Inauguration

So, we're watching the inauguration, and I feel like I really ought to write something about it. What it means to me, what I think it means to the nation, and so forth. But I really don't have much to say at the moment. Just glad this is happening and looking forward to seeing how things will go under the new administration.

Place and the Creative Class

Well, I'm in a coffee shop, so I guess I ought to write a blog post. It's been almost a month since the last one, so it's time. Have some work-related news, but that won't really be finalized for another couple weeks, so I'm going to hold off on that for now.

I've been reading some recent work by two authors recently that contradict in some interesting ways. One is Thomas Friedman (New York Times columnist and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree and Hot, Flat, and Crowded [I skipped The World is Flat]), who argues that globalization is opening the world economy to lots of places that didn't previously have access and generally changing the importance of location in the direction of less. The other is Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class and Who's Your City? (among others), who agrees that globalization is opening a lot of opportunities, but that it's also making location matter more.

It's an interesting dichotomy. Since I'm still in the middle of both (actually, I haven't read Hot, Flat, and Crowded yet, but I have some idea where it goes from Friedman's other work and recent writings in the NYT), and work is involved, I don't really have an opinion of which I agree on more, but it does lead me to an interesting train of thought which I haven't really developed into a coherent concept yet, but basically centers on an application of network analysis to stuff like The Tipping Point and using that to explain some of the stuff that both Friedman and Florida talk about. Problem is, when I try to distill it down to a few sentences, I keep coming up with additional layers to explore that seem essential to fully explaining my point. Like, for example, hierarchies of authority (which is, really, what The Tipping Point is mostly about) and channels of communication for those hierarchies (basically, that different modes of communication are good for different types of argument).


In the end, though, it's all about people. People talking to other people and interacting with each other in the pursuit of their continued survival.


Which, surprisingly, brings me to the other book I've been reading: Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery. Go find a copy of this book and read it. Now. It's fantastic.

Imagine the flat-out worst possible outcome of last year's economic troubles, culminating in the total collapse of the government, the dollar, and pretty much everything else. That's one of the precipitating events of Liberation. Riots destroy large parts of major cities. Mexico declares war on Texas. People take to selling themselves into slavery because it's better than starving. Bands of freewheeling hippies crisscross the country in a caravan of diesel-and-solar powered busses. Trains have machine gun nests and howitzers for self defense.

And into all this come the Slick Six, a gang of unstoppable international criminal, one of whom, Marco, has been in prison the last few years, since before the collapse. Marco has returned to reunite the Six and try to do some good in this new world.

Several of the interesting places in this world are where people have settled into a New Normal, where things are not so bad, or perhaps even better than Before. They grow their own food, barter for what they can't make, and generally get by. Maybe utopian, maybe not. The point is, despite a fantastic disaster, they're still alive. 

It's something that was on my mind a lot while Lehman was failing and they were debating the bailout. A lot of people were (and still are) losing their shirts, and were certainly looking at a more difficult future, but they weren't dying. That's my new yardstick for bad news: Did/will anyone die from it? If not, no problem. We'll get through it.

December 2008

Well then. Sitting in a coffee shop at moment, so I guess it's time for my monthly blog post. heh. I guess it's not so realistic to say that I really do mean to right more here, because, really, it doesn't seem to happen. So why say otherwise? I mean, really.

Anyways. Nice weather here in Delray. Which is a mixed blessing. When the weather in Florida is good and the weather everywhere else is not so good, it gets crowded here. I ran down to the grocery store the other day and couldn't get into the parking lot because it was so full of cars driven by very marginal drivers. It's the time of year to stay off the sidewalks again, and drive really defensively. Which is ok, actually, I do that anyways.

Just talked to my brother for almost an hour about a film project he's working for. He's a production assistant, and probably will be for a few years on this kind of production until he's accumulated a lot more Guild hours. Which is ok with him, it seems. He likes the kind of work involved, even though it sometimes means rather long and stressful hours. Some of the crew he's working with is really pro and gets stuff done, which is great, but the director/writer is a little scattered and, well, not so pro. Which results in delays, rewrites, and underplanned stuff. One of the lead actors started shouting at them the other day when they kept shooting him running down the same flight of stairs from different angles. Plus the other night they were on set until midnight trying to wrap some actors before they break for Christmas/New Year's. And after that my bro had a two hour drive home. Yay for him. But, amusingly, he's taken to talking on his cell in radio-speak: answers it by saying, "Go for AK" and acknowledges stuff with "Roger that" and so on. I guess after a 70-hour week things get like that. Anyways.

Going to Chicago for Christmas in a few days, then on to New York for NYE on Times Square with friends at ABC!! both of which are going to be awesome.


Trying to convert a short story I wrote for 365tomorrows (which I haven't heard back about yet) into a screenplay for my brother and a friend to shoot a short film of in February. The screenplay formatting is kind of a pain to work with if you're not used to it. I can see why there's dedicated programs for it like Final Draft. Being cheap, I'm using a set of macros and templates for Word for it at the moment. But it's kind of fun, so we'll see how it goes in the future. It would be a lot of fun to write and produce a medium-length short film. Maybe I'll see if time, money, ideas, and talent can intersect for that sometime in the future. Just sort of in the back of my mind, you know. I'd have to come up with a business model for it, because that's how my mind is working these days, and that might be the hard part, but we'll see how that goes.


We're signed up to test for our insurance licenses a few days after we get back from NY, I'll do an update about that (including what it's all about) after that happens.

Also: probably going to get a macbook sometime in the future. But not for another several weeks to a month at least. So I'm not sure why I'm even talking about it yet. But that's what I do, I guess.

Ok, back to work on indexing. Later.

Gotta get back to blogging again.

So. Hi. Still here, still in Florida, still indexing, etc.

I've kind of started writing again lately. Or, rather, I've started writing for the sake of writing and not just for work or whatever. I guess it started with some sort of epic email rants during the election (such as this), but I've even done a bit of fiction and the like. I submitted a flash fiction (under 600 words) story to 365 tomorrows, and plan to finish and submit 2-3 more to that site (one of which is basically done, one outlined, and one just an idea). I also ought to compile a writeup based on some comments I've been leaving over at Heather's site about music and creativity, if only because I think doing so could reinforce some of what I said in my own thinking.

I've also got a big pile of photos to sort through and touch up to put on my Flickr stream, and I want to find a way to better integrate my tumblelog with this blog. In theory, headlines from this blog are supposed to show up over at the tumblelog, so that the latter is kind of a gateway to my internet presences, but I've been having some trouble getting that working properly (which is to say at all). I've been tinkering with it, we'll see if this post shows up there....

Also, I've discovered that Blogger lets you subscribe to comments on a blog, which I've added to my RSS reader, which I'm hoping will make managing that easier, since it was a problem in the past, with a previous blog.

Right, anyways, got to index some more Guidelines for Exercise Testing. I'll put up some snippets of recent writings later.

edit: hey,the Tumblr import from this blog worked!! w00hoo! So, headlines from here and uploads from my flickr will appear there now, as well as at their home sites.

Schwarzenegger for president! (also, where's the reality go?)

At a campaign rally in Ohio today, Arnold Schwarzenegger gave the flat-out best campaign speech given by *any* Republican this year. Good writing, good delivery, hit the right points for his political perspective. He put the entire rest of the party to shame. If any of the other candidates in the primaries or since then had been talking like that, they would have actually had a chance.

Which raises a question:

What has happened to the Republican Party? It seems like it's been years since we've heard a really clear and concise message from them, and it seems like they can barely even agree amongst themselves what their principles are sometimes. They are, of course, not alone in that, as the Democrats have been just as bad, pre-Obama. I'm reluctant to let the matter off on just a problem of the lack of intellectual rigor in American politics. And of course there's been conflicting agendas and over-reliance on polls (in place of actually working the streets and getting your answers face-to-face) and considerable confusion about how to move forward. And soundbite news that has to compete with reality television and soap operas hasn't helped. And the post-Reagan disdain for anyone smart, which worked for getting Reagan and Gingrich elected but has been a total disaster otherwise... other than George Will, have you seen many really serious thinkers hanging around the GOP lately?

But I digress. Seriously, what happened?

Because I don't know. It seems like there's just so much confusion and manipulation and spin and, well, LYING that basically everything is broken. There is no real anymore, only spin.


The Age of Reason is over. It was killed by the Age of Marketing.

Oh, I have a blog. heh. Well. Lots to catch up on, which I'll do later. For now, there's the bailout thing going on.

this is from something I just wrote to my dad about the process going on about it.

He was mentioning a friend's take on it, mainly that this whole thing is just another huge handout to the wealthy+powerful.

In response, I wrote:

With everything that has gone on in the last 7-8 (or more) years, at
this point I wouldn't put it past them to try anything. And it looks
almost like they are. In Senate negotiations, the bailout seems to
have devolved to business as usual, and gained an additional 150
billion in price. A lot of that is due to a change to AMT, but there's
numerous other tax breaks accumulated in it.

We're watching out government lose it's legitimacy. The Republicans
finally proved that government doesn't work, really proved it, in so
many ways: planning and intel failures around 9/11, the destruction of
FEMA and all the Katrina troubles following that, several bubbles due
to deregulation-related shenanigans... blatant theft, massive transfer
of wealth to defense contractors and financial managers (the whole
investment business has basically become a way for investment banks to
enrich themselves at everyone else's expense), and so on... AND
THEY'VE TRIED TO STOP GOVERNING. The government has, it sometimes
seems, tried to dodge out on it's basic functions. Especially ones
unpopular with the administrations supporters (in other words,
anything which prevents big business from extracting more money from
the world).


It's being asked all over, but it's worth asking again: how is it that
we can give this huge blank check to the financial establishment and
yet we can't provide basic health care to our citizens? And in the
process undermine our employment cost base because it costs employers
as much to provide health insurance as it does to pay someone's
salary? Or any of the other things that 700 billion could do. We could
put off several of the likely mass disasters we're likely to have in
the next 20 years. We could provide basic healthcare to the entire
planet. We could do coastal restoration to lessen the impact of
hurricanes, and floodplain/riverbed restoration to lessen floods. We
could rebuild our cities so that we didn't have to drive so much,
reducing the demand for gas. We could re-engineer the power grid and
build next-generation power generation systems that would reduce air
pollution and improve reliability and safety. And so many other
things.

But we won't, because none of those things have a profit margin.



We could save the world, but instead we're going to make a buck or
two. So we can watch the world end from the penthouse.


Or, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, "The good Earth- we could have saved it,
but we were too cheap and lazy."

From Bobby Kennedy's speech after the assassination of Martin Luther King

"What we need in the United States is not division.
What we need in the United States is not hatred.
What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom and compassion towards one another, feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country whether they be white or whether they be black."

WORMTOOTH NATION EPISODE 1 PREMIERING TONIGHT

730 tonight CST.

www.theskyisfree.com/

go. watch. now.

I'll do an embed post when I get back from the launch party tonight if you can't be bothered to actually go there. :)