About Utah Stories
Utah Stories.com is maintained by Richard Markosian. For the past seven years I've had my own busines as a multi-media producer/coder Markosian Media. Prior to self-employment I worked as an Art Director for Allen Communication Learning Services. After six great years of this, followed by one year of cubicle drudgery and extreme boredom (due to lack of accounts) I decided I had enough of the coporate cushy life. I enrolled full-time the University of Utah to study documentary filmmaking and journalism. After graduating, I can't say that my degree opened up a lot of doors. The problem became that I could spend 12 hours writing a freelance story and earn the same amount I could from two hours of writing code. As much as I enjoyed journalism, I enjoyed being able to pay my mortgage even more. Therefore, since graduating from the University of Utah, I've spent my days mostly coding. This consists of using for-loops, if-statements, and language syntax to find the most elegant solutions for solving program problems. This life has its benfits, I'm not bothered by office politics or gossip. I am my own sovereignty authority (under the rule of my wife of course). However, I was neglecting the reason I received my degree: to attempt to observe, film and write about real-world issues. The interplay of power, culture and values in shaping our democratic society is the most facinating study of all for me. Debugging Government & SocietyThere are parallels in examining program code and examining society. The code or (laws) a government is constantly revising and the subsequent affects this code has on society, offer a complete system worth a programmer's scrutiny. Certainly society isn't a computer program, because people aren't robots. We don't live in Sim City. However, logic, quantifiable data and pragmitism are often neglected, because politicians use fear and emotion to gain support for their positions. This need not be the case. I've found in studying history and politics, just like solving coding problems, "elegant solutions" have been found for real-world problems. Most have been offered free-of-charge from the private sector. Very few politicians, work at debugging Government. This is often because they are too focused on writing their own legacy code. For too long, there have been too few debuggers. As a result, bugs run rampant in Government code resulting in errors producing infinite-loops (endless cycling loop lacking a condition for termination)(awarding government benefits for irresponsible behavior, is one obvious infinite-loop) Inner-city women have disincentives to get maried, resulting in people being stuck in the foor-loop of producing children out of wedlock and children destined to a life of being stuck within the same loop as their parents. However, unlike a poorly coded, overly-complex computer program, which would require a complete rewrite; poor legacy code is maintained, offering inefficient new releases and patches. We operate under public education 1.99432. Where teacher unions only wish to work to instill fear in the public to prevent a rewrite of the code for a new society. Many other examples persisit including healthcare, welfare, taxes, economic policy, city planning, infrastructure etc. The failure of our leaders to debug and perform sufficient upgrades has caused many institutions to become fraught with inefficency and abuse. If this code isn't rewritten, the whole system may crash, or slowly colapse. The United States Constitution is the best societal program architecture ever written. Democracy and free-markets (although imperfect) are the best engine for liberty ever divised. With proper analysis and dubugging of Utah and the United States Government, we can maintain the most efficient engine for prosperity and liberty on earth. (You might laugh at my assertion if could see me. I'm just a guy wearing old sweats, working out of a home office with my dog Kiki at my feet, but everything begins somewhere.) Although I now have a partnership to have my stories aired (in ultra-short format) on KJZZ. My goal isn't to use this site to become a reporter. I chose to study documentary film rather than broadcast journalism because the usual method of reporters in flawed for finding truth. My method is to allow stories to unfold like a tapistry-- revealing the weave and color by examining facts, opinions, power and behavoir, hopefully to reveal truth. Thats what you will find on Utah Stories, but I can't do this on my own. Debuggers wanted! Utah Stories goals:Currently I'm focusing about half time on making Utah Stories a reality. This site is still not officially launched, so if you are here, congratulations on finding us. We will "officially" launch the site if I reach my goal of 2000 unique visitors every week. We have had a few weeks where this goal has been attained but not consistantly. Once the site becomes viable I will solicit local advertising acounts and likely hire some reporters and writers to help me. Until then, I'm mostly on my own, with the great help from all the people you see as contributors of knowledge and insight who are listed below. |
| Pagerank |
|
Help me to continue coverage on the topics most important to you by making a small donation:
