well said

I appreciate Saunder's comments and concerns. While I'm not a Clinton or Obama supporter, I honestly can't understand Saunder's arguments about the American economic situation. We can blame Bill Clinton for NAFTA but that treaty is merely a symptom of what I like to think of as a long simmering American disease called free market capitalism. When are voters going to understand and politicians going to admit that this country has never had free markets; furthermore, there are no free markets anywhere in the world. That being an established fact, I'm astonished that our so called leaders--all of them--continue to view free markets as a sort of economic Holy Grail. For decades we had a reasonably balanced economy based on the Fair and New Deal agendas. These policies were abandoned in 1980 in favor of Milton Friedman's free markets. Bill Clinton merely continued policies begun by Reagan and enhanced by Bush I: Bush II accelerated the march to purported free markets. Saunders may not like Hillary Clinton and I can accept and respect that but he had better find a more defensible reason than NAFTA for fighting Clinton's nomination. I suggest he begin arguing against the failed policies of free markets more generally. Friedman's free market ideas may work but the problem has always been that there are no free markets. What our government has done is give away the US economic base in the hope that the rest of the world might see the benefits of free markets. While purporting to endorse free markets our government has selectively discriminated against certain industries in favor of others (specifically the national security complex). In my view, the whole notion of free markets is bull pucky. If we look back at every significant American economic downturn since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, abuses by banks and industry as a root cause. Free markets cannot and should not be expected to regulate themselves; that is the role of government. Almost everyone Democratic politician is guilty of supporting free market policies and until these leaders, including Obama, Edwards, and just about everyone else, publicly rejects the policies that got us where we are today, I can't see that picking on any one Democrat is fair or reasonably. In sum, the problem isn't Hillary Clinton: The free market problem is practically endemic in our political establishment and since they don't historically exist and never will, it would be nice if our leaders took a look at our history and buried these ridiculous ideas once and for all. We need government regulation and we need to establish the same sorts of industrial policies that the rest of the world uses to enhance their domestic economies. This isn't rocket science. -Roger H. Werner

Works well in theory, but now used as unchecked justification for horrendous acts. Get a fucking clue.

the one-dimensional person

what is it? and why is it perhaps the most prevalent meme around us?

from chuck klosterman's sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs.

gimme some pills!

In a review of Christopher Lane's new book, Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness, Guldberg writes:

"Lane writes: ‘Beginning in 1980, with much fanfare and confidence in its revised diagnoses, the American Psychiatric Association added “social phobia”, “avoidant personality disorder”, and several similar conditions to the third edition of its massively expanded Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In this 500-page volume… the introverted individual morphed into the mildly psychotic person whose symptoms included being aloof, being dull, and simply “being alone”.’ Shyness now allegedly almost rivals depression in magnitude, a ‘sickness’ for which ‘almost 200million prescriptions are filled every year’ in the USA. Apparently, social phobia – shyness – ‘has become a pandemic’, says Lane.

...The sad consequence of this state of affairs is that the range of ‘healthy behaviour’ is being increasingly narrowed. ‘Our quirks and eccentricities - the normal emotional range of adolescence and adulthood – have become problems we fear and expect drugs to fix’ [!!!!!], Lane writes. ‘We are no longer citizens justifiably concerned about our world, who sometimes need to be alone. Our affiliations are chronic anxiety, personality or mood disorders; our solitude is a marker for mild psychosis; our dissent, a symptom of Oppositional Defiant Disorder; our worries, chemical imbalance that drugs must cure.’"

Hmmmmm Lane might point out something a little fishy here. Oh! and I could not agree with it more. Unless I am in the office twelve hours a day, caffeinetedly crunching market research numbers, I probably suffer from 'dont go with the status quo 100%' disorder. I better numb myself. Everyone else is doing it!!!

I suppose, if i do not, the government will take care of it for me. Lets all be happy!!!

exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!im super enthused about my shitty shitty job!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!! !!! i cant stop!!!!!! i love it so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and i love you all too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(I have really been considering Scientology of late. Seems like a pretty legit religion. )

i love politics

so wait, "BET founder" is supposed to represent the black vote in this country? yay!!! that is almost better than "a black women with a big tv show."

according to a cnn poll barack pulled ahead amongst black voters today.


romney was questioned after he said he has no lobbyists "running" his campaign. an ap reporter called him out on it. really interesting.

after heeding the advice of my brooklyn buddy, ayka, i finally made a website. check it out. definitely still a work in progress and it is not scalable, but it is something.

i also put in an order at moo to make some personal minicards. the design is based around the little ditty on my site and it will have my contact info on the back. now people will have something to remember me by other than my charming wit and steely looks. pretty stoked about them.

i got the better of dreamweaver this time around. THANK GOD!
me- 1 , dreamweaver- 1,000,000

Creating original things is not ever bad. It is true, true to you, it is how we as humans keep going. We innovate to survive. One-ups-manship is our beautiful struggle. For us we just go. We fly into other worlds, bringing back whatever we can to this world's objective reality.

That is learning. That is what it is all about.

We understand, we entrench ourselves in it for nothing. We will persevere. It may cost us our lives, but that is not the point. We do it for us, our families, and all others.

Victor Frankl used to ask severely depressed people why they were alive: "why haven't you killed yourself yet?," he would say; usually to no response. If you have no one or nothing to live for, you make a statement and finish yourself; you hope for it to send a message, even if you deny it. But, why?

They want to presevere. We all do and it is ultimately, universally, whatever; good.

(adapted from thingsforpeople)

i do not think we will have a recession akin to the 1930s. but i do think the world's power will shift. this should prove most interesting.

in other news, Google processes over 20 petabytes of data per day (cite). That is equal to 20,000 terabytes, which is equal to 20,000,000 gigabytes. my computer has 100 gigabytes.

in other news, Jesse and I got kidnapped last night from a strip club called visions. we were driven around madison for 2 hours smoking reds and trying to verbally fend for ourselves. he did have a bat in the back seat. but he also, i thought, was hitting on me. thanks to luke dustin and jason for picking us up at the red roof inn, "across from perkins," near the east towne mall.

India's Tata Nano!!!

"But while the bright lights of the New Delhi Auto Expo were trained on Tata's minicar, activists near Kolkata were burning the car in effigy. The Trinamool Congress, a West Bengal opposition group, torched a mockup of the Nano in protest over land rights at the factory location. "Until farmers get back their land forcibly acquired for the Tata Motors small car plant at Singur, we will not allow the company to manufacture cars there," opposition leader Partha Chatterjee decreed, according to The Economic Times of India.

In New Delhi, a small group of protesters made a less dramatic showing, but their T-shirt slogans were bold, The Times of India reported: "The ($2,500) car has Singur people's blood on it."" [CNet NewsBlog, January 11, 2008]

"We are not against industrialization," said Rakhi, a member of the group, "but why should the poor always sacrifice their lives and livelihood for the dreams of the middle class? The Singur farmers say their lands yielded multiple crops and no compensation can match the loss." [The Times of India, January 11, 2008]

--I admire these Indians.

west reacts to east

Most of the time when you do not understand something, especially from a public source, it is not your fault. Have faith in yourself. Clear writing is logical and, depending on the degree of your knowledge, understandable.

People purposely write or set up processes unclearly so you can not understand. Reasons for this may or may not be conscious. The worker bee who does not understand the given task will have to work from shaky groundings to complete it. The end result is exactly as the ultimate authority consciously desired.

This is why workers at a company are put in and only know their small microcosm. Misguided or manipulative leaders do not want the worker to be able to wrap his or her mind around the entire organization. They want the worker in their place.

In light of this, it is so funny to be learning in my operations management class about companies like Toyota who value empowered workers. Business academics are trying to articulate why Toyota has pulled ahead. Oddly enough, Toyota's decision making is done, not only by the managers, but also by the people on the floor. The people who know what is going on. This is really a simple, logical concept which authoritarian organizations are trying to articulate (really, I am laughing).

This reactionary attitude by some American companies and my class towards Toyota is the epitome of hypercapitalism.

The field

All functions a computer does involve strings of zeros and ones. That is it. Standard logic has either a true or false value. There is no, 'not enough information to make a judgment'.

So, in sigpfe's blog, he is talking about at what point on .011111... or .00000... a computer should know when to stop and make the calculation. Funny.

He says, "it is impossible to implement addition correctly." The first example stops at six decimal places and the computer would spit out: .06. But how does a computer know to stop at six decimal places? Or in the second example, when does the computer know to just stop spitting out zero’s and just fucking say zero? At what point between 1 and 1 does 1+1 get to 2? What exact moment does the log catch on fire? The rational decision any computer ultimately makes is predetermined.

This is the difference between theoretical and actual infinity. Merely by calling infinity ‘infinity’, it contradicts itself by negating its intrinsic meaning.Th

That is what Girard touches on with his quote ,"To find an appropriate framework to formulate theorems on computation is one of Geometry of Interaction’s ultimate goals," in a comment to the posting. How do we teach a computer the frame, or in other words human intuition?

I do not think this is ever something a computer will ever be able to genuinely know. We are inherently different than the machines we make. They are merely reflections, derivatives, of us.
Worse, I think we try to embody the idea of computers. The problem is that the computer never knows when to stop.

It will take that stream of 1’s out to infinity forever, the same way the greedy person wants more and more and more money. Structurally, the human machine minimizes cost to maximize profit. But this is a problem because we can sacrifice our lives, joys, sorrows, and moments to maximize our consumption of arbitrary, dichotomous things. It is why people spiral down the path of drugs or any type of addiction. Addiction to knowledge, money, sex, calculators, typography, cheap labor, ourselves, on and on. Just certain addictions are more sustainable than others. The heroin user will go down, physically and mentally, a lot faster than the working pez addict.

The same is true, but oft-neglected, about the way we are operating towards the environment now. We are addicted, for many reasons, but mainly, financially to oil. We need to look at it in a higher order frame. We are running out of it for future sustainable use and, concurrently, destroying our ecosystems.

To all you neo-free market pundits out there: Keynes puts it well, “in the long run we all die.” The laissez faire person assumes humanly time and resources are infinite. The only thing is, they are not. Our earth is not renewable.

Klein's assault on the neo-free market randian philosophy, led --at more plausibly a higher level-- by Greenspan is pretty rad. I was on the fence about Arianna Huffington. This was fantastic.

Klein should ask Greenspan if she fits within his system? If she does, he is a brilliant economist who overextended his power, with seemingly dire consequences. But she should acknowledge she is a part of it all as well. I think she realizes this because she advocates for the idea of mixed economics, metaeconomics or organic economics as suggestion for change.

A great speech is easy to learn by heart and a great poem is easier still. How hard it would be to memorize as many words linked together senselessly, or a speech in a foreign tongue! Sense and understanding are thus critical to the function of memory. Sense is order and order is in the final analysis conformity with our nature. When we speak reasonably, it is our being and our nature that speaks. When we want to incorporate something into our memory, we always search for a sense or another kind of order as a tool to that end. That is why we utilize the notions of genus and species in the case of plants and animals. The practice of forming hypotheses must be considered in this same light: we are obliged to have them because otherwise we would be unable to retain things. And while this is frequently observed, we must return to it again and again. The question is whether everything is legible to us. Certainly experiment as well as reflection enable us to introduce a significance into what is not legible, either to us or at all: thus we see faces or landscapes in the sand, though they are certainly not there. The introduction of symmetry belongs here too, seeing silhouettes in inkblots, for instance. Likewise the gradation we establish in the order of creatures: truly, all of this is not to be found in the things themselves, but in us. In general we cannot recall too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

–Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbuch ‘J,’ No. 392 (1789) in: Schriften und Briefe, vol. 1, p. 710 (W. Promies ed. 1968)(S.H. transl.) [Harper's, picture: unknown]

i like some of john edwards' points, but in all reality i think his recent surge has been compensatory. this is fine, but i think it is ill-warranted. maybe in a few years a ban on white house lobbyism will work, but right now we are so entrenched in it those who want a chance will have to play the game. we'll see though.

i hope for a better 2008.
please.

bloomberg?