timoey’s Recent Comments

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  Toe clips & Speed caveat for tricycles

  Toe clips are a good idea to maximize power. Plus on a tricycle you can leave your feet attached to the pedals and remain upright when you stop (whereas on a bike you will fall over).

  On the flip side, regarding gears and hills, it is best to keep tricycles on relatively flat terrain and to watch your speed carefully to avoid tipping over -- unlike bikes it is much more difficult to take turns at high speed safely. So the gearing that comes with most tricycles is probably best left as is to encourage safe riding.

  Cheers,
  Tim OeyOn Umbra on adult tricycles posted 1 year, 3 months ago 16 Responses

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  Small steps are necessary!

  I strongly agree with this alternative view from the group of psychologist's and disagree with Mike Tidwell's perspective in this case.

  Lots of little actions are required before people are willing to take big steps. This was the case in the Civil Rights movement and this is the case for Global Warming as well.

  Big leaps often end in disaster. Little incremental steps are much safer and can more often get you to a good result with less wasted effort.

  reduce, reuse/freecycle, recycle

  Cheers,
  Tim Oey
  timoey.comOn Social scientists respond to Mike Tidwell posted 1 year, 10 months ago 39 Responses

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  Small steps are necessary!

  I strongly agree with the alternative article from a group of psychologist's at:
  http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/11/13338/9554/
  and disagree with Mike Tidwell's perspective in this case.

  Lots of little actions are required before people are willing to take big steps. This was the case in the Civil Rights movement and this is the case for Global Warming as well.

  Big leaps often end in disaster. Little incremental steps are much safer and can more often get you to a good result with less wasted effort.

  reduce, reuse/freecycle, recycle

  Cheers,
  Tim OeyOn Voluntary actions didn't get us civil rights, and they won't fix the climate posted 1 year, 10 months ago 61 Responses

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  Why freecycling must be kept free...

  Hi all,

  Most of you know this, but let me post this summary to educate new people and remind us all of what we are doing and why.

  The freecycle case against The Freecycle Network (TFN) is about trademark protection, not copyright protection.  Words/terms cannot be copyrighted, but they can be trademarked.  The legal documents covering the case are posted at http://greenribbon.us, in particular see the PDF files posted there.

  In brief layman terms, having the word freecycle be protected by a trademark in the area of generic recycling is a bad thing because:

  1. Words should not be trademarked in their own area. Imagine if the following words were trademarked: "blog", "recycle", "newspaper" to cover what the words actually mean.  If that were the case then people might need permission from their owner to use these words to describe the things that they are.  Doing this is not legal and damages people's right to use their own language.

  2. Words don't need trademark protection because they mean what they mean.

  3. Freecycling is about things being free. The word was freely used and freely given away a long time ago. When you give something away, it is wrong to ask for it back. And even more wrong to punish people who were given it for free.  Neither Deron Beal nor TFN nor RISE, Inc originally invented the word although they did help popularize it.

  4. TFN violates its own principles on a regular basis.  If freecycling is about letting go of ownership and giving things away, why doesn't TFN actually practice this more? http://freesharing.org and many others are much more open and giving than TFN is.  Others are willing to author documents to help people run freecycling groups and not require those groups to be controlled by any central "authority".

  5. An important principle of the recycling movement is "reduce, reuse, recycle".  TFN is not practicing this as well as it should -- it is using quite a few resources to try to control people and words when it simply is not needed.

  6. TFN has caused (and is causing) direct harm by deleting, damaging, or threatening perfectly fine running freecycling groups.  Almost all of the groups listed at  http://freesharing.org were once happy freecycling groups until TFN deleted the original groups, forcing them to recreate themselves, or TFN forced the original group to change its name to avoid deletion.

  7. If lots of people are interested in creating lots of freecycling (or recycling) groups, what is the real harm in letting them? People will naturally gravitate toward the groups that are doing a good job. There is no need to force people one way or another. Just let nature take its course.

  8. I and hundreds (thousands even) of other great folks were with TFN since the very beginning but were kicked out for really believing in freecycling. This is a tragedy.

  9. TFN has ended up valuing trash more than people.  Trash can be freecycled, whereas people are put on the TFN junk heap permanently.

  10. No single entity should control freecycling. It was meant to be free.

  To freecycle: to recycle by giving the thing away for free.  That is just the way it should be.

  We believe that the folks controlling TFN are misguided and should improve their policies by letting go of the word freecycle.  This will allow the good people within TFN and the good people outside of TFN to achieve a happier and more peaceful coexistence.

  BTW -- If TFN let go of the freecycle word, little groups would not be damaged by any of this and TFN would get kudos for freecycling freecycle.

  Sincerely,
  Tim Oey

  ------------------------
  Copyright 2006 Tim Oey

  This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
  ------------------------
  On As Freecycle grows, idealism and reality collide posted 3 years, 8 months ago 85 Responses

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  Keeping freecycle free..

  The "Keep freecycle free" campaign is going well.

  For more information please see:
  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fcnext/
  and
  http://greenribbon.us/

  Thanks!On ... oh, and R.I.P. posted 3 years, 9 months ago 13 Responses