Doesn't anybody carry ultraviolet LEDs?

Doesn't anybody have ultraviolet LEDs in stock in this town? I've tried the usual suspects (Vetco, Fry's, Radio Shack) and have no joy. Am I gonna have to mail order these stupid things? From Radio Shack? Jeez.

All these seem to be members of the same set

Something the friendly folks at Minyanville have been talking about for a while is how social change and economic change work together, and how this will trigger a social change away from spending. Essentially, the things you can't have become uncool, in the classic "fox and grapes" scenario. You can see USA Today's take on that here, wherein they note how, for example, Ellegirl.com, the teen offshoot of Elle magazine, launched a new video fixture called Self-Made Girl, which shows teens how to make clothes and accessories. Mish talks more about it here.

In that context, I present these items:

Gin, Television, and the Social Surplus, an article from the Here Comes Everybody blog about new participatory media and collaborative activities taking away from passive activities such as television, for the better. You should read it, and then you should read:

The Gospel of Consumption, and the Better Future We Left Behind, talking about the end of the 6-hour workday and the quite-intentional development of the consumerist society in the 1920s and 1930s, when industrial leaders feared that too much productivity would destroy the business world, and their solution to that dilemma.

Then, finally, we have something of a synthesis of the first article's idea of "cognitive surplus" and the second article's advocacy of "free time," over here, in roozle's livejournal, wherein Rachel disagrees with National Association of Manufacturers president John E. Edgerson's 1927 comment, "Nothing breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure," and has other comments on collaborative tools and networked communications vs. the "real world" with which I take issue, but that's a secondary point.

Essentially, all of these are talking about paths away from having things and watching things (in both cases, consumerism, and largely passive) into more participatory activities that, arguably, innately are about the creation of value, if in no other way value of community, all in ways that involve taking power (in this case, creative and/or economic) away from higher-degree concentrations of power, either by doing things yourself, or not caring particularly what other people decide to offer to you.

And all of that goes back to the argument I've been making (on and off, here, but sadly not lately) about the reversion to a more dispersed formation of power, and the ability (or, more commonly now, lack thereof) to force the degrees of concentration of power seen over the previous couple of centuries.

I don't have a conclusion to hand you from this set, I'm afraid. But it is interesting seeing these kinds of things keep popping up.