Kiva Hackers
Please join Olle, a guy from Burlington, Vermont and me on Kiva Lending Team: Hackers.
Please join Olle, a guy from Burlington, Vermont and me on Kiva Lending Team: Hackers.
Okay. I’ve reached saturation. I will henceforth not be listening to any news about the economy, its meltdown, how the world has gone to hell, how I need to prepare to eat more bread crusts, etc.
I just don’t care.
I don’t care about the S&P 500, the Hang Seng, the Nikkei, the Dow, the TSX. I don’t care about housing starts, job loss numbers, GNP or GDP. They are equally meaningless numbers over which I have no control. But they are held out as measures of, well, something. Something that is supposed to variably make me feel happy or sad.
I have no money in the market. I never have. I don’t care if you’ve lost money in the market: it’s your fault for trying to make something out of nothing. Too bad.
I’m not about to lose my business to the bank because my business has never borrowed money. I don’t believe in borrowing money from banks. I don’t believe in businesses that need more capital than is naturally available within the community.
I don’t care what the economic pundits on CNBC and CNN say. I don’t care what the head of the Federal Reserve says. I don’t care what plans the Finance Minister has for stimulating the economy. And I especially don’t care what the Dragons think we should do.
I think it’s absurd to continue to try to plug our fingers into a dike that we ourselves have constructed, while trying to maintain that somehow capitalism is a natural state, and what we’re going through is a natural disaster. If your house falls into the ocean, maybe it’s time to stop trying to move the ocean and think about somewhere else to live.
All of this is a distraction from anything that’s actually important about life, love, and the pursuit of happiness.
And from now on I refuse to be distracted.
We’re in the middle of the third week of Philosophy 105, and I’ve managed to make it to every lecture so far (this may be some sort of record for me — I don’t think I’ve made it to all 8 rounds of anything in a long, long time).
After six lectures on basic philosophical concepts — values, ethics, social contracts, egalitarianism, justice — this week we started into the meat of the course, looking specifically at the philosophy of science and technology, and starting out with induction vs. deduction and, today, reductionism vs. holism.
Step number two of the Twelve Step Program is “Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.”
If you’re a cocky “mature student” with a day-job selling access to your “rightness,” getting something out of a university requires a similar transition, albeit minus the deity: admitting that you don’t know everything, that you haven’t considered all the possibilities, and that there may, in fact, be completely valid paradigms of which you have no knowledge or experience.
For me there’s an extra challenge: leaving university early (I dropped out after a year, 23 years ago) despite the family and social pressures to stay required a certain degree of throwing the academic baby out with the personal bathwater: if university wasn’t working for me, it must be university that’s screwed up, not me. Suffice to say that, although it seems university is still pretty screwed up, I’ve become willing to consider the possibility that it is regardless still able to offer something of value to me.
Oh, and I’ve got some authority issues too.
To achieve this “okay, so I’m not so hot shit after all” state of mind, while simultaneously maintaining enough self-confidence to be able to contribute to the experience is something of a delicate balancing act: learning requires risk, but sometimes risk can manifest as false bravado.
In other words, when is it okay to quote from How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive to suggest that holism trumps reductionism, and when is just acting like a prick?
That’s what I’m in the process of finding out.
Otherwise, I must say that, to my surprise, I’m thoroughly enjoying the experience of taking 2 hours out of my day to dwell on matter completely impractical. Although it’s sucking time out of my workday, I’ve been finding that having an opener mind, rather than being distracting, is actually helpful in my day-job (this may break down entirely if I come to the conclusion that technology is evil and I have to go back to the land).
Some more technical observations:
Icelandair has released their 2009 schedule for flights from Halifax to Reykjavik:
Personally, I would have left the comma out, or tried to re-write the sentence: I don’t have the courage (or skill) to do it as elegantly as they did in The New Yorker.
So on the one hand there is Jon Favreau, born six months after me 1966, director of Elf, Iron Man and writer of (and actor in) Swingers.
On the other hand there is Jon Favreau, born 15 years after me in 1981, Obama speech writer.
Shouldn’t Favreau the Younger be forced to take a stage name?