Musings on law, tech, chess & other topics by a geek

TEDx Seattle is happening at the Pacific Science Center on April 10th.  The event is being TEDx Seattle is organized by the Master of Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) program at the University of Washington.  One of the most exciting parts of TEDx Seattle is that they are strongly considering creating an interactive website for the event that promotes social media in real time.

Here are my two favorite confirmed speakers:

Ben Huh – icanhascheezburger.comBen is the CEO of the Cheezburger Network, the company behind the hugely popular blogs I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog, There, I Fixed It, and more than 25 others. His job is to make the Internet laugh for 5-minutes a day.  In addition to making people laugh, Ben is a a true innovator in business models for user generated content websites.

Eugene Cho – Founder – www.onedayswages.org

Eugene Cho and his family began what became onedayswages.org when they made a decision to donate their 2009 income ($68,000) to the cause of fighting extreme global poverty. But we didn’t want to stop there. We also wanted to invite our family, friends, and the rest of the world to consider donating just their “one day’s wages” and be part of this international grassroots movement. And then to renew that pledge monthly, quarterly, or at least yearly, on their birthdays.

The complete TEDx Seattle list of speakers can be found here.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC offends me (I know this is not a lawyerly thing to say, but this turns my stomach) as it allows corporations to pour large amounts of money into elections by equating corporate spending to free speech. The best response I have seen is bellow form Umair Haque:

Dear Supreme Court,

I’m highly impressed with your recent decision to vaporize limits on corporate political spending. It’s the kind of campaign finance reform our ailing res publica needs. In fact, I found it so inspirational, here’s an even better idea.

Let’s give corporations the right to vote. One share, one vote. The logic? It’s simple. Corporations are people; all people are created equal; ergo, corporations must have equal rights — and no right is more important than the right to vote. (Well, maybe the right to buy fully automatic machine guns, but that’s another story).

Goldman Sachs, for example, has 514,080,000 shares outstanding — so they’d get 514 millon votes (in fact, maybe we should give them more, because they’re so smart). Ford has 3.31 billion shares outstanding, so they’d get approximately 2.8 billion more votes than Goldman.

I’ve discussed this with several other economists, and we all agree: it’s the most efficient solution. Why, it should save hundreds of millions in lobbying alone. Who needs K Street when corporations can simply, quickly, easily vote in the candidate of their choice? As a bonus, political scientists agree that the increasing polarization between left and right would quickly disappear, too. Human people — with their perpetual squabbling — would be simply outvoted by corporate people, who know what’s good for everyone.

Read the rest at the Harvard Business Review

Watch Lessig’s Video on fixing elections at Change Congress

I am still looking for a good human readable legal summary and will post it when I see one.