mediocre decisions. Wooly Fair is an event so unique and so awesome that it literally defies description. Seriously, I can’t count the number of times I’ve spent 10 minutues trying to answer the simple question “What is Wooly Fair?” only to [...]
Seven Short Essays On The Rhode Island Economy
As Rhode Island’s economy struggles along, I’ve wanted to write several essays on the situation. Sadly, doing my part in the regional economy has me a bit over my head still…yes, even 18 months in. The ship of [redacted] turns, but slowly. So instead of boring RI Future readers with 7,000 words, here are seven [...]
Note to Obama: Leave Our Senators Alone
Could we please have one day in which one of our recently- or even not so recently-elected pols isn’t a candidate for some other job? If the #2 line prep cook in the East Wing kitchen calls in sick, Politico will immediately speculate that Obama is already talking to Jack Reed. Leave our Senators alone. Operative [...]
Machinations in District 4
I have long argued that the key to contemporary Rhode Island politics lies almost entirely within the RI Democratic Party. “With Democrats like these, who needs Republicans,” I quipped. In 1995. The laws our General Assembly has FAILED to pass undermine our “most liberal state” reputation. The keystone legislation for any liberal issue area never [...]
Why America Is Screwed, but How RI Can Help
I’m in a particularly foul mood this evening, so I thought I’d share. And I’ll get right to the point: America, you’re screwed. With growing frequency, I’ve heard or read conversations between people of opposite political philosophies that go something like this: Sap #1: X is bad and ruining the country. Sap #2: Yeah, well [...]
Open PVD Public Hearing: Insider’s Report
The Open Providence Commission for Transparency and Accountability held its public hearing tonight at RISD’s Chase Center. According to public hearing veterans, it enjoyed excellent attendance and a high level of public engagement. As a commissioner, the energy level of off-topic, single-issue commentary on the Facebook events page gave me some cause for concern (scroll [...]
Open PVD: Transparency and Accountability
Exciting news for me! I’ve been asked to serve on the newly-created Open Providence Committee for Transparency and Accountability. Let’s call it Open PVD, okay? The committee, created by an act of the City Council, is tasked with developing guidelines and systems to help people interact with city agencies, gain easier access to government information [...]
Basic Oil Economics or No More Jed Clampetts
Today’s Morning Joe program on MSNBC featured a typically brain-dead discussion of oil prices. I’ll summarize… Joe Scarborough: We’re producing more oil, but the price is still high. That’s un-possible! Time Mag’s Richard Stengel: I know. Can you believe it? What’s missing from this discussion – and all the blather we’ve heard and will hear [...]
Providence: My Favorite Town
There’s a show tonight at Machines with Magnets that I won’t be going to, but it will be King Hell awesome. I think The Silks are one of the best acts on wheels right now, even though I’m not really a roots music kind of guy. Based on the advice of my friend Lord Giovanni, [...]
Cryptic Crossword #1
Welcome to the aggravating world of cryptic crossword puzzles. If you’ve never done one before, they’re like crossword puzzles, but devilishly difficult. (If you didn’t hate me already, you will after you try to solve this!) Logistics These puzzles are too difficult to try to solve online. You’re much better off printing the puzzle and [...]
RI DMV: ‘Puters…yer doin’ it wrong!
In general, I’m not much for complaining about government services. Yes, pretty much everything could be a lot more efficient, but the more you know about how things work, the more you realize that budgets often determine what gets cut and what survives. But even I have my limits. To be sure, I’ll let you [...]
Surprising Occupy Surprises Even Cynical Me
From the very beginning, the Occupy movement has been one surprise after another. The scale of the turnout in lower Manhattan is said to have stunned the AdBusters crew. The scale of peripheral support that came to the major protests surprised the activist core. The scale of the police response surprised the major media that [...]
One More Step Toward Prop 8′s Doom
In the summer of 2010, when I skimmed Judge Walker’s ruling on Prop 8, I said, “It’s all over but the crying.” The 9th Circuit’s decision on February 7, 2012 was another inevitable move in the legal end-game of marriage equality. I also predicted that the US Supreme Court would decline to hear the case. I’m sticking to [...]
Random Observations from Amsterdam
Our trip to Amsterdam was a great success. We previewed a new product line, and we expect to be building a good number of them up at the factory. As you can see from the photo, it’s an industrial design / high fit-and-finish approach that puts us in a league by ourselves. And all that [...]
Hard Talk About an Ugly Economy
After several months of more-or-less positive jobs numbers in RI, the last two months have been anything but. And the December numbers were, frankly, horrific. While it is certainly true that a wonk could parse [spin] the recent down-turn toward neutral, the same could be done with the previous up-cycle. As the wonk that could [...]
Race Cars and Revolution
In the introduction of my book, I confess embarrassment at the amount of sport stories I produced. Sport fascinates me. It arouses passions that let some sort of larger human narrative be told. Sport anthropomorphizes cultures; a mass of individuals expresses itself as a single person. And the more culturally complex the league is, the more [...]
Ignore POTUS: It’s the McGuffin
While I, like all of you political junkies, am practically main-lining the GOP Presidential primaries, they bring to mind a basic criticism I’ve had of almost every “outsider” political movement: they foolishly focus on electing a President. But that really doesn’t matter. It’s the McGuffin. While so many on the left have expressed outrage at [...]
The Mythology of Radical Capitalism
One reason that radical capitalism has won the hearts of so many is that it is highly plausible; it sounds great. A world of abstract morality where the anonymous ‘market’ expertly and without pity, favoritism or error decides the ultimate value of goods and services and delivers those goods and services with maximum efficiency, the [...]
Why the Projo Has Nobody to Blame But Themselves
By Frymaster on May 5, 2012
Over on the Facebook, dude of awesomeness Peter Hocking shared Ted Nesi’s blog post about the continuing deterioration in the Projo’s circulation. Surprisingly, their web traffic is also down and down hard. Call it 30%. You know me; I wrote a snarky comment about how newspapers have nobody but themselves to blame for their predicament. That [...]
Posted in Business & Tech, Featured | Tagged comments on newspaper websites, david brauer, linda borg, media, newspaper websites, newspapers, peter hocking, web 2.0 | 8 Responses